The Case of the Crooked Candle

Chapter 7

A light was on in Mason’s office as the lawyer’s rubber heels padded down the tiled floor of the corridor. He quietly fitted a latchkey to the door, clicked back the lock, and pushed the door open.

Della Street was seated at Mason’s desk, her head pillowed on her arm. She was fast asleep.

Mason gently closed the door, hung up his hat and coat, walked across to the desk and stood for a moment looking down at Della with tender solicitude. Then he slid his hand along her hair, let it rest on the back of her shoulders.

“Don’t you ever go home?” he asked tenderly.

Della wakened with a start, turned her head, blinked her eyes against the light and smiled up at Mason. “I had to know what happened,” she said. “That meant I had to wait.”

“Bosh! You were waiting because you thought I might ring up and want something. Had any dinner?”

“No.”

“Lunch?”

“I had Gertie go out and bring in a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of milk.”

Mason said, “I’m going to keep you with me after this — at least you’ll eat regularly.”

“What’s new?” she asked.

Mason studied her face intently, saw traces of fatigue. “The thing that’s new,” he said, “is that you’re going home and get yourself some shuteye.”

“What time is it?”

“Something after eleven.”

“Heavens! I’ve been asleep for over an hour.”

“Where’s Paul Drake?”

“He went home.”

“That’s where you’re going. Come on, get your things.”

“I was afraid you might call,” she said. “I...”

“Forget it,” Mason interrupted. “I have the number of your apartment. I could have called you there. Don’t take this job so seriously.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“We had a very nice ride up the coast,” Mason told her, helping her into her coat. “We went up to a very nice motel. We really must stop in there sometime, Della. It has a beautiful location. It’s called the Surf and Sun, and, while today there was a cold, raw wind blowing in from the ocean, I can imagine that it would be very delightful, particularly during the summer.”

“Did you find Roger Burbank?”

“Yes. But not up there.”

“Where was he?”

“In a restaurant about half an hour away from here on the Ventura Boulevard — an old adobe house taken over and turned into a restaurant.”

“What does the motel have to do with it?”

“Well,” Mason said, “it seems that Burbank is supposed to have met some big-shot politicians up there — people who exerted every precaution to see that their motions couldn’t be traced. Burbank, for instance, was supposed to have been aboard his yacht. Apparently every one of these men had laid careful plans so he could deny having attended any such conference.”

“Why?”

“The men were big-shots. Perhaps the governor himself was there. They were planning some political strategy. If the newspapers had got hold of it, it would have been dynamite.”

“Was the governor really there?”

Mason said, “Well, the significant fact may have been that he wasn’t invited.”

“You mean some of the legislative leaders were plotting against him?”

“Yes, it could have been that — the way Carol told it.”

Della frowned. “I can see where it would be very inconvenient to have a murder committed on one’s yacht under these circumstances.”

Mason said, “And then again...” He broke off to push his tongue against his cheek so that it made a big lump.

“What’s that,” Della asked, “chewing tobacco?”

“No. Just to show you that I have my tongue in my cheek. Come on, young lady. Switch out the lights.”

She switched out the lights. Mason waited for the door to click shut, then tried the knob to make certain it was locked.

As they started down the corridor, he said, “It seems that Lieutenant Tragg and a fingerprint man by the name of Avon had located Burbank at this restaurant shortly before we got there — just a minute or two, I guess.”

“This was at that adobe restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“Carol told her father he simply must tell where he’d been, and finally the old man quit denying he’d been there.”

“Rather a peculiar position for a man to be in, wasn’t it?” Della asked. “I mean, telling the police that he’d been with several men who would have to deny that they had been there with him?”

“Very,” Mason admitted. “It was a poser for Tragg. And the hell of it is, as far as Tragg’s concerned, he’s dealing with political big-shots. If he takes Burbank’s word that he wasn’t aboard that yacht when the murder was committed, that’s one thing. If he insists upon corroboration and starts checking up, he may stir up a hornet’s nest. Tragg, you see, is more or less dependent upon having a certain amount of political good-will.”

Mason rang for the elevator.

“Was there any corroborating evidence whatever?”

“Very strong corroborating evidence,” Mason said, “and produced at the psychological moment in a manner well calculated to carry conviction.”

“Just what was it?”

“Burbank’s hand dropped down to his coat pocket. He produced the key to the cottage that had been occupied by the potiticians — a key that undoubtedly came from cabin fourteen at the Surf and Sun Motel.”

“What did Tragg say to that?”

“That,” Mason said, “convinced Tragg so much that he jumped up from the table and went whizzing up the highway. Lieutenant Tragg never lets eating interfere with business.”

“You mean he passed up his dinner?”

“Didn’t even wait for the food to be brought, and it was a swell dinner. Green turtle soup. Then nice sizzling steak, and salad, with a dish of chili beans on the side and tortillas...”

“Chief! are you trying to make me hungry?”

“Are you hungry?”

“I hadn’t realized it. Guess I was just — well, I guess I haven’t gotten around to realize it, but I am hungry.”

“That,” Mason announced, “is as it should be. You’re going to get something hot to eat — and) I don’t ever again want to hear of you sticking around that stuffy office Saturday afternoons and nights. What has Paul found out about the murder?”

“I have a written report here. It gives the highlights. Come to think of it, I haven’t thought about the newspapers. It should make the late evening edition.”

Mason again jabbed his thumb against the elevator button, held it there for several seconds. “You,” he announced, “are going to have a cocktail, some hot soup and a steak.”

“A little hot soup would taste good,” she admitted. “Where do we go?”

“Down to that chummy little restaurant on Ninth Street. We can get a booth there and talk. Where’s Drake’s report?”

“In my purse.”

“Okay. We’ll stroll over and get a table.”

The janitor brought up the elevator, gave Mason the benefit of a frowning rebuke for that long second ring.

Mason and Della rode down in silence, then out on the street, smiled at each other in silent comment on the janitor’s grouch, walked up Ninth Street arm in arm, turned into a little unpretentious restaurant where they knew the proprietor, and found seats in a curtained booth near the entrance.

The proprietor, a huge florid figure of a lusty man, attired in a chef’s cap and apron, came in to give them a welcome.

“Ah — ze great Perry MASON! And zat so charming Della Strit! Welcome! Pierre weeth hees own hands cooks you ze food an’ serves you ze dreenks!”

“That’s fine,” Mason said. “We are honored. A dry Martini for Della, a Scotch and soda for me. Then a nice filet mignon for Della with some au gratin potatoes and coffee for two. Do you happen to have a nice filet mignon, Pierre?”

“For Miss Strit, yes! Anything she wants. Right away queek I get you these drinks.”

He backed through the curtained doorway. Della opened her purse, handed Mason Paul Drake’s report of what he had been able to find out about the murder. “There are some three-and-a-quarter by four-and-a-quarter photographs attached to it,” she said. “Paul says he can get some blown-up enlargements by tomorrow or Monday.”

The proprietor brought them their drinks, stood beaming over them with a certain paternal solicitude. “You come here and talk business! With so pretty a girl was Pierre twenty years younger — Poof! Business!”

Mason touched glasses across the table with Della Street, sipped his drink, then abruptly reached across the table to put his hand over hers. “Okay, Della, we’re going to take it easy from now on. You’ve always said it would be a lot better if I sat in the office the way other lawyers do and let people come to me. Pierre is right. We talk too damn much business.”

Della said demurely, “You’d better glance through Paul’s report.”

Mason started to say something and then changed his mind, unfolded Drake’s report and glanced at it casually.

It was a neatly typewritten report, and the first page read:

Mason ran through the papers that were attached to Drake’s report, studied the photographs. Della Street watched him silently, finishing her cocktail, smoking a cigarette.

Pierre brought food, frowned at Mason’s abstraction, said gallantly to Della Street. “To be twenty years younger, I give my right arm. No,” he amended abruptly, “weeth twenty years younger Pierre need hees right arm.”

Mason looked up and grinned. “It’s a good line, Pierre. Look, you’ve got a long extension, on your desk telephone. Hand it over here, will you? I want to make a call.”

Pierre sighed. “Always business,” he remonstrated. “So it was when I was young, too — but a different kind, you bet!”

He left the booth, handed a desk telephone on a long extension cord across the top of the partition. Mason dialed Paul Drake’s number and held his lips close to the telephone so that his voice would be inaudible beyond the confines of the booth.

When Drake came on the line Mason said, “Hello, Paul. Got a pencil handy?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, make a note of this. J. C. Lassing, L-a-s-s-i-n-g. Got that, Paul?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “Now make a note of the Surf and Sun Motel on the highway between Ventura and Santa Barbara, got that?”

“Uh huh.”

“All right. J. C. Lassing is supposed to have registered at cabin fourteen at the Surf and Sun Motel yesterday. I’d like to know a lot more about Mr. Lassing.”

“All right, I’ll get busy.”

“I’m just reading your report,” Mason said. “Who discovered the body, Paul?”

“A sheep man by the name of Palermo. Wanted to see Milfield and knew he was aboard Burbank’s yacht.”

“How’d he get aboard?” Mason asked.

“Palermo’s a tight-fisted son of the soil,” Drake answered. “He was damned if he was going to pay fifty cents to rent a rowboat when he had a folding boat he could use. There’s a lake up in that Skinner Hills district where they do a lot of duck shooting and Palermo guides dudes around at ten bucks a day, furnishing boat and decoys. So he loaded his folding boat into a trailer and carried it along.”

“Just to save fifty cents?” Mason asked.

“That’s his story. I haven’t talked with him. The newspaper boys say it sounds convincing once you’ve seen the guy. Here’s something else, Perry Van Nuys told the clerk at the hotel where he’s staying that if he hadn’t stopped Mrs. Milfield from taking a plane to San Francisco yesterday afternoon, she’d have been in a sweet mess by this time. My man was hanging around the lobby and managed to overhear enough of the conversation to get the general drift.”

“Nice going, Paul. I’ll see what he has to say about it.”

“Keep my man out of it if you can.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “You get in touch with Lassing. I think I’ll have a talk with Van Nuys right away — if I can beat the police to it. He’s at the Cornish Hotel?”

“According to the last report I had he is,” Drake said.

“When was that report?”

“About thirty minutes ago.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “I’ll look him up. How does it happen the police have overlooked him?”

“The police apparently don’t know too much about the Skinner Hills business. Remember we started working on that Karakul fur deal and that’s given us the inside track.”

“Okay,” Mason said, “I’ll call you if anything turns up.”

“I’ll be getting reports until around two or two-thirty,” Drake said, “but for the love of Mike, don’t call me after that unless it’s something damned important.”

Mason hung up, pushed the telephone to one side. “How’s the grub, Della?”

“Fine. Tell me about Carol.”

“What about her?”

“Why did you have your tongue in your cheek when you came back?”

Mason reached into the side pocket of his coat, took out the sheaf of twenty-dollar bills Carol had given him.

“What’s that?” Della asked him.

“Expense money.”

“It looks as though she thought you were going to have plenty of expenses.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“What’s the idea?”

Mason said, “When do the banks close, Della?”

“What do you mean? Oh, I see. It’s Saturday.”

“Exactly. Here we have five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. They are fastened together with a gummed strip of paper bearing the imprint of the Seaboard National Trust and Savings Bank. Nice new bills — interesting, isn’t it?”

“You mean Carol drew this expense money out of the bank before...”

“Exactly.”

“But she didn’t know about the murder before noon, did she?”

Mason grinned. “I didn’t ask her. I was careful not to. What would you do, Della, if you found yourself faced with the job of manufacturing an alibi?”

“You mean, if I had to make an alibi up out of whole cloth?”

“Yes.”

“Heavens! I don’t know. It would seem to me to be an impossible problem.”

Mason said, “Even if you had a long, long time to think it over, I’ll bet you couldn’t do a better job than to claim that you’d been attending a political conference of such great importance the bigwigs who attended it wouldn’t dare to let their identities be known, would even deny that they were there. And then if you could lead some witness into a place where that conference took place and point to ash trays that were littered with cigar butts and cigarette stubs, a wastebasket that was filled with empty bottles, bathrooms containing soiled towels, and, even as a final finishing touch, ‘Father’s razor on the shelf in the bathroom’ — that, I would say, would be a very artistic job.”

“Very.”

“Then if the police happened to discover ‘Father’ at just the opportune moment, and ‘Father’ seemed not at all eager to establish his alibi, but only did so under pressure, and then rather reluctantly put his hand down into his coat pocket and pulled out a key to the cabin in which the conference was supposed to have taken place — that would be one sweet job of alibi building, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you think the whole thing was faked?”

“I don’t know. I’m just pointing out things.”

“But can’t the police check every detail?”

“Which do you mean, can or will?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Query: What would you do if you were a police officer — and had to decide whether you wanted to rip aside the mask of secrecy some big-shot politicians had carefully set up?”

Della said, “Well, I might try to dig out the truth, and then again, I might drop the whole thing — fast.”

“Exactly,” Mason said.

“Apparently,” Della Street said thoughtfully, “Carol Burbank is a very unusual girl.”

“Or her father is a very unusual man,” Mason said. “I’m interested in finding out which — and in the meantime, finish your dinner because you’re going home and get some sleep.”

Della Street smiled across the table at him. “Not if you’re going to beat the police to the Hotel Cornish. A notebook might come in handy there.”

Mason smiled. “It’s going to cost you your dessert.”

“I didn’t want any, anyway.”

“That’ll run Pierre’s blood pressure up.”

Della Street opened her purse, calmly started applying lipstick. “One gathers,” she said, “that Pierre’s blood pressure has been boiling up and dropping down at alternate intervals for the last forty years.”

“That,” Mason said, “would have made it start when Pierre was about fourteen.”

“Well,” Della Street announced, putting her lipstick and compact back into her purse, “let’s make it forty-two years then.”