The Case of the Daring Decoy

Chapter Three

It was shortly after eight-thirty that evening when Mason and Drake left the elevator and walked down the echoing corridor of the office building.

The lawyer left Drake at the lighted door in the office of the Drake Detective Agency and kept on down the corridor. He turned at a right angle, walked to the door marked PERRY MASON, ATTORNEY AT LAW, PRIVATE, fitted his latchkey and opened the door.

Della Street was seated at her secretarial desk reading a newspaper.

She dropped the paper to the floor, ran toward Mason almost by the time he had the door open.

“Chief,” she said, “what is it? Is it... a murder?”

Mason nodded.

“Who found the body?”

“We did.”

“That’s bad!”

“I know,” Mason said, putting his arm around her shoulder and patting her reassuringly. “We always seem to be finding bodies.”

“Who was it?”

“No one seems to know. Rather an attractive young woman sprawled out on a bed. What about our client?”

“He’s taken care of.”

“Where?”

“Do you remember the Gladedell Motel?”

Mason nodded.

“The man who runs it is friendly, and it’s close in.”

“Did you call on the manager personally?”

She shook her head. “We drove down together. I had Mr. Conway let me out a block and a half from the motel. Then he went in and registered by himself, came back, picked me up, reported and took me to where I could get a taxicab. He’s in Unit 21. I came back by cab. I didn’t want to use my own car. I was afraid someone might notice the license number if I left it parked near the motel.”

“How much did you find out on the trip down?” Mason asked.

“Quite a bit.”

“Such as?”

“Jerry Conway’s a very eligible bachelor. He seems to be really a grand person. He takes an interest in the people who work with him and seems to be on the up and up.

“Giff Farrell worked for Conway for a year or two, then Conway helped him get promoted to assistant manager. It took Conway a year to find it out, but Farrell was systematically trying to undermine Conway. He started rumors. He got confidential information from the files and used it in such a way that it would make things more difficult for Conway. In fact, he did everything he could to get Conway in bad. Finally Conway found out about it and fired him. Farrell took the matter to the directors and he had been preparing his case for months. He’d made careful note of all sorts of things that had happened, and I guess there was quite a scene at the directors’ meeting.”

Mason nodded.

“Farrell almost made it stick. He might have done so, if it hadn’t been for the loyalty of one of the secretaries. Conway was able to show that Farrell had been passing confidential information on to a competitive company, simply in order to discredit the program Conway was carrying out. When that became apparent, the directors threw Farrell out. Farrell waited for an opportunity and then started this campaign trying to get proxies.

“Now then,” she went on, “I worked on him all the way down to see if he could place the voice of the person who phoned him. He seems to think the voice was disguised as to tone, and it was the tempo that was hauntingly familiar. He just can’t place it.

“I told him to keep working on it and phone Drake’s office if he came up with any answers.

“His secretary, Eva Kane, used to be a phone operator and is accustomed to listening to voices on the phone. She feels positive the voice was that of someone they both know.”

Mason said, “Well, I’ve got to go talk with Conway. You’d better go home, Della.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll stay arid hold the fort for a while. Phone if you want anything. I’ll make some coffee in the electric percolator.”

Mason drove his car past the lighted office of the Gladedell Motel, stopped in front of. Unit 21, parking his car beside Conway’s car, and switched out the lights.

Jerry Conway opened the door of Unit 21, but didn’t come out in the light. He stood back on the inside and said, “Come on in, Mason.”

Mason entered and closed the door behind him.

Conway indicated a chair for Mason, seated himself on the edge of the bed.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

Mason said, “Keep your voice down. These units are close together, and the walls may be thin. It’s bad!”

“How bad?”

“Murder!”

“Murder!” Conway exclaimed.

“Watch it!” Mason warned. “Keep your voice down.”

“Good heavens!”

“You should have known,” Mason told him. “I wouldn’t have spirited you down here unless it had been serious.”

“I knew it was bad... but I hadn’t— Who was killed? Farrell?”

“No, some woman.”

“A woman?”

“That’s right, a young woman. Now, tell me if you’ve seen her, and I want you to think it over carefully. This is a woman about twenty-six or twenty-seven, blond, with blue eyes and a good figure, but perhaps a little overdeveloped. The waist seemed slim, but she had curves above and below. She was wearing a light-blue sweater that probably matched her eyes.”

Conway thought for a moment, then shook his head. “She means nothing to me — unless she was the girl I saw. She had black-lace underthings. I think her eyes were sort of light, but that black mud pack on her face would make her eyes seem light. I can remember how the whites of the eyes glistened.”

“How about young women you know?” Mason asked. “Any of them fit that description?”

“Listen,” Conway said impatiently, “we have fifteen or twenty girls working for us. I can’t seem to place one of that description offhand. You say she’s good-looking?”

“Very!”

Conway thought again, shook his head.

“Try tying it up with the voice?” Mason asked.

“I’ve been trying to.”

“Let’s take a look at that gun.”

Conway handed Mason the revolver. Mason broke it open, looked at it, took down the numbers in his notebook.

“You’re going to try to trace it?” Conway asked.

“That’s right,” Mason said. “C48809. I’ll try to trace it. What about this secretary of yours? Where does she live?”

“Eva Kane. Cloudcroft Apartments.”

Mason said, “You’re going to have to go before the D.A. tomorrow morning at nine o’clock and tell your story.”

“Do I have to?”

Mason nodded.

“What do I tell him?”

“I’ll be with you,” Mason said. “I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock. We’ll talk on the way in.”

“Here?”

“Here,” Mason said.

“How about going back to my apartment?”

Mason shook his head.

“Why not?” Conway asked. “They won’t be able to get a line on me this early. I want to get some things: tooth brush, pajamas, razor, and a clean shirt.”

Mason said, “Go to an all-night drugstore. Buy shaving things and toothbrush. You’ll have to get along without the clean shirt.”

“Surely you don’t think they’d spot me if I went to my apartment?”

“Why not?” Mason asked. “Someone set a trap for you. We don’t know when that someone intends to spring the trap. Perhaps he’d like to have you sit tight for four or five days before giving a tip-off to the police and having you picked up. By that time, your silence would have made it seem all the worse. On the other hand, perhaps he knows that I’m in the picture and has decided to tip off the police so they can pick you up before I’ll have a chance to find out what it’s all about and advise you what to do.”

“Well, you can’t do anything between now and nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Conway said.

“The hell I can’t!” Mason told him. “I’m going to have a busy night. You go to an all-night drugstore, get what you want, then come back here and stay here.”

“Do I keep the gun?”

“You keep it!” Mason said. “And be damned sure that nothing happens to it!”

“Why? Oh yes, I see your point. If I should try to get rid of it, that would be playing right into their hands.”

“Right into their hands is right,” Mason said. “It would amount to an acknowledgment of guilt. I want you to tell your story, tell it in your way up to the time you left the hotel, got in your car and drove away.”

“I stop there?”

“You stop there,” Mason said. “Don’t tell them where you spent the night or anything about it. It’s none of their damned business. I told the police I’d have you at the D.A.’s office at nine o’clock in the morning, and you’re going to be there.”

“You know what this means?” Conway said. “Unless I can convince the police, it’s going to put me behind the eight ball. If the police should detain me or accuse me of having fired the fatal shot, you can realize what would happen at that stockholders’ meeting!”

“Sure!” Mason said. “Why do you suppose a trap was set for you in the first place?”

“Somehow,” Conway said, “I can’t believe that it was a trap.”

“You can’t believe it was a trap!” Mason exclaimed. “Hell’s bells! The thing sticks out like a sore thumb. Here was this girl in her undies pulling a gun on you, her hand shaking, and she walked toward you, kept walking toward you!”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“Everything!” Mason said. “A girl half-nude getting a gun out of the desk would have been backing away from you and telling you to get out of the room. She didn’t tell you to get out of the room. She told you to put your hands up and she kept walking toward) you with the gun cocked and her hand shaking. You just had to take it away from her. She did everything but shove it in your hand.”

“You think it will turn out to be the murder weapon?”

“I know damned well it will be the murder weapon!” Mason said. “And you’ll probably find that the young woman who was murdered was someone who had this list of stockholders who had sent in their proxies.”

Conway thought that over for a moment. “Yes, that part of it was a trap, all right. It had to be a trap. Yet somehow, Mason, I have the distinct feeling that there was an element of sincerity about that woman who called herself Rosalind. I think if we can ever get to the bottom of it, we’ll find that — I wonder if that young woman who was killed was Rosalind.”

“Chances are about ten to one that she was. This girl told you that she was Rosalind’s roommate, and that was their suite. That suite has been stripped clean. There isn’t so much as a pair of stockings in the place, no clothes, no baggage, nothing.”

“But won’t that make it look all the more like a trap? Can’t we explain to the D.A. that I was framed?”

“Sure we can,” Mason said. “Then we can try to make it stick. A good deal depends on whether we can find something to back up your story. The way you tell it, it sounds fishy as hell!”

“But I’m telling the truth,” Conway said.

“I know,” Mason told him, “but the D.A. is going to be cold, hostile, and bitter. He won’t like it because you didn’t go to the police instead of consulting an attorney. What’s more, we don’t know yet how much of a trap you’ve walked into.”

“You think there’s more?”

“Sure, there’s more,” Mason said. “But there are some things about it I can’t figure.”

“Such as what?”

“If the idea had been to frame you for murder,” Mason told him, “they’d have gone about it in a different way. If the Farrell crowd had been willing to take a chance on a killing, it would have been easier for them to have killed you and let it go at that.

“The evidence seems to indicate that they’d been planting one kind of trap for you to walk into, and then something happened and they found themselves with a corpse on their hands. So then they worked fast and tried to switch things around so they had you on a murder rap. When they start moving fast like that, they can easily make mistakes. If they make just one mistake, we may be able to trip them.”

Conway said, “I know that I look like a fool in this thing, Mason, but hang it! I can’t get over feeling that this Rosalind was sincere, that she really had this information she wanted to give me, that she was in danger. She said herself that she might be killed if anyone thought she was going to turn over this information to me.”

“That makes sense,” Mason told him. “If she wasn’t tied up with Farrell in some way, she wouldn’t have had access to the information you wanted. If she was tied up with Farrell and was going to run out on him, almost anything could have happened.”

Suddenly Conway’s face lit up. He snapped his fingers.

“What?” Mason asked.

“I’m just getting an idea,” Conway said. “Why should I have to wait here like a sitting duck while they start sniping at me? Why couldn’t I double-cross them at this stage of the game?”

“How?” Mason asked.

“Let me think. I may have an idea.”

“Ideas are all right,” Mason told him, “but let’s be damned certain that you don’t do anything that backfires. So far you’ve had things done to you. Let’s keep it that way.”

Conway thought for a moment, then said, “Hang it, Mason! Farrell is mixed up in this thing. He had to be the one who killed that girl. He—”

“Now, wait a minute,” Mason said. “Don’t start trying to think out antidotes until we’re sure what the poison is and how much of a dose you’ve had.”

Conway was excited now. “I tell you I’m certain. This girl Rosalind was sincere. She was terrified. She told me herself that she was afraid she’d be killed if anyone knew... Farrell found out what she was doing and—”

“And you think Farrell killed her?”

“No,” Conway said, “but I think this Gashouse Baker, or some of his thugs did, and then Farrell got in a panic and tried to blame it on me.”

“That checks,” Mason said. “I’m willing to ride along with you on that, but so far it’s just an idea.”

“Farrell tried to trap me,” Conway said. “I—”

Abruptly he broke off.

“Well?” Mason asked.

“Let me think,” Conway told him.

“All right. Do your thinking,” Mason said, “but don’t start moving until you know where you are. In the meantime, ring up your secretary and tell her that I’m coming up to talk with her.”

“Shall I tell her anything about what happened?”

“Don’t tell her what happened. Don’t tell her where you are,” Mason said. “Simply tell her that I’m coming up to talk with her, that I’m your attorney, that you want her to co-operate with me to the limit. Tell her nothing else.”

“Okay,” Conway said. “I’d better get busy. I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

Mason looked at him suspiciously. “Such as what?”

“Such as getting that phone call through, getting to an all-night drugstore and making my purchases.”

Mason regarded him thoughtfully. “You’re getting filled with energy all at once.”

“When there’s something to be done, I want to get started.”

“All right,” Mason said, “start in by calling your secretary. Tell her I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“And I’ll see you at eight o’clock in the morning?”

“A little after eight,” Mason said. “Be sure you have breakfast. You won’t want to tackle what we’re going up against on an empty stomach.”