The Case of the Deadly Toy

Chapter Six

It was three-thirty in the afternoon when Paul Drake called in on Mason’s unlisted telephone.

Mason, who had been dictating steadily since one-thirty, regarded the ringing telephone with annoyance. He picked up the receiver, said, “Hello, Paul, what is it?”

Drake’s voice over the wire said, “I have an idea you better get out here, Perry.”

“Where’s here?”

“Next door to the Jennings’ house.”

“What’s it all about?” Mason asked.

Drake, speaking guardedly, said, “I’m visiting with a Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Gales. The address is 6283 Penrace Street. They have some information that I’d like to have you check. I think you’d like to get their story.”

Mason said irritably, “Now listen, Paul, I’m terribly busy at the moment. I got Della to give up her week end in order to get this dictation out and we’re right in the middle of a very important matter.

“If you’ve uncovered any information there, write out a statement and get them to sign it. Get—”

“Then you’re going to be out,” Drake interrupted. “How soon can you get here, Perry?”

Mason thought that over, said into the phone, “I take it you’re where you can’t talk freely, Paul.”

“That’s right.”

“How about leaving the house and going to a telephone booth where you can tell me what it’s all about?”

“That might not be advisable.”

“You have some information that’s important?”

“Yes.”

“About that printing press or something?”

“About the bloodstains,” Drake said.

“About the what?”

“The bloodstains,” Drake said. “You see, Perry, the postal authorities started an investigation and then after they found this gun under the pillow of the bed where Norda Allison had been sleeping, they called in the local police. She’s been taken to Headquarters for questioning. For some reason the authorities are hot on her trail.

“Now, Jonathan Gales knows something about the bloodstains that I think you should know. There’s some evidence here that you’d better get hold of before the police—”

“I’ll be right out,” Mason interrupted.

“Don’t come in your car,” Drake warned. “Get a taxi-cab, let it go as soon as you get to the house. I have an agency car out here that is rather inconspicuous. I’ll drive you back when you’re ready to leave.”

“I’ll be right out,” Mason promised.

He dropped the telephone into the cradle, said to Della Street, “That’s the worst of this damned office work. It gets your mind all cluttered up with stuff — I should have known the minute Drake telephoned and asked me to come out that it was important, but I had my mind so geared to trivia that I forced his hand and made him tell me what it was he considered so important. Now, the witnesses may decide to clam up.”

“What was it?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you in the taxi,” Mason said. “Come on, let’s go. The address is 6283 Penrace Street. Apparently that’s next door to where the Jennings live. Grab a shorthand book and we’ll take a cab. Hurry!”

They raced down the corridor to the elevator, found a cab waiting at the cabstand at the corner, climbed in and Mason gave the address.

“Now tell me what it’s all about,” Della Street said.

“Bloodstains,” Mason told her.

“I heard you say that over the telephone. What’s the significance of the bloodstains?”

“Apparently,” Mason said, “the police have been called in. They found a gun under the pillow where Norda Allison had been sleeping. You remember she told about having found an ejected empty cartridge case in front of the tent where Robert was sleeping out in the patio. Now, apparently, bloodstains enter into the picture, and from the way Paul Drake talked, I have an idea the police don’t know anything about those stains as yet.”

“Well,” Della Street said, “we seem to be getting into something.”

“We seem to already have gotten into it,” Mason told her, “up to our necks.”

Mason lapsed into frowning concentration. Della Street, glancing at him from time to time, knowing the lawyer’s habits of thought, refrained from interruption.

The cab pulled up in front of the address on Penrace Street.

“Want me to wait?” the driver asked.

Mason shook his head, handed him a five-dollar bill, said, “Keep the change.”

The cabby thanked him.

Mason glanced briefly at the police car which was parked next door at the Jennings’ house, walked rapidly up the cement walk to a front porch and extended his thumb toward the bell button.

The front door was opened by Paul Drake while Mason’s thumb was still a good three inches from the bell button.

“Come on in,” Drake said. “I was waiting at the door hoping against hope you wouldn’t drive up until after Lieutenant Tragg had left.”

“That’s Tragg over in the other house?” Mason asked.

Drake nodded, said, “Come on in and meet the folks.”

Drake led the way into a cozy living room which had an air of comfortable simplicity.

There were deep chairs, comfortable in appearance, books, a large table, a television set, floor lamps conveniently arranged by the chairs, newspapers and magazines on the table. Through an archway could be seen a dining room with a big sideboard, a glass-enclosed cupboard for dishes. The house itself was modern, but the furniture gave the impression of being comfortably old-fashioned without qualifying for the label of “antique.”

A somewhat elderly couple arose as Paul Drake escorted Mason and Della Street into the living room.

“This is Mr. and Mrs. Gales,” Paul Drake said by way of introduction. “They have quite a story; at least Mr. Gales has.”

Gales, a tall, bleached individual with a drooping moustache, bushy white eyebrows and gray eyes, extended a bony hand to Perry Mason. “Well, well,” he said, “I’m certainly pleased to meet you! I’ve read a lot about you, but never thought I’d be seeing you — Martha and I don’t get out much any more and we spend a lot of time reading. I guess Martha has followed every one of your cases.”

Mrs. Gales reached out to take Della Street’s hand. “And I’ve seen photographs of Miss Street,” she said. “I’m really a fan of yours, my dear, as well as of Mr. Mason. Now, do sit down and if we can do anything that will be of any help, we’re only too glad to do it.

“How about making a cup of tea? I could...”

Drake glanced at his wrist watch, then looked significantly through the windows over towards the Jennings’ house. He said, “We may be interrupted at any minute, Mrs. Gales. If you don’t mind, I’d like to have you tell your story just as briefly as possible — what you have to say about Robert.”

“Well, do sit down,” she said. “Let’s be comfortable. Heavens to Betsy, I certainly feel shoddy having people like you here and not being able to offer a cup of tea. I’ve got some nice cookies I baked yesterday—”

“About the gun,” Drake said. “Tell Mr. Mason about Robert and the gun.”

“Well, there’s not much to tell. Robert is a mighty nice, very well-behaved boy. But he’s just crazy about guns. He’s always watching those Western television shows — ‘pistol pictures,’ Jonathan calls them.

“They have a baby sitter over there who takes care of him when Mr. and Mrs. Jennings go out, and I’ve noticed that when the baby sitter is there Robert has a real gun to play with.”

“A real gun?” Mason asked.

“An automatic,” Jonathan Gales supplemented. “Looks like a Colt Woodsman model. I think it’s a .22 caliber.”

“He only has that when the baby sitter is there?” Mason asked.

“Well, now, that’s the only time I’ve seen him with it,” Mrs. Gales said, “but if you ask me, a seven-year-old boy has got no business playing around with a real pistol... personally, I think it’s bad enough when they start pulling these imitation six-shooters out of holsters, pointing them at people and saying, ‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’ Good heavens! When I was a girl, if my brother had even pointed a cap pistol at anybody, my dad would have warmed him up good and proper.

“Nowadays, boys go around with these toy pistols and think nothing of pointing them at somebody and saying, ‘Boom! You’re dead!’ You can see what it’s doing. Pick up the paper almost any day and you see where some child ten, twelve or fifteen years old killed off a parent because he was mad at not being allowed to go to a movie. I don’t know what the world’s coming to when—”

“Do you know who this baby sitter is?” Paul Drake interposed.

“No, I don’t. They have a couple of them. This one I’m talking about has only been working there about six weeks. The Jennings aren’t much for being neighborly, and... Well, this is a peculiar neighborhood. People seem to live pretty much to themselves.

“Time was when people used to swap a little gossip and borrow things back and forth, but now there’s a car in the garage and whenever they have a minute they get up and scoot off someplace. Then when they’re home they’re watching television or something. Seems like times are changing right under our eyes.”

“This baby sitter,” Mason prompted, “an older or a younger woman?”

“The one who lets him have the gun is an older woman — oh, I’d say somewhere in the forties.” She laughed. “Of course, that’s not old at all, you understand. It’s just that she’s older than the other one, and, of course, older than some of the baby sitters they have these days; girls going to high school who come and sit with kids for an evening. I don’t know what would happen if there was any sort of an emergency. I don’t know what one of those girls could do.”

“Well, as far as that’s concerned, what could a woman of forty-five do?” Jonathan Gales commented. “Suppose some man walked in, and—”

“We have to hurry along,” Drake interrupted, his voice apologetic. “I would like to have Mr. Mason hear your story just the way you told it to me. We’ll have time only for highlights. You’ve seen the child playing with this automatic?”

Mrs. Gales nodded emphatically.

“How about you?” Drake asked, turning to Jonathan Gales.

“I’ve seen him two or three times,” Jonathan Gales said. “The very first time I saw it, I said to Martha, ‘It looks to me like that kid’s got a real gun over there,’ and Martha said, ‘No, it can’t be. That’s just some kind of a wooden gun. They’re making imitations these days that look so much like the real thing they scare a body to death.’

“Well, I took a good, long second look at it and I said, ‘Martha, I’m betting that’s a real gun,’ and sure enough, it was.”

“Did you ever have it in your hands?” Mason asked.

“No, but I did think enough about it to get my binoculars and take a look at it — Martha and I do a little bird watching out in the backyard and we’ve got a mighty good pair of binoculars, coated lenses and all. They’re sharp as a tack.”

“All right,” Drake said, hurrying things along. “The child at times plays with a real gun. You’ve noticed that only when this one baby sitter was there.”

They both nodded.

“Now, about the bloodstains,” Drake said.

“Well, that’s the thing I can’t understand,” Gales said. “This morning Barton Jennings was up before daylight. He went someplace. Then, later on, he had a hose and he was out there washing off the sidewalk and pretending he was watering the lawn. It wasn’t five-thirty.

“Now, of course, that’s not unusually early for people that are accustomed to getting up early, but over there in the Jennings house they like to sleep late — you take on a Saturday or a Sunday when they aren’t going anywhere they’ll stay in bed until nine-ten o’clock in the morning. You’ll see Robert up playing around by himself out there in the patio.”

“Not that we’re the nosy kind,” Martha Gales interposed, “but we do our bird watching, a lot of it, in the morning. That’s when birds are moving around and both Jonathan and I are early risers. There’s a hedge between the properties, but you can see through it if someone is moving around. If anybody over there is sitting still-like, it isn’t easy to see him. But if a body’s moving around over in the patio in the Jennings’ house you can see sort of a shadowy outline through the leaves in the hedge.”

“Jennings was watering the lawn?” Mason prompted.

“Well, it wasn’t so much watering the lawn,” Gales said, “as hosing it off. He was pretending to water the lawn but he was holding the hose almost straight down and walking it along the lawn, using too much force to just be watering the grass. He was putting the full stream of water along a narrow strip — oh, maybe two or three feet wide — walking right along with it. Then he came to the sidewalk and he hosed off the sidewalk and in a couple of places I saw him put the nozzle right down within eighteen inches of the cement, just like he was trying to wash something away.

“Well, I didn’t think too much of it until I went out to get my paper. The delivery boy had tossed the paper and usually he tosses it right up on the porch. This morning it didn’t seem to be on the porch and I went out looking for it and I found it in the gutter. Evidently it had slipped out of the delivery boy’s hand. It looks like there had been blood in that water that ran down the gutter.”

“You have the paper?” Drake asked.

Gales handed the newspaper to Mason. “Now, it was rolled up this way,” he explained, rolling up the front page, “and then there was a rubber elastic band around it. You can see the water had quite a reddish tinge to it.”

“But what makes you think it’s blood?” Mason asked.

“I’m coming to that,” Gales said. “When I went out looking for the paper, Jennings was just finishing up watering along the sidewalk. I said to him, ‘Good morning’ and told him it looked like it was going to be a nice day, just sort of neighborly-like, and he seemed right startled to see me out there. And, before he thought, he said sharply, ‘What are you looking for?’ Well, I told him I was looking for my newspaper; that it wasn’t on the porch or on the front lawn and sometimes when the boy threw it out of the car it would hit against the side of the car door and drop down in the gutter. So then I looked down in the gutter and said, ‘Here it is; right here in the gutter.’

“I picked it up and Jennings said, ‘Gosh, I hope I didn’t get it wet. I was watering the lawn.’ Well, I looked at it and saw it was wet all right, but I said, ‘Oh, well, it’ll dry right out. It isn’t very wet; just the corner. You’re up early this morning, aren’t you?’

“Well, he said he’d had to take Robert and the dog out someplace to meet with some other boys that were going out on a camping trip, and then I saw his eyes rest on the paper I was holding. Something in the expression of his eyes caused me to look down, and I could see there was this reddish stain on the paper. Well, I didn’t say a word, but I brought the paper in and dried it out, and Martha and I had our cup of coffee. We both like a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and then we read the newspaper. Sometimes we don’t actually get around to breakfast for an hour or two. We sit out in the yard and watch birds and maybe sip coffee, and—”

“There was a bloodstain,” Drake said.

“That’s right. I’m coming to that. I got to thinking about the reddish color on the paper, and along about ten or eleven o’clock I could see there was a lot of unusual activity over there at the Jennings’ house, with people coming and going, so I got to wondering about the way he’d been washing off that sidewalk with the hose. You see, he quit doing that the minute I got out there. He acted just as if he’d been a kid that had been caught in some kind of mischief. Well, I went out to look around. Out there in the gutter, just alongside the curb above where the paper had been lying, there was a red blotch of blood that hadn’t been washed away yet. I’m pretty sure it was blood, and out a little ways from the curb you could see two spots of blood — looked like somebody had been bleeding and had left the place, walking along the lawn instead of along the walk and then stood for a minute at the gutter, getting a car door open, then had stepped into the car and driven away.

“Now, you probably think I’m... well, maybe you’ll think I’m a little mite too nosy or something, but I just got to wondering about that blood. I said to Martha, I said, ‘Martha, suppose that seven-year-old kid was playing with a gun? Suppose they let him have it and took the shells out of it whenever he was playing with it, but suppose this time they didn’t get all the shells out. Suppose there happened to be a shell left in the barrel and suppose he’d shot somebody?’”

“Anything that makes you think he did?” Mason asked.

Gales hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “Nothing in particular — nothing I can put my finger on.”

“Don’t be so cautious, Jonathan,” Martha Gales prompted. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell them what you told me?”

“Because I can’t prove anything and I may be getting in pretty deep.”

“Go ahead,” Drake said impatiently, “let’s have it.”

“Well, of course, it’s only just a surmise, but Robert was going out on some kind of a Scout trip or something this morning — now why in the world would anyone get up to take a kid out on a Scout trip at four o’clock in the morning — and I thought I heard a shot sometime last night.”

Mason and Drake exchanged glances.

“They took Robert out at four o’clock in the morning?” Mason asked.

Gales nodded. “Must have been around there. It was before daylight.”

“If you couldn’t see, how did you know it was Robert?”

“I heard them talking. I didn’t look at the time, but it must have been right around four o’clock.”

“And it was after Robert left that you saw Jennings washing off the sidewalk?”

“That’s right.”

“His arthritis is bothering him this morning, I believe,” Mason said.

“Yes, he had his cane with him this morning.”

Drake, looking out of the window, said, “Oh-oh, here comes Lieutenant Tragg.”

Mason said to Jonathan Gales, “All right, tell me about the baby sitter. What do you know about her? Does she drive her own car?”

“That’s right.”

“What make is it?”

“I can’t tell you the make. It’s an older type of car — a sedan.”

“She’s in her forties?”

“I would say so.”

“Heavy-set?”

“Well, not fat, just... well, rather broad across the beam.”

“How long has she been baby-sitting for them?”

“Well, I guess maybe six-eight weeks or so. Robert is only there for part time. You know, he’s a child by another marriage — Selkirk, his name is, and—”

The doorbell sounded.

Martha Gales said, “I’ll get it.”

“Never mind Robert,” Mason said. “I know all about him. I’m interested in this baby sitter. Do they say anything about her, or...”

“No, we don’t visit much back and forth. I—”

“You don’t think she’s some relative, or...?”

“No, I think they got her through an agency. I think they said—”

Lt. Tragg’s voice said, “How do you do, madam. I’m Lieutenant Tragg of the homicide department. I’m making an investigation and I’d like to ask you a few questions. Do you mind if I come in?”

Tragg didn’t wait for an answer but pushed his way into the interior of the house, then jerked back in surprise as he saw Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake.

“Well, well, well,” he said, “what brings all of you here?”

“What brings you here?” Mason countered.

Tragg hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, you’ll read it in the papers so I guess there’s no harm in telling you. Mervin Selkirk was found dead in his automobile in the parking lot of the San Sebastian Country Club shortly after one o’clock this afternoon. He’d been dead for some time. There’d been an extensive hemorrhage from a chest wound. The doors of the car were closed and the windows were all up. The fatal bullet was of .22 caliber and there’s reason to believe it was fired from a Colt automatic.”

Lt. Tragg looked at the horrified faces of Martha and Jonathan Gales. “You folks know anything about Mervin Selkirk?” he asked. “Ever meet him? Know him when you see him? Did you see him here last night?”

They shook their heads.

“We don’t know him,” Gales said.

“Anything unusual take place next door during the night?” Tragg asked. “The boy, Robert, was Mervin Selkirk’s son, you know.”

Martha Gales shook her head.

Jonathan Gales said, “Not that we know of. The only thing I know about is the bloodstains.”

Lt. Tragg snapped to attention as though he had received an unexpected jolt of an electric current. “Bloodstains! Where?”

“Next door and on the sidewalk. I was telling Mr. Mason, his secretary and Mr. Drake here about what we saw—”

Tragg said, “Hold it, hold it! Okay, Mason, I guess you’ve beaten me to it, but from now on we’ll follow standard procedure. We’ll excuse you. This is a police investigation of a murder.”

As Mason hesitated, Tragg added, “We can, of course, just take these people up to the district attorney’s office and interrogate them there, but it will be more convenient for all of us if we do it here. And,” he added with a wry smile, “if you’re as fast as you usually are, you already have all the information you need.”

Mason shook hands with Mr. and Mrs. Gales. “Thanks for your co-operation,” he said. “You’ll find Lieutenant Tragg likes to adopt a hard-boiled exterior. He barks and he growls, but he really doesn’t bite.”

“On your way,” Tragg said gruffly.

Mason led the way to the door.

“I’ll drive you folks to the office,” Drake said, as he held open the door of his car.

“No, you won’t,” Mason said. “There isn’t time for that. Drive us to the nearest taxi stand, then get out to the San Sebastian Country Club, find out everything you can dig up out there. I also want you to locate the Selkirk boy. I want to interview him. You’d better telephone your office, and, while you’re about it, tell them to find out who the Jennings’ baby sitter is.”

“That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Drake protested.

“No, it isn’t, Paul,” Mason said. “We don’t give a damn about the haystack, so that will help. Burn up the haystack and wash away the ashes. That will leave the needle where you can find it. It’s the needle we’re interested in, not the haystack. Now, get busy.”