The Case of the Fabulous Fake

16

Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake were huddled around a table in an Italian restaurant which was near the courthouse and where the proprietor was accustomed to devoting a small private dining room to the exclusive use of the trio.

“Well,” Drake said, “it looks as if the judge has his mind made up, from all I could hear.”

Mason nodded. “What have you found out, Paul?”

“Not a whole lot,” Drake admitted, “a lot of detached bits of information. I don’t know whether they’ll do you any good... As you, yourself, have remarked, your client is an awful liar.”

“She is and she isn’t,” Mason said. “She lied to me because she wanted to save her brother’s reputation. She thought there was something that was hanging over his head, something that he’d pay five thousand dollars to eliminate. She wanted to carry out his wishes.

“Therefore, she acted independently of my advice and she tried to deceive me, but when it came to a showdown I don’t think she did try to deceive me. At least, I think there’s a possibility she’s telling the truth.

“That’s a duty that a lawyer owes to his client. Regardless of how many times he has been lied to in the past, he always has to keep the faith. He always has to believe that in the final showdown, the client is telling the truth and putting the cards face up on the table.”

Drake said, “She can’t be telling the truth on this one, Perry. She went down there and tried to buy him off. She couldn’t do it and she killed him.”

“What have you found out?” Mason asked, detouring the subject.

“Well,” Drake said, “you probably had Moray Cassel pretty well pegged. The guy lived a mysterious life, and no one knows his real source of income or how much his income was.

“This much I did find out. The man was always armed. He carried a thirty-eight-caliber, snub-nosed revolver in a shoulder holster under his left armpit. His clothes were tailor-made, and for years the same tailor had been making his clothes and making them so that there was an extra bit of room under the left armpit so the bulge made by the gun wouldn’t be conspicuous.”

“The deuce!” Mason said.

Drake nodded.

“And that gun was on him at the time his body was found?”

“It must have been,” Drake said.

Mason’s eyes narrowed. “Now, isn’t it interesting that the police described everything in the room, showed photographs of the body lying fully clothed on the bed with a bullet hole in the forehead, the blood all over the pillow and down on the floor, and no one said anything about the gun?”

“Did you ask them?” Drake inquired.

Mason grinned. “I didn’t ask them. I wouldn’t have thought to have asked them about a gun, but I certainly should have thought to have asked them what was found in his pockets and whether anything significant was found in the room... What about the source of income, Paul?”

Drake shook his head. “The guy did everything with cash. He wore a money belt. There were four one-thousand-dollar bills in the money belt. He had a leather wallet that was pretty well crammed with hundred-dollar bills. As nearly as can be found out he had no bank account. He bought that Cadillac automobile and paid for it with cold, hard cash.”

“Women?” Mason asked.

“Women came to see him from time to time.”

“The same woman or different women?”

“Different.”

“What did you find out about the note that was placed on the display case in San Francisco where I’d pick it up?”

“The note was written on an electric typewriter,” Drake said. “They’re all electric typewriters, but this particular note, as nearly as I can determine, was written on the typewriter of Joyce Baffin.

“For your information, Perry, if it’s worth anything, Joyce Baffin left the import-export office at noon, Thursday, pleading a terrific headache. She was, however, back on the job Friday morning, and Joyce was and is very popular with the officials and employees of the company and was at one time very friendly with Edgar Douglas. In fact, he had quite a crush on her. But so did lots of other people. Perhaps Franklin Gage, who is a widower, and Homer Gage, who has a predatory eye, would have liked to enjoy a closer relationship with Joyce Baffin.”

Mason, sipping a cocktail, digested that information.

Drake went on. “I have some more odds and ends of various bits of information. I spent quite a bit of time and a fair amount of money with the telephone operator at Tallmeyer Apartments. I found out that Moray Cassel put through a lot of telephone calls to a local number. I found that number was the apartment of one Irene Blodgett, twenty-seven, blond, Millsep Apartments, divorced, employed steadily during the daytime at the Underwood Importing Company. At night she’s something of a gadabout but never anything spectacular. Quiet, refined, good-looking, popular — I’ve got operatives working quietly on her, but if there’s anything phony she’s pretty well covered.

“The only thing is that this Underwood Importing Company does have some dealing or has had dealings with the Escobar Import and Export Company.”

Della Street, watching Mason’s face, said, “You have an idea, Chief?”

“Just this,” Mason said. “At the time of his death, Moray Cassel was either standing by the bed or sitting on the edge of the bed. He was shot in the forehead by one shot from a high-powered, single-action, twenty-two-caliber revolver with a nine-and-three-eighth-inch barrel. The murderer must have been facing him.”

“Well?” Drake asked. “What’s so peculiar about that? Diana Douglas went to call on the guy. She rang the bell. Cassel let her in. She tried to bargain with him, then he got tough with her. She knew at that time that blackmailers never quit. Once they get a hold on a victim they bleed him white. Diana was obsessed with the idea she had to protect her brother.”

Mason held the stem of his cocktail glass, watching the liquid on the inside as he twisted the glass between his thumb and forefinger.

“You got into Cassel’s apartment?” he asked the detective.

“Sure, after the police were through with it. That seemed to take an awful long while. They went over the whole place dusting for fingerprints, testing for blood stains, and all that.”

“What about the fellow’s wardrobe?” Mason asked. “Was he meticulous with his clothes as I thought?”

“Boy, you’ve said it,” Drake replied. “It was a fairly large-sized apartment with lots of drawer space. The drawers were filled with monogrammed shirts. He even had monograms on his underwear, and the closet was pretty well filled with tailor-made clothes.”

“You checked with his tailor?”

“Sure. The tailor told me that Cassel always paid him in cash, seldom wore a suit over six months, and was very fastidious. And, of course, there was that bit about tailoring the suits so the bulge didn’t show where the revolver was carried under the left armpit.

“The tailor got quite friendly with me, said that he always had an idea Cassel was a gangster of some sort, and was very certain that Cassel was cheating on the income tax. But, of course, it was none of the tailor’s business, and, believe me, the tailor loved to get that money in the form of cash... I wouldn’t be too surprised, Perry, if perhaps the tailor didn’t do a little cheating on the income tax himself.”

“What about overcoats?” Mason asked. “Were those tailor-made, too?”

“Everything,” Drake said. “Now, wait a minute, Perry, there’s one exception. There was one overcoat in there that Cassel had evidently used for rough-and-tumble stuff when he was loading or unloading things in an automobile.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, it was an overcoat that wasn’t tailor-made and the labels had been cut out from both the neck and the breast pocket.”

“The deuce you say,” Mason said. And then, after a while, “How did it fit, Paul?”

“How should I know?” Drake asked. “The corpse was being dissected in the medical examiner’s office at the coroner’s by an autopsy surgeon. I couldn’t very well go in there and try on an overcoat... He couldn’t have had it on since late spring. It had been hot for the whole week of the murder... What difference does the one coat make?”

Mason sat for a long moment in contemplative silence, then abruptly changed the subject. “You have the various telephone numbers of the personnel at the Escobar Import and Export Company?”

Drake nodded.

Mason said to Della Street, “See if you can get us a telephone, Della.”

When a telephone had been brought into the room and connected, Mason used his credit card, saying, “This is a credit-card call. I want to talk with Franklin Gage at this number in San Francisco.”

Mason took Drake’s notebook and read the number of Franklin Gage’s residence.

“It’s a person-to-person call. No one else if he’s out.”

The lawyer drummed with the fingers of his right hand while he held the telephone to his ear. “Let’s hope we’re in luck,” he said.

A moment later he heard the suave voice of Franklin Gage on the telephone.

“This is Perry Mason, the lawyer,” Mason said. “I take it that you are somewhat interested in this case against Diana Douglas, who is working for you... for your company, that is.”

“Well, in a way,” Gage said cautiously. “It depends upon what you want.”

“Has an audit been completed of the cash shortage of your import company?”

“Yes, it has.”

“Would you mind telling me what it shows?”

“In round figures,” Gage said, “it shows a shortage of ten thousand dollars.”

Mason said, “Would you be willing to do something which might prevent a miscarriage of justice, Mr. Gage?”

“What?”

“I would like to see that Joyce Baffin is present in court tomorrow morning when the case against Diana Douglas is called up.”

“Well, of course, if you want to pay her expenses down and back,” Gage said, “I would give her a leave of absence.”

“It’s not that,” Mason said. “She might not want to come.”

“Well, I certainly can’t force her to come.”

Mason said, “She has been in your employ for some time?”

“Yes, all of the secretaries have been with us for quite some time. We don’t have a turnover with help, Mr. Mason. Our business is highly specialized, and after we have trained a young woman to perform competent secretarial duties we try to keep her.”

Mason said, “The reason I am calling you personally, Mr. Gage, is that it is tremendously important that Joyce Baffin be here. I can’t begin to tell you how vital it may be. I am going to ask that you and your nephew, Homer Gage, come down to Los Angeles to the trial, that you personally get in touch with Joyce Baffin tonight and tell her that it is highly important that the three of you come down.”

“The three of us!” Gage echoed.

“Exactly,” Mason said. “I have reason to believe that if you ask her to come down by herself she might not come. She might even skip out. And, if only one of you is coming with her, she might again become suspicious. But if both you and your nephew are coming down ostensibly to see what you can do to help Diana Douglas—”

“If she’s guilty, she’s not entitled to any help,” Gage interrupted sternly.

“But suppose she isn’t guilty? You’ve had a chance to study the young woman. You’ve had a chance to know something of her loyalty. Do you think that she’s the type of a woman who would commit a murder?”

“Well, of course,” Gage said cautiously, “you never know what a person will do when they’re hard pressed, and she always tried to protect her brother, but — Do you feel this is really important, Mr. Mason?”

“I feel that it is highly important. I feel that it is vital,” Mason said.

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“If you can do exactly as I suggested,” Mason said, “I feel that it will be possible to eliminate certain questions which might otherwise come up in court.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Oh, about the Escobar Import and Export Company, the nature of its business, the large amount of cash that it keeps on hand, and all of those things that are business details which you might not care to have your competitors know about.”

“Very well,” Gage said quickly, “if I can have your assurance that you feel this will keep the business affairs of our company out of evidence, Mr. Mason, and if you assure me that it is vital to the case of your client, Homer and I will do our best to induce Joyce to come with us, and I feel that we can be successful... Where and when do we meet you?”

“You take a plane tonight,” Mason said, “so you will be sure to get in. You go to a hotel. All you have to do is to ring up the Drake Detective Agency and Paul Drake will send a car to escort you to the courtroom tomorrow morning, see that you are given admission, and properly seated.”

“The Drake Detective Agency,” Gage said.

“That’s right,” Mason said, and gave him Paul Drake’s number.

“Very well. We’ll do it.”

“I can depend on you?” Mason asked.

“You have my word,” Franklin Gage said with dignity.

“That’s good enough for me,” Mason told him, and hung up the telephone.

“Now, what the hell?” Drake asked.

Mason picked up the cocktail glass, drained it, and smiled. “I think,” he said, “I’m beginning to see daylight... A shortage of ten thousand dollars.”

“The original figure was twenty thousand,” Drake said.

Mason nodded. “Remember, however, that when Franklin Gage entered the office he said that he had been working on a business deal and had taken ten thousand dollars out, that the deal had fallen through and he was in the process of replacing the ten thousand dollars in the cash drawer.”

“I don’t get it,” Drake said.

“If we can get those people in court tomorrow morning perhaps we’ll get lucky,” Mason said.

“But you assured them that those business matters wouldn’t come out.”

“I think they won’t,” Mason told him. “Now then, I’m going to have another cocktail and then we’re going to order one of these fabulous Italian dinners and relax while we eat it.”