The Case of the Fabulous Fake

4

Paul Drake was already at his office at nine o’clock the next morning when Perry Mason, leaving the elevator, detoured into the office of the Drake Detective Agency.

The girl at the switchboard smiled, nodded, pointed down the corridor toward Drake’s private office, and returned to the telephone conversation she was holding at the switchboard.

Mason walked down a veritable rabbit warren of cubbyhole offices where Drake’s operatives prepared reports on their various cases, and then entered Drake’s personal office at the end of the passageway.

This also was a tiny office with a desk and a battery of telephones.

Drake looked up at Mason, grinned, yawned, said, “You and your mysterious client!”

“How come?” Mason asked.

Drake passed him over the newspaper containing the ad which Della Street had left on his desk the night before.

“Some of your work?” the lawyer asked.

“My work,” Drake admitted.

“Do any good with it?”

“Yes and no.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I had to take certain chances — that’s one of the things you have to figure on in this game. I’m playing it blind. The other side has all the numbers.

“Now, either this party had already contacted the person she wanted, or she hadn’t. I couldn’t tell which.”

“Wait a minute,” Mason said. “You’re using a female pronoun. Why?”

“Because she is a female.”

“Go on.”

“Well, as I said, either she had contacted the person or she hadn’t. Then I had another horn of the dilemma. Either she knew the person by sight or she didn’t. The fact that she put that ad in the paper indicated the probabilities were that she didn’t know the party by sight.

“Of course, I had one other chance to take. Either the party was a man or a woman. I was in a position to hedge a little bit on that by taking one of my women operatives with me.

“I put that ad in the paper, stating that I would be parked in front of the hotel entrance in a taxicab at exactly nine o’clock.”

Mason said, “I presume you had made other efforts to find her identity?”

“Of course. I went to the office of the newspaper which had run her ad. A five-dollar bill got me the information that she was a young woman, good figure, blond, blue eyes, a little bit diffident.

“I went to the Willatson Hotel and wasted five dollars. I couldn’t get any lead there.

“So I decided to take a chance and put this ad in the paper. Then, with my female operative, I went to the hotel and sat in front in a taxicab.”

“Why the taxicab?” Mason asked.

“So she couldn’t trace the license number.”

Mason nodded approvingly. “What happened?”

“Promptly at nine o’clock she walked past the car, but so did a lot of other people. However, I had it fixed so she couldn’t get a real good look at either my female operative or myself. I was wearing a cap pulled down over my forehead and dark glasses. The operative was wearing a coat with a high collar and dark glasses... It was all real cloak-and-dagger.

“With all those people walking past we couldn’t spot her the first time, but when she turned at the end of the block and walked back we had her spotted. She did that three times, never giving us the faintest tumble; no signal, no recognition, no attempt to come up and engage us in conversation. She just walked past four times. And she was clever enough so she didn’t indicate any particular curiosity. She kept her eyes straight ahead each time she passed the cab.”

“And so?” Mason asked.

“So,” Drake said, “we didn’t press our luck. We had the cab drive away.”

“You didn’t try to shadow her?”

“Of course, we shadowed her. I had one operative in an automobile parked behind me, and when the girl walked past the cab the second time he spotted her the same way we did. When we moved on I gave him the signal to follow her.

“After our cab drove off she went back to the Willatson Hotel. She’s registered as Miss Diana Deering of San Francisco. She’s in room seven-sixty-seven.”

“Good work, Paul,” Mason said.

“Wait a minute,” Drake told him, “I’m not finished. We put some more five-dollar bills to work with the bellboys and the phone operator. Her luggage is stamped D.D.

“Now, when a person assumes an alias they quite frequently use their own first name, and, of course, with initials on the baggage they want to get a name that tallies with the initials. So Diana Deering could well be Diana—, of San Francisco.”

Mason raised his eyebrows.

“So,” Drake went on, “we did a little leg work. We found that our subject telephoned a San Francisco hospital from time to time to inquire about a patient, one Edgar Douglas.

“Edgar is employed by the Escobar Import and Export Company of San Francisco. He was in an automobile accident a few days ago, has a fractured skull, and is still unconscious.

“So we took the initials of Diana D. and tried Douglas as the last name. We phoned the Escobar Company and asked about Edgar Douglas, were told about the automobile accident, and asked about Diana Douglas.

“We were told she was his sister, that she was also an employee of the company, was upset about the accident, and had been given a leave of absence for a few days so she could be near him.

“We got a description. It checks. We also found out there are no other members of the family.”

“Arouse any suspicion?” Mason asked.

“Not a bit. We said we were a finance company checking on Edgar’s employment and credit standing, made the questions as routine as possible and asked them in a somewhat bored tone of voice.”

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“So then we did leg work in San Francisco,” Drake went on. “The Escobar Company doesn’t seem at all alarmed, but they’re having a ‘routine’ audit of their books. We found that out more or less incidentally.”

“What’s the prognosis on the brother?” Mason asked.

“Probably going to be all right, but may be unconscious for as much as two weeks,” Drake said. “The guy was all set to take a business trip somewhere — that is, suitcase all packed; drove to a service station to get the car filled up; was clobbered by a car which drove through a red light and knocked him unconscious.”

“Any question that it was his fault?” Mason asked.

“None whatever. Not only did the car that struck him come through a red light with several witnesses willing to testify to that effect, but the driver was pretty well potted. The police took him to jail to sober up and he’s facing a citation for drunk driving.”

Mason was thoughtful for several seconds. “Why should all this cause Diana to leave her brother, critically ill, come to Los Angeles, and start putting ads in the paper?”

Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you want us to keep on we’ll find out. Probably it’s some form of blackmail which involves the family in some way.”

“You say there are no other members of the family?” Mason asked.

“That’s all. The parents are dead. Diana and her brother, Edgar, are the only survivors at the present time. Diana has never been married. Edgar is a bachelor, but the rumor is he’s going to announce an engagement to a wealthy heiress — although that’s just rumor.”

“How old?” Mason asked.

“Diana?”

“No, Edgar.”

“A little over twenty-one.”

“Younger than Diana,” Mason said thoughtfully.

“A couple of years.”

“She could try to mother him a little,” Mason said.

“It has been done,” Drake conceded... “How about you giving a helping hand?”

“To whom?”

“To me, and, incidentally, to yourself,” Drake said. “If you can tell me about Diana’s case and why you’re interested I may be able to help both of you. At least I can save you a little money.”

Mason shook his head. “I can’t, Paul. I’m bound by professional ethics.”

“Do you want me to keep on the job?” Drake asked.

“For a while,” Mason said.

“Want me to put a tail on her?”

Mason said, “I’d like to know where she goes and who she sees, but that’s a pretty ticklish job because I don’t want her to feel that she’s being shadowed. If that happened it might alarm her and cause her to take steps which would be against her own best interests.”

Drake said, “Then you’d better let me make a very casual shadow job of it, because on a tight shadow job the subject is quite frequently aware of the tail. It’s a pretty difficult job to put on a real shadow and guarantee that the subject is completely unaware of it.”

“Then make it a loose shadow job,” Mason said.

“Of course,” Drake went on, “where money is no object, we can use enough operatives to—”

“We haven’t an unlimited expense account here, Paul, and I don’t know that it’s absolutely imperative that we know where this young woman goes and what she does, but I would like to keep in touch with her and I would dislike very, very much to have her become alarmed and take a powder.”

“Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll see what can be done. We’ll make a loose tail job of it. When do you want a report?”

“Whenever you have anything worthwhile,” Mason said, put his hand briefly on Paul Drake’s shoulder, and walked down to his own office.