The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

Chapter number 10

Mason walked over to the place where his car was parked in the police garage. Della Street, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, waved her hand at him, and started the motor.

Mason moved over to the right-hand side of the car, opened the door and slid in beside her.

Della Street eased the car into motion, driving out of the police garage and into traffic on the cross street with all of the sure competency of the skilled driver.

She kept her attention on the traffic while she said to Perry Mason over her shoulder, “Did they try any funny stuff?”

“All they could think of,” Mason said. “What did they do with you?”

She said, “I talked. I told them my story and they knew it was right because they checked up on the time of the telephone call, and the place. They went over the car looking for fingerprints and trying to find bloodstains. Then they let me go. But I knew they were going to try something with you and Mrs. Kempton. Did she talk?”

“No. She sat tight. They put us together in a room that was all bugged up.”

Della merely nodded, jockeyed the car into position at a stop light, and held herself in readiness to beat the line of traffic to the crossing.

Mason studied her with an affectionate smile. “It isn’t going to hurt anything if one of those cars gets ahead of us, Della.”

“It’ll hurt my feelings,” she said. “That fellow in the gray sedan has been trying to push me over and hog the traffic for the last block.”

She shifted her position slightly, her skirt up over her knees so as to give her freedom of leg action, her left foot on the brake, her right on the throttle.

The signal changed.

Della Street’s reactions were instantaneous. The car leaped forward and shot across the intersection. The gray sedan tried to keep up, failed, and, sullenly dropped behind.

“Where to?” Della Street asked. “The office?”

Mason said, “The nearest telephone, and then we eat. There’s a drugstore with two phone booths around the corner here.”

Della Street whipped the car around the corner.

Mason shook his head sadly. “And you object to my driving.”

“It seems different when I’m doing it,” she admitted sheepishly.

“It is different,” Mason told her.

She parked the car, joined Mason in the phone booth.

“First James Etna and then Paul Drake, Della,” Mason told her.

Della Street’s swiftly competent fingers dialed the number, and a moment later she said, “Just a moment, Mr. Etna, Mr. Mason wants to talk with you.”

She passed the telephone across to Mason, and Mason said, “Hello, Etna. Mrs. Kempton has been trying to get you. There have been complications in...”

“I heard about it,” Etna said. “There was a bulletin on the radio. I was at a friend’s house. My wife and I came home at once and I’ve been trying everywhere I could think of to locate you.”

“You didn’t call the right place,” Mason said.

“Where?”

“Police headquarters.”

“Oh-oh!” Etna said.

“Our client, Mrs. Josephine Kempton, is being held at headquarters tonight.”

“What charge?”

“No charge.”

“Do you want to get a writ of habeas corpus?”

“I don’t think it would do any good. They’ll turn her loose tomorrow anyway, unless she tells them something tonight, and I don’t think she will.”

Etna said, “I may be able to find out something about what the score is, Mason. Can you tell me just briefly about it?”

“She rang me,” Mason said, “and told me she couldn’t get you, that she needed a lawyer at once. She was out at Stonehenge. So my secretary and I drove out there. She agreed to have the door on the back street opened for us. The door was open, but she was lying unconscious on the floor of an upper bedroom, and the body of Benjamin Addicks was lying face down on the bed. He’d been stabbed several times, and the handle of a big carving knife was protruding from his back.”

“I understand the animals were loose and that the place had been wrecked,” Etna said.

“I wouldn’t say it had been wrecked, but there’s a lot of commotion going on out there.”

“What do you think about letting her tell her story?”

Mason said, “I never let a client tell a story to the police unless I know what that story is.”

“You’re the doctor,” Etna told him.

“I’m not the doctor,” Mason said. “I’m associate counsel.”

“No you’re not. You’re in charge of the whole thing — in case there is anything. I don’t feel competent to handle a case of that kind. Frankly, I’m quite certain there’s something in connection with the case that we don’t know anything about, and it may be something that’s rather disquieting. What was Mrs. Kempton doing out at Stonehenge?”

“That’s what the police want to know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No. Actually she didn’t have the opportunity.”

“I have some contacts with newspapermen, and I think I can find out something of what’s going on. Suppose I get in touch with you, at say nine o’clock in the morning.”

“That’s fine,” Mason said.

“All right, I’ll be at your office at nine o’clock. I think I’ll have some information.”

“And,” Mason said, “if they haven’t turned Mrs. Kempton loose by that time we’ll get a writ of habeas corpus.”

Mason hung up the phone, waited a moment, then dialed the private, unlisted number of Paul Drake, head of the Drake Detective Agency.

When he had Paul Drake on the line, Mason said, “Paul, I have a job for you, an emergency job.”

“Why the devil is it your cases always break at night?” Drake asked irritably.

“They don’t, always,” Mason told him.

“Well, I can always count on a sleepless night whenever I get a phone call from you. Just what am I supposed to do?”

Mason said, “You’re supposed to find out everything about the late Benjamin Addicks.”

“The late Benjamin Addicks?”

“That’s right. Somebody pushed a carving knife down between his shoulder blades some time this evening, and the police are holding a client of mine, a Josephine Kempton, for questioning.”

“What do you want to know about Addicks?”

“Everything.”

“What do you want to know about the murder?”

“Everything.”

Drake said sarcastically, “I suppose you want me to have it all ready by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“You’re wrong,” Mason told him. “I want it by eight-thirty,” and hung up.