The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

Chapter number 13

Gertie closed and locked the door to the entrance room promptly at 5:00. By 5:30 Della had the outgoing mail arranged in a pile, and Gertie helped her with stamping the envelopes. Then Gertie went home.

Della Street walked into Mason’s private office.

“Tired, Della?”

“Not particularly. How about you?”

Mason smiled. “I’ve been reading diaries until I’m dizzy. Can you take some more?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“We’ve got to find out what’s in those Cadmus diaries.”

“But we’ve done that.”

“No, we haven’t. We’ve read the lines. Now we have to see what’s written between and behind the lines.”

A knock sounded on the door of the outer office, a long peremptory knock.

“Shall I see who it is?” she asked.

Mason shook his head. “Let it go, Della. We’ve had enough emergency stuff and enough after-hours work.”

She sat down at her secretarial desk. Mason came over to place his hip on a corner of the desk. He put his hand over hers. “Nice to have you around,” he said.

“Nice to be around,” she told him, smiling up at him.

The knock on the outer door became a steady tattoo.

Mason said, “Whoever’s trying to get in that outer office seems to be pretty certain someone’s here, Della. That’s a continued, persistent knocking. Better see who it is.”

Della Street hurried through to the outer office, opened the door. Mason heard her exchange a few words, then she came back with a late edition of the afternoon paper. On the paper had been written, “Mr. Mason. Compliments of Sidney Hardwick. I want you to see that I am a fast worker.”

Della Street once more sat down at her secretarial desk. Mason leaned over her shoulder as she spread the afternoon paper out on the desk.

Headlines across three columns at the top of the paper screamed:

“Why, the nerve of him,” Della Street said, “the...”

“That’s all right,” Mason said, “let’s take a look and see how far he’s gone, Della.”

Together they read the article, an article which stated that police were now making inquiries of Mrs. Josephine Kempton concerning the mysterious death of Helen Cadmus, the attractive secretary who was supposed to have jumped overboard from Benjamin Addicks’ palatial private yacht in a storm-tossed sea some months earlier.

That death, the newspaper pointed out, had been treated by the authorities either as a suicide or as an accident, but with the murder of Benjamin Addicks authorities had reopened the entire files surrounding the death of Helen Cadmus.

The article went on to say:

Mason’s jaw clamped, his eyes were cold and angry.

“Well,” Della Street said, “Hardwick was as good as his word.”

“No better certainly,” Mason said. “All right, Della. Wait here for a minute. I’ll go see Paul Drake. We’re in a shooting war, and I hope he has some ammunition for us.”

“You want me to give him a ring?” Della Street asked.

“No,” Mason said. “I’ll go on down to his office and see what’s cooking. In the meantime, Della, ring up the newspapers and tell them that if they’ll send representatives over here I’ll make a statement about the Addicks murder case.”

“Do you want me to wait until you’ve seen Paul before...?”

Mason shook his head.

“You mean if Paul doesn’t have anything you’ll make a straight denial and...?”

Mason said, “A straight denial, Della, won’t buy us anything in this situation. We’re going to have to put Hardwick and his side of the case on the defensive. I’ll need something spectacular. If Paul Drake has the ammunition I’ll shoot it. If he doesn’t, I’ll shoot blanks, but those blanks will make so much noise the other side will start running for cover. You put through the calls, Della, and hold the fort. I’ll be back as soon as I can get in touch with Paul.”

Mason went out through the exit door from his office into the corridor, walked down to the offices of the Drake Detective Agency, jerked open the door, caught the eye of the receptionist at the switchboard, and said, “Is Paul in?”

She smiled. “He insists he’s all in.”

“That’s fine,” Mason told her, glancing vaguely at a blonde who was waiting. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

Mason opened the gate in the long corridor leading to Paul Drake’s office, and found Drake holding his ear to a telephone, sorting out papers while carrying on a conversation with one of his men.

Drake motioned for Mason to sit down, and after a moment the detective said into the telephone, “All right. Get her to write her name on the back of the photographs so that it will make an absolute identification. She probably won’t care to make an affidavit as yet, but tie her up so she can’t back out. Be sure she identifies the photographs.”

Drake hung up, gave Mason a tired smile, and said, “Your hunch paid off, Perry.”

“What?”

“Getting the telephone numbers from which Addicks placed his collect calls to the yacht, and...”

“You mean you’ve tied him up with a woman?”

“That’s right.”

“Woman or women?”

“Apparently it’s the same woman in both instances — Helen Cadmus.”

Mason whistled.

“That’s about all there is to it. On a couple of occasions when the yacht got into port along about nine or ten o’clock in the evening, Addicks started back from the beach and yet didn’t get in until the next morning. When Addicks hadn’t taken Nathan Fallon, Mortimer Hershey, or Josephine Kempton along, there was nobody to make a check between the house and the yacht, and find out when the yacht did get in. I checked on the yacht’s log.

“A couple of times when Addicks started out on the yacht and then got off in Catalina, and sent the yacht cruising, he called the captain to give instructions. Those telephone calls were from these same two motels.

“I haven’t checked on the dates as yet, but there’s no question but what that’s where the calls came from, and in one of the motels the woman who runs the place is very definite in her identification. She identifies the photographs of Benjamin Addicks and that of Helen Cadmus.”

“How did he register?” Mason asked.

“He used a fictitious name, naturally.”

“They want license numbers of cars,” Mason said. “Did he...?”

“Yes, he gave the license number of his Cadillac.”

Mason thought that over. His eyes narrowed.

“Did you notice a blonde out in the office when you came in?” Drake asked.

“Yes, what about her?”

“I was going to call you. I asked her to wait a few minutes. She’s Mrs. Blevins, the wife of the animal psychologist. I got her to come to my office because...”

“Let’s get her in,” Mason said. “I want to talk with her. Now listen, Paul, very definitely I don’t want any slip-up on this thing. I want your men to get this angle tied up tight. What alias did Addicks use?”

“In both instances it was Barnwell. He was registered under the name of B. F. Barnwell.”

“What was Benjamin Addicks’s middle name, Paul?”

“I don’t know.”

Mason snapped his fingers and said, “I bet you a dime it was Franklin. Benjamin Franklin Addicks.”

“Well?” Drake asked.

“B. F. Barnwell would naturally be the way he’d register. He’d keep his first two initials B. F. Now look, Paul, Addicks had a lot of mining interests. He was in Nevada a lot. I want you to get your men started checking everything they can find in Nevada. I want you to find if there are any registrations in motor courts for B. F. Barnwell. And, while you’re about it, just for the fun of the thing, check the vital statistics. But find out everything you can about Barnwell.”

Drake said, “You’re going to have one hell of a bill on this, Perry. I’ve got men...”

“That’s all right,” Mason interrupted. “I’m in the middle of a fight, and something big is involved. I don’t know what it is. Apparently there’s nothing in those Helen Cadmus diaries, and yet everyone who has any connection with Addicks wants to get those diaries by one means or another. The only thing that I can think of is that I find nothing in the diaries because I’ve read them. The other people haven’t read them and are therefore assuming there’s something important in them because there’s something important that should be in them — all right, Paul, let’s get Mrs. Blevins in here.”

Drake said into the telephone, “Send Mrs. Blevins in,” then stretched back, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, yawned prodigiously, said, “Gosh, Perry, I’m all in. I’ve been sitting here at the end of this telephone night and day...”

Mason said reassuringly, “We’re getting toward the end of it now Paul. We’re striking pay dirt.”

“I don’t know what good that stuff’s going to do,” Drake told him. “The guy plays house with his secretary — an idea not exactly original with him. It has been done, you know. You have to admit she was a mighty darned good looking girl...”

“I know, I know,” Mason interrupted, “but we’re getting a lead on something.”

“Well, pretty quick,” Drake said, “I’m going to fall right forward on my face and...”

The door opened and Mrs. Blevins, a blonde about twenty-seven years old, with big blue eyes, stood in the doorway.

Her clothes made no effort to minimize her figure. She not only had a good one but seemed quite conscious of the fact.

“Hello,” she said to Perry Mason. “You’re Mr. Mason. I saw you come in. I smiled but I guess you didn’t notice me. I’m Fern Blevins, Alan Blevins’ ex-wife. And you’re Mr. Drake.”

Mason bowed, smiled, and Mrs. Blevins came toward him to extend her hand.

Drake said to Mason, “You talk, or do I?”

“I will,” Mason said. “Please sit down, Mrs. Blevins. We’re going to be frightfully inquisitive.”

She shifted her blue eyes momentarily, said, “What if I don’t choose to answer?”

“You don’t have to,” Mason told her. “We’re interested in your divorce.”

“Oh that!” she said, with relief apparent in her voice “I was afraid you were really going to get personal.”

“What we’re primarily after,” Mason said, smiling, “is in finding out everything that went on in the house where Addicks lived.”

“Stonehenge you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I guess a lot went on there.”

“Did you ever stay there with your husband?”

“Good heavens, no. He never stayed there. He worked there, that’s all — although sometimes he didn’t get home until pretty late at night.”

“I notice that you alleged mental cruelty in your complaint,” Mason said.

“That was as good as anything.”

“Can you tell us some of the details, some of the things that didn’t appear in the complaint?”

She said, “Alan was quite a bit older than I.”

“You were his second wife?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

She said, “He... well, I guess we got tired of each other, and — I got tired of being a human guinea pig.”

Mason glanced significantly at Paul Drake, and said, “Do you mean he hypnotized you, Mrs. Blevins?”

“I’ll say he hypnotized me. I think he must have had me under some sort of hypnotic influence when I married him.”

“Lots of people feel that way,” Mason said. “Can you tell us any details?”

She said, “I was working as a secretary and I did some work for him on a paper that he was writing. Well, of course, you know hypnotism is something that fascinates people. I became very much interested and asked him about hypnotism, and he... well, he seemed very nice. Those were the days of courtship. Everything he did was nice.”

“Go on,” Mason said.

“I don’t know how to describe it. You get starry-eyed and every minute that you’re with a man is just like heaven. Then you marry him, and in place of being happy you find that you’re terribly fed up with the whole thing. The glamour vanishes, and you see the man as a very ordinary individual. Moreover, he’s a jealous, possessive individual who keeps prying into your secrets and he starts making all sorts of accusations.”

“You kept on working after you were married?” Mason asked.

“Yes.”

“For your husband?”

“No. I had a regular job. I stayed with it.”

“Can you tell us a little more about being a guinea Pig?”

“Well, then he told me about hypnotism, he asked me if I’d like to be hypnotized. He was looking right at me, and I had the most delicious feeling of submission. I felt that I’d do anything for him. I wanted to show my confidence in him, and I told him that I’d be perfectly willing.”

“And then what?”

She said, “I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She said, “It’s one of those things that a hypnotist can do to you. He can hypnotize you and tell you that you won’t remember anything about what you did while you were under a hypnotic influence. I’ve seen Alan do it dozens of times to people. He’ll make them do the craziest things and say the craziest things, and then he’ll tell them to wake up without remembering anything that they had done, and not to remember even about being hypnotized.”

“And it was like that with you?”

She nodded. “I was looking at him and saying, “Well, go ahead, Alan, hypnotize me—’ and then he told me that he’d already hypnotized me, and I thought it was just a joke until I happened to notice my wrist watch and realized that either someone had set my watch ahead forty-five minutes, or there were about forty-five minutes that I couldn’t account for.”

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“Then he kept looking at me in a peculiar way, and after about five minutes I had the most absolutely insane impulse to — to do something.”

“What?” Mason asked.

She shook her head and said, “It was a crazy thing, but anyhow I did it, and... well, I know now what had happened.”

“What?”

“It was a post-hypnotic suggestion,” she said. “That’s the way hypnotists work. They get you under their domination and they cannot only make you do things but they’ll give you something to do as a post-hypnotic suggestion — that is, they’ll tell you to wake up and not remember you’ve been hypnotized, and then five or ten minutes after you wake up, you’ll do some crazy thing. That’s the way it was with me.”

“Go on,” Mason said.

“After a while we got married.”

“The hypnotism kept up?”

“It kept up, Mr. Mason, a lot more often than I realized.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’d find myself doing things that were the result of post-hypnotic suggestions. There’s some of that I don’t want to go into.”

Mason, watching her said, “We’d like very much to have your co-operation, Mrs. Blevins. We’d be willing to pay you for any inconvenience that...”

“That’s what Mr. Drake told me, but there are some things that money can’t buy.”

“Could you give us a hint?” Mason asked.

She hesitated.

Mason smiled and said, “You were already married to the man and...”

“Oh, all right,” she blurted. “I was a fool. I kept letting Alan hypnotize me. I’d have a headache and he would put me to sleep and I’d wake up in a minute or two and the headache would be all gone, and I’d feel just wonderful, completely relaxed. Sometimes when I was nervous and couldn’t sleep, he’d give me a brief hypnotic treatment with a post-hypnotic suggestion. Then I’d become so sleepy that I simply couldn’t hold my head up and... well, that’s the way it would happen.

“Then, as I told you, things got to the point where the glamour wore off and... well, I was working and — I don’t know how to tell you this.”

Mason said, “There was another man?”

“Alan thinks there was.”

“Was there?”

“Alan thinks there was,” she repeated tonelessly.

“Go on,” Mason said, “what happened?”

“Well, one night Alan was working, and I had a sudden crazy desire to put down in writing a lot of things about my private life, things that ordinarily I wouldn’t ever tell anyone about. I wanted to put those things in writing and hide the paper in the back of a drawer under a collection of photographs — I just couldn’t keep from it. I wrote out a lot of things about my private life and about what had happened and put it there under the photographs in the drawer.”

“And then?” Mason asked.

“The next morning I suddenly realized what a crazy thing I’d done and I wanted to get that paper and burn it up. I went to the drawer and... well, you know the answer, the paper was gone.”

“You mean it had been a post-hypnotic suggestion?”

“That’s right. I didn’t even know that he’d hypnotized me. I still don’t know when he had hypnotized me, but he had left that post-hypnotic suggestion in my mind. So then I knew that he had the paper, and the stuff in there was evidence that he could have used against me.”

“In a divorce case?”

Her face flushed. “Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I was so darned mad I believe I could have killed him, but I was smart by that time. There are some games two people can play. I didn’t let on that I knew a thing in the world about the paper being gone. I waited about two days and then I started searching the house. I took one day to stay home from work and, believe me, I went through that house from top to bottom. I finally found the paper.”

“Where?”

She laughed. “He was smart. He’d taken up one corner of the carpet, pulled it back and slid the paper in under the corner.”

“So what did you do with the paper?”

“I destroyed it, and then I walked right out of that house and went to a lawyer and filed suit for a divorce. I never went back and let Alan get in a position where he could clap those steel-gray eyes on me again.”

“He could hypnotize you quickly?”

“Apparently all he had to do was to snap his fingers and I’d be under the influence.”

“Go on,” Mason said.

“Well, Alan thought that he had me. He thought that I couldn’t do a thing, but then when he went to look for his evidence it was gone and... well, I’d sued him for mental cruelty and there were a lot of things that he didn’t want to have come out, so... well, I got my decree.”

“And remarried?” Mason asked.

She colored a bit and said, “Not yet. My decree isn’t final.”

“When will it be final?”

“In another week.”

“And then you’re going to remarry?”

“Yes.”

“To a man you’ve known for some time?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not a hypnotist, I take it,” Mason said, smiling.

“You can bet money on that, Mr. Mason.”

Mason opened his wallet, took out four fifty-dollar bills, and said, “Here’s two hundred dollars, Mrs. Blevins, that will pay for your time and compensate you for any inconvenience. Those might help on your trousseau.”

She accepted the money, folded it, placed it in her purse, looked up at Mason with eyes that were filled with gratitude.

“Mr. Mason, that’s... well, that’s just fine of you.”

“We certainly appreciate your frankness,” Mason said. “Now could you tell us whether Alan ever hypnotized you and made you think something had happened that didn’t.”

“Oh, yes. That was one of his pet stunts. He’d hypnotize a person and give him a long song and dance about what had happened, and tell the person to wake up and not to think about the thing for an hour or two hours, but gradually to absorb the narrative into his memory as an actual experience, and then after two hours, as a post-hypnotic suggestion, to start telling about it.”

“And people would do that?”

“Some of them would. Of course, you can’t hypnotize everyone, Mr. Mason, and...”

“I understand. Now do you know whether he ever hypnotized Josephine Kempton, Mr. Addicks’ housekeeper?”

“I think he did. I once heard him mention something he had done with her by way of demonstrating a point to Mr. Addicks.”

“Do you know anything else that might help us?” Mason asked.

“No.”

“Well, thanks a lot. I don’t think we need to detain you any longer right now, Mrs. Blevins, but we may want to talk with you again later.”

“Any time,” she said, “any time after four o’clock. You can call me and I’ll come in any time. Mr. Drake has my number.”

“Thank you,” Mason said.

She rose from the chair, started for the door, then suddenly detoured to take Perry Mason’s hand in both of hers. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Here’s something that may be of help. Addicks wasn’t his real name. I know that Alan managed to hypnotize him once and learned that his real name was Barnwell. If there’s anything else, you just let me know.”

Her eyes were grateful as she gave Mason a very cordial smile. Then she opened the door and went out, swinging into the corridor with a saucy flip of her skirts.

“Do you any good?” Drake asked.

Mason grinned at him and said, “Paul, the last few minutes have really done things for me. Start your boys working in Nevada, then go on home, take a good hot bath, crawl into bed and get some sleep.”

“You mean that?” Drake asked in surprise.

“Sure I mean it,” Mason said and hurried out of Drake’s office.

Mason opened the door of his private office.

Della Street, who had been standing by his desk, arranging some papers, looked up as he entered.

Mason reached her in two swift strides, put his arms around her, picked her off the floor, whirled her around, and then held her to him. “Baby,” he said, “we’ve struck pay dirt.”

She looked up at him somewhat wistfully. “All of which, I presume, accounts for this sudden display of enthusiasm.”

“It isn’t enthusiasm,” Mason said, hugging her to him, “it’s affection.”

“Well,” she said, “it must have been important information.”

“Get the newspapers?” Mason asked.

“Yes. Reporters are on their way up here. I told them it was hot, and they’re coming up fast.”

“Good girl,” Mason said, and looked down into her eyes.

She put her hands on his shoulders, her face tilted up. Mason bent forward tenderly.

Her lips clung to his for a long moment, then she suddenly was pushing him away, grabbing a Kleenex from her purse and wiping the lipstick off his lips.

“Chief,” she exclaimed, “have you forgotten that a bunch of observant, keen-eyed newspaper reporters are due to burst in here at any minute?”

Mason smiled, patted her shoulder and said, “It’s okay, Della. We’re going to give them something that will jolt Mr. Sidney Hardwick right back on the heels of his shoes.”

“Good. I hope you do it. How’s my mouth? Am I smeared? Oh, you wouldn’t know anyway!”

“I can see anything a keen-eyed reporter can,” Mason said.

She laughed, went to the mirror, adjusted her lips for a moment, and then said, “There’s someone at the door to the outer office now.”

“I’ll see the reporters out there,” Mason said.

He followed her to the outer office, greeted two reporters who had arrived simultaneously. While he was passing cigarettes a third arrived, and then a fourth.

“What’s the big news?” one of the reporters asked. “I hope it’s good. We certainly broke our necks getting over here. Your secretary intimated it was red hot.”

“It is red hot,” Mason said.

“What is it?”

“You have the information about the holographic will that Benjamin Addicks left?”

“Hell, yes. I hope you didn’t think that was news. Hardwick, Carson and Redding released information about that two hours ago. It’s in the late edition.”

“That’s fine,” Mason said. “The will’s no good.”

“What do you mean, it’s no good?”

“Just what I said,” Mason told him. “He didn’t make provisions for his wife.”

“His wife? Benjamin Addicks was a bachelor.”

“That’s what some people would like to have you think.”

“You mean he wasn’t?”

Mason shook his head.

“What the devil? — Don’t kid us, Mason. Good Lord, Benjamin Addicks was an important figure. He was nutty as a fruit cake and he was all goofy over this idea of the gorilla experimentation, but, after all, the guy was prominent. If he had married anyone the newspapers would have played it up. Not too big, but at least they would have played it up. Everything the guy did was news on account of his money and on account of his private zoo of gorillas.”

“You’re forgetting that there’s a big gap in his biographical data,” Mason said. “The man was married.”

“Where did he get married?”

“Here and there.”

“Come on, come on, give us the low-down.”

“Benjamin Addicks,” Mason said, “lived with a woman as his wife.”

“Where did he live with her?”

“In the house with him a part of the time.”

“Are you going to claim that Josephine Kempton...?”

“Not so fast,” Mason said. “The wife was Helen Cadmus. I’ll give you fellows the addresses of some motels where they registered as man and wife, and I can tell you there’s been an absolute photographic identification. You can take a picture of Helen Cadmus and check on it if you want to.”

“Aw, forget it,” one of the men said. “He was playing around with his secretary. That doesn’t mean he was married to her or that it makes the will invalid.”

Mason grinned. “You fellows are good investigators. Go look up these things. Look up the fact that the registrations at auto courts show that the parties were registered as Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Barnwell.”

“Barnwell?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” one of the reporters said, “That’s your answer right there. In order to have a common-law marriage it’s necessary to show...”

“Who talking about a common-law marriage?” Mason asked.

“You are, aren’t you? And I understand there isn’t any such thing in this state anyway. Even if there were, a man would have to use his right name, and...”

“What was Addicks’ right name?” Mason asked.

“Why, Addicks, of course.”

“Was it?”

“Why, of course. He — say, wait a minute, where did you get that name of Barnwell?”

Mason merely smiled.

“What about common-law marriage?” one of the men asked.

“In some states it’s recognized,” Mason said, “and in others it isn’t. But where a man travels with a woman as his wife he may well find himself in a state that recognizes common-law marriage.

“But what you fellows may be overlooking is that right here in this state when two people live together as husband and wife there’s a disputable presumption of marriage. That’s a rule of evidence, a legal presumption.”

The reporters exchanged glances.

Mason opened a book, placed it on the desk. “There it is, Subdivision 30 of Section 1963 of the Code of Civil Procedure.”

“But how about the will?” one of the reporters asked.

“He didn’t mention Helen Cadmus. If they lived together as husband and wife there is an evidentiary prima facie presumption of marriage. He doesn’t mention her in his will. Therefore the will is open to attack.”

“But he didn’t have to mention Helen Cadmus. She was dead.”

“Who told you so?”

“I suppose you think she just walked on the water. Come on, give us some facts if you want us to publish anything.”

“I don’t give a damn whether you publish anything or not,” Mason said, “but Helen Cadmus didn’t committ suicide.”

“You mean she was murdered?”

“She wasn’t murdered.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

Mason said, “I mean that for reasons that suited Benjamin Addicks and Helen Cadmus, she decided to disappear. You can draw your own conclusions.”

There was a stunned silence for a moment.

“You mean she took time out to have a baby?” one of the men asked.

Mason shrugged his shoulders and said, “After all, I’ve only been in this case for a few hours, but I’m constantly receiving new information which I am correlating and checking. I thought that you fellows would like to start from scratch on this and...”

“Start from scratch is right. If you’ve got anything to hang this theory on, it’s going to make headlines. Gosh, what a sob story, what a sensation!”

“All right,” Mason said, “use your own judgment. Who saw Helen Cadmus aboard the yacht the night of the storm? Who saw Helen Cadmus after the boat pulled out?”

“Crew members, didn’t they?”

“Name one,” Mason said. “The only person who actually saw her was Benjamin Addicks.”

“And Josephine Kempton.”

“Not Mrs. Kempton,” Mason said. “She heard the clack of a typewriter in the other stateroom. The typewriter kept clacking away. Anyone could have pounded a typewriter — Addicks, for instance. Mrs. Kempton had taken a dose of sleeping medicine and she went to sleep. When she wakened in the morning there was this story about Helen Cadmus having disappeared.”

“You got anything to pin that on?” one of the reporters asked.

“Sure,” Mason said. “I have the diaries of Helen Cadmus, remember.”

“And what does she say about having a baby?”

“I’ll show you a passage,” Mason said.

He picked up the diary, opened it to a page which Della Street had located and which he had marked with a bookmark. “Here it is. In the handwriting of Helen Cadmus:

The newspapermen studied the page very carefully.

“Say,” one of the men said, “let’s have these diaries. We can go over them in your law library and perhaps we can find things that...”

Mason shook his head. “That’s it boys. That’s the lead for your story.”

“That isn’t a story. That’s just a theory with a little stuff to go on. We can’t publish that.”

“The hell you can’t!” Mason said. “How much proof did you have as a basis for an accusation that Josephine Kempton had murdered Helen Cadmus?”

“We didn’t say she’d murdered Helen Cadmus. We said the authorities were making inquiries.”

“That’s right,” Mason said. “Now you can assure your readers that on the strength of this entry in the diary, the Drake Detective Agency has dozens of operatives out combing this section of the country trying to establish my theory that the passage in the diary means something definite. And if you go back and reopen the Helen Cadmus case you’ll find that there wasn’t a single member of the crew that saw Helen Cadmus after the boat left port.

“Furthermore, and this is the important thing, no one knows the nature of the confidential work that she was supposed to be doing for Benjamin Addicks. Addicks said that he left her typing the pages in her stateroom. Later on he was asked if he had received the typewritten documents, and he said, of course not, that the last time he had seen her was when she was transcribing the notes — now, get that straight. If she had been committing suicide she wouldn’t have taken the typewritten notes with her when she jumped overboard. If she had been intending to commit suicide she wouldn’t have typed out her notes. She’d simply have jumped and left the notes without being transcribed in her shorthand book. From the minute I started investigating this case I became very much interested in finding out just what had happened to the dictation Addicks had given her on the night she disappeared.

“There were photographs of the stateroom which she was supposed to have occupied on that last night out of port. Now you fellows study the photographs of that stateroom and you’ll notice two or three peculiar things.

“A typewriter has been set up on a table all right, and some paper has been spread around, but I’ve yet to hear that anyone found a shorthand notebook with any notes in it that hand’t been transcribed, and I’ve yet to find anyone who would admit that there was any typewritten document found in the stateroom.

“But the thing that interests me is what you can see in this picture. It’s a photograph taken after the yacht arrived in Catalina, and shows the stateroom occupied by Helen Cadmus. The door of the connecting bathroom is open, and you can see a portion of the interior of the stateroom occupied by Josephine Kempton on the other side. Now do you fellows notice anything peculiar?”

The newspaper reporters studied the photograph carefully.

Mason said, “The towels on one rack have been used. Those are the towels nearest the door of the stateroom occupied by Josephine Kempton. The towels by the door of the stateroom occupied by Helen Cadmus haven’t been used. Do you think she’d have boarded the yacht, have taken dictation, have done a lot of typing, and never so much as washed her hands, never so much as unfolded a towel?”

One of the men gave a low whistle, then said to Perry Mason, “Say, you’re a pretty good detective yourself.”

Mason grinned. “All right, you fellows have a head start on the police. It would be nice if you boys could find Helen Cadmus yourselves. And if you find that what I think is true, well — you’ll have something that’s a damn sight more valuable than the empty accusation of an interested party.

“I don’t know just how badly your city editors would like to have an exclusive interview with Helen Cadmus, and the true story of her supposed suicide, but I presume the fellow who turned it in could write his own ticket for a while, particularly if he signed her up for an exclusive.

“That’s why I’m giving all of you an even break. Here are the names of two motels where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Barnwell, and here are some photographs so you won’t waste time digging into your morgues.”

“Barnwell,” one of the men said meditatively. “Say, the fellow Hardwick had a cablegram from Herman Barnwell. He...”

The reporter abruptly ceased talking. For a moment the reporters stood there, then one of them lunged for the door.

That started a four-man stampede, everyone making a dash down the corridor.

Mason grinned at Della Street. “Tomorrow morning we can send Mr. Sidney Hardwick copies of the papers, and tell him we’re fast workers ourselves.”