The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

Chapter 16

Mason, pacing the floor of his office, said, “It’s a lawyer’s nightmare.”

Della Street nodded sympathetically.

“Put them on the stand and let them tell their stories,” Mason said, “and my clients will go to the death cell and I’ll be the laughingstock of the town.”

“Well,” Della Street said defiantly, “how do you know the story isn’t the truth?”

“I don’t. It may be true. The trouble is it doesn’t sound like the truth. It sounds exactly like a story a lawyer would have cooked up. It’s one of those stories that accounts for everything, yet everything about it is improbable.”

Paul Drake said, “Suppose you don’t let them tell that story, Perry...”

“Hell,” Mason said disgustedly, “they’ve told it. The newspapers are full of it.”

“I know, but I mean on the witness stand.”

Mason said, “The public knows generally what the story is. If I keep my clients off the witness stand and state that it’s up to the prosecution to prove its case beyond all reasonable doubt, you know what people will think. They’ll think that their story was so terrible their own lawyer was afraid to let them stand cross-examination.”

“So what do you do?” Drake asked.

“I’m damned if I know,” Mason said. “You know the story could be the truth. Some super-slick murderer could have carefully planned it so that these people would both be picked up by the police, so that they’d tell a story that would be just good enough to sound like the fabrication of a half-smart lawyer, but just bad enough to get them stuck in front of a jury with a first-degree murder rap.”

“Couldn’t you convince a jury that that actually was what happened?” Della Street asked.

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I doubt if I’m that good.”

He turned to Paul Drake. “Paul, we stand one chance, one mighty slim chance, and that is to find that girl who was in the room with me, the girl who claimed she was Dixie Dayton.”

“Well,” Drake said, “where do I start looking?”

“You start combing the past life of George Fayette. You find out everything about him. You look up every woman who was ever connected with him — and then you won’t find anything.”

“Why not?” Della Street asked. “It sounds logical.”

“If the story that we’re getting is true,” Mason said, “the people who are back of it would be too smart to use any girl who could ever have been tied up with George Fayette. She’ll be an absolute stranger. Someone whom no one would have thought of. Probably someone from another city.”

“And what do we do if we find her?” Drake asked. “You go on the stand and swear you had a conversation with her, she swears that you didn’t, and then Minerva Hamlin says you’re mistaken.”

“I don’t want to get on the stand, Paul.”

“Why not?”

“It puts me in the position of being both a lawyer and a witness, which is unethical.”

“Why is it unethical?”

“The American Bar Association frowns on it.”

“Let ’em frown,” Drake said. “Frowns don’t hurt. Do they slap?”

“They don’t like it.”

“Is it illegal?”

“No.”

“I think we’re doing Minerva Hamlin an injustice,” Drake said. “She’ll probably come around all right. It was just an ordinary mistake she made, and...”

“She spoke up too fast,” Mason said. “You can see what happened. They showed her the photograph and she made one of those snap judgments saying that she thought it was the girl. Then they told her to study the photograph, and she kept looking at it and looking at it. By the time she saw Dixie Dayton in the line-up, she had become so familiar with her face from looking at the photograph that she just knew the girl was familiar and so went ahead and identified her.”

“That stuff happens a lot of times, all right,” Drake said. “I know that it bothers the police. They get a lot of false identifications that the public never hears about. People study a photograph of a suspect so much that the features become familiar.

“A couple of weeks ago the police had a case where three people, who had been studying the photograph of a suspect, picked him out of a line-up and made a positive identification. Then it turned out he was in jail in San Francisco at the time the crime was committed. Just one of those cases of photographic identification.”

Mason nodded and started to say something but stopped when the telephone rang.

Della Street picked the receiver off the hook, turned to Drake and said, “It’s for you, Paul.”

Drake took the telephone, said, “Hello... Yes, this is he... What is it?... Oh, now wait a minute. Don’t get any false ideas... Now, is that final? You’re absolutely certain?... You’ve misunderstood him... Here, wait a minute, who’s this?... What?... No, I haven’t anything to say other than that the girl’s mistaken. We have positive evidence of it... No. Absolutely positive evidence... I’m not disclosing what it is. You can call Mr. Mason if you want details.”

Drake slammed up the phone, turned to Perry Mason, said, “That damned, double-crossing, grandstanding district attorney!”

“What’s he done now?” Mason asked.

“You just wait until you hear what he’s done,” Drake said indignantly.

“I’m waiting.”

“He’s got Minerva Hamlin up in his office. That was her on the phone. She was calling from the D.A.’s office.”

“Okay, so what?”

“She told me, in the manner of one reading from a prepared statement which had been carefully written out and which she was holding in front of her on the desk, that she was leaving my employ because she felt that undue pressure was being brought to bear on her to make her tell a falsehood in connection with the identification of Dixie Dayton.”

“A beautiful grandstand,” Mason said.

“Wait a minute. You haven’t heard the half of it yet,” Drake said. “I started to argue with her but she said, ‘That’s final, Mr. Drake. The resignation takes effect immediately, and I have accepted a position in one of the county offices at a larger salary. And here’s someone who wants to talk with you... And this fellow came on the line — a newspaper reporter. He wanted some comment. You heard what I said.”

“I heard what you said,” Della Street remarked.

“You should have heard what I was thinking,” Drake said, then added hurriedly, “No, you shouldn’t either.”

Mason said, “Well, there’s only one thing to do now. I’ll have to sit in on the preliminary and try every trick of cross-examination to look for a weak spot in the prosecution’s case. It’s a cinch the defendants’ case won’t stand up.”