The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

Chapter 7

Mason once more paced the floor of the hotel bedroom, plainly showing impatience.

He had only a few minutes to wait.

Exactly seven minutes and five seconds from the time the door had closed on the departing figure of the young woman, fingertips tapped gently on the panel of the door, an all but inaudible knock.

Mason detoured in his floor-pacing to twist the knob and pull the door open.

Paul Drake, somewhat disheveled, in need of a shave, grinned at Mason and said in a low voice, “Okay, Perry.”

Mason said, “Did you get...?” He ceased talking as Drake placed a warning finger to his lips and pushed his way into the room.

“What gives?” Mason asked in a low voice.

“She’s still here in the hotel,” Drake said.

“You got on the job yourself?”

“I had to, Perry, I couldn’t get the people here in time, and I jumped into my clothes and beat it up here as fast as I could. At that, I didn’t do you any good.”

“How come?”

“The girl who handles my switchboard was planted in the corridor. She had to register and get a room in order to do the job we wanted. She put on a maid’s cap and an apron and was out in the corridor when your girl came out. In place of taking the elevator down to he lobby, however, the way we had expected, this jane took the elevator up.”

“Oh-oh,” Mason said.

“Now there is only one floor above this,” Drake said, “so my operative felt she could take to the stairs and not be too far behind. Of course, she’d figured the lay of the land the first thing she did and before the action started, so she knew her way around.”

Mason nodded.

“She sprinted up the stairs, opened the door and was only a second or two behind the elevator. Your girl was walking down the corridor. She stopped in front of 815, took a key from her purse, opened the door and walked in. My operative ran on tiptoe down the corridor and was in time to hear the door being locked from the inside.”

“So then what?”

“So then she listened at the door long enough to hear low voices, one of them a man’s voice. Evidently that jane is registered there in room 815. We had no signals to cover that emergency, so my operative had to dash down to where I was sitting in my car to tell me what had happened and ask for instructions. I felt the hotel room was all the address you needed and I couldn’t leave my office switchboard shut off any longer, so I sent my girl back to the office and I came up to report. I stopped by the desk long enough to find out that room. 815 is rented to a Mrs. Madison Kerby.”

“The clerk suspicious of you?” Mason asked.

“The hell with him,” Drake said. “This is one of those dumps. If he’d said anything I’d have told him where he got off at. I presume they’re more or less accustomed to having private detectives crawling over the place.”

“You mean he knows you’re a private detective?”

“Hell, no. I let him think I was on the make. I slipped him a couple of bucks. Frankly, Perry, I don’t think he gave a damn.”

“So she’s here in the hotel,” Mason said.

Drake nodded. “It both complicates and simplifies things, Perry. As I tried to point out to you, we’re short-handed. I’d instructed my operative to put the finger on the jane who came out of this room and to signal me so I could...”

“How was she going to do that, Paul?”

“Simple enough. My operative registered and insisted on getting a room at the front of the building. As soon as your party took the elevator down my operative was going to run into her room, open the window and shine the beam of a flashlight down on my car. I had my rear-view side mirror so adjusted that as soon as the beam of the flashlight hit that it would be reflected in my eyes.”

“Nice going,” Mason said.

“Just routine,” Drake told him, and yawned.

“Well, we’ve run our quarry to earth,” Mason said.

“She’s Dixie...”

Mason grinned. “She said she was Dixie.”

“Well?” Drake asked.

Mason shook his head.

“What are you getting at?”

Mason pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, said, “Here are three stains of lipstick marked numbers one, two and three. What do you make of them, Paul?”

“You must have had a busy night,” Drake said.

“Never mind the wisecracks. What do you make of this lipstick? Is it all the same?”

“Two of them are the same. One might be just a little lighter than the other. I’d say — no, wait a minute — they’re all the same. I’d say they were all the same shade.”

“So would I,” Mason said.

“You mean you’ve been necking with three different gals?” Drake asked.

Mason pulled the lipstick from his pocket, said, “Smear number one was removed from the lips of the girl who claims to be Dixie Dayton. Smear number two was taken from the writing on the bottom of the table here, and smear number three was taken from this lipstick.”

“Writing on the bottom of the table?” Drake asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Mason picked the table up, gently turned it over, and Paul Drake looked at the writing on the bottom of the table and whistled, then said, “How the devil did you happen to find it there, Perry?”

“ ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ ” Mason said, grinning. “This lipstick was lying on the floor. You notice it’s a gold-plated tube of lipstick. It caught and reflected the light. Only a blind man could have missed it.”

“All right,” Drake said, “I still don’t see how it happened that you looked at the bottom of the table.”

“Take a look at this lipstick,” Mason said. “A woman’s lips are smooth. This lipstick was drawn across something rough which grooved deep lines in it and made it overlap the edges.

“So naturally I started looking around to see what the lipstick had been used on besides a person’s lips.”

“And you found this table,” Drake said.

Mason nodded.

“Now wait a minute,” Drake said, “this may be on the level, Perry. You were supposed to meet Morris Alburg here?”

“That’s right.”

“And— What the hell, Alburg and some woman, perhaps Dixie Dayton, were here in this room. Somebody slipped in and had a gun trained on them, and...”

“You’ll notice the imprint of the gun on the bedspread,” Mason said. “It’s quite plain.”

Drake followed the direction of Mason’s finger and said, “Damned if it isn’t, Perry... My gosh, that does it! That really ties the thing up! They sat here. They knew they were going to be taken for a ride. They wanted to leave you some message. They had no chance to do it, but the girl acted as if she wanted to look her best when she was bumped off, so she opened her bag, took out her lipstick and started messing around with it. It was all very natural and no one noticed her when she surreptitiously scribbled this message. She was afraid you’d never find it in time to do any good, so she dropped her lipstick on the floor, feeling certain you’d see that. Then they prodded her with the gun, and told her it was time to go.”

“Sounds logical all right,” Mason said without enthusiasm.

“Gosh,” Drake told him, “I can’t understand why you’re so calm about it, Perry. Jeepers, let’s get to work on this thing. Let’s start figuring this message. Let’s— What do you think? Think we’d better get the police?”

“I think so.”

Drake looked at him and said, “You’re the damnedest guy I ever saw. At times you get all worked up over something and want me up out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, then you fool around and take something like this in your stride and don’t seem to be in any hurry about it. Those folks are in danger. Whether we find them alive or dead depends on how long it takes us to decipher that message and bring help to them.”

“Could be,” Mason said.

“What the hell’s wrong?” Drake asked.

“This message,” Mason said, “is supposed to have been written surreptitiously on the underside of the table by some woman who was playing around with her lipstick, and managing, whenever the attention of her captors was distracted, to write something on the bottom of the table. Is that the idea?”

“Well, that certainly is the way it looks to me,” Drake said.

Mason took a notebook from his pocket, put it on his knee and said, “Now, this represents the top of a table. Take a pencil and write the word ‘help’ on there.”

“Okay,” Drake said, “what does that prove?”

“Now then,” Mason said, “turn the notebook upside down. Pretend that’s the bottom of the table. Now you’re sitting at the table. Here, if it’ll help you any, hold this notebook against the bottom side of the table. Now, take the pencil and write the word ‘help’ on the bottom side of the table.”

“All right,” Drake said sarcastically, “anything to accommodate. But it seems to me a hell of a way to waste time.”

He seated himself in the chair. Perry Mason held the notebook firmly against the bottom of the table. Drake wrote the word “help.”

Mason brought the notebook back to the top of the table.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Drake said. And then suddenly said, “Let’s do that again, Perry.”

Mason held the notebook against the bottom of the table, and again Drake wrote the word “help.” Again he turned the notebook face up on the table and shook his head dubiously. “It’s a new one on me,” he said. “Of course, it’s logical enough, when you come to think of it. It just never occurred to me, that’s all.”

“Every time you write something on the undersurface of a table, you have to write it that way,” Mason said. “Hold this notebook up in front of a mirror now and it spells ‘help’ perfectly, but when you look at it like this it’s a good example of what is known among kids as ‘looking-glass writing.’ ”

“Therefore,” Drake said, “you feel that this message was not written by someone who was seated at the table.”

“That message,” Mason said positively, “was written by someone who had no need whatever to hide what she was doing. She simply turned the table upside down and wrote the word ‘help’ and then that string of figures.”

Drake nodded.

“The message,” Mason said, “could be a trap.”

“In what way?”

Mason ignored the question and continued to think out loud. “We feel certain that the message is a fake because it couldn’t have been written in the manner in which it’s supposed to have been written. Therefore there must be some reason why that message was written.”

Drake watched him silently.

Mason held up two fingers. “First,” he said, touching his thumb to the index finger, “the message is a trap. Second, the message is a blind.”

“What do you mean, a blind?”

Mason said impatiently, “We know that Morris Alburg was in this room. At least he said he was.”

“It was his voice all right?”

Mason nodded. “I recognized his voice. The man was terribly excited. He was in this room, or at least that’s where he said he was, and there was no reason why he should lie.”

“Then what happened to him?”

“Then,” Mason said, “someone held a gun on him, and Morris left a message. Perhaps there was a girl with him and she left a message in lipstick.”

“But I thought you just said she couldn’t have done that, that it would be...”

Mason motioned him to silence. “The parties who took Morris Alburg out of this room discovered that a message had been left. Perhaps they didn’t have time to find the real message so they left an obvious blind alley for me... Now let’s take another look at that table, Paul.”

Together the two men studied the bottom of the table.

“It doesn’t look to me as though there had been any-other message here,” Drake said.

“Apparently not. Let’s look around. Perhaps the message was in some other place and they couldn’t find it, and wanted to fix it so I couldn’t. The people who took Alburg out of the room must have been in a hurry.”

“Aren’t you getting rather farfetched with this thing?” Drake asked.

Mason said impatiently, “There’s a reason for everything. There’s a message on the bottom of that table. There’s a reason for it. I want to find out what the reason is.”

“But why should somebody leave one message in order to destroy another if he didn’t know about the other message?”

“They must have had a suspicion there was another message, but didn’t know where it was. So they decided they’d leave a message that would be a blind... Start looking around, Paul. Let’s see what we can find.”

Mason opened the closet door, looked on the inside of the doorjamb, looked on the space at the back of the door which was disclosed when the door swung outward on the hinges.

He searched the inside of the closet, the inside of the bathroom.

“Finding anything?” Drake asked.

Mason came to the bathroom door and shook his head.

Drake, who had been making a rather desultory search, said, “Suppose we explore the idea that it’s a trap, Perry. What would it be?”

Mason said, “It could be a trap laid for us. It could be something to make us waste a lot of valuable time. Since I’m convinced the whole thing is phony I don’t want to waste time on it.”

“But it means something, Perry.”

“Sure it does,” Mason said, “probably a book. Take the words ‘262 V 3.’ That probably means page two-sixty-two of volume three.”

“That’s it,” Drake exclaimed, “and then ‘L 15 left’ would mean line fifteen in the left-hand column.”

“Obviously,” Mason said, “it’s a book in a series of three volumes, then, that are divided into columns. What would that mean, Paul?”

Drake frowned thoughtfully. “Could it be a set of law books, Perry?”

Mason said, “More apt to be the volumes you’re looking at right now.”

“I don’t get it... Oh, you mean the telephone directory. But they don’t come in marked volumes.”

“These do. See that paper pasted on the back?”

Paul Drake picked up one of the books and turned it over. “Keymont Hotel Telephone Directory No. 1, Room 721,” he read. “Obviously the type of joint where the tenants steal anything that isn’t nailed down... Gosh, Perry, let’s look!”

Drake grabbed volume three of the telephone directory, turned the pages, counted down the lines, then read off, “Herbert Sidney Granton, 1024 Colinda Avenue.”

“Mean anything?” Mason asked.

“Hell, yes,” Drake said excitedly. “It’s a name I’ve heard. It — Wait a minute, Perry.”

He whipped out a notebook, thumbed the pages, said, “Sure. It’s one of the aliases of George Fayette who was arrested for bookmaking, and whose case seems simply to have evaporated into thin air... Gosh, Perry, let’s go and...”

Mason shook his head.

“You mean we don’t follow up this lead?” Drake demanded.

“Not yet,” Mason said, “we finish looking.”

Mason looked on the undersides of the chairs, crawled under the bed, and said, “Paul, that’s a movable mirror over the washstand. Take a look on the back of it, will you?”

Mason was still under the bed when Drake called out excitedly, “Something here, Perry.”

Mason hastily crawled out, dusted off his clothes, and walked over to where Drake had swung the mirror out from the wall.

In lipstick on the back of the mirror were the figures 5N20862.

“Now that,” Mason said, “is probably the license number of an automobile.”

The two men stood studying the string of figures which had been written in lipstick on the back of the mirror.

“I don’t get it,” Drake said.

“I do,” Mason said. “Morris Alburg and some woman were in this room. Someone got the drop on them, or for some reason they had to leave. They wanted to leave a message for me. The girl used lipstick and wrote the message on the back of the mirror while she was standing up in front of it apparently making up her face. No one caught her at that time. But as they left the room something caused them to realize she’d left a message in lipstick. They were afraid I’d find it. So they went back and baited a trap, leaving such an obvious message that even a blind man couldn’t fail to see it.”

“Then you think this one is the original message, and that it’s genuine?” Drake asked, indicating the lipstick on the back of the mirror.

Mason nodded. “And that the one on the bottom of the table is a trap.”

Drake said, “It looks very much like the license number of an automobile, all right.”

“How long will it take you to trace that license number?” Mason asked.

“Let me get to the phone,” Drake told him. “It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

“Wait a minute,” Mason said, “not from here, Paul.”

“No?”

“No. The only person on duty downstairs is that night clerk. I have an idea that he’s pretty much interested about what’s going on. If he listens in while you’re tracing that car he might get a good idea of where we’re going after we leave here. And no one is keeping an eye on the girl who was in here... How long will it take to round up some men and put a tail on that girl in 815, Paul?”

“Not too long.”

Mason said, “Hang it, Paul, I think this is a case for the police. I think we’re getting beyond our depth.”

“Do you want to give the police a ring?”

“Not right like that,” Mason said, “but I would like to have a little police action if we can figure out just the right way to get it — and how to control it once we got it... And there’s still something screwy about this thing.”

“How do you mean?”

“That license number on the back of the mirror,” Mason said.

“What about it?”

“Who left it there?”

“Probably the real Dixie Dayton,” Drake said. “She was here with Morris Alburg. They were waiting for you. Somebody had them spotted. They left the door unlocked so you could walk in without making any commotion.”

“That part of it checks,” Mason said. “I’ll ride along with you that far, but keep talking, Paul. What happened after that?”

“Someone who knew where they were, someone who didn’t want them to get in touch with you just opened the door and walked in. And when he walked in he had a gun in his hand.”

“So then what?”

“So then he told them they were going to have to take a ride, and probably Dixie Dayton said, ‘All right, boys, let me make up my face first,’ and walked over to the mirror and took her lipstick and started putting on a little lipstick and smearing it around with the tip of her little finger. While she was doing that she kept watch in the mirror to see what was going on.

“Alburg may have acted a little rusty, or perhaps they thought he was going to act rusty, so they moved in on him, and Dixie immediately stepped up to the mirror, moved it out an inch from the wall and marked down the license number of the automobile.”

“What automobile?” Mason asked.

“One that would give us a clue as to where they were being taken.”

“You mean she’d know the license number of the car that was waiting?”

Drake frowned. “No, I guess that’s out.”

“And then they were forced to accompany the people who had entered the room?” Mason asked.

“Sure.”

“Down the elevator, across the lobby, out into the night?”

Drake suddenly became thoughtful.

“Sounds like one of those things they do in motion pictures,” Mason said.

“Well, it could have been done,” Drake said. “Damn it, Perry, it has been done.”

“And this car number?” Mason asked.

“That stumps me,” Drake admitted.

Suddenly Mason snapped his fingers.

“What?” Drake asked.

“We’re looking for an automobile,” Mason said. “This may be the license number of the automobile that was driven by the potential kidnaper, the automobile that has the bullet hole in the right front door.”

“Could be,” Drake said, frowning in thoughtful concentration.

Mason said, “That gives us two messages, Paul. One of them could be a genuine message left by Morris Alburg’s woman companion, whoever she was, and the other one a fake message left by other persons. Now the fake message points directly to George Fayette. What would that indicate?”

Drake said, “I’m inclined to play along with this Herbert Sidney Granton from the telephone directory. It won’t do any harm to go out there.”

“I’m afraid it will, Paul.”

“Why?”

Mason said, “We’re working against time. Someone wants to send us on a wild-goose chase. The thing I can’t understand is why the wild-goose chase should lead to Fayette, who is one of the conspirators, unless for some reason they have decided that they don’t want Fayette any more. Perhaps they’re going to sacrifice Fayette. But if so... Hang it, it doesn’t make sense, Paul.”

“They’re not going to sacrifice him because in that event Fayette would talk,” Drake said.

“Unless,” Mason said suddenly, “he’d be in a position where he couldn’t talk... Paul, let’s find out more about what’s in room 815. Let’s...”

The door of the room opened abruptly. Lieutenant Tragg of Homicide Squad, accompanied by another officer whom Mason didn’t know, stood on the threshold and said, “What the hell do you know about room 815?”

“Well,” Mason said, “we’re honored by unexpected visitors, Paul. What brings you here at this hour in the morning, Lieutenant?”

“Line of duty,” Lieutenant Tragg said. “What about 815?”

“Oh,” Mason said, “we were talking about getting a little sleep and leaving a call for eight-fifteen.”

Tragg’s face darkened. “Mason, you keep on with this kind of stuff and you’ll be where you won’t need to leave a call. You’ll get up at six-thirty in the morning, have coffee and mush pushed through the bars and like it. Have you ever met Sergeant Jaffrey?”

Mason acknowledged the introduction. “I thought. I knew most of the boys on Homicide,” he said.

“He isn’t on Homicide,” Drake said in a low voice. “I know him, Perry. He’s on the Vice Squad.”

Jaffrey nodded curtly to Drake.

Lieutenant Tragg said, “Sergeant Jaffrey is in charge of the Vice Detail. Bob Claremont was working under him when he was killed and this whole damn thing is tied in with Claremont’s murder. Mason, you’re in bad. Now what the hell did you have to do with room 815? Let’s have a straight answer, because this time the chips are on our side of the board.”

“Frankly,” Mason said, “I wanted Paul Drake to shadow the occupant of room 815 because I wanted some more information about her.”

“About her?”

Mason nodded.

Tragg said, “What are you doing here?”

“I came to meet a client.”

“Listen, Mason, I’m going to lay it on the line with you. We know all about...”

“I wouldn’t do that, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Jaffrey interrupted. “Let him answer questions.”

Tragg brushed the interruption to one side, said, “I’m going to give you a fair deal, Mason, with the cards on the table and not try to trap you. This hotel is a dump. Usually anything that goes on here doesn’t attract any attention, but the occupant of 813 heard the sound of an argument and what he thought was a muffled shot. He called the police.”

“How long ago?” Mason asked.

“Not very long ago,” Tragg said. “We just got here. A radio car showed up within two minutes of the time the telephone call came in. They found the door of 815 unlocked, a body on the bed, and notified Homicide Squad. I happened to be working with Sergeant Jaffrey on another angle of the case and we made time getting here.

“The dead man on the bed in room 815 is a rather chunky chap, with dark complexion and exceedingly bushy black eyebrows that almost meet at the bridge of the nose. The driving license in his pocket says his name is Herbert Sidney Granton, and he resides at 1024 Colinda Avenue. I put my men in charge and started giving the clerk the works. He’s one of these fellows with a photographic memory for faces. I asked him if anything unusual was going on in the hotel, and he said that Perry Mason was here, that he thought Mason had gone to room 721, that he’d been joined by a private detective, and that a woman had registered whom he took to be an operative of some sort. Now then, what the hell’s going on here?”

Mason glanced at Paul Drake. “Our investigations lead us to believe that Sidney Granton is an alias of George Fayette, and that George Fayette may have had something to do with the attempt to kidnap and kill Dixie Dayton. Aside from that, I can’t tell you a thing.”

“Aside from that,” Tragg said grimly, “you don’t have to. If you want to play it the hard way, that’s the way we’ll play. You’ll not be permitted to leave the hotel. Go on down in the lobby and wait until I get ready to question you.”

“You mean you’re holding us as material witnesses?” Mason asked.

Sergeant Jaffrey, a heavy-shouldered individual, moved a belligerent step forward. “Not as witnesses, but as suspects in the murder of Herbert Sidney Gran-ton,” he said. “Now get the hell out of here.”