The Case of the Reluctant Model

Chapter Five

Mason and Della Street were finishing their after-dinner coffee when the waiter placed a newspaper clipping in front of the attorney.

“I suppose you’ve seen it, Mr. Mason,” he said. “We’re very proud of it.”

Mason looked at the clipping, one of the syndicated gossip columns of goings-on about town.

“No, I hadn’t seen it,” he said.

Della Street leaned forward, and Mason held the clipping so they could both read.

Mason handed the clipping back to the waiter with a smile. “I hadn’t seen it,” he said.

“Well,” Della Street said, as the waiter vanished, “I suppose that means the end of another good eating place.”

“For dinner dancing,” Mason said, “you can’t beat it. But once the word gets around that I can be found here, heaven knows how many pests will cut in on us.”

“Unless I am greatly mistaken,” Della Street said, “and as a good secretary I seldom make a mistake in such matters, one of these pests is bearing down upon us right now. He is approaching the table with a singleness of purpose indicating a desire either to secure legal advice without being billed for it, or to be able to mention casually, ‘As I was having a drink with Perry Mason last night in the Robbers’ Roost, he said to me...’ ”

She broke off as the man in question came within earshot, a small-boned, wiry individual in his late thirties; nervous, intense, quick-moving.

“Mr. Mason?” he said.

Mason regarded the man coldly. “Yes?”

“You don’t know me and I’m sorry I have to approach you in this manner but it’s a matter of great urgency.”

“To you or to me?” Mason asked.

The man ignored the remark. “I’m Collin Durant,” he said. “I’m an art dealer and critic. The newspapers have been pestering me over some smear that Otto Olney dished out this afternoon. I understand you’re in on it.”

“Your understanding is incorrect,” Mason said. “I am not ‘in’ on any ‘smear’ being ‘dished out’ by Otto Olney.”

“I understand he’s suing me, claiming that I’ve cheapened his paintings, questioned his judgment and branded one of his paintings as spurious.”

“As to that,” Mason said, “you’ll have to talk with Mr. Olney. I’m not an attorney of record in any such case and have no intention of becoming one.”

“But you were there this afternoon. The newspaper photographs show you and your secretary — I take it this is Miss Street who is with you tonight?”

Mason said, “I attended a press conference given by Otto Olney on his yacht this afternoon. I gave no interview to the press and I don’t care to be interviewed now.”

Durant reached over to an adjoining table, whipped a vacant chair around, seated himself, said, “All right, now I want you to hear my side of it.”

Mason said, “I have no desire whatever to hear your side of it. I am not in a position to treat anything you may say as confidential, nor do I have any business which I care to discuss with you.”

“This is something I’m going to discuss with you,” Durant said.

“In the first place, I don’t know what Olney is talking about. I was never called on by him to express any opinion in regard to any of his paintings. I was a guest on his yacht about a week ago.

“Naturally, being a dealer, I looked over his collection of paintings with an appraising eye but I didn’t make any careful inspection because there was no reason for me to do so.

“The man did have a Phellipe Feteet, or what passed for one. I didn’t examine it. I only glanced at it casually. I understand he paid some thirty-five hundred dollars for it. It is a painting of which he is very proud. I never said it was a forgery. I would have to examine it with great care to make certain. I will say, however, there were some things about the painting that I would want to study carefully if I were to be called upon to express an opinion.”

Mason said, “I’m not asking you to make any statement. I’m not interested in your version of the case and I didn’t ask you to sit down.”

“All right,” Durant said, “let’s put it this way. I invited myself to sit down and since the newspapers have dignified Olney’s suit by having you and your secretary listed among those present at the press conference, I’m going to tell you that I’m not going to stand for all this.

“I understand that the only person who says I expressed an opinion is a former model who I have reason to believe is anxious to secure a lot of cheap publicity. Or perhaps I should express it the other way: who is anxious to secure a lot of publicity cheap.

“I would like very much to find out whether this person is the one who is back of all this uproar. I never told her or anyone else anything about the painting, except that I think I told this young woman that if anyone asked me to give an opinion on the painting, I would want to examine it most carefully. That’s what I would have to do before I could express an opinion on any painting.

“I’m not going to let this publicity seeker parlay a statement like that into a bid for newspaper notoriety.”

“I can’t tell you anything,” Mason said, “and I have no desire to discuss the matter.”

“Don’t discuss it if you don’t want to, you can just listen,” Durant said.

“And I have no desire to listen,” Mason said, pushing back his chair. “I’m trying to relax,” he went on, “from the day’s work. I am dining socially. I don’t care to discuss any business at this time and I have nothing to discuss with you.”

The lawyer got to his feet.

“I’m just telling you,” Durant said, “that any time any cheap trollop thinks she’s going to bounce her curves off my reputation as an art dealer in order to feather her own nest, she has a surprise coming.”

Mason said, “I’ve tried to be courteous about this, Durant. I’ve told you repeatedly I don’t care to discuss anything with you. Now, you can get up out of that chair and start moving or you’ve got a surprise coming.”

Durant looked at the angry lawyer, shrugged his shoulders, got to his feet, said, “And the same thing goes for you, Mr. Mason. I have a business reputation and I’m not going to have it cheapened by you or anyone else.”

Mason walked over, picked up the chair Durant had been sitting in, replaced it at the adjoining table, turned his back on Durant and again seated himself opposite Della Street.

Durant walked away after a moment’s hesitation.

Della Street reached across to put her hand over that of Perry Mason. Her fingers strong, steady, capable, gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Don’t look after him like that, Chief,” she said. “If looks could kill, you’d be your own defendant in a murder case.”

Mason moved his eyes back to Della Street’s face and then his own face softened into a smile. “Thanks, Della,” he said, “I was actually contemplating justifiable homicide. I don’t know exactly why he irritated me so much.

“Of course, I hate to have my evening interfered with by people who want to take short cuts on getting legal advice. I don’t like table-hoppers, I don’t like name-droppers.”

“And,” Della Street said, “you don’t like art experts by the name of Collin Durant.”

“Period,” Mason said.

“Well,” Della Street told him, “being virtually assured that you are now going to leave this place and not return until the notoriety connected with that gossip column has abated somewhat, do you think it would be a good plan for me to call the Drake Detective Agency and see what Paul knows, if anything?”

“It might be a very good plan,” Mason said, “to keep in touch with him.”

The lawyer reached in his pocket.

“I have a whole purseful of dimes,” Della Street said. “Drink your coffee and relax. I’ll be back in a moment with all the dirt from Paul.”

Della Street vanished in the direction of the telephone booth. Mason poured another cup of coffee, settled back and let the stiffness and tension flow out of his muscles as he contemplated the couples dancing, the people eating.

Della Street was back in a few minutes.

“What’s cooking?” Mason asked.

“Nothing on the front burner,” she said, “and nothing in the oven. But something is simmering on the back burner.”

“Such as what?”

“Maxine Lindsay.”

“What about her?”

“She called just a few minutes ago and insisted that she had to speak to you tonight, that she must get in touch with you.”

“What did Drake say?”

“He told her he couldn’t reach you, that you’d probably call in during the evening. Then Maxine said while she wanted to reach you she knew how busy you were and it might not be necessary to bother you if she could just get in touch with your secretary, Della Street.”

“Did Paul give her your phone number?”

“That’s right.”

“That means you’ll probably get a call late tonight,” Mason said.

“That’s all right, it won’t bother me any. What will I tell her?”

“Just see what she has in mind and tell her to stay put. Call her attention to the fact that I have an affidavit from her so she can’t change her testimony.”

Della Street nodded.

Mason said, “You know, Della, the law schools teach law. No one teaches anything about the facts to which the law is applied, or what to do about those facts. Yet when a young lawyer starts practicing law he finds that his problems for the most part don’t deal with law but deal with proof. In other words, they deal with facts.

“Now, let’s take this case for instance. Rankin was all steamed up. He wanted to file suit. He wanted to get his name in the paper. He wanted to put his own professional reputation out on the block and he had a perfect legal right to do so. If I had let him walk into that trap, however, he’d have been hung, drawn and quartered in the market place. Everyone would have remembered him as the art dealer who had been accused by another art dealer of peddling a phoney painting.

“Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Durant is on the defensive, Rankin is sitting pretty, and the ultimate result will be to enhance Rankin’s reputation — but we’re still up against facts.”

“Such as what?” Della Street asked.

“First,” Mason said, “we have to prove that the Phellipe Feteet Rankin sold Otto Olney is genuine.”

“That seems to have been taken care of all right,” she said.

Mason nodded.

“The next thing,” Mason said, “is to prove that Durant said the picture was spurious. We have a witness for that end of it all tied up, but apparently that’s where Durant is going to make his fight.”

“Well,” Della Street said, “Maxine was most definite in her statement — she can’t back up on her testimony now. I really made an affidavit. I tied her up, up one side and down the other.”

“That’s what’s worrying me,” Mason said. “If anything should happen to Maxine, we couldn’t use her affidavit as testimony. The only purpose of the affidavit is to keep her in line, to hold it over her head in case she should start getting vague and changing her testimony.”

“She won’t do that,” Della Street said reassuringly.

“And there’s one other thing,” Mason said.

“What?”

“Suppose she should marry Collin Durant?”

“Heaven forbid!”

“But just suppose she should,” Mason said.

“Well, there’s no use worrying about it,” Della Street told him.

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “There’s something fishy about this whole business. The lawyer in me is beginning to wave red danger signals all up and down the track.”

She said, “The lawyer in you makes you so skeptical that you’re always looking for the joker in the deck.”

“I am, for a fact,” Mason admitted, “but there’s something about the way Durant is acting that bothers me.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll be darned if I know,” Mason said. “It’s in his manner — his attitude — something about the way he approached us. Did you ever hear of the famous jewelry bunco game that put so many jewelers out of business?”

“No,” Della said, her voice showing her interest.

Mason said, “A personable young man goes into a jewelry store at four-thirty Friday afternoon after the banks have closed. He tells a very plausible story. He picks the leading jeweler in a small town. He wants to get a very fine diamond as an engagement ring. He is going to propose that night. He’s happy and impulsive and he has the best of credit references and the jeweler finally sells him a fifteen-hundred-dollar diamond ring and takes the man’s check drawn on a city bank.”

“Then what?” Della Street asked. “You mean the check is no good?”

“No, no,” Mason said. “The check is as good as gold. That’s the catch in the thing.”

“I don’t get it,” Della Street said.

“The next day,” Mason said, “the fellow goes to a pawnshop and wants to pawn the ring for two hundred dollars. The ring is worth about seven hundred and fifty wholesale. The pawnbroker becomes suspicious and notifies the police. The police come and interview the man and ask him where he got the ring and he tells them that he bought it at the jewelry store. So they check with the jeweler and the jeweler says, ‘Sure enough. The fellow bought the ring and paid for it with a check,’ but of course he’s now completely satisfied he’s the victim of a bad-check artist and tells the police to hold the fellow as a swindler.

“The police hold him until Monday morning when the jeweler can get in touch with the city bank and present the check. Then, to his consternation, he finds the check is good as gold.

“The young man tells a story of having purchased the ring, of having proposed to the woman of his choice only to be given a flat rebuff, so he has no use for the ring and every time he looks at it he becomes nauseated with thoughts of his frustrated love affair.

“He says he was too proud to go back to the jeweler and admit to him that he had been turned down. He wanted to get rid of the ring and was willing to take anything he could get on it, so he went to this pawnshop and asked if they’d give him two hundred dollars for the ring.

“Then in order to make the thing absolutely ironclad he gives the name of the girl to whom he had proposed. The police interview the girl and she confirms his story in every detail. He had been courting her and she had liked him but didn’t consider he was really in love with her. She thought he was just escorting her around and thought it was just a friendship. So when the fellow came to her with the diamond ring and proposed, he had been drinking a little bit and, what with one thing and another, she decided he wasn’t the sort of person she wanted as a husband and turned him down flat.

“So the fellow is angry over his arrest and goes to a lawyer and files suit for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ damages against the jeweler who had him arrested and held in jail over the weekend. He claims his reputation has been damaged and he’s going to insist on collecting damages for false arrest.”

“Does he do it?” Della Street asked.

“No, he doesn’t do it,” Mason said. “That’s the payoff. He offers to let the jeweler off the hook if the jeweler will let him keep the diamond ring and give him anywhere from two to fifteen thousand dollars in cash, depending on how frightened the jeweler is.

“So the guy makes his settlement and doesn’t have anything to do until next Friday when he pulls the same gag on another country jeweler somewhere, always picking one who’s reasonably prosperous, who’s afraid of litigation and who simply couldn’t stand to have a big judgment outstanding.”

“But surely there isn’t anything like that in this case,” Della Street said.

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “There’s something about the whole thing that bothers me. — All the time that man, Durant, was talking to me I had the idea he was putting on an act. He was... well, he wasn’t really trying to accomplish anything, he was being deliberately obnoxious and he was laying the foundation for some kind of a racket. He wasn’t sincere.”

“How can you tell?” Della Street asked.

“I’m darned if I know,” Mason said, “but it’s something that any lawyer can tell after he’s cross-examined enough witnesses. You listen to a man’s story, you watch his actions, his mannerisms, you listen to his voice, you watch his facial expressions and — well, you just know, that’s all.

“It’s something that’s difficult to describe, but you’ve seen motion pictures where the director has tried to milk too much out of a situation, where he’s had the actors overacting just a little, and all of a sudden you get the realization that the whole thing is phoney, that it’s just a lot of actors mugging in front of a camera.

“On the other hand, you see some movies where the actors are doing a good job, the director is after the right effect, and you get the illusion of reality. It’s as though you were looking through a window at real genuine action that is taking place before your eyes.”

“Well, of course,” Della Street said, “I’ve had that experience. Unfortunately it isn’t as frequent as I’d like.”

“I know,” Mason said. “That’s because different people have a different threshold of credulity. The average person looks at action which has been photographed and thinks the action is real. A lawyer or someone who has been working with a lawyer, like you, becomes more skeptical, and the faintest overacting, the faintest attempt to milk a situation past a critical point and you suddenly revolt. The subconscious mind refuses to accept the story, the conscious mind enters the picture with the realization that the whole thing is phoney. They’re suddenly just a bunch of actors and actresses reciting a script with background scenery that was cooked up in a studio and there isn’t the faintest illusion of reality — there’s nothing except irritation and annoyance with yourself for wasting perfectly good time sitting there watching a lousy show.”

“And you think Durant put on a lousy show?” Della Street asked.

Mason said, “He didn’t impress me as putting on the right kind of an act as far as sincerity was concerned. He was trying to accomplish something when he was talking to me. He was acting and it wasn’t an act that went across.”

“But with Maxine’s affidavit she can’t back out on her testimony,” Della Street said.

“She could of course vanish,” Mason said. “Suppose Otto Olney gets ready to try his lawsuit and can’t find Maxine. Suppose Durant indignantly denies that he ever said the Feteet was spurious. Suppose he claims that Olney’s suit has discredited him as an expert, that the resulting publicity has irreparably damaged him — damn it, Della, I’ve just got a feeling, an intuitive feeling predicated on that guy’s phoney performance, that I’ve led with my chin somewhere along the line.”

“You haven’t,” Della Street said.

“The hell I haven’t,” Mason said. “I’m the one that suggested to Rankin that he get Olney to file suit. I’m the one that told Olney’s attorneys about how it should be handled.

“Olney is vulnerable to the extent that every rich man is vulnerable. A case comes up in front of a jury. Durant is the young, ambitious art dealer trying to get ahead. He makes a pathetic picture in front of a jury. Olney, the big contractor, filed suit against Durant, without first calling on Durant and giving him an opportunity to explain. The first thing Durant knew, out of a clear sky he sees himself blasted in the press as a phoney, a man who has branded a painting as spurious. Actually, he claims, he never said any such thing, and if Otto Olney had taken the trouble to investigate instead of breaking into the front page of the newspapers, he would have learned that the whole thing was a mistake on the part of the woman he was relying on as a witness.”

“Then, do you think Maxine is in on it?” Della Street asked.

“I don’t know,” Mason said, “but I’m going to find out... You know, that’s the tragic part of those cases where the jewelers were sued for putting the man in jail over the weekend. They just didn’t have guts enough to fight and to dig into the guy’s past, to check on the girl and find out all about her... Come on, Della, we’re going up to Drake’s office and see that he has a sleepless night. By this time tomorrow we’re going to know all there is to know about the background of Maxine Lindsay and all we can find out about Collin M. Durant.”

“All on the strength of the fact that you didn’t like Durant?” Della Street asked.

“All on the strength of the fact that Durant impresses me as a phoney,” Mason said, “and if Otto Olney with his money has been trapped into a situation of this sort, I intend to beat everybody to the punch. I want to get all the ammunition I need to do a little shooting of my own.”

“And if it turns out to be a false alarm?” Della asked.

“Then we’ve given Paul Drake a good job,” Mason said, “and have at least laid the foundation for me to get a good night’s sleep. I tell you, Della, I’ve cross-examined too many witnesses to be taken in by a phoney act of the kind Durant tried, and Durant was putting on an act; that much I’ll stake money on. We’re going up to Drake’s office and start the ball rolling.”