“Why, yes, of course.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Mrs. Perlin, Hocksley’s housekeeper.”

  “Did she live here?”

  “No. She lived in the flat with Mr. Hocksley. I don’t know how she happened to come here.”

  “Had you seen her at all today?”

  “I’m not going to be questioned about this.”

  Mason said. “That’s what you think. You’re going to be questioned about this until your eardrums get calloused. Who telephoned you?”

  “I don’t know. It was a woman with a nice voice, who said Sarah had given her a message to pass on to me, that I was to leave my car about half a block beyond the house up the hill. I was to walk back to this house and come right in. In case Sarah wasn’t here, I was to switch on the lights and make myself at home. She said Sarah would be here within a very few minutes of the time I arrived. She said Sarah was keeping a watch on someone who might be trying to double-cross her, and she couldn’t break away long enough to talk with me herself.”

  “Did you think it might be some sort of a trap?”

  “Not then.”

  “Did the one who spoke to you say anything about not telephoning the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t think of this as being a trap of some sort to get you? In other words, didn’t you feel somewhat diffident about coming out into a residential neighborhood and simply walking into a strange house at two o’clock in the morning, switching on the lights, and making yourself at home?”

  “I tell you, I didn’t at the time. I did later.”

  “How much later?”

  “When I got near the house and began to think over the things I was supposed to do. This woman told me the front door would be unlocked. I decided that I’d see if the front door actually was open. If it was, I’d go in. Otherwise, I wasn’t even going to try to ring the bell or do anything about it.”

  “So you tried the front door and it was open.”

  “Yes. I came in. No one seemed to be home. I thought I’d find the bathroom . . .”

  “What did Mrs. Perlin want to confess?”

  “She didn’t say. That is, the one who was talking with me didn’t have anything to say about that. She simply said that Sarah had told her to tell me she wanted to make a confession, and ask my forgiveness.”

  “Ask your forgiveness!”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t know who this person was?”

  “No. She said she was simply passing on the message, that Sarah was busy, and . . .”

  “Yes. You’ve gone over all that, but did this person give you any idea of who she was?”

  “No. Somehow, I got the impression she was a waitress in some restaurant where Sarah had established headquarters. You know, where Sarah could stand by the door to wait and watch. She said Sarah was over at the window, watching to see if a man to whom she’d telephoned was double-crossing her.”

  “You have your own car?”

  “Yes. That is, it isn’t mine. It’s a car I can borrow when I need one.”

  “And you parked it a half a block beyond the house up the hill?”

  “Yes.”

  “She distinctly told you a half block beyond the house, and up the hill, did she?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mason said, “That shot was instantly fatal. She’s dead. There isn’t the faintest trace of pulse. You can tell from the location of the wound and the direction of the bullet that death was virtually instantaneous. Now then, why should she have committed suicide?”

  “I tell you I don’t know.”

  “And why can’t you tell your story to the police?”

  “Because—because I’m afraid I’m in an awful jam, Mr. Mason. Sarah was the only one who could have vouched for me in case—well, in case the police turn up certain things.”

  “And you want me to suppress all of this,” and Mason included the room and the body with a sweeping gesture of his hands, “simply in order to save you from being questioned by the police?”

  “It isn’t going to hurt anything if you do this for me,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do to help solve this.”

  Mason studied her thoughtfully. Abruptly, he asked, “This Mrs. Perlin, was she a woman who had had much experience as a housekeeper, or had she perhaps had money at one time, run into hard luck, and had to get work as a housekeeper . . . ?”

  “No. She’d been a housekeeper for years. I remember checking on her agency card when Mr. Hocksley hired her.”

  Mason strolled down the corridor toward the dining room. His hands were pushed down in his pockets, his head thrust forward. She followed him, apprehensive, silently pleading. Abruptly, Mason whirled to face her. “You know what you’re asking?” he demanded.

  She said nothing as he paused, her eyes pleading eloquently, her lips motionless.

  “You’re asking me to square a murder,” Mason said, “to get my neck in a noose, and you’re doing it as casually as though you were wanting to know if I wouldn’t buy you an ice cream, or sign my name in your autograph album.”

  She kept looking at him, pleading with her eyes. Her hand came out to touch his arm.

  Mason said, “Once I walk out of this house without calling the police, I’ve put myself in the middle of a great big spot. I’ve given you a stranglehold on me. How deeply are you mixed in this business?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come on. Speak up.”

  “I’m not in it at all.”

  Mason said, “That’s what you think. You called the police yesterday morning, didn’t you?”

  “Do we have to talk here?”

  “We have to do some talking here.”

  “It’s dangerous just being here.”

  “It’s dangerous just walking away.”

  “I came to work yesterday. No one was in the house. Usually Mrs. Perlin is there, and nearly always there are some records for me.”

  “Records?” Mason asked.

  “You know, the wax records that have been dictated on a dictating machine.”

  “Oh.”

  “This morning there weren’t any records. Mrs. Perlin wasn’t there.”

  “How about Hocksley?”

  “I very seldom see him. He sleeps most of the day. He works rather late at night.”

  “But you have seen him?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I couldn’t understand there not being any work laid out for me or any message. Then I started looking around, and I saw the door to Mr. Hocksley’s room was open. Then I saw spots of blood. I went in and saw the safe with a great pool of blood in front of it, and then I went out to the garage where we keep the car.”

  “That’s in the house next door?”

  “Yes. The Gentries rent Mr. Hocksley a garage.”

  “And the car was there?”

  “Yes; but there were bloodstains in it, all over the back seat. Really, Mr. Mason, that’s all I know. Then I called the police.”

  “Why not call them now?”

  “I can’t explain my being here. I can’t explain—lots of things.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “Things—complications that would be brought about by what’s happened here. Don’t you see. They’d think that Mrs. Perlin and I had worked together to get Mr. Hocksley out of the way.”

  “Why should you want him out of the way?”

  “I don’t know. I only know that’s what they’d say. It looks as though I must have had some connection with Mrs. Perlin, as though she’d communicated with me sometime today, and I hadn’t told the police.”

  “She did communicate with you, didn’t she?”

  “Well, in a way, yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell the police?”

  “She told me not to.”

  Mason looked at his watch, hesitated a moment, then said, “If I do this for you, what’ll you do for me?”

  She met his eyes without flinching. “What do you want?” she asked.

  Mason said, “I don’t want you to run out on me if the going gets tough.”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll stick?”

  “Yes—only—only don’t kid me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t tell me that you’re going to give me a break, and then as soon as I’ve left, call the police.”

  Mason said, “As far as that’s concerned, I’ll go you one better. I know a roadhouse that’s still open. I’ll buy you a drink, and a sandwich, and you can watch me to make certain I don’t even go near a telephone.”

  She hugged his arm. “You don’t know what this means to me! It—it means everything!”

  Mason said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Shouldn’t we—turn the lights off?”

  “No,” Mason said. “Leave things just as they are.”

  “But I’m the one who turned the lights on.”

  “All right, leave them that way.”

  “How about locking the doors?”

  “No. Leave them just the way they are.”

  “Why?”

  “Suppose something happens. Suppose we’re picked up within a block by a prowl car. Suppose someone sees us leaving. We tell our story, and police find the doors locked.”

  “I see. Look here, we have two cars. We can’t. . .”

  Mason said, “You get in my car. I drive you up to your car. You get in, turn it around, and follow me for four or five blocks, park your car, get out, and go to the nightclub with me. I bring you back to where your car is parked. In that way, you’ll know I’m not doing any telephoning.”

  Looking up, she said, “I think you’re wonderful. I can’t imagine why you’re doing this for me.”

  Mason said, “Neither can I.”

  Chapter 9

  Paul Drake, his face gray with fatigue and worry, looked across the desk at Perry Mason, and said, “Some day when you play me for a sucker, I’m going to wriggle off the hook.”

  The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “Why, Paul, what’s the idea?”

  “You know darn well what the idea is,” Drake said.

  “You mean piling so much work on you I kept you up all night?” Mason asked. “Shucks, think of me. I was pulled out of bed around one o’clock in the morning to go out on a wild-goose chase.”

  Drake said, “And I suppose you haven’t heard anything at all about the wild goose?”

  Mason said, “Spill it. What’s on your mind, Paul?”

  Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, no, you don’t know what it’s all about. You haven’t the faintest idea. You wouldn’t have got me in a jam for worlds.”

  “What the devil are you talking about, Paul?”

  “Why didn’t you telephone me?”

  “When?”

  “When! When you said you were going to.”

  “Why, did I say . . .”

  “How about that date to go out and save your bacon at Hillgrade Avenue if you didn’t call inside of an hour?”

  Mason said, “I had some trouble, Paul. I was talking with a witness. I couldn’t break away to get to a telephone without jeopardizing the whole thing. And after all, it only meant a trip out to Hillgrade Avenue for you. That was only a matter of twenty minutes, and it was better to send you on a wild-goose chase than to jeopardize what I was working on.”

  “Oh, yes, a wild-goose chase,” Drake said. “I see.”

  “Well,” Mason said, “that was the way it looked to me. House standing there, gloomy and sedate, with a light or two in it, but no one to answer the doorbell.”

  “And the doors all unlocked and waiting for you to go right on in?” Drake asked.

  Mason shook his head. “Not me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Be your age, Paul. Somebody rings you up at one o’clock, tells you to go to a certain address, and walk right into a house you’ve never seen before. You go blundering on in. Someone comes out with a double-barreled shotgun, says, ‘Burglars, eh,’ and lets you have both loads of buckshot right in the middle of your stomach. No, thank you. None of that in mine. They answer bells or I don’t open doors.”

  “You mean to say you didn’t go in?”

  “I mean to say I don’t make a practice of having strangers tell me to go out to some residence and walk right in. But what are you crabbing about? You had a wild-goose chase out there, and that was all. You got back in twenty or thirty minutes. You found out that I wasn’t there. You knew I’d either been kidnaped, or was working on some new angle of the case.”

  Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, yes. It’s nothing to me, just the few minutes necessary to run out there and back.”

  “Well, what are you beefing about?” Mason asked, letting a note of impatience creep into his voice.

  Drake said, “I don’t suppose you went inside. I don’t suppose you found the body and didn’t want to take the responsibility of telephoning the police and trying to explain to them how it happened you were out there. I don’t suppose you decided you’d discovered enough bodies and that it would be a smart idea to let Paul Drake take the rap on this one. You knew damn well I’d have some hard-boiled detectives on my staff who would bust right on into that house. You knew damn well I’d find the corpse, and when I found it, I’d have to telephone the police.”

  Mason said, “What body?”

  “Oh, I don’t suppose you knew there was a body in the house?”

  “What about the body? Who was it?”

  “Apparently,” Drake said, “it’s the body of Mrs. Sarah Perlin, the housekeeper for Hocksley. She may have committed suicide, and she may have been shot.”

  Mason said excitedly, “You mean she was actually in that house?”

  “Of course, she was in that house, in a bedroom in front of her dressing table. After the shot had been fired, she’d slumped down on the floor. Her own gun did the job.”

  Mason’s face held an expression of puzzled surprise. “Paul, you’re not kidding me about this? You mean she was there?”

  “Of course, she was there.”

  “And that’s who it was? What I mean is, the body’s been identified?”

  Drake nodded.

  “Then she must have been killed after she telephoned me and . . . Gosh, Paul, she said she wanted to confess. She must have telephoned me then started getting ready to meet me. The thought of what she’d done began preying on her mind, and she decided on suicide. What is there that indicates it wasn’t a suicide?”

  “The course of the bullet, and position of the body,” Drake said.

  “Tell me what happened, Paul.”

  “I waited for you to telephone. At first I didn’t think very much of it. Just a matter of routine. Then when about forty-five minutes had gone by and you hadn’t phoned, I began to worry. After all, it could pretty easily have been a trap. You work on a case in an unorthodox manner. You keep two or three jumps ahead of the police. You’re usually pretty close to the murderer. A man who was being crowded could bump you off, and, by shutting your lips, might save himself a one-way trip to the gas chamber at San Quentin. One o’clock in the morning was a hell of a time to be calling a lawyer out of bed. The more I thought of it, the less I liked it. I rounded up a couple of tough operatives and sat here with my eye glued on the clock. Somehow, I had a feeling in my bones you weren’t going to call. I wanted to get started. I felt that seconds were precious, but you’d said an hour, so I decided to give you the full hour.

  “Believe me, boy, when the second hand on that electric clock swung around to the sixtieth minute, I was on my way. And maybe you don’t think we burnt up the roads getting out to Hillgrade.”

  “Good boy,” Mason said. “I knew I could count on you. Then what happened?”

  Drake said, “I didn’t even bother to waste any time sizing up the lay of the land. I got to six-o-four East Hillgrade and saw lights in the house. I slammed the car to a stop right in front of the house, jumped out, and the three of us ran up the steps to the front porch and started jabbing the bell button. I could hear the doorbell jangling on the inside of the house, but nothing happened. So I pushed the door open. It was unlocked. We went in. You know what I found.”

  Mason shook his head. “What did you find, Paul?”

  Drake said, “There was a reception corridor with an arched entrance into a living room, and back of that a dining room and kitchen. Over on the other side was a door which led to a hallway. A light was on in the hallway, and the bedroom door was open. I was the one who walked down the hallway while the other boys took the living room and dining room. Believe me, I had my gun where I could reach it right quick. Okay, I get down to the second bedroom door. It’s open. I take a look inside. I see the top of a woman’s head, gray hair sprawled out over the floor. I see a left arm stretched out, and a right hand holding a gun. I let out a yell for the other boys, then I go over and make sure she’s dead. Then we go through the house looking for you. By that time, my gun’s out, and I’m having the jitters.

  “We can’t find any trace of you anywhere, so I find a telephone and call the police and tell them to rush me out some radio officers and also to notify Homicide.”

  “Mention my name?”

  “No. I didn’t see where that would do any good. I knew they’d look things over pretty thoroughly. At the time, I thought it was suicide.”

  “You don’t think so now?”

  “I’m darned if I know what to think now. I’m beginning to swing over toward the murder theory.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They wanted to know how I happened to go walking into the house at that time in the morning, and how I happened to find the body.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  Drake said apologetically, “I only had four or five minutes after I telephoned headquarters before the radio officers showed up. I didn’t have time to think up an absolutely iron-clad story. I could have improved it if I’d had a little more time. I. . .”

  “What was it?” Mason asked.

  “I couldn’t be absolutely certain who she was. Looking at things fast, it looked like an open-and-shut case of suicide. So I told the cops that I’d got a telephone message from a woman who said she wanted to tell me something before it was too late, that if I’d jump in my car and get out to that address fast, I’d find out something in connection with the Hocksley murder that would interest me.”