With cold-blooded triumphant verve, Drumm began the presentation of his case, smashing each point home with telling effect, striking his blows with as much sure precision as though he had been a carpenter driving nails into the scaffold on which Diana Regis was to be hanged.

  And because Drumm wanted to fully enjoy the taste of triumph now that he had it at his command, he put on evidence on the preliminary hearing with as much painstaking care as though he had been trying a murder case in front of a jury, realizing, of course, that behind him interested members of the press were taking notes on the testimony of each witness, supplementing their notes with photographs taken in the corridors of the courthouse and following the recesses of court.

  First, Drumm put on the manager of the apartment house who identified Diana Regis, the defendant, as the young woman who had shared an apartment with Mildred Danville, and Mildred Danville, she testified, was dead. The witness had been taken to the morgue where she had viewed the body of Mildred Danville and had no hesitancy in identifying it as the body of the young woman who shared the apartment with Diana Regis.

  “Cross-examine,” Claude Drumm announced.

  “Yes.”

  “In other words, nine p.m. on the day previous.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think that it could not have occurred more than five hours prior to the time you saw the body?”

  “Can you answer the question, Doctor?”

  “Certainly. I am answering it.”

  “I don’t think so. I am asking you for a direct answer, Doctor. Could death have taken place more than five hours before you saw the body?”

  “Oh, it could have, yes,” the doctor said testily. “I am telling you when I think death occurred. If you want to explore the most remote possibilities it could have been eight or nine hours. But that’s so unlikely as to be fantastic.”

  “Let’s not have your thoughts, Doctor, let’s have your best estimate predicated upon medical facts which you can produce. Now did I understand you to say that death could have taken place as much as eight or nine hours before you saw the body?”

  “It is conceivable, yes, but hardly probable.”

  “What are the extreme limits within which you would say death could possibly have occurred?”

  “Well, perhaps as late as ten-thirty the night before or perhaps as early as six o’clock—if you want to go to absurd lengths of extreme possibilities.”

  “Six o’clock would then be seven hours before you worked on the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you said as much as nine hours you really didn’t mean that, Doctor?”

  “Well, I meant that that would be the extreme limit of even a remote possibility.”

  “But there is a remote possibility that death took place as much as eight hours prior to the time you made your examination?”

  “If you want to go into all of the extreme interpretations of evidence in the case, yes.”

  “You mean the medical evidence, Doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then as an extreme limit, death could have taken place as much as eight or nine hours prior to one o’clock. Is that right?”

  “Well, yes—if you want to discard probabilities.”

  “Thank you,” Mason said, “that is all.”

  “As I understand it,” Drumm said smiling reassuringly at Dr. Perllon, “your answers to Mr. Mason’s questions went to extreme limits.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “The limits during which death might have occurred under the most unusual, under the most medically improbable circumstances?”

  “Exactly. Circumstances that are fantastically improbable.”

  “Now then, Doctor, what are the time limits within which death most probably took place? Calling now, Doctor, not for your mere opinion, but for an interpretation of the medical facts.”

  “Death probably took place between four and live hours prior to the time I saw the body.”

  “And on what do you base that statement, Doctor?”

  “In part, upon the peculiar development of rigor mortis.”

  “What was there about that, Doctor, which you consider distinctive?”

  “Thank you,” Drumm said in the tone of one gentleman to another, and his smile indicated to both the judge and the witness that the attempts of a shyster to obscure the situation had been very adroitly foiled. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that Mr. Mason cares for any recross examination.”

  “Very well,” Drumm snapped.

  Mason smiled at the doctor, a cold icy smile. “Death could have occurred as much as nine hours before you examined the body, Doctor?”

  “As I have stated,” the doctor said with ponderous dignity, “the state of rigor mortis is a determining factor. Now rigor mortis has a tendency to develop within certain general time limitations——”

  “Could death have occurred as much as nine hours before you examined the body?” Mason asked.

  “I am trying to explain, Mr. Mason.”

  “I don’t want an explanation, I want an answer. You answer my question, and then you can explain it afterwards if you want to, but I want an answer to my question. Could death have taken place as much as nine hours before you examined the body?”

  “Yes or no?” Mason asked. “Could it have taken place as much as nine hours before you examined the body?”

  “Yes!” the harassed doctor all but screamed.

  “We’ve got the cop, Perry.”

  “The one that arrested Mildred Danville for a traffic violation?”

  “Yes. Overtime parking.”

  “Where is he?” Mason asked with excitement.

  “He’s at my office, Perry. I’m holding him there. Certainly had plenty of trouble finding him. He was a relief officer who was on duty in this precinct only for that one day.”

  “Let’s go talk with him,” Mason said. “What’s his name?”

  “Philip C. Rames.”

  “What sort of a chap, Paul?”

  “Pretty good. Of course you know how those cops are. They have very elastic memories when their jobs are at stake, and usually a cop hates to testify to something that will knock the prosecution’s theory of the case into a cocked hat.”

  “Well, let’s have a talk with him,” Mason said. “We’ll get a statement out of him if we can.”

  “How’s the case going, Perry?”

  “About as I expected it,” Mason said. “They’re building a foundation. Hang it, Paul, I’ve got a defense in this case, but I’m not certain whether I can prove it. And if I can’t establish it by evidence, I’m licked. But I know that the faucet in that rain water system was open. I remember it definitely. So far I haven’t been able to get a look at the police photographs, but I’m afraid that … . Oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s go see what Rames has to say.”

  Chapter 13

  “Remember her name?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’d know her if you saw her again?”

  “Yes. I think I would.”

  “Can you recall the circumstances of the arrest, Mr. Rames? It’s rather important.”

  “Why is it important?” Rames asked quickly.

  Rames ran his hand along the back of his neck, scratched the hair over his ears, said, “Well, I didn’t give her a ticket. It wasn’t anything particularly serious. She was parked overtime and it just happened that as I was getting ready to make out a tag she showed up. I’d been making the rounds a little faster than usual, and she could have been only five minutes overdue on the parking—anyway, that’s what she claimed, and she might have been right at that. I decided to take a look at her driving license, and the way she acted when I pulled that one on her made me think perhaps she was operating a car without a license—you know, the usual excuse about running down to do a little shopping and leaving her purse in her apartment, not realizing she’d left it until after she’d got started, and then thinking it wasn’t worth while going back for it because she was going to shop where she had charge accounts.”

  “Well, I asked her where she lived. It wasn’t too far from there, a matter of five or six blocks, so I decided to call her bluff. I told her, ‘All right, you say the car’s only been here five minutes more than an hour. Just leave it here and I’ll drive you up to your apartment and back to your car, and you can get your purse and show me your driving license.’”

  “How did she take that?”

  “She didn’t take it so very good,” Rames said. “I knew as soon as I pulled that line on her that I had her—at least that’s what 1 thought, and it ain’t very often that I get fooled.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, she climbed in the car with me. She didn’t want to, but it was either that or else get a ticket. We went to this apartment house, some place just off Washington, and she opened the door, and sure enough there was a purse lying on the table. She opened it and took out her driving license.”

  “You checked the description?”

  “You’re damn right I checked it.”.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I felt sort of cheap,” Rames confessed. “It ain’t often we make a bum guess that way, so I drove her back to her car and kidded her along a little bit and told her she’d better keep her driving license with her at all times after this, and that even five minutes overtime parking was technically just as much of a crime as parking for a longer time, and I was letting her off this time but I didn’t want to catch her again.”

  “Do you remember where the car was parked?” Mason asked-

  “Yes, as it happens I can tell exactly where it was parked, because it was next to a fire hydrant, and she only missed being within the limits by about half an inch. Here, you got a map of the city there ? I’ll show you the exact spot.”

  “And you think you’d recognize this young woman?”

  “I think I would. She was a pretty classy number, blonde with bluish green eyes and a blue outfit—just a neat package.”

  “She looks familiar. It’s hard to make an identification from a photograph … . Say, wait a minute, I’ve seen this picture somewhere. Hey! What are you fellows trying to pull?”

  “We’re simply trying to get you to identify a picture,” Mason said.

  “Well, wait a minute. That picture’s been in the papers. Here, let’s take a look.”

  Rames whirled and picked up a newspaper which was on the table at the back part of Drake’s office. “Shucks, I thought that picture looked familiar … . Sure, here it is! Mildred Danville, the girl that was murdered by the blonde who shared the apartment with her. Say, this may be important!”

  “You’re certain,” Mason asked, “that this is the young woman who took you to her apartment and showed you her driving license?”

  “Stenographer? Where?”

  “She’s in an adjoining room,” Mason said, “taking it down in shorthand over the interoffice communicating system. “A girl can take shorthand much more accurately when she’s at her own desk, you know, and——”

  “Say, what were you trying to do, trap me?”

  “Certainly not,” Mason said. “No one has asked you to tell anything except the truth.”

  “Well, I better report this before I do any more talking, and I’m not signing any statements until I get a clearance from the D.A.’s office. You write that up and send a copy over to the D.A. and … ”

  “Did you,” Mason asked, “make any statement that wasn’t the truth?”

  “Can you,” Mason asked, “tell us approximately what time this was?”

  “Well,” Mason said, “that’s that.”

  “Think it’ll do you some good?” Drake asked.

  “Leave it to Sergeant Holcomb,” Drake said. “They’ve sewed that apartment up as tight as a drum.”

  “Someone watching the door?”

  “Not only watching the door, but actually living in the apartment, staying right there, a man who’s on the job twenty-four hours a day, has his meals brought in three times a day. Sergeant Holcomb isn’t taking any chances. And if I know him, he’ll keep that man there until doomsday, or until Diana Regis gets convicted.”

  “Then Carl Fretch managed to convince him he didn’t get the thing Holcomb wanted?”

  “No one knows what happened with Carl Fretch. He was up at Headquarters for about twelve hours, then they released him. I guess they put him through the mill all right, but I have an idea Fretch talked his way out of something at that. He’s rather a smooth customer.”

  Mason said moodily, “Holcomb hasn’t any right to have a man in the apartment. He can put a guard at the door if he wants, but to have a man live right in the apartment...”

  “When Sergeant Holcomb wants to do anything,” Drake said, “he isn’t particularly hampered by a lot of technicalities. He goes ahead and does what he wants to do and leaves it up to the other man to stop him. Couldn’t you get a court order——”

  “Well, that’s the way it is,” Drake said.

  “Look, Paul, could you get an operative to pull a fast one and try to … ”

  “Nix,” Drake interrupted, “not with a police guard on the job.”

  “This would be just incidental, something that … ”

  “Not a chance, Perry. No private detective is going to take a chance on sneaking something out from under the noses of the Police Department. It’s too risky. You get caught and your license is revoked and you’re out of a job.”

  Mason frowned down at the carpet. “Hang it, Paul, I’ve got to get that thing out of the apartment.”

  “That’s one place where we can’t help you a bit, Perry. The police guards will know me. They’ll know you. They’ll know Della Street, and there isn’t another soul you’d dare to trust, or that would even consider doing the job. How about this cop, won’t he do you some good?”

  “In all probability,” Mason said, “they’ll find some way of spiking my guns by having him get vague about something. But you can gamble one thing, he’ll take the position that he can’t possibly identify the purse, so that he can’t tell whether Mildred picked up her purse or Diana’s. And he won’t, under any circumstances, ever admit that the driving license that was shown to him was in the name of Diana Regis. He’ll say he can’t remember the name.”

  “Case look pretty black against her?” Drake asked.

  “Black as ink unless I can get some new facts. Of course this is just a preliminary hearing. If they bind her over, I’ll still stand a chance, but I’d like to do something to counteract the newspaper publicity they’re building up … . One thing we’ve got to do, Paul. We’ve got to trace Mildred Danville’s moves on the day of the murder. That’s one place where Rames has given us something to work on. Her car was parked there for at least an hour and five minutes. Now what was she doing there ? What’s in the general vicinity?”

  “I don’t know, offhand,” Drake said, “but we’ll sure find out. I’ll have men working on that, and have a complete map of the block showing every building, who occupies it, and what it’s used for.”

  “I don’t know. Why?” Drake asked grinning. “Think you could get the garbage collector to walk in and pick up what you want?”

  “You never can tell,” Mason said casually. “I might hire myself out as a garbage collector and … ”

  “Don’t try it,” Drake warned. “Don’t ever kid yourself that Holcomb won’t have a man on the job who would spot you no matter how you tried to disguise yourself. And if they ever caught you pulling that stuff … ”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mason said casually. “It might work out all right. Find out who collects the garbage and give me that information by the time court adjourns this afternoon, will you, Paul?”

  “I’ll get you the information,” Drake said dryly, “and the advice goes with it. Don’t try anything with Holcomb. That guy is tough. He knows you want something that’s in that apartment. He wants it, too. He isn’t taking any chances of losing out, and he’ll be ruthless as hell. And if you know where that diary is, my lad, you just leave well enough alone and let it stay there.”

  Chapter 14

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “I’m going to show you some photographs which, I believe, were taken in your presence by persons, however, other than you. I’m going to ask you to look at these photographs one at a time, and tell whether they represent and faithfully portray the scene of the crime and the position of the body as you saw it when you were called to this house on San Felipe Boulevard.”

  “They do,” he said.

  “Just a moment,” Mason interrupted. “I want to see each particular photograph, and I may want to cross-examine the witness on each of the photographs before they are introduced in evidence.”

  “I don’t know,” Mason said. “I haven’t seen them.”

  “Certainly,” Drumm said. “We can identify them by half a dozen witnesses if necessary. I will further state that I intend to put the photographer on the stand who took these pictures, but I didn’t want to withdraw Lieutenant Tragg again and have his testimony interrupted. However, if it becomes necessary——”

  “I am not intending to question the authenticity of the photographs,” Mason said, “but I do feel that I am entitled to ask some questions as to the things that are shown in the photographs for the purpose of testing the Lieutenant’s recollection.”

  “Oh, very well,” Judge Winters ruled. “You’ll have ample opportunity to cross-examine.”

  “Technically I believe I have the right to cross-examine as to the recollection of the witness on the photographs before the photographs are admitted in evidence.”

  “Very well, if you wish to do so,” Judge Winters ruled. “I see no reason why you shouldn’t. In fact,” he added somewhat reprovingly, “I can’t see that it makes any great difference one way or the other.”