“Perhaps a case of heart trouble,” Mason said.

  “Oh, undoubtedly,” Tragg said, “or perhaps he could have fallen asleep just casually, you know. But you’ll probably notice that car over on the corner, Mason. One of my men is shaking the driver down. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find the driver was one of Paul Drake’s operatives. In fact, I thought I recognized him as we drove by. And he made frantic signs when he recognized me, trying to catch your attention, waving his hand and turning his headlights on and off. As it happened, you were quite preoccupied in your conversation with Miss Street, so didn’t notice. I’m going to have to ask him just what his idea was in trying to give you those furtive signals.

  “You know, Mason, you’re developing the damnedest habit lately of hiring Paul Drake’s men to watch a house and almost invariably the occupant of that house dies about the time the men get there. If this keeps up we’ll have to communicate with the insurance companies. They’ll want to change their statistics, or mortality tables, or whatever it is they call them…. Let’s see, I guess we go around this way. You were also looking at the garage, Mason. What was the idea?”

  “Just looking the place over,” Mason said. “Actually I was thinking of buying it.”

  “Oh, you were! Well, you didn’t tell me that you were interested in making real estate purchases out here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mason said, “very, very sorry. We’ve been awfully busy up at the office and I neglected to notify you. Now I’ve been thinking of buying some railroad stock and I believe we’ve been putting some money in Government Bonds. Do you think that’s all right? Is that a good investment?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t bother me at all,” Tragg told him. “In fact I like it Now let’s get this all straight, Mason, you wanted to buy this house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you met the owner?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “What time?”

  “Shortly after I last saw you.”

  “I see. You had an appointment with me to discuss a murder case, and then you rushed out here to buy this property.”

  “I was looking for investments.”

  “Then you’ve been in this house?”

  “Yes.”

  “While this man—what’s-his-name was with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No funny stuff?”

  “No funny stuff.”

  “He was with you all the time you were inside the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t a client of yours? He didn’t send for you and ask you to come out here?”

  “No. I came to see him. I told him I was looking for investments. I didn’t even give him my name. He didn’t know who I was.”

  “Well, that sounds fishy as hell, Mason, but we’ll let it ride at that for the moment. Now let’s take a look at that garage. We may be able to get in through there.”

  They walked up the driveway and Tragg said, “A car was either driven in or driven out a short time ago.”

  “How do you know?” Della Street asked.

  Tragg said, “Elemental, my dear Miss Street. You’ll notice there’s a low place in the driveway here. The gravel has been pretty well thinned out at this place, what you’d call a regular mud puddle, and you’ll notice that the water is muddy. If those tracks hadn’t been made recently the water in the puddle would have been clear. You see, it hasn’t been raining since midnight.

  “Now let’s see, Mason, this door is one of the kind that lowers automatically to close. You evidently press this button to open the door and then after an interval of about two minutes the door automatically closes. A new gadget they’re putting out for garage doors. Very nice.”

  Tragg pressed the button and the garage door swung upward on a hinge against a counterweight, disclosing an empty garage.

  “I suppose, under the circumstances,” Tragg said, standing to one side, “I should be the host. If you’ll walk right in, please.”

  They entered the garage. Tragg looked swiftly about him and said, “A two-car garage. Evidently only one car is kept here. The other side of the garage is used for storage. Now I suppose that door goes directly into the house. Let’s try it…. Ah, yes, it’s unlocked.”

  Tragg paused to look swiftly around the garage and while he was doing so a clockwork mechanism clicked an electric connection and the garage door slowly and ponderously swung shut, cutting off a good part of their light.

  Tragg opened the kitchen door and said, “And from here on, Mason, I think you and Miss Street had better follow me. Now please be very careful not to touch anything. Keep your hands off of everything. You understand?”

  Mason said, “As a matter of fact, Lieutenant …”

  “Let’s not engage in conversation right now, if you don’t mind, Mason. I want to get through here to the front hall. I want to take a look at this man who’s blocking the doorway.”

  Tragg opened the swinging door from the kitchen into the dining room, went through the dining room to the living room, then paused suddenly as he looked through the open door into the downstairs front bedroom which had been fixed up as an office.

  “Well, well,” he said, “there seems to have been rather a hurried search.”

  Mason looked past Tragg and saw that the door of the safe in the corner of the office was wide open. A litter of papers and books had been spewed out in a pile on the floor. Account books were lying opened, or partially opened, face up and face down, some of them standing on end. Great piles of canceled checks had been scattered over the floor. There were letters strewn around and a tray, which had evidently contained cards of property listings in alphabetical order, had been dumped carelessly so that the cards were strewn all over the floor.

  “Very, very interesting,” Tragg said. “Now quite evidently someone was looking for something in very much of a hurry. No time to be orderly.”

  Tragg turned suddenly to Mason. “Perhaps you can tell me exactly what they were looking for, Mason.”

  The lawyer shook his head.

  “Well, well, we’ll look around,” Tragg said. “At the moment the gentleman who’s lying in the hallway in front of the door seems to take precedence. He …. Oh-oh, notice the stairs, Mason.”

  They had entered the reception hallway.

  A wide trail of blood ran down the stairs. Blood which as yet had only begun to dry and retained its brilliant red color rather than the darker, more brownish hue which would come later.

  Tragg said, “Now you and Miss Street had better stand right there, Mason. Don’t move. Don’t touch a thing.”

  Tragg stepped forward, looked down at the body that was lying on its back, sprawled out in the hallway on the waxed hardwood floor.

  “You seem to have moved the body just a bit, Mason, when you opened that door. That is, you moved the left arm, and there’s just a little smear indicating you may have moved the body an inch or so.”

  Tragg bent to feel the wrist. “Not much chance of life after a hemorrhage like that…. No, as I suspected, he’s quite dead, but he hasn’t been dead long. You recognize him, Mason? Just step forward so you can see the face.”

  Mason looked down at the death-colored features of Arthman D. Fargo.

  Mason said, “That’s the gentleman who seemed to live here. He told me his name was Arthman D. Fargo when I talked with him a short time ago.”

  Tragg looked up the stairs, following the trail of blood. “Evidently he was stabbed up there on the second floor. There’s not a sign of a weapon here. Nasty cut in the neck. Then he tried to run out of the front door, perhaps seeking help, perhaps trying to escape, hit the top of the stairs, tumbled down and was dead by the time he hit the bottom.

  “And now, I am very sorry, but I think we have some work to do, Mason, and if you and your estimable secretary will just turn right around, being very careful not to touch anything, I’ll escort you out of the house the same way we came in, and then I’m going to ask you to wait in your car, if you don’t mind, until I can ask you a few questions.

  “Before I can talk with you, Mason, I want to look around here. I’m going to have to notify headquarters and get some photographers out here and a deputy coroner. And by all means we want to interview Mr. Drake’s detective who happens to be so opportunely posted out there at the corner. Tell me, Mason, do you arrange for these murders on some sort of a schedule? A very, very interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” Mason said.

  “And so you were interested in buying this house?” Tragg went on, with his voice showing the extent of his keen interest. “I suppose that you rang up Drake and asked him to put an operative out here to make certain that no other customer came in and raised your bid. I think, Mason, that for a person who doesn’t know who his client is, you certainly have an uncanny ability to determine where the next murder is going to take place. Right this way, please. I’ll signal my driver and get him over here, and then after a while we’ll have a nice little heart-to-heart chat, Mason, but first I want to know a little more about the situation here in the house, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Mason said. “There are days when I don’t have anything to do at my office. Nothing at all.”

  “I’m sure that’s right,” Tragg said, “so just to keep yourself amused you pick out the places where murders are going to be committed and have Paul Drake post men there. You’re a regular bird dog, Mason.”

  Chapter 11

  Mason had an opportunity for a few hurried words with Della Street as Lieutenant Tragg moved out to the curb to give secret instructions to the officer who had accompanied him to the Fargo house.

  “Do we talk?” Della Street asked.

  “Not yet,” Mason said.

  “He’ll want to know how you located the place, he’ll want to know …”

  “I can’t tell him, not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Mason said, “Apparently my client is Mrs. Fargo. My best hunch is that she’s going to turn up missing, but I can’t be certain.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “That’s what I did think. Now I’m not certain. Someone stuck a knife in him. It just might have been that his wife found out he was intending to murder her, and beat him to it. In that event it was self-defense, but we’d have one hell of a time proving it. Or he may have killed his wife, sent for his mistress, told her what he’d done and asked her to run away with him. She might not have been willing under the circumstances. She might have told him she wouldn’t go for that at all, and threatened to tell the police; so he began to get rough—and got stabbed—self-defense again. No one knows—not yet.”

  “Can’t you tell Tragg that much?”

  “Suppose I should be wrong.”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t tell Tragg anything my client told me in confidence.”

  “Is the wife your client?”

  “We took money from someone, presumably the wife. She … Hold everything, Della, here he comes.”

  Lieutenant Tragg said, “Just get in the car with the officer, if you will, please, Miss Street, and you too, Mason. We’ll try not to detain you any longer than is absolutely necessary, but there are a few facts I want to find out just as soon as I finish with my examination in here.”

  “Always glad to accommodate you, Lieutenant,” Mason said cheerfully.

  He and Della Street entered the car. There followed a long wait, during which official cars came siren-screaming out to the house. Reporters showed up, news photographers took pictures for their papers, the “meat wagon” from an undertaking establishment drove up to remove the body, and then Lieutenant Tragg came hurrying down the driveway, the gravel crunching under his energetic feet. “Sorry to keep you folks waiting,” he said briskly, “but there were quite a few angles I had to check on. Now we’ll go to headquarters, if you don’t mind.”

  Mason said, “Why don’t you question us here, Tragg, and save …”

  “No, thank you, Mason. I think headquarters is the place. We have all of the stenographic facilities there in case you care to make a statement.”

  “I’ll make a statement right here.”

  “Headquarters,” Tragg said, nodding to the officer who was driving the car, and jumped in, slamming the door behind him.

  Mason knew that protests were out of order, so he sat quietly while the siren screamed for a right of way through traffic.

  Tragg ushered his visitors into his office at the department devoted to homicides, called in a police stenographer.

  “Sit right down and make yourself comfortable,” he said. “Now, Mason, I’d like to know just what happened.”

  “I gave you a general sketch earlier in the day.”

  “About Carlin?”

  “That’s right, about having been retained.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. Some mysterious client. You don’t want to mention who it was. A woman, I believe. Could it have been Mrs. Fargo by any chance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you happen to be out there, Mason? How did you happen to have one of Drake’s men on the job?”

  Mason said, “I was trying to find out something about my client, the person who had telephoned me.”

  “And did you?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to develop the information.”

  “But you did have a lead to Fargo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “A little detective work.”

  “Mind telling me how you got the lead?”

  “Pure deduction, Lieutenant. I couldn’t trace the phone call over the telephone, but I had another way of tracing it and—well, Fargo was one of the possibilities.”

  “Fargo himself?”

  “Perhaps his wife.”

  “And where’s his wife now?”

  “My best guess,” Mason said, “is that she’s dead.”

  Tragg’s eyes for a moment were hard as gimlets. “Another one?”

  “Another one.”

  “You seem to be leaving a trail of murder this morning, Mason.”

  “Following a trail of murder, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, I stand corrected. Tell us about Mrs. Fargo.”

  Mason said, “I talked with Fargo earlier in the day. I pretended that I was in the market to buy his house. As a matter of fact, Della and I were going out there posing as a prospective bride and groom who were interested in getting a house where they could set up housekeeping.”

  “Most commendable,” Tragg said. “Am I to offer congratulations?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t been able to sell Della on the idea.”

  “You might do worse,” Tragg said to Della Street. “But I certainly wouldn’t advise you to say yes until you hear the outcome of this latest scrape, because he may be in a little more serious trouble than he realizes.”

  Mason lit a cigarette.

  “Why do you think she’s dead?” Tragg asked.

  “Fargo told me that his wife had taken the six o’clock plane to Sacramento. I don’t think she did.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think the car had been out of the garage.”

  “The car had been out sometime this morning. It …”

  “Sure,” Mason said. “The car was gone. It had to go out.”

  “And, by the same token, someone had to drive it out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “As to identity, no. As to general classification, I might say yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Fargo’s girl friend, perhaps.”

  At that moment a sergeant entered Tragg’s office, laid a folded piece of paper on the Lieutenant’s desk, and without a word turned arid left the office.

  Tragg opened the paper and studied it frowningly.

  “Fargo’s girl friend,” he repeated slowly. “Find the woman, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tragg’s eyes were cold, hard, and penetrating. “Did Fargo have something you wanted, Mason?”

  “What?”

  “A paper, for instance?”

  Mason shook his head.

  “You’re certain you’re not holding out on me?”

  “I’m telling you everything I can.”

  “That means everything you want to.”

  “Well, perhaps.”

  “Isn’t it possible that Mrs. Fargo employed you to handle her affairs, that you were particularly anxious to get some paper Fargo had in his possession and …”

  Mason shook his head.

  “Careful, now,” Tragg said. “I’m going to check up on you.”

  “No, absolutely,” Mason said. “That’s not the case.”

  “Told you she’d gone to Sacramento, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you don’t think she had?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think she’d left the house?”

  Mason said, “I haven’t the faintest proof, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t want to be quoted on it. I would be very much embarrassed if you released any statement to the press which indicated I had said anything of the sort. But if I were in your shoes, if I were in charge of the homicide detail, I’d get the license number of Arthman D. Fargo’s automobile, which incidentally, is registered under his wife’s name, and I’d throw out a state-wide broadcast I’d try to find that automobile just as soon as possible and then I’d make it a point to look in the trunk.”

  “Well, thanks for your advice,” Tragg said. “It’s appreciated. It shows you’re developing a professional mind, Mason. We’ve already done that. Now if you were in my shoes, what would you do with one Perry Mason who seems to have certain information that he’s holding out?”

  “What do you think I’m holding out?” Mason asked.

  “The thing you’re not telling me.”

  “I have virtually all my cards on the table, Lieutenant The only things that I can’t give you are certain confidential matters which may have something to do with my client.”