“So?” Drake asked.

  “So,” Mason said, “somewhere along she’s going to see that he has dinner. After all, the guy has to eat, you know.”

  “Well, let’s hope she didn’t give him a hamburger,” Drake said. “Those things are fine when you eat them while they’re fresh, but when you put them in a paper bag the bread gets soggy and—Oh, I guess they’re all right, but I’ve eaten so darned many of them sitting up there in the office with a telephone at my ear that I just don’t like the idea.”

  “Why don’t you get something else?” Mason asked.

  “What else can you have sent in?” Drake asked. “What takes place of a good old hamburger sandwich with lots of onions?”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” Mason said, “you make it sound appetizing.”

  The waitress brought their cocktails and the French bread, butter and the bowser bag for Paul Drake.

  Drake made a ceremony out of buttering two thick slices of French bread.

  They finished the cocktails and after a few minutes the waitress brought the steaks.

  Della Street waived her feminine prerogative pointing at Paul Drake she said, “Serve him first. He”s apt to be called out.”

  The headwaiter approached the table. “One of you is Mr. Paul Drake?” he asked. “I have a call for you. Shall I plug the phone in here?”

  Paul Drake groaned.

  Mason nodded. “Bring the phone,” he said.

  Drake picked the steak off the plate with a fork, put it between the two slices of French bread.

  As the waiter brought the telephone, Drake sliced a piece off the steak, started chewing on it then, still chewing, picked up the telephone, said, “Yes, this is Drake.”

  The receiver made noises. Drake listened for a while, said, “Just a moment.”

  He turned to Mason, said, “The tail is reporting on Daphne Shelby. She went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered food to take out—chow mein, fried rice, barbecued pork and chicken pineapple. I’ll get back to the office and—”

  “Stay right here,” Mason interrupted. “You won’t have time to get to the office. What’s she doing now?”

  “She’s waiting for the food. My man slipped to a telephone.”

  “She doesn’t know she’s being tailed?”

  “No, apparently not. She looked around a bit when she started out, but apparently she feels pretty safe.”

  “Tell your man to keep on her tail,” Mason said. “Don’t take any chances of losing her, We’ve got to know where she goes. She’s taking food to Horace Shelby right now.”

  “You mean I eat?” Drake asked with mock incredulity.

  “You eat,” Mason said. “Tell your man not to lose her under any circumstances.”

  Drake gave instructions in the telephone, slipped the thick steak out from under the pieces of buttered French bread, noted especially the stained surfaces of the bread where the steak juices had soaked in mingling with the melted butter.

  He heaved an ecstatic sigh and said, “Sometimes, Perry, I think you’re a slave driver, but this time I’m for you a million per cent. I thought you”d want to have me get Horace Shelby located, bolt my food and get out there.”

  Mason shook his head. “I want to find out what Daphne Shelby is up to first, Paul. There’s something cooking and I don’t know what it is.”

  “You don’t think there’s any chance the guy really is off his rocker and Daphne is keeping him stashed away?”

  “I doubt it,” Mason said. “If he were confused and disoriented, she wouldn’t want to leave him alone and—After all, Paul, the guy’s only seventy-five and the way we’re living nowadays with vitamins and people being conscious of diet and cholesterol, a guy at seventy-five is just coming into the prime of life.”

  “Some of them get a little woozy at” that age,” Drake pointed out. “You know you have the testimony of the doctor who said he found him disoriented and confused.”

  “And, by the same token,” Mason said, “we don’t know what medication he had had before the doctor saw him.”

  The headwaiter took away the telephone. Drake attacked his steak, wolfing it down with swallows of hot coffee between bites.

  Mason and Della Street ate more leisurely but without wasting time.

  The waitress, sensing the urgency of the situation, hovered over the table.

  Paul Drake dug out the last of the baked potato, rich with golden butter and red paprika on the top.

  “That’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed an evening meal in a long time. You’d be surprised how exacting this job is, Perry. And when you get a case, everything seems to go bang all at once.”

  “I’ll admit I want lots of fast service,” Mason said. “Somehow my cases seem to develop at high speed.”

  Drake said, “You’re the high-speed factor. Once you start on something you whip it through to a conclusion. The other attorneys I work for keep office hours, go home at four-thirty or five o’clock, forget about business until eight-thirty or nine-thirty the next morning.”

  “They don’t have my type of work,” Mason said.

  “No one does,” Drake told him, grinning.

  The headwaiter was apologetic as he returned with the phone the second time.

  “For you, Mr. Drake,” he said.

  Drake grinned affably. “It’s all right—now,” he said, “I’ve had my dinner. No hamburger tonight.”

  Drake picked up the telephone, said, “Drake speaking … Go ahead, Jim, what do you know?”

  Drake was silent for a moment, then cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Mason, “She took the food to the Northern Lights Motel, parked the car directly in front of Unit 21, gave a perfunctory knock on the door, then opened the door which was unlocked and went in with the food in two big bags.”

  “Then what?”

  “Closed the door. She’s there now. There’s a phone booth at the corner and my man is in the phone booth.”

  “Tell him to keep an eye on the situation,” Mason said, “and particularly notice the time element. I want to know what time she went in I want to know what time she comes out and I want to know where she goes when she leaves there. … How about some more coffee, Paul?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  Drake relayed Mason’s instructions into the telephone, settled back in his chair with a grin. “Paul Drake,” he announced to no one in particular, “is dining high on the hog tonight. I think I’ll have a hot fudge sundae as well.”

  “May as well have whatever you want,” Mason said. “I have an idea Daphne is going to be in there for some time and we have to wait here.”

  They had a leisurely dessert.

  “Now what?” Drake asked when they had finished.

  “We still wait,” Mason said.

  “We can go to my office,” Drake suggested. “My men all call the office, and the office relays the call to wherever I happen to be.”

  Mason nodded. “Call your office. Tell them we’re on our way back,” he said.

  “I hope you know what this is all about,” Drake said. “It’s all mixed up as far as I’m concerned.”

  “It’s mixed up as far as I’m concerned,” Mason admitted. “But I want to get a few high cards in my hand before I start calling for a showdown.”

  “You’re calling for a showdown?” Drake asked.

  “I’m going to have to,” Mason said, “somewhere along the line.”

  “Tonight?”

  Mason nodded, summoned the waiter, signed the check, gave the waitress an extra ten-dollar tip and said, “I just want you to know how much we appreciate the friendly service that you gave us.”

  Her face lit with pleasure. “Why—thank you so much. You’re so nice!”

  Mason detoured past the headwaiter, handed him another bill, said, “Thanks ever so much for keeping an eye on us and, incidentally, the waitress who handled our table did a wonderful job, the sort of job that makes people want to come back.”

  The headwaiter bowed. “She’s one of our best. I assigned her to your table, Mr. Mason.”

  “Thanks,” Mason said.

  Driving back to the office, Drake said, “Why all the flowery talk, Perry? The money would have been enough. That’s what they care about.”

  Mason shook his head. “They like appreciation.”

  “You show it with money.”

  “No you don’t,” Mason said. “It takes both money and words. Money without words is vulgar. Words without money are cheap.”

  “I never thought of it exactly that way,” Drake said. “But perhaps that’s why you always get such good service in restaurants.”

  “Don’t you?” Mason asked.

  Drake grinned. “Sure, I send my secretary down to the restaurant for a couple of hamburgers with mustard and onion, and a pint of coffee. She always smiles when she brings it in. That’s what you call service with a smile.”

  “We’re going to have to do something about your eating,” Mason said.

  “You can say that again,” Drake told him. “Now that I’ve found out how the other half lives, I’m ruined.”

  They dropped Paul Drake at his office. Mason and Della Street went on down to the lawyer’s office.

  “She’s having dinner with Horace Shelby?” Della asked.

  Mason nodded.

  “And you’re worried about the case, aren’t you?”

  Again Mason nodded.

  “Why?”

  “In the first place,” Mason said, “my client has started taking shortcuts. I don’t like that. In the second place, she isn’t confiding in me and I don’t like that. In the third place, the fact that she’s taking such elaborate precautions to keep Horace Shelby out of circulation either means that he’s pretty far out in left field or that both of them are afraid the Finchleys are going to put him back in that sanitarium and restrain him by force.”

  “Well,” Della said, “after a man has been strapped to a bed after he’s been taken against his will and thrown into what is virtually a mental institution and all of that, he’s going to dread any possibility of returning.”

  “That probably accounts for it,” Mason said, “but the situation may be a lot more complicated than appears on the surface. … What do you suppose Borden Finchley and his wife are doing? What do you suppose Ralph Exeter is doing?”

  “Doesn’t Drake have men on them?”

  Mason shook his head. “After his men picked up Daphne Shelby, I concentrated on her. The others are relatively unimportant, and I don’t want Finchley reporting to the court that I had him shadowed.”

  “Do you think he’d know that he was being shadowed?” Della Street asked.

  “He’s pretty apt to find it out. A skillful shadow can tail a person for a while, but when you have three people to shadow, someone’s going to get wise. And then, of course, if that one communicates his thoughts to the others and they begin to look around, it isn’t too difficult to spot a shadow.

  “Of course, it can be handled if you have the money to spend. You can alternate shadows, you can put several shadows on one suspect you can have them behind him, ahead of him, and generally do a pretty good job. But I didn’t want to take chances in this case, and therefore once we’ve found Horace Shelby that’s what we’re playing for. When we get him, we’ve hit the jackpot.”

  “And what are you going to do then?”

  “It depends on the condition he’s in,” Mason said. “I’m going to play fair. As soon as we’re dead certain we have him located, I’m going to get in touch with Dr. Alma and arrange for an interview. If Shelby is okay, I’m going to see what we can do for Daphne. If he isn’t—if he’s really in need of having someone look after him, then, of course, we’re in a different situation.

  “However, I am going to try and get evidence that will make the Court change his order in regard to Borden Finchley. I think we’ll have some other conservator.”

  Mason walked around the office aimlessly, working off his restlessness while he was waiting.

  Della, knowing that Perry Mason did much of his intensive thinking while pacing the floor, settled herself in the big, overstuffed leather chair, remaining motionless so as not to disturb the lawyer’s thoughts.

  The silence of night settled upon the big office building.

  The sound of the unlisted telephone ringing shattered the silence.

  Only three people had the number of that unlisted telephone—Perry Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake so Mason scooped up the instrument and said sharply, “Yes, Paul.”

  Drake said, “My man just telephoned. She’s back at the Serene Slumber Motel. He didn’t have a chance to telephone when she came out of the Northern Lights. She just jumped in her car and started moving and he had to follow. He”s at a phone now, waiting instructions.””

  “Tell him to wait until we get there,” Mason said. “Unless, of course, she goes out. If she does, he’s to follow her and report at the earliest opportunity. We can’t afford to lose her now.”

  “Your car or mine?” Drake asked.

  “Both,” Mason said. “We may want to separate later. You take your car and lead the way. Della will go with me. We’ll pick you up at your office and start out at once.”

  Mason hung up the telephone, nodded at Della Street, who already had her hand on the light switch.

  They hurried down the corridor, stopped at the illuminated oblong of Paul Drake’s door. Mason was reaching for the doorknob just as the door was opened from the inside and Drake emerged.

  “All ready?” Drake asked.

  “All ready,” Mason said. “Let’s go.”

  They rode down in the elevator, crossed to the parking lot, got in their respective cars, and Drake led the way out to the freeway, then along to the turnoff at El Mirar.

  The lawyer knew that Drake had the telephone in his automobile and saw the detective using it once in a while, apparently getting directions as to the best way to get to the Serene Slumber Motel.

  Drake drove unerringly, making good time, then blinked his brake lights a couple of times to call Mason’s attention to the illuminated sign ahead which read, “Serene Slumber Motel” and, down near the street, a red illuminated sign reading, Sorry. No Vacancies.

  Drake pulled his car into the parking lot and usurped a vacant place. It took Mason a few seconds to find a place where he could leave his car. Since the marked parking stalls were all filled, it was necessary for the lawyer to leave his car down at the curb at the far end of the lot.

  Mason and Della walked to join Paul Drake, who, by that time, was standing close to the shadowy figure of a tall, young man.

  “I think you know Jim Inskip,” Drake said, by way of introduction and then added, “This is Della Street, Mr. Mason’s secretary.”

  Inskip bowed. “I’ve met you before, Mr. Mason, and I’m very glad to meet you, Miss Street. Our party’s in Unit 12.”

  “Any sign of leaving or turning in for the night?”

  “Neither. Her car’s here. You can see the lights on in the unit—that’s the one with the light right over there.”

  The detective pointed.

  “What do we do, Perry?” Drake asked.

  Mason said, “Inskip stays here and keeps the place covered. He is to stay with Daphne Shelby no matter what happens. If we come out and drive away, Inskip is not to come anywhere near us but is to sit in his car and wait, because Daphne might be smart enough to turn out the light and look out of the back window. We’ll arrange our communication system by phone later on.”

  “You want me to come with you?” Drake asked.

  “I think I do,” Mason said, “but I may have to ask you to leave. Anything that a client says to a lawyer is a privileged, confidential communication anything that a lawyer says to a client, is a privileged, confidential communication.”

  “That privilege also applies to a lawyer’s secretary, but if the lawyer takes along someone else as an audience, that person can be called to the stand to relate any conversation which took place. I may want to have certain parts of the interview confidential. A great deal will depend on just what she’s trying to do and just what she hopes to accomplish.”

  The three of them separated from Inskip, moved around to the walk which went around the front of the units, and Mason tapped gently at the door of number 12.

  There was no answer from within, although a faint illumination shone through the curtains.

  Mason tapped again.

  Again, there was no answer.

  The third time, the lawyer’s knock was loud and peremptory.

  After a moment, the knob turned, the door opened a crack and Daphne Shelby said, “Who … who is it? … What do you want?””

  Mason said, “Good evening, Daphne.”

  Daphne, light-dazzled eyes failing to penetrate the semi-darkness, flung herself against the door, trying to close it, but Drake and Mason pushed their weight against the door and Daphne slid back along the carpet.

  Mason held the door open while Della Street entered.

  Daphne, apparently recognizing him for the first time, was wide-eyed with surprise.

  “You!” she exclaimed. “How in the world did you get here?”

  Mason said, “Daphne, I want to ask you some questions. I want you to be very careful how you answer them. Anything that you say to me is a privileged communication as long as only you. Della and I are in the room. But with Paul Drake, a detective, present, the communication is no longer privileged. Drake can be called as a witness. Now, if there are any questions I ask which are going to embarrass you, or anything you want to tell me which you don’t want known, just speak up and Paul Drake will either step outside or step into the bathroom. Is that clear?”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “All right,” Mason said, “just what do you think you’re accomplishing?”

  “I’m trying to save Uncle Horace’s sanity,” she said. “He would have gone stark, staring, raving mad if I hadn’t got him out of that place. Or did you know that I had got him out of the place?”