Mason settled himself in the conventional overstuffed chair with its cloth-covered cushions, was reaching for a cigarette when the telephone rang.

  Della Street answered it, said, “Yes … hello … oh, hello, Paul … yes, he’s here.”

  She handed Mason the phone and said, “Drake wants to talk with you.”

  Mason, holding the telephone and the receiver with one hand, groped for a match with the other, lit his cigarette and said in the general direction of the mouthpiece, “Yes, hello, Paul.”

  Drake said, “Perry, get out from under on Veronica. The police are on their way out to shake Della down. They have a hunch …”

  “Your tip’s too late, Paul. They’ve been here,” Mason said.

  “Find anything?”

  “Yes, Veronica.”

  “Ouch! She’ll talk.”

  “She talks all right. Holcomb and Tragg gathered her in …”

  “They’re all steamed up over something, Perry. They may be on a hot trail and Holcomb wouldn’t be above framing you. Keep your nose clean.”

  “I will,” Mason told him, and hung up.

  Della Street took the telephone from his hand, put it back on the sideboard.

  Mason said, “Paul Drake had an idea, Della. He said Holcomb might try to frame me. Whether someone opened your door with a pass key, or whether you left the place unlocked, the answer could be the same. Let’s look around.”

  “You surely don’t think they …”

  “Could have planted a dictograph,” Mason finished.

  “Let’s look.”

  He started peering behind pictures, looking over the walls, moving cushions. Della joined him in the search.

  “Can’t find a thing,” Mason said at length. “I still can’t figure it.” He turned over the cushion of the big overstuffed chair.

  “Oh, oh!” he exclaimed.

  She rushed toward him. “What is it?”

  In the space beneath the cushion, six empty .38 calibre cartridges were clustered in a little nest.

  “What are those?” Della Street asked.

  “Those,” Mason said, “represent planted evidence, Della.”

  “Did Sergeant Holcomb plant them there?”

  “Unless Veronica sat in this chair and ditched them – or Lorraine Ferrell. You say she called on you?”

  “Yes, but just for a few moments.”

  “Was she near this chair?”

  “Yes. She sat there for a few seconds, not long.”

  “And Veronica sat here?”

  “Yes.”

  Mason frowned thoughtfully.

  “What do we do?” Della asked.

  “If it’s a trap we should ring up police headquarters and report finding those cartridges. That will put Sergeant Holcomb in his place. If it isn’t a trap, and someone has left the evidence here, we’ll have to try to get rid of it without being caught.”

  “And if we get caught disposing of the evidence?”

  “Then we’re hooked.”

  “How do you know whether it’s a trap or not?”

  “That’s the rub. I sure wish I knew whether you had locked that door before we went down to Apartment 13-B.”

  “I do, too.”

  “You could simply have neglected to lock it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I rather think you did neglect to lock it,” Mason said. “I am quite certain we simply pulled the door closed. We were talking at the time, and I don’t remember you snapping the release button on that lock.”

  “What’ll happen if you ring the police and tell them you found these empty shells here in the apartment?” Della Street asked.

  Mason said, “It will crucify our client, Della. If I had been trying to conceal evidence, I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to have put it in your apartment. But the newspaper readers won’t figure it that way. Headlines will go screaming across the front pages, Addison’s lawyer surrenders evidence! Police find empty cartridges in apartment of Mason’s secretary!”

  Della Street made a little shuddering motion, said, “Gosh, Chief, I can just see those headlines, now that you mention them.”

  Mason said, “And if it is a police trap and I fly to take the evidence out of this apartment and police catch me … Got any good powerful elastic up here, Della?”

  “Yes, some thick bands that we have for holding transcripts together. I brought some of them from the office.”

  “Let’s have a couple.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “If it should be a trap,” Mason said, “I’m going to try to get us out of it. Also bring some string, Della, if you will, please.”

  Mason moved a dining-room chair up to one of the windows. He opened the window, fastened the strips of elastic to two vertical bars in the back of the chair, said, “I used to be considered a pretty good shot with one of these, Della.”

  He cradled one of the empty cartridges in the improvised slingshot after first wiping all possible fingerprints from it. He pulled back the elastic, aimed at the far corner of a vacant lot, and let go.

  The empty cartridge case whirred and glittered through the air, but carried it neatly into the adjoining lot.

  Mason subjected the remaining five cartridges to the same treatment, then dismantled his slingshot, and closed the window.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mason, pacing the floor of his office, said to Paul Drake, “Hang it, Paul, that woman must be somewhere. And for my money, she holds an important missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. Incidentally, just to show you the pattern, the cheque she gave me on the Indianapolis bank was a phoney. I telephoned the bank to get her address. She has no account there. They’ve never heard of a Laura Mae Dale.”

  “I can’t find her,” Drake said.

  Mason resumed pacing the floor.

  “What happened with Veronica?” Drab asked.

  “She was just getting interesting when the party was broken up.”

  The telephone rang. Mason scooped it up, said, “Hello,” and heard Della Street’s voice saying, “I’ve been watching out the window, Chief. They all went away some place. Veronica had her bag with her, and she went away in a police car.”

  “And no one showed up to search your place?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, Della, keep me posted. I’ll be here at the office for a while.”

  Mason hung up the telephone, said, “They’ve all left the apartment house out there. Veronica’s with them. That’s the last we’ll see of that babe until they put her on the witness stand.”

  “What are you going to do with Addison?” Drake asked. “Is he going to tell his story?”

  “Not until he gets on the witness stand.”

  “That makes it tough.”

  Mason nodded.

  “You going to try to stall things along?”

  “I’m afraid to, Paul. I can’t hold Addison in line much longer. He’s going to crack, one way or another. He’ll either have a nervous breakdown or he’ll throw caution to the winds and start talking.”

  “What’ll happen when he starts talking?”

  “He’s in no position to talk, Paul.”

  “He didn’t do it, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t he tell the truth?”

  “Not very well.”

  The telephone rang. Mason picked it up, said, “Hello … yes, right here.”

  He turned, said, “It’s for you, Paul.”

  Drake took the telephone, said, “Hello,” listened for a while, then said, “How’s that? … Oh yes … wait a minute, I’ll get it … what’s that? … well, I’ll be damned! … put him on and let me talk with him … hello, Frank … how’s that? … what’s the rest of it? … Okay. Stick around.”

  Drake hung up the phone and said to Mason, “That’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “The police have another witness, a chap who lives about half a mile away from that farmhouse. He can’t see the place from where he lives, but he knew generally it had been sold. And Tuesday night he heard six shots coming from the vicinity of that farmhouse. Of course, Perry, it’s the same old story. At the time he heard the explosions, he thought it was a truck backfiring as it slowed up along the highway, but his wife insisted someone was shooting so he made a note of the time.”

  “What time?”

  “Exactly ten minutes to nine.”

  “Anything about the sequence of the explosions?”

  “Yes, there was one shot, then another one almost immediately, then an interval of two or three seconds, and then four more.”

  Mason lit a cigarette, frowningly contemplated the flame of the match before he shook it out.

  “One more thing,” Drake said. “There’s a young woman in the department store, a sweet-looking kid, I understand, full of class and curves. Edgar Ferrell asked her to drive out to that farmhouse on Friday night. He said that if she’d come out and have a talk with him it would mean a lot to her. He promised to put her in charge of the personnel department.”

  “Friday night?” Mason exclaimed.

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s her name, Paul?”

  “Merna Raleigh.”

  Mason said, “I want to talk with her.”

  Drake shook his head and said, “No chance, Perry. She talked to my man and then she talked to the police. The police sewed her up like a barley sack. You couldn’t get to talk with her on a bet, but my operative got her story before she told it to the police. He’s writing out a report in the office. Do you want to see him?”

  “You’re darned right,” Mason said.

  Drake said, “I’ll go get him. He’s in my office.”

  He left Mason’s office, walked down the corridor and returned in a few moments with a personable young man, clean-cut, efficient and one who would quite definitely appeal to women.

  “Frank Summerville,” Drake said. “He’s my sheik. I turn him loose on cases where there are impressionable young women to interview. I had him circulating around the department store, pretending to be a customer. Just gossiping.”

  Drake nodded to Summerville and said, “Tell him your story, Frank.”

  Summerville made a characteristic dramatic gesture, running long, tapering fingers through dark, wavy hair which rippled in natural glossy waves from his forehead.

  “Mr Drake instructed me to keep moving around the department store, buying little knickknacks, asking questions, and trying to get the girls to gossip. Naturally I’d move around and pick the counters where there wasn’t very much doing. I avoided the busy places.”

  Mason nodded.

  “I’d ask discreet questions about whether Ferrell’s death as reported in the papers would result in any changes, and the girl at the toilet article counter said I’d better ask that question of Merna Raleigh at the fountain pen counter – and then she gave a catty little smirk.

  “So I went across the store to the fountain pen display, spotted Merna Raleigh as a cute redhead and really tried to build myself up.”

  “What happened?”

  “I started looked at fountain pens, and I was pretty hard to please. I kept trying them out and while I was trying them out I started talking about what was happening there at the store, asking her if it was going to make any change and so forth. I hate to say so, but she had me spotted. She’d seen me at other counters, and she opened up and asked me if I was a detective.

  “Ordinarily I’d have laughed at her and denied it, but something in the way she said it made me think I could strike pay dirt by telling her I was, and had the deadwood on me anyway, so I told her I was, and then she confessed that she’d been thinking this thing over and didn’t know whether she should go to the police with it or not, but since I was a detective, she was going to tell me.”

  “And what was it?”

  “She said Ferrell came to her Monday morning and seemed to be all perked up. He had always stopped by her counter and passed the time of day, and lately, as I found out afterwards, he’d been getting a little more intimate, coming around the counter and letting his hand rest on her shoulder, then slide down her back and giving her a pat on the hips.”

  “Go on,” Mason said. “What happened?”

  “He talked with her a while and asked her how she’d like to better her position, and naturally she would. She figured him as trying to be a wolf but wasn’t dead sure. She was wondering just how far she’d have to go. And, as she told me very frankly, wondering herself just how far she would go.”

  “Did she like him?”

  “Apparently he didn’t mean too much one way or another. He was one of the bosses. She’s been working for a while and knows her way around. Her mother was an old employee in the store, one of the holders of bonus stock; she died a couple of years ago and the redhead’s been on her own. Think she does nicely. She was ready to string Ferrell along, I think, if he could deliver the goods.”

  “And just what did he promise?”

  “Told her he was going to put her in charge of the personnel department at a big raise in salary and told her he wanted her to be out at his country place on Friday night, but she wasn’t to breathe a word of it to anyone. She wanted to know where his country place was, and he drew her a map.”

  “Do you have that map?”

  “No. I did have it. Merna gave it to me, but before I left I had to tell her I wasn’t a police detective; that I was a private operative, and she’s a smart little devil. She made me give the map back. She was going to get in touch with the police, and she didn’t want to have to tell them she’d told her story to a private detective first. Under the circumstances, I figured it was better to let it go that way. But I got a darned good squint at the map. I think she’s telling the truth.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “A lot of things. They have some paper there on which customers can try out pens, and this map was drawn on a sheet of that paper. I looked at the watermark to make certain, and the printing on it definitely was not feminine printing; it was the type of printing Ferrell would have done. He’d been an accountant, and the figures were all as neat as could be.”

  “What figures?”

  “Distances. He gave her the speedometer distance from the department store; the number of the roads; then showed her where to turn off; even marked a place showing the plank bridge across the dry stream bed.”

  “And told her to be there Friday night?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What time?”

  “He said between nine and ten.”

  “Didn’t she think that was rather late?”

  Summerville grinned and said, “Hell, you’re not fooling that baby any. She’s a redheaded trick who knows her way around. She figured she wasn’t going to get to be manager of the personnel department without playing ball, at least a little bit.

  “Ferrell was about thirty-one; she’s about twenty-two. She could probably have gone for him in a big way if she thought there’d be anything in it for her. I don’t think she was stuck on him at all, but he was falling for her and naturally she liked it. The other girls had noticed that Ferrell had always stopped at her counter and – well, you know, she knew he was one of the bosses, and naturally she was playing up to him.”

  “Darned interesting,” Mason said, “but I can’t figure …”

  “Well, here’s something that may help. The girl who’s in charge of the personnel department now is Myrtle C Northrup and she’s always been a strong booster for John Addison. She worships the ground Addison walks on and thinks he’s the smartest department store executive in the world. She’s about forty-five; Addison’s forty-eight. Apparently she’s not too long on looks but she’s strong on efficiency. Ferrell doesn’t like her. She’s been there since way back before Ferrell’s time, when his dad was Addison’s partner. Incidentally, she’s the treasurer of the corporation.”

  Mason jerked bolt upright. “The hell she is!”

  “That’s right, attends all the meetings. She’s the biggest of the small stockholders. I guess she was pretty strong for Ferrell’s dad, but she hates Junior’s guts.”

  Mason frowned. “And Ferrell was going to tie the can to her?”

  “Well, he’d promised this redheaded chick her job. But there again the babe was sceptical because she knew Ferrell couldn’t fire this Northrup gal. Addison supervises most of the personnel end of the business. Ferrell makes graphs and analysis charts. Gossip is that they’re a joke. He’s been in there five years and has put in most of that time making charts and business forecasts and the store gossip is that no forecast has ever been right yet.”

  “You’ve been talking with a good many of the employees?”

  “Uh huh. I think I’ve overdone it. This redhead spotted me and others may have. I’ve got lots of gossip and I think I’m all finished.”

  “What happened to the redhead?”

  “She phoned the police. They eased her out of there. I don’t think you’ll get to talk with her.”

  Mason said irritably, “They don’t give me any breaks. They grab the people who may know anything about it and put them out of circulation.”

  “Darned if they don’t,” Drake said.

  “Anything else you want from me?” Summerville asked.

  “I guess not,” Mason said.

  “You make out a report,” Drake told him. “Make out a very complete report. Put everything in it you can think of; every little detail, no matter how small. You may think of some little thing that’ll be significant.”

  When Summerville had left the office, Mason said, “It’s late, but I’m going to take a chance.” He picked up the phone, said, “Gertie, I want to talk with Miss Myrtle C Northrup at Addison’s department store. If she isn’t there, find out where I can reach her.”

  Mason dropped the receiver into place.

  Drake said to Mason, “You going to move right ahead with the request for a prompt hearing?”

  Mason nodded. “Nothing else to do.”

  “Your man will have to tell a damn plausible story at that time; otherwise public sentiment will crystallize against him. You can’t stall the thing along much longer.”