“If I am denied an opportunity to confer with my client before this conference goes on,” Mason said, “I will simply advise him not to answer any questions and you can keep right on waiting.”

  “In that event, we will not try to protect him as far as publicity is concerned,” Hamilton Burger warned. “Mr. Garvin is a responsible businessman. I have explained to him that we don’t want to work any injustice, that we don’t want to drag his name into this case so that there will be any unfavorable publicity.”

  Mason said, “Let the record show that I have demanded an opportunity to confer with my client before the interrogation proceeds further, that I have been answered with a threat by the district attorney to call in reporters and crucify my client with publicity.”

  Hamilton Burger got to his feet, his face dark with anger.

  Tragg said, “Just a minute.” He arose, walked over and whispered in the district attorney’s ear.

  “We’ll give you ten minutes,” Hamilton Burger said after a moment. “There’s an office in there on the left.”

  Mason nodded to Garvin. “This way, Garvin.”

  Garvin was out of his chair with alacrity. Mason opened the door and disclosed a secretarial office equipped with a typewriter desk, a machine, a cabinet of stationery, and several chairs.

  Mason looked the place over quickly, then moved over to another door and opened it, disclosing a small coat and hat closet.

  “In here,” he said to Garvin.

  Garvin entered the closet. Mason switched on a light. They stood close together within the narrow confines.

  Mason said, “That room is probably bugged. I didn’t like the expression on Burger’s face. He gave in too easily. Keep your voice low. Now tell me what the devil this is all about and tell me fast.”

  Garvin said, “I should have told you before, I guess. I—Hang it, Mason! I was disappointed in my son.”

  “Lots of parents are disappointed in their children.”

  “Well, it’s all right now. I thought for a while he was marrying the wrong girl, but now I think he married the right girl.”

  “By that, do you mean you think Stephanie Falkner is mixed up in this murder?”

  “By that,” Garvin said, “I mean that I’m in love with Stephanie Falkner. I guess I always have been in love with her ever since I met her. I wanted Junior to marry her. That is, I thought I did. But when he married someone else, I … I knew I should have been disappointed, but I wasn’t. I was suddenly elated.”

  “Have you told her about it?” Mason asked.

  “I’m afraid I hinted at it. That’s all there’ll ever be to it. I’m old enough to be her father.”

  “Barely,” Mason said. “Some women prefer older men.”

  Garvin brushed the subject aside impatiently. “It’s not in the cards, Mason, but I’m telling you that one fact so you can understand the situation.”

  Mason said, “We only have a minute. Give me facts, and give them to me just as fast as you can dish them out. You took that murder gun down to your son’s office and planted it in his desk. I wanted to divert attention from the gun you had left with Stephanie, and thought I could do something smart. I loused things up, and—”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” Garvin said. “You’re all wet. I didn’t put any gun in my son’s desk.”

  Mason said impatiently, “You went to Casselman’s apartment before you went to your office. Did you kill him or not?”

  Garvin said, “Don’t be silly. Stephanie saw him after I did.”

  “Just what did you do?”

  Garvin said, “I stopped in to see Casselman on the way to my office. I had just driven in from Las Vegas. It was around eight-fifteen. I had a key that worked the lock on the outer door of the apartment. I didn’t want to tip him off by ringing his bell.

  “You know how these street doors on apartment houses are, Perry. Almost any sort of key will work them. Well, I went up and knocked on Casselman’s door. He opened it, but didn’t invite me in. He seemed strangely disturbed when I told him who I was.

  “He told me he had someone with him and was all tied up. He said I should return at eleven o’clock and he’d see me then. Then he all but slammed the door in my face. I took the stairs to the street.

  “I don’t know how you found out about this, Mason. I haven’t told a soul.”

  “Never mind how I found out,” Mason said. “You went to your office from Casselman’s apartment?”

  “Not directly. I stopped to get gas and called Las Vegas. Then I went to my office. I have a little emergency apartment fixed up in connection with my office. I had previously telephoned on ahead and asked Eva Elliott to wait for me. I wanted some information on some business matters, and wanted her to give it to me personally.”

  “All right,” Mason said. “You went to your office. What happened?”

  “I changed my clothes and took a shower. I told Miss Elliott to get the information for me while I was taking the shower and put it on my desk. After my shower, I asked Eva Elliott what the devil she meant by not telling you where I was. One thing led to another and I fired her. You know what happened after that.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Mason said.

  “Well, I went to see you, and then we went down to see Stephanie Falkner, and …”

  “And you were at Stephanie’s when we left,” Mason said.

  “I stayed there for a short time. I tried to let Stephanie know how much I had wished to have her in my family.”

  “What about the gun?” Mason asked.

  “I always carry a gun. I have a shoulder holster and my suits are tailored so I can carry the gun under my left arm without it showing. I took my gun out of the holster and gave it to her.”

  “Was that gun fully loaded when you gave it to her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Had it been fired?”

  “That gun hadn’t been fired for months, Mason. I’m telling you this, but I’m not going to tell anyone else. Before I left Las Vegas I removed the shells in the gun and put in fresh shells. I intended to get rough with Casselman and I wanted to be armed when I called for a showdown. I felt I might need my gun.”

  “All right,” Mason said. “Go ahead. What happened?”

  “I keep another gun in my safe in the office. I was going to see Casselman at eleven, but I didn’t tell anyone about that appointment. I wanted to be armed when I saw him, so after I left Stephanie’s apartment I returned to my office, got the other gun out of my safe, put that gun in my shoulder holster, and then went to call on Casselman.”

  “That was at eleven o’clock?”

  “Perhaps five or ten minutes either way.”

  “All right, what happened?”

  “I used my key on the front door. I went up to Casselman’s apartment. I knocked and got no answer. I tried the apartment door. It was unlocked. It had a key lock, not a night latch. I could walk right in, and I did.

  “Casselman was in there, sprawled in a pool of blood. He was dead as a mackerel. I looked around. Some woman had stepped in the blood and there was the imprint of her foot and heel plate as plain as could be.

  “I felt certain it was the print of Stephanie’s shoe. I had to know for sure. So I left Casselman’s apartment leaving the door unlocked.

  “I went to Stephanie’s apartment. She was in bed. She got up and let me in. I didn’t tell her where I had been or what I had found. I told her I was terribly nervous and simply had to see her and talk with her for a while.”

  “All right. What happened?”

  “I tried to tell her something about how I felt toward her without going too far. I told her to call on me if she ever needed a friend.

  “I could see the gun I had given her was under the pillow. I made an excuse to handle it very briefly. When she had her back turned, I surreptitiously opened the cylinder and sure enough one shell had been fired since I had given her the gun.

  “She was wearing a bathrobe, pajamas and slippers. I saw a pair of shoes. I managed to get a good look at them. One of them was still damp. Evidently it had recently been washed. There was a metal heel plate. It matched the imprint of the bloody shoe print I’d seen in Casselman’s apartment.”

  “Did you ask her about it?” Mason asked.

  “No. I stayed until around midnight. I told her I wanted her to know I’d be her friend if anything ever happened and she needed a friend, and then I left. I knew I had work to do.”

  Mason regarded him with level-lidded appraisal. “You went back to Casselman’s apartment?”

  “Yes. I went back and took time enough to eliminate all evidence that could point to Stephanie.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I am kicking myself for overlooking the one real golden opportunity I had. I had that other gun of mine in my shoulder holster while I was in Stephanie’s apartment that second time. I should have simply made a substitution, then and there. But I was too shocked to think clearly.”

  Mason, his face only a matter of inches from the other man’s, regarded him with steady concentration. “You’re not lying to me, Homer? You didn’t switch guns?”

  “Definitely not. I tell you, Mason, that gun had been fired between the time I left it with her and the time I returned.”

  “So what did you do in Casselman’s apartment?” Mason asked.

  “I did the only thing that could be done. The blood that outlined the print of Stephanie’s shoe had dried. At first I thought of trying to scrub it up, but I was afraid there would still be traces they could find and I was afraid of being caught in there with the murdered man. I knew I had to work fast. I put my own foot in the puddle of blood and pressed down enough to get blood all over the sole of my shoe and particularly on my heel. The blood was thick and sticky by that time. I pressed my own bloodstained shoe directly over the print that had been made.

  “I decided to take the heat off Stephanie in every way I could. I left several clues that would point to me. I wanted to be a red herring. Then I left the state, intending to keep out of the way of the police here so they couldn’t question me. However, after this other matter came up, Junior was destroying your work. I felt I had to see him personally and tell him to sit tight.

  “I thought I had eluded the detectives who were shadowing me in Las Vegas. Evidently, I played right into their hands. They waited until my chartered plane landed, and then they picked me up and brought me here for questioning. I refused to make any statement until you were present, and that’s the story to date.”

  “All right,” Mason said, “let’s go back and face the situation. You follow my lead. I’ll do most of the talking. Don’t tell them anything unless I give you an okay. You’re going to have to take the newspaper publicity. That’s the weapon they’re holding over you to make you talk. Under the circumstances, you can’t avoid it. Come on. Let’s go.”

  Mason opened the closet door, turned out the light, led the way across the secretarial office and back to Hamilton Burger’s office.

  “Well?” Hamilton Burger asked.

  “What do you want to know?” Mason asked.

  Burger said, “Mason, I’m calling your attention to a photograph. You’ve seen a reproduction of this photograph in the press. I want you to study a glossy print of the original photograph. You can see some things on there you can’t see in the newspaper reproduction.”

  Burger handed Mason the glossy eight-by-ten print showing the pool of blood on the floor and, quite plainly, the print of a foot.

  “Go ahead,” Mason said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Now this information,” Burger said, “we would like to have come from your client rather than from you, Mr. Mason. We want to know if that is the print of your shoe, Garvin.”

  Garvin looked at Mason. Mason smiled and shook his head.

  “Now wait a minute,” Hamilton Burger said, his face coloring. “We’re in this thing in good faith. Garvin at least intimated that he would tell us his story straight from the shoulder if we gave him an opportunity to get in touch with his attorney. Either you folks talk or you don’t talk!”

  “And suppose we don’t talk?” Mason asked.

  “Then you’d both be sorry.”

  Burger said, “I’m going to ask you, Garvin, if you went to a shoe shop at 918 Mowbray Street and had a pair of rubber heels put on a pair of new shoes about three weeks ago?”

  “Answer that,” Mason said.

  “I did,” Garvin admitted.

  “I’m going to show you a pair of shoes and ask you if those are the shoes on which you had those rubber heels installed.”

  Burger opened a drawer in his desk, took out a pair of shoes, and handed them to Garvin.

  “Where did you get those?” Garvin asked with some surprise.

  “Never mind,” Burger said. “Are those yours?”

  Garvin looked them over. There were several peculiar bluish stains on the sole of one of the shoes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “For your information,” Burger went on, “those shoes have been given a benzidine test for blood. Those purplish stains you see are where there was a reaction indicating the presence of blood on that left shoe. Now in view of that, do you have any statement you want to make as to how that blood got on that shoe?”

  “I don’t think I care to make any statement on that at this time,” Garvin said.

  “All right,” Hamilton Burger said with ponderous patience, “I’m now going to show you a color photograph,” and handed it to Mason.

  “Look that over carefully, Mason,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

  Mason said, “I see a footprint.”

  “Look it over carefully.”

  Mason studied the photograph.

  Hamilton Burger said, “If you study that photograph carefully, you will see something quite plainly which you could only barely detect on the black and white photograph, but which nevertheless is shown here. It’s another footprint, the print of a woman’s shoe directly under the print of Homer Garvin’s shoe. You can see the imprint of the heel plate on the very tip of the heel.

  “Now then, Garvin, I’m asking you if you didn’t go out to George Casselman’s apartment after he had been killed, knowing he had been killed, for the purpose of leaving evidence there that would confuse the issues. I am asking if you didn’t deliberately step in the puddle of blood and then place your own footprint over this woman’s footprint with the deliberate intention of obliterating and concealing that footprint.”

  “Just a moment,” Mason said. “As I understand it, that would be a crime.”

  “Permit me to congratulate you upon your knowledge of the law,” Burger said sarcastically.

  “Under those circumstances, I advise my client to refuse to answer the question,” Mason said.

  Burger took a deep breath. “Garvin, I am going to show you a fingerprint which was recovered from the knob of the back door. I may further state that someone had evidently wiped the knob of that back door clean of fingerprints. There was only one fingerprint on it, and that was a very plain, legible fingerprint of the ball of a thumb which had obviously been deliberately placed in the exact center of the knob after the surface had been wiped clean of any other fingerprints.

  “That thumbprint is yours, Garvin. There can be no mistake about it. I am going to ask you the circumstances under which you made that print on the doorknob.”

  “Just a minute,” Mason said, “if your contention is correct, and if Garvin was the one who wiped off the doorknob and then left his fingerprint on it, he would be guilty of a crime?”

  “He would be guilty of a crime,” Hamilton Burger said.

  “Then I advise him not to answer,” Mason said.

  Hamilton Burger turned to Mason. “You yourself made an elaborate switch so you could juggle the murder weapon around in this case, Mason. I’m going to give you one chance to come clean. I want you to tell how that murder weapon came into your possession.”

  “And if I tell you the truth, you won’t prosecute me?”

  Hamilton Burger thought that over, looked at Mason with suppressed hatred in his eyes. “I’m trying to be fair about this thing, Mason. I’m not going to come out and make a lot of specific promises, but what you say now will greatly affect the attitude of the district attorney’s office.”

  Mason said, “I went out to Homer Garvin, Jr.’s place. I asked him if he had a gun. He gave me a gun. I discharged the gun so that the bullet ploughed a furrow in Garvin’s desk. I took Garvin, Jr. to Stephanie Falkner’s apartment. He gave her the gun. Now I’ve told you the truth. What are you going to do?”

  “I know that you switched guns out there, and that because of that switch young Garvin acted as your cat’s-paw and took the murder weapon up to Stephanie Falkner.”

  Mason turned to his client. “There you are, Homer,” he said. “That’s a pretty good indication of what his promises are worth. If you tell him something that doesn’t conform to his cockeyed theory of the case, he says it can’t be the truth. He’ll only believe the things he wants to hear.”

  Burger pushed back his chair, started to get to his feet, thought better of it, settled back again in the chair.

  Tragg said, “May I ask a question, Mr. District Attorney?”

  “Sure, go ahead. Ask all you want,” Burger said.

  Tragg said, “Mason, do I have your personal assurance, man to man, that you did not substitute any gun out there at young Garvin’s place?”

  “You have that assurance,” Mason told him.

  Tragg turned back to Hamilton Burger. “I tell you, Burger, there’s something about this whole thing that is a lot deeper than we think at the present time. I personally can’t conceive of any reason why Mason would have substituted weapons. I personally want to carry on this investigation on the theory that a weapon wasn’t substituted, and that the gun Garvin, Jr. took out of his desk was the murder weapon.”

  “It couldn’t have been,” Hamilton Burger said flatly.

  Lieutenant Tragg snapped, “Don’t be silly!” then corrected himself quickly. “There are certain things about this case which don’t fit together. Mason would have had no possible incentive for—”