Minerva Hamlin took the picture, studied it carefully, then frowned. “Of course,” she said, “I …”

  “Now, remember,” Sergeant Jaffrey interposed, “that lots of times a photograph doesn’t look too much like person until you study it carefully. Take a good long look at it. This is important. This is important to everybody. Don’t say yes, right off the bat, and don’t say no. We don’t want you to say it’s the woman unless it was, but we sure don’t want you to boot the identification and do something you’ll be sorry for.”

  “I think—I—I think it is.”

  “Take a good long look at it,” Sergeant Jaffrey said. “Study that picture carefully.”

  “I have done so. I think this is the woman.”

  “That isn’t the strongest way to make an identification,” Lieutenant Tragg said. “Can’t you do better than that?”

  “I’ve told you that I thought it was the woman.”

  “You don’t ordinarily make mistakes, do you? You look to me like a rather efficient young woman.”

  “I try not to make mistakes.”

  “And you’re not vague in your thinking, are you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “All right,” Sergeant Jaffrey said, “never mind the thinking then. Is this the woman or isn’t it?”

  “I think—” She paused as she saw the grin on Sergeant Jaffrey’s face.

  “Go ahead,” Lieutenant Tragg said.

  “It’s the woman,” she said.

  “Now, then,” Mason said, “may I see that photograph? You know I had a better opportunity to look at the woman who was in room 721 than anyone else. Miss Hamlin, of necessity, had only a quick glimpse of her when she …”

  “Who was the woman who was in 721 with you?” Lieutenant Tragg asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mason said.

  Sergeant Jaffrey said to Minerva Hamlin, “Write your name on the back of that photograph.”

  “And the date,” Lieutenant Tragg said.

  Minerva Hamlin did so, then Tragg passed the photograph over to Frank Hoxie. “Write your name on it.”

  Hoxie complied.

  “And the date,” Sergeant Jaffrey said.

  Mason said, “If you’ll let me look at it, Lieutenant, I’ll …”

  Sergeant Jaffrey stood up. “Look, Mason,” he said, “you have a certain immunity as a lawyer. The law gives you a loophole. You can squirm out of giving us information. You can claim that things that were said to you were privileged communications from a client. We can’t put pressure on you. Now, I’m going to ask you straight from the shoulder whether the woman who was in that room with you was Dixie Dayton, and whether she didn’t tell you that Morris Alburg was going to kill George Fayette.”

  Mason said, “Permit me to point out two things, Sergeant. If the woman in that room was not Dixie Dayton, then anything she said wouldn’t have the slightest evidentiary value against anyone. If she was Dixie Dayton, but wasn’t acting in concert with Morris Alburg, nothing she said could be used against Morris Alburg. And if this person was Dixie Dayton and was my client, anything that she said to me concerning her case would be a confidential communication.”

  “That’s just what I thought,” Jaffrey said. “Let me see the picture, Lieutenant.”

  Lieutenant Tragg handed him the picture.

  Sergeant Jaffrey promptly thrust it into the inside pocket of his coat.

  “I think that’s all, Mason,” he said. “Drake, you’ve been yelling about having to go back to run your business. Go ahead. Mason, I guess we can dispense with any more assistance from you.”

  “And do I get to see the photograph?” Mason asked.

  Jaffrey merely grinned.

  “I’ll tell you this much, Mason,” Lieutenant Tragg said, “this is an authentic photograph of Dixie Dayton, the girl who left town at the same time as Thomas E. Sedgwick, on the night that Bob Claremont was murdered.”

  “Why give him information when he won’t give us any?” Jaffrey asked.

  “I want to be fair with him,” Lieutenant Tragg said.

  Jaffrey snorted. “Let him be fair with us first.”

  Tragg turned to the shorthand reporter. “You have my statement that this is an authenticated photograph of Dixie Dayton?”

  The shorthand reporter nodded.

  “I think that’s all,” Tragg said. “This time, Mason, you can leave the hotel.”

  “Can I take one more look in room 721?” Mason asked.

  Lieutenant Tragg merely smiled.

  Sergeant Jaffrey gave a verbal answer. “Hell, no,” he said.

  Tragg said, “Come to think of it, Sergeant, it might be better to hold Mason and Paul Drake here until we’ve located that—that thing we were looking for.”

  Jaffrey nodded emphatically.

  “You may go, Miss Hamlin,” Lieutenant Tragg said. “Drake, you and Mason can wait in the lobby.”

  Sergeant Jaffrey flung the door open. “This way out,” he said.

  Mason waited in the hallway for Minerva Hamlin.

  Abruptly Jaffrey stepped out and said to the uniformed officer who was guarding the corridor, “Here, take this girl down and put her in a taxicab. Send her back to her office. Don’t let anyone talk with her.”

  “Look here,” Drake said, “this is my employee. I have to give her some instructions about how to run the office until I can get back and …”

  “Give them to me,” Jaffrey said, “and I’ll pass them on to her.”

  Chapter 10

  Drake and Mason sat in the lobby, impatiently watching the hands of the clock. Daylight had started to filter through the big plate-glass windows of the lobby. A few early trucks rumbled past. A milk wagon went by.

  “What the devil are they looking for?” Drake asked Mason.

  Mason shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose they gave you the works, Paul.”

  “They gave me the works,” Drake said, and then added fervently, “and how!”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I followed your instructions. I didn’t hold out on them.”

  “It’s a cinch,” Mason said, “that that room was wired for sound. As nearly as I can figure it out, Morris Alburg expected to get some witness in there. He wanted me to interrogate that witness and he wanted to have a record of what was said. I’m willing to bet money that the adjoining room, or some room nearby, had a complete recording outfit.”

  “I gathered that was what you had in mind,” Drake said.

  “Their questions were too apropos to be just groping in the dark,” Mason told him. “Having a shorthand reporter there and asking us those specific questions, particularly bearing down on you the way they did, meant that they were loaded for bear and were trying to get your license. That’s why I told you to tell them the whole thing.

  “Well, they sure knew everything that went on in that room,” Drake sad. “I’m satisfied you’re right, Perry. I wasn’t too certain at first, but after they asked me questions about the messages written in lipstick I knew that you were on the right track.”

  “The question is,” Mason said, “how far back those records go, how much they know.”

  “I think there’s a gap of some sort,” Drake said. “They sure want to know what happened when you entered the room, just what was said. They kept trying to find out from me what I knew about that.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “All I knew, which wasn’t much.”

  Mason said, “Look, Paul, there aren’t too many authorized private detective agencies here in the city. Now, then, suppose you had a job and you wanted to have a tape or disc recording made, just whom would you get?”

  Drake said, “We all of us have sound equipment, Perry. We have to be a little careful about how we use it, but we have tape recorders, microphones, and the best of the agencies have all the latest gadgets.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “These machines that you can leave on a plant,” Drake said, “without necessarily having to monitor them. The feed is automatic. There’s a relay of acetate discs so that a fresh one comes on as soon as one has been filled up. There’s a clockwork mechanism by which the machine automatically shuts itself off it there’s silence in the room for a period of around ten seconds. Then as soon as any sound comes over the wires, the machine cuts in again…. Or, of course, you can set them for continuous recording. Often when we want to know what’s going on in a room over a twenty-four-hour period we put the machine on its automatic adjustment. In that way the disc revolves only when people are talking.”

  “They work pretty well?”

  “Pretty well,” Drake said. “Of course, those are the latest gadgets, and conversations of that sort aren’t much good as evidence because there’s no way of telling how much time elapses between conversations, and there’s no one to testify to the fact that conversation took place in the room where the microphone was placed. Theoretically it would be possible for someone to get into the room where the recording mechanism was housed and fake the thing.”

  “I know,” Mason said, “but it’s a good way to check on … Oh-oh, here’s Tragg. He looks tickled to death.”

  Lieutenant Tragg left the elevator, walked over toward Mason and Drake, said, “I’m sorry we had to inconvenience you fellows, but you know how it is. This is a murder case…. Everything’s okay. You can go now.”

  “Thanks,” Drake said and started for the door.

  Mason held back. “Your friend Sergeant Jaffrey seems to be of the old school.”

  “If you had to contend with the things he has to fight, you’d be hard-boiled, too,” Tragg said.

  “Got the case all solved, Lieutenant?”

  Tragg hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Mason—you’ll read it in the papers anyway, so you may as well know it.”

  “Shoot.”

  “That number that was penciled in lipstick on the back of the mirror was the license number of George Fayette’s automobile. It was registered under the name of Herbert Sidney Granton. That was his latest alias. And when we found that automobile, which we finally did, we found a nice bullet hole through the right front door. A bullet that had been fired from the inside. Seems safe to assume that was the car that was used in the attempted kidnaping and murder of Dixie Dayton.”

  “But Fayette wasn’t driving it,” Mason said.

  “Fayette wasn’t driving it,” Tragg said. “We’re having the car processed for fingerprints and before too very long we may know who was driving it.”

  Mason frowned thoughtfully.

  “And personally I wouldn’t blame Morris Alburg for beating George Fayette to the punch,” Tragg said. “Actually it would have been self-defense. Fayette was dynamite. But Alburg is a red-hot target not because of Fayette, but because he’s teamed up with Dixie Dayton, and until Dixie Dayton produces Tom Sedgwick we’re going to raise merry hell with your clients, Mason. I thought you might as well know it.”

  “You didn’t think that was any secret, did you?” Mason said, and headed toward the exit.

  Chapter 11

  Mason said to Drake, “Go on up to your office, Paul. Talk with that girl of yours and find out if she’s really positive about her identification of that photograph.”

  Drake paused with one foot on the running board of his car. “You think she’s made a wrong identification?”

  “I’m damn near certain of it.”

  “She’s pretty efficient, Perry.”

  “Look at it this way,” Mason said. “That room was wired. There was a bug in it some place that we didn’t find. That means it was done cleverly and was a professional job.”

  “Well?” Drake asked.

  “Now, then, Morris Alburg wanted me to meet him in that room…. Either Morris wired the room or he didn’t.”

  “Well, let’s suppose he didn’t,” Drake said.

  Mason shook his head. “Somehow that idea doesn’t appeal to me, Paul. The facts are against that supposition.”

  “Why?”

  “Morris wanted me to meet him in that room. He had something he wanted, some witness he wanted to interrogate, something that he wanted recorded. He wanted me to do the questioning. He was all hooked up for a big killing. Something happened to him.”

  “Well?”

  “Figure it out,” Mason told him. “Morris Alburg apparently is playing hand in glove with this Dixie Dayton. Now if that had been the real Dixie Dayton who was talking with me she would have been in touch with Morris Alburg and therefore would have known the room was wired.

  “In that event she’d probably have told me, because I’m supposed to be playing ball with them, but even if she hadn’t, she never would have made the statement that Alburg was going to kill George Fayette.”

  “That sounds logical,” Drake admitted.

  “On the other hand,” Mason said, “if something had happened to the real Dixie Dayton, if Morris Alburg was being detained somewhere against his will, and this woman was sent to stall me along, knowing that I had never met Dixie Dayton, and if she knew that George Fayette had been killed, or was about to be killed, and wanted to lay a perfect trap for my clients, she’d have said exactly what this woman said.”

  “Then you don’t think the woman was Dixie Dayton?”

  Mason shook his head.

  “Sounds reasonable,” Drake said. “I wish you could have got a look at that picture.”

  Mason said, “I can’t help but feel that we’re playing for big stakes, Paul. Fayette was just a tool. When Fayette bungled the job of getting Dixie Dayton rounded up he didn’t do himself any good, and then when he made the mistake of coming to my office and trying to get information under the guise of being an insurance agent, and when he realized that the woman who had been trying to follow him the night before was my secretary, he put himself on a spot.

  “In addition to that, the automobile that had been used in the kidnaping attempt was his own automobile, registered in his name. Someone had the license number. That made Fayette a cinch for police interrogation.”

  “You mean members of his own mob killed him?”

  Mason said, “I can’t picture Morris Alburg as getting in that hotel room and killing Fayette in cold blood.”

  “You never know what these chaps will do when they get crowded into a corner,” Drake pointed out.

  “I know,” Mason told him, “but let’s look at it this way, Paul. Suppose the thing was a beautiful trap. Suppose Alburg and Dixie Dayton were there in room 721 waiting for me, and suppose someone came in and got the drop on them and took them out of the hotel.”

  “Sounds rather melodramatic,” Drake said. “I told you before, it sounds like the movies.”

  “Well, there may have been more than one man,” Mason said. “There may have been a couple, and you don’t know that they walked across the lobby of the hotel.”

  “That’s true, of course.”

  “But,” Mason told him, “let’s look at it from the standpoint of a case in court. Suppose some phony is in that room with me and tells me that Morris Alburg, who is working with her in a common cause, is out killing George Fayette so that Fayette won’t kill him. She makes it sound rather reasonable. An attempted self-defense by first launching a counteroffensive.”

  “Well?” Drake asked.

  “And,” Mason said, “that conversation is recorded on acetate discs, and the police have those discs. Then your secretary and the hotel clerk identify the woman who was talking with me as Dixie Dayton. The corpse is found in her room. How much of a chance would that leave a defense attorney?”

  Drake gave a low whistle. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. You’d have about the same chance as the proverbial snowball.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Mason said. “Now, I don’t believe that woman was Dixie Dayton, and I sure don’t want to have your girl get off on the wrong track. Get up and talk with her, and then I’m coming up.”

  “You’re not driving up with me?”

  “You take your car and I’ll take mine. I’ve got places to go and things to do. I want to locate the person who put in that sound equipment. I want to find out how much stuff the police have, and how much they don’t have.”

  “The police will beat you to it,” Drake said. “If that room was wired they’ll find out who …”

  “They may and they may not,” Mason told him. “We’re working against time and so are the police. Get up to your office, Paul, and I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  Drake nodded, jumped in his car and stepped on the starter.

  Mason found his own car, drove down the street until he came to an all-night restaurant with a telephone booth, and stopped to call Morris Alburg’s restaurant.

  Della Street answered the phone.

  “You on the job, Della?”

  “Just got here,” she said. “I have the cashier—it was a job getting her up out of bed and down here and …”

  “You have the safe open?”

  “Yes. She has no recollection of any detective agency, and Alburg didn’t keep a check register. But we’ve found a mass of check stubs, and we’re going through them, comparing them with names of the private detectives in the classified directory. It’s a terrific job. Where can I reach you if we strike pay dirt?”

  “Sit right there until I get there,” Mason said, “unless, of course, you should get anything within the next few minutes. In that case call me at Paul Drake’s office. I’ll be there for a while, then I’ll join you within fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “All right. We’ll keep plugging, Chief, but it’s a terrific job. He paid for meats and groceries, paid help and personal bills, all from one checking account, and we have stacks of check stubs here.”

  “Stay with it,” Mason said. “I’ll be there to help as soon as I can tie up some loose ends. Be good.”

  “ ’Bye now,” she said, and hung up.

  Mason drove to his office building, swung his car into the all but vacant parking lot and rang the bell for the elevator.

  The night janitor said, “Good morning, Mr. Mason. You’re certainly an early bird this morning.”