“Yes, that’s right.”

  “Now, I’ve got some pictures here. We’ll connect them up later, but they’re pictures of the cabin. You take a look at them and tell me if that’s the cabin.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Those are pictures of the cabin.”

  “All right. You found the body there. When was it?”

  “It was Sunday, September eleventh.”

  “About what time?”

  “Around three or four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I was coming along the road, driving up to my place, and got to wondering whether Sabin had got in for the fishing. I hadn’t seen him, but he usually managed to get in when they opened up the fishing in Grizzly Creek, so I stopped the car to take a look at the house, and heard the parrot screaming something awful. So I says to myself, ‘Well, he’s there if his parrot is there,’ so I drove up to the house. The shutters were all down the way it is when the place is closed up, and the garage was closed and locked, and I thought, ‘Shucks, I’ve made a mistake, there ain’t anyone home.’ So I started to drive away, and then I heard this parrot again.”

  “What was the parrot saying?” the coroner asked.

  Waner grinned and said, “The parrot was cussing a blue streak; he wanted something to eat.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I got to wondering if Sabin had maybe left the parrot there without being there himself. I figured maybe he’d gone fishing, but if he had, I didn’t see why he’d pull all the shutters down; so I got out and looked around. Well, the garage was locked, but I could get the doors open a crack, just enough to see that Sabin’s car was in there, so then I went around to the door and knocked, and didn’t get any answer, and finally, thinking maybe something was wrong, pried open one of the shutters and looked inside. This parrot was screaming all the time, and, looking inside, I saw a man’s hand lying on the floor. So then I got the window up and got inside. I saw right away that the man had been dead for quite a while. There was some food for the parrot on the floor, and a pan that had held water, but the water was all gone. I went right over to the telephone and telephoned you. I didn’t touch anything.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “Then I got out into the fresh air, and left the place closed up until you got there,” the witness said.

  “I don’t think there’s any need to ask this man any more questions, is there?” the coroner asked.

  The district attorney said, “I’d like to ask one question, just for the sake of fixing the jurisdictional fact. The body was that of Fremont C. Sabin?”

  “Yes, it was pretty far gone, but it was Sabin, all right.”

  “How long have you known Fremont C. Sabin?”

  “Five years.”

  “I think that’s all,” the district attorney said.

  “Just one more question,” the coroner said. “Nothing was touched until I got there, was it, Waner?”

  “Absolutely nothing, except the telephone.”

  “And the sheriff came up there with me, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, we’ll hear from the sheriff,” the coroner said.

  Sheriff Barnes eased himself into the witness chair, crossed his legs, and settled back at his ease. “Now, Sheriff,” the coroner said, “suppose you tell us just what you found when we went up there to Sabin’s cabin.”

  “Well, the body was lying on the floor, on its left side. The left arm was stretched out, and the fingers clenched. The right arm was lying across the body. Things were pretty bad in there. We opened all the windows and got as much air in as we could … looking over the windows before we opened them, of course, to make certain they were locked on the inside, and there weren’t any evidences that they’d been tampered with.

  “There was a spring lock on the door, and that lock was closed, so whoever did the killing, walked out and pulled the door shut behind him. We got the parrot back in the cage, and closed the cage. It had been propped open with a notched pine stick. I took some chalk and traced the position of the body on the floor, and traced the position of the gun, and then the coroner went through the clothes, and then we had a photographer take a few pictures of the body, as it was lying on the floor.”

  “You’ve got prints of those pictures with you?” the coroner asked.

  “Yes, here they are,” the sheriff said, and produced some photographs. The coroner, taking possession of them, said, “All right, I’ll hand all these over to the jury a little later. Let’s find out, now, what happened.”

  “Well, after we moved the body and got the place aired out,” the sheriff said, “we started looking things over. I’ll start with the kitchen. There was a garbage pail in the kitchen; in the garbage pail were the shells of two eggs, and some bacon rind, a piece of stale toast, badly burnt on one side, and a small can of pork and beans, which had been opened. On the gas stove—he had a pressure gas outfit up there—was a frying pan in which some pork and beans had been warmed up quite a while ago. The pan was all dry, and the beans had crusted all around the sides. There was still some coffee, and a lot of coffee grounds, in the pot on the stove. There was a knife and fork and a plate in the sink. There’d been beans eaten out of the plate. In the icebox was part of a roll of butter, a bottle of cream, and a couple of packages of cheese which hadn’t been opened. There was a locker with a lot of canned goods, and a bread box, which had half a loaf of bread in it, and a bag with a couple of dozen assorted cookies.

  “In the main room there was a table on which was a jointed fly rod, a book of flies, and a creel, in which was a mess of fish. Those fish had evidently been there about as long as the body. We made a box to put the creel in, got the box as nearly airtight as possible, and put the whole thing in and nailed it up, without touching the contents. Then we checked on the gun and found it was a forty-one caliber derringer, with discharged shells in each of the two barrels. The body had two bullet holes just below the heart, and, from the position of the bullet holes, we figured that both barrels of the gun had been fired at once.

  “There were some rubber boots near the table, and there was dried mud on the boots; an alarm clock was on the table near the bed. It had stopped at two forty-seven; the alarm had been set for five-thirty; both the alarm and the clock had run down. The body was clothed in a pair of slacks, a shirt and sweater. There were wool socks and slippers on the feet.

  “There was a telephone line running out of the cabin, and the next day, when Perry Mason and Sergeant Holcomb were helping me make an investigation, we found that the telephone line had been tapped. Whoever had done the tapping had established a headquarters in a cabin about three hundred and fifty yards from the Sabin cabin. It had evidently been an old, abandoned cabin, which had been fixed up and repaired when the wiretapping apparatus was installed. We found evidences that whoever had been in the place had left hurriedly. There was a cigarette on the table, which had evidently been freshly lit, and then burnt down to ashes. The dust indicated that the place hadn’t been used for a week or so.”

  “Did Helen Monteith make any statement to you about that gun?” the coroner asked.

  “Yes, she did,” the sheriff said. “That was only today.”

  “Now, just a moment,” the district attorney inquired. “Was that statement made as a free and voluntary statement, and without any promises or inducements of any kind having been offered to her?”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff said. “You asked her if she’d ever seen the gun before, and she said she had. She said she’d taken it at the request of her husband, and bought some shells for it; that she’d given him the gun and shells on Saturday, the third of September.”

  “Did she say who her husband was?” the district attorney inquired.

  “Yes, she said the man she referred to as her husband was Fremont C. Sabin.”

  “Any questions anyone wants to ask of the sheriff?” the coroner inquired.

  “No questions,” Mason said.

  “I think that’s all for the moment,” the district attorney said.

  The coroner said, “I’m going to call Helen Monteith to the witness stand.” He turned to the coroner’s jury and said, “I don’t suppose Mr. Mason will want his client to make any statement at this time. She’ll probably decline to answer any questions, because she’s being held in the detention ward on the suspicion of murder, but I’m going to at least get the records straight by letting you gentlemen take a look at her and hearing what she says when she refuses to answer.”

  Helen Monteith came forward, was sworn, and took the witness stand.

  Mason said to the coroner, “Contrary to what you apparently expect, I am not advising Miss Monteith to refuse to answer questions. In fact, I am going to suggest that Miss Monteith turn to the jury and tell her story in her own way.”

  Helen Monteith faced the jury. There was extreme weariness in her manner, but also a certain defiance, and a certain pride. She told of the man who had entered the library, making her acquaintance, an acquaintance which ripened into friendship, and then into love. She told of their marriage; of the weekend honeymoon spent in the cabin in the mountains. Bit by bit she reconstructed the romance for the jury, and the shock which she had experienced when she had learned of the tragic aftermath.

  Raymond Sprague fairly lunged at her, in his eagerness to cross-examine. “You took that gun from the museum exhibit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “My husband asked me for a gun.”

  “Why didn’t you buy a gun?”

  “He told me he needed one right away, and that, under the law, no store would deliver one for a period of three days after he’d ordered it.”

  “Did he say why he wanted the gun?”

  “No.”

  “You knew it was stealing to take that gun?”

  “I wasn’t stealing it, I was borrowing it.”

  “Oh, Sabin promised to return it, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want this jury to understand that Fremont C. Sabin deliberately asked you to steal the gun, with which he was killed, from a collection?”

  Mason said, “Don’t answer that, Miss Monteith. You just testify to facts. I think the jury will understand you, all right.”

  Sprague turned savagely to Mason and said, “I thought we weren’t going to have any technicalities.”

  “We aren’t,” Mason assured him smilingly.

  “That’s a technical objection.”

  “It isn’t an objection at all,” Mason said. “It’s simply an instruction to my client not to answer the question.”

  “I demand that she answer it,” the district attorney said to the coroner.

  The coroner said, “I think you can question Miss Monteith just about facts, Mr. Sprague. Don’t ask her what she wants the jury to understand.”

  Sprague, flushing, said, “How about that parrot?”

  “You mean Casanova?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Sabin bought it … that is, that’s what I understood.”

  “When?”

  “On Friday, the second of September.”

  “What did he say when he brought the parrot home?”

  “Simply said that he’d always wanted a parrot, and that he’d bought one.”

  “And you kept that parrot with you after that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you on Sunday, the fourth of September?”

  “I was with my husband.”

  “Where?”

  “At Santa Delbarra.”

  “You registered in a hotel there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Under what name?”

  “As Mrs. George Wallman, of course.”

  “And Fremont C. Sabin was the George Wallman who was there with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did he have this gun there at that time?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

  “Did he say anything about going up to this cabin for the opening of the fishing season?”

  “Of course not. He was leading me to believe he was a poor man, looking for work. He told me that Monday was a holiday, but he had some people he wanted to see anyway—so I went home Monday.”

  “That was the fifth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you on Tuesday, the sixth?”

  “I was in the library part of the day, and … and part of the day I drove up to the cabin.”

  “Oh, you were up at this cabin on Tuesday, the sixth?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “And what did you do up there?”

  “Simply drove around and looked at it.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “About eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “What was the condition of the cabin at the time?”

  “It looked just like it had when I’d last left it.”

  “Were the shutters down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just the same as is shown in that photograph?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear a parrot?”

  “No.”

  “The cabin seemed deserted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice whether there was any car in the garage?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Just drove around there for a while, and then left.”

  “Why did you go up there?”

  “I went up to … well, simply to see the place. I had some time off, and I wanted to take a drive, and I thought that was a nice drive.”

  “It was quite a long drive, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, you understand that the evidence points to the fact that Fremont C. Sabin was killed at approximately ten-thirty or eleven o’clock on the morning of September sixth?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And that he arrived at the cabin on the afternoon of Monday, September fifth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you want the coroner’s jury to understand that you found the cabin with the shutters closed, saw no evidence of any occupancy, heard nothing of a parrot, and did not see Mr. Sabin at that time?”

  “That’s right. I found the cabin just as I have described, and I did not see Mr. Sabin. I had no idea he was there. I thought he was in Santa Delbarra, looking for a location for a grocery store.”

  Mason said, “I think this witness has given all the information which she has to impart. I think any further questions are in the nature of a cross-examination, and argumentative. There is no new information being elicited. I will advise the coroner and the district attorney that, unless some new phase of the case is gone into, I’m going to advise the witness not to answer any more questions.”

  “I’ll open up a new phase of the case,” the district attorney said threateningly. “Who killed that parrot which was kept in your house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This parrot was brought home to you on Friday, the second?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And on Saturday, the third, you left with your husband?”

  “No, my husband left on Saturday afternoon and went to Santa Delbarra. Monday was a holiday. I drove up to Santa Delbarra Sunday, and spent Sunday night and Monday morning with him in the hotel. I returned Monday night to San Molinas. My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Winters, had been keeping the parrot. I arrived too late in the evening to call for it. The next day, Tuesday, the sixth, I didn’t have to be at the library until three o’clock in the afternoon. I wanted to be away from people. I got up early in the morning, and drove to the cabin, and returned in time to go directly to the library at three o’clock.”

  “Isn’t it a fact,” the district attorney persisted, “that you returned to your house at an early hour this morning for the purpose, among other things, of killing the parrot which was in the house, the parrot which your next-door neighbor, Mrs. Winters, had kept while you spent your so-called honeymoon with the person whom you have referred to as your husband, in this mountain cabin?”

  “That is not a fact. I didn’t even know the parrot was dead until the sheriff told me.”

  The district attorney said, “I think perhaps I can refresh your recollection upon this subject, Miss Monteith.”

  He turned and nodded to his deputy, a young man who was standing near the doorway. The deputy stepped outside long enough to pick up a bundle covered with cloth, then hurried down the aisle, past the rows of twisted-necked spectators, to deliver the bundle to Sprague.

  District Attorney Sprague dramatically whipped away the cloth. A gasp sounded from the spectators as they saw what the cloth had concealed—a bloodstained parrot cage, on the floor of which lay the stiff body of a dead parrot, its head completely severed.

  “That,” the district attorney said dramatically, “is your handiwork, isn’t it, Miss Monteith?”

  She swayed slightly in the witness chair. “I feel giddy,” she said. “… Please take that away … The blood …”

  The district attorney turned to the spectators and announced triumphantly, “The killer quails when confronted with evidence of her …”

  “She does no such thing,” Mason roared, getting to his feet and striding belligerently toward Sprague. “This young woman has been subject to inhuman treatment. Within the short space of twenty-four hours, she has learned that the man whom she loved, and whom she regarded as her husband, was killed. No sympathy was offered her in her hour of bereavement. Instead of sympathy being extended, she was dragged out into the pitiless glare of publicity and …”

  “Are you making a speech?” the district attorney interrupted.

  Mason said, “No, I’m finishing yours.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of finishing my own,” the district attorney shouted.

  “You try to finish that speech you started,” Mason told him, “and you’ll …”

  The coroner’s gavel banged. The sheriff, jumping from his seat, came striding forward.

  “We’re going to have order,” the coroner said.

  “You can have it from me,” Mason told him, “if you keep the district attorney from making speeches. The facts of the matter are that this young woman, who has been subjected to a nerve strain well calculated to make her hysterical, is suddenly confronted with a gruesome, gory spectacle. Her natural repugnance is interpreted by the district attorney as an indication of guilt. That’s his privilege. But when he starts making a speech about it …”