Mason said, “You’re advising the bank. I want to know the facts about that account. I’m satisfied they’re being withheld from me on the advice of counsel.”

  Dimmick started to get to his feet, fell back in his chair with a groan, said, “Now, Rodney, remember what the doctor said about my getting excited. Don’t let me get excited!”

  Cuff said, “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions, Mr. Mason?”

  “I think not,” Mason told him, without taking his eyes from Dimmick.

  “Well, after all,” Dimmick said, “I haven’t taken the time to look it up, but as I remember the law, until some person is actually appointed as executor or administrator, the bank doesn’t have to answer questions.”

  “I’m not talking about what the law says right now,” Mason said, “I’m telling you what I want.”

  “Of course,” Dimmick pointed out, “we have to take the law into consideration in advising the bank.”

  Mason got to his feet. “You know my position,” he said. “I’ll expect to hear from the bank within an hour.”

  Dimmick pounded the floor with his cane. “You can’t get anything from us until Mrs. Prescott has been vindicated or until she’s been appointed by the court as administratrix—”

  Mason crossed the room to stand by the comer of the older man’s desk, looking down at him. “Dimmick,” he said slowly, “you live in an academic atmosphere of legal abstraction. Your idea of rights and liabilities come from reading the statutes. Now then, you’ve been dealt cards in another sort of game entirely. You’re not playing auction bridge now, you’re playing no-limit poker. Now, you can co-operate with me, or not, just as you damn please. If you don’t co-operate with me on this matter, I’m going to raise hell. I’ll expect to hear from you within an hour.”

  Dimmick struggled to his feet. “You look here,” he shouted, “you can’t bulldoze us! You’re not doing business with some cheap firm of shysters! Dimmick, Gray & Peabody represent the—”

  Mason said, “Don’t forget what the doctor told you, Mr. Dimmick. You mustn’t get excited.”

  He strode toward the exit door, opened it, turned to Cuff and said, “How about the wallet you took from Packard’s coat pocket, Cuff?”

  “The wallet!” Cuff said, his eyes widening.

  Mason nodded.

  “There wasn’t any wallet.”

  “There isn’t any,” Mason said. “That’s no sign there wasn’t any.”

  “But I don’t understand you,” Cuff said. “You—”

  “I understand him,” Dimmick said. “He’s going to claim that you wrongfully removed a wallet from Packard’s pocket.”

  Mason said, “I’m not going to claim anything of the sort, gentlemen. I am going to point out to the press that it’s most unusual for a man to be driving a car without a driving license. When Dr. Wallace treated Packard at the hospital, Packard had a driving license showing his name and his Altaville residence. That driving license was in a wallet. The wallet and the driving license were returned to him. What became of them?”

  “How should I know?” Cuff asked.

  “What were you doing, going through the man’s pockets?”

  “I was trying to identify him.”

  Mason nodded and said, “That’s what you say. You’re representing James Driscoll. Don’t forget Prescott was killed with Driscoll’s gun. Don’t forget Carl Packard saw something in the window of Prescott’s house just about the time Prescott was being killed. Don’t forget that Packard was murdered to keep him from talking, and don’t forget that James Driscoll knew that the body was that of Packard just as soon as the wreck was found. Perhaps the ultra-respectable firm of Dimmick, Gray & Peabody will have some embarrassing questions to answer before I get finished.”

  Cuff came striding toward Mason, his face indignant. “You can’t pull that stuff,” he said. “That’s—”

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Mason said, stepping into the corridor. “You have half an hour.” He slammed the door shut behind him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PERRY MASON, his thumbs pushed through the armholes of his vest, head dropped forward in thought, paced the floor of his office with rhythmic regularity. From time to time he flung remarks over his shoulder to Della Street; his eyes, however, kept staring straight ahead in fixed focus.

  “—Can’t understand the thing—like reaching in the dark for a light globe that’s dangling from a string. It hits your fingers, bounces away. You grope for it, can’t find it,then bump into it again. . . . What the devil could Packard have seen in that window? . . . And Packard was murdered, don’t forget that. Personally, I’m inclined to think he was unconscious when somebody ran the car over the bank. In the first place, it was a stolen car. Now, why the devil should Packard steal a car? In the second place, there wasn’t a single finger-print on the steering wheel, but Packard wasn’t wearing gloves. Someone stole that car, wiped all prints from the steering wheel. Packard was unconscious. They ran the car up the mountain road, then someone who wore gloves stood on the runningboard, pushed down the hand throttle, kicked in the clutch, ran it to the edge of the cliff, and let ’er go.”

  Della Street tapped with her pencil on the polished surface of her desk. “Now listen, Chief,” she said. “Don’t forget our ship sails tomorrow. And, while I think of it, here’s the ticket for you to sign.”

  She unfolded a sheet of paper filled with fine printing. Mason paused in his stride, whipped a fountain pen from his pocket, bent over the desk, and affixed his signature with a flourish.

  “If a client did that you’d jump all over him,” she said.

  “Did what?”

  “Sign a printed form without reading it.”

  He grinned. “After they get in trouble,” he said, “and bring a printed document in to me, bearing their signature, I always tell them they shouldn’t have signed it without reading it. And they shouldn’t. Not that one. But if a business man stopped to read over the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand fine print regulations they put on the backs of tickets, bills of lading, telegraph blanks, and things of that sort, he’d be blind before he was fifty.”

  “Perry Mason, you’re avoiding the question. Are you or are you not going to start getting your trunks packed?”

  He frowned and said, “You know as well as I do, Della, we can’t leave on that ship until we have Rita Swaine out of her difficulties.”

  “Suppose she’s guilty?”

  “Do you think she’s guilty?”

  “To tell you the truth, Chief, I don’t know. I don’t think I pay as much attention to the sob-sister stories women hand out as you do. But, just the same, it’s hard to figure how she could have gone in the house, killed Walter Prescott, and then tried to plan things so it would look as though her sister had done the job.”

  “How about Rosalind Prescott?”

  “I’m not so sure about her. Rosalind’s in love. A woman will do anything to protect the man she loves.”

  “Even to the extent of getting her sister convicted of murder!”

  “Her sister isn’t convicted of murder yet,” Della Street pointed out. “And if she is, it’ll be the first client you’ve defended who has been convicted. Rosalind may have passed the buck to you.”

  Mason resumed his pacing of the floor and said, “Yes, that’s so.”

  “Chief, will you please take the time out tonight to pack your trunks?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t promise. If I can’t clear this case up, there’s no use packing any trunks. You know as well as I do I won’t sail unless it’s finished.”

  “That isn’t what’s bothering me,” she said. “I don’t doubt your ability to work out a solution of this case before tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. But, what I’m afraid of is, you’ll get interested in some other case and stay over to handle that.”

  “No,” he told her, “when we get this thing cleaned up we’re going around the world.”

  “Will you promise you won’t take on any other case?”

  Mason said, with a grin, “Well, now, a promise is definite and final.”

  “So you really don’t mean it.”

  “Well,” he offered, “I’ll make you a conditional promise.”

  “What do you mean by a conditional promise?”

  “I won’t take any ordinary case,” he said. “Of course, if something should come in which fairly reeked of mystery— Well, you wouldn’t want me to go around the world putting in every waking minute wondering what I’d left behind me, would you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

  “I wouldn’t enjoy the trip.”

  “You think you wouldn’t. If you once got started you’d get a kick out of it. You’d see so much beneath the surface that you’d get a lot of fun sizing up your fellow travelers, going ashore in the different ports, and—”

  She broke off, to lift the receiver from the telephone on her desk as the bell shrilled into noise. Listening a moment, she looked up and said, “Frederick Carpenter, the Vice-President of the Second Fidelity Savings & Loan.”

  Mason grinned and said, “That may be good. Better listen in.”

  He strode to his desk, jerked up his telephone, said, “Hello. Mason speaking.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Mason. This is Mr. Frederick Carpenter of the Second Fidelity Savings & Loan. You’ll remember talking with me about the account of Walter Prescott, deceased.”

  “I remember it perfectly,” Mason said, winking across at Della Street.

  “At the time you talked with me,” Carpenter went on, in the slow, deliberate voice of one who has trained himself not to do things in a hurry, “I felt that it would be far better to wait until your client had been appointed by the court before making any accounting. However, after taking the matter up with our legal department, we have concluded that perhaps it might be better to co-operate with you and not force you to take steps to ascertain the exact amount which—”

  Mason impatiently interrupted the smooth cadences of the banker’s voice. “Never mind explaining,” he said. “How much is his balance?”

  Carpenter cleared his throat. “Sixty-nine thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five dollars and thirty cents,” he said.

  “Can you tell me how that’s been deposited?”

  “The deposits,” Carpenter said, “were rather unusual.For the most part, they represented sums ranging from five to fifteen thousand dollars, deposited in cash.”

  “By Walter Prescott personally?”

  “As far as I am able to ascertain from our records and the recollection of the persons who handled the account, by Walter Prescott personally.”

  “Thanks,” Mason said.

  “And if we can be of any assistance to you in the future,” Carpenter said, “please ask for me personally, Mr. Mason.”

  Mason said, “Okay,” dropped the receiver into place, and stared across at Della Street. “That,” he said, “doesn’t look very much as though we were sailing tomorrow.”

  “Why not, Chief?”

  “It means there’s another complicating circumstance which we haven’t considered; something which has to be ironed out before we can reach a solution.”

  “Why does it have to be ironed out?”

  “Because,” he told her, “a solution of any crime which doesn’t account for all of the various factors involved is no solution at all. Now, I’ve paid too much attention to the people the district attorney’s office suspect, and not enough to the victim. In the long run, Della, the essence of all successful detective work lies in reconstructing the life of the victim. That gives motivation, and motivation makes murders.

  “Virtually every man has enemies. Sometimes they’re business enemies. More often they’re personal enemies, people who hate him, people who will look down their noses and say it’s too bad when they hear he’s bumped off, but who will be tickled to death just the same; but it takes a peculiar psychological build-up to perpetrate a murder. A man must have a certain innate ferocity, a certain lack of consideration, and, usually, a lack of imagination.”

  “Why a lack of imagination?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “except that it’s nearly always true. I think imaginative people sympathize with the sufferings of others because they’re able to visualize those sufferings more keenly in their own minds. An unimaginative person, on the other hand, can’t visualize himself in the shoes of another. Therefore, he sees life only from his own selfish angle. Killers are frequently cunning, but they’re rarely original. They’re selfish, and usually determined. Of course, I’m not talking now about a murder which is the result of some sudden overpowering emotion.”

  “Why couldn’t this murder be one of that type?” she asked.

  “It could,” he admitted readily enough. “In that event, I’d say that Rita Swaine pulled the trigger. But, whether she was justified, is another question.”

  “Would you represent her if she’s guilty?”

  “It depends on what you mean by being guilty. I don’t necessarily define murder the same way the district attorney defines it. If there were circumstances of moral provocation, they might be just as compelling as circumstances of physical provocation. In other words, the law says that if a man is in a position to do you great bodily harm, or to kill you, and he comes at you, apparently for the purpose of putting a murderous intent into execution, you have the right to kill him. In other words, that’s a physical provocation. It’s all the law, in its blundering generality, can take into comprehension. But, how about the person who brings a crushing mental or moral pressure upon a more or less helpless victim? I admit circumstances like that aren’t common. But, with certain temperaments, they might be possible.”

  “Chief,” she said, “will you please unfocus your mind long enough to get your clothes packed?”

  “Not now,” he told her, frowning, and starting once more to pace the floor. “I’m going back to first principles and building up from there. Now then, let’s look at the victim—Walter Prescott—an unsocial individual—selfish, cruel, cold, ruthless—In short, just the type of person who could commit a murder.”

  “But he didn’t commit a murder, Chief. He was murdered.”

  Mason said, “That’s the puzzling part of it, Della. He should have been the murderer instead of the corpse.”

  “This,” Della Street pointed out, “isn’t getting us any nearer China.”

  “I think it is,” Mason said thoughtfully. “It sounds foolish, and yet I think it’s getting me some place. It’s paradoxical. The man who was murdered isn’t the man who was murdered, but the man who committed the murder. Now, if we can follow that contradictory premise through to a logical conclusion, Della, we’re certainly going to be one jump ahead of the police, because that’s a starting point of deductive reasoning which would never suggest itself to them.”

  “No,” she admitted with a smile, “you win on that.”

  “Now then,” Mason said, “let’s suppose that Walter Prescott is a murderer. Let’s suppose that what Jason Braun, alias Carl Packard, saw in the window of that house didn’t have to do with the murder of Walter Prescott but did have to do with the murder of someone else—someone Walter Prescott was killing.”

  Della Street said, “You also win on that, Chief. I can’t conceive of the police being able to follow you into that line of reasoning.”

  “It’s goofy,” he admitted, “and yet, somehow or other, I feel that I’m getting on the track of what really happened. Somehow, putting all these possibilities in words takes away that feeling of fumbling around in the dark. Now then, with that as a starting point, and considering that Packard saw something connected with a murder, who was the victim? If Walter Prescott had killed someone, who would he have killed? If he’d tried to kill someone, who was that someone, and what could Packard have seen—Wait a minute, Della—good Lord!”

  Mason paused in his pacing, to stand in the middle of the floor, his legs spread apart. “Della,” he said slowly, “if what I think happened is actually the real solution, then—”

  A series of knocks sounded on the door which led to the corridor. Mason said, “That’s Paul Drake. Let him in, Della, and see what he wants.”

  Della Street crossed the room and opened the door.

  “Hello, folks,” Drake said. “What’re you doing?”

  “We’re engaging in a new form of logic,” Della answered with a grin. “It’s swell. It solves murders and everything.”

  “Gimme,” Drake said, entering the room.

  “Well, it goes like this,” Della said. “Because you’ve come in the room, you must have been the person going out of the room. Therefore, having gone out of the room while you were coming into the room, someone who saw you in the corridor coming into the room, would have known you were going out of the room, and—”

  “Oh, I see,” Drake said, “like a puppy chasing his tail, huh?”

  “Exactly,” Della agreed, “only the puppy catches his tail. Then, having swallowed himself, he becomes, so to speak, completely self-contained.”

  Mason chuckled and said, “Don’t mind her, Paul. She’s filled with travel bugs. She’s been down picking out light whatnots to wear in tropical countries.”

  “Not only in the countries,” Della Street said, “but on shipboard, under the stars, and in the moonlight. Think, Chief, of sailing down below the equator, with the Southern Cross blazing overhead, the wind a warm caress on the skin, the wake of the boat streaming out behind in a white path. The scent of spices in the air, the hiss of water past the bow. Over on the right—”

  “Starboard,” Drake interrupted. “By the time you’ve gone below the equator, you’ll know the nautical terms.”

  “Okay,” she said, with a sweep of her arm, “over on the starboard is an island, the crests of the volcanic mountains silhouetted against the stars. Down lower against the water, where the palm trees fringe the lagoon behind the barrier reef, is a native village. And, from the deck of the ship you can hear the rhythmic throb of the native drums, the peculiar wail of primitive music—”