“We aren’t licked yet,” Mason said.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. My own idea is we’re so far behind the eight ball that we aren’t ever going to get out.”

  Mason said, “Look, Paul, a man gets out of federal prison, he has government agents shadowing him, he has rough shadows and smooth shadows. The guy buys good clothes, he buys good cigars. Where does he get the money?”

  “Where indeed?” Drake asked. “He bought an automobile and he got that money from you.”

  “That’s right,” Mason said. “He did that for the moral effect, but when he got the automobile he was all prepared to disappear. He didn’t charter a taxi, he didn’t have another automobile staked out. The next time we find him he’s in a storeroom which has been vacant for some time, which is tied up in litigation, and the storeroom is provisioned with food, a sleeping bag, a suitcase with clothes. Now, where did Collister Gideon get all those things?”

  “In stores, probably, he had money.”

  “He was keeping out of sight,” Mason said. “There’s more to the Gideon case than we realized.”

  “Okay, okay,” Drake said, “I’ll get busy with the banks. Do you want me to try and join you at the storeroom?”

  “No,” Mason said, “I’m going to goad the police into making the right kind of a search.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The man from the power company said, “Okay, the power’s on.”

  Tragg threw a switch which turned on a battery of lights in the storeroom and office part of the building.

  Mason looked around, then moved over to the far side of the room and started a minute search.

  Tragg, Hamilton Burger and two plain-clothes men, obviously bored by the entire procedure, looked at their watches, casually looked around and waited for Mason to finish.

  “All right, Tragg,” Mason said, “here’s the first thing I want to look at.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mason pointed to a traverse beam over the doorway. “There’s something in there. A hole, there’s a fresh splinter by the side of the hole.”

  Tragg started to say something, then changed his mind and said to one of the men, “See if there’s a stepladder around here.”

  Hamilton Burger said, “This is another good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle. This building hasn’t been sealed up. Anyone could have gone in here and planted all sorts of evidence.”

  Tragg said nothing.

  Mason started up on the stepladder. Tragg gently pulled him back and said, “I’ll do this, if you don’t mind, Perry.”

  Tragg got up, looked at the hole in the beam, pursed his lips, looked down at Hamilton Burger and said, “I think it’s a bullet.”

  Burger’s face flushed. “All right,” he said, “we’re having Mason up for contempt of court at two-thirty this afternoon on one charge. We may as well have him on two charges. Let’s get the bullet out. The same old gag of planting evidence.”

  “If you folks had made the careful search you should have, it would have been impossible for anyone to have planted evidence,” Mason said. “Now we can’t tell when that bullet was fired in there.”

  “Well, I can tell,” Hamilton Burger said, “and I can tell who held the gun.”

  “Want to make a statement in the presence of witnesses so I can hold you liable?” Mason asked.

  Hamilton Burger turned his back and walked off.

  “In getting that bullet out,” Mason said, “please be very careful not to disturb the striations or mark the lead–”

  “You don’t need to tell me how to take out a bullet,” Tragg said.

  Tragg enlarged the hole slightly with a pocket knife and said to one of the plain-clothes men, “That’s as deep as I can go with a knife. Go out to the car and get that kit that has the drill in it for taking out a section of wood.”

  The plain-clothes officer returned from the car with an auger designed to cut a circular core from a section of wood.

  Tragg said, “Get up there and be very, very careful to be sure you’re on the course of that bullet. Cut out a section of the wood that has the bullet in it.”

  The man climbed the stepladder and, after a few minutes, brought down a section of the wooden beam.

  Tragg carefully split the section and shook out the .38 calibre bullet into his hand.

  “All right,” he said, “we’ve found the bullet, what do we do next?”

  “We have it appraised by Redfield,” Mason said.

  “All right,” Tragg said, “let’s get going. I presume you want to have the report before two-thirty?”

  “Send a man with the bullet,” Mason said. “Let’s not make the same mistake twice. Let’s not quit searching just because we find something. Let’s look this thing over carefully.”

  “All right,” Tragg said, “we’ll go into the warehouse now.”

  They went back in the warehouse. Tragg threw a switch, and the gloomy, dank interior of the place instantly became flooded with light.

  “Now, let’s take a look around here,” Mason said. “Have your men turn over every one of those big cartons and let’s see what we can find.”

  “There are fifty of them here,” Tragg said.

  “All right,” Mason said, “if you can’t turn over fifty cartons by two-thirty, we’ll telephone the judge and get an order.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” Tragg said.

  Tragg and one of the officers shook the corrugated board packing cases one at a time, moved them, looked inside.

  Suddenly one of the men started to say something to Tragg, caught himself, looked significantly at the police lieutenant and turned his back.

  “What is it?” Mason asked sharply. “We’re making this search under an order of court. We’re entitled to know.”

  “Somebody stood in here,” the officer said. “You can see the imprint of his rubber heels. They’d been in oil somewhere and they left a print here.”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing,” Hamilton Burger said. “You can’t tell when the heel prints were made. They could have been made a month ago, or,” he added significantly, “they could have been made last night.”

  “Nevertheless,” Mason, said, “they were made. It’s evidence. Let’s take the packing case into custody.”

  “All right,” Tragg said wearily, “take it along.”

  “And I want it dusted for fingerprints.”

  “You can’t get fingerprints from paper – Oh, well, let him have his way. Leave it here long enough for a technical man to come down and dust for fingerprints. What else do you want, Mason?”

  “I don’t know,” Mason said, moving slowly around, prowling into the various nooks and corners of the place.

  Suddenly Mason said, “Hey, wait a minute, this window has been forced.”

  “I should have guessed that a long while ago,” Hamilton Burger said. “That’s how the man got in to fire the bullet into that beam.”

  “This window has been opened from the inside,” Mason said. “You see, the cobwebs have been brushed away and the window was opened, then lowered. It’s unlocked.”

  “An inside-outside job,” Hamilton Burger said. “Same old razzle-dazzle.”

  Tragg studied the pane thoughtfully.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Mason said. “What’s this?”

  “What?” Tragg asked.

  Mason pointed over to a corner. “I got a glint of reflected light from blued steel.”

  Tragg moved over, said, “Oh, oh, it’s a gun!”

  Hamilton Burger started to say something, then checked himself and said, “All right, it’s a gun. Take it into custody, Lieutenant, and we’ll have it examined carefully in court. We’ll see whose fingerprints we find on it – although the person who planted it there was probably shrewd enough to wear gloves.”

  Mason said. “Be careful with it, Lieutenant, and I want some test bullets fired from it. You will note that that also is a thirty-eight-calibre Smith and Wesson.”

  “It would be,” Hamilton Burger said.

  “Meaning,” Mason said casually, “that in your opinion it was planted.”

  “It was planted,” Hamilton Burger said angrily. “And at two-thirty this afternoon I hope to be able to show who did the planting.”

  “You wouldn’t want to make any accusations before then, would you?” Mason asked.

  “I have my opinion,” Burger said, turning away.

  “You have everything you want?” Tragg asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mason said. “I want this place sealed up; put an officer in charge and leave him here until we can evaluate this evidence we have at the present time.”

  “Okay, okay,” Tragg said. “I want to see if there are any fingerprints on that gun but ordinarily we don’t get fingerprints on guns. Sometimes you get a thumbprint at the base of a cartridge clip, but it’s not once in a hundred that you get a fingerprint off a gun.”

  “All right, we’ve got the gun,” Mason said. “I want Redfield to fire test bullets through it. I’d like to have him bring his comparison microscope into court so we can make tests right there in court.”

  “The good old drama,” Hamilton Burger said. “Never forget the dramatic approach. That’s showmanship. I’m getting damned sick and tired of all this. Every case we have, it’s the same old razzle-dazzle, the same old seven and six.”

  Mason looked at his watch and said, “If you’d hurry, Hamilton, you might be able to get some lunch; at least a cup of coffee, and I think it’s possible that would change your outlook.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At two-thirty, Judge Saxton, who had conceivably heard some rumours of what had happened, took the bench with a glance of puzzled respect at Perry Mason.

  “Search of the premises has been completed in the case of People versus Warren?” he asked.

  “No, Your Honour,” Mason said, “but a search has been made and that search has uncovered certain things. I believe Lieutenant Tragg was on the stand and he can probably testify as to what was discovered.”

  “Very well, Lieutenant Tragg to the stand,” Judge Saxton said.

  Mason said, “I believe I was cross-examining Lieutenant Tragg, but I don’t know that it makes much difference who brings this out … Lieutenant, you found certain things in the storeroom at Clovina and Hendersell?”

  “We did,” Tragg said, dryly.

  “What did you find?”

  “When the lights were turned on, we found that a beam over the door between the storeroom and the warehouse had a bullet which had lodged in it. We took that bullet out without destroying any of the striations or leaving any tool marks on it. I have that bullet here.”

  “Will you mark it for identification, please, as Defendant’s Exhibit Number 1a?”

  “It will be so marked for identification,” Judge Saxton said.

  “What else did you find?”

  “We found a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight-calibre revolver containing five live shells and one exploded cartridge.”

  “Have you tested that gun?”

  “I understand that Alexander Redfield has fired a test bullet through it. To that extent the gun has been tested.”

  “And,” Mason asked, “didn’t Alexander Redfield compare the test bullet from that gun with the fatal bullet in this case?”

  “I believe he did, yes, sir.”

  “That test was in your presence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And did Alexander Redfield state to you what he had found?”

  “Objected to as hearsay,” Hamilton Burger said.

  “Sustained,” Judge Saxton said. “You can put Mr Redfield on the stand. In fact you can put him on for further cross-examination if you wish.”

  “Now, then,” Mason said, “during all of the time that you were at the scene of the murder and while you were finding these things, was Hamilton Burger, the district attorney, present?”

  “Why, yes, he was.”

  “And did he keep up a running fire of remarks indicating that I had planted this evidence?”

  “I’ll stipulate that I did,” Hamilton Burger said angrily.

  “There you are,” Mason said, turning to Judge Saxton. “Lieutenant Tragg is a witness in this case, and during the entire course of our search, the district attorney was belittling the objects we found, was implanting in the mind of this witness the idea that I had been responsible for having those objects at the scene of the crime, that the evidence was without proper evidentiary value and had been planted.

  “If the Court please, if I am to be cited to show cause for contempt of court for seeking to influence the testimony of a witness, I insist that the district attorney also be cited at the same time for seeking to influence the testimony of this witness.”

  Judge Saxton looked at the angry district attorney, at Lt Tragg and then tried to fight back a smile.

  “Very well, Mr Mason,” he said, “the Court will note your motion. However, that doesn’t mean the Court will act on it. Let’s proceed with the evidence in this case.”

  “I want my motion to show that the district attorney was there in his official capacity, that his remarks carried all the weight of an elected official of this county who conceivably had influence over the police department, that they represented a continual running fire of accusation.”

  “Very well, we will take that up at the proper time,” Judge Saxton said. “I presume now you would like to call Mr Redfield to the stand.”

  “I would, Your Honour.”

  “I note Mr Redfield is in court,” Judge Saxton said. “You may take the stand, Mr Redfield.”

  Mason said, “If the Court please, this comes under the heading of further cross-examination.

  “Mr Redfield, you stated that, taking all the facts into consideration and in all human probability, the gun, People’s Exhibit B, was the weapon from which the fatal bullet had been fired. I’m now going to ask you if, since the time you gave your testimony, subsequent facts have been disclosed which change your opinion?”

  “They have.”

  “Now, then, taking into consideration all the facts, are you still willing to swear that in all human probability, the fatal bullet was fired from the gun, People’s Exhibit B?”

  “No, I am not,” Redfield said. “In fact, I am now prepared to swear positively that the gun which was discovered this noon at the scene of the murder and which is now labelled for identification as Defendant’s Exhibit Number 1a was the gun from which the fatal bullet was fired.”

  “What!” Judge Saxton said, unable to conceal his surprise.

  “Yes, Your Honour. I am sorry, but enough striations are visible on the base of the fatal bullet so that it is possible to make a match. It isn’t easy, but there is enough of a match so that I am now satisfied that the fatal bullet was fired from this gun, Defendant’s Exhibit 1a.”

  “Now, then,” Mason said, “are you also prepared to make a statement in regard to the bullet which was found in the beam over the door?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What gun was that fired from?”

  “That was fired from the gun, People’s Exhibit B.”

  “So,” Mason said, “with only one shot fired from that gun, People’s Exhibit Number B, we now have that bullet accounted for as having been fired into a beam. Therefore that gun couldn’t possibly have been used in the commission of the crime. Is that right?”

  “Scientifically, and in my opinion as an expert, that is correct,” Redfield said.

  Judge Saxton threw his hands apart in a gesture which a man makes when he is tossing something away.

  “Now, then,” Mason said, “I have one more request to make. Your office keeps a record of fatal bullets and unsolved crimes?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “I am referring now to the attempted murder of the watchman at the Pacific Northern Supermarket,” Mason said. “You have the bullet that was recovered from his body?”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked you to bring it with you. Will you make a comparison test on the microscope and tell me whether you can match that bullet with the test bullet which was fired from Defendant’s Exhibit Number la?”

  “Since you asked me to bring that bullet into court, I knew what you had in mind,” Redfield said, somewhat wearily, “and I have made such a test.”

  “With what result?”

  “The bullet that wounded the watchman was also fired from this gun which has been marked for identification as Defendant’s Exhibit Number 1a.”

  Mason turned to Judge Saxton. “There you are, Your Honour. I had deduced from the evidence that the defendant had committed a hold-up at the Pacific Northern Supermarket. I had a sketch made of the decedent and approached the eyewitnesses with such a sketch. Then the district attorney of this county, using the weight of his high office, led the witnesses to believe that I had unduly influenced them, thereby ruining their testimony so that it can’t be used in an attempted murder case. I suggest, if the Court please, that in addition to asking that the district attorney be cited for contempt in influencing the testimony of Lieutenant Tragg, he also be cited for contempt in influencing the testimony of two witnesses who saw the hold-up man at the scene of the crime at the Pacific Northern Supermarket, and by the use of his influence, his scepticism and the power of suggestion so changed their identification that it would now be useless to attempt to prove the crime committed by the decedent.”

  Judge Saxton looked at Hamilton Burger’s utterly astounded countenance, at Redfield, at Lt Tragg and said, suddenly, “It appears that as far as the case against this defendant is concerned, there is none. All that can be brought to bear against him is that he was hiding at the scene of the crime. That certainly is not enough to warrant this Court in binding the defendant over. The Court, therefore, is going to dismiss the case against the defendant, and as far as all these other incidental matters of contempt are concerned, the Court is going to strike them off the calendar and give the matter consideration and announce whether there will be a hearing at some later date.

  “Court’s adjourned.”