“Yes, sir. Any particular station you’d like?”

  “Just a little organ music, if you can find any.”

  The driver moved the car. Mason settled back to the relaxation of a cigarette. The driver, after some dial twisting, found a program in which organ music was blended with that of a steel guitar. The furrows ironed themselves from Mason’s forehead as he sat back and gave himself up to the music.

  Half an hour passed. The program changed. The driver looked back at Mason for instructions. Mason said, “Try and find more organ music or some Hawaiian music. Perhaps . . . hold it.”

  A quick change came over the lawyer’s face. He moved forward, dropping to one knee so that he could study the plane which was coming in from the south, a compact monoplane with retractable landing gear.

  “Start your motor,” Mason said to the driver as the lowered wheels of the plane slid smoothly on to the cement runway.

  The driver obediently stepped on the starting switch. The motor purred into life.

  “Switch off the radio,” Mason said.

  Della Street turned to look at Mason, then back to the plane again. The relaxation had vanished from Mason’s face. He was as tense now as a runner awaiting the starting gun.

  “Neat job that,” the driver said, noticing Mason’s interest in the plane.

  The lawyer didn’t even hear him.

  The plane taxied up to a point almost directly opposite the place where Mason was seated in the parked automobile. A gate opened. A long gray-colored automobile with a red spotlight slid through the gates.

  “An ambulance,” Della Street said.

  Mason, without taking his eyes from the ambulance, motioned her to silence.

  The ambulance turned, backed up to the plane. The driver jumped out and opened the doors in the back. The body of the ambulance concealed what was taking place, and Mason frowned his annoyance.

  “Get ready to go,” he said to the driver, “and you’re going to have to go fast. Never mind the speed laws. I’ll stand good for fines.”

  The driver said dubiously, “You want that ambulance followed?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll use a siren and spotlight and go right through all the signals.”

  “Follow right along behind,” Mason said.

  “I’ll get pinched.”

  “Not if you’re close enough. Cops will think it’s a member of the family rushing to the bedside of a dying relative.”

  “What’ll the driver of the ambulance think?”

  “I don’t give a damn what he thinks, just so we find out where he goes. Okay, here we go.”

  The doors of the ambulance slammed shut. The driver ran around, jumped in behind the steering wheel, and the gates swung open once more as the big machine gathered momentum.

  The driver of Mason’s car started out in low gear, turned to say over his shoulder, “It might not be just a fine. Up here they . . .”

  “Get over,” Mason told him. “I’ll take the wheel.”

  “I can’t let you do that. I . . .”

  “Look,” Mason said. “If I threatened you with a monkey wrench, and made you get over, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I . . .”

  “And then,” Mason said, “if anything happened, you could say that you had been in fear of your life, that you thought I’d gone crazy, and that I took the automobile away from you by force . . . . Get over.”

  The man stopped the car, slid over in the seat, said dubiously, “I don’t like this. You ain’t even got a monkey wrench.”

  Mason swung his long legs over the back of the front seat, jackknifed his slim figure, slipped in behind the steering wheel, and snapped the car into second gear, easing back the clutch as he pressed the foot throttle. The car slid smoothly forward. Mason swung it into a sharp turn, snapped the gear shift into high, and fell in behind the ambulance.

  The blood-red rays of the spotlight from the car ahead made a sinister pencil of light. A siren screamed. Mason, moving the wheel of the rented car with deft skill, kept the machine within a few feet of the rear of the ambulance, following through the traffic in the pathway cleared by the spotlight and siren.

  The man who had been driving the car gripped the back of the front seat with his left hand, held to the edge of the door with his right. “Good Lord,” he moaned. “I didn’t know it would be like this!” His face was strained with nervous tension. Several times he instinctively pressed down with his feet against the floorboards as though trying to put on the brakes. Once when collision seemed imminent, he reached for the ignition switch. Mason, batting his hand away, stepped on the throttle and avoided the oncoming car.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Mason said without taking his eyes from the road. “No chance to stop on that one. Using the throttle was our only chance. If you hesitate, you’re licked.”

  Della Street, in the back of the car, hanging on to the robe rail, her heels braced against the foot rest, watched the kaleidoscope of traffic which flashed past the windows of the speeding automobile. Her lips were half parted; her eyes sparkling. The driver of the car, looking back to her for moral support to back up his demand for less speed, abruptly changed his mind and concentrated simply on hanging on.

  The ambulance cut its way through traffic, to slow down in front of the red brick structure of a rambling hospital.

  Mason left the ambulance as it turned into the emergency entrance. He swung his car around to the front of the hospital, parked it, and said to the driver, “Here’s the monkey wrench I was holding over your head.”

  He handed him three ten-dollar bills.

  The driver put the money in his pocket wordlessly.

  “Okay?” Mason asked.

  The driver tried to speak. His voice came as a throaty squeak. He coughed, cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay, but I wouldn’t go through it again for a thousand.”

  Mason slid out of the car. “Come on, Della.”

  She followed him into the hospital. Mason said to the girl at the information desk, “I know something about this ambulance case that’s just coming in the door now. I’m supposed to tell the doctor something about the patient.”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What did you want to tell him?”

  “Something he wants to know,” Mason said.

  She flushed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Was it information about the patient?”

  “Of course.”

  “He won’t be able to see you right now. It may be an operative case. They telephoned the doctor from Los Angeles and again from the airport. He’d been waiting for the call.”

  “What’s that doctor’s name?” Mason asked. “I wasn’t certain I caught it.”

  “Dr. Sawdey.”

  “His initials?”

  “L. O.”

  “I’ll be waiting here in the lobby. No. Perhaps I’d better go get in touch with the nurse. I think the information I have is something he wanted before he operated. Where will I find the patient?”

  She said, “Just a moment,” plugged in a telephone, consulted a memo, said, “What room will Carr Luceman be in? It’s an ambulance case that just came in. Emergency operation. Dr. Sawdey. Oh, yes.”

  She pulled out the line, said, “The patient will be in room three-o-four. Dr. Sawdey is preparing to operate. Go to the third floor, tell the nurse in charge who you are, and ask her to get in touch with Dr. Sawdey’s nurse.”

  Mason nodded, said to Della Street, “Come on,” and walked across the lobby, down the corridor to the elevator.

  “Third,” he said to the attendant.

  Once on the third floor, Mason motioned to Della Street, led her down to the end of the corridor where there was a solarium. Now the room was darkened, and the wicker furniture, spaced with the rectangular efficiency of a hospital rather than the careless informality of a private home, seemed in its stiff silence to be occupied by white-clad ghosts.

  Mason looked at the door of 304 as they walked past, said, “We’ll sit here for a while and watch.”

  A nurse garbed in a spotless, stiffly starched uniform walked by on rubber heels, rustling her way efficiently down the linoleum-covered corridor. She vanished in the door of 304. A few moments later, a man in the middle fifties, clothed in a dark business suit, pushed open the door and walked in. Shortly after that, the man left the room again.

  Mason waited until this man had left the room. A few moments later the nurse bustled out, then Mason touched Della Street on the arm. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

  They walked down the corridor, the faint smell of disinfectants in their nostrils. Mason paused before the door of 304, on which a sign said, “Dr. Sawdey,” and below that a printed placard reading, “No Visitors.”

  Mason silently pushed open the door.

  The man in the room lay in the hospital bed. The sheet-covered blankets were arranged with hospital efficiency over the thin figure. A dim night light made the shadows a backdrop against which the white, tired face on the pillow was sharply accented.

  The man who lay motionless in the bed, his eyes closed, was Elston A. Karr.

  In the hospital surroundings, with wax-like lids closed over the burning power of his hypnotic eyes, he seemed wasted, tired, as robbed of power as a burnt-out electric globe.

  Mason stood in the doorway long enough to note that the bedclothes were rising and falling with the even respiration of a man who is sleeping under the quieting influence of a powerful narcotic. Then he closed the door, took Della Street’s arm, and tiptoed down the corridor.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, as Mason pressed the button for the elevator.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  Mason said with a smile, “I’m still jealous of my reputation as a prophet. I don’t dare risk it, but I think perhaps we’ll drop around to Dr. Sawdey’s residence for a little chat.”

  Chapter 15

  Mason’s taxicab slid to a stop in front of one of the newspaper offices. A brightly lighted office on the ground floor marked the Want Ad Department. A separate doorway to the street made it easy for persons desiring to place want ads to approach the long counter where two quick-moving young women waited on the persons who came in with ads to be placed in the classified column, or with answers to be delivered to advertisers.

  Mason paid off the cab, said, “Might as well come in, Della, and help me look.”

  One of the young women behind the counter approached him. Alert eyes sized him up. She said, “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like back copies of your paper for the last week. I just want to look at them here.”

  She reached under the counter, took out a hinged stick through which had been filed copies of newspapers.

  “Do you have two of these?” Mason asked. “I’d like to have my secretary assist me.”

  “You don’t wish to remove them from the office?”

  “No.”

  She walked down the counter a few feet, took out another file, and handed it to Della Street.

  “What do we look for?” Della Street asked.

  “We may not find it,” he said, “but I rather think we will. A small paragraph somewhere on an inside page, an account of a Mr. Luceman who was cleaning a revolver when it accidentally dropped and exploded. It will probably be written in a somewhat humorous vein. Dr. L. O. Sawdey will have been called in to give emergency treatment.”

  Della Street, for the moment, did not look at the newspaper. Instead she looked at Mason, comprehension dawning on her face. “Then you mean that. . . ?”

  Mason interrupted her. “Once more I am not risking my reputation as a prophet. Let’s get the facts first, and make deductions afterwards.”

  Mason plunged at once into the pages of the paper, but it was Della Street who found the notice first. “Here it is,” she said.

  Mason moved over to look over her shoulder.

  The article read:

  “BURGLAR” DEMANDS MILK SHOOTS HOUSEHOLDER IN LEG

  It was an unlucky day for Carr Luceman who resides at 1309 Delington Avenue. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Luceman heard the noise made by a prowler trying to effect an entrance through the back screen door. Luceman sat up in bed to listen. The more he listened, the more certain he became that a prowler was cutting the screen.

  Luceman, who despite his sixty-five years is a rugged individualist given to direct action, disdained to summon the police. He decided to teach the burglar a lesson he would not soon forget.

  As Luceman expressed it, “I didn’t intend to try to hit him, but I most certainly did intend to give him the scare of his life.”

  With this in mind, Luceman took a .38 caliber revolver from his bureau drawer, put on a pair of felt-soled bedroom slippers, and noiselessly tiptoed to the kitchen. As he opened the door from the dining room, he could distinctly hear the sounds of someone cutting through the screen on the back door.

  Luceman cocked his revolver.

  The doughty householder crept forward. Bearing in mind the admonition of a general who had exhorted his men to wait until the whites of the eyes were visible, Luceman tiptoed across the kitchen. He saw a dark form silhouetted against the screen of the back door—and promptly deposited his cocked revolver on the kitchen table—for the “burglar” was Luceman’s cat. Luceman had forgotten to give the animal its customary bowl of warm milk. The cat had sought to remind him by jumping to the screen. After hanging there for several seconds, it would drop back to the porch floor, then repeat the maneuver.

  Luceman opened the back door, unlatched the screen, let in the irate cat, and approached the icebox in the kitchen. He had opened the door and was in the act of taking out a bottle of milk when the cat, purring in expectation of its deferred repast, jumped to the kitchen table and, in true feline manner, rolled over in squirming abandon. The cocked revolver teetered on the edge of the table. Luceman dropped the milk bottle, and tried to catch the weapon before it hit the floor. He was too late. The gun eluded his grasp. The bullet crashed into Luceman’s right thigh, inflicting a painful wound. The cat, frightened by the noise of the explosion, dashed out of the back door, and Luceman, painfully wounded, tried to crawl to the telephone. The shock and pain, however, caused him to lose consciousness, and it was not until nearly four A.M. that he recovered sufficiently to call Dr. L. O. Sawdey who lives in the neighborhood.

  Luceman will be on the inactive list for several days, but, aside from that, need expect no bad effects, as the bullet missed the principal arteries and only grazed the bone. The “burglar” at latest accounts had not returned. Perhaps it has decided it is less trouble to prowl the alleys in search of nocturnal quadrupeds, and forego its milk diet.

  Mason glanced at Della Street, smiled, walked over to the counter, and said, “Could you let me have one of these papers of the fourteenth? I’d like to answer some of the ads in it.” He deposited a nickel on the counter and after a few minutes the girl supplied him with a copy of the paper.

  Mason thanked her and escorted Della Street back to the automobile. “We will now have a chat with Dr. Sawdey, who is doubtless back from the hospital by this time,” he said.

  Mason rang the bell of Dr. Sawdey’s residence. After several moments, the man they had seen at the hospital opened the door.

  “Dr. Sawdey?” Mason asked.

  The doctor nodded, looking shrewdly from Mason to Della Street, then down to where the taxicab was waiting. He might have been making a diagnosis. “It’s late,” he said, “and except in matters of extreme emergency . . .”

  Mason said, “I will detain you only a moment, Doctor. But I’m a friend of Carr Luceman. I knew him back East, and thought I’d look him up. I had his address, and drove down there as soon as I . . .”

  Dr. Sawdey said, “He had an accident. He’s at the Parker Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately, he can have no visitors.”

  Mason’s face showed his concern. “I heard he’d had an accident,” he said. “I want very much to see him, and I think he’d like to see me. I only expect to be here for another twenty-four hours. Would it be possible for me to see him in that time?”

  “I’m afraid not. He has overtaxed himself. I warned him particularly against that very thing. As a result, he’s weakened his resistance, and complications have set in. It’s going to be necessary for him to be kept absolutely quiet for several days.”

  Mason said, “I might wait over if by day after tomorrow . . .”

  Dr. Sawdey said positively, “I am certain that it will be necessary to keep him quiet for at least three days.”

  Mason said, “Gosh, that’s a shame. I’ll send him a card. I’m awfully sorry I missed him. Have you known him long, Doctor?”

  “I’ve seen him on several occasions,” Dr. Sawdey said guardedly.

  Mason said impulsively, “Well, I hope this doesn’t affect his other condition too much. How are his legs now, Doctor?”

  The doctor said gravely, “In a man of his age, one may expect progressive . . . however, I think it will be better if you correspond directly with Mr. Luceman. You can address him at the Parker Memorial Hospital, and I see no reason why he can’t open mail within the next forty-eight hours. And now if you’ll excuse me—I’ve had rather a hard day, and I have some operations to perform in the morning.”

  Mason bowed gravely. “I’m sorry I disturbed you, Doctor, but I was very much concerned. You see I was quite intimate with Mr. Luceman at one time.”

  “If you’d leave your name,” the doctor said, “I might . . .”

  Mason had already started down the stairs. “So sorry I disturbed you, Doctor. I can appreciate the demands that are made on your time.” And to keep the doctor from realizing that he had failed to follow his suggestion, Mason went on, “What time do you operate in the morning?”

  “Eight-thirty,” Dr. Sawdey said and closed the door.

  “Hungry, Della?” Mason asked as they approached the taxicab.

  “I could use a little food,” she admitted.

  Mason said, “I don’t feel particularly hungry, and I want to keep an eye on Dr. Sawdey. I want to see if he goes out within the next ten or fifteen minutes. Suppose you take the cab and go to Locarno’s Grill. I’ll be along in twenty minutes or half an hour.”