“Did they explain to you the importance of the time element before you mentioned the exact time of that telephone conversation to them?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And you were shrewd enough to realize that this might give you an advantage, so you made some statement to the effect that you saw no reason why you should co-operate with the officers if they were going to raid your place of business, and arrest you on a felony charge, did you not?”

  “Well, naturally, I didn’t feel any too cordial.”

  “And one of the officers said that that might be fixed up, didn’t he?”

  “Well, he said that if the prosecuting witness didn’t show up, it was no skin off their shins.”

  “All right,” Mason said, “now getting back to what you did after you left Hogarty’s apartment. You telephoned a friend of yours. Isn’t it a fact that that telephone call was to the Home Kitchen Cafe, and that you talked with Hazel Stickland?”

  Serle’s face showed alarmed dismay. “Why. . . I. . .”

  “Remember,” Mason said, leveling a rigid forefinger at him, “you’re under oath.”

  “Well, yes. I did call her, but not at the cafe.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial, and not proper cross-examination,” Kittering said.

  “Sustained,” Judge Knox ruled. “You may fix the time of the conversation, counselor. The subject matter would seem beyond the scope of proper cross-examination.”

  “Your Honor, I think this conversation is pertinent,” Mason said.

  “I don’t, not as the question is asked at the present time. You are, of course, the cross-examiner, and, therefore, have the right to ask leading questions. If you think the conversation is pertinent, frame a question to show that fact.”

  Mason, turning to Serle, inquired, “Isn’t it a fact that you told Hazel Stickland to pack her things, and leave town, that you would meet her, give her some money, and explain?”

  “Same objection,” Kittering said.

  Judge Knox frowned at Perry Mason. “Is it your contention, counselor, that this has anything to do with the crime?”

  “Yes,” Perry Mason said. “This girl was a waitress at the Home Kitchen Cafe, and was quite friendly with this witness. On the night of the murder, Serle located Bill Hogarty, before Hogarty went to his apartment. He took Hogarty to the Home Kitchen Cafe for dinner, Hazel Stickland waited on them. The restaurant had two ‘specials’ for dinner that night. One was filet of sole and baked potatoes, the other roast lamb chops, peas, and baked potatoes. Serle and Hogarty had the meat dinner. . .. I have here a menu from that restaurant showing the regular weekly dishes.”

  “What time was this?” Judge Knox inquired, puzzled.

  “Approximately six o’clock or six-fifteen,” Mason said.

  “But this witness had dinner in the apartment with Hogarty the night of the murder,” Judge Knox pointed out. “There seems to be no question of that fact.”

  “Look at his face if you think he did,” Mason said.

  Kittering was on his feet. “I object to this colloquy between court and counsel, and I object to that statement on the part of counsel. I assign it as prejudicial misconduct.”

  Judge Knox glanced swiftly at Serle’s white, drawn face, then looked back to Perry Mason. “The objection is overruled,” he said. “Answer the question.”

  “Isn’t that a fact?” Mason asked. “Isn’t that what you told her?”

  “No,” Serle said, in a strained, harsh voice.

  “You tried to get Hogarty to come through with bail. He wouldn’t come through,” Mason said. “You knew that even if you were bailed out, you’d never be allowed to reopen your business. You were furious. You paid him money for that business. You demanded a return of the purchase price; and you also insisted that he must put up bail. He refused. You started brooding. You knew that he had the better part of twenty thousand dollars in his possession, probably on his person in a money belt. After you separated, you began to wonder whether it would be possible for you to murder him and get that money, but do it in such a way that you would have a perfect alibi. You knew something about how autopsy surgeons fix the time of death from the extent to which digestion has progressed. You knew that at six-fifteen, Hogarty had eaten, and exactly what he had eaten.

  “Almost two hours later, you went to his apartment, and killed him. You paused long enough to order a restaurant in the block to bring you up food that was exactly the same as that which Hogarty had consumed in the restaurant. When the waiter arrived with the food you were in Hogarty’s bedroom, apparently engaged in a spirited conversation with him. . . but Hogarty was already dead. You were pitching your voice to two different tones, and doing all the talking yourself. Isn’t that right?”

  “It’s a lie!” Serle shouted, his voice was strained and hoarse.

  Mason went on calmly and remorselessly. “You waited until the plates had arrived, and then scraped all of the contents of the plates into the garbage chutes.”

  “I did not.”

  “Then you left, intent upon building up an alibi. You were careful to see that the door was locked. You didn’t know Marcia Whittaker had a key to that apartment. You left there after the murder and went to the pool room where you knew you could find several of your cronies, and took occasion to tell them that you were going to call Hogarty at around ten-thirty.

  “Then, to clinch matters, and make it appear that the decedent had been murdered right after that telephone conversation, you pretended to dial the number and talk with him on the telephone. You pretended to be engaged in a conversation about bail. And from the pool room you went directly to the police station, figuring that that would be the safest way for you to clinch your alibi.”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Serle said with dogged persistence.

  Kittering, who had recovered his composure, said, “Your Honor, I object to this. This is an attempt to browbeat the witness. It. . .”

  “Objection overruled,” Judge Knox said. “Proceed, Mr. Mason.”

  “Better think again,” Mason said, “because I’m going to prove what I say, Serle.”

  Serle clamped his lips tightly together, and said nothing, but the skin across the top of his forehead began to glisten as it slimed with cold perspiration.

  “Now,” Mason went on calmly, “let’s go back to the night of the murder. You went to the Home Kitchen Cafe. Hazel Stickland waited on your table. She. . .”

  “I didn’t eat there the night of the murder,” Serle blurted. “I ate with Hogarty in his apartment. I tell you, I never was at the Home Kitchen Cafe any time that night.”

  Mason said, calmly, “You were there, Serle. You and Bill Hogarty. You may have arranged to get rid of the waitress, but you perhaps failed to notice that two girls were seated at the table next to you, and that Hogarty was surreptitiously trying a pickup.”—Mason whirled abruptly to face the audience. “Miss Gertrude Lade,” he called out. “Will you stand up please?”

  Gertrude Lade stood up.

  Mason, pointing a rigid forefinger, said, “Look at that young woman, Serle. I am going to ask you if you have ever seen her before—if, as a matter of fact, she wasn’t seated at the table next to you when you were eating dinner in the Home Kitchen Cafe on Friday, the seventh of this month?”

  Gertrude Lade said, “That’s him all right.”

  The deputy district attorney jumped to his feet, spouting objections. Mason held up his hand, and said, “No, no, Miss Lade, not a word from you! Please! Your time will come later, you and the young woman who was with you. I just wanted to ask Mr. Serle to identify you, that’s all. Sit down please.”

  Gertrude Lade sat down.

  Serle’s face had turned a pasty green.

  At that moment, the door of the courtroom opened, and two deputies escorted Emily Milicant into the room.

  Mason met her eyes in a stony stare, whirled suddenly to face Serle once more. “You still insist that you ate dinner in the company of Bill Hogarty in his apartment and not at the Home Kitchen Cafe?” Mason asked.

  Serle hesitated a moment, then blurted, “We ate two dinners. Once there and once in the apartment. He was still hungry.”

  Mason smiled. “And were you so hungry,” he asked, “that you ate up everything off the plate?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want this court to understand that you ate the jackets from the baked potatoes?”

  “Yes,” Serle said. “I always eat them.”

  “And,” Mason observed, “you also swallowed the bones from the chops, did you not?”

  Serle’s eyes stared at Mason in speechless fear.

  Mason said, “You’ll have to try and do better on your next murder, Serle. When you scraped the plates down the garbage chute, you made a fatal error in neglecting to remember that it is customary to leave bones on the plates.”

  Mason smiled affably at Judge Knox, and said, “It is the contention of the defense that when Alden Leeds arrived at the apartment, Hogarty was dead. It is, I presume, true that Milicant was really Hogarty. He had been blackmailing this defendant, and it was only natural, although perhaps not legally proper, for the defendant to try and regain possession of papers which he knew were in possession of the dead man, papers which would make public the very disclosures he had sought to suppress. And so the defendant searched the apartment—which accounts for his fingerprints. He made a frantic effort to find those papers.”

  “But,” Kittering countered, jumping to his feet, “those papers were papers which connected him with the attempted murder of Bill Hogarty, with the stealing of his property, and. . .”

  “Oh, no,” Mason said with a smile. “Those papers related to an entirely different matter. The defendant found them, thank you. They have been destroyed.”

  And Mason sat down.

  Serle yelled, “It’s a lie!”

  Kittering said, “Your Honor, I object to. . .”

  Mason whirled to face Kittering, “If you were a little more interested in finding the real criminal, and a little less in trying to convict an innocent man, merely because you have started to prosecute him, you’d be cooperating with me in this thing instead of opposing me. . . . When the first check was given to Hogarty, the bank had to cash it, but, thinking it might be blackmail, they wrote down the numbers on the bills. Serle got those bills after the murder of Hogarty. I think you’ll find them in his possession right now.”

  Judge Knox said, “This court is going to take a twenty-minute recess. We. . .”

  He broke off as Serle, shouting, “I refuse to stand for this persecution,” streaked across the courtroom and through the door of the judge’s chambers.

  Judge Knox shouted at the deputy sheriff, who had Leeds in charge, “Get him! Get him! Don’t sit there like a fool!”

  The deputy sheriff sprinted into action.

  Mason scratched a match on the sole of his shoe, and lit a cigarette.

  Della Street squeezed his wrist enthusiastically. “Chief,” she said, “I could dance a jig on the judge’s bench.”

  “Take it easy, “he told her. “Be nonchalant. Light a cigarette. Remember people are watching you. Act on the assumption that you can pull a rabbit out of the hat any time any place. How about a cigarette?”

  “Give me the one you’re smoking, Chief,” she said. “I couldn’t light a cigarette to save my life. Why did you make that crack about Alden Leeds finding Hogarty dead, and then searching the apartment?”

  “Because I wanted to explain his fingerprints,” Mason said, “and I wanted to give Emily Milicant a tip on the Hogarty angle. I. . .”

  He broke off as Kittering came storming over to their table.

  Kittering, his voice so indignant that he could hardly talk, sputtered, “What the devil do you mean. . . You’ll be disbarred for this.”

  “For what?” Mason asked.

  Kittering pointed an indignant finger at Gertrude Lade. “That girl ” he stormed. “She was no more in the restaurant than I was! One of my investigators tells me she’s in your office, working at the switchboard.”

  “That’s right,” Mason observed, calmly exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “You can’t pull that stuff and get away with it,” Kittering stormed.

  “Why not?”

  Kittering said, “Because it’s illegal; it’s unethical; it’s. . . I believe it’s a contempt of court. I’m going to see Judge Knox, and tell him the whole contemptible scheme.”

  Kittering strode away in the direction of the judge’s chambers. Mason continued to smoke calmly and placidly.

  “Chief,” Della Street said in a half whisper, “don’t you suppose Judge Knox will figure it is a contempt of court?”

  “I don’t give a damn what he figures,” Mason said, elevating his heels to the seat of an adjoining chair. “I hope he does. It’s time we had a showdown. It’s getting so that any time we don’t follow the conventional methods of solving a case, somebody wants to haul us up before the Grievance Committee of the Bar Association. To hell with them! It’s time they learned where they get off.”

  “But, Chief,” she said, “this was. . .”

  Mason interrupted her to nod his head toward where the two deputies, who had escorted Emily Milicant into the room, were engaged in a low-pitched conversation with Alden Leeds.

  “Look at them,” he said. “They’re pulling the same old tactics. They’re telling Leeds that Emily Milicant has confessed to everything, and that there’s no use trying to hold out any longer. They think they have the right to pull any of this third degree stuff, that if we do it, we’re shysters. To hell with that stuff. I. . .”

  He broke off as Judge Knox, his face grave, appeared at the door of his chambers and spoke to the bailiff. The bailiff crossed over to Mason, and said, “The judge wants to see you in his chambers immediately, Mr. Mason.”

  Mason ground out his cigarette, and said, “Wait here, Della If anyone asks you anything clam up on them. Don’t talk, and above all don’t try to explain.”

  Mason strolled on into the judge’s chambers, heedless of the babble of excited voices which filled the courtroom, of the curious eyes which followed him.

  Judge Knox said, “Mr. Mason, Mr. Kittering has made a charge of such gravity that I feel I should call on you for an explanation before taking any steps. If this charge is true, it is perhaps not only a contempt of the court, but a flagrant violation of professional ethics.”

  Mason seated himself comfortably, crossed his legs, and said, “It’s true.”

  “You mean that this young woman was planted in the courtroom for this purpose, that she is an employee of yours, and was not at the restaurant?”

  “That’s right,” Mason said, and then added, after a moment,

  “There’s been a lot of loose talk around here about what constitutes professional ethics. I’m glad to have a showdown.”

  “You won’t be so glad if the court considers it contempt,” Judge Knox said grimly.

  Mason said, “It’s about time the courts realized that they’re agencies for the administration of justice. They’re instruments of the people. They’re here, not to unwind red tape, but to administer justice. I’ll admit my cross-examination was irregular, but what’s wrong with it? I asked Gertrude Lade to stand up. She stood up. I asked Serle if he didn’t remember this young woman as having been at the table next to him. If he’d been telling the truth, he could have said, ‘no,’that she couldn’t have been there because he wasn’t at the table, and that was all there was to it.”

  “But you had this young woman swear she was there,” Kittering protested.

  “I had her do nothing of the sort,” Mason said, glancing contemptuously at the excited deputy. “In the first place, she wasn’t under oath. In the second place, all she said was, ‘That’s him.” Obviously, it was. He’s never claimed to be anyone else. I could point at Judge Knox, and yell, ‘That’s him.’ It wouldn’t be a falsehood. He is him. He’s he, if you want to be grammatical.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” Kittering said.

  “All right,” Mason said. “We’ll debate the point. You take the side that he isn’t he. I’ll say he is. Now, what proof have you to offer?”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Kittering said.

  “It’s what you said,” Mason observed.

  “Well, you know what I meant.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you meant,” Mason commented. “I’m talking about what was said. That’s all Gertrude Lade said. She said, ‘That’s him.’”

  “Well, you know what you intended her words to mean.”

  Mason sighed. “She said it was him. I still contend that it was him. Dammit, it is him! I’ll go into any court on any contempt proceedings, or otherwise, and insist that it’s him. Serle is Serle. That’s all she said:—‘It’s him.’”

  Judge Knox’s face softened somewhat. The ghost of a twinkle appeared at the corner of his eyes.

  Mason followed his advantage. “I have a right to ask anyone in the courtroom to stand up and then point that standing person out to a witness when I’m asking a question. Try and find some law which says I can’t.”

  Judge Knox regarded Mason with thoughtful eyes. At length, he said, “Mason, your mind is certainly not geared to a conventional groove. However, as a matter of justice, I am inclined to agree with you, and I don’t know but what I am, as a matter of technical law.”

  Mason said, “Why not? If we’d followed this case along conventional lines, Alden Leeds would have been bound over on that fingerprint evidence. He might have been convicted.”

  “He had no right to lie about it,” Kittering said.

  “He didn’t lie,” Mason observed. “He kept quiet.”

  “Well, he should have told us.”

  “That,” Mason said, “involves another difference of opinion. However, the law at present says he doesn’t have to. If you have any objection, you’ll have to change the law.”

  “He should have notified the authorities as soon as he discovered the body.”