Judge Bolton said, “The Court noticed that, when Mr. Mason made his statement about the real reason Mr. Baylor could not raise his right hand, Miss Elliston slipped out of the courtroom. In order to dispose of the case at bar, the Court suggests that the district attorney instruct the officers to pick up Nellie Elliston for questioning. The Court might also suggest that it views with the greatest disapproval attempts to bolster the recollection of a witness who is making an identification so that she will not be shaken on cross-examination.

  “The Court takes judicial cognizance of the fact that many of our miscarriages of justice are the result of mistaken identification, and suggests that, when a witness is making an identification, the witness be permitted to pick a person from a line-up under test conditions which are conducted with scrupulous fairness.”

  “And,” Perry Mason said, “in order to keep the record straight, and in view of Mr. Baylor’s statement, I now wish to call my last witness, Fern Driscoll.”

  “Who?” Judge Bolton snapped. And then added angrily, “Is this a trick, Mr. Mason?”

  “This is not a trick,” Mason said. “I wish to call Fern Driscoll as my next witness. She is waiting in the witness room. If the bailiff will please summon her, I will—”

  “Order!” Judge Bolton shouted. “Order in the courtroom! I will have no more demonstrations. The spectators will remain orderly or I will clear the courtroom!”

  Judge Bolton turned to Mason. “I trust, Mr. Mason,” he said acidly, “that you are not attempting to impose upon the Court to obtain a dramatic effect. Having called Miss Driscoll as a witness, the Court is going to consider it as an abuse of the process of the Court unless you are able to produce that witness.”

  “Here she is now,” Mason said.

  Abruptly the courtroom became tensely quiet as a rather tall, dark-eyed, chestnut-haired, young woman walked slowly to the witness stand, held up her right hand, and was sworn.

  “Your name?” Judge Bolton asked.

  “Fern Driscoll,” she said.

  Judge Bolton glowered at Perry Mason. “Proceed!” he said.

  “Would you kindly tell us what happened after you left the employ of the Baylor Manufacturing and Development Company in Lansing, Michigan?” Mason asked.

  “I left there under circumstances that made me very despondent,” she said. “I felt that I was no longer welcome in the organization. I started driving west with my car.”

  “And you picked up a hitchhiker?” Mason asked.

  She nodded.

  “And what happened?”

  “The hitchhiker was a young woman who told me a story about being down on her luck. I guess she was. She told me she had listened to the importunities of a married man who told her that he loved her, that he was going to get a divorce and marry her. She found out that he was completely insincere, utterly ruthless, and when she went to him and told him she was in trouble, he simply laughed at her. He threw her out. She had lost her friends. She had no money.”

  “Go on,” Mason said.

  “I think,” Fern Driscoll said, “the young woman was temporarily insane. She was desperate. I had a little money. She watched for an opportunity, clubbed me over the head, grabbed my purse, knocked me unconscious, and rolled me out on the road. When I regained consciousness, I found that she had taken my car, my suitcase, and all of my belongings. I reported the theft, but no one seemed particularly concerned.

  “I felt certain my car would be recovered eventually. I even hoped nothing very serious would happen to the young woman who had stolen it. She was emotionally unstable and I believe temporarily insane. She had come to believe the world owed a living to both her and to her unborn child. It was quite in keeping with her emotional state for her to hold up a bank.

  “No one paid any particular attention to me or made any effort to recover my property. It wasn’t until the press announced that the identity of the bank robber was known and that Fern Driscoll had done the job, that the F.B.I. went into action. That organization located me within an hour.

  “Needless to say, I knew nothing about the fact that I was supposed to have been murdered, or that this young woman was on trial, or that she wound up with my purse and my identification.”

  “Was the defendant who is here in court the young woman hitchhiker who stole your car?” Mason asked.

  “Absolutely not!”

  Mason turned to the popeyed Hamilton Burger and smiled. “Your witness,” he said.

  Burger said, “No … no questions.”

  “That’s my case, Your Honor,” Mason said smiling.

  “Do you have any further evidence?” Judge Bolton asked Hamilton Burger.

  The district attorney merely shook his head.

  “The case against the defendant is dismissed,” Judge Bolton said. “Court’s adjourned.”

  Fern Driscoll started to leave the witness stand, then suddenly stopped, her eyes on the tall man who was hurrying toward her.

  “Forrie!” she said quietly.

  Forrester Baylor didn’t waste time in conversation. He simply took her in his arms, held her close to him, and made no attempt to conceal the tears which were coursing down his cheeks.

  “My darling!” he said at length. “My darling …! Oh, my darling …!”

  So intent were the newspaper photographers on catching the scene, that Mason and his client were able to slip out of the courtroom.

  Chapter 18

  Mason and Della Street entered the lawyer’s private office.

  Della Street moved close to Mason, held his arm, and he could feel her trembling.

  “Chief,” she said, “I’m so darned excited, and so … so … I want to cry.”

  Mason patted her shoulder. “Go ahead and cry.”

  “The look in his eyes—he really did love her, Chief! He really did! I mean he really does!”

  “He shouldn’t have let her get away,” Mason said. “He was like so many men who take too much for granted.”

  She looked at him for a long, searching moment, then asked, “How in the world did you know she was alive?”

  “When people start doing things that are definitely and decidedly out of character, you know that there’s been a mistake somewhere,” Mason said.

  “Harriman Baylor might have paid money to Carl Harrod and started working with Carl Harrod, if Harrod had the letters his son had written to Fern Driscoll.

  “However, Harrod didn’t have those letters. I had them.

  “We know that Harrod was stalemated. He couldn’t sell his story without proof. He couldn’t get proof until he got the letters, and he couldn’t get the letters. Yet suddenly Harriman Baylor began to be very palsy-walsy with Carl Harrod.

  “And as we gradually began to get the picture of Fern Driscoll, we learned that everything in connection with her as the hitchhiker was out of character. She wasn’t the sort of girl who would have been in the second month of pregnancy, who would have tried to wreck Mildred Crest’s automobile. The whole thing simply didn’t add together into a total.

  “Then when I learned that the money in Fern Driscoll’s purse had come from a bank robbery, that Fern Driscoll’s car had been found wrecked where it had evidently been driven off the road, it didn’t take too much brainwork to realize that the woman who had wrecked Mildred Crest’s car wasn’t Fern Driscoll at all. After all, we only knew she had Fern Driscoll’s purse and suitcase and was using Fern Driscoll’s name.

  “Therefore, I felt that if we could broadcast the fact that Fern Driscoll was wanted for the robbery of a national bank, we’d probably get some fast action. Fortunately we did. Paul Drake’s correspondent was able to get Fern Driscoll on a midnight plane, giving a happy solution to an otherwise puzzling case. Then, by calling Harriman Baylor to the stand, we had the whole case really buttoned up.”

  “But you wouldn’t have ever thought of calling him unless you had known—”

  “I should have known a lot sooner than I did,” Mason said savagely. “I made the mistake of looking at things from the police viewpoint instead of from an objective viewpoint. I knew that Mildred Crest couldn’t possibly have stabbed him with that ice pick which was produced in court. Therefore, either the police had to have mixed up the ice picks, or Nellie Elliston was the only person who could have killed Carl Harrod.”

  “What about Mildred Crest?” Della Street asked. “What’s going to become of her?”

  Mason’s face became granite-hard. “Mildred Crest,” he said, “is going to have a very nice job with the Baylor Manufacturing and Development Company. And Mr. Harriman Baylor is going to see to it that she advances just as fast and just as far as her ability warrants.”

  Della Street looked up at him with misty eyes.

  “Will you please bend over,” she said, “so I can kiss you on the forehead?”

  Mason regarded her with eyes that were tender. He said gently, “I’m afraid, Della, I can’t bend quite that far. You won’t mind if I’m a few inches short, will you?”

  “Not at all,” she told him.

  About the Author

  Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

  Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) is a prolific American author best known for his works centered on the lawyer-detective Perry Mason. At the time of his death in March of 1970, in Ventura, California, Gardner was “the most widely read of all American writers” and “the most widely translated author in the world,” according to social historian Russell Nye. He was cited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the #1 Bestselling Writer of All Time. The first Perry Mason novel, The Case of The Velvet Claws, published in 1933, had sold twenty-eight million copies in its first fifteen years. In the mid-1950s, the Perry Mason novels were selling at the rate of twenty thousand copies a day. There have been six motion pictures based on his work and the hugely popular “Perry Mason” television series starring Raymond Burr, which aired for nine years and 271 episodes.

 

 

  Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll

 

 

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