Mrs. Gentrie said, “That’s really fine. Don’t you think you’d better straighten up Mr. Steele’s room?”

  “Oh, it isn’t time for that.”

  “It’s ten-thirty.”

  “Good heavens, how time flies. Yes, I suppose I should. Sometimes he comes home at noon. Do you know, Florence, I wonder if he’s really an architect. He left some sketches in his room yesterday, and they looked very crude and amateurish to me.”

  “I don’t think we should bother about his sketches, Rebecca.”

  “Well, good heavens, they were right where a body would notice them. They were right in his upper bureau drawer, right where I couldn’t help seeing them.”

  “Did he leave the bureau drawer open?”

  “Well, no; but you know how the dust collects on those handles, and when I was dusting, it pulled the drawer open just a little, so I peeked.”

  “An architect doesn’t necessarily have to be an artist.”

  “Well, perhaps not, but he certainly should be able to draw the floor plans of this house so it would look—well, professional.”

  “The floor plans of this house!”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. There was a complete sketch of the basement floor plan with the garages, my darkroom, the shelves, window, stairs, and everything.”

  Mrs. Gentrie said, “Well, I should think that would prove he was an architect and was interested in this old architecture.”

  Rebecca sniffed. “Like as not he’ll turn out to be snooping for some of these agencies, and a building inspector will show up to tell us that our foundations are defective and that we’re going to have to do a lot of expensive repair work.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, run along in and clean up the room, Rebecca.”

  Mrs. Gentrie had utilized an outside entrance two years ago to create a room and bath which could be rented. Delman Steele was a very recent tenant. He had moved in within the last ten days. Yet in that short time he had made himself quite one of the family. In the evening he frequently sat with Rebecca, helping her solve crossword puzzles or assisting her in the darkroom.

  The huge, rambling, old-fashioned house had its defects. It was hard enough to heat and to keep clean, but there was lots of space, and the rental from the room more than made up for a lot of the inconveniences due to the size of the house.

  Moreover, because the house was on a slope, two garages had been cut out of the basement. One of these garages was rented to R. E Hocksley, who lived in one of the flats next door. Mrs. Gentrie had never seen Hocksley himself, but his secretary, who came in by the day, Opal Sunley, was always on hand to pay the garage rent promptly in advance. That started Mrs. Gentrie thinking about Junior. Junior had been evidencing quite an interest in Opal Sunley lately. Junior was only nineteen. In a way, he was old enough to take care of himself; but lately there had been a smug expression about Opal’s eyes that Mrs. Gentrie didn’t like. Opal was four or five years older than Junior, and Mrs. Gentrie felt certain she’d been married and was separated from her husband. It would be a lot better if Junior would spend more time with some of the girls in his own set. Suppose Opal was twenty-three or twenty-four. Those few years made a big difference.

  Mrs. Gentrie sighed with the realization that the years, of late, had begun to flit by with smooth, streamlined speed.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Gentrie awakened sometime during the night with the vague feeling that she had heard a door open and close, and steps on the stairs—the cautious steps of someone trying to be quiet and succeeding only in being furtive.

  It was that time of the night when weary muscles and tired nerves wrap themselves in the mantle of slumber as in a protective cloak, drugging the senses into an oblivion so deep that sounds, penetrating through to the consciousness, are robbed of significance.

  Mrs. Gentrie felt no apprehension, only a mild irritation. Her sleep-numbed senses struggled with her uneasiness and won the argument. As soon as the sounds themselves ceased to register, she slipped tranquilly back into a deeper slumber, from which she was aroused abruptly by some sound so sinister that she found herself sitting bolt upright in bed, trying to call back a noise which had already become an echo in her ears.

  At her side, Arthur Gentrie said sleepily, “Whatsmatter?”

  “I thought I heard something, Arthur.”

  “Goschleep.”

  “Arthur it sounded like—like a door banging or—or—or a shot.”

  Arthur Gentrie rolled over, said, “ ’Sall right,” and almost immediately settled down into a rhythm of breathing which soon deepened into a gentle snore.

  Mrs. Gentrie could hear sounds on the stairs again, the steps of someone trying to be quiet, yet someone who was in a hurry. A board creaked.

  Mrs. Gentrie switched on the light over her bed. She looked at the sleeping form of her husband; then realized that before she could waken him to a realization of the emergency, it would be too late to do anything about it. She slid out of bed, flung her robe around her, kicked her feet into slippers, and opened the door which led to the hallway.

  Down at the far end of the corridor, by the bathroom door, a dim night light furnished a vague sort of illumination which was hardly brilliant enough to penetrate the shadows near the doorways.

  Mrs. Gentrie rubbed sleep from her eyes, walked over toward the head of the stairs. She paused to listen, and could hear nothing. The insidious chill of the night air stole the warmth from her body, and Mrs. Gentrie wrapped the robe more tightly around her. She shivered nervously. She knew that an ominous noise had wakened her yet her mind could conjure up only an uncertain memory of that sound. It might have been a slamming door. It might have been that someone had fallen over a chair, or . . . well, it might have been the sound of a backfire from a truck somewhere. Mrs. Gentrie, sufficiently wide awake now to be more matter-of-fact, refused to consider the possibility of a shot.

  Then from the dark bowels of the house there came another sound, a dull, muffled, thudding noise as though someone had struck against something in the dark, or knocked something down. This noise came very definitely from the lower floor. That called for activity on the part of her husband.

  Mrs. Gentrie hurried back to the bedroom. She was shivering now, and abruptly conscious of the fact that a night wind was blowing the lace curtains, billowing them into miniature balloons that remained distended for a while, then collapsed, letting the curtains fall against the screen with an audible slapping noise.

  Mrs. Gentrie had been the first to bed. Her husband had been puttering around with painting in the cellar. That was what came of trusting Arthur to open the windows. He’d neglected to pull back the curtains. There might be an intruder on the lower floor, but Mrs. Gentrie considered the curtains to be the matter of paramount importance just then. Slapping against that dusty screen, they’d get themselves filled with dirt. . . . “Arthur,” she called as she crossed the room and looped back the curtains.

  Her husband failed to respond. She had to shake him awake, impressing upon him the fact that there’d been a series of noises.

  “Junior coming in,” he said.

  Mrs. Gentrie looked at the clock. It was thirty-five minutes past midnight. “He’ll have been in long before this,” she said.

  “Look in his room?”

  “No. I tell you it was someone running, stumbling over something.”

  “It was Junior coming in and the wind blowing a door shut.”

  “But I heard some other noises from down on the lower floor.”

  “Wind,” he said, then as her very silence became sufficiently pronounced to constitute a contradiction, “Well, I’ll go take a look.”

  She knew that Arthur’s look would be perfunctory. She could hear him moving around on the lower floor, switching on lights. She wondered about Junior. Once more she walked down the corridor toward the head of the stairs. Junior’s room was the first on the right as you came up the stairs. His door was closed. She opened it gently, looked inside.

  “Junior.”

  There was no answer.

  Somehow, the dark interior of the room indicated that it was empty. She clicked on a light switch. Junior wasn’t in his room. The unwrinkled, smooth, white counterpane seemed to Mrs. Gentrie a fresh cause for alarm. But the plodding steps of her husband, climbing wearily back up the staircase, seemed, somehow, reassuring in a matter-of-fact sort of way. And suddenly, she wanted to shield Junior—didn’t want her husband to know he wasn’t in.

  “Was anyone down there?” she asked, moving away from the door of Junior’s room.

  “Of course not,” he said. “You heard the cellar door bang shut. The wind blew it shut, and Mephisto jumped . . .”

  “The cellar door!”

  “Yes, going down from the kitchen.”

  “Why, it’s always kept closed. It. . .”

  “No. I left it open tonight. I did some painting down there, and wanted to let the air circulate. The wind blew it shut, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Gentrie felt sheepish. The very weariness in her husband’s voice, the dejected slump of his shoulders as he walked down the corridor, carried conviction to her mind. She had become nervous, permitted herself to magnify and distort noises of the night. Arthur, plodding down the corridor, had the attitude of a man who has learned from twenty-one years of married life that women will get those ideas and send men prowling around on nocturnal investigations. Nothing can be done about it, so there’s no need to remonstrate after it’s all over; just get back into bed, try to get warm again, and back to sleep.

  Mrs. Gentrie, feeling apologetic, followed her husband to bed. She snuggled close to him, heard once more the gentle rhythm of his breathing, felt the delicious warmth of drowsiness stealing over her like some powerful drug dragging her into the welcome oblivion of sleep.

  The alarm wakened her in the morning. She shut it off and pulled down the window. Putting on her robe, she moved around the upper floor, pressing the controls which turned on the gas furnace in the cellar. In the dim light of early morning, her fears of the night before seemed rather ludicrous. But she couldn’t resist looking into Junior’s room.

  His clothes were piled in a careless heap on a chair by the window. He lay wrapped in the blankets, deep in slumber.

  It was only after she had seen him that Mrs. Gentrie realized how much she had feared that when she opened the door the unwrinkled counterpane and smooth white of the pillowcases would greet her once more, just as they had done at thirty-five minutes past midnight.

  Mrs. Gentrie closed the door quietly. Junior didn’t need to get up for an hour yet.

  So the big house took up once more the burden of its daily routine—a routine which differed no whit from that of any other day until the sound of screaming sirens tore the silence of the neighborhood into shreds, and completely disrupted the smooth functioning of Mrs. Gentrie’s domestic machinery.

  Chapter 3

  Perry Mason was standing at the cigar counter buying a package of cigarettes when Della Street came through the doorway, carried along by the stream of people pouring in from the street. Several masculine eyes looked at her with approval as she swung to the outer edge of the file of in-pouring office workers. From the straight seams of her stockings to the tilt of her chin, she represented a feminine bundle of neat efficiency which was remarkably easy on the eyes.

  Perry Mason, tossing a quarter on the glass counter and turning back toward the elevators, encountered Della Street’s smiling eyes looking up at him. “What is the rush?” she asked.

  Mason gripped her elbows with his hand. “Surprise!” he said.

  “I’ll say it’s a surprise. What’s bringing you down this early? Is there a murder in the air that I haven’t sniffed? I didn’t expect to see you before eleven, not after the way you were working last night when I went home. I suppose the office is a litter.”

  “Your supposition is entirely correct,” he said, “and don’t try putting away the books in the law library. I’ve worked out a new theory in that Consolidated case. The books are all lying face open, piled one on top of the other in the exact order that I want to follow in dictating an office brief.”

  They walked together into one of the crowded elevators, stood back from the door, being pushed into the intimacy of a close proximity by the packed humanity. Mason’s hand, still on Della Street’s arm, tightened into that little gesture of friendship and understanding which was the keynote of their relationship.

  “Going to win that case?” she asked.

  He nodded, smiled at her, but said nothing until the elevator stopped to let them out, then as they walked down the long corridor, he said, “It’s a cinch now. I always thought it should have been presented on the doctrine of ‘last clear chance,’ but I couldn’t find the authorities to support that contention. Last night about eleven o’clock I uncovered just the line of decisions I wanted.”

  “Nice going,” she said.

  Della Street unlocked the door of Mason’s private office, said, “I’ll take a peek at the outer office and see what’s doing. I suppose you’ll want the mail?”

  Mason grinned. “Not all the mail. High-grade it for checks. Throw the bills away, and put the other correspondence in the deferred file.”

  “Where it will duly repose for a week or two, and then get transferred to the dead file,” she said.

  “Oh, well, if there’s anything important, you’ll know what to do about it.”

  Mason, who hated all letters with the aversion a man of action feels for routine work, hung up his hat in the cloak closet, walked over to the window, looked down for a moment at the confusion of tangled traffic, then turned back to his desk. Picking up a law book which lay open on his blotter, he started studying the decision. As he followed an obscure legal principle through an intricate maze of legal reasoning, the corners of his eyes puckered with the enjoyment of concentration. Slowly, as though hardly aware of what he was doing, he pulled out the swivel chair and settled down at his desk without interrupting his reading.

  Several minutes later the door opened and his confidential secretary, easing her way into the room, waited for him to look up. It was almost five minutes before, turning a page, he saw her standing there. “What is it?” he asked.

  “An aviator who wants to see you on behalf of his stepfather,” Della Street said. “He’s in the outer office.”

  “Not interested,” Mason said. “I have this Consolidated case on my mind and don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “He’s a tall, handsome devil,” she said, “and knows it. He says that his stepfather is a cripple and can’t come himself, that he has a most important legal matter to take up with you, that because there was a shooting affair last night in the flat below, he’s afraid the situation may be complicated.”

  Mason put down the law book somewhat wistfully. “The gunshot does it,” he announced with a grin. “I never can concentrate on a brief when there’s shooting going on. What’s his name, Della?”

  “Rodney Wenston. He’s one of these playboy aviation enthusiasts; living, I gather, largely on funds inherited from his mother. I doubt if his stepfather entirely approves of him, and I also doubt if he entirely approves of his stepfather—refers to him as the guv’nor.”

  “How old?” Mason asked.

  “Somewhere around thirty-five. Tall, straight, and has that slow-moving assurance of a man who’s accustomed to the best in life. He has a lisp when he’s embarrassed or self-conscious and you can see it annoys him.”

  “He’s not flying for a living, just as a sport?”

  “A hobby, he calls it.”

  “You seem to have found out a good deal about him.”

  “What it takes to get information I have,” she told him coolly. “But this time I didn’t even have to work. The man really loosened up. Perhaps that’s why I’m prejudiced in his favor. He doesn’t regard a secretary as a wall to be jumped over or detoured but as a necessary part of a business organization. As soon as I told him I was your secretary and asked him about his business, he opened right up.”

  Mason said, “With that in his favor and the gunshot as a lure, we’ll certainly give him an audience. What about the lisp, Della?”

  “Oh, it isn’t bad. He’s really very distinguished looking, tall, straight, blue eyes, blond hair and lots of it, a nice profile, probably more than a little spoiled, but quite definitely a personality. The lisp embarrasses him a lot but he gets over it somewhat after he’s warmed up to his conversation.”

  “All right, let’s talk with him,” Mason said.

  Della Street picked up the telephone, said, “Send Mr. Wenston in, Gertie.” She dropped the telephone receiver, said to Mason, “Now, don’t start reading that law book again.”

  “I won’t,” Mason promised.

  “Your mind is just about half focused on that book right now.”

  Reluctantly, Mason turned the book face down on his desk. The door of his private office opened, and Rodney Wenston bowed deferentially. “Good morning, Mr. Mason. I hope you’ll pardon this early intrusion but the fact ith the guv’nor is all worked up. Apparently, there’s been a shooting in the lower flat, and he’s afraid officers will be thwarming all over the place to interfere with what he wants to see you about. He says it’s dreadfully important and I’m commissioned to get a habeas corpus, mandamus, or whatever you lawyers call it, to see that you get there at once. My stepfather promises to pay you anything you want if you’ll come immediately.”

  “Can you tell me the nature of the business?” Mason asked.

  Wenston smiled. “Frankly, I can’t. My stepfather ith one of those rugged individualists. I was to act as intermediary. He’s . . .”

  The telephone rang. Della Street picked it up, said, “Hello,” then, shielding the mouthpiece with her hand, said to Mason, “This is he on the phone now. Elston A. Karr. Says he sent his stepson to explain matters, and he’d like to talk with you personally.”