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 co-operating 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, took a deep drag of his cigarette, 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.”

  “What makes you think he discovered the body?” Mason asked.

  “You said he did.”

  “I wasn’t under oath,” Mason observed.

  “But you were acting as his attorney.”

  “That’s right. But you can’t convict a man of a crime because of a statement his attorney has made. As a matter of fact, Leeds had never told me that he discovered the body. I’d never asked him that question in those specific words. I merely commented on what I thought had happened, in order to assist the court in arriving at a decision.”

  Judge Knox smiled. “It may interest you to know, counselor,” he said to Kittering, “that they caught Serle in the corridor. I don’t want to suggest to you how you should conduct your office, but if I were a deputy district attorney, I certainly would strike while the iron was hot, and try to get a confession from him.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kittering said savagely. “But I object to these damnable tactics.”

  Judge Knox frowned.

  Mason said, “You tapped my telephone line and listened in on confidential . . . ”

  “That isn’t the point,” Kittering interrupted. “The point is, that you tried to trick that . . . ”

  “What I did was perfectly legal,” Mason cut in, “but tapping our line was manifestly illegal. However, you close your eyes to that. Because you were getting something on me, you were perfectly willing to overlook the manner in which the evidence was obtained. You wouldn’t have known anything about the dead man being Bill Hogarty unless you’d taken advantage of information received through tapping my telephone line. If I’d tapped anyone’s telephone line or hired a detective agency to do it, you’d have had me arrested and instituted disbarment proceedings.”

  “Occasionally,” Kittering admitted to Judge Knox, “we have to condone certain irregularities in order to combat criminal activities. It’s a case where the ends justify the means.”

  “The ends in this case,” Mason observed, “would have been the conviction of an innocent man of first degree murder.”

  Kittering jumped to his feet. “You,” he said, “can’t . . . ”

  “I really think, counselor,” Judge Knox interrupted, “that you should get busy and start discharging the real duties of your office.”

  Mason smiled across at Judge Knox. “The attitude of the prosecution,” he said, “is that they don’t care so much about who committed a murder as about keeping me from winning a case.”

  “That’s not true,” Kittering shouted.

  Judge Knox fastened him with a stern eye. “It seems to be true,” he observed, and then added, “If your office has been listening to privileged communications over a tapped wire, it would seem that your position is definitely precarious. You understand, counselor, that if Alden Leeds had been guilty, the situation might have been different. Leeds’ innocence, however, puts your office in an entirely different position, and puts Mason in a different position, legally, ethically, and morally.”

  “Some day,” Kittering flared, “Mason will defend a guilty man, and then . . . ”

  Mason yawned, and said, “Well, if counsel doesn’t care to confine his discussion to the present, and wishes to neglect the duties of his office, to waste time in idle speculation on the future, I’d like to ask him what he thinks about railroad stocks as an investment . . . ”

  Kittering flung himself out of the door.

  Judge Knox stared across at Perry Mason. “You have to admit,” he said, “that you skate on pretty thin ice, Mason—how long have you known Serle was the guilty party?”

  “Not very long,” Mason admitted. “I should have known it a lot sooner than I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Mason explained, “it’s this way. Right from the first, the evidence showed dinner had been ordered at the Blue and White Restaurant, not in the usual manner, but in a most extraordinary manner. In other words, they didn’t ask the waiter what was on the menu and then make a selection. The waiter was told to get lamb chops, green peas, and potatoes, and if he didn’t have them available, to get them. Then again, the evidence showed right from the first that the plates were empty. It’s unusual for two men who are engaged in a hurried conference to order a dinner in that manner. It’s unusual for two men to both order the same thing. It’s unusual for men to clean up everything on the plates, and it’s absolutely unique for a man who has been eating a lamb chop to devour the bone. And you’ll remember the waiter testified that the plates were bare. Nothing remained on them.

  “Moreover, it’s always been my idea that when a man has an iron-clad alibi in a murder case, it’s a very good thing to inspect that alibi closely. While a man who has a genuine alibi can’t have committed a murder, nevertheless, a man who has committed a deliberate murder always tries to provide himself with an alibi. Serle was the only one involved who had an alibi. It looked iron-clad on the face of it, but alibis should never be taken at their face value.

  “It was quite apparent that the dead man had a large sum of cash in his possession. That money disappeared. It would seem, therefore, that at least one of the motives for the crime was robbery. Now Alden Leeds might have killed him because of that blackmail business, but he would never have robbed the corpse—not unless he had done so in an attempt to throw the officers off the trail. If he had done that, he would have been far too cautious to have left his fingerprints all over the apartment.

  “I knew that Serle ate regularly at the Home Kitchen Cafe. I knew that they had a weekly menu—that is, each day of the week they featured a special, the same dish on the same day.

  “The murder was committed on a Friday. Serle accompanied Conway or Milicant or Hogarty—or whatever you want to call him—to his apartment. They were both smoking cigars. At that time in the evening, a cigar usually represents an after-dinner smoke. And then I suddenly remembered what I myself had eaten at the Home Kitchen Cafe on Friday night—roast lamb, baked potatoes, green peas. And I had the menu that they use week after week to prove I wasn’t dreaming! A good chemical analysis would probably show the difference between beef and lamb after the digestive processes have stopped working, but the difference between roast lamb and broiled lamb, never.”

  Judge Knox said, “Personally, Mason, I think it’s a most remarkable piece of detective work, an example of sheer deductive genius.”

  Mason shook his head. “I’ll never forgive myself for becoming so engrossed in the incidental matters.—After all, Judge, that’s one thing a detective should guard against. He should never let his attention become so concentrated on the incidental matters that he feels they are other than mere incidentals.”

  Judge Knox studied him curiously. “What,” he asked, “were the incidental matters which so engrossed you?”

  “Minor matters,” Mason said, vaguely, “interesting but purely incidental.”

  Judge Knox smiled. “Are you, by any chance, referring to the identity of John Milicant as Bill Hogarty?”

  Mason said, “That really was a surprise to me, although I should have appreciated the significance of that clue of the frostbitten foot.”

  Judge Knox let the smile fade from his lips, although his eyes remained kindly. “Mason,” he said, “the proof that Milicant was Hogarty certainly seems rather vague and sketchy. If Milicant had been blackmailing Leeds, and one of Leeds’ relatives had called on him for an explanation, wouldn’t it have been only natural for Milicant to have used the documents in his possession to substantiate a spurious claim made by way of justification to the nephew that he actually was the Bill Hogarty who had been wronged by Leeds years ago? Wouldn’t this be the logical way to fabricate a justification for blackmail?”

  Mason’s face showed surprise. “That,” he said, “is an interesting question.”