“He probably couldn’t have done it in time. He’d have been handicapped. The best organized law enforcement agency in the country today is the one perfected by insurance companies to apprehend automobile thieves. They’ve worked out a perfect system of coördination. Ordinarily police don’t coördinate. They do in automobile cases. So I fixed things so Watson Clammert would be apprehended as a car thief. That got me quicker results, enabled us to have him arrested, and brought about his confession. After all, it was really very simple. By going to the Biltmore Hotel, establishing our identities as honeymooners, letting the clerk see our new car, and get interested in you, then having you conceal the car and report it as stolen, we started in motion the machinery which was bound to put a finger on Clammert. He was entirely unsuspecting. He was driving the car he had purchased under his assumed name. It was only a matter of hours until he’d be arrested.”

  “Well,” Della Street said, “the Lord knows your methods are unconventional, but I will say this for them, they’re effective.”

  He grinned at her.

  “And,” she said, “now that we’ve finished up this case, we have an extra Buick sedan on our hands. What are we going to do with it; sell it, or sell the convertible?”

  “No,” Mason said slowly, “we’d better keep them both.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “You see,” he said, “it’s a handy car to have around—in case I should ever want to go on a honeymoon.”

  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 Caretaker's Cat

 

 

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