“And she paid you one hundred and fifty dollars?” Drake asked.

  “No. She gave me a cheque for that amount. The cheque was no good. Yet she either wanted me to have that cheque or else she wanted the receipt – or both. Notice also, Paul, that the cheque was a single blank cheque with the name of the bank to be filled in. It had been torn from a pad of similar cheques. Those are the sort of blank cheques big firms have for the convenience of out-of-town customers who haven’t their chequebooks with them. This woman had torn a single cheque from such a pad.”

  Drake said, “You’re going too fast for me, Perry. Why would the have done that? She must have known you wouldn’t do anything more than accept the cheque for collection.”

  “She did it because she wanted me to have the cheque.”

  “Why, Perry?”

  Mason said, “We’ve acted so far on the premise she was part of the blackmailing setup. That premise won’t hold water. Let’s try the other angle. Suppose she was trying to give me a defence to the blackmail. Suppose she wanted me to be able to say to Hansell, ‘You’re nuts. Addison didn’t pay my fee. Veronica’s mother did. There’s the cheque to prove it.’”

  Drake whistled.

  Mason went on, “Now consider this. We have Ferrell taking a two weeks’ vacation just before the stockholders’ meeting to put across a super secret deal. We have Myrtle Northrup, the treasurer of the company, taking a similar vacation. Both vacations are at a very unusual time for vacations.”

  “But the Northrup woman hates Ferrell’s guts and is loyal to Addison.”

  Mason merely nodded.

  “And Ferrell had promised this redheaded chick to give her Myrtle Northrup’s job, which certainly means that he was going to fire Myrtle Northrup.”

  “Or promote her,” Mason said dryly, “so her job would be vacant.”

  Drake started thinking that over. Mason swung the wheel of the car.

  “Hey,” Drake said, “where are you going, Perry?”

  Mason said, “We are about to call on Myrtle C Northrup, Paul. And when we do, I think we’ll find out something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The bright morning sunlight gilded the tall white buildings in the apartment house district.

  Mason, bringing the car to a stop, said, “Okay, Paul, this is the place. Have your notebook ready, Della.”

  Mason led the way to the doorway of an apartment house, glanced at his wristwatch, said, “I’m afraid this is going to call for a pass key, Paul.”

  Drake grumblingly produced a small ring of pass keys.

  “I wish you’d use more conventional methods, Perry.”

  “It’s just the outer door of an apartment house,” Mason said. “No one’s going to say anything about that. It isn’t as though you were getting into a private apartment.”

  Drake grudgingly tried his keys. The third one snapped back the lock.

  “What’s the number?” Drake asked as they walked down a corridor.

  “Third floor,” Mason said. “321.”

  The elevator rattled up to the third floor. Mason found Apartment 321, jabbed the button.

  The door opened. An aroma of coffee and bacon greeted their nostrils. A woman, clad in a house coat, holding a morning newspaper in her hand, said, “I’m sorry I …”

  What else she was going to say was cut off in a gasp of consternation.

  Mason pushed the door open, said, “Come on in,” and entered the apartment.

  The trio filed in. Paul Drake and Della Street followed Mason. Drake kicked the door shut.

  Della Street, moving unobtrusively, slipped over to the table where an electric coffee percolator was bubbling, seated herself by an electric toaster, opened her shorthand notebook and unscrewed the cap from the pen.

  Mason said, “Perhaps I’d better introduce you folks. This is Paul Drake, head of the Drake Detective Agency, and this, Paul, is Myrtle C Northrup, holder of a small block of stock in the corporation that owns the department store on Broadway. The last time I saw her, she was masquerading as the mother of Veronica Dale – and I think Mrs Northrup is going to tell us just what happened out there at Ferrell’s country place the night he was killed. I think it’ll be better for you, Mrs Northrup.”

  The woman, her face a sickly yellow beneath her make-up, moved slowly backwards, as though hoping that by some magic a hole would open in the wall and enable her to disappear.

  Mason said, “I guess you thought that I wouldn’t find you, Mrs Northrup. After all, you left rather a broad trail. As the person who was in charge of the personnel department, you have given Veronica Dale a job at Mr Addison’s request. You, therefore, knew her background as well as the salary she was to get. When you interviewed her, she had filled out a card giving her age, the name of her mother, and a few other matters which enabled you to pose as the girl’s mother when you came to my office.

  “You were just about the only person who could have had that combination of correct and incorrect information at that time.

  “And, quite apparently, you were working with Ferrell to form a coalition of stockholders that would have enough stock to control the corporation at the stockholders’ meeting on the twenty-fifth. Now, suppose you tell us what went wrong.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said defiantly.

  Mason grinned. “You won’t deny that you came to my office and said you wanted to pay Veronica Dale’s bill for legal services? My secretary and my receptionist can both identify you.”

  “No,” she said slowly, “I won’t deny that.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I … I had a peculiar idea that I could save Mr Addison from being blackmailed.”

  “How did you know he was being blackmailed?”

  “I happened to have some business which took me to Mr Ferrell’s office, and while I was in there I heard this conversation in Mr Addison’s office. I could tell someone was threatening him. I went to the door and listened. I heard this – this despicable character call him Fatso!”

  “So then you listened to the whole thing?”

  She nodded.

  “And came to me to pose as Veronica Dale’s mother, so I’d have a worthless cheque signed Laura Mae Dale, which I could show the blackmailer?”

  “I thought that might help.”

  Mason said, “All right, you’ve admitted that readily enough because you realize I have witnesses who can identify you. Now, what do you have to say about going to Mr Ferrell’s house out in the country?”

  “I know nothing whatever about any house in the country. I didn’t go out there.”

  Mason grinned and said, “Witnesses say you did.”

  “They are mistaken.”

  “The witnesses, in this case,” Mason said, “are fingerprints which you left out there and which police have recovered. You can’t dodge the evidence of those fingerprints, Mrs Northrup.”

  “My fingerprints?” she said in dismay.

  “Sure,” Mason said. “You haven’t had any experience at being a crook; therefore, you forgot all about your fingerprints.”

  “How … how do they know they’re mine?”

  “They don’t. I do. But all they have to do is to take your fingerprints and compare them with the fingerprints that were found in the house. Then you’ll have to tell them why you went out there and what you did while you were out there. You’d better begin by telling me.”

  She thought that over for a few moments, then said quietly, “I guess I’m licked.”

  Mason nodded.

  The resistance seemed to ooze out of the woman. She said, “I guess you know it all already. I’m glad. I couldn’t have stuck it out, anyway.”

  “I’d like to hear the details,” Mason said, “particularly about the shooting.”

  She went to a clothes closet, opened the door, took out a heavy coat. There was a powder burn and a jagged hole in the cloth.

  “Go ahead,” Mason said, “you may as well make a clean breast of it.”

  “Believe me, Mr Mason, I want to! I want to get it off my chest. It’s been preying on my mind. I didn’t get to sleep until four o’clock this morning. That’s why I’m so late getting breakfast.”

  The lawyer’s nod was sympathetic.

  She said, “It’s so simple, the wonder of it is someone didn’t find out about it before. I knew I couldn’t get away with it.”

  “Just tell us,” Mason said, glancing at Della Street to see that she was taking down what was said.

  “It started out,” Myrtle Northrup said, “when I began to play the ponies. I had a system. I felt sure it was an infallible system, but it went haywire. I thought it was a temporary setback. I dipped into company funds. Ferrell was always fooling around with his charts and graphs and audits. It was simply a way he had of wasting time.

  “He owned forty per cent of the stock. Addison owns forty per cent. The remaining twenty per cent is scattered around among the old time employees of the store who are in responsible positions. It’s always been a matter of policy for the two heavy stockholders, or the partners, as they call themselves, to thresh out all the matters of policy between themselves and present a harmonious front at the meetings. Therefore, the stockholders’ meetings have always been, more or less, a matter of formality.”

  She paused to take a cigarette from a package and light it with a trembling hand.

  “Well,” she said, “Ferrell caught me. He put it up to me. I had to sign a confession. I had to agree that I would vote my stock the way he wanted me to. And, as a matter of form, nearly all the little stockholders mail proxies to me so I can vote them at the meetings. Then through me, Ferrell started approaching the one or two who usually came to the meetings. There was a girl down at the fountain pen counter, Merna Raleigh, who had a few shares of stock. He was going to promise her a big boost and a salary raise, and there was my boy friend, Tom: Thomas P Barrett. In order to keep from being prosecuted on my shortage, I had to agree to swing Tom into line.

  “Ferrell took this house out in the country so that he would have a place to work, getting all the stock transfers and agreements and everything lined up so he could walk into the stockholders’ meeting and control it.”

  “Isn’t Merna Raleigh rather young to have been in on that stock distribution?”

  “She inherited the stock from her mother. Her mother worked in the store for years.”

  “So what happened?” Mason asked.

  She said, “On Tuesday Ferrell was supposed to leave on his vacation. He didn’t go anywhere. He went out to that house and started opening up his headquarters. He had told me to be out there a little before nine Tuesday night and to have Tom with me.

  “I didn’t tell Tom what was in the wind. We drove out there in Tom’s car, just before we turned off the highway, we passed a car going out. That was Mrs Ferrell, although at the time I didn’t know who it was.”

  “Then what happened?” Mason asked.

  “When we got to the house, I left Tom outside in the car. I went in to talk with Ferrell. That was the way we’d planned it. Tom didn’t even know what it was all about or why he was out there. I was to sound Tom out on the road out and see how he’d feel about tagging along with us, the understanding, of course, being that when Ferrell got into control, he’d put Addison out of the managing position into a subordinate position and give Tom, Merna, and me responsible positions at a great salary increase. Also I was to get my confession of shortage back, and the shortage was to be covered up.”

  “And what actually happened when you went out there?” Mason asked.

  “I found Ferrell in a very nervous state. He told me he’d picked up a little blonde girl named Veronica Dale, that she was running away from the humdrum life of a small town where her mother ran a restaurant. He had taken pity on her and told her that if she’d come out to the house and wait while he transacted a little business, he’d take her into the city and see she had a place to stay.”

  “Did he intend to do it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps he thought he could talk her into staying there in the house overnight. Perhaps he did intend to take her in. Ferrell was something of a wolf when the breaks came just right. I know that he was making awkward passes at Merna.”

  “Go ahead,” Mason said. “What happened?”

  “He told me that in some way his wife had found out about that country place, that she’d driven out there and unfortunately had caught Veronica there, that he’d told Veronica to duck out the back door, but his wife had seen her. His wife thought it was a love nest and was going to get a divorce with all the resulting publicity and scandal. He was afraid at the time to tell his wife the real purpose of the place because he felt she wouldn’t believe him.”

  “So what did you do?” Mason said.

  “So, he told me he’d been thinking the thing over, that the only thing to do was to go right back to town and go to his wife, that he was going to show his wife my confession, that he was going to have me go along and that I was going to tell his wife the real purpose of that place, and we’d trust to the fact that his wife would keep the thing secret. He said it was the only thing to do. He told me to go back out and tell Tom to go home and we’d start right after Tom left.”

  “And you did that?”

  “I went to Tom and told him to go home and say nothing about having been out there. Then Mr Ferrell went upstairs to get that confession I’d signed. He had it in his suitcase in an upstairs bedroom. He intended, of course, to use that as a prop to bolster his story to his wife. But when I saw the confession – well, I thought I should have something too. So I told him if I was going to co-operate with him the way he wanted, I wanted it understood that my confession was to be torn up and my shortage would be taken care of no matter whether the stock deal worked out or not. That made him angry. We had a lot of words and I don’t know what in the world ever possessed me, but his suitcase was lying there and this gun was on top of the suitcase. He was holding the confession in his hand. I grabbed up the gun and pointed it at him and told him to give me that confession. I knew as soon as I’d done it, I’d made a terrible mistake.”

  “What happened?”

  “He hit me, and when he hit me, the gun went off. That’s the bullet that went through the window. Then he grappled with me. He bent my arm back. The folds of my coat were over my wrist and when he twisted my hand back, he twisted the finger against the trigger.

  “I screamed with pain and yelled for him to stop, but he kept twisting the arm, and the gun went off. The bullet went through my coat and into his head. He fell over and I guess he died instantly. I suppose it was because the coat was over the barrel of the gun that there were no powder burns on his face.

  “I was in a panic. I wanted to get rid of the gun and of the shells. I just didn’t think, and then I don’t know very much about such things anyway. I opened the window and fired all the rest of the bullets down into the ground. Then I took the empty shells out of the gun and put them in my pocket. I wiped the gun clean, threw it as far as I could into the darkness and then realized I was stranded with a corpse. I put the window back down, turned out the gasoline lantern and the oil lamps downstairs.

  “I had to get out of there and get out fast. I thought of hitchhiking, but I didn’t want to do that because I might have some trouble. I’m not young and good-looking like Veronica is. And I didn’t want to leave a back trail.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “So, I knew that Mr Ferrell had told everyone at the store he was going up to the Northwest on his vacation. I got in his car and drove it to Las Vegas, Nevada, filed a telegram which was to be sent, and signed Ferrell’s name to it. I left the car and caught a plane back. I went into the store just as though nothing had happened. I was late but no one thought anything about that because I was free to keep my own hours. I didn’t have any time clock to punch.

  “Late that afternoon Veronica Dale came in with a card from Mr Addison. I knew right away that she was the hitchhiker that had been out there in the house with Mr Ferrell, and I realized then that Addison must have been out there and must have picked up Veronica Dale. I asked her a few questions under the pretence of giving her an aptitude test, and she told me quite a bit about herself and about how she had met Mr Addison. She was putting on an act of baby-faced innocence.

  “I gave her the job, of course, and had all the information about her age and about the name of her mother. I also had those six empty shells which were burning a hole in my pocket, and I was terribly angry at the smug hypocrisy of that baby-faced little bitch.”

  “But you didn’t do anything that day?”

  “No, it wasn’t until the next day. I was in Mr Ferrell’s office and the door was open just a crack. His office adjoins that of Mr Addison. I heard Hansell giving him a blackmail shakedown, and I knew right then that blonde hussy was in with a ring of blackmailers, and they were trying to stick Mr Addison. You know, I always admired Mr Addison, and, Lord, how I hated to turn against him with a rat like Edgar Ferrell. I guess that was one of the reasons I went so crazy trying to get that confession back.”

  “Go on,” Mason said.

  “I have always admired Mr Addison. I respect him. I think all the employees do. I thought that if I could get over to your office quickly enough, pretend I was Veronica’s mother and pay the lawyer’s fees, that would give Mr Addison a defence to the blackmail. I thought I’d come back then and tell him what I’d done.”

  “Go on,” Mason said.

  “So I dashed over there and pretended to be Veronica’s mother, left you a worthless cheque so you could show it to the blackmailer. I thought that might confuse him, and that if Veronica thought her mother was out here – well, it might nip that little blackmail scheme of theirs. I knew you wouldn’t lose anything because of the forged cheque and I felt neither Veronica nor the blackmailer would ever know it was a forgery.”