Mason nodded.

  She said, “I took the receipt that you gave me and then, all of a sudden, decided to go tell Veronica that I was wise to her; that she could lay off of Mr Addison or face the consequences, and frighten her so she’d skip out. Then I thought that when – well, you know, when Mr Ferrell’s body was discovered, it would look as though this little blonde trick had been with him and – well, had done the job. And then I thought that she could squirm out of it with that baby-faced innocence of hers. She could get on the stand and tell a jury that he had attacked her and she had to shoot him in self-defence.”

  “You did some pretty quick thinking,” Mason said. “What did you do after you left my office?”

  She said, “I went over to see Veronica. Veronica wasn’t in the hotel as yet, because she was still working in the department store. They’d put her to work immediately in the hosiery department.

  “Of course, Mr Mason, I had those six shells. They were burning a hole in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do with them. I was frightened to death. They represented evidence. Well, I went over to the hotel to wait for Veronica. And then I got a bright idea. I went up to Veronica’s room and tried the door. It wasn’t open but there was a chambermaid on the floor. She saw me and I told her I was Veronica’s mother. I showed her the receipt that you had signed to prove it, and the maid, on the strength of that receipt, my story and a dollar tip, opened the door and let me in. I planted the shells in the bottom of Veronica’s little suitcase where I didn’t think she’d find them, and then I went back and waited for nature to take its course. I felt sure that the police would give Veronica a shakedown, would examine her bag, would find the empty shells, and then I thought – well, I thought that would put her on the defensive and give her something to think of and – well, that’s all of it.”

  “And Veronica,” Mason said, “played the cards close to her chin, found the shells, realized what they were, took them out and planted them in the apartment of my secretary.”

  “No!” Myrtle Northrup said. “Why, that two-timing little …”

  “Save it,” Mason said. “You have your own troubles to think of now.”

  “Darned if I haven’t,” she said.

  Mason walked over to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and said, “Get me police headquarters, if you will, please. This is an emergency call.”

  Paul Drake sighed, walked over to the table and poured himself a cup of coffee from the electric percolator.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake lined up at the lunch counter in a drugstore.

  “Give,” Paul Drake said.

  Mason poured cream in his cup of coffee, dumped in sugar and said, wearily, “It all came from falling for a plausible police theory, Paul. The facts of the case stuck out like a sore thumb, but because I thought that shot had been fired from the outside, through that window, I passed up every really significant clue. Since those clues didn’t fit in with that theory of the case, I ignored them.”

  “What were the significant clues?”

  “You know most of them,” Mason said. “The woman who came to my office wasn’t Veronica’s mother. Yet she had information that could only have been received from Veronica, and if she wasn’t Veronica’s mother, she was obviously trying to save Addison. Therefore, it must, of necessity, have been some loyal employee of Addison’s store. There was only one employee who would have had those facts that soon, and that was the woman who was in charge of the personnel department. And I had you rushing all around the city trying to find the woman who posed as Veronica’s mother when a little real thought would have told me who and where she was.

  “Then I fell for all that stuff about Ferrell leaving on a vacation just as everyone else did. But I began to feel uneasy when I heard Myrtle Northrup had left on a vacation at the same time. It wasn’t until later I realized the significance of the fact that both of them were going to be away until the day of the stockholders’ meeting. As a lawyer I realized the danger of Addison’s position so far as control of his own company was concerned as soon as he told me of the corporate setup. He told me himself that he hated Ferrell. Therefore, it was pretty certain Ferrell knew of that feeling and hated him. I realized that if one of the partners wanted to be a little unscrupulous, resort to a little pressure, and a little bribery, it would be a relatively easy matter to get control of the stock. But because there had always been a policy of threshing everything out outside of the presence of the employees who were stockholders, apparently the idea never occurred to Addison. It occurred to Ferrell all right, and it occurred to me. But for the moment it didn’t seem to tie in with the murder … Oh, what’s the use? It was all caused because I fell for the police theory and relied on the false premise that the shot must have been fired from the outside of the house, through the window, and into Ferrell’s head. It simply shows how much damage a false premise can do.”

  “Yes,” Della Street said demurely, “look at Addison’s premise about his little virgin. At that, the man was right when he first rang us up. It would have been pretty difficult for the police to make a vagrant out of a virgin.”

  “As difficult,” Mason said grinning, “as it was for Addison to make a virgin out of a vagrant.”

  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. 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.

  Table of Contents

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

  Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Vagabond Virgin

 

 

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