Mason nodded, crumpled the note, tossed it into the wastebasket, signed the receipt and passed the paper over to Mrs Dale. “I think you’ll find this is in order,” he said, “and I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to excuse me. I’m terribly busy and have to call a client.”

  “Oh, I understand,” she said, getting to her feet. “And, thank you so much, Mr Mason.”

  “You’d better leave your address with …”

  “Oh, but I did that already. I gave it to your receptionist at the switchboard.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Mason said, getting to his feet.

  “And you won’t mention my visit to anyone?”

  “Not to Veronica?”

  “Heavens, no. I don’t want that girl to know I’m anywhere in the city. If she thought – well, you know, she’d think I was spying on her. She’s very high-strung.”

  “Suppose,” Mason said, “Veronica should come in and want to pay me?”

  Mrs Dale thought that over for a moment, then said, “Just tell her that the fee has been paid by a friend, Mr Mason. You don’t need to say any more than that, simply that it was paid by a friend. And now, Mr Mason, I simply mustn’t take any more of your time.”

  She bowed, nodded smilingly to Della Street, and sailed out of the office.

  Mason said, “She certainly dug up a lot of information in a short time, Della. Paul Drake should have her working as a detective.”

  “I suppose she really pumped that chambermaid,” Della Street said. “Shall I get John Addison on the phone?”

  Mason nodded.

  Della Street rushed the call through, then said, “Here he is, Mr Mason.”

  Mason picked up the phone, said, “You calling me, Addison?”

  “Yes, yes. I have to see you right away. At once!”

  “Can you tell me what it’s about?”

  “Not over the phone. Not when I’m talking from the office. Dammit, no. I want to see you. I don’t want to have to wait in your office. I want to come over and dash right in.”

  “Come on and dash,” Mason invited. “Incidentally, there has just been an interesting development in connection with the case of your friend, Veronica …”

  “Dammit, Mason,” Addison shouted over the phone, “don’t keep referring to her as my friend!”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “No,” Addison shouted. “I’m coming up. I want to see you when I get there!”

  And Addison slammed up the receiver at his end without so much as waiting to say goodbye.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gertie, the good-natured receptionist, tiptoed into Perry Mason’s private office.

  “Gosh, Mr Mason,” she said in an awed whisper, “Mr Addison is out there and he’s fit to be tied.”

  Mason grinned. “He’s accustomed to having his own way about ninety-nine per cent of the time. Tell him to sit down.”

  “He won’t sit down, Mr Mason. He paces the floor and glares. He told me to go tell you he was there and wanted to see you right away.”

  Mason said, “Keep him waiting a couple of minutes, just for the principle of the thing, and then send him in.”

  John Racer Addison presented an incongruous appearance as he entered the room three minutes later.

  Quite evidently a man accustomed to conducting himself with a bearing of authoritative dignity, he was now so upset that his careful measured stride had given place to quick, short, waddling steps as he hurried toward Mason.

  As Gertie expressed it afterward in a tête-à-tête with Della Street, “He reminded me of a goose trying to go some place in a hurry and not really getting anywhere, just wagging his tail feathers faster than usual.”

  Addison was a chunky, thick-chested individual who paid careful attention to his clothes. Having studied how to make people come to him, the big department store owner was in uncharted waters now that it became necessary for him to make the approach.

  “Hello, Addison,” Mason said, walking around the desk to extend his hand.

  Addison all but brushed the greeting aside with a perfunctory handshake. “Mason, I’m in the devil of a mess – the very devil of a mess!”

  “Sit down,” Mason said. “Let’s have it.”

  Addison glared at Della Street.

  “You know Miss Street, my secretary,” Mason said, “She sits in on all my conferences, makes notes and keeps the facts straight. You can trust her absolutely.”

  “I don’t want to trust anyone,” Addison said. “I’ve done too much of that already.”

  Mason merely smiled and sat behind his desk, waiting for Addison to go on.

  The silent tension was too much for the department store owner.

  “Oh, all right,” he said, “have it your own way. Dammit, everyone seems to be having his own way these days.”

  Della Street held an unobtrusive pencil over her open notebook.

  “Just what seems to be the trouble?” Mason asked.

  “Mason, I’m being blackmailed.”

  “By whom? For how much? And over what?”

  “A man I’ve never heard of before, chap by the name of Dundas – George W Dundas.”

  Mason smiled and said, “George W, eh? I presume Mr Dundas’ fond mother christened him George Washington, hoping that he would turn out to be another Father of his Country, in place of which he turns out to be a blackmailer.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Addison said, “I believe his middle name is Whittley. The man writes, I believe, a newspaper column under the by-line of George Whittley Dundas, a gossip column that appears, as I understand it, in one of the tabloids. I have a specimen column here which I’ve cut out for you.”

  Addison’s well-manicured hand nervously jerked a wallet from the inside of his vest pocket and extracted a folded section of newspaper.

  “Oh yes,” Mason said, his eyes glancing down the column. “One of these gossip things making its success by innuendoes.” He selected a passage at random and read, “What young married woman has recently been trotting around the night spots with a ‘friend of the family?’ And does hubby realize that a Reno lawyer has already been consulted?”

  Mason looked up and said, “This stuff makes nice reading for persons of a certain type of mind. You can’t tell whether the stuff is true or not. If you happen to know someone who’s a target for gossip it’s all right, but this ‘young married woman,’ whose name is discreetly not mentioned, may well be only a figment of the imagination of George Whittley Dundas. What does Dundas want with you?”

  “I’m not dealing directly with Dundas,” Addison said, “but with a man by the name of Eric Hansell who says he’s leg-man for Dundas and gets most of the facts Dundas uses in his column.”

  Mason said, “That looks like a sweet blackmailing setup. If you come right down to it, you really haven’t anything on Dundas. He can repudiate Hansell at any time.”

  “I suppose so, I suppose so,” Addison said nervously. “I’m not interested in the mechanics of the thing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s blackmail pure and simple.”

  “Suppose you tell me about it.”

  Addison crossed his left leg over his right knee, shifted his position, then nervously uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them, with the right leg over the left knee. “Dammit,” he said, “I don’t know how to start.”

  “Begin with the time you met this virgin,” Mason said.

  Addison was visibly startled. “Eh? What’s that?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How did you know she had anything to do with it?”

  Mason merely smiled.

  “Well,” Addison said, “I suppose it’s as good a place to begin as any other. It was about nine o’clock Tuesday night. I saw this young woman, with a light suitcase, standing by the side of the road. She wasn’t using her thumb, but her attitude said very plainly that she was looking for a ride.”

  “You stopped?”

  “At first I didn’t. I assumed she would be some hardened old battle-axe, and I definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with her. I drove by, but I glanced at her as I went by, and saw she was a young, sweet-looking girl. I simply couldn’t leave her there where some unprincipled, irresponsible person might have picked her up and taken advantage of her. I stopped the car and backed up.”

  “She was properly grateful?”

  “She was very sweet,” Addison said.

  “Go on,” Mason commented dryly.

  “Naturally,” Addison said, “in picking up a young, unsophisticated, fresh, unspoiled woman of this type, one engages in conversation.”

  “All right, let’s have the facts.”

  “At first there was a certain constraint,” Addison said. “She was sizing me up. Her manner was somewhat diffident and cautious, a little uneasy. But I soon put her at her ease and convinced her she was riding with a man whose interest in her was purely a fatherly interest.”

  “Purely,” Mason repeated tonelessly.

  “Eh, what’s that?”

  “Go on.”

  “She was soon confiding in me freely, telling me her story. She had a good mother, and she was fond of her mother. But the child was simply bored stiff with the small town where her mother lived. And it looked as though the girl never would get out of that deadly dull small-town environment.”

  “What sort of home life?” Mason asked.

  “No home life at all. The father is dead. The mother runs a small restaurant lunch counter, some place about fifty miles from Indianapolis. It’s too far to commute to see shows, yet near enough so most of the business flows into the big city, leaving this little town pretty static, or so I gathered from her conversation. She talked freely enough, once she got started. The child had to wait tables, wash dishes and help out. She found it a dreary monotony of small-town drudgery. All the really interesting young men have gone to the larger cities where there is more opportunity. Those who are left have no romance, no soul, no fire.”

  “She evidently made quite an impression on you.”

  “What makes you say that?” Addison snapped angrily.

  “Because of the way you remember her words – no soul, no fire.”

  Addison glared.

  “How old?” Mason asked.

  “Eighteen.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hell, no! How can I be sure. Am I supposed to have been there when she was born or …”

  “See her driving licence?”

  “No. Hang it, Mason, I can’t tell the age of a girl like that. Anywhere between sixteen and twenty-five she’d have me fooled.”

  “All right,” Mason said, “what happened with you and Veronica Dale?”

  “Well, she told me very frankly that she had decided to go out in the world and seek her fortune, try and get a job somewhere and be independent. Then she was going to write to her mother and tell her mother where she was.”

  “Did she give you her mother’s name at that time?”

  “No, I didn’t find out too much about the details there. You see, it was a short ride, only twenty miles, and I was more concerned with what she intended to do in the future, that is, what her plans were and where she intended to stay.”

  “She told you?”

  “She admitted that she was rather short of actual cash and that she didn’t have any particular plan. She was a young woman who felt self-reliant and in place of shunning the experiences of life, she seemed only too anxious to wade out and meet them halfway. It was – hang it, Mason, it was shocking to me. It frightened me. I’ve done so much planning in my life and worked so hard to get a feeling of established security that it was a shock to me to find this young girl looking forward to spending a night in a strange city where she knew no one, with hardly adequate funds to furnish her with a little food, let alone shelter.”

  “So you gave her money?”

  “The problem was not that simple,” Addison said. “There was the question of getting a room in any decent hotel. As you probably realize, Mason, it isn’t simply a matter nowadays of walking into a hotel and getting a room. In the first place, hotels are rather unwilling to accept unescorted women when they don’t know something about the guest’s background. Then again, with all the willingness in the world, where reservations haven’t been made for days, sometimes weeks, in advance, it’s virtually impossible to secure decent accommodations.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “So I stopped at one of the outlying service stations, made a call to a friend of mine, the manager of the Rockaway Hotel. I told him that I was having this young woman, Veronica Dale, inquire at his hotel for a room. I wanted him to be certain that a room was available, and he assured me that he would see to it she had proper accommodations. I told him, of course, that I would vouch for her.”

  “So then what did you do?”

  “Then I returned to the automobile, drove the girl to the Rockaway Hotel and told her to go in and get herself a room. I stayed there, parked in front of the hotel until I saw that she had registered, and actually had a room. You know, Mason, in most of these hotels they keep one or two rooms, no matter how crowded they may be, for emergencies – in case there have been duplicate reservations, where the hotel might be liable for damages, or where some very influential customer comes in unexpectedly – any of the hundred and one emergencies that may show up.”

  “Then what?” Mason asked.

  “Then I drove home, completely satisfied that I had done everything I could.”

  “You learned she’d been arrested for vagrancy?”

  “I did.”

  “How?”

  “The matron at the jail called me, said Veronica wished to have me notified, that she wouldn’t let the call be put through the night before because she didn’t want to bother me. Can you imagine that? A sweet, pure young thing spending a night in jail, simply because she …”

  “How did she know who you were? Did you give this girl your card?”

  “To be frank with you, Mason, I didn’t. I felt ashamed of myself, but nevertheless there are certain precautions which a man in my position has to take. However, I presume she satisfied a perfectly natural curiosity. While I was telephoning from the service station, she must have read the registration slip that was on the steering post of the automobile and remembered my name and address. So she had the matron phone me.”

  “What time did you get this call telling you she was under arrest for vagrancy?”

  “Just before I called you.”

  “All right,” Mason said, “that apparently brings us up to date on that. I take it you haven’t seen her since I arranged her release.”

  “Oh, but I have,” Addison said. “I gave her a job. I called her up at the Rockaway and suggested she interview the personnel manager at the store.”

  “When did you do that?” Mason asked.

  “I did that shortly after she was released from jail. You telephoned me from the lobby of the Rockaway Hotel, I believe, telling me that everything was fixed up and that the girl was in her room, so I telephoned back shortly after I received your call.”

  “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “I haven’t talked with you since.”

  “I mean, you didn’t tell me you were going to do it.”

  “Dammit, Mason, do I have to tell you every time I turn around?”

  “It’s sometimes advisable to tell your lawyer things.”

  “Hang it, Mason, you act as though this girl were poison or something!”

  “You seem to have some trouble getting her out of your life.”

  “Don’t talk like that. I tell you the girl’s a pure, sweet, lovable child.”

  “Any blackmailing, I take it, is purely coincidental,” Mason said.

  “You’re damn right it’s coincidental,” Addison rasped. “Wait until I tell you how it happened.”

  “That,” Mason announced, “is what I’m waiting for.”

  “Well,” Addison said, “when Veronica Dale called on me, I gave her a frank, fatherly talk. I told her that she couldn’t expect to go drifting around the country, particularly at night, without having embarrassing experiences. I told her I didn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily, but I called her attention to some of these sex murders that have been taking place around the country, and then I sent her down to see the head of my personnel department.”

  “And gave her a job?”

  “I suppose she was put to work. The fact that she came to the personnel department with a card from me should assure her of a job. I naturally assumed it had. I didn’t even bother to check up on it.”

  “So, as far as you know, she’s working for you in your store right now.”

  “I would say so, yes.”

  “All right, what about Dundas?”

  “Well, this man, Eric Hansell, called me up and said he wanted to interview me in connection with a newspaper story, ‘a little character sketch for one of the columnists,’ was the way he expressed it. Well, you know, Mr Mason, a man in my position cannot afford to offend the Press. I am not averse to publicity. I never have been.”

  “No,” Mason said dryly.

  “Well,” Addison said, “the interview was entirely different from anything I had anticipated. Mr Hansell turned out to be a redheaded, flippant young man of a type one is more accustomed to associate with racehorse touts than with reputable newspaper people. I found him very disgusting and very impudent. He asked me a few questions about my life, my partner and my business affairs – impertinent, personal questions, asked with an air of arrogant impudence. And then when I was on the point of throwing him out, he wanted to know about my relationship with Veronica Dale.

  “The thing absolutely flabbergasted me, Mason. This man seemed to have gone out of his way to get a lot of facts. He evidently knew that I had telephoned the manager of the Rockaway Hotel and went on to tell me that George Dundas was going to publish something about me in the gossip column and wanted to know if there was any truth to the rumour that I was intending to marry Veronica Dale, a young woman who had been established in a downtown hotel through my connections, and arrested for vagrancy that same night.