“What was your car?”

  “A Cadillac.”

  “You’re rather good to yourself, aren’t you?”

  “There’s no use fighting your way over roads with a trailer and a light car. You want a car that’s heavy enough to hold the road and pull the trailer along behind.”

  “You see lots of big trailers pulled by light cars.”

  “Sure, they pull them, but it’s not the most comfortable means of locomotion. You have to keep driving all the time. When you hook the Heliar on behind this Cadillac you can just forget you have a trailer. All you do is sit at the wheel and watch the miles dissolve beneath the wheels.”

  “And do you mean to say the police and the income-tax people and everyone haven’t had you on the carpet asking you where you get this money?”

  Her smile was a one-sided twisting of the right corner of her mouth. “They did for a while. Now they’ve quit.”

  “You only think they’ve quit.”

  “No, they really have—as far as getting me on the carpet is concerned. But I don’t think for a minute they’ve given up. They’re following me around. If I go into a store and buy groceries, within thirty seconds someone is apt to slip a note to the cashier telling him to save the bill that I turned in. That bill will be checked to see if the numbers on it are those of the stolen money.”

  “And yet you hop around and sun-bathe.”

  “Up to now,” she said, “I didn’t think anyone knew about this place.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Mason said. “They’ve been watching you. They’ve had you trailed with cars, with motorcycles. They’ve probably been watching you from helicopters.”

  “I thought that I’d worn them out.”

  “You want to bet?” Mason asked her.

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  Mason said, “While you’ve been traipsing around in your bare feet, feeling the caress of wind on your skin, a couple of detectives have been sizing you up with binoculars.”

  “That’s their privilege.”

  Abruptly Mason said, “All right, you’re going to be at my office with fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “At ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Make it nine-thirty.” Mason said, “I’m going to take steps to find your trailer because I want to find out what the answer is. Now then, let’s have a complete understanding?”

  “What is it?”

  “If you’re on the up-and-up,” Mason said, “I’ll try and protect you. If your dad got away with that three hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars and you have all of it or part of it concealed and are drawing on it from time to time, I’m not going to be an accessory after the fact. Do you understand that?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ll turn you in to the police. I’ll find where the money is hidden. I’ll turn it over to the authorities, and I’ll get my fee by collecting a reward.”

  Her smile was enigmatical. “Fair enough,” she told him and stretched a muscular hand across the table.

  Mason took the hand, said to Della Street, “Get Paul Drake of the Drake Detective Agency on the telephone, Della. We’re going to work.”

  Chapter 3

  Paul Drake, carrying a sheaf of reports, entered Mason’s office shortly before five o’clock, said, “Hi, Perry. How are you, Della? Got something on that trailer case for you, Perry.”

  Mason glanced at his watch. “Anything really hot?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You must have been working fast.”

  “That’s what you said you wanted.”

  Paul Drake dropped into the client’s big, leather chair, riffled through some of the reports, then, awkwardly ill at ease in the conventional position, slid around so that his legs were hanging over one rounded arm, the other supporting the small of his back.

  Tall, thin and casual, there was about him an air of lazy indolence. His face seemed disinterested. His eyes, which seldom missed any significant, detail, belied their efficiency by appearing completely bored.

  Drake said, “One of the men who was in on the theft is a man named Thomas Sackett. He’s living at 3921 Mitner Avenue—that’s an apartment house. No one seems to know too much about him. He’s supposed to be a prospector and spends quite a bit of time out in the desert —an outdoorsman—drives a jeep, throws a sleeping bag in the back end, a few boxes of provisions, pick, shovel, gold pan and a tent. Takes off on trips and they don’t see him for a week or ten days, then he’ll be back and hang around for a while.”

  “And he was in on stealing the trailer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Perhaps,” Mason said, glancing at Della Street, “he just wanted to steal a trailer and take it out in the desert so he could park it and live in it.”

  Drake shook his head. “The trailer itself,” he said, “is up for sale on a consignment basis at the Ideal Trade-In Trailer Mart. Sackett left it there for sale. He put a price tag of twenty-eight hundred and ninety-five dollars on it. The man who runs the place doesn’t think it’s worth over twenty-five hundred. Sackett arranged to put it up for sale on consignment. Sackett didn’t use his right name, by the way, but used the name of Howard Prim when he brought the trailer in.”

  “And it’s up for sale?”

  Paul Drake nodded.

  “I wonder what’s in it?” Mason said. “He could hardly have had time to have cleaned it out.”

  “One of my men checked it and made as if he’d like to make an offer,” Drake said. “The thing hasn’t been cleaned up but it’s sure been stripped of everything in the line of personal belongings—bedding, dishes, cooking utensils, provisions, everything. It’s just stripped right down to the bare trailer, just as it came from the manufacturer.”

  Mason said, “They must have worked fast.”

  Drake nodded.

  “How in the world did you get all that information in this time?” Mason asked.

  “Just a lot of routine work, Perry. You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “But I am interested. My client is going to be very much interested.”

  Drake held up the sheets of flimsy. “Well,” he said, “you told me not to spare any expense, to put as many operatives on it as I needed. These are their reports. They tell the story.”

  “Never mind the reports,” Mason said. “How did you go about it?”

  “Well, it’s not too difficult,” Drake said. “You told me where the trailer had been stolen. I went down there and looked around. Someone drove off the car and trailer. The question was, did he walk into the place and pick up the car and trailer, or did someone drive him in? That, of course, is the first question a detective would want to have answered.

  “So we looked around and found some automobile tracks turning in on the old road. They were tracks that had been made by a jeep. That, of course, gave us a break. Those tracks came in and they went out. When they went out they were superimposed over the tracks made by a car and house trailer. We know that because they were the last tracks going out, the freshest tracks on the road.

  “Well, it was a job of tracking. We could see where the jeep had gone in, and then the car and house trailer had been driven out over those jeep tracks and then the jeep was driven out.

  “Well, of course, we had the license number on the trailer. Ordinarily you’d have expected they’d juggle license numbers. However, a Heliar is a rather distinctive house trailer. It has some features you don’t find on the others, and there aren’t too many of them sold. It’s a relatively high-priced unit.”

  “I still don’t see how you found it,” Mason said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s nothing romantic or glamorous about this business. When you come right down to brass tacks it’s just a matter of routine. For instance, the tracks indicated there had to be at least two persons in on the deal. Well, just figure it out for yourself, Perry. They only had four things they could have done.”

  “What were they?”

  “They could have driven the trailer along the road, headed for some distant city or some place out of the state; they could have parked the trailer in some trailer parking place; they could have run the trailer into a back yard or private garage; or they could have put the trailer up for sale.

  “Now the one thing that could have stymied us was if they’d put it in a back yard or a garage. That would have licked us. So we didn’t bother about that. We turned to the highways. We’d got on the job pretty fast, within a couple of hours of the time the trailer was stolen. You can’t take a car and a house trailer through city traffic and get too far in two hours.

  “I have an arrangement with various all-night service stations along the different highways—one on the coast highway, one on the inland highway, one on the desert highway—well, anyway, I cover all of the main highways. Of course, a person has lots of different routes to use getting out of town, but once you start really traveling you only have a choice of about seven main highways. I have service stations that are under a working arrangement with me. I called up each one of those service stations. They all started looking out for a Heliar trailer.

  “Then I started a girl telephoning all of the trailer camps to see if a Heliar trailer had checked in during the afternoon, and another operative telephoned all of the various trailer sales places to see if they had a Heliar trailer for sale, a secondhand trailer, one that hadn’t been on the lot too long.

  “Reports began to come pouring in. A Heliar trailer had passed Yermo on the Las Vegas road. A Heliar trailer had gone through Holtville on the road to Yuma. There was a Heliar trailer between Ventura and Santa Barbara.

  “A check showed that one of them was an eighteen-foot Heliar, the other was the big thirty-two foot job. The one out of Yermo was the only twenty-five foot Heliar which matched the one we want. I did some checking on time and it would have been pretty difficult for that trailer we wanted to have made it to Yermo in the time that was available.

  “There were two Heliar twenty-five foot trailers that had checked into trailer camps around the city. I had men go out to look those over. Then we struck pay dirt in this Ideal Trade-In Trailer Mart. They had a Heliar that had been brought in just a few minutes before we telephoned. A man by the name of Prim had it on consignment. Well, we dashed out to take a look at it, and, shucks, there was nothing to it, Perry. It still had the same license number on it.

  “Well, we got a description of Prim, and his address which, of course, didn’t mean anything because it was a phony address, but when he’d driven the trailer in he’d been driving a jeep, and the man who runs the place is pretty smart. He’s had a lot of experience and when he sells a trailer he has to guarantee title, so he just jotted down the license number of the jeep to be on the safe side.

  “Well, we ran down the jeep license number, found it was registered in the name of Thomas Sackett, 3921 Mitner Avenue. We had an operative check out there to find out what was known about Sackett and picked up the information I just gave you.”

  “Any chance that it’s not the same man?” Mason asked.

  “None whatever. We have his description. Five feet seven, weighs a hundred and seventy-five, blond, about thirty years of age, walks with a very slight limp.”

  “How about the Cadillac?” Mason asked.

  “The Cadillac we haven’t located,” Drake said, “and we’re not going to be able to locate it unless we can notify the police. That’s a dragnet operation. There are too many Cadillacs, too many places where you can leave them. The house trailer was different.”

  “That’s dam fine work, Paul.”

  Paul Drake dismissed the compliment with a gesture. “Just routine,” he said. “You have to figure all of the different things a man can do with a house trailer, then you have to figure how to check on them, and you have to be organized so you can check on them.”

  “Well, it’s darn fine work just the same,” Mason said, “and it may give us a valuable lead.”

  He turned to Della Street. “What about our client, Della? How can we reach her?”

  “She left us a number,” Della Street said. “Care of Dr. Holman B. Candler, at Santa Ana.

  “She said he was a trusted friend and we could give him any information we might want relayed to her in case we learned anything before she called in at nine-thirty in the morning.”

  Mason glanced across at Paul Drake. “Do you have someone keeping an eye on that trailer, Paul?”

  “Sure. I have two operatives on the job. That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. If this guy shows up and tries to move the trailer away from the trailer lot, what do you want done?”

  Mason said, “I don’t know. I’ll have to find out.”

  He nodded to Della Street. “Get Dr. Candler on the line for me, Della.”

  Della Street put through the call to Dr. Candler’s office. After explaining who she was and the nature of the call to Dr. Candler’s office nurse, she nodded to Perry Mason and said, “He’s coming on the line.”

  Mason picked up the phone, said, “Hello,” and heard a cautious voice at the other end of the line saying, “Yes. Hello. This is Dr. Candler speaking.”

  Mason said, “This is Perry Mason speaking. I am very anxious to get in touch with Miss Arlene Duvall, Doctor. She told me that she could be reached through you.”

  “Am I to understand that you are Mr. Perry Mason, the attorney?”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I ask why you wish to get in touch with her, Mr. Mason?”

  Mason said, “Miss Duvall told me that I could confide in you, that you were a friend of the family and were like an uncle to her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Miss Duvall consulted me earlier in the day.”

  “Yes?”

  “About a certain matter,” Mason said, “on which she wished me to take immediate action.”

  “I see.”

  “I would like to tell Miss Duvall that the action has been taken and has resulted in at least a partial success.”

  “It was about the trailer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surely you haven’t located it?”

  “We have,” Mason said. “It’s for sale at a secondhand trailer lot. It has been cleaned of all personal possessions—dishes, clothes, bedding, everything. I think this is information that Miss Duvall would like to have without delay, and if you will let me know where I can reach her I’ll try and get in touch with her at once and see what her instructions are.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t give you an address,” Dr. Candler said cautiously, “but I can try and get a message through to her. How long will you be in your office, Mr. Mason?”

  “Will thirty minutes be satisfactory?”

  “I think so. If you’ll wait there I’ll try and get a message through to her and then she can call you back.”

  “Thank you,” Mason said, and hung up.

  Della Street, who had been monitoring the conversation, glanced across at Mason. “Cautious,” she said, smiling.

  “Playing them close to his chest,” Mason said. “However, you can’t blame him. How does he know that I’m not a detective calling up and assuming the identity of Perry Mason, the lawyer? After all, he doesn’t know me and is not familiar with my voice.”

  “I see, and by having her call back he would—”

  “Verify the number,” Mason said. “You’d better plug in the switchboard so you can pick up any calls after Gertie goes home.”

  “I think she’s just leaving,” Della Street said and went to the outer office to plug in the line so that any incoming calls would be routed to Mason’s private office.

  Mason turned to Paul Drake and said, “Paul, I want Thomas Sackett put under surveillance. It will have to be a smooth job. I don’t want him to know he’s being watched.”

  “You want him followed day and night?”

  “That’s right. I want to know where he is and what he’s doing every minute of the time. And I want you to find out all you can about a job pulled on the Mercantile Security when a truck shipment of nearly four hundred thousand dollars was—”

  Drake snapped his fingers. “That’s it!”

  “What is?”

  “That name, Duvall. He was the guy who juggled packages. They sent him up. Is she any relation?”

  “His daughter.”

  “Oh, oh!”

  “Find out everything you can, Paul.”

  “How soon?”

  “Fast.”

  “Well I’ll be darned,” Drake said. “Can you feature that? It was her dad who did the job, eh?”

  “He got the credit,” Mason said dryly.

  “He got the cash,” Drake corrected.

  Della Street returned to the office, said, “Everything’s plugged in.” She made a dive for the phone as it started ringing. “We’ll probably be deluged with calls for the next thirty minutes, Chief. I—”

  She picked up the receiver and said, “Hello,” then, after a moment, her eyes widened and she nodded to Perry Mason.

  “Arlene Duvall?”

  She nodded.

  Mason picked up his phone.

  Della Street said, “He’ll talk with you, Miss Duvall. He’s right here. Hold the line.”

  Arlene Duvall’s voice was very different from that of Dr. Candler. She made no attempt to control her excitement.

  “You have something on the trailer? Did I understand Dr. Candler to say you’d found it?”

  “The trailer has been located, Miss Duvall.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s at the Ideal Trade-In Trailer Mart.”

  “At the Ideal?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why, I… I—”

  “You know the place?” Mason asked.

  “Why, of course. That’s where I bought the trailer.”

  “When?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “Well, it’s there now—offered for sale on a consignment basis.”

  “Who left it?”

  “The name which he gave the manager of the place was Howard Prim. The address which he gave was fictitious.”