“However,” Mason said, “suppose that I, as Miss Duvall’s lawyer, tell you that you are keeping stolen property in your possession. Then what?”

  “Wouldn’t bother me at all,” Hartsel said. “Not in the least. I’d tell you to go to court and start rolling your hoop. Bring a suit in replevin, or whatever you want.”

  “Together with damages for its detainer.”

  “Oh sure. You’d ask for damages,” Hartsel said, “but all I’m asking is that you call the cops. That’s the reasonable thing to do. I’d tell that to a judge or a jury and that’d be all there was to your lawsuit for damages. It’d go out the window. That’s all I’m asking you to do. If the trailer has been stolen let’s notify the police.”

  “Miss Duvall doesn’t want the notoriety.”

  “Phooey! There wouldn’t be any.”

  “There might,” Mason said.

  “Why?” Hartsel asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Because when the trailer was stolen,” Mason said, grinning, “Miss Duvall was engaged in sun-bathing. That’s how it happened the persons who took the trailer were able to drive off with her car and the trailer.”

  “Car too?” Hartsel asked.

  Mason nodded.

  “Then it sure is a case for the police,” Hartsel said.

  “And the newspapers,” Mason pointed out.

  “That’s her hard luck, not mine.”

  “All right,” Mason said, “let’s forget that the trailer was stolen.”

  “And do what?” Hartsel asked.

  “I’ll buy it,” Mason said. “What’s the price on it?”

  “The price he wanted was twenty-eight ninety-five,” Hartsel said. “I offered him two thousand. I’d have put it on sale at twenty-four hundred and turned it within thirty days. Twenty-eight ninety-five is just a little high. Perhaps if you care to make an offer I’ll—”

  “No offer,” Mason said. “I’ll buy it at his price. Twenty-eight ninety-five. Give him a ring and tell him to come on down with his registration slip and we’ll close the transaction.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Hartsel said. “That doesn’t make sense. If he’s stolen the trailer—”

  “When he comes down here,” Mason said, “if he comes down here, I’ll put him under arrest as a citizen and then we’ll call the cops.”

  “Now that does make sense,” Hartsel said. “Come on. We’ll go to the office and give him a ring.”

  They stepped out of the trailer. Arlene Duvall locked it and they started back toward the office.

  After they had gone some fifteen or twenty steps Della Street, who had been watching Arlene Duvall, said quietly, “Didn’t you have a purse, Miss Duvall?”

  “Oh, good heavens,” Arlene said. “Of course. I put it on the bed in the trailer while we were looking at the interior of that vanity case for the ink stains. I’ll get it.”

  She whirled and ran to the trailer. Hartsel looked after her admiringly.

  “Now there’s a girl who really runs,” he said. “Knees together, elbows close to the side, holds up her skirts so she has plenty of knee action, and really covers the ground. She runs like a deer. Wonder if she’s ever had any athletic training.”

  “Probably a natural athlete,” Della Street said, watching Arlene Duvall fit the key to the door.

  “Well,” Mason said, “we’ll go on to the office and you can call Prim.”

  Hartsel waited for a moment, slowly turned back toward the office, walked a few steps, then abruptly stopped. “I should be sure that she looks the thing up,” he said. “As long as it’s in my possession I have a responsibility and… well, we’ll just wait, if you don’t mind.”

  They waited.

  Mason lit a cigarette.

  “Well, it’s taking her a time to find that purse,” Hartsel said.

  “Probably it wasn’t on the bed,” Della Street said. “She may have left it in one of the closets and—”

  Abruptly Hartsel started walking toward the trailer with long purposeful strides that made Mason and Della Street hurry to keep up.

  They had almost reached the trailer when Arlene Duvall jerked open the door and came out.

  “Thought we’d lost you as well as the purse,” Hartsel said, unsmilingly.

  Her slate-colored eyes regarded him with disarming candor.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, I had no idea I was holding up the procession. Did you ever know a girl who could pass up a mirror? When I got one look at my face I made a dive for my compact. I’m afraid I’ve been traveling too fast this afternoon to pay much attention to personal appearance.”

  Hartsel, suddenly reassured, grinned and said, “You have something there. You’d be surprised at how many women inspecting a trailer look over the kitchen facilities, then pause in front of one of the full-length mirrors, look themselves over, pull out a compact and go to work. Okay, let’s lock the door. Well, just to be on the safe side, suppose I lock it with my key.”

  He locked the trailer door.

  “That, I take it,” Mason said, “is the key you got from Prim?”

  “Sure, he left the key with the trailer. Why?”

  “Oh nothing,” Mason said, “I was just wondering.”

  “Say, wait a minute,” Hartsel said. “You have a point there. If he’d stolen the trailer how did it happen he had a key for it?”

  “He had to have a key to get in. I’d left it locked,” Arlene Duvall pointed out.

  “Well, where did he get his key?”

  “Perhaps one trailer key will unlock all the other models of the same make,” Della Street suggested.

  “Not with the Heliar,” Hartsel said. “That’s a pretty classy job. They pay a lot of attention to that job. It’s one of our best-made trailers on the market.”

  “Well,” Mason said, “he undoubtedly had a key since he gave you one, and since it works, suppose we ask him where he got it?”

  “Yes,” Hartsel said, “I think that’s next in order. Let’s go telephone.”

  They returned to the office. Hartsel consulted the card, picked up the telephone, dialed the number, then, after a moment, said, “Hello. May I speak with Mr. Prim, please. This is Mr. Hartsel at the Ideal Trade-In Trailer Mart.”

  They heard squawking sounds on the telephone, then Hartsel said, “But he left this number. Doesn’t he stay there? . . . Howard Prim. Don’t you know him? . . . Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

  Hartsel dropped the telephone back into place and said, “Well, there’s no need for them to get sore about it. It’s a private residence. They say that’s the second call they’ve had this afternoon both from people asking for Howard Prim. They’ve never heard of him.”

  “Any chance you got the number wrong?” Mason asked.

  “No chance that I got the wrong number. He may have had it wrong. Here’s the card with the number he wrote down. That’s in his own writing, together with the address.”

  “Did you,” Mason asked, “check the street?”

  “You mean the address?”

  “No, just the street,” Mason said. “I don’t think there is any such number on that street. As I remember it, it’s a short street and—”

  Hartsel took out a map of the city, checked on the street and the numbers, then consulted the alphabetical index of streets, folded the map and said to Mason, “Okay, you win. I want a receipt for the trailer and a statement that you’re assuming the responsibility for delivering it to your client. I’ll take your assurance that it’s stolen. Your credit’s good. I want a written statement, however, signed by you as part of the receipt.”

  “Draw it up,” Mason told him. “I’ll sign it.”

  “When are you going to take the trailer?”

  “Right now,” Arlene Duvall said.

  “But what about a car? You say yours was stolen.”

  “I have a car,” she said.

  “With a trailer hitch?”

  “With a trailer hitch. It’s all ready to go.”

  “Okay,” Hartsel yielded. “I prefer to have you call the cops on this, but if you don’t want to it’s okay, only I’m going to make that receipt plenty tight so it’ll protect me.”

  Mason said, “If you confine your statements in the receipt to the fact that you are delivering the trailer to Arlene Duvall on the strength of my assurance that the trailer was stolen from her and that she is the true owner, and include in there a statement that you have checked the number of the trailer with the number of the trailer you previously sold Miss Duvall, I’ll sign it.”

  “Fair enough,” Hartsel said, and started writing.

  Hartsel placed a sheet of paper on the desk, wrote a few lines, hesitated, wrote some more, then finally sent his pen dashing over the paper.

  He handed the document to Mason.

  “You’re a lawyer. Let’s see if you’ll sign that. I have always been given to understand a lawyer will never sign anything the way it’s written.”

  Mason whipped out his fountain pen and said, “I’ll sign it without reading it.”

  Hartsel looked at him in amazement.

  “Chief,” Della Street said in a low voice, “you haven’t even read it?”

  “I’ve signed it,” Mason said. “Now then, Della, will you please copy this in a notebook. I’m willing to sign anything but I want to have a copy of what I’ve signed.”

  Mason held the document so that Della Street could see it as she took shorthand notes; then Mason casually tossed the document over to Hartsel.

  “All right, Miss Duvall,” Mason said. “Go hook onto the trailer.”

  “On my way,” she said.

  Hartsel slowly got up from his desk. He shook his head. “I can’t get over it,” he said. “A lawyer signing something without even reading it. I thought you tell your clients never to do that.”

  “We do,” Mason said.

  Arlene Duvall hurried down the steps from the office. Hartsel went to the door and called to one of the assistants, “Help Miss Duvall hook on that Heliar trailer, Joe.”

  “She bought it?” the man asked.

  Hartsel grinned. “Twice,” he said and went back into the office, “Signed it without reading it,” he muttered under his breath incredulously.

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better,” Mason said, “I can tell you a point of law that may come in handy sometime.”

  “What?” Hartsel asked.

  “A document,” Mason said, “in order to constitute an agreement has to be signed, sealed and delivered. In this state the signature imports a seal, but a document is valueless unless it’s delivered.”

  “Well?” Hartsel asked.

  “And while I didn’t read it before I signed it, I read it after I’d signed it, while I was holding it for Miss Street to copy.”

  “And you mean that if there had been something in there that you couldn’t go for you’d have refused to deliver it?”

  “Exactly. I’d have torn it up,” Mason said.

  Hartsel grinned. “Now I feel better. You jarred me when you signed it without reading it. I didn’t think you’d sign it the way I’d put that guarantee in there.”

  “And If I’d quibbled with you about it,” Mason said, “you wouldn’t have delivered the trailer.”

  “You’re right on that,” Hartsel admitted, smiling. “I guess you’d have made a dam good trailer salesman, Mr. Mason.”

  He got up and extended his hand.

  “This time,” Mason said, “let’s both he reasonable and use half as much pressure as we did the first time.”

  “You set the pace,” Hartsel said.

  The two men shook hands.

  Mason and Della Street walked back to the lot where Arlene Duvall, backing her car with the skill of one who has had a great deal of trailer experience, centered the ball right under the socket on the trailer hitch. The mechanic dropped the trailer into position, adjusted the chain with the looked link, and said, “The socket on the direction lights, stop lights and electric brakes won’t fit, Miss—”

  “I have a Heliar socket here,” she said, opening the glove compartment. “Put it on the wiring on the car.”

  “Well,” the mechanic said, surprised, “you sure thought of everything, didn’t you?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Arlene Duvall told him.

  “I am,” the man announced dryly.

  While the mechanic was scraping the ends of the wire to make the connection Mason walked over to his client.

  “Any plans?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I want you to handle my affairs, and Dad’s. I think you’re making a swell start. Go ahead from here.”

  “You may not care for my methods when you’ve seen more of me.”

  “Why?”

  “I serve justice.”

  “I like what I’ve seen for far.”

  “Suppose your dad really was guilty?”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “You want me to unscramble that case?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You’re taking the trailer with you now?”

  “Definitely.”

  “It has just occured to me,” Mason said, “that you are rushing out with a trailer that has been stripped. There’s no bedding, no pillowcases, no sheets, no towels, no soap, no provisions.”

  “How right you are.”

  “And yet you intend to start out in it?”

  “At once.”

  “And spend the night in it?”

  She nodded.

  “And when do I see you?”

  “Tomorrow morning at nine-thirty, when I bring you your retainer. And thank you very much.”

  Mason said, “If I’m going to represent you I’ll need a lot of information.”

  “From me?”

  “You and others. I’ll have to hire detectives.”

  “Go ahead. Hire them.”

  “It may run into quite a bill.”

  She met his eyes. “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Mason. If you can help my dad, I’ll authorize you to take any steps that may be necessary.”

  “That’s all right, but the expense—”

  “Did I say anything about expense.”

  “No. I’m the one who’s talking about expense.”

  “Well quit talking about it. Do what you have to.”

  “I’m retaining the Drake Detective Agency. Paul Drake does my work. It was through him we located the trailer.”

  “Fine. Hire as many people as you need.”

  “And what’s the limit?”

  She said slowly, purposefully, “There isn’t any.”

  Abruptly she extended a lean, browned hand, gripped Mason’s hand. “There’s no need for you to wait.”

  “This is rather an unsatisfactory point at which to terminate our conversation.”

  “For you, perhaps, but not for me. Go ahead. Do what has to be done.”

  Mason, somewhat angrily, said, “Remember what I told you. There’s a big reward out on that money. If you try to cut corners with me I’m going to make my fee out of the reward.”

  “I have an idea you’d do it, too.”

  “I would.”

  The mechanic said, “All ready, miss.”

  She smiled at the lawyer. “ ’Bye now. See you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 4

  It was a little before nine when Mason and Della Street entered Drake’s office.

  Paul Drake sniffed and said, “I detect the well-fed aroma that exudes from your satisfied faces.”

  Mason lit a cigarette. “It’s a great world, Paul.”

  “It is for you,” Drake said, snapping open a box and dropping a pill of bicarbonate of soda in his palm. He walked across to the water cooler, trickled water into a paper cup, took the soda pill.

  “That bad?” Mason asked.

  “It’s catching up with me,” Drake said. “Sitting here on the end of a telephone, running men out on jobs, supervising them, chaperoning them, correcting their mistakes, doing their thinking for them, correlating their reports, arguing with clients, running down to hole-in-the-wall restaurants, grabbing greasy fried food, gulping it down, hurrying back and trying to find out what’s been happening during the few minutes I’ve been gone.”

  “You’re working too hard, Paul.”

  “You said it.”

  “What’s new with our little sun bather?”

  “She’s driving a car furnished by a rental agency. She hooked onto her trailer and went to one of the big marts where they have parking space and all sorts of things, a regular drive-in department store so to speak.”

  “Your men didn’t have any trouble following her?”

  “Hell,” Drake said, “we were in a procession.”

  “Others?”

  Drake nodded.

  “What happened?” Mason asked.

  “Well, your little friend bought blankets, sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, silverware, towels, soap, provisions. Boy, she sure went on a shopping spree and she did it fast. You’d have thought she’d rehearsed the whole procedure or else had done it so many times before it was a habit.”

  “Did she have a shopping list?” Mason asked.

  “Not a sign of a list. She went through those departments like a whirlwind through a pile of autumn leaves. She had clerks scurrying around putting stuff in cartons, trotting out to the trailer like those pictures of African natives on a safari.”

  Mason glanced at Della Street. “Did she pay for that stuff or have it charged, Paul?”

  “She paid for it.”

  “What with? Check or—?”

  “Cold, hard cash.”

  “Did she seem to have plenty?”

  “She was just like Santa Claus. She scattered money around like green confetti. She never asked about price —she just pointed. This and this and this and this and some of that and a dozen of those and what’s your best grade of so-and-so.”

  Mason frowned.

  “So,” Drake said, “she had the trailer all provisioned. I bet it took her hours to put the stuff away. Boy, she sure was all fixed up. Virgin wool blankets, down-filled quilts, dishes, silverware, cups, saucers, coffee pots, finest quality frying pans, double boilers, a whole supply of canned goods—everything.”