Mason said, “Paul, have your men start working on the neighbors and see what they can uncover.”

  “How’re you going to find the neighbors in this mob?”

  “Easy. You’re a hell of a detective. The neighbors will be standing around with overcoats thrown over pajamas, talking excitedly to each other. The neighbors will know each other. People from farther down the street are more apt to be strangers. Have your men spot the groups that are talking and …”

  “Okay,” Drake said, “I’m on my way. You wait here.”

  Mason stood watching the house, which was now illuminated only by the powerful searchlights from the fire-fighting apparatus. There was no longer any glow of flames. A steamy smoke emanated from the building, carrying the characteristic smell of wet, charred wood mingled with the odor of burned upholstery.

  For the moment there were no streams of water playing on the outside of the building. Two lines of hose had been snaked in through the windows and from the interior came the flicker of lights as powerful flashlights moved around the inside of the building.

  The rain had ceased and it had turned cold. Mason, standing there in the damp chill of early morning, wished that he had brought a heavy overcoat. The spectators, now that there was no longer the warmth of the burning building and the excitement of action, began melting away.

  Drake came back to Perry Mason and said, “Okay. My men are working under definite instructions. All three of them are rounding up people, finding out all they can learn, and then they’re going to beat it by the time the deputy chief comes out of the building. It might not be a bad idea if you and I were out of the way where we couldn’t be questioned. I’ve arranged to get a report on anything new at my apartment and I have some things up there I think you’d be interested in.”

  “What?”

  “Some hot water, spices, a cube of butter, a little sugar, and a big slug of rum. A fine hot buttered rum about this time would …”

  “What the deuce are we waiting around here for?” Mason inquired.

  “That,” Drake said, “is the point I was trying to make.”

  “You’ve already made it,” Mason told him.

  Chapter 5

  The steam heat was off in Drake’s apartment, but by lighting the oven of the gas stove in the kitchenette and turning on a small electric heater, Drake managed to get a small area of reasonable warmth.

  “That’s my kick about California,” Drake complained. “You get colder here than any place in the country. They rave about the mild climate. They turn the heat on at six in the morning, shut it off at eight-thirty, turn it on again from four-thirty until nine-thirty, then shut it off for the night…. Here, try this.”

  He poured a steaming hot rum mixture into a mug in which there was a big chunk of butter, stirred it with a spoon, handed it to Mason, and poured a steaming drink for himself.

  They lit cigarettes, sat smoking, and sipping their drinks, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  Mason shifted his position in the straight-backed kitchen chair and said, “That certainly does hit the spot, Paul.”

  “Best thing on earth,” the detective said, “when you’ve been out on a cold assignment. Other drinks don’t mean so much to me, but hot buttered rum is a lifesaver. Here, let me fill it up.”

  He reached for the container, refilled Mason’s mug, then filled his own.

  “What is this? A secret formula?” Mason asked.

  “Oh, it’s something I’ve worked out by rule of thumb,” Drake said. “A little cinnamon, a little sugar, lots of rum, butter, water, and then I put …”

  The telephone rang.

  Drake abruptly put the mug down on the drainboard of the sink, walked into the other room, lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.”

  He waited a moment, then nodded to Mason and said into the transmitter, “All right, Pete, go ahead.”

  Drake listened for something over a minute, then he said, “No one spotted you? … Well, I guess that’s all you can do for tonight. … Where are you now? … Okay, I’ll call you back inside of ten minutes. Wait there for my call. It’ll be within ten minutes. Let’s make sure I’ve got that number right Give it to me again.”

  Drake copied the number on a scratch pad which was affixed to the telephone, said, “Okay. I have it. Thanks.”

  He hung up, walked back into the kitchen and said to Mason, “They found a body.”

  “Burned to death?” Mason asked.

  “That,” Drake said, “is the question. Probably not.”

  “How can they tell?”

  “Thanks to our men, the fire department got on the scene sooner than would otherwise have been the case. The boys at the fire department aren’t sticking their necks out, but they don’t think the victim was burned to death. The fire seems to have been in an adjoining room and this corpse is burned but not charred.”

  “You know this deputy chief pretty well?”

  “Sure,” Drake said. “He’s a smart guy.”

  “Think he’s apt to be right?”

  “He’s apt to be right.”

  “That,” Mason said thoughtfully, “complicates the situation.”

  “Of course,” Paul Drake pointed out, “it’s just his opinion. We’ll see what the doctors say.”

  Mason said, “A burned body assumes what they call a pugilistic attitude. Looks as though it had been standing in the ring, fighting, when it was suddenly enveloped by flames. The firemen must have had a lot of experience. Would they move the body, Paul?”

  “Not this body,” Drake said. “They telephoned for the homicide squad. They evidently have some pretty good lead. Lieutenant Tragg was on his way out when my men ducked for cover.”

  “Where is your man now—the one who phoned?”

  “At an all-night café.”

  “Find out anything from the neighbors?” Mason asked.

  “Quite a bit of stuff. He’s going to type a report and have it on my desk in the morning.”

  “What was this body, man or woman?”

  “Man,” Drake said. “About sixty. Physical description seems to match the description of Carlin.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Mason mused.

  “My operative,” Drake went on, “gave me just a thumbnail report. There’s a lot of stuff he wants to put in writing. He’ll have it on my desk at eight-thirty in the morning. He says it was an incendiary fire all right. It had been touched off with a time bomb. The police think this was worked through an electric clock that was plugged in on the lower floor.”

  “The lower floor?” Mason said.

  “That’s right. It’s one of those clocks that’s designed to turn on a radio. You know, you can plug it in, fix the hands for any particular time and promptly on that hour the clock will turn on the radio. You have to turn it off by hand.”

  “Go ahead,” Mason said.

  “They found a clock connected on the lower floor with wires that had evidently been running upstairs. The clock had been set for three o’clock.”

  “Oh-oh,” Mason remarked, and then added after a moment, “Where does that leave your woman visitor?”

  “Probably right in the middle of a very complicated situation.”

  “What time was it she showed up?”

  “One-twenty-eight.”

  “And no one knows how long she was there?”

  “She couldn’t have been there after one-fifty. That’s when my man took up his station at the back door. From that time we had the house watched both front and back.”

  “When she entered, was she carrying anything with her? A suitcase, or anything?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then she could hardly have carried a clock into the building, a jug of gasoline and all the other stuff.”

  “That’s right.”

  “On the other hand, when she entered the house she must have found everything all set ready for the fire.”

  Drake nodded. “She was the last one in the house, all right.”

  “So she must have gone in the front door and out the back.”

  “That’s right…. What about my operative? He’s waiting out there at this café.”

  Mason said, “Telephone him to go home and type that report, then to keep out of circulation and not talk with anyone.”

  “We should report this to the police,” Drake said.

  “I’m representing a client.”

  “I have my license to think of,” Drake pointed out.

  “You’re working for me, Paul.”

  “Just the same, we’re supposed to let the police know what happened out there.”

  “How are you going to explain the fact that you had men on the job?”

  “That’s something I could hold out on,” Drake said. “I could refuse to divulge the name of my client.”

  Mason grinned and said, “That would be like a candidate for office refusing to divulge whom he voted for when he walked out of the voting booth.”

  “Want some more hot rum, Perry?”

  “No thanks. Guess we’d better get some more shut-eye. Lieutenant Tragg will be hot on our trail. He’ll find out that we were out there and he’ll be after both of us. Gosh, I got chilled out there.”

  “Ain’t that liquor warming you up?”

  “A little bit. Tell you what let’s do, Paul, let’s go up to the club and take a Turkish bath.”

  “You shouldn’t take a Turkish bath right after you’ve had a hot toddy.”

  “It’ll wear off by the time we get there. No one will think to look for us there.”

  “Tragg’ll have kittens.”

  “Let him have them.”

  “Well,” Drake said, “I’ll call up my operative. Oh, say, Perry, there was one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “In that house,” Drake said, “there was something that didn’t register. The police think it may have been mixed up in some dope-running, or something of that sort.”

  “How come?”

  Drake said, “Remember that it was an old, ramshackle, rambling house. It had evidently been sparsely furnished, but there was one son-of-a-gun of a big fireproof safe on the lower floor, a regular humdinger of a safe.”

  Mason’s eyes lit up. “Gosh, Paul, I’d sure like to take a look at the inside of that safe.”

  “So would the police.”

  “I wonder what the chances are of being on hand when the police get it open.”

  “Just about one in a million,” Drake said.

  “But suppose a man could furnish the police with the combination?”

  Drake looked at him sharply. “The combination to that safe?”

  “The combination to that safe.”

  “You’re holding out on me?”

  Mason pushed back the mug half full of unfinished hot buttered rum. “Okay, Paul,” he said. “Call up your operative and tell him to make himself scarce. You and I are going to the club for a Turkish bath where Lieutenant Tragg can’t find us.”

  Drake said, “I hate to dump good liquor down the sink, Perry. I …”

  “Don’t dump it down the sink,” Mason told him. “Leave it there so we can point out to Tragg that I was chilled to the bone. It was only when the hot buttered rum didn’t have any effect that I suggested we go to a Turkish bath. That’ll make our story sound plausible.”

  “Oh yeah?” Drake asked skeptically, moving over to pick up the telephone.

  He dialed the number of the all-night café where his operative was waiting, then said ominously over his shoulder, “If you have the combination to that safe, Perry, there isn’t time enough between now and noon tomorrow to think up any story that’ll make Lieutenant Tragg … Hello.… Oh, hello, Pete. This is Drake. Okay. Go on home. Put all that stuff on paper and have it on my desk by eight o’clock. No one saw you down there? No one that recognized you? … Didn’t know any of the firemen? … Okay…. Oh, sure, they’ll spot you as one of my men but they won’t know which one. Keep under cover until you hear from me…. Okay…. Good-by.”

  Drake hung up the telephone, said wearily to Mason, “Come on. I don’t know why you’re complaining about the cold. You’re in hot water and it’s going to get hotter from now on.”

  Chapter 6

  Mason and Paul Drake were the only men in the hot room at this hour of the morning. They sprawled out on wooden deck chairs, sheets underneath them, wet towels wrapped turban-wise around their heads, their feet in tubs of warm water.

  A huge bank of radiators around the side of the room kept the temperature high enough to start perspiration almost immediately on entering the room. The wood of the chairs was almost too hot to touch save where it was cooled by the perspiration-soaked sheets.

  “This,” Mason announced, “feels good. Gosh, I got cold standing out there on the wet pavement. My feet got so cold they were numb.”

  “My feet are still cold,” Drake said gloomily. “I’d like to know just what you’re getting me mixed up in.”

  “Why,” Mason said, “my cards are on the table, Paul. I told you …”

  “That combination of the safe,” Drake said. “You didn’t tell me anything about that.”

  Mason hesitated. “Well, Paul, it was—oh-oh!”

  Drake followed Mason’s glance through the heavy plate glass of the swinging doors.

  A tall, well-knit man, whose shoulders bore the unmistakable stamp of a trained boxer, his back turned to the hot room, was talking with the attendant.

  The attendant jerked his thumb in the direction of the hot room and the man turned, regarded the two nude, perspiring figures, grinned, and pushed the door open.

  “Well,” he said, “you fellows don’t seem glad to see me.”

  “What’s all the excitement?” Mason asked.

  Lieutenant Tragg slipped off his coat. “You fellows made a tactical error. The last time you ducked out of sight I made it a point to check back and find out where you’d been. I found you were here, so I thought I might …”

  Mason interposed hastily, “I got completely chilled. I was out at a fire tonight and never got so cold in my life. Neglected to take an overcoat and …”

  “I heard about it,” Tragg said. “You had a golf sweater on. Must have got up out of bed and dressed rather hastily.”

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead, said, “How about you fellows coming outside?”

  “Couldn’t think of it,” Mason told him, glancing at Paul Drake. “We’d catch cold now. We’ve just started to sweat How about taking your clothes off and having a Turkish bath, Lieutenant?”

  “I have work to do. You know damn well I’d catch cold if I stayed here and then went out without taking time to cool off.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Mason said, “but go ahead, Lieutenant, we’ll be glad to answer any questions.”

  Tragg said irritably, “Dammit, I can’t stay in here!”

  “Well, we can’t go out,” Mason told him.

  Tragg ran the handkerchief around the inside of his collar, again mopped his forehead. “What were you two doing out there at the fire?”

  “Watching it.”

  “Don’t be smart. How did you know the house was on fire?”

  “Paul Drake telephoned me,” Mason said.

  “How did Paul Drake know?”

  “One of his men told him.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one that was watching the house,” Mason said.

  “And why, may I ask, were you so fortunate as to be watching the house, waiting for the fire to break out, and …”

  “Oh, we weren’t waiting for the fire to break out,” Mason said. “That was a complete surprise.”

  “All right,” Tragg said irritably, “you two guys are up to something. Drake had a man out there watching the house. I want to know what happened. I want to know how long he was there. I particularly want to know who came and who went.”

  Drake said, “My man hasn’t filed his report yet, Lieutenant.”

  Tragg said, “Hell, I can’t stay in here. I’ve got work to do. Give me the name of the man. Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know where you can find him,” Drake said. “He’s one of my night operatives. He’s making out a report somewhere now. I told him he could go on home. But he’s going to type out a report.”

  “When are you going to get that report? Come on, snap out of it Kick through with whatever information you have. He must have told you all the important stuff.”

  Drake looked appealingly at Perry Mason.

  Mason said suavely, “Drake is acting under my orders and I’m completely responsible.”

  “You’re not responsible as far as the police are concerned,” Tragg said grimly. “Paul Drake is running a detective agency. He has a license. I presume he wants to keep that license. That’s okay by us, but when he has information in a homicide …”

  “In a homicide?” Mason interrupted.

  “Homicide,” Lieutenant Tragg said. “Now look, I want the low-down on this thing, and I want it now.”

  Mason said, “It’s a long story.”

  Tragg squirmed in anguish. “Hang it, I can’t stay in here. You fellows come outside.”

  “I told you we couldn’t go out now. We’ve just begun to sweat.”

  Tragg once more wiped his soggy handkerchief over his perspiring forehead, around the collar of his shirt and said, “All right. You win. I can’t get all sweaty and then go out in this cold wind. When are you going to have this report, Drake?”

  “In the morning.”

  “What time?”

  Drake glanced at Mason.

  “Eight o’clock,” Mason said.

  Lieutenant Tragg said, “If you know anything that’ll help me find out who murdered Medford D. Carlin I want to know it now.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know who murdered him,” Mason said. “As I told you, Lieutenant, my connection with Carlin is a long story and …”

  Tragg interrupted, “All right. I’ll be at your office at eight o’clock, Mason. You be there, Drake. If you had any men covering that Carlin house, you have them there. If you’re not there and the men aren’t there, you’ll be summoned to the district attorney’s office, and if that doesn’t work you’ll be subpoenaed before a grand jury. I don’t want any more funny business.”