“Are they burnt?” Mason asked.

  “Well, they’re feeling pretty hot. I hope I don’t raise a blister. I could have got them burnt off.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. I came in to find out.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

  Paul Drake got up, said, “Well, I’ll toddle along and see how the overhead is clicking in my office.”

  “Don’t let me frighten you away, Drake.”

  “Just away—not frightened,” Drake said, and flashing Mason a glance, eased out of the exit door.

  Tragg drew a cigar from his pocket, clipped the end, looked at Mason shrewdly and lit up. “How’s business?”

  “Too much business, not enough money.”

  “I know,” Tragg sympathized. “Some days when you don’t make even a measly thousand dollars…. What’s your tie-up with the Alburg case?”

  Mason said, “I was in the restaurant when all the excitement took place. I eat there once in a while. Alburg asked me a few questions.”

  “What questions?”

  Mason smiled at Tragg and said, “I can’t remember, Lieutenant.”

  Tragg inspected the end of the cigar to see that it was burning evenly, gave Mason a grin and said, “You know, Counselor, I like you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s where the trouble comes in.”

  “What trouble?”

  “My trouble. There are those down in the department who don’t like you.”

  “No?”

  “No. They think you’re on the other side of the law.”

  Mason said, “The law gives a man the right to have counsel and …”

  “Save it,” Tragg said. “Someday a luncheon club may want you to make a speech and I’d hate to have you use up all your material.”

  “I’m just rehearsing.”

  “You don’t need rehearsal. You do all right when you ad lib. In fact sometimes you’re too good…. What about the fur coat?”

  “What fur coat?”

  “The one Della wore out of the restaurant last night.”

  Mason turned to Della Street with mock sternness. “Della, have you been shoplifting again?”

  She nodded, contritely. “I can’t help it, Chief. It’s that awful impulse. Everything goes black, and when I come to, there I am standing on a corner in a fur coat with the price mark still on it, and I know that my amnesia has been playing tricks on me again.”

  Tragg clucked and sadly shook his head. “Poor kid,” he said to Mason, “it’s something she really can’t control. It’s an occupational disease. It comes from working for you.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Della Street said quickly. “It’s hereditary. It came from my paternal grandfather’s side of the family—old Captain Street, the pirate. He used to take what he wanted whenever he could find a cutlass handy.”

  “Why don’t you try going to a psychoanalyst?” Tragg asked.

  “I did. He told me that my conscience was at war with my inherited impulses. And so whenever I wanted to take anything I blacked out so I wouldn’t know what I was doing. It was what he called a defense mechanism.”

  “Offer any cure?” Tragg asked.

  “He wanted me to lie on a couch and tell him about my early life.”

  “It didn’t help?” Tragg asked.

  “Not a bit.”

  “Well,” Tragg said, “I’m going to give you a treatment of my own that may cure you, Della.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m going to give you twenty minutes to get that fur coat in my possession.”

  “Which fur coat?” Mason asked.

  “The fur coat she wore out of Alburg’s restaurant last night.”

  “Well, now, let’s see,” Mason said. “Was that the Hudson Bay rabbit, or the clipped beaver cat, Della?”

  Lieutenant Tragg interrupted. “It was the ‘mink stole.’ ”

  “A mink stole?” Mason asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Perhaps that is the wrong use of grammar,” Tragg said. “I should have said the ‘mink stolen.’ ”

  Della Street glanced at Perry Mason.

  “Stolen from whom?” Mason asked.

  “That I can’t tell you, yet.”

  “Come again when you can.”

  “No, I want the coat, Mason.”

  Mason lit a cigarette and settled back in his chair.

  “You could get in bad over this thing,” Tragg told him.

  Mason asked politely, “How was the elevator service coming up, Tragg?”

  “Lousy.”

  “It frequently is this time of night. The fellows who can clear up their desks early leave their secretaries to handle the last-minute rush of stuff, and start streaming out of the building and getting in their cars so they can beat the traffic rush going home.”

  Tragg nodded.

  “So that sometimes you have to wait awhile for an elevator. And yet, Tragg, people do put up with that inconvenience. They come all the way downtown and pay for a parking lot for their car. Then they put up with all the inconvenience of the elevators and come up here to see me just to ask me to protect their rights. You know, after a person has gone to all that trouble, I feel that I really should give him at least a run for his money.”

  “Anybody ask you to protect her rights on the fur coat?”

  “If I answered that question,” Mason said, “you’d probably ask me another.”

  “I’d ask you two more.”

  “I thought so.”

  Tragg said, “So I’m going to tell you something.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Ever hear of Robert Claremont?”

  Mason shook his head.

  “Don’t remember reading about him?”

  Again Mason made a gesture of negation.

  “Bob Claremont,” Lieutenant Tragg said, almost musingly. “A pretty darned nice kid. I worked on that case. A fine, clean-cut, upstanding young chap who had always wanted to be on the force. That was his ideal. The war came along and put a crimp on his ambition for a while, and then he was discharged and used the schooling he had coming to study up a lot of stuff about police science so he’d be a better cop…. Can you imagine that, Mason, a fellow going to school day after day, studying. So many people think of cops as being beetle-browed gorillas who go around smacking citizens on the head with night sticks, collecting payoff from the bookies …”

  “And then retiring to ranches down in Texas,” Mason interrupted.

  For a moment Tragg frowned. Then he said, with repressed anger in his voice, “That’s the hell of it, Mason. That’s what gives the decent cop a hard row to hoe, a few rotten apples in the barrel. Citizens don’t remember the story of the cop who gave his life trying to stop a hold-up. All they can remember is the cop who has the bad memory and can’t recall for the life of him the name of the bank in which he deposited the last hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I was only kidding,” Mason said.

  “I’m not kidding,” Tragg told him. “You have any idea what it means to be a cop, Mason? You’re off duty. You go to a market or a service station or a liquor store. The door opens. Three men stand there with sawed-off shotguns. It’s a stick-up.

  “If you were a citizen you’d reach for the ceiling. Your friends would make a hero out of you because you didn’t faint. But you’re a cop. You reach for the ceiling and the hoodlums would frisk you and take your gun and badge. The angry citizens would swamp the department with letters of protest.

  “So you go for your gun. You haven’t a chance in a million. You’re off duty. You’re at a disadvantage, but you have the tradition of the force on your shoulders. You take your one chance in a million. You go for your gun. You brace yourself against the bite of the slugs in your guts so you can squeeze the trigger a couple of times before you cash in.

  “Then citizens make wisecracks about oil wells in Texas.”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “There are cops and cops. You’re on the square, Tragg. I didn’t mean you when I talked about the millionaires. You told me to save my line for a luncheon-club speech when I tried to talk about the lawyers. I’ve let you talk about the cops. Now tell me about Claremont.”

  “Bob became a rookie. He went ahead rapidly. Everybody liked him. He was alert, on the job every minute of the time, and if anyone had told him there was corruption anywhere on the force, he’d have smeared the guy. The force was his ideal. It represented the law, standing guard over the helpless.”

  “What happened to him?” Mason said.

  “No one knows exactly. Apparently he saw something about an automobile that made him suspicious. He must have stopped the car to question the driver. Why he would have done it, no one knows. He wasn’t on traffic, and he wouldn’t have stopped a car for a routine shakedown. There was definitely something about the car that aroused his suspicions.”

  “Go ahead,” Mason said.

  “There must have been at least two men in the car, and perhaps more,” Tragg said, “because they undoubtedly surprised him and forced him to get into the car with them.”

  “Why would they do that?” Mason asked.

  Tragg shook his head.

  “Go ahead,” Mason invited.

  “As nearly as we can put things together,” Tragg said, “he was forced into the car. They made him lie down on the floor. They took his gun away from him, and then they drove about ten miles out of town. And then while he was still lying down on the floor of the car, they pushed the gun against his head—a contact wound. Ever see a contact wound, Mason?”

  Mason raised his eyebrows.

  Tragg said, “They’re not nice to look at. The gun is held right against the head. The bullet goes in and so do the gases from the gun. When the gases get inside the head, they keep on expanding.”

  “Go ahead,” Mason said, “but don’t torture yourself, Lieutenant.”

  “Hell, I can’t get over it,” Tragg said bitterly. “You should have talked with the guy’s wife, and his two kids, a couple of fine upstanding children who looked like their father with steady, honest blue eyes. The older one was old enough to know what had happened. The younger one wasn’t.”

  “And the wife?” Della Street asked.

  Tragg looked at her for a moment, then tightened his lips and said, “She knew what had happened, all right…. A darned nice girl. She and Bob Claremont had been in love for years, but the war came along and he went overseas. You know what it means, praying for someone every night, looking for a letter from him in the mail, dreading the delivery of a telegram, hating to hear the phone ring…. All right, she went through that, so did a lot of other people. That’s war. Her man came back to her. Lots of men didn’t come back.

  “She was lucky that far. He came back on leave. They got married. He never did see his son until the war was over. The boy was over a year old then…. Then Bob started studying, studying so he’d be a credit to the profession. He had an idea law enforcement was a career. Used to claim that the scientific investigator would be as important in the public eye as the lawyer or the doctor. Spent all of the money he could get hold of buying books on crime detection, criminology, legal medicine, and that sort of stuff.”

  “You said it was a contact wound?” Mason said.

  “One of them was. The others weren’t. It was the contact wound that caused death. Then they went on and emptied the gun into him just to make sure. Or else because one of the guys was trigger-happy and liked to hear the bullets thud.”

  “Then what happened?” Mason asked.

  “Then,” Tragg said, “they dumped him out.”

  “Right where he was shot?” Mason asked.

  “Nobody knows where he was shot,” Tragg said. “Apparently it was in a speeding car. They dumped him. They didn’t even bother to stop the car—just opened the door and let him hit the pavement and roll over and over like a sack of meal, leaving little splotches of blood every time he hit. The car kept on going.”

  Tragg puffed thoughtfully at his cigar for a moment, then said, “We saved the bullets, of course…. Now here’s a funny one. We’ve got a man in Ballistics who has been collecting a bank of specimen bullets. Every cop has to fire a bullet from his gun into a tube of cotton waste. The bullets are saved and filed.

  “So we had test bullets from Bob Claremont’s gun. We compared them with the fatal bullets. They matched. Bob had been shot six times with his own gun.”

  “Well?” Mason asked.

  Tragg shook his head. “It couldn’t have happened that way. Bob Claremont wouldn’t have knuckled under and let them take his gun. That’s why I was telling you about cops, Mason. Even if there’s only one chance in a million, a cop has to take it. If there’s no chance at all, a cop goes out fighting—Bob Claremont’s kind of cop.

  “They wouldn’t have found six shells to have shot at him from his own gun. He’d have fired a shot or two—if he’d stopped an auto to shake it down.”

  “What about his gun?” Mason asked.

  “It never showed up. That’s strange. Ordinarily they’d have tossed the gun out before they’d gone a hundred yards. Remember the gun was empty. It was an officer’s gun and it was hot.”

  “You searched, of course?”

  “Searched?” Tragg said. “We combed the sides of that road—every inch of it. Then we got mine detectors and looked around through the tangled weeds.”

  “And found nothing?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “I presume,” Mason said, “you’re telling me the story for some particular reason?”

  “For a particular reason,” Tragg said. “Bob Claremont was murdered September seventeenth—a year ago…. Believe me, Mason, we turned everything upside down. We had one suspect.”

  “Who?” Mason asked.

  Tragg hesitated.

  “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Mason said. “I was just trying to get a picture of the case.”

  “No, I’ll tell you,” Tragg said. “I’m putting all the cards on the table, because this may be awfully damn important, Mason. The suspect was a fellow by the name of Sedgwick. His name was Thomas E. Sedgwick, and he was making book. Claremont was on to him. Claremont was hoping to get the goods on him, and run him in. Claremont hadn’t learned all of the angles yet. That is, he knew them but he didn’t want to use them. He wouldn’t work through stoolies. He wanted to get evidence himself. He was working on Sedgwick at the time he was bumped off.

  “We wanted to round Sedgwick up for questioning on the murder, not that we had anything specifically on him, but we knew that Claremont was working on him.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “And,” Tragg said, “we couldn’t find Sedgwick. He had vanished, disappeared, swallowed his tail, gone. We’d like very, very much to know where Thomas E. Sedgwick is.”

  “You didn’t have anything else on him,” Mason asked, “only the fact that this officer had been working on Sedgwick …?”

  “Sedgwick had a cigar counter,” Tragg said. “He was doing a pretty good business. He was doing a damned good business, when you put everything together. And the night Claremont was killed, Sedgwick left town. The next day there was a new chap in the cigar counter. Said that Sedgwick had sold out to him for a thousand dollars, and had a bill of sale to prove it. Said that he had been negotiating with Sedgwick for a purchase for a week or ten days, that at two o’clock in the morning Sedgwick had called him on the phone, told him that if he wanted to put up a thousand dollars in spot cash, the cigar business was for sale, lock, stock and barrel, lease, good will, cigars on hand, inventory, everything.

  “The fellow jumped at the chance. Sedgwick wouldn’t take his personal check. He had to have cash. The guy finally raised the cash, and about four o’clock in the morning the deal was consummated. Sedgwick signed the bill of sale in front of witnesses, and that was the last anyone has ever seen of Thomas E. Sedgwick. Needless to say, the guy who bought the place sold cigars, that was all; just cigars. It was a good location. He sold cigars and he kept his nose clean. If he’d ever given us a chance to take him down to headquarters the boys would have worked him over. He never gave anybody the chance. We tried everything on him. We tried stoolies. We tried spotters. We tried everything we could think of. Hell, the guy was clean.”

  “What happened to him?” Mason asked.

  “He stuck around the place for about two months, then he sold it out to another guy who had a police record. That guy started making book and we flattened him so damn fast he never knew what hit him.”

  “But no Sedgwick?”

  “No Sedgwick.”

  “I suppose this is leading up to something,” Mason said.

  “Last night,” Tragg said, “there was this mix-up down at Alburg’s place. A waitress got terrified and ran out through the back alley. Someone threw a gun on her. She didn’t react the way the gunman probably expected she would act. She didn’t get in the car. She screamed and made a dash for the mouth of the alley.

  “Sometimes things are funny that way. A man has a gun and it’s a symbol of power. The average person is deathly afraid of a gun. He looks down the big black hole and sees the wicked little bullets grouped around the cylinder, and his knees buckle…. The more you know about guns the more you realize that it isn’t the gun that’s dangerous—it’s the man behind it. Some men can shoot a gun, some men can’t. A few men who pack rods couldn’t hit a man-sized target at a distance of fifteen feet, without stopping to take careful aim, and even then they might miss. Shooting a gun just by the feel of the weapon takes a little practice.”

  “Go on,” Mason said.

  “Whoever was driving that car hadn’t figured on the fact that the open door gave him a pretty narrow target. His first shot missed. He didn’t expect to have to shoot. When the waitress jumped forward she got out of the line of fire. The driver stepped on the throttle to speed up so he could get abreast of her. When he did that, the right-hand door jerked back shut. The fellow fired a second bullet, and, according to the story of witnesses, that bullet, which was fired just as the door was swinging closed, went through the right-hand door of the car.