“What’s the limit?” Drake asked.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Okay, I’m starting.”

  Mason hung up and turned to Marilyn Keith. “Well?” he asked.

  “Have you told anyone about me?”

  “Not by name.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m in the case now.”

  “I know.”

  “It may be more of a case than it seemed at first.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m representing Ted.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “I may have to show who was really driving the car.”

  She thought that over for a minute, then raised her chin. “Go right ahead, Mr. Mason. You do anything that will help Ted.”

  “This case may have a lot more to it than you think,” Mason told her. “Do you want to tell me anything?”

  “I drove the car,” she said.

  “Was that the reason you came to me?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “On account of Ted. Oh, please, Mr. Mason, don’t let anything happen to him. I don’t only mean about the car; I mean—lots of things.”

  “Such as what?” Mason asked.

  “Ted’s being exposed to influences that aren’t good.”

  “Why aren’t they good?”

  “I can’t tell you all of it,” she said. “Mr. Addison Balfour is a wonderful man, but he’s an old man. He’s a sick man. He’s a grim man. He looks at life as a battle. He was never married. He regrets that fact now, not because he realizes that he missed a lot of love, but only because he has no son to carry on the Balfour business.

  “He wants to make Ted a second Addison Balfour. He wants to make him a grim, uncompromising, unyielding fighter.

  “Ted’s young. His vision, his ideals are younger and clearer than those of Addison Balfour. He sees the beauties of life. He can enjoy a sunset or the soft spring sunlight on green hills. He sees and loves beauty everywhere. It would be a tragic mistake to make him into a grim, fighting machine like Addison Balfour.”

  “Any other influences?” Mason asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “The influence of beauty,” she said.

  “I thought you said you wanted him to appreciate beauty.”

  “Real beauty, not the spurious kind.”

  “Who’s the spurious beauty?” Mason asked.

  “Dorla.”

  “You mean to say she’s married to his uncle and has her eyes on the nephew?”

  “She has big eyes,” Marilyn Keith said. “Oh, Mr. Mason, I do so hope you can handle this thing in such a way that… well, give Ted an opportunity to develop his own individuality in his own way. There’ll be lots of time later on for him to become as grim as Addison Balfour, and a lot of time later on for him to become disillusioned about women.

  “And if Guthrie Balfour should think that Ted and Dorla…. Mr. Mason, you’re a lawyer. You know the world.”

  “What you have outlined,” Mason said, “or rather, what you have hinted at, sounds like quite a combination.”

  “That,” she said, “is a masterpiece of understatement. You haven’t met Banner Boles yet.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the trouble shooter for the Balfour interests. He’s deadly and clever, and whenever he’s called in he starts manipulating facts and twisting things around so you don’t know where you’re at. Oh, Mr. Mason, I’m terribly afraid!”

  “For yourself?”

  “No, for Ted.”

  “You may not be in the clear on this thing,” Mason said, his voice kindly, “and now that I’m representing Ted, I may have to drag you in.”

  “Drag me in if it will help Ted.”

  “Does he know you drove him home?”

  “He’s never intimated it if he does.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was out in the parking space back of Florence Ingle’s place. He wasn’t drunk. He was sick, I knew he couldn’t drive in that condition. I saw him trying to back up the car. He was barely able to sit up.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “I just said, ‘Move over,’ and I got behind the steering wheel and drove him home.”

  “What happened?”

  “The last part of that trip he was falling over against me, and I’d have to push his weight away so I could drive the car. He’d fall against the wheel. I guess I was going all over the road there on Sycamore Road, but I didn’t hit anyone, Mr. Mason. That is, I don’t think I did. I kept my eyes on the road. I tried to, but he would lurch against me and grab the wheel. I should have stopped, but I wasn’t driving fast.”

  “You put him to bed?”

  “I had a terrible time. I finally got him to stagger up to his room. I took his shoes off. I tried to find a servant, but there didn’t seem to be anyone at home.”

  “What time was this?”

  “A lot earlier than Myrtle Haley said it was.”

  Mason was thoughtful. “How did you get home? If you called a cab we may be able to find the driver and establish the time element by—”

  “I didn’t call a cab, Mr. Mason. I was afraid that might be embarrassing to Ted—a young woman leaving the house alone, the servants all away. I walked to the highway and thumbed a ride. I told the man who picked me up a story of having to walk home.”

  Mason looked at her sharply.

  “There was no reason why any young woman couldn’t have called a cab from that house at ten-thirty or eleven at night.”

  “Don’t you see?” she pleaded. “I’m not just any young woman. I’m Addison Balfour’s confidential secretary. I know the contents of his will. If he thought I had any interest in Ted … or that I had been in Ted’s room—Oh, Mr. Mason, please have confidence in me and please protect my secret!

  “I have to go now. I don’t want the girls in the office to get suspicious. I’m supposed to be letting you use the phone. The switchboard operator will know how long it’s been since you hung up. Good-by now.”

  Mason left Addison Balfour’s residence, stopped at the first telephone booth, called Paul Drake, said, “I can talk now, Paul. Here’s your first job. Find out where Ted Balfour is. Get him out of circulation. Keep him out of circulation. Get in touch with me as soon as you have him and—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Drake said. “Back up. You’re not playing tiddlywinks. This is for high stakes, and it’s for keeps.”

  “What do you mean?” Mason asked.

  “Hell!” Drake said. “The police had Ted in custody within fifteen minutes of the time the autopsy surgeon picked up the telephone and made his first preliminary report about the bullet.”

  “Where are they keeping him?” Mason asked.

  “That’s something no one knows,” Drake said.

  “How about the press, Paul?”

  “Figure it out for yourself, Perry. Here’s the only heir to the Balfour fortune charged with a murder rap which was dressed up to look like a hit-and-run accident. What would you do if you were a city editor?”

  “Okay,” Mason said wearily. “Get your men working. I’m on my way to the office.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Mason hurried to his office and started mapping out a plan of campaign before he had even hung up his hat.

  “Paul,” he said to the detective, “I want to find out everything I can about Jackson Eagan.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Drake said. “If they’d been on the job, police would have spotted this as a murder right at the start. I’ve seen photographs of the body, Perry. You don’t smash up a man’s head like that in a hit and run. That man had been tied to a car somehow and his face had literally been dragged over the road. His head was then smashed in with a sledge hammer or something. It was done so the authorities would never think to look for a bullet.

  “It worked, too. They thought the guy had been hit, his head dashed to the pavement and then his clothes had caught on the front bumper and he’d been dragged for a while.”

  “Couldn’t it have been that way?” Mason asked.

  “Not with the bullet in the guy’s brain,” Drake said.

  “All right,” Mason told him, “let’s use our heads. The police are concentrating on Ted Balfour. They’re trying to get admissions from him. They’re trying to check what he was doing on the night of the nineteenth of September. They’ll be putting all sorts of pressure on him to make him disclose the identity of the girl whom he remembers as having driven the car.

  “There’s just a chance that by using our heads we may have just a few minutes’ head start on the police on some of these other angles that they won’t think of at the moment.

  “Now, these car rental agencies won’t rent a car unless they see a driver’s license, and they usually make a note on the contract of the number of the driver’s license. Have operatives cover the car rental agency, take a look at the contract covering the Jackson Eagan car on that date. See if we can get the number of the driver’s license from the contract.

  “There’s a, chance we can beat the police to it in another direction. The police won’t be able to get in the Balfour house until they get a search warrant or permission from Ted Balfour. Quite frequently you can tell a lot by going through a man’s room. They’ll be searching his clothes for bloodstains. They’ll be looking for a revolver. They’ll be doing all of the usual things within a matter of minutes, if they aren’t doing it already.

  “Della, get Mrs. Guthrie Balfour on the phone for me. Paul, get your men started covering all these other angles.”

  Drake nodded, said, “I’ll go down to my office, so I won’t be tying up your telephone system, Perry. I’ll have men on the job within a matter of seconds.”

  “Get going,” Mason said.

  In the meantime, Della Street’s busy fingers had been whirring the dial of the unlisted telephone which was used in times of emergency to get quick connections. A moment later she nodded to Perry Mason and said, “I have Mrs. Balfour on the line.”

  Mason’s voice showed relief. “That’s a break,” he said. “I was afraid she might be out.”

  Mason picked up the telephone, said, “Hello, Mrs. Balfour.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mason, what is it?”

  “There have been some very important and very disturbing developments in the matter which you discussed with me.”

  “There have?” she asked, apprehension in her voice.

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean … you mean that the matter has been—Why I thought—”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with that matter, but a development from it,” Mason said. “The police are now investigating a murder.”

  “A murder!”

  “That’s right. I don’t want to discuss it on the phone.”

  “How can I see you?”

  Mason said, “Wait there. Don’t go out under any circumstances. I’m coming over as soon as I can get there.”

  Mason slammed up the telephone, said to Della Street, “Come on, Della. Bring a notebook and some pencils. Let’s go!”

  Mason’s long legs striding rapidly down the corridor forced Della Street into a half run in order to keep up. They descended in the elevator, hurried over to Mason’s car in the parking lot, and swung into traffic.

  “Do you know the way?” Della Street asked.

  “Fortunately I do,” Mason said. “We go out the State Highway. The scene of the accident was only about a mile from the Balfour estate, and maps were introduced in the case yesterday. You see, the prosecution was trying to prove that Ted Balfour would normally have used this route along Sycamore Street to the State Highway, then turned up State Highway until he came to the next intersection, which would have been the best way to the Balfour estate.”

  “If there was a murder,” Della Street said, “how can they prove that Ted Balfour was in on it?”

  “That’s what they’re trying to do right now,” Mason said. “They have a pretty good case of circumstantial evidence, indicating that Balfour’s car was mixed up in it, but they can’t prove Balfour was mixed up in it, at least, not from any evidence they had yesterday.”

  “So what happens?”

  “So,” Mason said, “we try to find and appraise evidence before the police think to look for it.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to tamper with evidence in a case of this sort?”

  “We’re not going to tamper with evidence,” Mason said. “We’re going to look at it. Once the police get hold of it, they’ll put it away and we won’t be able to find out anything until we get to court. But if we get a look at it first, we’ll know generally what we’re up against.”

  “You think some evidence may be out there?” Della Street asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mason told her. “I hope not. Let’s look at it this way, Della: the man was shot. The body was mutilated to conceal the gunshot wound and prevent identification. Then it was taken out and placed by the side of the road. They waited for the tipsy driver to come along and then they threw the body out in front of the car.”

  “Why do you say ‘they?’” Della Street asked.

  “Because one man wouldn’t be juggling a body around like that.”

  “Then Ted Balfour may have simply been the means to an end?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But how did they know that a tipsy driver would be coming along that road?”

  “That’s the point,” Mason said. “Somebody loaded Balfour’s drink. He probably wasn’t only intoxicated; he was doped.”

  “Then how do you account for his testimony that a girl was driving the car?” Della Street asked.

  “That was probably a coincidence. It may not be the truth.”

  “That was Ted’s story,” Della Street said.

  “Exactly. Myrtle Anne Haley swore that she was following a car that was weaving all over the road. The prosecutor didn’t ask her who was driving the car, whether it was a man or a woman, whether there was one person in the driver’s seat, or whether there were two.”

  “And all those head injuries,” Della Street asked, “were simply for the purpose of preventing the corpse from being identified?”

  “Probably for the primary purpose of concealing the fact that there was a bullet hole in the head.”

  “Would Ted Balfour have been mixed up in anything like that?”

  “He could have been. We don’t know. We don’t know the true situation. Myrtle Haley is lying at least about some things. But that doesn’t mean all of her testimony is false. I think she wrote down that license number sometime after she got home. I think she wrote it down in good light and while she was seated at a table. But her testimony may well be true that she was following a car which was weaving all over the road.”

  “Then Ted must have been driving it?”

  “Don’t overlook one other possibility,” Mason said. “Ted may have been sent home and put to bed in an intoxicated condition, and then someone took the automobile out of the garage, started weaving all over the road as though driving in an intoxicated condition, waited until he was certain some car behind him would spot him and probably get the license number, then the dead body of Jackson Eagan was thrown in front of the automobile.”

  “But why?” Della Street asked.

  “That,” Mason said, “is what we’re going to try to find out.”

  On two occasions after that Della Street started to say something, but each time, glancing up at the lawyer’s face, she saw the expression of extreme concentration which she knew so well, and remained silent.

  Mason slowed at the intersection, turned from State Highway, ran for about two hundred yards over a surfaced road, and turned to the right between huge stone pillars marking the driveway entrance in a stucco wall which enclosed the front part of the Balfour estate.

  The tires crunched along the graveled driveway, and almost as soon as Mason had brought his car to a stop, the front door was thrown open by Mrs. Guthrie Balfour.

  Mason, followed by Della Street, hurried up the steps.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Have the police been here yet?” Mason asked.

  “Heavens, no!”

  “They’re coming,” Mason said. “We’re fighting minutes. Let’s take a look in Ted’s room.”

  “But why, Mr. Mason?”

  “Do you know a Jackson Eagan?”

  “Jackson Eagan,” she repeated. “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Ever hear of him?” Mason asked.

  She shook her head, leading the way up a flight of steps.

  “No,” she said over her shoulder, “I’m quite certain I haven’t heard of any Jackson Eagan…Why?”

  “Jackson Eagan,” Mason said, “is the corpse. He registered at the Sleepy Hollow Motel. He was murdered.”

  “How?”

  “A bullet in the head.”

  “Are they certain?”

  “The bullet was still there when the body was exhumed.”

  “Oh,” she said shortly.

  She fairly flew up the wide oaken staircase, then hurried down a wide corridor and flung open the door of a spacious corner bedroom. “This is Ted’s room,” she said.

  Mason regarded the framed pictures on the wall—some of them Army pictures, some of them college pictures, a couple of gaudy pin-ups. There were pictures of girls fastened to the sides of the big mirror.

  In one corner of the room was a gun cabinet with glass doors. Another locker contained an assortment of golf clubs and two tennis rackets in presses.

  Mason tried the door of the gun cabinet. It was locked.

  “Got a key to this?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know much about this room, Mr. Mason. If it’s locked, Ted would have the only key.”

  Mason studied the lock for a moment, then opened his penknife and started pushing with the point against the latch of a spring lock, biting the point of the knife into the brass, and moving the lock back as far as he could.

  “I’ve got to have something to hold this lock,” he said after a moment.

  “How about a nail file?” Della Street asked, producing a nail file from her purse.