Drake stepped away from the desk, coughed twice. The man who had been reading the newspaper lowered it. Drake made a signal, motioning toward the bellboy who was waiting at the elevator. The man casually folded his newspaper, tapped ashes

  from the end of his cigar, stretched, yawned, and got to his feet just as the elevator door opened and the bellboy entered.

  "Going up!' the man called, and then walked leisurely across the lobby.

  Five minutes later, the bellboy was back with a report. "The door is locked from the outside. I used the passkey. There is no one in the room. The bed hasn't been slept in. There is no baggage in the room. The towels haven't been used. The curtains are drawn, and the lights are on."

  The assistant manager regarded Mason with cool appraisal. "I believe you said she was your sister-in-law. If there is any trouble about the hotel bill...?"

  Mason said, "I will stop by the desk and settle the bill right now. Probably she has had a heart attack in a restaurant, and has been taken to a hospital."

  "Sometime during the night," the assistant manager asked pointedly, "before she had gone to bed?"

  Mason said easily, "Yes. She said she was going out to get a cup of tea. Poor girl, I hope she isn't seriously ill. I will call the hospital. Della, would you mind stepping over to the desk and paying the bill? ... If she should happen to return, tell her to get in touch with her brother-in-law at once. Will you tell her that, please?"

  The assistant manager said, "I will be only too glad to. But just a moment, please."

  He picked up the telephone on his desk, said to the operator, "Get the records on six-twenty-eight. Find out what baggage, I shall hold the line."

  He sat with the receiver to his ear. His eyes surveyed his visitors in speculative appraisal while he waited. Then he said into the transmitter, "All right, let me have it... You are certain? Very well."

  He dropped the receiver into place and said to Mason, "She checked in with a suitcase and a hat box. They are not in the room now. Would she have taken them to the restaurant?"

  Mason became indignant. "Are you insinuating that a relative of mine would leave the hotel to avoid paying her bill?"

  The manager's manner became somewhat uneasy. "It's strange," he said. "That's all."

  Mason leaned toward him and said, "You're right it is strange, and your manner and your insinuations are stranger still. Here is a woman, unsophisticated, inexperienced, staying in a hotel in a large city. She disappears mysteriously. In place of being of any assistance, you start making cracks about her hotel bill. Her bill has been paid. I am paying it, see? And I am good for anything she runs up."

  The manager said, "I didn't mean it exactly that way. It is a suspicious circumstance, that's all."

  "What's suspicious about it?"

  "Well, for one thing, she simply couldn't have taken her baggage out through the lobby. The employees are instructed that no guest is permitted to take baggage

  through the lobby. The bellboy always takes it and goes to the desk. The guest then either checks out or gets an okay from the clerk on duty."

  Mason surreptitiously nudged Drake and said, "I fail to see what that has to do with it."

  "Was your sister-in-law subject to spells of amnesia?"

  "Not that I ever heard of."

  "I merely asked," the manager said.

  "There is a back way?"

  "There is a basement and a baggage room."

  "And there is an exit to the alley from those?"

  "There is, but it is through a freight elevator, and the freight elevator can't be operated except with the janitor's knowledge. He is under instructions to notify the desk whenever there is any outgoing baggage."

  "Then the only way a person could leave is through the lobby?"

  The manager coughed deprecatingly. "There is the fire escape," he said.

  Mason drew himself up with dignity. "I can hardly imagine my sister-in-law climbing through the window of her room to a fire escape and ..."

  "No, of course not," the manager interrupted, and then added, "I just thought you should know. That is why I asked about the amnesia."

  "Thank you," Mason said with frigid dignity. "I believe my secretary has, by this time, paid the hotel bill. Good morning."

  The manager was still watching him speculatively as Mason and Drake left his office.

  "Just babes in the wood," Mason groaned to the detective as they marched across the lobby.

  Chapter 11

  FRANK RUSCELL of the district attorney's office was suave but insistent. "We would like to get that Stephane Claire case on its way, Mason. How about having an arraignment and setting the preliminary for Friday?"

  "You haven't got any case against her," Mason said.

  Ruscell refused to be drawn into argument. "I don't know very much about it. I am not going to handle it myself. The office thinks there is a case. How about Friday at ten o'clock?"

  Mason hesitated.

  "Of course, we could go ahead and take her into court and let the judge fix the time. I understand she has been admitted to bail. If she is going to object to a prompt hearing, we would want the bail increased."

  "All right," Mason conceded, "Friday at ten. We can have the whole thing handled at that time by stipulation and go right ahead with the preliminary."

  Ruscell said, "Thank you," with the smug courtesy of a deputy district attorney who thinks all defense lawyers are crooks, and hung up.

  Mason dropped the phone into place and said to Della Street, "I am damned if they are going to send her to the pen to cover up for some Hollywood big shot."

  "Any ideas?" she asked.

  Mason pushed the books over to one side of the desk and sat on the space he had cleared away. His brows were level. "I think that dinner jacket has something to do with it, Della."

  "I don't get you."

  "A man doesn't put on evening clothes to drive an automobile. This man either expected to arrive in Los Angeles and attend some party, or else he had some reason for dressing up before he left. Now look at the time. He would have got in here sometime after midnight. He would have hardly gone to a party then. On the other hand, he left Bakersfield around ten. There is some question whether he came from Bakersfield or down the San Francisco highway. Gatherings for which people go to the trouble of putting on formal or semi-formal clothes don't usually break up that early in the evening."

  "Stay with it," Della Street said. "You are doing fine."

  "Bakersfield isn't so large but what we should be able to check with the society editors of the papers and find out anything unusual which would have called for evening clothes. Then we might check a list of the guests and see if someone left early."

  "Swell," Della Street said.

  "Make a note of it. We will get Paul Drake working on it."

  "Any other ideas?" she asked, making pot hooks in her notebook.

  "There is some influence back of Homan," Mason said. "He has gone up like a skyrocket."

  "Don't people do that occasionally in Hollywood?"

  "Occasionally. When it happens, there's usually someone back of them, someone who knows the ropes. You know how it is out in Hollywood. Joe Doakes can go begging for years. Then someone mentions at a Hollywood party that MGM is trying to sign him up on a long-term contract. Within twenty-four hours, Joe Doakes will have four or five telephone calls."

  "But what difference does it make about Homan unless you can prove something about the car? He wasn't driving it himself, was he?"

  "No, apparently not. He doesn't even answer the description."

  "I don't see how the secret back of his Hollywood success is going to help you."

  "Neither do I," Mason admitted, "not yet. But I want to learn more about him, get all of the different angles on his character and personality. Then I will have something to work on. Of course, the man I want is Spinney. It looks as though I would have to reach Spinney through Homan, and Spinney is being kept under cover. If I could only find some way of smoking him out in the open..."

  Mason became silent, staring down at the carpet.

  "Look," Della Street said, "I have an idea."

  "Shoot."

  "If your theory is correct, Spinney is a yes-man, a fixer who cleans things up for Homan, takes care of Homan's dirty linen and all that stuff."

  "Uh-huh."

  "And Homan knows you are looking for Spinney."

  "He probably doesn't know exactly how much we have on Spinney, but he knows enough to keep Spinney out of sight for a while."

  "But if Homan got in a jam, he would call on Spinney, wouldn't he?"

  "He might. Why?"

  Della Street's eyes were twinkling. "Why shouldn't we..."

  "We couldn't even worry him, Della," Mason interrupted. "He would have to be faced with something bigger than anything we could frame up to bring Spinney out into the Open."

  "Well, can't you think up something?"

  "Let us try looking at it from Homan's angles. He must be worried. Somewhere, somehow, it must be possible to associate Spinney with him. He must be afraid of that."

  "How about Mrs. Warfield? What do you think happened to her?"

  "She must have left under her own power. They all say she couldn't have got out of the hotel and taken her baggage with her without being stopped. It sounds reasonable,

  too. If a person could leave a hotel and take his baggage without going through the lobby, a lot of people simply wouldn't bother to pay hotel bills. So somewhere in there is a factor we have missed."

  Della Street said, "She didn't stay, yet she couldn't have left. She ..."

  Mason, jumping from the desk, exclaimed, "You have got it, Della! You've got it!"

  "What have I got?" she asked, puzzled.

  "The solution. Don't you see? You have got the whole thing."

  "Oh, yes. Clear as mud. Pardon me if I don't share your enthusiasm."

  "Get Drake," Mason said excitedly. "Don't bother with the telephone. Beat it down the corridor. By gosh, we have got it! We have got the whole thing. This time, Homan has stuck his neck out, and we are going to... Get started, Della."

  "On my way," she said. "World's record in the fifty-yard dash. Hold the stop watch, Chief." She dashed through the door, and Mason could bear her running steps in the corridor.

  The lawyer paced the floor, nervously impatient, snapping his fingers from time to time. Occasionally he nodded his head.

  Drake, accompanying a breathless Della Street, entered the office and said, "What is the excitement, Perry?"

  "Della gave me the solution to that hotel disappearance."

  "This," Della Street explained to Paul Drake, "is the way you give something you haven't got. It is the way bankrupt nations finance armaments."

  "It is so damn simple and so damn daring," Mason went on.

  "Go ahead, Perry. What is it?"

  "Don't you see, Paul? Your men were in the lobby. She couldn't have checked out. She didn't even come down to the lobby to talk with anyone – not even the clerk. Her baggage is missing. The manager says she couldn't possibly have got out the back way, particularly with her baggage. He mentioned the fire escape, but she couldn't have carried her baggage down it."

  "Well?" Drake asked.

  "She is still in the hotel. Don't you get it?"

  "No," Drake said. "I am damned if I do. They searched her room. My man says they..."

  "Don't you see? She is in another room."

  Drake thought for a moment, then frowned and shook his head. "No, she would have had to go down to the desk to get another room. She didn't..."

  "Wake up, Paul," Mason said. "We were tailed to that hotel. Someone else was following every move we made. After we got her placed in a room, that someone simply checked into the hotel and got a room. After he was in his room, he went down

  to Mrs. Warfield's room – and he must have gone there very shortly after we left. Now he was able to say something to her which meant more to her than the job you had offered, something which made her decide to double-cross you and go with him."

  "You mean she left her room?"

  "That's right, and went to his room. She simply moved her baggage down there."

  Drake whistled a few bars from a popular tune. "You are right! It is so obvious we overlooked it."

  "And it worked," Mason said. "That's the beauty of the scheme – its direct simplicity."

  Drake said, "I wish you could kick me, Perry. If we had only thought of it last night – and I blame myself for it. I am the detective. I am supposed to keep a line of what is happening. To think I could have been followed ..."

  "The streets were crowded about that time. A dozen people could have followed us," Mason said.

  "Well, if I had only had the sense to figure out what had happened this morning, when we first went there, we still might have found out something."

  "We can still find out."

  "What do you mean?"

  Mason said, "Mrs. Warfield left that room. She was either lured away from it and into another room, or she went voluntarily. Let us suppose she went voluntarily. There are only two persons who could have done the job, her husband and Spinney. Her husband is keeping out of her way. He is either in a penitentiary or has gone to a lot of trouble to impress her with the idea that he is in a penitentiary. Therefore, the man is Spinney."

  Drake said, "You are ringing the bell every time you pull the trigger, Perry. Keep shooting."

  "Now then," Mason went on, "we come to the involuntary phase of it. Suppose she didn't move her baggage. Suppose that someone went to her room, knocked on the door, told her there was a message for her, asked her to go with him, and took her into another room. She didn't come out. Afterwards, the man went back, got her baggage, put it in that other room, locked the door, and went out."

  Drake looked pained. "The more I think of it, Perry, the more that theory sounds like the one we shall have to pay off on. The fact that the towels weren't used... I don't like it."

  Mason said, "All right, Paul, here is what we have got to do. We have got to find out who followed us to that hotel. We have got to check everyone who registered there after we got that room. Remember, we didn't even know ourselves what hotel we were going to select, so it had to be someone who came in immediately after we did."

  "I don't get that immediately part," Drake said. "Why couldn't..."

  "Don't you see, Paul? It was done too fast. The towels weren't used. She wasn't in that room ten minutes – probably not five minutes ... She waited until we had left, then went down to the newsstand to ask for back issues of Photoplay. Then she went back to ..."

  "I get you," Drake interrupted. "Okay, Perry, my operatives are still there in the hotel. They had their room already paid for, and when I took them off the case, they decided to grab a few hours' shuteye. I can telephone them, get them on the job, and ..."

  "Well, what the hell are you waiting for?" Mason asked. "Get busy."

  "I shall do it from my office," Drake said. "I can ..."

  "Okay, get going. Seconds are precious. I want that information, and I want it fast. On your way."

  Drake was back within ten minutes. "Okay, Perry," he said, "we have got him."

  "Nice work, Paul. How did you get it through so fast?"

  "It turned out my operative hadn't gone to bed. He was standing in the lobby chatting with the clerk when I called him. We have got this man on two counts. First, he registered within five minutes after Mrs. Warfield went up to her room, and there were only two people who registered within the first hour after she went to her room. One of them was this man, and the other was a woman who registered right after he did, then there was no one for an hour. Then a couple, and after that..."

  "Didn't you use the description of the driver?"

  "Yes. I am coming to that. We have got him on both counts. We ..."

  "To hell with all that stuff," Mason said impatiently. "Where is he now?"

  Drake grinned triumphantly. "In his room."

  "You are certain?"

  "Absolutely. He registered as Walter Lossten of Los Angeles, said he had been having a directors' meeting, and had decided to stay downtown overnight. He didn't have any baggage. He paid for his room in advance and went up ..."

  "What room?"

  "Five-twenty-one."

  "What makes you think he is still there?"

  "There is a 'Don't Disturb' sign on the door."

  "You didn't try giving him a ring?"

  "No. I told my operative just to look the situation over."

  Mason stood for a moment with his hands pushed down in his trousers pockets, his legs spread apart, his head thrust forward. "By Jove, Paul," he said, "I don't like it. That 'Don't Disturb' sign is a danger signal."

  "I don't get it."

  Mason said, "Mrs. Warfield is in that room. There is a 'Don't Disturb' sign on the door. She hasn't communicated with us. That sign means something, Paul. It may mean murder."

  Drake thought the situation over. "Shucks, it does look bad."

  Mason said, "You go on down to the hotel, Paul. I am going to get Lieutenant Tragg on the job. We have discovered too many corpses as it is."

  "Wait a minute, Perry. You can't get Tragg to go down there without letting him think ..."

  "Leave it to me," Mason said. "I will take care of Tragg. I will hand him a line that will get him down there. Remember, it may be all right, Paul, and if it is all right, we are going to find who Spinney is and who the driver of that car was."

  "Do you think they are the same?"

  "Looks like it."

  Drake said, "You are going to have a hard time with Tragg. Remember we got Mrs. Warfield that room in the hotel. If she is ..."

  "Forget it," Mason said. "Leave Tragg to me. You beat it down there."

  Chapter 12

  LIEUTENANT TRAGG looked up, saw who was calling, nodded a greeting, and dismissed the detective who was making a report.

  "Hello, Mason. This is an unexpected pleasure."

  The two men shook hands. Tragg was about Mason's age, an inch or two shorter, a pound or two lighter, but there was a certain similarity about the men which would impress a close observer. Tragg's high forehead, wavy black hair, clean-cut features, and thoughtful eyes were at sharp variance with the bull-necked beef of Sergeant Holcomb whose place on the Homicide Squad he had taken.