“Okay,” she said, “I’ll get busy trying to straighten out the mess up here.”

  Mason had hardly hung up the telephone when he heard Paul Drake’s code knock on the corridor door of his private office. He swept open the door, said, “Come on in, Paul.”

  Drake said, “Thanks, Perry,” moved over to the client’s chair, sat conventionally for a moment while he was fishing a notebook out of his pocket, then whirled around so that he was sitting crosswise in the chair, one rounded leather arm propped against the small of his back, the other furnishing a rest for his long legs.

  “Now this is a hell of a mess, Perry!” he said.

  “What?”

  Drake said, “I’m afraid you’re in for some unpleasant publicity, Perry.”

  “What’s the matter?” Mason asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “You know the columnist Jack Crowe who runs the daily column in the paper entitled ‘Crowe’s Caws’?”

  Mason nodded.

  “Well,” Drake said, “somebody down at young Garvin’s secondhand-car lot came up with a story about you handling a gun that you didn’t think was loaded, and blowing a furrow all the way across the top of young Garvin’s desk.”

  Mason looked sheepish. “Good heavens, Paull Don’t tell me that’s going to get in the papers?”

  “Not going to get in the papers!” Drake said. “A choice item like that? Hell! You couldn’t have pulled the job under more auspicious circumstances as far as publicity is concerned, if you had been trying to …”

  Drake stopped abruptly.

  “What’s the matter?” Mason asked.

  Drake regarded Mason thoughtfully. “That was a hell of a statement I just made,” he said. “It’s given me a little food for thought.”

  “What statement?”

  “That if you had been trying to get publicity you couldn’t have done it under more auspicious circumstances. You’re getting the publicity all right.… I couldn’t believe the story when I first heard it. I’m beginning to believe it now.”

  “I was careless,” Mason admitted.

  “Well,” Drake said, “just for your information, Crowe got the tip, and he’s printing a humorous article about the lawyer who is so full of technical information about firearms that he can make the ballistic experts look foolish on the witness stand, pulling the didn’t-know-it-was-loaded line the minute he gets his hands on a firearm.”

  “That would be very, very embarrassing,” Mason admitted.

  “That’s what I thought when I first heard it,” Drake commented thoughtfully.

  “You’re changing your mind now?” Mason asked.

  Drake’s eyes took on a faraway look as he gazed over toward the windows in unblinking concentration. Abruptly he jackknifed himself up out of the chair.

  “What makes you think you can get away with this stuff, Perry?”

  “I don’t,” Mason said.

  “Then what’s the idea of trying it?”

  “It gives the columnists something nice to write about. Having gone that far, Crowe will follow up on the story the next day.”

  “Well,” Drake said, “my face is a little red, Perry. I thought I had a hot tip and—Perry, are you certain you haven’t violated the law?”

  Mason grinned. “I guess perhaps I have, Paul, but by the time the smoke blows away, discharging a firearm within the city limits is the only thing they can actually hook me on.”

  Chapter 11

  When Mason entered his office on Thursday morning, Della Street had a copy of the morning newspaper placed on his desk. The paper was folded over so as to leave the column entitled “Crowe’s Caws” in the most visible position.

  Mason had just started to read the column when Della Street came in from the outer office.

  “Hi, Della,” Mason said. “I gather that I am the subject of a little publicity.”

  “Quite a little publicity,” she said.

  Mason read:

  Perry Mason, the spectacular trial attorney, whose cases have such a tendency to explode into courtroom pyrotechnics, and who has won many a courtroom battle by proving that his technical knowledge of forensic ballistics is at least the equal of that of the expert whom he is cross-examining, proved to be not quite so adept when it came to handling firearms on a practical basis.

  Seems Stephanie Falkner, the attractive young woman whose father was murdered some time back in a case which so far has never been solved, received some threats which caused Perry Mason considerable concern. Homer Garvin, the high-powered used-car salesman, and Stephanie had at one time been quite ga-ga. It is to be presumed that Garvin’s recent marriage terminated the romance, but apparently not the friendship.

  When the noted lawyer called to Homer Garvin’s attention the fact that Stephanie might be in danger, Garvin promptly produced a gun and suggested that Miss Falkner be given an adequate means of protection.

  Perry Mason was all in favor of the deal, and picked up the gun to test the balance, and decide whether the mechanism functioned perfectly.

  It functioned.

  The result was considerable excitement in the offices of the used-car dealer, a long deep furrow plowed in the veneered desk, and a rather red face on the noted attorney.

  Inasmuch as Mason’s face rarely becomes red, the occasion was considered epochal by an interested but somewhat apprehensive audience. However, all’s well that ends well, and, since police have been wondering whether the gun which they found in Stephanie Falkner’s apartment with one exploded shell in the mechanism had been used in connection with a homicide, it gives this column great pleasure to point out that they need look no farther than Homer Garvin’s desk to find the bullet that is missing.

  It was reported that the used-car dealer had been planning on having a new desk installed immediately, but as salesmen piloted in a procession of potential customers to view the damages, and the customers somehow affixed their signatures on dotted lines before leaving the place, Garvin has decided to feature the “wounded” desk as his main attraction—sort of a corpus deskus.

  Mason had just finished reading the account in the paper when the telephone on Della Street’s desk jangled.

  Della Street answered the telephone, and nodded to Perry Mason. “It’s Paul Drake. He’s coming right down.”

  “Hear anything from Homer Garvin?” Mason asked her after she had hung up.

  “Senior or Junior?”

  “Either.”

  “Junior telephoned. He’s tickled to death with the publicity. He’s sold five cars to prospective purchasers who originally came in to survey the damage in the desk.”

  “He’d better give me a commission,” Mason said. “Hear anything from Stephanie Falkner?”

  “Not a word.”

  “That’s a little strange, Della.”

  “She may be a late sleeper,” Della Street said.

  Mason frowned. “Give her a ring. Wake her up.”

  Della Street picked up the phone, said, “Ring the Lodestar Apartments, Gertie. We want to talk with Stephanie Falkner.”

  While she was waiting, Paul Drake’s knuckles tapped the code knock on the door.

  Mason got up to let him in, and Della Street said, “She doesn’t seem to answer, Chief.”

  “Tell Gertie to keep trying,” Mason said. “Hi, Paul, what’s new?”

  Drake said, “George Casselman had a criminal record. He served time, once for pimping, once for extortion. He was killed sometime between seven and eleven-thirty o’clock Tuesday night by a .38 caliber bullet which was fired from a gun that was held against Casselman’s chest. It made what is described in medical circles as a contact wound.

  “You know what a contact wound is. The muzzle of the gun is held directly against the body into which the shot is fired. The bullet not only enters the body, but a lot of explosive gases from the gun also enter and cause quite a bit of internal damage.”

  “Anyone hear the shot?” Mason asked.

  “Apparently not. In cases of contact wounds, the sound of the shot may not be much louder than that of an inflated paper bag being smashed.”

  “Then no one heard it?”

  “No one heard it.”

  “What else, Paul?”

  Before Drake could answer, the telephone on Della Street’s desk rang again.

  Della Street picked up the telephone, said, “Hello,” in a subdued voice, then said, “Yes, he’s here,” turned to Paul Drake and said, “For you, Paul. It’s your office. They say it’s most important.”

  Drake moved over to the telephone, said, “Hi, this is Paul,” waited a moment, then said, “The devil … !” There was a long silence. Then, “They’re sure … ? Okay.”

  Drake hung up the phone and stood for a moment in puzzled perplexity.

  “Well,” Mason said impatiently.

  “This,” Paul said, “is the best-kept secret of the day. Police knew about it yesterday and managed to keep it buttoned up.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Bullets fired from the gun police found in Stephanie Falkner’s apartment match the fatal bullet that killed George Casselman.”

  “Which gun?” Mason asked sharply.

  “Which?” Drake asked in surprise. “Why, there’s only one, the one Garvin gave her.”

  Mason’s eyes narrowed.

  Drake said, “This means that you had the fatal gun in your possession and that you discharged one shell into the desk at Homer Garvin’s office in the used-car lot. Quite naturally, police felt at first that you were engaged in some sort of a hocus-pocus trying to confuse the issue somehow. They picked young Garvin up and are giving him a shakedown. Their original idea was that you must have planted the murder weapon in his desk.”

  “They’ve changed their minds now?” Mason asked tonelessly.

  “They’re changing their minds,” Drake said. “At the moment they have a brand-new suspect, in the person of Mrs. Homer Garvin, Jr. It seems she was employed as a resident hostess, bathing beauty and ornamental model at one of the Las Vegas hotels out on the Strip. She knew Casselman. No one seems to know how well. They found Casselman’s unlisted number written down on a memo pad by her telephone.

  “Casselman was a blackmailer. The young woman just got married. Figure that one out and you have a perfect sequence.

  “That, in the words of the police, makes your clumsy attempt to fake a didn’t-know-it-was-loaded accident at Garvin’s used-car lot a diabolically clever attempt to mix up the ballistic experts.

  “Police don’t like that. The ruse almost worked. They’re examining all the evidence carefully. The D.A. would love to book you. If he could catch you tampering with evidence, he’d turn the department upside down trying to get a conviction.”

  Mason nodded to Della Street. “Tell Gertie to get Junior on the telephone. He probably won’t be in, but have Gertie leave word for him to call.”

  Mason pushed back the chair from his desk, got up and began pacing the floor. Abruptly he turned, said to the detective, “Paul, I want to know what’s going on. I want all the information you can get on what the police are doing. They probably have both Stephanie Falkner and Garvin, Jr. Thank heavens Senior is across the state line! They’ll have to unwind some red tape before they can drag him in. There’s something fishy about this whole business.”

  Drake said, “Watch yourself, Perry. Keep in the clear on this thing. Police are going to want to know how it was that you had such unerring insight as to go out to Garvin’s used-car lot, ask for a gun, fire a bullet into Garvin’s desk, and then take the gun up and leave it with Stephanie Falkner in a place where police would be sure to find it.”

  “You aren’t telling me anything,” Mason said, “but there’s a lot back of all this that you don’t know. Get busy and start finding things out.”

  Drake nodded, left the office.

  Mason continued pacing the floor for a while, then whirled to face Della Street. “There’s only one answer, Della.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Homer Garvin, Sr.,” Mason said, “must have a key to the office at Junior’s used-car lot. Garvin, Sr. had possession of the murder gun. He knew that Garvin, Jr. kept a gun in his desk. So Garvin, Sr. went out and substituted guns. He put the murder gun, which must have been reloaded, in Junior’s desk where police would never think of looking, then took Junior’s gun out of the desk. He fired one shot through that gun, then took it up and left it in Stephanie Falkner’s apartment. His idea was that the police would find the gun with the empty shell, think that Stephanie had killed Casselman, and then be forced to abandon that theory because they would find that the gun she had hadn’t been used in the crime. That’s why he was so anxious to have me do everything I could for Stephanie.”

  “Go on from there,” Della Street said.

  “So that’s where I inadvertently nullified everything he had done,” Mason said. “Feeling certain that the police would pick up Stephanie Falkner for questioning and feeling that, by that time, they could well have found out Garvin, Sr. had given her a gun, or that they would search for a gun, I conceived the idea of having Garvin, Jr. also give her a gun. In that way, if the police found the one gun, they would hardly keep on searching for another gun. And if they knew Garvin, Sr. had left a gun with her and demanded she produce it, she could have produced the gun that Garvin, Jr. left and so mixed the case all up.

  “As it happens, by one of those peculiar coincidences which sometimes occur in real life, my brilliant idea backfired. I went out and got the very gun that Garvin, Sr. was trying to keep from ever being associated with Stephanie Falkner. I took that gun to Stephanie Falkner’s apartment and left it right where police would be sure to find it.”

  “Where does that leave you?” Della Street asked apprehensively.

  “I’m darned if I know where it leaves me, Della. The police can’t say I was concealing evidence. I went out and dug up the very bit of evidence they wanted so badly, and placed it in the possession of the woman they probably had pegged as their number one suspect.

  “At the moment I’m not concerned where it leaves me, but where it leaves my clients.”

  “And,” Della Street asked, “who do you suppose fired the fatal bullet from the gun in question into the body of George Casselman?”

  “Now there,” Mason said, “you raise quite a question.

  “In the minds of the police, Junior’s new wife now becomes a prime suspect, or perhaps Junior himself. Police won’t credit me with good faith. They’ll naturally think I was trying to take the heat off Junior and his wife by implicating Stephanie Falkner.

  “I have an idea that Junior and his wife are going to be very, very angry. They’ll feel I went out there with the murder weapon, that I asked Junior for his gun, that I did a little sleight-of-hand substitution, and under cover of the confusion resulting from the apparently accidental discharge of the weapon, managed to substitute the murder gun in place of the one Junior had given me. Junior thereupon walked into my trap, took the gun up to Stephanie Falkner and left it with her.

  “I can also imagine that when Garvin, Sr. reads the papers he’s going to be cursing me for a clumsy lout.”

  “And the police?” Della Street asked.

  “The police will naturally assume that whatever I did was designed to confuse the issues. They will now be able to prove that I had the fatal gun in my possession. Once having reached that point, they’ll drag me into it as deep as they can drag.”

  “Can they prove it was the fatal gun?”

  “They can now.”

  “How?”

  “By that bullet which was fired into Junior Garvin’s desk. If it wasn’t for that bullet, they’d have one hell of a time proving that I ever had the fatal gun.

  “Once they recover that bullet, which eyewitnesses can testify was fired by me, they can show it came from the fatal gun. Remember, Della, I went out there to see Casselman. It’s not too utterly improbable that the D.A. may try to claim I committed the murder.”

  “Then if it wasn’t for the bullet you fired into Junior’s desk, they couldn’t absolutely prove that the gun you had in your possession was the fatal gun?”

  “They could prove it by inference,” Mason said, “but that’s all.”

  “Chief, couldn’t I get Paul Drake to go out there and get that bullet? If police don’t think of it in time and that bullet has disappeared … ?”

  Mason shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Della, Paul Drake has a license. He doesn’t dare to cut corners. They’d take his license away. The minute you suggested anything like that to Paul Drake he’d be in a panic.”

  Della Street thought the situation over. “Just where did that bullet go, Chief?”

  Mason said, “I fired the gun at the desk on an angle, hoping that the bullet would glance up into the wall.”

  “Did it?”

  “I think it did.”

  “And just why did you fire it?” she asked.

  Mason grinned. “So that the gun the police found in Stephanie Falkner’s apartment would have one discharged cartridge case in the cylinder. Then in case the police should have been looking for a gun with one discharged cartridge, they’d quit looking as soon as they found this gun I’d had Junior leave there.”

  “So what do we do now?” Della Street asked.

  “Right now,” Mason said, “we can’t do anything except wait.”

  “That,” Della Street said, “is the most difficult thing I know of. I’m afraid my nerves are giving out. I’m going to skip down and get something for my head. I’ll be right back.”

  “What’s the matter?” Mason asked sharply.

  She averted her eyes. “I didn’t sleep much last night. I kept thinking about Stephanie Falkner and Garvin, Jr. I don’t know why—I guess I’m just getting …”

  Mason said, “You’re overworked, Della. You’re putting in altogether too much time at the office and taking too many responsibilities. You can’t keep on supervising the work that goes out of here, handling mail, apportioning work to the stenographers, and checking the work they do, running the office, and at the same time trying to keep up with me on these cases.”