“Okay,” Mason said. “Now, here’s another angle. Look back in the newspapers in 1932 and you’ll find they published a list of checks which had cleared through Franklin Shore’s account within a few days of his disappearance. You can be sure the police have dug up everything they could find out about those checks as of 1932. I want you to make a fresh investigation as of 1942.”
“Anything else?” Drake asked, jotting down notes in a leather-backed, loose-leaf notebook.
“As an incidental development,” Mason said, “a kitten was poisoned out at Matilda Shore’s house. I think Tragg will be covering all the drugstores looking for poison purchases, and it won’t do any good for us to trail along behind the police. They have the organization and the authority. They’d be bound to get the facts before we could. But you might bear in mind the poison angle.”
“What’s the kitten got to do with it?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know, but Matilda Shore was fed poison from some source — apparently the same sort of poison that was used on the kitten. There’s a chap by the name of Komo who works as houseboy. There’s some question whether he’s Japanese or Korean. Tragg has a letter and map which was mailed, special delivery, around six-thirty from a Hollywood branch post office. It sounds very Japanesy — almost too Japanesy. However, you can’t tell a thing by that. Komo might have written it, or it may have been someone who thought Komo, because of his nationality, would make a good bait for the police to snap at. You can probably get a photostatic copy of that letter. Tragg will be searching for typewriters which could have written it, and will have had an expert check it over. You can probably find out from one of the newspaper boys what has been reported by this expert — the make and model of typewriter it was written on. It looked to me like a portable owned by someone who didn’t do any serious typewriting, quite probably a man who’s owned the machine for sometime.”
“What gave you that impression?” Drake asked.
“Letters badly out of line, a faint ribbon which looked as though it had dried out from lack of use, dirt in the loops of the e’s and the a’s, a few strike-overs and cross-outs, poor spacing of the letter on the sheet of paper, and irregularities in the letters which indicated a ragged touch. However, Tragg will have seen all that almost at a glance, so don’t waste too much time on the letter. There’s no use duplicating the police effort, and we can’t expect to engage in competition with them on the things they’ll be covering.”
“Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll...”
Della Street said, “The phone keeps ringing in the outer office. Hear that peculiar buzzing sound? That’s the way the switchboard sounds when the lines are out and someone’s ringing on the main line. It’s been doing that at intervals for the past five minutes.”
Mason glanced at his watch, said, “On a hunch, Della, see who it is.”
She got up and went through to the outer office and in a few minutes came running back.
“What is it?” Mason asked.
“Helen Kendal. Someone broke into the house and shot her boyfriend — the one who’s on leave from the Army. She notified the police and called for a taxicab. She’s at the hospital now. They’re operating, on a desperate chance. They don’t expect him to live through the operation. She’s been calling for the last five minutes.”
Mason nodded to Paul Drake. “Let’s go, Paul.”
Drake shook his head. “You go. By the time you get there, Lieutenant Tragg will have things sewed up so tight you’ll have to pay admission to get within a block of the place. I’ll put in the time working these other angles while Tragg’s busy out there.”
Mason said, “There may be something to that.”
“This new development will keep him occupied,” Drake said, “and leave my hands free.”
Mason was struggling into his overcoat. “Want to come, Della?”
“Try holding me back.”
Drake looked at Mason, with his peculiar, lopsided smile twisting his features. “Where was your client when this last bit of shooting took place?” he asked.
Mason looked at his wrist watch, narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he made a rapid mental calculation, and said, “That’s one of the first things Lieutenant Tragg is going to ask. For all I know, he’s asking it right now — and getting an answer. And, as I figure out the time element, my client could have made it back to the house in time to do the shooting.”
Chapter 13
The big, old-fashioned house in which Franklin B. Shore had reigned as a financial power was lighted from cellar to garret. Two police cars were parked in the driveway. Under the contagion of excitement, adjoining houses showed lighted windows, mostly in the upper stories, and these oblongs of light, in a neighborhood which was otherwise wrapped in slumber and darkness, held in themselves a certain portent of tragedy.
Mason drove past the house twice, then parked his car on the opposite side of the street and said to Della Street, “I’ll make a preliminary survey. Do you want to sit here in the car?”
“Okay.”
“Keep your eyes open. If you see anything suspicious, strike a match and light a cigarette. Otherwise, don’t smoke. When you strike the match, hold it for a second close to the windshield, then cup your hands and bring it up to the cigarette. It won’t do any harm to let the first match go out and strike a second, just in case I’m where I don’t get your first signal.”
“Are you going up to the house?”
“Eventually. I want to snoop around the yard first.”
“Want me to go in with you when you do make the house?”
“I’ll let you know. I want to check up here first. Notice that window over on the north side of the house, the one on the ground floor. It’s wide open and the curtains aren’t drawn. I saw the light from a flash bulb on the inside of that room just now. It looks as though they were photographing the window. That’s significant.”
Della Street settled down in the car. “I suppose Tragg’s already on the job in person.”
“Oh, sure.”
“And your client, Gerald Shore?”
“May have walked right into the middle of things,” Mason said. “I hope he has sense enough not to give them his alibi.”
“What is his alibi?” Della Street asked.
“He was with us — I hope, I hope.”
She said, “I don’t think we’ve ever furnished an alibi for a client, have we?”
“No. That’s why I hope he keeps his mouth shut.”
“Wouldn’t Tragg accept your word?”
“Tragg might, but put yourself in the position of someone in a jury box. A lawyer comes into court defending a man charged with one murder. Another murder gets linked up with him. He says, ‘At that time I was with my lawyer’, and the lawyer who is defending him, and his secretary, get on the stand and glibly try to prove the alibi. Doesn’t look very well, does it?”
She shook her head. “Not to a jury it wouldn’t.”
“That is why the better lawyers withdraw from a case when they have to be witnesses,” Mason said.
“You mean you’d withdraw if you had to make an alibi for Shore?”
“I wouldn’t want to be both a witness and an attorney in a case.”