“That’s better,” Mason told her. I’m going down and get a taxicab. Give me your suitcases. This is Miss Street, my secretary. We’ll take the suitcases down and handle things so no one will know you checked out. You wait exactly twenty minutes, then take Robert, go down in the elevator, ask if there’s a drugstore near here, walk out of the hotel and turn to the right. Miss Street and I will be waiting in a taxicab on the corner. You’ve made a wise decision. We must keep Robert away from all these emotional stresses. Now you go to Mexico where you can take Robert’s mind off what has happened. It’s particularly important you stay where Horace Selkirk won’t know where you are.”
“But how can we do that?” Grace Hallum asked. “He’ll be furious. He’ll find us.”
Mason said, “No, he won’t. You’ll be at the one place where he’d never expect you to be. The Hotel Reforma in Mexico City.”
Grace Hallum said, “The suitcases are all packed. We haven’t unpacked. We just got here.”
Mason nodded to Della Street, said, “If you don’t mind, we’ll take the suitcases to another floor. We don’t want it to appear that you’re checking out.”
“But what about the bill on these two rooms?”
“The reservations were made by Horace Livermore Selkirk,” Mason said. “Let him pay the bill.”
“How long will it be before anyone finds out we’re not here?”
Mason grinned. “It could be a long time.”
“And then?” she asked.
“Then,” Mason said, “when Horace Livermore Selkirk finally puts two and two together, he may quit being so damned patronizing.”
Chapter Thirteen
Back in the cocktail lounge at the hotel where they had engaged the cab Mason said to Della, “I think those are our shadows over there.”
“Where?”
“The man and the woman in the corner. There have been surreptitious glances in our direction, and the man’s not as interested in her as he should be in an attractive woman companion who is being plied with liquor.”
“Why plied?” Della Street asked.
“It makes them pliable,” Mason said.
She laughed. “Ever try it?”
“What we need,” Mason told her, “is a red herring. Go to the phone booth, call Paul Drake and tell him we want a woman operative who is about twenty-seven blonde, rather tall, with a good figure, and a seven-year-old boy, well-dressed, quiet and dark.”
“Why do we want them?” she asked.
“Because,” Mason said, “we’re going to give Horace Selkirk’s detectives something to think about.”
“And what do they do?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “They move into the hotel where Horace Selkirk got the two connecting rooms for Grace Hallum and Robert Selkirk. Drake can fix them up with a passkey and they can move right into the hotel as though they owned the place. Tell Paul not to ever let them charge anything, but to pay cash for everything. The woman isn’t ever to sign the name of Grace Hallum. She’s simply to pay cash for everything.”
“But won’t the clerk know the difference? That is, won’t he—?”
“We’ll wait until the night clerk comes on duty,” Mason said, “then this operative and the boy will go into the hotel, take the key to 619 and 621, move in there and stay there.
“The woman is to keep the key to the room in her purse, never to go near the desk, never to say to anyone that she is Grace Hallum.”
Della Street thought the matter over, then said, “You don’t suppose they’ve got the line tapped here, do you?”
“I doubt it,” Mason said. “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. Just go to the phone and call Paul. I’ll keep an eye on the couple over there and see what they do.”
Ten minutes later when Della Street was back, Mason said, “They were certainly interested in your telephone call, Della, but they didn’t dare appear too curious. They’re wondering what kept us out of circulation for so long — how did Paul Drake react?”
“The same way you’d expect,” she said. “He agreed to do it, but he’s not happy about it.”
“Why isn’t he happy?”
“Says he’s violating the law.”
“What law?”
“What law!” Della Street asked. “Good heavens, here’s a woman who moves into some other woman’s room in a hotel, and—”
“What do you mean?” Mason asked. “She isn’t moving into any other woman’s room. Grace Hallum has left the hotel.”
“But she didn’t pay her bill.”
“The bill was already paid,” Mason said. “Horace Selkirk arranged for that, and even if she had left the hotel without paying the bill, she would have been the one who defrauded the hotel-keeper. Drake’s operative isn’t defrauding anybody.”
“But she’s moving into a room in a hotel.”
“Exactly,” Mason said. “She’s prepared to pay for the accommodations. The hotel keeps its rooms for rental to the public.”
“But she didn’t register.”
“Is there any law that says she has to?”
“I think there is.”
“Grace Hallum didn’t register. She simply went and picked up the key. That means somebody had registered into those rooms and left instructions with the clerk that the key was to be delivered when a woman with a child asked for it.”
“Well,” she said, “Paul Drake wasn’t happy.”
“I didn’t expect him to be happy,” Mason said. “When you hire a detective you pay his price for services rendered. If he follows instructions, you can guarantee to keep him out of jail, but you can’t guarantee to make him happy.”
Chapter Fourteen
Judge Homer F. Kent looked down at the people assembled in the courtroom and said, “This is the time fixed for the preliminary hearing in the case of the People versus Norda Allison.”
“Ready for the People,” Manley Marshall, a trial deputy from the district attorney’s office, said.
“Ready for the defendant,” Perry Mason responded.
“Very well. Proceed,” Judge Kent said.
Marshall, following a generally recognized pattern with the crisp efficiency of a man who knows both his case and his law, and is determined to see that no loophole is left open, called the caretaker at the San Sebastian Country Club.
The caretaker testified to noticing a car parked early on the morning of the eighteenth. He had thought nothing of it as occasionally golfers came early for a round of golf. Later on, at about eleven-thirty, one of the golfers had told him that there was someone out in one of the parked cars who apparently had been drinking and was sound asleep.
The caretaker looked, saw the figure slumped over the wheel, did nothing about it for another hour. Then he had taken another look, had seen blood on the floor of the car and had notified the police.
“Cross-examine,” Marshall said to Mason.
“Did you,” Mason asked, “look inside the car?”
“I looked inside the car,” the witness said.
“Did you open the door?”
“I did not open the door. I looked in through the glass window in the door.”
“Through the glass window in the door?”
“Yes.”
“Then the glass window in the door was rolled up?”
“I think so.”
“That’s all,” Mason said.
Marshall called the deputy coroner who testified to being called to the scene, a photographer who introduced photographs, an autopsy surgeon who testified that death had been caused by a .22-caliber bullet. The bullet had entered on the left side of the chest, just in front of the left arm. It had ranged slightly backward and had lodged in the chest and had not gone all the way through the body. The autopsy surgeon had recovered the bullet and had turned it over to Alexander Redfield, the ballistics expert. Death, in the opinion of the physician, had not been instantaneous. There had been a period of consciousness and a period of hemorrhage. That period was, in his opinion, somewhat indefinite. It might have been an interval of ten or fifteen minutes after the shot had been fired and before death took place; it might have been only a minute or two.