"Clever," she exclaimed.
"That part of it was all right," Perry Mason said judiciously, as though he had been commenting on the manner in which he had played a hand in a bridge game after the cards were all played. "But then, I made the mistake of my life."
"What?" she asked, her eyes slightly widened and staring steadily at his face.
"I underestimated the intelligence of J.R. Bradbury."
"Oh," she muttered, with a distinct feeling of relief, and then said, after a moment, "Has he any…?"
"You're damned right he has," Perry Mason said.
"I can say one thing about him," she said, "he has a roving eye and a youthful disposition. He was offering me a cigarette when you went out of the door, remember?"
"Yes."
"He leaned forward to give me a light."
"Did he try to kiss you?"
"No," she said slowly, "and that's the funny part of it. I thought he was going to. I still think he intended to try to, but something made him change his mind."
"What was it?"
"I don't know."
"Thinking perhaps you'd tell me?"
"No, I don't think it was that."
"What did he do?"
"He leaned close to me, held the match to the cigarette; then straightened, and walked to the other side of the office. He stood staring at me as though I had been a picture, or as though he had perhaps been trying to figure just where I'd fit into a picture. It was a peculiar stare. He was looking at me, and yet not looking at me."
"Then what?" Perry Mason asked.
"Then," she said, "he snapped out of it, laughed, and said he guessed he had better be going after the newspapers and the brief case."
"And he left?"
"Yes."
"By the way, what did he ever do with them?"
"He left them here."
"Did he say anything about the brief case when he went out?"
"No, that was what he telephoned about from the hotel."
"What did you do with them?"
She motioned toward the closet.
Perry Mason got up, walked to the closet, opened the door and took out a leather brief case and a pile of newspapers. He looked at the top newspaper. The heading showed that it was the Cloverdale Independent of an issue dated some two months earlier.
"Got a key to the closet?" asked Mason.
"Yes, it's on my key ring."
"Let's lock this closet door and keep it locked while we've got the stuff in here," Mason said.
"Should we have it in the safe?"
"I don't think it's that important, particularly. But just the same, I'd like to have it under lock and key."
She crossed to the closet door and fitted the key to the lock, and snapped the bolt into position.
"You still haven't told me," she reminded him, "about how you underestimated Bradbury's intelligence."
"I had seen a girl walking away from the place. I figured she was mixed up in the murder in some way. I didn't know just how. I didn't care particularly, unless the girl happened to be Marjorie Clune. But I wanted to make certain about it, so I telephoned Bradbury."
"And told him Patton was murdered?"
"Yes, and asked him about Marjorie Clune. I knew that if it had been Marjorie Clune that was leaving the apartment, I had to work fast and keep ahead of the police."
"But there wasn't anything else you could have done, was there?" she asked. "You had to find out about it, and find out what Bradbury wanted done."
"I guess so."
"I thought," she said, "there was something wrong. He acted so absolutely startled when you telephoned to him. I don't know what there was in what you said, but it seemed to knock him for a loop. I thought he was going to drop the telephone. He started breathing through his mouth, and his eyes got so big I could have knocked them off with a stick."
"Well," Mason said, "that's the situation in a nutshell."
"And how does that get you in bad?" she asked.
"It gets me in bad," he said, "because I don't dare let the cops know that I was in that room. If I should tell them the truth now, they'd probably suspect me of the murder. I've got to stand by my story of the locked door. On the other hand, that locked door may figure in the case quite prominently. A whole lot more prominently than I want."
"Well," she said, "isn't that up to the police to figure out?"
"I'm not so certain," he said, "but I am certain that Bradbury is going to be a dangerous antagonist."
"An antagonist," she said, "why, he's a client. Why should he become an antagonist?"
"That," he said, "is just the point. That's where I overlooked my hand."
"How do you mean?"
"The girl who left the apartment was Marjorie Clune. She's mixed up in the thing some way. I don't know just how much. Bradbury is crazy about her. He's desperately in love with her, and he's served notice on me that if she gets mixed in it, he doesn't care whom he has to sacrifice. He's going to clear her at any cost."
Della Street squinted her eyes thoughtfully; then suddenly turned to her notebook.
"Did you," she said, "expect a message from a young woman who was to ring up and leave an address?"
"Yes," he said, "that's Marjorie Clune. She's going some place where I can talk with her. I haven't had a chance to talk with her yet and find out what happened. She had an audience all the time."
"Just before you came in," Della Street said, "a young woman's voice came over the telephone and said, 'Simply tell Mr. Mason I'm at the Bostwick Hotel, room 408, and to check that alibi. "
"That was all?" he asked.
"That was all."
"Check what alibi?"
"I don't know. I figured you would."
"There's only one person who has an alibi in this case," he said, "and I've checked it."
"Who's that?"
"That's Thelma Bell. She was out with a fellow named Sanborne, and I checked it before she got in communication with him."
"Perhaps that's the alibi she wanted you to check."
"I've already checked it."
He frowned thoughtfully at her; then shook his head slowly.
"That's the only thing it could mean," he said. "I'll check it again as soon as I've talked with Paul Drake. He'll be waiting around for me. He was to have met me out at Patton's apartment, but he got wise to what had happened, and kept back under cover."
"You want me to wait?" she asked.
"No," he said, "you go on home."
As she put on her hat and coat, and added touches of powder to her cheeks and lipstick to her lips, Perry Mason hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and started pacing up and down the floor.
"What is it, chief?" she asked, turning away from the mirror to watch him.
"I was thinking," he said, "about the blackjack."
"What about it?"
"When you can tell me," he said, "why a man should kill another man with a knife; then walk into another room and throw a blackjack in the corner, you'll have given me the solution of this whole case."
"Perhaps," she said, "it's one of those cases where a man planted evidence. He might have had a blackjack that had some one's fingerprints on it, some one that he wanted to implicate in the crime. The fingerprints might have been made months before he carried the blackjack, and then —"
"And then," he said, "he certainly would have killed the victim with the blackjack. There wasn't a mark on Patton's head. The thing that killed him was that knife thrust, and it killed him instantly. That blackjack had no more to do with the man's death than the revolver that's in the upper righthand drawer of my office desk."
"Why was it left there then?" she asked.