“The question is,” Mason said, “how far back those records go, how much they know.”
“I think there’s a gap of some sort,” Drake said. “They sure want to know what happened when you entered the room, just what was said. They kept trying to find out from me what I knew about that.”
“What did you tell them?”
“All I knew, which wasn’t much.”
Mason said, “Look, Paul, there aren’t too many authorized private detective agencies here in the city. Now, then, suppose you had a job and you wanted to have a tape or disc recording made, just whom would you get?”
Drake said, “We all of us have sound equipment, Perry. We have to be a little careful about how we use it, but we have tape recorders, microphones, and the best of the agencies have all the latest gadgets.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“These machines that you can leave on a plant,” Drake said, “without necessarily having to monitor them. The feed is automatic. There’s a relay of acetate discs so that a fresh one comes on as soon as one has been filled up. There’s a clockwork mechanism by which the machine automatically shuts itself off if there’s silence in the room for a period of around ten seconds. Then as soon as any sound comes over the wires, the machine cuts in again... Or, of course, you can set them for continuous recording. Often when we want to know what’s going on in a room over a twenty-four-hour period we put the machine on its automatic adjustment. In that way the disc revolves only when people are talking.”
“They work pretty well?”
“Pretty well,” Drake said. “Of course, those are the latest gadgets, and conversations of that sort aren’t much good as evidence because there’s no way of telling how much time elapses between conversations, and there’s no one to testify to the fact that the conversation took place in the room where the microphone was placed. Theoretically it would be possible for someone to get into the room where the recording mechanism was housed and fake the thing.”
“I know,” Mason said, “but it’s a good way to check on... Oh-oh, here’s Tragg. He looks tickled to death.”
Lieutenant Tragg left the elevator, walked over toward Mason and Drake, said, “I’m sorry we had to inconvenience you fellows, but you know how it is. This is a murder case... Everything’s okay. You can go now.”
“Thanks,” Drake said and started for the door.
Mason held back. “Your friend Sergeant Jaffrey seems to be of the old school.”
“If you had to contend with the things he has to fight, you’d be hard-boiled, too,” Tragg said.
“Got the case all solved, Lieutenant?”
Tragg hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Mason — you’ll read it in the papers anyway, so you may as well know it.”
“Shoot.”
“That number that was penciled in lipstick on the back of the mirror was the license number of George Fayette’s automobile. It was registered under the name of Herbert Sidney Granton. That was his latest alias. And when we found that automobile, which we finally did, we found a nice bullet hole through the right front door. A bullet that had been fired from the inside. Seems safe to assume that was the car that was used in the attempted kidnaping and murder of Dixie Dayton.”
“But Fayette wasn’t driving it,” Mason said.
“Fayette wasn’t driving it,” Tragg said. “We’re having the car processed for fingerprints and before too very long we may know who was driving it.”
Mason frowned thoughtfully.
“And personally I wouldn’t blame Morris Alburg for beating George Fayette to the punch,” Tragg said. “Actually it would have been self-defense. Fayette was dynamite. But Alburg is a red-hot target not because of Fayette, but because he’s teamed up with Dixie Dayton, and until Dixie Dayton produces Tom Sedgwick we’re going to raise merry hell with your clients, Mason. I thought you might as well know it.”
“You didn’t think that was any secret, did you?” Mason said, and headed toward the exit.
Chapter 11
Mason said to Drake, “Go on up to your office, Paul. Talk with that girl of yours and find out if she’s really positive about her identification of that photograph.”
Drake paused with one foot on the running board of his car. “You think she’s made a wrong identification?”
“I’m damn near certain of it.”
“She’s pretty efficient, Perry.”
“Look at it this way,” Mason said. “That room was wired. There was a bug in it some place that we didn’t find. That means it was done cleverly and was a professional job.”
“Well?” Drake asked.
“Now, then, Morris Alburg wanted me to meet him in that room... Either Morris wired the room or he didn’t.”
“Well, let’s suppose he didn’t,” Drake said.
Mason shook his head. “Somehow that idea doesn’t appeal to me, Paul. The facts are against that supposition.”
“Why?”
“Morris wanted me to meet him in that room. He had something he wanted, some witness he wanted to interrogate, something that he wanted recorded. He wanted me to do the questioning. He was all hooked up for a big killing. Something happened to him.”
“Well?”
“Figure it out,” Mason told him. “Morris Alburg apparently is playing hand in glove with this Dixie Dayton. Now if that had been the real Dixie Dayton who was talking with me she would have been in touch with Morris Alburg and therefore would have known the room was wired.
“In that event she’d probably have told me, because I’m supposed to be playing ball with them, but even if she hadn’t, she never would have made the statement that Alburg was going to kill George Fayette.”
“That sounds logical,” Drake admitted.
“On the other hand,” Mason said, “if something had happened to the real Dixie Dayton, if Morris Alburg was being detained somewhere against his will, and this woman was sent to stall me along, knowing that I had never met Dixie Dayton, and if she knew that George Fayette had been killed, or was about to be killed, and wanted to lay a perfect trap for my clients, she’d have said exactly what this woman said.”
“Then you don’t think the woman was Dixie Dayton?”
Mason shook his head.
“Sounds reasonable,” Drake said. “I wish you could have got a look at that picture.”
Mason said, “I can’t help but feel that we’re playing for big stakes, Paul. Fayette was just a tool. When Fayette bungled the job of getting Dixie Dayton rounded up he didn’t do himself any good, and then when he made the mistake of coming to my office and trying to get information under the guise of being an insurance agent, and when he realized that the woman who had been trying to follow him the night before was my secretary, he put himself on a spot.
“In addition to that, the automobile that had been used in the kidnaping attempt was his own automobile, registered in his name. Someone had the license number. That made Fayette a cinch for police interrogation.”
“You mean members of his own mob killed him?”
Mason said, “I can’t picture Morris Alburg as getting in that hotel room and killing Fayette in cold blood.”
“You never know what these chaps will do when they get crowded into a corner,” Drake pointed out.
“I know,” Mason told him, “but let’s look at it this way, Paul. Suppose the thing was a beautiful trap. Suppose Alburg and Dixie Dayton were there in room 721 waiting for me, and suppose someone came in and got the drop on them and took them out of the hotel.”
“Sounds rather melodramatic,” Drake said. “I told you before, it sounds like the movies.”