“I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. I... I’ll... I think I’ll discuss that with my partners.”
“Do that,” Mason said. “If the fellow says he never made any such statement, then you know what his defense is. If he says he made it and the picture is spurious, then you know what you’re up against. In any event, let’s find out what the score is... What makes you think she’s going to marry Durant?”
“Well, at our partnership meeting we just started thinking about what could happen, what the possibilities were. If something should happen that... Well, that we had got our client out on a limb, we wouldn’t like that, Mr. Mason.”
“I wouldn’t like it either,” Mason said.
“Well, I’m glad to have had this opportunity to talk with you,” Hollister said. “The more I think of it, the more I feel that we should find out where we stand and I think taking Durant’s deposition is perhaps the best course immediately available. I will prepare the necessary papers and we’ll proceed at once.”
“Do that,” Mason said.
He hung up the phone, turned to Della Street, said, “Here we are standing on a rug with somebody ready to jerk it out from under us.”
“So what do we do?” Della Street asked.
Mason grinned and said, “Spike the rug down so that when the guy jerks, he loses a set of fingernails.”
“What do we do next?” Della Street asked.
“Now,” Mason said, “we gently ease ourselves out of the office without telling anyone where we’re going, and we go to the apartment of Maxine Lindsay and see just what we can find.”
“You mean we take the canary?”
“We take the canary,” Mason said, “and while we’re there we go through the place with a fine-toothed comb. We look for any sort of a clue we can get.”
“And then what?”
“Then,” Mason said, “we ask Mr. Hollister of Warton, Warton, Cosgrove and Hollister if he would like to have associate counsel in the case.”
“The associate counsel being who?”
“Being me,” Mason said. “It’s about time someone with guts got into the thing. We take the deposition of Collin Durant. We ask him a series of the most embarrassing questions imaginable. We ask him whether he has ever been sued before for proclaiming a painting spurious. We ask him whether he did or did not state that the Otto Olney Feteet was spurious. We ask him how long he has known Maxine Lindsay. We ask him if he has ever been married. We ask him the names of his wives. We ask him the places where he got divorces.”
“Is all that pertinent?”
“Sure, it’s pertinent,” Mason said. “If the guy thinks he’s going to sneak up to Oregon and marry Maxine and then come back here and smile at us, we’re going to try to prevent it. We’re going to see if all his previous marriages have been dissolved or whether one may still be in force. If we can find a valid outstanding marriage, we’re going to arrest the guy for bigamy the minute he marries Maxine, and then we’re going to force Maxine to testify on the ground that she isn’t the legal wife of Collin Durant. It seems that the guy is the marrying kind, and if this lawsuit racket is a habit with him, he’s married other witnesses to keep them from testifying.”
“What makes you think they’re having a rendezvous to get married in Oregon?” Della Street asked.
“Well, we’ll look at it this way. Where is Collin Durant? He hasn’t been home, his car is missing, and Maxine was in a hurry. She had to leave last night. She evidently had a meeting place that had been definitely pinpointed somewhere.”
“It begins to add up,” Della Street admitted.
“Come on,” Mason said, “let’s go.”
“Are you going to tell Paul where we’re going?”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Mason said.
After they were in Mason’s car, Della said, “She gave me a key. That makes anything we do legal, doesn’t it?”
“She gave you a key in order to get the canary,” Mason said, “but something seems to tell me you won’t be able to find the feed for the canary and you’ll have to look around some to find out where she kept it.”
“In the kitchen?” Della Street asked.
“Well, of course you can’t tell with a girl like Maxine,” Mason said. “She might have kept it in the bedroom or in one of the closets. Or again, it might have been in a suitcase somewhere, or down in the bottom of a bureau drawer. A package of birdseed could be kept almost anywhere — and then of course there’s cuttlebone. I think you have to use cuttlebone to keep a canary healthy and — oh, I can think of lots of things that might be around there in various places.”
“So we’re going to look in various places.”
“Don’t make any mistake, Della, we’re going to look in all the places.”
They drove in silence, Della Street apparently speculating on the various possibilities.
Mason said, “We don’t need to go blind very much longer, Della. The trail is pretty well blazed. The fact that Warton, Warton, Cosgrove and Hollister are beginning to worry is something to think about. If this is a racket, it’s about time some lawyer shows up stating he represents Durant and wants to start talking settlement.”
“And you think Olney will settle?”
Mason said, “His attorneys are corporation attorneys. They aren’t accustomed to rough-and-tumble fighting. They begin to realize now what a horrible mess their client could be in and naturally they don’t want to have it get around the courthouse that they got Olney out on a limb, any more than I want to have it get around that I got a client out on a limb. The only difference is that when the going gets tough I’ll fight regardless of whether the situation is disagreeable or not. I don’t think those other lawyers will.”
Della Street said, “This is her apartment house. We should be able to find a parking place at this hour of the morning— Here’s one right here.”
Mason said, “That’s rather a long walk. I think we can find one closer.”
He suddenly braked the car to a stop.
“What’s the matter?” Della asked.
“That car,” Mason said, pointing to a large pretentious automobile parked at the curb.
“What about it?”
“It’s the same general description as Collin Durant’s. I got the description from Paul Drake just a short time ago — and I think it’s the same license number. Skip out and take a look at the registration on the steering post, will you, Della?”
Della whipped open the door of the car, jumped to the ground, took a quick look at the registration then hurried back to the car and said, “That’s right, it’s Collin Max Durant’s automobile.”
“The plot thickens all to hell,” Mason said. “Now, what do you suppose Durant is doing here?”
“Trying to see Maxine?” Della Street asked.
“In that event,” Mason said, “he has been here for a long time, or else the guy likes to walk. When he parked his car, there weren’t many parking places available near the apartment house, which means either that the people hadn’t gone to work early in the morning or that he came in at night after people had come home from the offices and had taken up most of the readily available parking spaces.”
“Well, since we know she wasn’t in her apartment all last night,” Della Street said, “that would seem to indicate he had come this morning and—”
“Or has been waiting for her all night,” Mason said, “in which event he probably found some means of letting himself into her apartment.”
“Perhaps he has a key.”
“Could be,” Mason said. “Those things have happened.”
The lawyer eased his car into motion and drove up to one of the vacant parking places near the main entrance to the apartment house.