He telephoned the Drake Detective Agency and asked for messages. The man at the telephone said, “Your secretary telephoned, Mr. Mason, and said she’d located the party you desired and was carrying out your instructions.”
Mason thanked him, hung up and drove directly to the loft building at 913 South Marsh Street, where George Trent had his office and shop. Mason rang for the janitor, whose surliness changed into smiling cooperation as Mason slipped a folded bill into the man’s palm.
“Trent?” he said. “Oh, yes. He has an office on the fifth floor. The niece went up about five minutes ago.”
“Virginia?” Mason asked.
“I think that’s her name. She’s a tall, thin girl.”
“I want to see her,” Mason said. “Let’s go.”
The janitor took him up in the elevator, stepped out into the corridor to indicate a lighted doorway. “That’s the office,” he said, “down there on the left.”
Mason thanked him and pounded his way down the corridor. He knocked on the door, and Virginia Trent said, “Who is it, please?”
“Mason,” he told her.
“Oh, just a minute, Mr. Mason.”
She threw back a bar and opened the door. Mason entered a room fitted up as an office, a small desk at one side of the room, filing cases, a stenographer’s desk and chair on the other. A door opened from the side of the room, another from the back. Virginia Trent was wearing a light tweed overcoat with deep side pockets. Her hands were encased in light weight tan kid gloves. A brown hat was pulled down low, to slant slightly over her right ear, balancing a bird wing of bright colors.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Mason watched her as she closed the door and slipped the bar into place. “Just dropped in to have a chat with you,” he said.
“What about?”
Mason looked around for a chair. She indicated the chair at the desk. Mason looked across to where her large dark brown purse reposed on the stenographer’s desk. “Been typing?” he asked.
“I just got here.”
“Where’ve you been?” Mason asked casually. “I’ve been trying to get you.”
“I went to a picture show,” she told him, “I wanted to get my mind off Aunt Sarah. You know, when you continually brood over anything, you lose your mental perspective. I think it’s better to go to a picture show and give your mind a rest. Don’t you ever do that when you’re working on a case, Mr. Mason?”
“No,” he said grinning, “I don’t dare to take the time for fear someone might steal a march on me. Was it a good show?”
“Pretty fair... Mr. Mason, I want to ask you something.”
“Go ahead,” Mason told her.
“What’s a lie detector?” she asked.
Mason studied her and failed to find any expression in her eyes. “Why the question?” he asked.
“I wanted to know, that’s all.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m interested from a psychological standpoint, that’s all.”
Mason said, “It’s really not much more than an instrument for taking blood pressure, the theory being that when a witness gets ready to lie, he sort of mentally braces himself, and that shows in a change of blood pressure, which, in turn, shows on a needle. Telling the truth is easy and effortless. Telling a lie involves mental effort.”
“Are they of any real value?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mason said, “their value, however, depends on the skill of the man who does the questioning. In other words, the machine registers what you might call a psychic change in the individual. The skill of the questioner accentuates those psychic changes and makes them significant.”
She looked at him steadily and said, “Mr. Mason, do you know something? I believe I could beat the lie detector.”
“Why should you?” he asked.
“Just as a psychological experiment,” she said. “I’d like to try.”
“What,” Mason asked, “would you like to lie about?”
“Oh, anything.”
“For instance, about what you were doing here?”
Her eyes widened. “Why,” she said, “I came up here to write a few personal letters. The typewriter was here and I thought I’d tap out a couple of letters to my friends.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know, five minutes or ten minutes.”
“But you hadn’t started writing when I knocked?”
“No.”
“What were you doing?”
She laughed and said, “What is this, Mr. Mason, some sort of a third-degree?”
“Were you,” he asked, “thinking about beating the lie detector?”
“Don’t be silly, Mr. Mason. I just asked you that because I’m interested in the psychological significance You said you wanted to see me, Mr. Mason. What did you want to see me about?”
“I wanted to tell you about your aunt,” he said, watching her narrowly.
“About Aunt Sarah?” He nodded.
“Oh, dear,” she said, “I knew it. I had the most awful premonition all the time I was in the show. I felt certain that it had happened.”
“That what had happened?” Mason asked.
“That she’d been arrested, of course.”
“For what?”
“For shoplifting,” she said, “or... or about the diamonds.”
Mason said, “I’d like to find out something about the Bedford diamonds. Can you give me a description of them?”
“Yes,” she said, “Uncle George had some notes... But tell me about Aunt Sarah. What happened? Is she arrested?”
“She was hit by an automobile,” Mason said.
“An automobile!” the girl exclaimed.
Mason nodded. “Out on St. Rupert Boulevard,” he said, “near Ninety-First Street. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Way out there?” the girl asked. “Why, what would Aunt Sarah be doing out there?”
“That’s where Cullens lives, isn’t it?” Mason asked.
She knitted her forehead in thought. “Yes, I guess it is. Wait a minute, I have his address here in the files, Mr. Mason, and...”
“You don’t need to look at it,” Mason told her. “Cullens lives out ‘here. That is, he did live out there.”
“Has he moved?” she asked.
“No,” Mason said, “he was killed.”
“Killed!”
“Yes, shot in the left side with a revolver.”
“What are you leading up to, Mr. Mason? Please tell me.”
Mason said, “Your aunt stepped out on the street right in front of an automobile. The automobile hit her and broke her leg and fractured her skull. There are possible internal injuries. There was blood on her left shoe. That blood didn’t come from any injuries she’d received. Moreover, there was blood on the sole of the shoe, indicating that she’d...” He broke off as the girl swung half around and toppled into a chair, her face white, her lips a pale pink. “Take it easy,” Mason cautioned. She tried to smile. “Any whiskey in this place?” the lawyer asked.
She indicated the desk. Mason jerked open the upper right-hand drawer, and found a bottle half filled with whiskey. He unscrewed the stopper and handed it to Virginia Trent. She drank awkwardly from the bottle, trying to suck the liquid from the container, and spilling some down the front of her dress as she removed the bottle from her lips, making a wry grimace.
Mason said, “You’ll have to learn to drink out of a bottle. Let some air into it. Like this.”
She watched him and smiled wanly. “You do it very expertly,” she said. “Go on, Mr. Mason, I can take it. Tell me the rest of it.”
“There isn’t any rest of it,” Mason said “Your aunt is unconscious. They found a gun, a bunch of diamonds, some silk stockings which had been stolen from another department store, and some knitting in your aunt’s bag.”