The Case of the Velvet Claws (8 page)

She widened her blue eyes by an effort, and stared full into his face with that look of studied innocence.

Perry Mason stared at her, then shrugged his shoulders. "All right," he said, "we'll talk about that later. In the meantime you've got to get yourself together. Now were your husband and this other man quarreling about you?"

"Oh, I don't know. I don't know!" she said. "Can't you understand that I don't know what they were talking about? I only know that I must go back there. What will happen if somebody else should discover the body and I should be gone?"

Mason said, "That's all right, but you've waited this long, and a minute or two isn't going to make any great difference now. There's one thing I want to know before we go."

"What is it?"

He reached over and took her face and turned it until the light from the globe in the top of the car was shining full on her face. Then he said, slowly, "Was it Harrison Burke that was up in the room with him when that shot was fired?"

She gasped. "My God, no!"

"Was Harrison Burke out there tonight?"

"No."

"Did he call you up tonight or this afternoon?"

"No," she said, "I don't know anything about Harrison Burke. I haven't seen him or heard from him since that night at the Beechwood Inn, and I don't want to. He has done nothing but bring trouble into my life."

Mason said, grimly: "Then, how did it happen that you knew that I had told him of your husband's connection with Spicy Bits?"

She dropped her eyes from his, tried to shake her head free of his hands.

"Go on," he said, remorselessly, "answer the question. Did he tell you that when he was out there tonight?"

"No," she muttered in a subdued voice. "He told me that when he telephoned me this afternoon."

"Then he did call up this afternoon, eh?"

"Yes."

"How soon after I had been at his office, do you know?"

"I think it was right after."

"Before he had sent me some money by messenger?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me that before? Why did you say that you hadn't heard from him?"

"I forgot," she said. "I did tell you earlier that he'd called up. If I had wanted to lie to you, I wouldn't have told you at first that I'd heard from him."

"Oh, yes, you would," said Mason. "You told me then because you didn't think there was any possibility that I would suspect him of having been in that room with your husband when the shot was fired."

"That's not so," she said.

He nodded his head slowly.

"You're just a little liar," he said, judicially and dispassionately. "You can't tell the truth. You don't play fair with anybody, not even yourself. You're Iying to me right now. You know who that man was that was in the room."

She shook her head. "No, no, no, no," she said. "Won't you understand, I don't know who it was? I think it was you! That was why I didn't call you from the house. I ran down to this drug store to call you. It's almost a mile."

"Why did you do that?"

"Because," she said, "I wanted to give you time to get home. Don't you see? I wanted to be able to say that I called you and found you at your apartment, if I should be asked. It would have been awful to have called and found that you were out, after I recognized your voice."

"You didn't recognize my voice," he said quietly.

"I thought I did," she said demurely.

Mason said, "There's no thinking about it. I've been in bed for the last two or three hours, but I couldn't prove any alibi. If the police thought I'd been to the house I'd have the devil of a time trying to square myself. You've figured that all out."

She looked up at him and suddenly flung her arms around his neck.

"Oh, Perry," she said, "please don't look at me that way. Of course, I'm not going to tell on you. You're in this thing just as deep as I am. You did what you did to save me. We're in it together. I'm going to stand by you, and you're going to stand by me."

He pushed her away and put his fingers on her wet arm, until she had released her hold. Then he turned her face once more until he could look in her eyes.

"We're not in this thing a damned bit," he said. "You're my client, and I'm sticking by you. That's all. You understand that?"

"Yes," she said.

"Whose coat is that you're wearing?"

"Carl's. I found it in the corridor. I started out first in the rain, and then realized I would get soaking wet. There was a coat in the hallway, and I put it on."

"Okay. You be thinking that over while I'm driving up to the place. I don't know whether the police will be there or not. Do you know if any one else heard the shot?"

"No, I don't think they did."

"All right," he said, "if we've got an opportunity to go over this thing before the police get there, you forget this business about running down to the drug store and putting in the telephone call. Tell them that you called me from the house, and then you ran down the hill to meet me. And that was why you were wet. You couldn't stay in the house. You were afraid. Do you understand that?"

"Yes," she said, meekly.

Perry Mason switched out the dome light in the car and snapped back the gear lever, eased in the clutch, and started the machine boring through the rain.

She came over and cuddled closely to him, her left arm around his neck, her right arm resting on his leg.

"Oh," she wailed, "I'm so afraid, and I feel so alone."

"Shut up," he said, "and think!"

He drove the car at a savage pace up the long grade, turned on Elmwood Drive, and went into second as he climbed the knoll on which the big house was situated. He turned in at the driveway and parked the car directly in front of the porch.

"Now listen," he said to her in a low voice, as he helped her out, "the house seems to be quiet. Nobody else heard the shot. The police aren't here yet. You've got to use your head. If you've been Iying to me, it will mean that you're going to get into serious difficulties."

"I haven't been lying," she said. "I told you the truth – honest to God."

"Okay," he said, and they sprinted across the porch.

"The door's unlocked. I left it unlocked," she said, "you can go right in." And she hung back, in order to let him be the first to enter the house.

Perry Mason tried the door.

"No," he said, "it's locked. The night latch is on. Have you got your key?"

She looked at him blankly.

"No," she said, "my key's in my purse."

"Where's your purse?" he asked her.

She stared at him with eyes that were indistinct, but her poise was that of one who is rigid with terror.

"My God!" she said, "I must have left my purse up in the room with… with my husband's body!"

"You had it with you when you went upstairs?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, "I know I did. But I must have dropped it. I don't remember having it with me when I came out."

"We've got to get in," he said. "Is there another door that's open?"

She shook her head, then suddenly said, "Yes, there's a back door where the servants come in. There's a key that we keep hanging up under the eaves of the garage. It will open the door, and we can get in that way."

"Let's go."

They walked down the steps from the porch and around the gravel driveway which circled the house. The house was dark and silent. Wind was lashing the shrubbery, and rain was pelting against the sides of the house, but no noise whatever came from the interior of the gloomy mansion.

"Don't make any noise," he cautioned her. "I want to get in without the servants hearing us. If nobody's awake, I want to have a minute or two to check things over after I see how the land lies inside."

She nodded, groped in the eaves of the garage, found the key, and opened the back door.

"All right," he said. "You sneak through the house and let me in the front door. I'll lock this back door from the outside, and put the key back in the place on the nail."

She nodded her head and vanished in the darkness of the house. He closed the door, locked it, and put the key back where it had been; then he retraced his steps around the front of the house.

There was a light burning in the entrance hall, a night light which illuminated things vaguely, showing the dark stretch of stairs which led up to the upper floor, the furniture of the reception hallway, a couple of straight back chairs, an ornamental mirror, a coat rack, and umbrella stand.

There was a woman's coat on the rack, two canes, and three umbrellas in the stand. A trickle of rain water had oozed from the bottom of the stand where the umbrellas were kept, and made a puddle which reflected the rays of the night light.

"Look here," said Mason in a whisper. "You didn't turn out the light when you went out?"

"No," she said, "it was just like this when I left."

"You mean that your husband let some one come in this door to see him without turning on any lights except that night light?"

"Yes," she said, "I guess so."

"Don't you ordinarily keep a brighter light burning over the stairs until the family has retired?"

"Sometimes," she said, "but George has his upstairs apartment all to himself. He doesn't bother the rest of us, and we don't bother him."

"All right," said Mason. "Let's go on up. Turn on the light."

She clicked a switch, and the stairway was flooded with light.

Mason led the way up the stairs and into the reception room of the suite where he had first seen George Belter.

The door through which Belter had entered on that occasion was now closed. Mason turned the knob, opened the door and stepped into the study.

It was a huge room, done in much the same style as the sitting room. The chairs were huge and heavily upholstered. The desk was twice the size of an ordinary large desk. There was a door open which led into a bedroom, and, within a few feet of that door, was the door which led into the bath. There was also a door from the bedroom to the bathroom.

The body of George Belter lay on the floor, just inside the doorway from the bathroom to the study. It was wrapped in a flannel dressing gown, which had fallen open along the front and showed that underneath the gown the body was entirely nude.

Eva Belter gave a little scream and clung closely to Mason. Mason shook her off, strode to the body, and knelt down.

The man was quite dead. There had been but one bullet, and that had penetrated directly through the heart. Death had apparently been instantaneous.

Mason felt the inside of the bathrobe and noticed that it was damp. He pulled the bathrobe together over the corpse, stepped over the outstretched arm, and into the bathroom.

Like the other rooms of the suite, the bathroom was built on a massive scale, for a huge man. The bathtub, set down below the level of the floor, was some three or four feet deep and almost eight feet long. A huge washbowl occupied the center of the bathroom. There were towels folded on the racks. Mason looked at them, then turned to Eva Belter.

"Listen," he said, "he was taking a bath, and something caused him to get up and get out. Notice that he flung on his bathrobe, and didn't dry himself with a towel. He was still wet when he put the bathrobe around him, and the towels are all folded, and haven't been used."

She nodded slow acquiescence. "Do you suppose we had better moisten a bath towel and crumple it as though he had dried himself?" she asked.

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "I just wondered."

"Listen," he told her, "we get to faking evidence here, and we're going to get into serious difficulty. Now listen, and get this straight! Apparently, no one besides yourself knows what happened, or when. The police will get sore if they aren't notified right away. They'll also want to know how you happened to telephone to a lawyer before you telephoned to them. It makes it look like a suspicious circumstance as far as you're concerned. D'you understand?"

She nodded again, her eyes wide and dark.

"All right," he said, "now get this, and get it straight, and keep your head all the way through. Here's what happened. You're going to tell exactly the truth, just as you told it to me, with one exception. And that is about your coming back upstairs after the man had left the house. That's the thing that I don't like about your story, and that's the thing that the police won't like about it. If you had presence of mind enough to go up the stairs and look around, then you would have had presence of mind enough to call the police. The fact that you wanted to call an attorney before you called the police, is going to make the police think that you had a consciousness of guilt."

"But," she said, "we can explain to them that I had consulted you on this other matter, and that it was all so mixed up together that I wanted to talk with you before I talked with the police, couldn't we?"

He laughed at her.

"What a sweet mess that would be. Then the police would want to know all about what that other matter was. And before you got done, you'd find that you had given them the best kind of motive for you to kill your husband. That other matter can never come into the thing at all. We've got to get hold of Harrison Burke and see that he keeps his mouth closed."

"But," she protested, "how about the paper? How about Spicy Bits?"

"Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, "that, with your husband's death, you are the owner of that paper? You can step into the saddle, and control the policy right now."

"Suppose he left a will disinheriting me?"

"In that event," he said, "we'll file a suit contesting the will and try and get you put in as a special administratrix, pending the determination of the suit."

"All right," she said, swiftly, "I ran out of the house, and then what happened?"

"Exactly the way you told it to me. You were so panic-stricken that you ran out of the house. And remember that you ran out before the man who was in the room with your husband ran down the stairs. You dashed out of the house and out into the rain, grabbing up the first coat that you came to as you went past the hall stand. You were so excited that you didn't even notice that one of your coats was there, but picked a man's coat."

"All right," she said, speaking in that same swift, impatient tone of voice, "then what happened?"

"Then," Mason continued, "you ran out into the rain, and there was an automobile parked out in the driveway, but you were too excited to notice the automobile, what kind it was, or whether it was a closed car or a touring car. You just started running. Then a man dashed out of the house behind you, jumped in the automobile, and switched on the headlights. You plunged into the shrubbery because you were afraid he was chasing you.

"The car went on past you down the drive and down the hill, and you started running to follow it, trying to get the license number, because, by that time, you realized the importance of finding out who this man was who had been with your husband when the shot was fired."

"All right," she said. "And then?"

"Still just the way you told it to me. You were afraid to go back to the house alone, and you went to the nearest telephone. Remember that all of that time you didn't know that your husband had been killed. You only knew that you had heard a shot fired, and you didn't know whether it was your husband who had fired the shot and wounded the man who escaped in the automobile, or whether that man had fired the shot at your husband. You didn't know whether the shot had hit, or whether it had missed, whether your husband was wounded, slightly, seriously, or killed, or whether your husband had shot himself while this man was in the room. Can you remember all that?"

"Yes, I think so."

"All right," he said. "That accounts for your reason in calling me. I told you that I would come right out. Remember that you didn't tell me over the telephone a shot had been fired. You simply told me that you were in trouble and afraid and wanted me to come."

"How did it happen that I wanted you to come?" she asked. "What excuse is there for that?"

"I'm an old friend of yours," he said. "I take it that you and your husband don't go around together much socially."

"No."

"That's fine," Mason said. "You've been calling me by my first name once or twice lately. Begin to do it regularly, particularly when people are around. I'm going to be an old friend of yours and you called me as a friend, not particularly as an attorney."

"I see."

"Now the question is, can you remember all that? Answer!"

"Yes," she said.

He gave the room a quick survey.

"You said you left your purse up here. You'd better find it."

She walked to the desk and opened one of the drawers. The purse was in that. She took it out. "How about the gun?" she asked. "Hadn't we better do something with the gun?"

He followed her eyes, and saw an automatic Iying on the floor, almost underneath the desk, where the shadows kept it from being plainly visible.

"No," he said, "that's a break for us. The police may be able to trace this gun, and find out who it belongs to."

She frowned and said, "It seems funny that a man would shoot and then throw the gun down here. We don't know who that gun belongs to. Don't you think we had better do something with it?"

"Do what with it?"

"Hide it some place."

"Do that," he said, "and then you will have something to explain. Let the police find the gun."

"I've got a lot of confidence in you, Perry," she replied. "But I'd a lot rather have it the other way. Just the dead body here."

"No," he said, shortly. "You can remember everything I told you?"

"Yes."

He picked up the telephone.

"Police Headquarters," he said.