The little group remained tense as the sound of a motor became plainly audible, a motor in a car which was being driven without headlights.
Abruptly the car came to a stop.
'If
'Hush!' Mason whispered.
They held their positions, listening and watching. The dark shadows played tricks on their eyes. Once Della Street grasped Mason's arm, said, 'Something moved.'
No one else, however, had seen the movement.
They waited five minutes. Tragg sucked in his breath, starting to say something when, suddenly, they all saw a figure silhouetted against a patch of night sky.
Mason pressed the button of the powerful flashlight he was holding.
A figure interfused a forearm between eyes and flashlight. There was a glint of metal on blued-steel, then an orange spreading flash and the whistle of a bullet going past Mason's head.
The lawyer extinguished the flashlight. 'Come on!' he said.
The group ran forward.
Twice more the reddish orange flame spurted into the night. Twice more they heard the whistle of bullets, then there were no more shots.
'We use plan three!' Mason shouted. 'We don't want to kill unless we have to, and we don't want to move in and be sitting ducks.'
They froze into immobility for what seemed an interminable period of silence, then, suddenly, they heard the roar of a car motor as it throbbed into life, and a second later headlights came on. The car, a hundred yards down the road, tried to make a U-turn, stalled, backed, crashed into a tree, then started forward.
The group ran to Lt. Tragg's police car which had been hidden in the brush. They climbed in hurriedly. Tragg throbbed the motor into life, switched on the red light, hit the siren, and at the same time called in on the radio asking the dispatcher to head off a car which was proceeding at high speed from the dirt road into the dump, asking that roadblocks be put up on the principal paved roads leading from the dirt road.
The car had traveled wildly, the taillights glowing like red rubies.
Tragg, driving the car with police competency, hustled over the road, gaining on the car ahead.
Abruptly the lights on the other car were switched off.
'Trying to find a side road to turn down,' Tragg grunted, and switched on a powerful searchlight.
The searchlight not only held the car ahead in the beam of its illumination but the reflection in the windshield blinded the driver.
Again the lights of the car ahead were switched on, but during the period of dark driving the car had lost valuable ground.
The fleeing car made a screaming turn from the dirt road onto the pavement, and suddenly the blood-red brake lights flared into brilliance as the driver frantically depressed the brake pedal.
A police car was parked broadside in the road, and on each side of the police car were officers with drawn guns.
'I guess that does it,' Tragg said.
'Let's hope she doesn't have enough presence of mind to throw the gun away,' Mason said. 'That's our best evidence.'
The fugitive's car skidded to a stop. Mrs. Hedley's hate-distorted features were illuminated by the glaring lights as she slowly got out of her car with her hands up.
Tragg stopped his car immediately behind hers, and the party piled out.
Mrs. Hedley looked at them with venomous hatred. Her eyes came to focus on Perry Mason's face. 'How I wish I could have killed you!' she spat at him.
Tragg pushed past her, looked in the automobile and picked up an automatic from the seat.
'This your gun?' he asked.
'See my lawyer,' she snapped.
'You won't need to ask any questions,' Mason said.
'Take that gun to ballistics. Check the empty cartridge case we found at the seventh tee for what the ballistics experts call the breech-block signature and you'll find the cartridge was fired from that gun.'
Another car came driving up behind. Drake's operative got out and said, 'Gosh, you folks get a man into all sorts of scrapes.'
Perry Mason grinned at him. 'When you get on the stand,' he said, 'tell Hamilton Burger that you were collecting the regular fee of fifty dollars a day and that you were shot at three times-all of which is only part of the day's work.'
Chapter Twenty-Five
Paul Drake, Della Street and Kerry Dutton were gathered in Mason's office the next afternoon. Dutton, still somewhat dazed from the rapid developments of the day, said, 'Would you mind telling me how you did all this?'
Mason grinned. 'I didn't,' he said. 'Lieutenant Tragg did. Lieutenant Tragg had to.'
'Well, the papers certainly gave Tragg a wonderful spread of publicity. One would have thought he originated the whole idea.'
'An officer has to take credit,' Mason said. 'It's part of the game. When Tragg consented to go with me, he knew I'd give him all the publicity if the scheme paid off-and keep him out of it if it didn't.'
'But how did you know what had happened?'
'It was just simple reasoning,' Mason said. 'So simple that I almost overlooked it.
'Palmer was killed shortly after nine o'clock, but the murderess needed a Patsy, so the murderess picked on you. She decoyed you into going to the scene of the murder because she knew Palmer had been trying to put the bite on you. Just before you arrived, the murderess fired another shot so that if anyone happened to be listening, there would be the sound of a shot that would coincide with the time the murder was supposed to have taken place.
'Then, of course, you very stupidly played into the hands of the murderess just as she had expected you would, because she had planted Desere's gun by the body-a gun which she had taken from the bureau drawer in Desere's bedroom.'
'And the reason?' Drake asked.
'Not the reason that any of us had thought of.
'Palmer had been in two hotels when these stocking strangulation murders had taken place. The police had, quite naturally, considered him as a suspect, but very foolishly they didn't consider him as a witness. They didn't ask him in detail about the people he had seen in the hotel although he probably wouldn't have told them if they had asked.
'We know now that he had seen Hedley in each of the hotels, and Hedley was the mysterious person who had registered under an assumed name and then vanished. The description fits him.'
'And Mrs. Hedley knew what her son had done?'
'Her son has been a little bit off ever since he was a boy. She has a fierce protective instinct-an instinct which was strong enough to make her willing to kill if she had to in order to protect her boy.
'But the point is Palmer knew what Hedley had done, and Palmer desperately needed money to win his proxy fight in the Steer Ridge Oil Company. He felt that he could ultimately gain a million if he could only get operating capital.
'So Palmer put the bite on Mrs. Hedley. It was blackmail for the highest stakes possible. Either he got money or he put the police on the trail of her son on a series of murders.
'That's always a dangerous gambit. Palmer knew that, but he was playing for big stakes. He had to take the chance.
