'No.'
'Was the door locked or unlocked?'
'It was open an inch or two.'
'Did you see anyone in the corridor?' Mason asked.
'You mean when I went up to see the bishop?'
'Yes.'
'No.'
'Did you see anyone coming down in the elevator just as you went up?'
'No.'
'Why didn't you notify the hotel authorities when you found the bishop?'
'I didn't think there was any need. They couldn't have done anything. I went out and telephoned for an ambulance.'
'And then came here and got ready to skip out?' Drake asked sneeringly.
'I wasn't getting ready to skip out. I'd done this earlier in the day because the bishop said I'd have to travel. He said the patient was sailing on the Monterey.'
'What're your plans now?'
'I'm just going to wait here until I hear from the bishop. I don't think he's seriously hurt. He'll be conscious in an hour or two at the latest unless there are sclerotic conditions.'
Mason got to his feet and said, 'Okay, Paul, I think she's told us everything she knows. Let's go.'
Drake said, 'You're going to let her get away with this, Perry?'
The lawyer's eyes were stern. 'Of course I am. The trouble with you, Paul, is that you deal so much with crooks you don't know how to treat a woman who's on the square.'
Drake sighed and said, 'You win. Let's go.'
Janice Seaton came close to Perry Mason, placed her hand on his arm and gave it a friendly squeeze. 'Thank you so much,' she said, 'for being a gentleman.'
They stepped into the corridor, heard the door slam behind them. A moment later there was a click as the key turned in the lock. Drake said to Mason, 'What's the idea in being such a softy, Perry? We might have found out something if we'd made her think it was a murder pinch.'
'We're finding out plenty the way it is,' Mason told him. 'That girl's up to something. Make her suspicious and we'll never find out what it is. Let her think she's pulled the wool over our eyes and she'll give us a lead. Put a couple of men on the job. Run over to the Regal Hotel. Hand your friend the house dick a little more salve, and see if you can get a description of some man who came down the stairs to the lobby shortly after the girl went up on the elevator and before the house dick started after her.'
'Anything else?' Drake asked.
'Follow the girl wherever she goes, and get that other dope for me just as quickly as you can-you know, the manslaughter business, a line on the bishop and all that. And remember to keep a tail on that bishop. Find out what hospital he's at and get a line on his condition.'
'Bet you four to one he's a phoney,' Drake said.
Mason grinned and said, 'No takers-not yet. Call me at the office and keep me posted on developments.'
Chapter 3
The five o'clock exodus of workers was swarming down the elevators into the vortex of swirling humanity which flowed along the concrete canyons of the city thoroughfares. Through the windows came the sound of police whistles directing traffic, the clang of signals, the impatient gongs of street cars, the raucous horns of stalled traffic, and the ever present throbbing undertone of sound which comes from idling motors.
Della Street, seated at her secretarial desk, making entries in a ledger, looked up at the grinning figure of Perry Mason as he entered the office. 'Well,' she asked, 'did you have your meeting with Bishop Mallory and find out what it's all about?'
He shook his head and said, 'No. The bishop isn't in any condition to keep appointments. He's temporarily indisposed, and probably will be for some time. Get all of the newspapers, Della, both today's and yesterday's. We have a job checking want ads.'
She started for the door to the law library, then stopped and said, 'Can you tell me what happened, Chief?'
He nodded. 'We traced the bishop to his hotel. Someone had tapped him to sleep with a blackjack. We ran onto a redheaded spitfire who strung us along with a lot of fairy stories. But, every once in a while her face slipped and she told the truth, because she couldn't think up the lies fast enough.'
'What do we look for in the newspapers?' she asked.
'The red-head said she got in touch with the bishop by answering an ad. She may have been telling the truth, because the bishop is probably a stranger in the city. At any rate, we're going to run that angle down and see what we can find. Look under the 'Help Wanted' ads and see if we can find where someone has advertised for a nurse, young, unencumbered, and willing to travel… Her name, by the way, is Janice Seaton.'
'But why would Bishop Mallory want a nurse?' she asked.
'He wants one now,' Mason said, grinning, `'and perhaps he had some idea of what was coming and wanted to be prepared. He told her she was to travel with a patient.'
Della Street, moving with the crisp efficiency of a thoroughly competent secretary, slipped through the door into the library, to return in a few moments with an armful of newspapers. Mason cleared a space on his desk, selected a cigarette and said, 'Okay, let's start.'
Together, they read through the want ads in the newspapers. At the end of fifteen minutes, Mason looked up, blinked his eyes and said, 'Find anything, Della?'
She shook her head, finished the last column of ads and said, 'Nothing doing, Chief.'
Mason twisted his face into an exaggerated grimace and said, 'Think of how Paul Drake's going to rub it into me. I figured we could get farther by giving her plenty of rope, and I was foolish enough to think I could tell when she was lying and when she was telling us the truth.'
'You figured she was telling the truth about the ad?'
'I thought so, yes. Perhaps not the whole truth, but enough of it to give us a line on what was happening.'
'What gave you that idea?' she asked.
'Well,' Mason said slowly, 'you know how it is when people lie at high speed without having any chance to make things up beforehand. They'll try to follow the truth as far as possible and then figure some falsehood which will link one batch of truth with another batch of truth. There's a certain tempo that gets in their voices when they're running along over ground they're certain of, and then they slow down a bit when they're thinking up the connecting links. I figured this ad business was on the square.'
Mason got to his feet and started pacing the office floor, his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his vest, his head tilted slightly forward. 'The hell of it is,' he said, 'Paul Drake wanted to get rough. He figured we could get somewhere getting her frightened. He might have been right. But you know how red-heads are. And this one looked able to take care of herself. I figured she'd flare up and start fighting until she got hysterical. I felt certain we'd stand more chance giving her plenty of rope and being kind to her than we would by going after her, hammer and tongs.'
The telephone rang. Della Street, with her eyes still on one of the newspapers, groped for the receiver, found it and said, 'Perry Mason's office,' then extended the receiver toward the lawyer. 'Paul Drake on the line,' she said.
Mason picked up the receiver and said, 'Hello, Paul. What's new?'
Drake's drawling voice showed a trace of excitement. 'I've got the dope on that manslaughter for you, Perry,' he said. 'At least I'm hoping it's the right dope. A woman and a man had been down to Santa Ana getting married. They were on their way back to Los Angeles. The woman was driving. She'd had a few drinks. She ran into a car driven by an old rancher, a chap who was in the late seventies. Now, here's the funny thing about it: Nothing much was done at the time. They took the woman's name and address. The man died a couple of days later. But it wasn't until four months after that a warrant was filed for the arrest of the woman on a manslaughter charge. That looks sort of fishy on the face of it.'
'Who was the woman?'
'She had been Julia Branner,' Drake said, 'but at the moment she was Mrs. Oscar Brownley. And in case you don't know it, Oscar Brownley was the son of Renwold C. Brownley.'
Mason gave a low whistle and said, 'Wasn't there some sort of scandal about that marriage, Paul?'
'Remember,' Drake said, 'that was back in 1914. Brownley made nearly all of his money on the big bull market and was wise enough to get out and duck out just before the crash in '29. Brownley in 1914 was dabbling around in real estate. Twelve years later he was a millionaire.'
'Couldn't they have arrested the woman easily enough if they'd really wanted her?' Mason asked.
'No. She and Oscar had a fight with the old man and went places. About a year later, Oscar came back. The old man had turned some good real estate deals in the meantime. He rode the crest of the subdivision wave, then switched into the stock market, made a killing, and got out.'
'Where's Oscar now? Didn't he die?'
'That's right. He died two or three years ago.'
'He left a daughter, didn't he?'
'Yes. There's something more or less mysterious about that daughter. You know, Renwold was all wrapped up in Oscar. It wasn't until after Oscar died that he was willing to recognize the granddaughter. You see, he'd bitterly disapproved of the marriage, and apparently figured the daughter was a mistake on the part of the mother, rather than any offspring of his son. Two years ago he hunted up the granddaughter and took her in to live with him. No great commotion was made over it. The girl simply moved in with Renwold.'
Mason frowned thoughtfully, clamped the receiver to his ear with his left hand, made drumming motions with the fingertips of his right hand on the edge of the desk. 'Then the mother of the girl who is now living in the lap of luxury in Renwold Brownley's Beverly Hills residence is a fugitive from justice on a manslaughter warrant issued in Orange County twenty-two years ago?'
'That's right,' Drake said.
'This thing,' Mason told him, 'commences to be really interesting. What do you hear from the bishop, Paul?'
'Still unconscious at the Receiving Hospital, but surgeons say it's nothing serious. He'll regain consciousness any minute. They're taking him to a private hospital. I'll find out where it is and let you know.'
'You're keeping shadows on that Seaton girl?'
'I'll tell the world. I've got two men there, one watching the front of the apartment house and one the back. I wish you had let me tear into her, Perry. We had her on the run and then…'
Mason chuckled and said, 'You don't know your red-heads, Paul. It'll turn out all right. Find out all you can about that Brownley angle and let me know just as soon as you get anything definite.'
'By the way,' Drake said, 'I found out a little more about the bishop. He came in six days ago on the Monterey and was in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for four days. Then he came down here.'
