The Case of the Troubled Trustee

about six feet one inch in height, weight two hundred and five pounds, very hairy hands, big powerful wrists.'

'No keys on him?' Mason asked.

'No keys, no coins, no knife, no handkerchiefs, no pens, no pencils-nothing.'

Mason said thoughtfully, 'Paul, you talked about a man you thought was a process server who was waiting to serve papers on Dutton?'

'That's right, he- By George, Perry, it could be the same man. The description fits.'

'You'd recognize the man if you saw him?'

'Sure.'

'Stay away from the morgue,' Mason said. 'Let's see if you can get a look at the police photographs.'

'Gosh, Perry,' Drake wailed, 'if I make the guy, I'll have to go to the police. That's evidence a private detective can't withhold.'

'You can't make a positive identification from a newspaper photograph like that,' Mason said. 'You'd have to see the corpse.'

'Well, you were talking about police photographs.'

'I was,' Mason said. 'Now I am talking about newspaper photographs… Della and I are on our way back just as fast as we can get there. I'll leave my car here. I'll get my friend Munoz to fly us to San Diego. You have Pinky waiting at the San Diego airport with a twin-motored job to bring us in to the Tn-City Airport, and sit tight until we get there. Meet us at Tn-City Airport.'

'Even if there's a very good resemblance in the newspaper photographs, I'd have to run it down,' Drake said. 'In a murder case my license wouldn't be worth a thin dime if I held out an identification.'

'You and your license,' Mason said.

'Me and my living,' Drake told him. 'I'll have the plane in San Diego by the time you get there.'

'We'll get there pretty darn fast,' Mason said and hung up.

Chapter Ten

'Pinky' Brier, the famous aviatrix, brought the twinmotored plane in at the Tn-City Airport as gracefully as a bird coming in to a landing.

A worried Paul Drake, who had been anxiously waiting, came out of the late afternoon shadows to meet Perry Mason and Della Street as they disembarked.

'You left your car?' Drake asked.

'Left it down there,' Mason said. 'We'll get it later on. Right now we're working against time.'

'We're working against time and against a condition you aren't going to like,' Drake said.

'What's the condition?'

'I've seen the photograph in the papers.'

'What about it?'

'Perry, I think that man is the one that I took for a process server-perhaps he is, perhaps he isn't, but in any event, he was hanging around keeping cases on this Dutton apartment.'

'But you can't make a positive identification from a newspaper photograph of that sort,' Mason said.

'I know I can't, but I've got enough of an identification to tell Lieutenant Tragg that I might be of some assistance and should go down to the morgue and take a look at the body.'

'Then, if you identify him,' Mason said, 'you're going to have to tell Tragg where you saw him and when.'

'That's right.'

'And that,' Mason said, 'is going to put our client in a hole.'

'Your client is in a hole now,' Drake said.

'Well, you'll put him deeper in the hole.'

'He's in just about as deep as he can get right now,' Drake said, 'or he will be when my operative testifies.

'You remember my operative was shadowing Dutton. He put a wire recorder up against the telephone booth and heard one side of the conversation in which Dutton arranged to meet someone out at the Barclay Country Club on the seventh tee.

'That's where they found this murdered man.' Mason said thoughtfully, 'Your operative is in Ensenada now?'

'No, he's started home,' Drake said. 'By the time he gets here he'll know what his duty is. He'll report to the police, and the police will confiscate that wire recording.'

'Who has the wire recording?'

'He does. It's in the trunk of his car.

'You've got a responsibility here, too, Perry. You can't suppress evidence. You can represent your client regardless of what the evidence against him may be, but you can't conceal evidence of a murder.'

'All right,' Mason said, 'let's face it before they smoke us out. Let's call Lieutenant Tragg. Then Pinky can take us in to the Los Angeles Airport, and Tragg can meet us.'

Drake said, 'We'll have cars scattered all over the country. Your car in Ensenada; mine here at Tn-City.'

'We can rent cars if we need them,' Mason said, 'but we're fighting against time. Della will drive your car to Los Angeles.'

'What does your client tell you?' Drake asked.

'Nothing,' Mason said.

Drake said, 'The only defense that's going to be open to you in the long run is trying to prove self-defense. Your client went out there to meet this guy. Whoever it was, the man was blackmailing Dutton. The party got rough. Your client had to shoot to kill in order to get away. The police found five thousand dollars in fiftydollar bills in your client's possession when he was arrested at the border. They think this was money for a blackmail payoff.'

'That's what they think,' Mason said. 'How do they know it wasn't getaway money?'

'They believe it was a blackmail payoff. They know things we don't know.'

'I suppose so,' Mason said. 'There's so much about this that I don't know that it bothers me. The best defense is the truth, but in this case I don't know what the truth is, and I'm not at all certain my client is going to tell me.''

'Why not?'

'There's just a chance he's protecting someone, or trying to.'

'That would mean a woman, wouldn't it?' Drake asked.

Mason said, 'Come on, let's get hold of a telephone.'

Mason went to a telephone, called the Los Angeles Police Department, got Lt. Tragg at Homicide on the line.

'I see you're investigating a death at the Barclay Country Club,' Mason said.

'You saw that in the papers?'

'I heard it was in the papers.'

'Yes. Yes,' Tragg said, 'and I suppose you have some information in connection with it that you've been sitting on for several hours, and now that you've decided it's too dangerous to hold out any longer, you've decided to be co-operative.'

'You do me an injustice,' Mason said, grinning.

'I know. I always do,' Tragg said dryly.

'As a matter of fact,' Mason told him, 'I have just this minute arrived by plane from Mexico. I have been talking with Paul Drake, and Paul Drake tells me that from the picture of the murdered man that was published in the paper he has an idea he may have seen the individual in question sometime last night.'

'Where? When?' Lt. Tragg asked, snapping the questions like the crack of a whip.

'Not so fast,' Mason said. 'We don't know as yet that it's the same person.'

'Well, you'd better find out, and find out pretty damn quick,' Lt. Tragg said. 'If Paul Drake has any information