The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (4 page)

Mason said. "Let me handle this for a minute, Paul. No, listen, Janice, it happens that several people were watching Bishop Mallory. I'm not going to tell you who they were nor why they were watching him, but he was shadowed when he entered his hotel. You were seated in the lobby and gave him a high-sign. He motioned for you to wait a little and then come up to his room. You gave him four or five minutes, then went up in the elevator. After a little while you came down, and you were plenty excited. All of that time you were being shadowed by my men, who are trained to remember people. You don't stand any chance whatever of lying out of it. Now, then, after you left the bishop's place you went to a telephone and telephoned for an ambulance to come and pick up the bishop. That put you in a spot. I'm trying to give you a chance to get out."

"Who are you?" she asked.

"A friend of Bishop Mallory's."

"How do I know that?"

"Just at present," he said, "you take my word for it."

"I'd want something more than that."

"Okay, then, I'm a friend of yours."

"How do I know that?"

"Because I'm sitting here talking with you instead of telephoning police headquarters."

"He isn't dead?" she asked.

"No," Mason said, "he isn't dead."

Drake frowned impatiently and said, "You'll never get anywhere this way, Perry. She's going to lie now."

The girl whirled to the tall detective and said, "You shut up! He'll get a lot farther with me than you would."

Drake said impersonally, "I know the type, Perry. You've got to keep them on the run. Get them frightened and keep them that way. Try to play square with them and they'll slip out from under."

She ignored the comment, turned to Perry Mason and said, "I'll play square with you. I answered an ad in a paper."

"And met the bishop that way?"

"Yes."

"What was the ad?"

She hesitated a moment, then tilted her chin and said, "He advertised for a trained nurse who was dependable and trustworthy."

"You're a trained nurse?"

"Yes."

"How many other people answered the ad?"

"I don't know."

"When did you answer it?"

"Yesterday."

"Did the bishop give his name and address?"

"No, only a blind box."

"So you answered the ad. Then what happened?"

"Then the bishop telephoned me and said he liked my letter and wanted a personal interview."

"When was that?"

"Late last night."

"So you went to the hotel this morning for that interview?"

"No, I went to the hotel last night, and he hired me."

"Did he say what for?"

"He said he wanted me to nurse a patient."

"You're a registered nurse?" Paul Drake interrupted.

"Yes."

"Show me," Drake said.

She opened the suitcase, took out a manila envelope, handed it to the detective and immediately turned her eyes back to Mason. She was more sure of herself now, more calmly competent, more wary, and more watchful.

"So Bishop Mallory hired you?" Mason asked.

For a moment her eyes wavered. Then she shook her head and said, "No."

"What paper was it in?"

"I can't remember. It was in one of the evening papers a day or two ago. Someone called the ad to my attention."

"So Bishop Mallory hired you?" Mason asked.

"Yes."

"Did he say what was wrong with the patient?"

"No, he didn't. I gathered that it was a case of insanity in the family or something of that sort."

"Why all the packing up?" Paul Drake asked, handing back the manila envelope.

"Because Bishop Mallory told me I'd have to go with him and the patient on a trip."

"Did he say where?"

"No."

"And he told you to meet him in the hotel?"

"Yes. And I wasn't to talk with him in the lobby. He was to nod if everything was all right, and I was to go up to his room after five minutes."

"Why all the mystery?" Drake asked.

"I don't know. He didn't tell me, and I didn't ask him. He was a bishop, so I knew he was all right, and he was paying good wages. Also, you know how some mental cases are. They go wild if they think they're under treatment or even observation."

"So you went up to the room," Mason said. "What did you find?"

"I found things all topsy-turvy. The bishop was lying on the floor. He had a concussion. His pulse was weak but steady. I picked him up and got him to bed. It was a job – an awful job."

"Did you see anyone in the room?"

"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."

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."

"Well, see what you can find out in San Francisco," Mason said. "Find out who called on him at the hotel and all that sort of stuff. Let me know as soon as you get anything else. I'll be here for an hour or so. Then Della and I are going out to get some eats."

Mason hung up the receiver and resumed his pacing of the office. He had taken only two turns, however, when Della Street said excitedly, "Wait a minute, Chief. You were right after all. Here it is!"

"What?"

"The ad."

He strode to her secretarial desk, stood with one hand on her shoulder, leaning over, looking at the ad she was indicating with the point of a polished nail: "IF THE DAUGHTER OF CHARLES W. AND GRACE SEATON, WHO FORMERLY LIVED IN RENO, NEVADA, WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH BOX XYZ LOS ANGELES EXAMINER SHE WILL LEARN SOMETHING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO HERSELF."

Mason whistled and said, "In the personal column, eh?"

Della Street nodded, grinned up at him and said, "You see, I have more faith in your judgment than you have. If you thought she was telling the truth about an ad, I was willing to gamble on it. But when we couldn't find it in the 'Help Wanted' or 'Business Opportunities,' I decided to take a look at the 'Personals.'"

Mason said, "Let's look at the Times and see if he has one in there. When was this?"

"Yesterday," she said.

Mason pulled out the Times classified ad section of the same date, ran hurriedly down the "Personals" and then gave a low whistle and said, "Look at this, Della."

Together, they stared at an ad reading: "WANTED: INFORMATION WHICH WILL ENABLE ME TO GET IN TOUCH WITH A JANICE SEATON WHO WILL BE TWENTY-TWO YEARS OF AGE ON FEBRUARY 19TH. SHE IS A GRADUATE NURSE, RED-HEADED, BLUE EYES, ATTRACTIVE, WEIGHT ABOUT A HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN, HEIGHT FIVE FEET ONE. IS THE DAUGHTER OF CHARLES W. SEATON WHO WAS KILLED SIX MONTHS AGO IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT. $25 REWARD TO THE FIRST PERSON FURNISHING AUTHENTIC INFORMATION. BOX ABC LOS ANGELES TIMES.

Della Street picked up a pair of scissors and snipped both ads from the papers. "Well?" she asked.

Mason grinned and said, "Saves my face with Paul Drake."

"And," she told him, "I take it the plot thickens?"

Mason frowned and said, "Yes, it thickens like the gravy I made on my last camping trip – all in a bunch of lumps, which don't seem to be smoothing out."

She laughed up at him and said, "Did you apologize for the gravy, Chief?"

"Hell, no!" he told her. "I told the boys that it was the latest thing out, something I'd learned from the chef in a famous New York restaurant; that it was Thousand-Island Gravy.

"Ring up Paul Drake, tell him we're going to dinner. Don't tell him anything about the ad. Let's see if he finds it. Tell him to meet us here after dinner."

"Listen, Chief," she told him, "aren't you sort of getting the cart before the horse? We're finding out a lot about the bishop, but not very much for him. After all, what the bishop wanted to know was about a manslaughter case."

Mason nodded thoughtfully and said, "That's what he said he wanted to know about. But I smelled something big in the wind, and the scent keeps getting stronger. The thing which bothers me is that it's getting too strong. I tried putting two and two together, and the answer I get is six."