The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (15 page)

"Yes, of course she could have done that."

"And you think she did?"

Brownley nodded.

"What makes you think so?"

"Because she was desperate. She's an impostor. She was going to be showed up and sent to jail."

Mason said slowly, "The thing doesn't make sense."

Brownley's tone was impatient. "I'm not claiming it makes sense," he said. "I'm telling you what happened."

Mason frowned thoughtfully at the tip of his cigarette for several minutes, then slowly opened the door of the car.

"Have you told anyone about this?" he asked.

"No. Should I?"

Mason nodded and said, "Yes, you'd better tell the D.A."

"How will I get in touch with him?"

"Don't worry," Mason said grimly, "they'll get in touch with you," and slammed the door of the car shut behind him.

Mason tried to hold Julia Branner's eyes with his, but she kept avoiding his gaze. Mason said, "Julia, look down at my hand – not that one, the other one. Now I'm going to open that hand causally. There's something in the palm. I want you to look at it and tell me if you've ever seen it before."

Mason glanced at the matron, looked out of the corner of his eye at the two officers, slowly opened his right hand, but carefully avoided letting his own eyes drop. Julia Branner stared as though fascinated at the hand. Slowly, Mason closed it again into a fist and pounded gently on the table as though emphasizing some point. "What is it?" he asked.

"A key."

"Your key?"

"What do you mean?"

"A man by the name of Sacks," Mason said, "a private detective, is going to claim you gave him that key and…"

"It's a lie! I don't know any Sacks. I don't…"

"Wait a minute," Mason cautioned. "Not so loud. Take it easy, sister. You probably didn't know him as Sacks, and of course you didn't know he was a detective. He's a tall, broad-shouldered chap, about forty-two or forty-three, with gray eyes and regular features – that is, he did have regular features," Mason added with a grin. "His features aren't so regular now."

"No," she said, putting her hand to her mouth, "I never saw him. I don't know him."

"Take your hand from your mouth," Mason said, "and quit lying. Is this the key to your apartment?"

"I haven't any apartment."

"You know what I mean – the one where you were living with Stella Kenwood."

"No," she said in a faint voice. "I don't think that's the key. It's a frame-up."

Mason said, "Why did you send a message to Renwold Brownley, telling him to go down to the water-front?"

"I never did."

"Don't try to pull that," he said, frowning irritably. "They can prove you did. There's a taxi driver and…"

"I'm not going to say anything more," she interrupted, clamping her lips together. "I'll take my medicine if I have to."

"Look here," Mason told her, "I had faith in you and I tried to help you. You're not playing fair with me. I may be able to get you out of this, but I've got to know just exactly what happened. Otherwise, I'm like a prize fighter going into the ring blindfolded. You mustn't tell anyone else, but you've got to tell me."

She shook her head.

Mason said, "I tried to give you a square deal. Now you're lying down on me."

"You don't need to handle my case," she said. "Just get out of it. It's probably the best thing for you to do."

"Thanks for the advice," Mason said sarcastically, "but you've got me in so deep I can't get out, and you know it. I don't know how much of what I've heard is true. Perhaps you didn't plan to drag me into the case and leave me holding the sack, but it sure looks as though you did. If I try to get out now and they convict you, I'll either go up as an accessory or I'll be disbarred, and, so far as I'm concerned, it won't make a whole lot of difference which – and I think that's just the way you planned it. You wanted to get me in so deep I couldn't quit. I started playing around the edges and got in over my head before I knew where the deep spots were. Now I've got to get you out in order to get myself out."

She kept her lips tightly compressed. Her eyes remained downcast.

"Look here," Mason told her, "the story is that you got someone to impersonate Bishop Mallory so you could talk me into taking the case. Then you were going to make a quick clean-up and get out. Now somewhere there's a real Bishop Mallory. You may or may not be the real Julia Branner. Janice Seaton may or may not be your real daughter, and she may or may not be Renwold Brownley's granddaughter. There are things about this case that don't look good and don't smell good, and, in addition to all of them, there's a murder to be explained and…"

The woman interrupted him with a half scream. She jumped to her feet, turned toward the matron and said, "Take him away! Take him away! Don't let him talk to me!"

The matron rushed toward her. One of the officers jerked out his revolver, clicked back the lock on the barred door and moved aggressively toward Perry Mason.

Mason dropped the key from his right hand into his vest pocket and got to his feet.

"What the hell's the idea?" the officer asked.

Mason shrugged his shoulders and said calmly, "You can search me. Hysterics, I guess."

The matron led Julia Branner from the room.

Mason paced the floor of his office impatiently. Della Street, worried, sat at her desk, an open notebook in front of her. Paul Drake, freshly emerged from a Turkish bath, sprawled over the leather chair. His cold had vanished, save for an occasional sniffle.

"Tell me what you know first," Mason said to the detective, "and then I'll tell you what I know."

Drake said, "The case is nutty, Perry, any way you want to look at it. I wish you'd get out of it and stay out of it. Julia Branner is a bad egg. There's no question but what she bumped him off. There's a lot of other stuff mixed in it, but I don't think it's going to do you any good. There's…"

"What's the other stuff?" Mason asked.

"Janice Brownley took her car out of the garage less than five minutes after the old man left," Drake said, "and young Brownley followed her out. A couple of detectives, Victor Stockton and Pete Sacks, have been handling the thing for Janice Brownley and probably for the old man. Now Janice…"

"Wait a minute," Mason interrupted. "We were wondering who had fallen heir to Jaxon Eaves' cut. Now why don't these two detectives fit into that picture? You told me yourself that Eaves collected a twenty-five thousand dollar bonus for finding the girl and undoubtedly had an arrangement by which he was going to get a cut out of any inheritance she received."

Drake shook his head lugubriously. "That won't do you any good, Perry," he said. "Let's suppose that Eaves did run in a ringer. Let's suppose Stockton and Sacks did inherit his interest in the case. That doesn't help you any, because Julia Branner couldn't find the real granddaughter any more than Eaves could, so she decided to run in a ringer and collect, but she got vicious about it and evidently got tied up with a gang of crooks. The theory the D.A.'s working on – and he's got some straight dope on it from someone – is that Julia decided to wait until Bishop Mallory was taking a sabbatical year where he couldn't be reached, then she was to have someone who claimed to be Bishop Mallory contact a lawyer with a build-up. She picked on you. After you'd been sold, you were to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. But she couldn't even wait for that. She bumped off Brownley to keep him from upsetting her apple cart. Remember, she hated his guts. Personally, I think the woman's a little off in the upper story. She's brooded over this thing until she's nutty, and she's just at an age when you can't tell what form her nuttiness is going to take.

"At that, these detectives took an unfair advantage. Sacks is just a big bruiser, but Stockton is deadly as hell. He's got brains, and don't ever kid yourself he hasn't. Sacks, acting under instructions from Stockton, contacted Julia and gave her a song and dance about being a torpedo who would bump off anyone so it could never be traced, and Julia fell for it hook line, and sinker… That's the story I get from the newspaper men. And I think Jaxon Eaves used Sacks in the original substitution – getting him to pump Julia. Then afterward, when Eaves died, Sacks cut Stockton in on the deal."

"Why can't Pete Sacks be lying?" Mason asked. "If there's a big cut coming to him of the inheritance, why wouldn't he make this whole story up out of whole cloth, just so he could get Julia in bad?"

Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, "He would, but the D.A. believes he's telling the truth. Perhaps you can make a jury believe he's lying, but what's the D.A. going to be doing with you, before you get Sacks before a jury?"

"Do you know anything more about where Janice Brownley went?" Mason asked.

"She's got an air-tight alibi."

"Really air-tight, or does it just look air-tight?"

"It looks air-tight, and I think it is air-tight. Victor Stockton has already reported to the D.A. He says Janice telephoned him that she thought her grandfather had gone out to make some sort of a deal with Julia Branner, and she wanted to talk things over with Stockton. Stockton wanted to come to see her, but she said she was all dressed and could drive down to his place quicker, so Stockton told her to come ahead. He lived down on Fifty-second Street, and, as I told you, he's a foxy guy. He had his wife present when Janice arrived, and then he went across the hall and got a notary public out of bed and had the notary come in."

"And the notary was there all the time?"

"Yes."

"In the same room with Janice and Stockton?"

"That's my understanding."

Mason shook his head and said, "I don't like it, Paul."

"You shouldn't," Drake said grimly.

"If Bishop Mallory was the real McCoy," Mason said. "then…"

Della Street interrupted to say, "There's another wireless from Captain Johanson on the Monterey, Chief. They've found a couple of suitcases labeled 'William Mallory, Stateroom 211,' but Stateroom 211 is taken by people who don't answer the description of William Mallory and claim they never heard of him. The suitcases contain several yards of bandage and a suit of black broadcloth, an ecclesiastical collar, and black shoes. They were delivered to Stateroom 211 together with the baggage which really belonged there."

Mason sat down at his desk and made little drumming motions with the tips of his fingers. "And that doesn't make sense," he said. "Suppose Bishop Mallory is a phoney. Then where is the real bishop? On the other hand, if this was the real bishop, why should he have played ring-around-the-rosy and ducked out of the picture?"

Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, "I've got one more thing on Bishop Mallory. This is a tip which Jim Pauley, the house dick at the Regal Hotel, gave me. Before we had the bishop spotted, and before our men got on the job, a man called on Mallory. His name was Edgar Cassidy. Pauley knows him. He visited the bishop in his room and was there for about half an hour."

Mason's face showed keen interest. "Good Lord, Paul," he said, "this is the break we've been looking for. Someone who knows the bishop could tell us whether…"

"Hold everything," Drake interrupted. "It's just a false alarm. I rushed men out to interview Cassidy. He said that a friend of his in Sydney had written him Bishop Mallory was a good scout and was going to be visiting in Los Angeles at the Regal Hotel and to do anything he could for the bishop. Cassidy's quite a yachtsman. He has a neat little job, the Atina, which he uses for swordfishing. He thought the bishop might like to go out, so he dropped in to get acquainted. His testimony isn't going to help you a damned bit. He said his friend had told him the bishop was an enthusiastic fisherman, but when he contacted the bishop he didn't even get to first base. The bishop apparently wasn't interested in fishing and wasn't even cordial. Cassidy was sore when he left."

Mason resumed pacing the floor. Suddenly he paused to turn to the detective. "Cassidy's a yachting enthusiast," Mason said. "Find out if Cassidy knows Bixler. When you stop to think of it, Bixler's story about walking through the rain at that hour in the morning sounds just a little bit goofy."

Drake pulled a notebook from his pocket, scribbled a note and said without enthusiasm, "Okay, I'll find that out."

"And in the meantime," Mason said significantly, "it might be a good-plan if Pauley didn't say anything to the D.A.'s men about Cassidy. I don't suppose they could use Cassidy's testimony, because it's all hearsay and conclusions, but I'd just as soon the newspapers didn't get hold of it."

Drake grinned and said, "Don't worry, Perry, that's all taken care of already. Pauley's a good friend of mine, and a little salve goes a long way with him… How about young Brownley? We can't find out anything about where he was when the murder was committed, but his car wasn't in the garage this morning."

"I've talked with him," Mason said, "and he's going to talk with the D.A. His story isn't going to hurt Janice Brownley at all, but I still think there's something phoney about that alibi, and I don't trust Stockton."

"Stockton's nobody's fool," Drake said warningly. "Don't tangle with him, Perry, unless you have to."

Mason fished in his vest pocket and pulled out a key which he tossed to the detective. "I have to," he said, "meaning that I already have. I'm in this thing up to my necktie, Paul. That key may fit the apartment where Julia Branner was staying, out at 214 West Beechwood. I want you to find out if it does, and I want you to find out just as fast as you can, and then go back to your office where I can get you on the telephone."

Drake stared moodily at the key and said, "How did you happen to get the key to Julia Branner's apartment, Perry?"