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.

Chapter 12

Mason, his face wearing a worried frown, sat in the visitor's room and looked through the wire mesh to where Julia Branner sat directly across from him. A long table stretched the length of the room. Down the center of the table ran the wire mesh, separating visitors from prisoners. A jail matron stood at the far corner of the room on the jail side. On Mason's right, back of a barred partition which was between Mason and the door, two officers were on duty. Back of them was a little room containing a veritable arsenal of revolvers, tear bombs and sawed-off shotguns.

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.