"I don't see what's to have kept him from wiping his face before he started out to see who was in the other room," Sergeant Holcomb protested, interested in spite of himself.

"Simply," said Perry Mason, "that he dropped the towel when he was unchaining the dog. If he had been going to unchain the dog in the first place, he wouldn't have wiped the lather from his face. He would have unchained the dog first, and then gone out and wiped the lather from his face."

"Well, then," said Sergeant Holcomb, "where's Arthur Cartright?"

"I don't know. I tried to find him earlier in the day. His housekeeper says he's gone away."

"Thelma Benton says that he ran away with Mrs. Foley," Sergeant Holcomb remarked.

"Yes," said Perry Mason, "she told me that."

"And that's what Clinton Foley told Pete Dorcas."

"So I understand," Mason said wearily. "Are we going to go over all that again?"

"No, we're not going over that again," snapped Sergeant Holcomb. "I'm simply telling you that it's exceedingly possible your client, Arthur Cartright, ran away with Mrs. Foley; that he heard from Mrs. Foley's lips a story of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband; that he went back, determined to kill Clinton Foley."

"And about the only evidence you've got to go on is the fact that Cartright was having some trouble with Clinton Foley and ran away with his wife. Is that right?"

"That's enough evidence to go on."

"All right," Perry Mason said, "I'm just going to puncture your theory right now. If that had happened, and Arthur Cartright went back, he would have gone back with the deliberate intention of killing Clinton Foley, isn't that right?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"All right. If he had done that, he would have gone into the house, seen Clinton Foley, pointed a gun at him and gone bang, bang, right away. He wouldn't have stood around and argued while Foley was wiping the lather from his face. He wouldn't have stood still and let Foley go back and unchain a savage police dog. The only trouble with you guys is that you find a dead man and immediately start looking for some one who would make a good suspect. You don't look at the evidence and try to see where that evidence points."

"Where does it point?" asked Sergeant Holcomb.

"Hell!" said Perry Mason wearily. "I've done damn near all the detective work on this case so far. I'm not going to do all of your work for you. You're the one that's drawing pay for the job; I'm not."

"From all we can understand," said Sergeant Holcomb, "you've drawn pretty good pay to date for everything that you've done in the case."

Perry Mason gave an audible yawn.

"That," he said, "is one of the relative advantages of my profession, Sergeant. It also has corresponding disadvantages."

"Such as?" Sergeant Holcomb asked curiously.

"Such as the fact that one gets paid entirely on one's ability," Mason remarked. "The only reason I collect good money for what I do, is because I've demonstrated my ability to do it. If the taxpayers didn't give you your salary check every month until you'd delivered results, you might have to go hungry a few months, — unless you showed more intelligence than you're showing on this case."

"That'll do," said Sergeant Holcomb in a voice that quivered with indignation. "You can't sit here and insult me like that. You're not going to get anywhere with it, Mason, and you might as well realize it. This isn't a case where you're just an attorney. Dammit! You're a suspect."

"So I gathered," Mason said. "That's the reason I made the remark."

"Look here," Holcomb announced, "either you are lying about going out there at eightthirty, or else you're being deliberately vague about it so that you can confuse the issue. Now, an examination shows that Foley was killed around seventhirty to eight o'clock. He'd been dead more than forty minutes when the Homicide Squad got there. All you've got to do is to show where you were between seventhirty and eight, and you'll be out of it as a suspect. Why the devil don't you cooperate with us?"

"I'm telling you," said Perry Mason, "that I don't know just what I was doing at that time. I didn't even bother to look at my watch. I went out and had dinner, strolled around and smoked a cigarette, went to the office, and then went back down to the street, walked around a little bit, thinking and smoking, picked up a cruising cab and went out to keep my appointment."

"And the appointment was at eightthirty?"

"The appointment was at eightthirty."

"But you can't prove it."

"Of course not. Why the devil should I have to prove the time of every appointment I've made? I'm a lawyer. I see people by appointments. I make lots of appointments during the day. As a matter of fact, in place of being a suspicious circumstance, the fact that I can't prove the time of the appointment, is the one thing that shows the appointment was made in ordinary business routine.

"If I could produce a dozen witnesses to show you that I'd made an appointment to talk over something with Clinton Foley, you would immediately commence to wonder why I had gone to all that trouble to show the time of the appointment. That is, you would if you had any brains.

"Now, I'll tell you something else. What the hell was to have prevented me going out to the house at seventhirty, killing Foley, taking a taxicab back uptown, picking up another taxicab, and coming out to the house at eightthirty to keep my appointment?"

There was a moment of silence in the room, and then Sergeant Holcomb said, "Nothing, as far as I can see."

"That's just the point," said Perry Mason. "Only, in the event I'd done that, I'd have been pretty much inclined to take the number of the taxicab that took me out there at eightthirty, and to have had witnesses to the fact that my appointment was at eightthirty, wouldn't I?"

"I don't know what you'd do," said Sergeant Holcomb irritably. "When you start in on a case you don't do anything logically. You just act goofy all the way through it. Why the devil don't you come through and be frank with us, and go home and go to bed and let us get working on the case?"

"I'm not stopping you from working on the case," Perry Mason said, "and I'm not particularly keen about having these lights blazing into my eyes while you detectives sit around and stare at my face, thinking you can find something in my facial expression that's going to give you a clew. If you'd turn out the lights and sit in the dark and think for a while, it would do you a damn sight more good than sitting around in a circle and looking at my face."

"Well, it's not a face I'm crazy about looking at," Sergeant Holcomb said irritably.

"How about Thelma Benton?" asked Perry Mason. "What was she doing?"

"She's got a complete alibi. She can account for every minute of her time."

"By the way," said Perry Mason, "what were you doing at that time, Sergeant?"

Sergeant Holcomb's voice showed surprise.

"Me?" he asked.

"Sure, you."

"Are you going to try and make me a suspect?" he asked.

"No," said Perry Mason. "I was just asking you what you were doing."

"I was on my way up to the office, here," said Sergeant Holcomb. "I was in an automobile, somewhere between the house and the office."

"How many witnesses can you bring to prove it?" asked Mason.

"Don't be funny," Sergeant Holcomb told him.

"If you'd use your noodle, you'd see that I'm not being funny," Mason remarked. "I'm serious as hell. How many witnesses can you bring to prove it?"

"None, of course. I can show when I was at my house, and I can show the time I arrived at the office."

"That's the point," said Mason.

"What is?" asked Sergeant Holcomb.

"The point that should make you suspicious about this perfect alibi of Thelma Benton's. Whenever a person can show an iron clad alibi covering what they've been doing every minute of the time, it's usually a sign that they've taken a great deal of care to perfect an alibi. A person who does that either participates in the commission of a murder and fakes an alibi, or else knows a murder is going to be committed, and therefore takes great pains to make a perfect alibi."