"We look back on our spending orgy that culminated in 1929, and shake our heads sadly that we could have been swept off our feet by such contagious financial fallacies.

"Isn't it equally possible that some sweet spring morning we will wake up with a terrific headache and wonder if we weren't just as hysterical in our anxiety to sweep aside all of our old standards, to embark upon an orgy of governmental spending, when we should have tried governmental economy, to have penalized those who had weathered the economic storm with savings in the bank, and, last but not least, to have given the sanction of our prosecuting officers to a husband who would rush frantically to the nearest police station to snitch on his wife.

"Personally I think so, but then, I am just an "oldfashioned husband."

Paul Drake looked up at Perry Mason and said in his drawling voice, "What good's that going to do, Perry?"

"A lot of good," Mason said. "It's going to start a discussion."

"You mean about the husband?"

"Sure."

"Then why put all the political stuff in it?"

"Because I want to be sure that it starts a discussion. Lots of people wouldn't care enough one way or the other to write in and take sides with Rhoda or with her husband, but, by putting in this other stuff, there will be enough sentiment, pro and con, to bring in a flood of correspondence that will make the newspaper sit up and take notice, and it will assign a sob sister to play up the angle of the betraying husband."

Drake nodded slowly. "I guess," he said, "you're right at that."

"How about that photograph?" asked Perry Mason. "Did you get photographs of the room where the murder was committed?"

Paul Drake picked up a brief case which he had propped against the foot of his chair, pulled out a manila envelope and extracted four photographs printed on glossy paper. Mason took the photographs, spread them on his desk, studied them carefully for several minutes. Then he opened the drawer of his desk, took out a magnifying glass and studied one of the photographs through it. "Take a look at this, Paul," he said.

The detective pushed over to the desk. Perry Mason indicated a portion of the photograph. "Yes," Drake said, "that's the alarm clock. It was on a stand by the bed."

"And, as I understand it, Paul, the bed had been slept in but Moxley was fully dressed at the time he was killed."

"Yes."

"Then," Mason went on, "the importance of that alarm clock becomes doubly significant."

"Why?"

"Take a glass and look at it."

The detective nodded. "Yes," he said, "the alarm clock is pictured plainly enough to show the hands distinctly. The hands point to three seventeen. The figures in the righthand corner of the photograph, where the police photographer made a note of the location of the camera, the time of exposure, and so forth, shows the picture was taken at three eighteen. That puts the alarm clock only a minute off, as compared with police time."

"That's only part of it," Perry Mason told him. "Take another look."

"What are you getting at?"

"By looking closely," Mason said, "you can see the dial in the upper part of the alarm clock, the dial that regulates the alarm."

"What about it?"

"It shows that the hand was set just a little before two o'clock."

"Sure," Drake said. "He had an appointment for two o'clock with Rhoda Montaine. He wanted to be awake when she called."

"Didn't leave him much time to dress," Mason remarked. "That hand looks to me as though it was set for perhaps five or ten minutes before two o'clock."

"Remember, he'd been her husband once. She probably had seen him in pajamas before."

"You still don't get my point," Mason said, drumming with his fingers on the edge of the photograph. "That telephone call woke Moxley up. Therefore, he didn't need the alarm. He was all dressed by the time the alarm went off."

Paul Drake's glassy eyes surveyed Perry Mason steadily.

"There's lots of your points I don't get," he said. "Why the devil don't you go in and plead selfdefense? I'm not asking you to violate any of your client's confidences, but if she told you the truth, she's undoubtedly told you there was a struggle and she struck Moxley with the poker. It doesn't seem to me it would be a hard job to make the jury believe that was what happened. That's selfdefense."

Perry Mason shook his head slowly. "That," he said, "is the danger of formulating a defense before you know all the facts."

"What's wrong with that as a defense?" asked the detective.

"In the first place," the lawyer replied, "there's that business of drugging her husband. You've got to understand something of the psychology of jurors in order to figure what they'll do in any given case, and it's not always easy to look at the thing just the way they're going to figure it. But one of the bad things in this case is that Ipral bottle. The fact that Carl Montaine's wife was a nurse, and that she placed a drugged drink in his hand, is going to do more to prejudice an American jury against her than anything that could possibly be uncovered in connection with the murder. Moreover, if she's going to plead selfdefense, she's got to admit that she did the killing. I'm not certain that the prosecution can show she did the killing."

"They can show she was in the room at the time of death," Drake said. "The killing certainly must have taken place right around two o'clock, between two and two twenty, when the neighbors decided to notify the police. It's a foregone conclusion that Rhoda Montaine had left her house in the dead of night to go to Moxley's apartment. The fact that she was there is shown by the fact that her garage keys were there. She had to have the garage keys in order to open the garage doors when she started. She left them there. If she didn't kill him herself, the jury certainly is going to believe that she was there when the killing took place, and must know who did it."

"That's just the point," Perry Mason said slowly. "I'm not certain but what she may be trying to shield somebody."

"What makes you think that?"

"The fact that there are no fingerprints on the doorknob," Mason said.

"Rhoda wore gloves," the detective reminded him.

"Well, what if she did? If she had worn gloves, she wouldn't have left fingerprints on anything, would she?"

"That's right. And the police didn't find any of her fingerprints."

"Then," Mason insisted, "if she hadn't left fingerprints because she wore gloves, she wouldn't need to worry about fingerprints."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that a woman wearing gloves wouldn't leave any of her fingerprints, but when there were no fingerprints on the knob of the door or on the murder weapon it means that some one took a rag and carefully obliterated all of the fingerprints. The only reason a person would do that would be to obliterate certain telltale fingerprints. A person who was wearing gloves wouldn't have left behind any fingerprints to worry about—nothing she would need to obliterate."

Drake's frown was thoughtful. "So that's what you were getting at when you phoned me," he said.

Perry Mason resumed his pacing of the office. Abruptly, he jerked open the door of a coat closet, pulled out a hat, clapped it firmly into position on his head, glanced meaningly at Della Street. "Take a look at that habeas corpus petition," he said. "It should be ready for my signature."

She nodded, moved with the swiftly silent efficiency of a nurse making things ready for a major operation. A few moments, and she returned, bearing a piece of paper in her hand. "This is the last page," she said, "ready for your signature."

Perry Mason scrawled his signature. "Send it up," he said. "Get a judge to issue the writ. See that it's served. I'm going out."

"Going to be long?" asked Paul Drake.