The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“Hello,” she said to Perry Mason. “You’re Mr. Mason. I saw you come in. I smiled but I guess you didn’t notice me. I’m Fern Blevins, Alan Blevins’ ex-wife. And you’re Mr. Drake.”

Mason bowed, smiled, and Mrs. Blevins came toward him to extend her hand.

Drake said to Mason, “You talk, or do I?”

“I will,” Mason said. “Please sit down, Mrs. Blevins. We’re going to be frightfully inquisitive.”

She shifted her blue eyes momentarily, said, “What if I don’t choose to answer?”

“You don’t have to,” Mason told her. “We’re interested in your divorce.”

“Oh that!” she said, with relief apparent in her voice “I was afraid you were really going to get personal.”

“What we’re primarily after,” Mason said, smiling, “is in finding out everything that went on in the house where Addicks lived.”

“Stonehenge you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I guess a lot went on there.”

“Did you ever stay there with your husband?”

“Good heavens, no. He never stayed there. He worked there, that’s all — although sometimes he didn’t get home until pretty late at night.”

“I notice that you alleged mental cruelty in your complaint,” Mason said.

“That was as good as anything.”

“Can you tell us some of the details, some of the things that didn’t appear in the complaint?”

She said, “Alan was quite a bit older than I.”

“You were his second wife?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

She said, “He... well, I guess we got tired of each other, and — I got tired of being a human guinea pig.”

Mason glanced significantly at Paul Drake, and said, “Do you mean he hypnotized you, Mrs. Blevins?”

“I’ll say he hypnotized me. I think he must have had me under some sort of hypnotic influence when I married him.”

“Lots of people feel that way,” Mason said. “Can you tell us any details?”

She said, “I was working as a secretary and I did some work for him on a paper that he was writing. Well, of course, you know hypnotism is something that fascinates people. I became very much interested and asked him about hypnotism, and he... well, he seemed very nice. Those were the days of courtship. Everything he did was nice.”

“Go on,” Mason said.

“I don’t know how to describe it. You get starry-eyed and every minute that you’re with a man is just like heaven. Then you marry him, and in place of being happy you find that you’re terribly fed up with the whole thing. The glamour vanishes, and you see the man as a very ordinary individual. Moreover, he’s a jealous, possessive individual who keeps prying into your secrets and he starts making all sorts of accusations.”

“You kept on working after you were married?” Mason asked.

“Yes.”

“For your husband?”

“No. I had a regular job. I stayed with it.”

“Can you tell us a little more about being a guinea Pig?”

“Well, then he told me about hypnotism, he asked me if I’d like to be hypnotized. He was looking right at me, and I had the most delicious feeling of submission. I felt that I’d do anything for him. I wanted to show my confidence in him, and I told him that I’d be perfectly willing.”

“And then what?”

She said, “I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She said, “It’s one of those things that a hypnotist can do to you. He can hypnotize you and tell you that you won’t remember anything about what you did while you were under a hypnotic influence. I’ve seen Alan do it dozens of times to people. He’ll make them do the craziest things and say the craziest things, and then he’ll tell them to wake up without remembering anything that they had done, and not to remember even about being hypnotized.”

“And it was like that with you?”

She nodded. “I was looking at him and saying, “Well, go ahead, Alan, hypnotize me—’ and then he told me that he’d already hypnotized me, and I thought it was just a joke until I happened to notice my wrist watch and realized that either someone had set my watch ahead forty-five minutes, or there were about forty-five minutes that I couldn’t account for.”

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“Then he kept looking at me in a peculiar way, and after about five minutes I had the most absolutely insane impulse to — to do something.”

“What?” Mason asked.

She shook her head and said, “It was a crazy thing, but anyhow I did it, and... well, I know now what had happened.”

“What?”

“It was a post-hypnotic suggestion,” she said. “That’s the way hypnotists work. They get you under their domination and they cannot only make you do things but they’ll give you something to do as a post-hypnotic suggestion — that is, they’ll tell you to wake up and not remember you’ve been hypnotized, and then five or ten minutes after you wake up, you’ll do some crazy thing. That’s the way it was with me.”

“Go on,” Mason said.

“After a while we got married.”

“The hypnotism kept up?”

“It kept up, Mr. Mason, a lot more often than I realized.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’d find myself doing things that were the result of post-hypnotic suggestions. There’s some of that I don’t want to go into.”