The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

“All right, I’ll be frank with you. The disappearance of Helen Cadmus caused a lot of conjecture. Newspaper writers, who make their living from catering to the demands of an audience which is hungry for sensational slop, fairly eat that stuff up. It was necessary for Mr. Addicks to go into seclusion, to take elaborate precautions from being hounded to death by these sensation-mongers.

“Now then, it appears that Helen kept a diary. I don’t know how it happened that the investigative officers didn’t find out about that.”

“The report is,” Mason said, “that Addicks used every bit of political influence at his command to see that the investigation consisted of nothing more than a big coat of whitewash hastily applied with a big brush. There was no investigation worthy of the name.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can’t say that, Mr. Mason. You can’t really believe that. Mr. Addicks tried to save himself personal inconvenience but that’s all.”

Mason grinned.

“All right,” Fallon said, “let’s be frank. Those diaries turn up. Good Lord, we had no idea they existed at all. Evidently they were found in some box or something that no one knew anything about. The current diary, of course, was...”

“Yes?” Mason asked.

Fallon coughed. “I shouldn’t have used that expression. It was unfortunate.”

“What happened to the current diary?” Mason asked.

Fallon met Mason’s eyes. His own eyes were cold, hard, and hostile. “There was none,” he said. “She evidently stopped keeping a diary with the last volume that you now have in your possession.”

“How much is Addicks willing to pay?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know,” Fallon said. “He told me to go up to a thousand dollars. We had no idea on earth but what we could probably get them as a matter of courtesy by merely reimbursing you for the cost you had incurred, or, if you had an idea of making a profit, that two or three hundred dollars would represent all that we needed to pay. It is a measure of the impression that you have made on me that when I saw you weren’t being fooled by my sentiment act, I went right away to the extreme limit that I was authorized to offer.”

“All right,” Mason said, “so what do you do now?”

Fallon pushed the hundred dollar bills back into his pigskin billfold, carefully folded the five dollar bill, put that in his pocket, smiled at Mason and said, “I go back for further instructions. Thank you. Good morning!”

He turned abruptly on his heel and marched out of the office.

Mason glanced at Della Street in an unspoken question.

“Well,” Della Street said, “I presume that means the end of all office work for today.”

“It means the end of all office work for the day. I’ll take one of the volumes, you take one, give one to Jackson, give one to Gertie. We read through those diaries. We read every single word. Make notes of anything that’s significant and tie the notes in with the page references. Let’s find out what’s bothering Mr. Benjamin Addicks, preferably before we hear from Mr. Addicks again. What’s the last entry in the last volume, Della?”

“I’ve already checked on that, Chief,” she said, “It’s about two weeks before the date of her disappearance.”

“Gosh, how I wish we had volume number five,” Mason said, “but from the inadvertent slip made by Three-Dollar-Bill Fallon, I am certain that Addicks, Fallon, and Company found that diary, put it in a sack, tied a weight on it and dropped it overboard in the deepest part of the channel. All right, Della, let’s find out what we have. Cancel all appointments for today, throw that mail off the desk, and let’s go to work.”

Chapter number 3

Late Tuesday afternoon, after all of the rest of the office force had gone home, Perry Mason and Della Street sat in Mason’s private office correlating information that had been received from Helen Cadmus’ diary.

“Hang it,” Mason said, “I’m not excluding the possibility of murder.”

Della Street said, “Well, I’m almost at the point of excluding the possibility of accident and suicide.”

“We haven’t any evidence,” Mason told her, “that is, nothing tangible.”

“It’s tangible enough to suit me,” Della Street said with feeling. “You read through that diary, Chief, and you get the picture of a darned nice, normal, young girl with a beautiful body, who has ambitions to get into the movies — which I suppose nearly all girls with beautiful bodies have — and a keenly sympathetic, understanding mentality.

“She was fascinated by the force of Benjamin Addicks’ character. She resented his treatment of the gorillas and monkeys. She felt that there was some great mystery in connection with his life. The first volume shows a fierce curiosity to find out what that secret is, and then all of a sudden there’s no further reference to it.

“Now here’s something else, the girl was in love.”

“How do you know, Della?”

“Her attitude, the way she wrote in her diary. She had leisure time and she spent it thinking romantic thoughts.”

“But she didn’t confide those romantic thoughts to her diary,” Mason pointed out.