The Case of the Mischievous Doll

“No. He knows that I have a rather peculiar job. He’s been asking questions but I’ve been sort of... well, giving indefinite answers. I think any young woman who has training in the business world should learn to keep her mouth tightly closed about the things she observes on the job. I think she should keep them entirely removed from her social life.”

“That’s very commendable,” Mason said. “You go on home and I’ll try and find out something more about all this and then get in touch with you.”

“Thank you so much,” Dorrie Ambler said, and then acting on a sudden impulse, gave him her hand. “Thank you again, Mr. Mason. You’ve taken a tremendous load off my shoulders. Good night. Good night, Miss Street.”

She slipped out of the door into the corridor.

“Well?” Della Street asked.

“Now,” Mason said, “we find out what happened at Western and Hollywood Boulevard on September sixth. Unless I’m very much mistaken, Minerva Minden was driving while intoxicated and became involved in a hit-and-run, and now she wants to confuse the witnesses so they’ll make a wrong identification.

“Telephone the traffic department at Headquarters, Della, and see what they have on file for hit-and-run on the sixth.”

Della Street busied herself on the phone, made shorthand notes, thanked the person at the other end of the line, hung up and turned to Perry Mason.

“On the night of the sixth,” she said, “a pedestrian, Horace Emmett, was struck in the crosswalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. He is suffering from a broken hip. The car which struck him was driven by a young woman. It was a light-colored Cadillac. The woman stopped, sized up the situation, got out of the car, then changed her mind, jumped into the car and drove away. She apparently was intoxicated.”

Mason grinned. “Okay, Della. We close up the place and I’ll buy you a dinner. Tomorrow we’ll see about Minerva Minden. By tomorrow night we’ll have a very nice cash settlement for our client, Dorrie Ambler, and a very, very handsome cash settlement for Horace Emmett.

“And we’ll let Paul have his man, Jerry Nelson, cover Minerva Minden’s hearing tomorrow and see what the judge does to her — and better tell Paul to get all the dope on that Horace Emmett accident.”

Chapter Four

At ten o’clock the next morning Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door of Mason’s private office.

Mason nodded to Della Street, who opened the door for the detective.

“Hi, Beautiful,” Paul said. “It does you good to get out and dance. Your eyes look like the depths of a deep pool in the moonlight.”

Della Street smiled, said, “And it does you good to sit in an office and drink cold coffee and eat soggy hamburgers. Your mind is filled with matters of romance.”

Drake made a wry face. “I can taste that cold coffee yet.”

He turned to Perry Mason. “I sent Jerry Nelson down to the hearing on the report for probation and the fixing of sentence in Minerva Minden’s case, Perry. I gave him your number and told him to report to me here. I felt that you’d want to know just as soon as I heard from him.”

Mason nodded.

“I held him up a little while,” Drake said, “because it wasn’t certain that Minerva Minden was going to be in court personally. She might have appeared through an attorney.”

“She’s there?” Mason asked.

“In person, with all her charm,” Drake said. “She is adept at showing just enough leg to win the judge over to her side and stop just short of indecent exposure. That’s quite a gal.”

Drake looked at his watch. “We should be hearing from Nelson any minute now.”

“Wasn’t there some litigation over the Minden inheritance?” Della asked.

Drake grinned. “There was some and there could have been a hell of a lot more. Old Harper Minden left a whale of a fortune and not a single heir in the world that anybody could find until finally some enterprising investigator dug up Minerva.

“Minerva at the time was slinging hash and was something of a problem. She was supposed to be wild in those days. Now that she’s got a whole flock of money, she’s a quote madcap unquote.”

“But Harper Minden wasn’t her grandfather, was he?” Mason asked.

“Hell, no. He was related to her through some sort of a collateral relationship, and actually the bulk of the estate is still tied up. Minerva has received a partial distribution of five or six million, but—”

“Before taxes?” Mason asked.

“Proviso in the will that the estate was to pay all taxes,” Drake said, “and boy, it was quite a bite. But old Harper sure had it piled up. He had so much money he didn’t know how much he had. He had gold mines, oil wells, real estate, the works.”

The telephone rang.

“That’s probably Jerry now,” Drake said.

Della answered the phone, nodded to Paul and held out the receiver.

Drake said, “You have an attachment you can put this on a loudspeaker, haven’t you, Della?”

She nodded, pressed a button, and put a conference microphone in the middle of Mason’s desk.

“All the voices will come in,” she said.