The Case of the Mischievous Doll

“Sit down,” Mason invited. And then when she had complied, said, “So you’re really Minerva Minden, sometimes referred to as the madcap heiress of Montrose.”

She met his eyes with a steady frank gaze. “I am not!” she said.

Mason shook his head, his manner that of a parent reproving a mendacious child who persists in an incredible falsehood. “I’m afraid your denial isn’t going to carry much weight, but this is your party. You wanted to see me upon a matter of some importance and it’s only fair to remind you that you’re paying for my time. Moreover, one of the factors in fixing my charges is the financial ability of the client to pay. Now, you just go ahead and take all the time you want. Tell me any fairy story you want me to hear and remember that it’s costing you money, lots of money.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m afraid I do,” Mason told her. “Now I’m going to tell you something else. When you were here in the office I knew that you had a gun in your purse. I hired a detective to shadow you. You were shadowed up to the airport, and a detective was standing within a few feet of you when you staged that demonstration.

“Now then, Miss Minden, I’d like to know just what your game is, what you have in mind and how you expect me to fit into the picture.

“For your further information, I don’t like to have clients lie to me, and I feel that after I have heard your story there is every possibility that I will not care to have you continue as a client.”

She was watching him with wide eyes. “You’ve had me shadowed?”

Mason nodded.

“You knew there was a gun in my purse?”

Again the lawyer nodded.

She said, “Thank God!”

Mason’s face showed his surprise.

“Look,” she said, “I’m not Minerva Minden. I’m Dorrie Ambler, and the thing I did this afternoon at the airport was for the purpose of forcing Minerva Minden to tell what was really going on, but she was too smart for me. She outwitted me.”

Mason’s eyes showed dawning interest. “Go ahead,” he said.

She said, “It all started four days ago when I answered an ad for a young woman, either trained or untrained, who could do special work. The ad specified that applicants must be between twenty-two and twenty-six years of age, that they must be exactly five feet three inches tall, weighing not less than a hundred and ten pounds nor more than a hundred and fifteen pounds, and offered a salary of a thousand dollars a month.”

Della Street flashed a glance at Perry Mason. “I saw that ad,” she said. “It only ran for one day.”

“Go ahead,” Mason said to Dorrie Ambler.

“Someone mailed me a copy of the ad and I applied for that job,” she said, “and so did scads of other people — and there was something phoney about it.”

“Keep talking,” Mason said, his eyes now showing keen interest.

“Well, to begin with, we were asked to go to a suite in a hotel in order to make application. A very efficient young woman sat at a desk in a room in that suite, on which had been pasted a sign, personnel manager.

“Opening out of this suite were two rooms. One of them had a label, red room. The other had a label, black room. The young woman at the desk would give each applicant a ticket. The red tickets went to the red room, the black tickets went to the black room.”

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“As far as the red room is concerned I don’t know for sure, but I did talk with one girl who was given a ticket to the red room. She went in there and sat down and she said there were about twenty young women who came in and sat down in that room. They waited for about fifteen minutes and then a woman came to them and told them that there was no need for them to wait any longer; the situation was no longer open.”

“All right,” Mason said, “you were given a ticket to the black room. What happened there?”

“Apparently only about one applicant out of fifteen or twenty got a black ticket. I was one of them. I went in there and sat down and one other girl came in while I was there.

“After I’d been there for ten or fifteen minutes, a door opened and a man said, ‘Step this way, please.’

“I went into still another room in the suite — heavens, that suite in the hotel must have cost a small fortune.”

“Who was the man?” Mason asked.

“He said he was a vice president in charge of personnel, but the way he acted I think he was a lawyer.”

“What makes you think so?”

“The way he threw questions at me.”

“What sort of questions?”

“He had me sit down and asked me a lot about my background, all about my parents, where I’d been employed, and so forth. Then he asked me to stand up and walk around. He was watching me like a hawk.”

“Passes?” Mason asked.

“I don’t think that was what he had in mind,” she said, “but he certainly was looking me over.”

“And then?”

“Then he asked me how my memory was and if I could give quick answers to questions and a lot of things like that, and then said, ‘What were you doing on the evening of the sixth of September?’