The Case of the Queenly Contestant

Drake grinned. “I’m not doing any speculating, Perry. I don’t even want to know where you have the real girl stashed away, but I can warn you to be careful. Garland is one hell of a smart operator. Jarmen Dayton is no slouch. You may have those people fooled for a while, but be careful they don’t turn the tables on you.”

“I’ll be careful,” Mason promised.

Chapter Six

It was shortly before closing time in the afternoon when the phone from the outer office rang and Della Street, answering it, raised her eyebrows in surprise, glanced at Perry Mason, said into the phone, “Just a minute, Gertie; I’ll let you know.”

She turned to the lawyer. “Stephen L. Garland is in the outer office, says he has no appointment, that he wants to see you upon a matter of business in which he has reason to believe you’re already interested.”

“Good old Slick Garland,” Mason said. “The troubleshooter, the smart one! Now, what do you suppose he wants?”

“Information,” Della Street said.

“But this is such a peculiar way to get it,” Mason said. “Garland should be the sort who taps telephone lines, who bribes witnesses, who— Anyway, Della, go get him. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

A few moments later Della ushered the tall, cadaverous, unsmiling Garland into the office.

“Mr. Mason,” Garland said in a deep, bass voice.

“Sit down,” the lawyer invited.

“You know who I am and all about me,” Garland said.

Mason raised his eyebrows.

“Let’s not play innocent with each other, Mason. Time is very definitely not on our side. I think the time has come to be absolutely frank with each other.”

“Go ahead; it’s your move,” Mason said.

Garland said, “For many, many years I’ve been a troubleshooter for the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company.

“Originally I was a claims adjuster; then I graduated into assisting attorneys in damage suits; then I became a troubleshooter, more or less in charge of public relations.”

Mason nodded.

“Now, then,” Garland went on, “you have a woman, in whom I am vitally interested, as a client. You have her salted away. You think I don’t know where she is. I do.”

“Indeed,” Mason said.

“She’s in the Rosa Lee Apartments, apartment three-ten. She’s going under the name of Ellen Smith. Actually her name is Ellen Calvert. I did her a bad turn some twenty years ago. I’m sorry about it. I’ve lived to regret it, but a man can’t bat a hundred per cent when he gets into a big-league hall game.”

“Your are playing big-league ball?” Mason asked.

“The biggest.”

“Such as what?”

“I had a job,” Garland said. “I tried my best to do that job and do it well. The head of the company was Ezekiel Haslett. He was a tough, square-jawed, thin-mouthed product of the old school.

“Heaven knows what the kids in his generation really were like. I guess they were repressed, disciplined, and worked so hard that they didn’t have time for any animal spirits.

“Ezekiel wanted the public image of the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company to be the highest. It was up to me to keep it that way.

“One of the employees would be in trouble over drunk driving. I had to square it so there was no publicity. One time one of the guys got drunk and raped one of the employees. I had to square that — and, believe me, it was a job. She was all set to prosecute. But I pointed out to her that under the peculiar provisions of the law the minute she claimed that she had been forcibly attacked the defense had a right to show her previous sexual experience, if any — all of it.

“She tried to bluff it out. She said that it didn’t make a bit of difference to her. But that was where old Garland had been on the job earning his salary. I’d done a lot of gumshoe work. I was able to point out names, dates and telephone numbers. Then I gave her a thousand dollars in cash to satisfy her injured feelings, arranged to get her a job with one of the companies that we dealt with in a distant city, and shipped her off with a prepaid ticket and my blessing.

“In the end I think she felt good about it.”

“And this other young woman that you’re talking about?” Mason asked.

“There I botched things,” Garland said, “although I followed the same procedure that was standard in cases of that sort. She had been in love with young Haslett. Things had gone pretty far, and she found herself pregnant.

“Mind you, that was a while ago. She talked about ‘shame’ and she absolutely refused to do the things that are more or less taken for granted these days.”

“What did she want?” Mason asked.

“I’ve no idea what she wanted. At the time, I assumed that she wanted Haslett to marry her and to have the child. But now I think she was just so completely panic-stricken that she didn’t know what she did want. Anyway, I did the usual. I sent young Haslett off to Europe on a prolonged tour where no one knew where he was and it would take a person with money to find him. Then I sent her a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in a plain, unmarked envelope.