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“Anyway, none of our friends have ever suspected. They all think that George makes his money out of playing the stock market. I married George Belter seven months ago. I am his second wife. I guess I was fascinated by him and his money, but we’ve never got along well together. The last two months our relations have been strained. I was going to sue him for divorce. I think he knew it.”
She paused to stare at Perry Mason,and saw no sympathy in hiseyes.
“I was friendly with Harrison Burke,” she went on. “I met him about two months ago. It was just a friendship. Nothing more. We were out together, and that murder took place. Of course, if Harrison Burke had to divulge my name, it would have ruined his career politically, because George would have sued me and named him as correspondent right away. I simply had to hush it up.”
“Maybe your husband would never have found out,” suggested Mason. “The District Attorney is a gentleman. Burke could have disclosed the facts to the District Attorney, and the District Attorney wouldn’t have called you unless you had seen something that made your testimony absolutely necessary.”
“You don’t understand how they work,” she told him. “I don’t know all of it myself. But they’ve got spies everywhere. They buy pieces of information and run down odds and ends of gossip. Whenever a man gets prominent enough to attract attention, they go to a lot of trouble to get all the information they can about him. Harrison Burke is prominent politically, and he’s coming up for re-election. They don’t like him, and Burke knows it. I heard my husband telephoning to Frank Locke, and I knew that they were on the trail of the information. That was why I came to you. I wanted to buy them off before they had any idea of who it was that was with him.”
“If your friendship with Burke was i
She shook her head, vehemently.
“You don’t know anything at all about it,” she warned. “You simply don’t understand my husband’s character. You showed that in the way you handled him last night. He’s savage and heartless. He’s a fighter. What’s more, he is money-mad. He knows that if I bring suit for divorce, I will probably get some alimony and a lot of money for attorneys’ fees, and suit money. All that he wants is to get something on me. If he could get something on me, and at the same time drag Harrison Burke’s name through the courts, it would be a wonderful break for him.”
Perry Mason frowned thoughtfully. “There’s something fu
“No,” she said firmly.
There was a moment of silence.
“Well,” said Mason, “what do we do? Do we pay their price?”
“There won’t be any price any more. George will call off all negotiations. He’ll go ahead and fight. He figures that he can’t afford to give in to you. If he does, he thinks that you’ll hound him to death. That’s the way he is, and that’s the way he thinks everybody else is. He simply can’t give in to anybody. It isn’t in his nature, that’s all.”
Mason nodded, grimly. “All right, if he wants to fight, I’m perfectly willing to go to the mat with him. One of the first things I’ll do will be to file suit against Spicy Bits the first time they mention my name, and I’ll take the deposition of Frank Locke and force him to disclose who actually owns that paper. Or else I’ll have him prosecuted for perjury. There are a lot of people who would like to see that sheet put where it belongs.”
“Oh, you don’t understand,” she told him, speaking rapidly. “You don’t understand the way they fight. You don’t understand George. It would take a long while for you to get a libel suit to trial. He’ll work fast. And then, you’ve got to remember that I’m your client. I’m the one you’re supposed to protect. Long before any of that happens, I’ll be ruined. They’ll go after that Harrison Burke business hammer and tongs now.”
Mason drummed on his desk again, and then said, “Look here. You’ve hinted at some information your husband has that holds Frank Locke in line. Now I have an idea that you know what that information is. Suppose you give it to me, and I’ll see if I can’t crack a whip over Frank Locke.”
Her face was white as she looked at him.
“Do you know what you’re saying?” she said. “Do you know what you are doing? Do you know what you’re getting into? They’ll kill you! It wouldn’t be the first time. They’ve got affiliations in the underworld with gangsters and gunmen.”
Mason held her eyes with his.
“What,” he insisted, “do you know about Frank Locke?”
She shuddered and dropped her eyes. After an interval, she said, in a tired tone: “Nothing.”
Mason said, impatiently: “Every time you come here you lie to me. You’re one of those baby-faced little liars that always gets by by deceit. Just because you’re beautiful, you’ve managed to get by with it. You’ve deceived every man that ever loved you, every man you ever loved. Now you’re in trouble, and you’re deceiving me.”
She stared at him with blazing indignation, either natural or assumed.
“You’ve no right to talk to me that way!”
“The hell I haven’t,” said Mason, grimly.
They stared at each other for a second or two.
“It was something down South,” she said, meekly.
“What was?”
“The trouble that Locke got into. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know where it was. I only know it was some trouble, and that it was down South somewhere. It was some trouble over a woman. That is, that’s the way it started. I don’t know how it finished. It may have been a murder. I don’t know. I know it’s something, and I know it’s something that George holds over him all the time. That’s the only way George ever deals with anybody. He gets something on them and holds it over them, and makes them do just as he wants.”
Mason stared at her, and said, “That’s the way he handles you.”
“That’s the way he tries to.”
“Was that the way he made you marry him?” asked Mason.
“I don’t know,” she said. “No.”
He laughed grimly.
“Well,” she said, “what difference does it make?”
“Maybe not any. Maybe a lot. I want some more money.” She opened her purse.
“I haven’t got much more,” she said. “I can give you three hundred dollars.”
Mason shook his head.
“You’ve got a checking account,” he said. “I’ve got to have more money. I’m going to have some expenses in this thing. I’m fighting for myself now as well as for you.”
“I can’t give you a check. I don’t have any checking account. He won’t let me. That’s another way that he keeps people under his control, through money. I have to get money from him in cash, or get it some other way.”
“What other way?” asked Mason.
She said nothing. She drew out a roll of bills from the purse. “There’s five hundred dollars here, and it’s every cent I’ve got.”
“All right,” said Mason. “Keep twenty-five and give me the rest.”
He pressed a button in the side of the desk. The door to the outer office framed the inquiring features of Della Street.