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"Arthur stayed inside and heard the muffled sound of a shot. He tried to get out and couldn't. He didn't hear anything more until I opened the door of the vault. It was Sylvia Oxman who shot Grieb, and she carried away the gun.
"I wanted to get rid of Mason and Perkins so I could get those IOU's out of the vault. I'm willing to admit I figured I could pull a fast one with them. I didn't see any reason why they should be a part of the partnership assets and be ruled uncollectable by a court. If I could have found them, I could have collected from Sylvia and pocketed the coin.
"Finding Ma
"I realized no one knew Ma
"You damn fool!" Ma
Perry Mason chuckled delightedly. "Keep right on talking, Arthur," he said.
CHAPTER 16
PERRY MASON sat in his office and regarded Matilda Benson with respect in his eyes. "How the devil," he asked, "did you ever concoct such a beautiful lie on the spur of the moment?"
"Young man," she said, taking her cigar from her mouth and staring at him with snapping gray eyes, "I've lived sixty-eight years. I lived my girlhood in an age of universal hypocrisy. I found it was necessary for me to lie. I've had exactly fifty years of practice in extemporaneous prevarication. I'm not exactly a fool; and when I sized up the situation and saw how absolutely logical your theory was, I felt that it needed a damned good lie to bolster it up. And if you think it took any great amount of skill to think up as simple a lie as that, you should have heard some of the whoppers I've told in my time." She wrapped her lips about her cigar, puffed a couple of times, took the cigar from her mouth, nodded her head, and went on proudly, "And made them stick, too! Don't forget that."
Della Street opened the door from her secretarial office to bring in a filing jacket filled with papers.
"All there, Della?" Mason asked.
She nodded. "Everything's ready for Sylvia's signature."
Mason said to Matilda Benson, "Here are the papers in Sylvia's divorce action. She's alleging cruelty on the ground that her husband made a false statement to the officers, willfully, maliciously and falsely accusing her of the crime of murder."
"Can she get a divorce on that?" Matilda Benson asked.
"You bet she can," Mason said. "We've got Frank Oxman right where we want him. The minute Charlie Duncan thought there was a chance to save his bacon by trying to invent an explanation which would account for Ma
Matilda Benson nodded, tucked the filing jacket of papers under her arm and said, "All right, I'll get Sylvia's signature to the complaint."
"And she'll have to sign the affidavit of verification before a notary public," Mason said. "Then I'll be ready to file the case."
The white-haired woman's jeweled fingers gripped the lawyer's hand with a firmness which was almost masculine. "I knew you'd see me through," she said.