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Della Street climbed the stairs of the Hall of Justice, her heels clicking on the deep stone steps. Today was the last day that evidence in the Masterson case could be handed over to the District Attorney's office, and when Perry had asked her to hire a courier, she'd offered to deliver it herself on her way to lunch.
It wasn't exactly on her way—most of her favorite lunch spots were to the south of the office, although she was sure there must be somewhere good to eat around here, as there must be in any place surrounded by offices full of workers—but it was nice to get out in the sunshine and stretch her legs after hours behind a desk. And it was a pleasant enough errand; she might be on opposing sides from everyone in the D.A.'s office, but both sides knew that was all in a day's work, and they didn't treat her like the enemy.
Even Hamilton Burger. She'd sat across the courtroom from him countless times, doing anything she could to assist Perry in demolishing Burger's case; yet here he was, coming out of the inner office to greet her personally. "Miss Street! What brings you to my office this morning?"
"Just some paperwork for the Masterson case. Shall I give it to your secretary, or would you prefer to take it yourself?"
"I'll take it. Marie! Please give Miss Street a receipt to confirm we received this." He smiled at Della. "How has your day been?" he asked.
Della smiled back, though she was wary of the need not to reveal anything that might be useful to him in court. "Oh, uneventful," she said. "I found a penny on the sidewalk on the way in to work."
"That means you'll have good luck all day," he assured her. "I don't know, does that mean I should hope you aren't working on any cases I'd be involved in today?"
"All of our cases are ones you'll probably be involved in," Della said. "Well, I suppose there are a few wills and such..." With a smirk, she reached into her dress pocket and pulled out the penny. She held it up and looked him in the eye, then let it go. "But if you find a penny today, too, then we'll both have equally good luck, won't we?"
He chuckled and bent down. "Well, look at that! I seem to have found a lucky penny." He held it out to her. "Will you hold on to this for me? It's a very special penny; I'm inclined to believe it contains more luck than the average penny."
"I will," Della said with a smile, and returned it to her pocket. "Oh, look at the time! It must have taken me longer to get here than I realized. I'd better get that receipt and go. Thank you for the good luck."
"No, thank you," he said. "I've a feeling you've got enough luck yourself without needing any pennies. Enjoy the rest of your day!"
He turned back to his office, and Della headed over to Marie's desk to get her receipt.
Her lunch break was half over by the time she left the Hall of Justice, but Della didn't hurry too much. Perry would understand that she'd had to spend time on his errand, and wouldn't begrudge her the leisurely meal.
In fact, when she returned to the office, Perry was still out at his own lunch, so in that case, he definitely couldn't blame her. "Oh, Della!" Gertie exclaimed as Della took off her coat. "There was a phone call for you. From the D.A.'s office. The D.A. himself. I think he wanted to speak to you directly, not to Mr. Mason."
"Did he say what he was calling about?" Della asked. Perhaps they'd found something wrong with the papers she'd dropped off, though she'd gone over them herself, right before she left the office, and she would have been willing to swear that everything had been in order.
Gertie shook her head. "Once I told him you weren't here, he just said to ask you to call back when you could."
"I'll call him now," Della said. "Are there any other messages?"
Gertie shook her head again. "It's been a quiet day."
Della nodded at the fashion magazine in Gertie's lap, half visible under the desk, where she must have quickly shoved it when Della came in. "So I see. Well, just make sure you let me know right away if anything else comes up. I'll return Mr. Burger's call in a minute." She slipped past the reception desk into her own office.
She sat down at her desk and pulled a steno pad from the drawer, ready to take notes in case the phone call required it. Then she lifted the receiver and asked Gertie to connect her to the D.A.'s office. Gertie was quick to oblige; if Della hadn't just seen her furtive magazine-reading, she would have had no reason to think that Gertie wasn't fully devoted to the business at hand.
"District Attorney's office, Marie speaking."
"Hello, Marie. This is Della Street, returning Mr. Burger's call."
"Yes, of course. Please hold." With that, the line clicked to temporary silence. Hastiness or efficiency? Della did not know Marie well enough to tell, but rather than ruminate on the possibilities, she turned her thoughts to the conversation ahead, from which she still had no idea what to expect. She jotted the date and the time in the upper corner of her steno pad.
"Miss Street! Thank you for returning my call. Your receptionist told me you were at lunch. I didn't realize you weren't heading straight back to your office when you left here, or I would have waited to call."
"That's quite all right. What can I do for you?"
"Well, it's not exactly something for you to do. I mean it is, but you don't need to unless you want to. That is—" He stumbled to a halt. She heard him take a deep breath, then he began again. "I enjoyed chatting with you this afternoon."
Oh. "I did too." Perhaps she should have paused, to think about whether she wanted to encourage him, but she had enjoyed their chat. Mr. Burger was actually quite pleasant to talk to—when he wasn't glaring (and being glared at, to be honest) from the other side of the courtroom.
"I was wondering...I heard about a new restaurant opening in Santa Monica. Lares, they serve Mexican food. It's far enough out of town that we'd be unlikely to run into anybody we knew. Not that I'd mind being seen with you, of course, but I thought you might prefer not to be seen dating across the aisle, as it were...that is if you're interested at all, of course."
"I'm free Friday evening," Della said. Why not? It might be fun.
Della left work early on Friday, and went shopping. It was partially because she did need some new lipstick, and partially because she'd rather not be seen getting into the District Attorney's car right outside of Perry Mason's office building. Instead, her purse heavier with a new compact, two lipsticks, and a bottle of White Shoulders, she stepped into his car on a side street more than a mile to the south, far from the eyes of potential gossips.
She knew that Burger would be no more likely to ask her about her own work than he had been on Wednesday, but she could ask him about his work—at least the parts of it that didn't intersect with hers. It proved a fruitful topic, and he was soon declaiming at length about his upcoming trial of oil boss James Kingsbury for conspiracy and fraud. Della had heard Kingsbury's name on occasion—he worked at the Inglewood Oil Field, not a dozen miles southwest of downtown—and she recalled seeing his name in the headlines when he was arrested, but she hadn't heard any of the particulars, and found the case quite interesting.
"I'd been a bit worried about the case," Burger said, "but I think we've finally had a breakthrough. I got my hands on a letter that conclusively proves that Kingsbury is in this thing up to his neck. I can tie it in with bank account records and witnesses who will swear to his location on the days in question, and the jury will eat it up. We're not out of the woods completely until the case is over—we never are—but I'm feeling much more satisfied than I was this morning."
"How did you come across the letter?"
"Kingsbury has one major weak point," Burger said, "and that is that he's a skinflint. He doesn't pay people one cent more than he thinks he owes them, and sometimes that's less than they believe they're owed. The man he wrote the letter to had a disagreement with him on that score, and even though he certainly won't end up with any more money if Kingsbury gets locked away in prison, I'm certain it will make him feel better."
"Who does Kingsbury have as his lawyer?"
"Ralph Eccles."
Della frowned. "He's not...particularly known for his honesty."
"No, he's not," Burger said dryly. "He can be a tough opponent, willing to play any sort of dirty trick if he thinks it will give him an advantage. But he overplays his hand sometimes. I'll say this, I think he's far more likely to get caught doing something that will get him disbarred than, say, your boss."
"No, you'll never catch Perry doing anything like that," Della said with a half smile.
"Not if you have anything to say about it, I'm sure," Burger said. He turned on his headlights; the sun had almost set and the moon had yet to rise. A van behind them turned on its headlights as well.
"Hasn't that van been following us for a while?" Della murmured.
Burger's eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. "At least since we turned on to Pico Boulevard," he said. "It could be that they're headed to Santa Monica as well...it isn't as if there are that many alternate routes, if they started the same place we did..."
"But your instincts are alerting you just as much as mine are," Della said. "Perhaps we should try an alternate route ourselves?"
Burger pressed on the accelerator. To their left stretched the hedge of a country club; on their right, construction on the former 20th Century Fox backlot. There was a cross-street ahead of them, and with Burger's coupe somewhat exceeding the speed limit, they turned left a moment before the light turned red.
The van turned left behind them, and then they were certain. The country club was still to their left, its hedge impenetrable. To their right, the Rancho Park golf course, its grassy hillocks and old trees filling the dusky horizon with green. The van had a decent engine under its hood; it had almost caught up with them, and was crowding them on the left. There were no other cars around, now that they had left the main boulevard, and nightfall was almost complete. Della clung tightly to her door handle as Burger, unable to get around the van, made another wide turn, entering the grounds of the golf course.
"Enemies of yours?" Della yelled over the squealing of the wheels. "I'm not sure that I've got any enemies. At least not the sort that show up in windowless vans."
"My job attracts quite a few," Burger said. "I didn't think there were any who would go to these lengths, but apparently there are. I'm sorry." The van was still crowding them. "Hold on!" One more shove from the van, and their car was hurtling down the slope into a grassy gully. Burger stomped on the brakes, but their momentum worked against them; the car caromed off of a few trees before coming to rest against a giant eucalyptus. Upright but shaken, Della didn't dare take a moment to breathe. She seized her purse and jumped out of the car, ready to run.
The van had parked on the road at the top of the slope, and its occupants were running towards them. Della dodged the first man, only to run straight into the arms of the second. She swung her purse at him for lack of any other weapon. There was a crash of breaking glass as White Shoulders shattered and splashed out of the top of her purse. She hoped he hated gardenia.
One final man was walking down the slope in a much more leisurely fashion. "There's a gun behind this flashlight," he said in a measured tone. Not loudly, but what need was there to be loud when he had a gun? "Both of you, up to the van," he said.
Goon #2 seized Della's arm. She dropped her purse (and what remained of its contents, though most of them had flown in all directions when she struck him), and allowed him to escort her up the hill. She wobbled on her heels as much as she could, hoping to play for time, but they weren't visible from the main road, and there was nobody around to rescue them. Ahead of her, Burger, too, was firmly in the grasp of an assortment of goons. They were well outnumbered, and the sky was now completely dark. Both cars' lights were off and even the flashlight had now been extinguished; unless someone came upon them by happenstance, there was no way their predicament would be noticed until someone realized they were missing. Still wobbling exaggeratedly on the uneven slope, she hit a place where the ground dipped abruptly, and stumbled and fell, not entirely on purpose.
The cloud of White Shoulders drifted nearer again, and Goon #2 caught her under the shoulders and pulled her back to her feet. "What's the matter, lady?" he muttered. "Don't know how to climb a hill?"
"Shut up!" one of the others hissed. Della didn't reply.
Hamilton Burger was leaning against the side of the van when they reached it, being patted down by one of the goons. "Where is the letter?" asked the man with the gun.
"I left it in my office," Burger replied.
"No you didn't," the man said. "We've been watching you all day. You didn't go back to your office after you met with Jones; you went straight to pick up this lady."
"Yeah, who's the dame?" someone else asked.
"Maybe he gave the letter to her."
"I promise I didn't—"
"Doesn't matter. Search her." Rough hands pushed Della up to lean against the van, ducking into her pockets and patting against her legs, but there was no crackle of paper, only the soft rustle of her rayon dress against her silk stockings. Della wished she knew where Burger had put the letter, so that she could help to mislead them; but as it was, she thought her best refuge was silence.
"Lock them up inside the van, and then search the car," the leader commanded. "Inside and out. That letter's there somewhere."
"We only brought one pair of handcuffs," Goon #2 objected. "We didn't know he wasn't going to be alone."
"Well, then handcuff them together or something. Use your imagination!"
Della found herself propelled into the back of the van. Goon #2 snapped a handcuff around her right wrist. "We got something we can loop this around, or through, or something?" he asked.
Nobody replied. It seemed Kingsbury didn't spend extra on getting high-quality hired thugs with imaginations, any more than he spent extra on making sure his business associates didn't hand his correspondence over to the authorities. Finally, the goon holding Burger piped up: "There's some exposed metal on the base of the passenger seat. Is there anything there that will hold them?"
Della sighed and scooted to the front of the van when Goon #2 shoved on her shoulder. He pushed her to lean against the back of the driver's seat. Burger was soon seated next to her, against the passenger seat, and attached to the other half of the handcuffs. "They're not going anywhere, boss!" Goon #2 announced, checking that the chain of the handcuffs was secure under the seat, and the bar it was looped around wasn't going anywhere even when he tugged on it. With one last yank, he climbed back out of the van and closed the door behind him, and finally, it didn't smell quite as much like gardenia and lilac. Perfume really was better in smaller doses.
"I'm sorry," Burger said. "You don't deserve to be mixed up in this."
Della shook her head, although the gesture was wasted in the pitch dark. "If I wanted to avoid all danger, I'd have a different job. Although I wish they would have waited for our second date."
"Oh, would there have been a second date?" From his voice, she suspected he was smirking.
"I can't know now, can I? This date wasn't long enough for me to properly evaluate it. The conversation on the drive over was nice enough, but you lost points for not providing me with dinner, and then the handcuffs and the kidnappers put your score permanently in the negatives. But if it hadn't been for that, who knows?" She shifted forward, stretching her hands. "I've never been handcuffed before," she volunteered. "My wrist aches."
"I was handcuffed once, as a teenager," Burger said. "My friends and I decided to mess around in the school parking lot in the middle of the night—no vandalism or anything, just stupid kids thinking it was cool to hang out somewhere we weren't allowed. A police officer showed up and decided to scare some sense into us...had us sit cuffed in the back of the car for what seemed like forever. Our parents knew all about it the next day, too. I think the cop was a friend of one of theirs. They sure let me have it, as if I hadn't already decided I was never going to do that again. But I think my wrists were smaller back then. My joints were certainly less stiff."
"I assume that means you don't know how to pick handcuffs, then," Della said.
"No, do you?"
"I've heard it involves hairpins," she said, "but I'm unsure of the particulars."
"We could give it a try if we had any hairpins," he said. "Ah...do you?"
"Not in this hairstyle," Della said. "I had a few in my purse, but it's scattered across half the hillside now." She pulled herself up into a crouching position, then slid her legs so that she was kneeling the opposite way from how she had been before. "You're right, one's joints are definitely more stiff once one isn't a teenager anymore."
"Now I imagine your teenager-hood didn't involve any police cars," Burger said. "I can't quite place whether you would have been the type to get up to mischief or the type to be so busy getting good grades that you didn't have time to get in trouble...but if you did get up to things, it would have been the discreet sort of classy mischief that didn't involve coming to the attention of the law."
"Oh, I was definitely classy in high school," Della said with a smile. "And I got plenty of A's. But who says that takes so much time that you can't be up to something at the same time?"
"But did you manage to avoid the long arm of the law?"
"Oh, we did one better and just remained on the right side of the law. A couple of my girlfriends and I ran a Girl Scout cookie reselling ring. We would stock up on whatever our little sisters and their friends hadn't been able to sell, for as much of a discount as we could convince them to give us. We stacked the boxes in the basement and waited a few months until everybody had run out, then sold them to the other students at our high school for two or three times the price. After all, you can't expect to pay list price for Girl Scout cookies when you're buying them out of season."
"That sounds like it would earn you a tidy profit."
"A lot more than my allowance, that was for sure. Although I did cut into our profits by eating far too many of the Cooky-Mints."
He chuckled. "Those were always my favorites, too. I think they changed the recipe after the war when they changed the name, but I still like Thin Mints enough to buy boxes of them every year."
"Shall I save a few boxes and then parade them past your office once it's late enough I'm sure you've run out?"
"If you do, I'll buy your entire stock. I don't care how exorbitant your prices. Shh!" They waited in silence for a few moments. "Sorry, I thought I heard them coming back. They must still be searching. I hope they take the car to pieces without finding a thing."
"Is it there for them to find?" Della asked. "Or, I suppose it would be better if I didn't know."
"Actually, I think I'd better tell you." He leaned towards her and whispered in her ear: "I slipped it in your purse when you got in the car. I had thought I might be being followed, but then I thought it must have been my imagination so I didn't bother to mention it. I'm sorry."
"Was it on top where it would have fallen out, or deep enough it would have stayed inside?" Della murmured in response. She spoke no word of censure, for at the present time it seemed as good a place for the letter as any. Better than many possibilities, since it seemed it had not yet been found.
"Along the side. I don't know how easily it would have fallen out; I was too busy fighting the thugs nearest me to see what happened with your purse."
"I hit one of them with it. The one that now reeks of white florals. The contents went everywhere."
"Is that what that smell was? Anyway, they'll have to give up at some point, even if they don't find it. We need to figure out our next move when that happens. There's more than half a dozen of them, and even if they didn't have us outnumbered at this point, I don't think either you or I can do much fighting while handcuffed to a car seat. Did you see who had the keys to the van?"
"No. I suppose it would be too much to ask for them to have left them in the ignition."
Burger reached up with his free hand—or at least, that was what she supposed he was doing, leaning back and momentarily increasing the tension on her cuffed arm. "No, more's the pity. We could try to hot-wire it."
"Do you know how?"
"I saw a demonstration once. Part of a trial actually, back when I was a lowly assistant DA. The judge had us all adjourn to the parking garage, and the defense attorney showed how to hot-wire the type of car that had been used in the crime, and showed how it supposedly couldn't be done without damaging the car noticeably. We still convicted, though; the part of the vehicle that would supposedly have been damaged just so happened not to match the rest of the car, and I posited that it had been replaced after the crime for the very reason the defense attorney mentioned."
"It seems worth a try," Della said. "I've never seen it done, but I'm familiar with the basic principle."
"I'm going to try to climb into the front seat," he said. "Can you hold on to the chain nearest your wrist, or wrap some of your skirt around it, or something, to protect your hand if I tug on it?" Della followed his instructions, and waited through quite a bit of tugging and muffled thumping. "I'm in the driver's seat," he said finally, "but I'm having to lean way to the right because of the handcuff. I could get a little more play if I turned and faced away from the dashboard, but there's very little room to maneuver. Which of your hands is cuffed, left or right?"
"Right."
"That might be better. Want to give it a try?"
Della sighed. "Stripping wires I've never seen before in the dark with one hand? That's exactly how I wanted to spend my evening! Sure, get in the passenger seat and I'll come up there." She waited through a bit more muffled thumping, then climbed up beside him.
"Keep your head back and slouch as much as you can," Burger told her. "I think they're still busy with the car, but they might spot movement if they looked up here at the wrong moment."
Della felt under the dashboard. A number of wires presented themselves. They all felt the same, and it was dark enough that she didn't bother to lean down and see whether she could see any difference between them.
"There should be some wires going into the steering column," Burger said. "One of them is red."
Della frowned. "And am I supposed to spot the red wire with my handy pocket flashlight, or has the moon risen in the last minute?"
He sighed. "That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? I wouldn't even be bothering to try this if we had any other options, but it's better than sitting here doing nothing."
"It is that," Della said. She tsked thoughtfully. "Are we certain we haven't got any other options?"
"We could go back to trying to pick the handcuffs," Burger said. "But if we could get the vehicle started, we'd have a better chance of getting away than we would on foot."
"Here's a question that may be more relevant than it seems," Della said. "Did those goons seem to you like this is their full-time job, or just part-time?"
"Definitely part-time."
"So what do they do the rest of the time?"
"Good question. My guess is that they're oil workers who got offered some unorthodox off-the-books overtime."
"That would be my guess, too. And the van is probably just one they use at work."
"So it's probably shared between multiple drivers..."
"...which means we should have been searching much more thoroughly for spare keys. They weren't planning to have to leave us here until they had to, so they may not have bothered to go over the van beforehand."
"I'll check the glove compartment," Burger said.
"I'll check the visor and under the seat. Anywhere else?"
"The door feels like it's got molding around it. They might have wedged a key in there."
They both set to work, cheerfully ignoring the tugs on their wrists as one or another of them got carried away with the search.
"I'm not finding any keys," Burger said after he had dumped the entire contents of the glove compartment on the floor, "but there's some handy pieces of wire that we could use to try to pick the cuffs."
"I think..." Della replied, her head between her knees as she reached under the seat, "ha! that won't be necessary." Triumphantly, she drew forth a key. "We should have thought of this earlier; that key would probably have been easier to reach from where we were before."
"Hurry, they could come back any time," Burger said.
Della found the pedals with her stockinged feet, scraped about with the key until she found the keyhole, and breathed a sigh of relief when the key slid in. "Can you handle the shifter?" she asked.
"If it will get us out of here, I'll handle anything," Burger said. "Reverse?"
"Please. Three...two...one..." The van roared to life, and they sped back down the entry road in reverse. At least the road was nearly straight, because she could barely see anything in the rear-view mirror, and she didn't dare take the time for a U-turn. "First gear. Where's the closest police station? Okay, second gear," she said.
"Head back the way we came," Burger said. "I think there's one a mile or two back. Can I give you a raincheck on that date? Something tells me we won't be able to have any Mexican food tonight."
Della turned right without stopping or slowing. She didn't feel much of a need to follow traffic laws at the moment, and besides it would make it easier not to change gears too often. "Oh, definitely," she said. "Third gear, please. In fact, I'm pretty sure that after tonight's adventure, you owe me more than one dinner."
"And a bottle of perfume, I think," Burger said.
Della sniffed the air, which still had a faint floral odor to it. "I'm not sure if I'll be able to wear White Shoulders ever again," she said. "But you could buy me some Chanel No. 5."