“I so understand,” Mason said courteously. “My first witness will be Lieutenant Ogilby.”
Lieutenant Ogilby advanced to the stand with military bearing. He testified that he was a Lieutenant in the United States Army that, as such, he was interested in revolver shooting that he was friendly with Virginia Trent, a niece of George Trent that they occasionally took walks in the country that he had taught her revolver shooting that his service revolver was too heavy for her, but that her uncle possessed a light thirty-eight caliber revolver, shooting a shell known generally as a thirty-eight short, which suited Miss Trent’s hand. That, under his guidance, she had become an expert shot. That on the Saturday afternoon when George Trent had been murdered, he had called for Virginia Trent in his automobile. That she had taken the gun from the upper right-hand drawer of the desk in George Trent’s office. That at the time, Trent had been out to lunch. That the witness saw Trent eating lunch at a lunch counter near the building where he had his office. That the witness and Virginia Trent had gone out into the hills and had fired some fifty shots at targets. That he had returned the witness to her home at approximately six o’clock in the evening.
Mason turned to Sampson and said courteously, “Now if the Prosecutor’s office will kindly produce the gun which was found in the drawer of George Trent’s desk, and the gun with which it is claimed George Trent was killed, I will ask the witness to identify that gun.”
Sampson said, “It will take a few minutes.”
“Very well,” Mason said, “the Court will perhaps take a brief recess.”
The Court took its recess. Newspaper reporters crowded around Mason, asking questions. Spectators, feeling that courtroom history was being made, refused to leave their seats. The jurors glanced at Mrs. Breel as they filed out. Their glances no longer contained hostility. There was curiosity, interest, and, here and there, a glance of sympathy. Perry Mason continued to sit at his counsel table. There was about him nothing of the swagger of one who is putting across a tricky play. He had, instead, only the attitude of a disinterested expert who is trying to assist intelligent jurors in discharging their duties.
Mrs. Breel indicated by a beckoning forefinger that she wished to talk with Perry Mason. He moved his chair over to her side. “Do you,” she asked, “know what you’re doing?”
“I think so,” Mason said. “I’d hoped, of course, I could keep them from definitely establishing that it was your handbag. Now, I’m having to fall back on my second line of defense.”
“Well,” she said, weighing the issues as judicially as though her own fate had not been involved, “it seems to me that you’re getting out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
“Well,” Mason observed, smiling, “that at least will be a change of scenery.”