“Be your own sweet self,” Drake supplemented.
Della ran out her tongue at him and made a note. “Ten-thirty,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“You have a man planted on the job by that time, Paul,” Mason said to Drake.
“Okay.”
Mason said, “I want to find out something about Byrl Gailord, Paul. The story Mrs. Tump tells doesn’t hold water.”
Della Street looked up in surprise. “How so, Chief?” she asked. “I thought it was very dramatic.”
“You bet it was dramatic,” Mason said. “Too dramatic. The hands clutching at the steel sides of the vessel, people being swept away on waves and all that… But what she overlooked was certain routine matters of procedure. In the first place, the Russian nobleman and his wife wouldn’t have gone over in the first lifeboat — not with Mrs. Tump standing on the rail looking down into the dark waters. It’s a rule of the sea that women and children go first.
“Mrs. Tump gives a swell picture, but it’s only the way she’s imagined it. She pictures herself standing on the rail, looking down with a detached, impersonal interest. If she’d actually been on that ship, she’d have spoken about how hard it was for her to stand up on the slanting deck, how she struggled to get on her life preserver, and how officers kept blowing whistles and herding passengers around from one boat to another… That shipwreck sounds phony to me. Notice she didn’t give any data about the name of the ship. Whenever she’d come to statistics, she’d wave her hand and say, ‘All this is preliminary, Mr. Mason.’ ”
Della Street said, “When you come to think of it, it does sound fishy… But why?”