A key clicked in the lock. The door opened, and a man, whose face hardly came to Mason’s shoulders, looked up over the top of steel-rimmed reading spectacles. “What sort of news?” he asked.
“Bad,” Mason said, and walked in.
Drake followed the lawyer into the room. Mason flashed him a swift glance of inquiry, and the detective nodded almost imperceptibly. Drake moved over to a chair by the window and sat down. The chair was still warm from human occupancy. Freel, still holding a newspaper he’d been reading between thumb and forefinger, glanced from one to the other. “I don’t think I know you,” he said.
“You will,” Mason said. “Sit down.”
Freel sat on the bed. Mason possessed the only other chair in the room, a rickety, cane-bottomed affair which creaked as he sat down.
It was a small, cheerless bedroom with an iron bedstead, a thin mattress, and a mirror which gave back distorted reflections. Dripping water had left a pathway of reddish incrustations spreading fan-shaped from beneath each faucet in the washstand. There were only the two chairs, a rug worn thin from much use, a wardrobe closet, the bed, and some faded lithographs as furnishings of the room.
Beneath the bed appeared the ends of a suitcase and a handbag. A worn, tweed overcoat was folded across the white enameled foot of the iron bed. The grayish white counterpane had been patched in two places and was worn almost through in another place.
Freel nervously pushed his newspaper to one side. In the silence of the room, the rattle of the paper sounded unusually loud. “What is it?” he asked.
“You know what it is,” Mason said, watching him narrowly.
“I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea what brought you here, or what you’re talking about.”