Mason said, “All right, I’ll be out,” and hung up the telephone.
He looked at his watch to verify the time, then wrote the address 604 East Hillgrade Avenue on a sheet of paper, folded the paper, put it in an envelope, addressed the envelope to Lieutenant Tragg, sealed it, and placed it on the little table by the side of the bed, then he called the Drake Detective Agency. When he had Paul Drake on the line, he said, “Paul, I’m going places. It doesn’t sound any too good. There’s just a chance we’re dealing with a woman who is a homicidal paranoiac. In case you don’t hear from me within an hour, bust out to six-o-four East Hillgrade Avenue — and be damn sure you get in. Also be sure you have a gun in your hand when you go in, and you’d better have a couple of hard-boiled men with you.”
“Why not let me pick up a couple of tough operatives and go out there with you, Perry?”
“I don’t think it would do any good. She’s given me certain specific instructions. She’s evidently where she can check up on me to see if I’m following those instructions. I wouldn’t doubt if she’s planted right across the street waiting to see what I do.”
“Okay, Perry, I’ll crash the joint in exactly one hour if I don’t hear from you.”
Mason slid the receiver back into place, put on a light topcoat, pulled his hat down low over his eyes, and left his apartment. Walking to the garage where he kept his car, Mason was careful to avoid looking around, as though afraid someone might be shadowing him. He slid in behind the wheel of his car, warmed up the motor, nodded to the night attendant in the garage, and rolled out into the dark, all-but-deserted street.
Following instructions to the letter, he left his car in the five-hundred block on Hillgrade Avenue and walked up the steep incline toward the intersection.
Six hundred and four was the first house on the right, after he had passed the intersection. It was a typical Southern California bungalow, neat, cool, efficiently arranged, and without anything to differentiate it from thousands of other bungalows. The house seemed dark and deserted. Mason, however, had expected this. If Mrs. Perlin had decided to follow him, to make certain he wasn’t leading police to the place, it would normally take her some little time, after she had satisfied herself, to enter the house and turn on the lights. It was quite possible she’d deliberately keep him waiting. The fact that she had instructed him to wait until he saw the light and then go in through the back door convinced him that the woman herself would slip in through the front door, divest herself of hat and coat, and subsequently claim she had been in the house all the time.
Mason, keeping to the shadows, moved around toward the garage at the back of the house. A moon in the last quarter furnished a faint yellowish light which enabled him to find his way down the side street and into the driveway which led to the garage. Beneath the deep shadows of a spreading pepper tree, the lawyer found an empty box which he improvised as a chair, and waited.
He watched for a light to come on in the house. The luminous hands of Mason’s watch ticked through an interval of minutes without anything happening — fifteen minutes — twenty minutes.