Helmold nodded genially, escorted Perry Mason to the door of the pet shop. “Any time I can do something for you, you tell me. It is a pleasure. This—” with a sweep of his hand — “talk of a lame canary, it is nothing. I wish to do something.”
Mason grinned, left the pet-shop proprietor bowing and smiling in the doorway, and sought a barber shop, where he was shaved, massaged and manicured.
Usually, hot towels on his face made him relax into a state where he was neither awake nor asleep, a peculiar, drowsy, half-dreaming condition in which, his imagination stimulated, he could see things with crystal clarity. But this time the hot towels steamed no thoughts into his mind. The canary was lame. One of the claws on the left foot had not been clipped at all. The remaining claws on that foot had been trimmed correctly. But the claws on the right foot had been trimmed too closely. And it was this which made the canary lame. Moreover, Rita Swaine, in taking the bird to the pet store, had been frank enough in referring to Mason as the person who had sent her there, but had given a fictitious name and address.
Why?
Out of the barber chair, Mason adjusted his tie, glanced at his wrist watch, and strolled leisurely back to his office. The street was filled with afternoon shadows and the advance guard of the late afternoon traffic jams.
Rounding the corner in the corridor from the elevator, he saw Della Street standing in the doorway of his private office, beckoning to him frantically, and, as he quickened his stride, she ran swiftly down the flagged floor of the building.
“Listen,” she said, “Paul Drake’s on the private line and he says he must talk with you right away.”
Mason’s long legs added another few inches to his quick stride. “How long ago did he call?”
“He’s on the line, just this minute. I recognized the sound of your steps in the corridor.”
“This his first call?”