“Yes.”
“Well, by that time this young man had gone back into the Prescott house. He seemed frightened about something, and that’s when he gave Rita Swaine the gun.”
“A gun?”
“Yes— Oh, I wasn’t going to tell you about that. Perhaps I shouldn’t. You—”
“What kind of gun?”
“It was a blued-steel revolver. He took it from his hip pocket and gave it to Rita and she pulled out a drawer in that big desk near the corner of the solarium, and pushed the gun in back of the drawer and then closed the drawer.”
“Then what happened?” Mason asked.
“Well,” she said, “I’d already telephoned to the officers that there’d been an accident and that a man was hurt. I figured I could tell them about the gun when they came over here to question me. And then they didn’t come.”
“Was the man still in the coupe when you telephoned?”
“No. He’d been taken to the hospital.”