Mason said, “I don’t know. I can’t tell very much about it until after I find out what’s happened at the Prescott residence. Right now I’m working pretty much in the dark.”
Drake said, “Well, I’ll call the office and get another earful.”
“I’ll wait here in the car,” Mason said. “Tell your girl to run in to my office and tell Della to wait for me.”
For some five minutes Mason reclined against the cushions of Drake’s car, smoking thoughtfully, then he raised expectant eyes as Drake came running down the white stone steps of the big building. “Anything new?” he asked, as Drake opened the door of the car.
“I’ll say! Plenty of news. The homicide squad was playing around the Prescott house because Walter Prescott was found dead in an upstairs bedroom. He was fully clothed for the street, and somebody had plugged him right through the brisket with a .38 caliber revolver. Three shots were fired. All of them took effect. One of them went through the heart. The shots must have been fired at close range, because there were powder bums on the clothing and skin. The cops searched the drawer in the desk where Mrs. Anderson had seen the Swaine girl planting the gun. They didn’t find any gun in the drawer, but back of the drawer, where it had been shoved down into a little recess in the desk, they found a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, with three empty cartridges in the cylinder, and three loaded shells. The smell of the gun shows it had been recently fired.”
“How about the Swaine girl?” Mason asked. “What are they doing about her?”
“They’re looking for her. She left the house around two-thirty, carrying a suitcase and a caged canary. Police figure she intended to skip the country and didn’t want to leave the canary in the house to starve.”
“In that event,” Mason pointed out, “she must have felt certain her sister, Rosalind Prescott, wasn’t going to return.”
“The police are looking for the sister, too.”
“Any luck?”