He turned back to Paul Drake. “Have your men found out anything about where those forty-one caliber shells were bought, Paul?”
“Not where they were bought,” Drake said, “but by this time the police sure have found out who bought ’em.”
Mason dismissed it with a gesture. “Concentrate for a while on the Reno end of things, Paul. Find out as much as you can about what Mrs. Sabin did in Reno, and get me copies of the long distance telephone bill.”
“Okay,” Drake said, sliding from the chair, “and remember this, Perry Mason, the next time you duck out because things are getting too hot for you to handle, I’m going to duck out too. Being a stooge is all right, but being pushed up into the front-line trenches just when the machine guns start rattling, is a gray horse of another color.”
Chapter nine
It was shortly after eleven when Charles W. Sabin and Richard Waid reached Mason’s office. Mason wasted but little time in preliminaries. “I have some news,” he said, “which may be of interest to you. As I told you last night, I had located Casanova. He was in the possession of a Helen Monteith, whom Fremont C. Sabin apparently married under the name of George Wallman. The parrot in her house was killed sometime either last night or early this morning. The theory of the police is that Helen Monteith killed him. The parrot had been saying repeatedly, ‘Put down that gun, Helen... don’t shoot... My God, you’ve shot me.’
“Now then,” Mason went on, glancing from one to the other, “does that mean anything to you?”
“It must mean the parrot was present at the time my father was murdered,” Sabin said. “Then Helen must have... but which Helen?”
“But another parrot was found in the cabin,” Mason pointed out.
“Perhaps the murderer switched parrots,” Waid ventured.