“Of course, they don’t get smaller,” he said; “it’s simply that you’re farther away from them. Other telephone poles come in and fill up the foreground. The telephone poles are all the same size. However, as you get farther distant from them they appear to be smaller, and...” He broke off abruptly and said, “Wait a minute. You aren’t gently trying to point out a fallacy in my argument, are you?”
At her triumphant grin, he made a mock grimace. “I should have known better than to argue with a woman. All right, Simon Legree, get your notebook ready, and we’ll write those confounded letters.”
He opened the filing jacket, scanned a letter from a prominent firm of lawyers, tossed it across the desk to her, and said, “Write these people that I’m not interested in handling the case, even at twice the fee named. It’s just a plain, ordinary murder case. A woman gets tired of her husband, plugs him with a six-gun, and then weeps and wails that he was drunk and trying to beat her up. She lived with him for six years, and seeing him drunk was no novelty. The business about being afraid he was going to kill her doesn’t check with the story of the other witnesses.”
“How much of that,” Della Street asked with calm efficiency, “do you want me to put in the letter?”
“Just the part about not wanting to handle the case... Oh, Lord, here’s another one. A man, who’s swindled a bunch of people into buying worthless stock, wants me to prove that he was within the letter of the law.”
Mason slammed the file shut and said, “You know, Della, I wish people would learn to differentiate between the reputable lawyer who represents persons accused of crime, and the criminal lawyer who becomes a silent partner in the profits of crime.”
“Just how would you explain the difference?” she asked.
Mason said, “Crime is personal. Evidence of crime is impersonal. I never take a case unless I’m convinced my client was incapable of committing the crime charged. Once I’ve reached that conclusion, I figure there must be some discrepancy between the evidence and the conclusions the police have drawn from that evidence. I set out to find them.”
She laughed. “You sound as though you were more of a detective than a lawyer.”
“No,” Mason said, “they are two different professions. A detective gathers evidence. He becomes skilled in knowing what to look for, where to find it, and how to get it. A lawyer interprets the evidence after it’s been collected. He gradually learns...”