“Oh, shucks,” Mason told him, “don’t be so squeamish. Put her in a sanitarium somewhere as suffering from a nervous breakdown.”
“She’s probably upset,” Drake told him, “but we’d have quite a job making the nervous breakdown business stick.”
“Not if she realized the full significance of what that parrot’s saying, you wouldn’t,” Mason said grimly.
Chapter four
Mason guided his car in close to the curb and glanced across the street at the lighted house. “Certainly is big enough,” he said to Della Street. “No wonder the old man got lonely living there.”
He had slid out from behind the wheel and was standing at the curb, locking the car door, when Della Street said, “I think this is one of Paul Drake’s men coming.”
Mason looked up to see a man emerge from the shadows, glance at the license plate on the automobile, then cut across the beam of illumination from the headlights.
“Shall I put the lights out, Chief?” Della Street asked.
“Please,” he told her.
The light switch clicked the surroundings into darkness. The man approached Mason and said, “You’re Mason, aren’t you?”