She whipped the envelope from behind her back, and literally pushed it into his hands.
Without looking at it, Mason dropped it into his inside coat pocket. “I’m not your lawyer,” he said. “I’m Alden Leeds’ lawyer. To the extent that you play ball with him, I’ll play ball with you. Try to slip anything over on him, and I’ll give you the works. Do you understand?”
She nodded. There were tears in her eyes.
“Listen,” Mason went on, “John Milicant was being shadowed. Private detectives kept a record of everyone who went to the sixth floor of that apartment. There’s an elevator indicator over the elevator shaft. There are two other apartments on the sixth floor. At least one of them is vacant. Everyone who took the elevator up to the sixth floor was clocked in and clocked out.”
“Who hired them?” she asked.
“I did,” Mason said.
“Then can’t you... ”
“Not a chance in the world,” Mason told her, “and I don’t even dare to try. There were two men and two women on the job working in relays. You try to hush up anything like that, and you wind up in a lot hotter water than when you started.”
“But what can I do?” she asked.
Mason said, “The apartment door was closed when you went in?”