“We hadn’t,” Mason observed. “We would have if you’d told us about these fingerprints.”
“I didn’t know about them.”
“You knew you’d searched that apartment.”
Leeds said nothing.
Mason, smiling broadly, patted him on the shoulder as a deputy sheriff approached.
“Okay, Leeds,” he said, loudly. “Things are looking fine. They don’t have a ghost of a chance of pinning this on you. Get a good night’s sleep now, and leave the worry to us.”
Out in the corridor, Della Street fell into step with Perry Mason.
“Those fingerprints,” she said, “don’t look so good, do they, Chief?”
“I’d more or less discounted them in advance,” he said. “I figured that Leeds must have been the one to search that apartment, although he said he hadn’t. What I was mainly counting on was that he’d been too smart to leave fingerprints. Apparently, he was in too much of a hurry to be careful.”
“What,” she asked, “would happen if tomorrow they show that his fingerprints are on the handle of the knife?”