“Someday,” Kittering flared, “Mason will defend a guilty man, and then...”
Mason yawned, and said, “Well, if counsel doesn’t care to confide his discussion to the present, and wishes to neglect the duties of his office, to waste time in idle speculation on the future, I’d like to ask him what he thinks about railroad stocks as an investment...”
Kittering flung himself out of the door.
Judge Knox stared across at Perry Mason. “You have to admit,” he said, “that you skate on pretty thin ice, Mason — how long have you known Serle was the guilty party?”
“Not very long,” Mason admitted. “I should have known it a lot sooner than I did.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Mason explained, “it’s this way. Right from the first, the evidence showed dinner had been ordered at the Blue and White Restaurant, not in the usual manner, but in a most extraordinary manner. In other words, they didn’t ask the waiter what was on the menu and then make a selection. The waiter was told to get lamb chops, green peas, and potatoes, and if he didn’t have them available, to get them. Then again, the evidence showed right from the first that the plates were empty. It’s unusual for two men who are engaged in a hurried conference to order a dinner in that manner. It’s unusual for two men to both order the same thing. It’s unusual for men to clean up everything on the plates, and it’s absolutely unique for a man who has been eating a lamb chop to devour the bone. And you’ll remember the waiter testified that the plates were bare. Nothing remained on them.
“Moreover, it’s always been my idea that when a man has an iron-clad alibi in a murder case, it’s a very good thing to inspect that alibi closely. While a man who has a genuine alibi can’t have committed a murder, nevertheless, a man who has committed a deliberate murder always tries to provide himself with an alibi. Serle was the only one involved who had an alibi. It looked iron-clad on the face of it, but alibis should never be taken at their face value.
“It was quite apparent that the dead man had a large sum of cash in his possession. That money disappeared. It would seem, therefore, that at least one of the motives for the crime was robbery. Now Alden Leeds might have killed him because of that blackmail business, but he would never have robbed the corpse — not unless he had done so in an attempt to throw the officers off the trail. If he had done that, he would have been far too cautious to have left his fingerprints all over the apartment.
“I knew that Serle ate regularly at the Home Kitchen Café. I knew that they had a weekly menu — that is, each day of the week they featured a special, the same dish on the same day.