Sudden suspicion flared in her eyes. “You’ll do nothing of the sort!” she said. “Don’t think for a minute you’re going to come in here with some trumped-up story, and talk me out of a wrist watch. Say, what kind of a racket is this, anyway?”
Mason motioned to the telephone and said, “It’s okay with me. Call police headquarters. I thought we could handle it just among ourselves, but if you want to have it done formally, we can do it formally.”
“You can’t touch me, even if it is the same wrist watch,” she said.
“That’s what you say,” Mason told her. “Let’s concede that someone gave you the wrist watch and you didn’t know it was stolen. You know it’s stolen now. What are you going to do about it?”
“You can’t prove it’s the same wrist watch,” she said.
Mason said, “A platinum oval wrist watch, rimmed with diamonds, with four emeralds on the top, bottom, and each side.”
“There’s some mistake...” she said. “I... I have such a wrist watch, but that doesn’t mean anything. How do I know it belongs to you?”
Drake said, “I think she’s right, Perry. You can’t expect her to give up the wrist watch just on our say-so.”
Mason said, without sympathy, “Okay, let’s call headquarters and get them to send a man from the burglary detail out here. They can take the girl down to headquarters, your wife can make the identification and back it up with an identification from the jewelry company. I thought your wife didn’t want her picture in the papers.”
“She doesn’t,” Drake said. “We’d much prefer...”