She moved a mouthpiece up to her lips, snapped a switch and put through a call.
Mason said, “Wait here, Paul. I’m going to see Hungerford.”
“Want me to get out,” Drake asked, “and let you have the office?”
Mason said, “No. I’ll see him in the law library.” He walked through the law library to the reception room, opened the door and said, “Come in, Hungerford.”
Hungerford jumped to his feet and shook hands with Mason as the lawyer closed the door of the library and motioned toward a seat. “Well?” Mason asked.
Hungerford dropped into a chair, as Mason seated himself on the other side of a long, mahogany table.
“I wanted to talk with you about Belle,” Hungerford said. “What about her?” Mason asked.
“I came down on a plane,” Hungerford said. “I was talking with San Francisco a half hour ago on long distance. I understand the newspapers are carrying a story that Carl Newberry, posing as a well-to-do tourist, was C. Waker Moar, an absconding employee of the Products Refining Company. He’d been working on a salary of a hundred and eighty-five dollars a month.”
“So what?” Mason asked.
“And the San Francisco newspapers carry an interview by Charles Whitmore Dail in which he says that Moar absconded with twenty-five thousand dollars of the company’s funds; that had he lived, detectives would have met him at the gangplank and jailed him on a charge of embezzlement; that he has every reason to believe the money which Moar had in the money belt was part of the funds embezzled from the Products Refining Company.”