The Case of the Lucky Legs   ::   Гарднер Эрл Стенли

"Yes, perhaps a little before that."

"And you think she'll give us Frank Patton's address?"

"I'm certain she will. I've got a good man waiting to catch her as soon as she comes in. He can hand her a line about wanting to keep other girls from being lured to the city by false promises and all that sort of stuff."

"Well," Perry Mason said, pulling a Marlboro from the desk humidor, "that's swell."

"Oh, no, it isn't," the detective said. "Not yet."

"How do you mean?"

"I want to know," Paul Drake said, "exactly what you're going to do when we've located Frank Patton."

Perry Mason faced Paul Drake with an expression that was grim as granite.

"When I find that man," he said slowly, "I'm going to break him."

"Just how are you going to break him?"

"I don't know," Perry Mason said. "The element of surprise is going to enter into it in some way. You understand, Paul, that this racket he's pulling may be on the up and up, and again it may not be. It's a question of intent.

"Now, that's where all criminal prosecutions break down. District attorneys get frightened to death to take a case where they've got to prove the element of fraud or an intent to defraud. It's an element of the crime. Therefore it has to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. It's hard enough to establish what's in a man's mind by evidence of others, let alone to establish an intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

"Therefore what I want out of this man is a confession. I want to force him to betray himself; to admit that the whole thing is a racket; that his intent from start to finish is to defraud the merchants with whom he is doing business and the girl who is given the phony picture contract. In order to do that, we've got to crash in and surprise him. We've got to get him off his guard and rush him off his feet before he gets a chance to figure just how much of our talk is bluff and how much of it we can prove."

"And I take it we don't want Bradbury there?"

Perry Mason stared steadily at Paul Drake.

"Get this, Paul," he said. "We don't even want J.R. Bradbury to know anything about what we're doing."

The telephone on his desk rang.

Perry Mason picked up the receiver.

Della Street 's voice said cautiously, "J.R. Bradbury is calling. He says that he's found out you've left the court house for your office and that he's coming over unless he can talk to you on the telephone.