The Case of the Velvet Claws   ::   Гарднер Эрл Стенли

Eva Belter looked from one to the other. “What is it?” she asked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to get the straight of this,” Mason told her.

“You want me here?” asked Paul Drake.

“Sure,” Mason told him. “You’re a witness.”

“You make me nervous,” said Eva Belter. “That’s the way they did last night. They had me in the District Attorney’s office, and they had people sitting there with notebooks and pencils. It makes me nervous to have people take down what I say.”

Mason smiled. “Yes, I should think it would. Did they ask you anything about the gun?”

Eva Belter widened her blue eyes in that stare of innocence which made her seem so young and helpless.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You know what I mean,” Mason persisted. “Did they ask anything about how you happened to have the gun?”

“How I happened to have the gun?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Mason. “Harrison Burke gave it to you, you know, and that’s the reason you had to telephone him—to tell him that it was his gun that had been used in the shooting.”

Della Street’s pencil was skipping rapidly over the page of the notebook.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eva Belter said with dignity.

“Oh, yes, you do,” Mason told her. “You telephoned Burke that there had been an accident or something, and that his gun had figured in it. He’d had the gun given him by a friend named Mitchell, and he drove right around and picked up Mitchell. The two of them ducked under cover.”

“Why,” she exclaimed, “I never heard of anything like that!”

“That line isn’t going to get you anywhere, live,” Mason told her, “because I saw Harrison Burke, and I have a statement signed by him.”

She stiffened in sudden consternation.

“You have a statement signed by him?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I thought you were representing me.”

“What’s wrong with representing you and having a statement from Burke?” he asked.

“Nothing, only he’s lying if he said that he ever gave me that gun. I never saw it in my life.”

“That makes it more simple,” Mason commented.

“What does?”

“You’ll see,” he told her. “Now let’s go back and clear up another point or two. When you got your purse it was in your husband’s desk. Do you remember that?”

“What do you mean?” she inquired in a low cautious voice.