The Case of the Counterfeit Eye by Erle Stanley Gardner Page A

The town thought she was going to hell fast. Her folks wanted her to give Brunold the bum's rush. She stuck up for him, and I guess perhaps she had ideas buzzing around in her bonnet – ideas of living her own life. You know, Perry, it was along about that time that girls were just commencing to break away from the kind of stuff that had been drilled into their noodles for generations."
    Perry Mason yawned ostentatiously.
    "Oh, hell," the detective said, "you're taking all the romance out of my young life – just when I was beginning to think my youth hadn't entirely vanished."
    "It isn't youthful romance, it's the mush of senility," Mason said. "For God's sake, get it through your head that I've got a murder case on my hands and I want facts. You give me the facts and I'll hang plenty of romance on them when I dish them out to the jury."
    "The hell of it is," Drake said, turning to Della Street, "that when the Chief gets this sketch he's going to feel just the same way about it I do. He's like a bride's biscuit – he puts up a hard-boiled exterior, but when you bust through him he's all soft and mushy on the inside."
    "Half-baked is the word you're groping for," Mason told him. "Come on, Paul; let's have the stuff."
    "One day," Drake said, "Brunold got a letter from Sylvia. That letter told him they couldn't put off getting married any longer."
    The half quizzical smile faded from Perry Mason's face. The impatience left his eyes. His voice showed quick sympathy.
    "Like that?" he asked.
    "Like that," the detective said.
    "What did Brunold do?"
    "Brunold got the letter, okay."
    "And ducked out?" Mason asked, in cold, hard accents.
    "No, he didn't. It was a small burg and he didn't dare to send a telegram because he didn't want the telegraph operator to know anything, but he hopped a train and started for Sylvia. That's where fate took a hand. Those were the days when railroad beds were like you found them. My God, I can remember one time when I took a trip on one of those hick lines that I tossed around in an upper berth like a bunch of popcorn in a corn popper on a hot stove…"
    "The train was wrecked," the lawyer interrupted. "I suppose Brunold was hurt."
    "Cracked his dome, punctured his eye, and gave him a loss of memory. The doctors took the eye out, put him in a hospital and gave him a nurse. I found the hospital records and was lucky enough to locate the nurse. She remembered the case because when Brunold got his memory back she surmised something of what must have been in the back of his mind.
    "He put in a person-to-person call for Sylvia and got a report back that Sylvia had disappeared. Brunold was like a crazy man. He had a relapse and was delirious. He talked in his delirium. The nurse figured it was a professional secret and she wouldn't tell me much, but I think she knew."
    "Sylvia?" Mason asked, and there was no longer any banter in his tone.
    "Sylvia," the detective said, "had been fed up for months with stories about the city slickers, about the women who paid and paid and paid. It was the age of literature that got fat on putting erring daughters out in snow storms. Sylvia's parents had been good at dishing out this sort of dope. When Brunold didn't show up, Sylvia figured there was just one reason. So she busted her little savings bank and beat it. No one knew how she left town. There was a little junction on another road three miles away. The kid must have hoofed it and got a milk train. She went to the city."
    "How do you know?" Mason asked.
    "I got a break," Drake told him. "I'd like to make you think it was just high-class detective work, but when she got married, and in connection with the boy's adoption, she gave some data that enabled me to check back."
    "She married Basset?" Mason asked.
    "That's right. She came to the city and took the name of Sylvia Loring. She worked as a stenographer as long as she could. After the child was born she went back to the office. They'd held the place open for