The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (Perry Mason #10)

by Erle Stanley Gardner

Della laughed. “Take your arm away, Paul. Experience has taught me that when a man sticks around my apartment about daylight, drinking Scotch and soda and talking about my wonderful loyalty, he’s getting ready to go out of control.” Drake sighed. “I see you’re a good judge of character as well as a darned efficient secretary. Going to kiss me good-by when I leave, Della?” “No. If I did you wouldn’t leave.”

“Not this baby. I’ve seen her only once, but I wouldn’t trust her around the block. She has one of those baby stares veneered on a face that’s hard as cement, if you know what I mean.” “I know what you mean,” Mason told him. “The last time I saw an expression like that was on the face of a nineteen-year-old blackmailer.” He chuckled and added, “While she was waiting in the outer office, I asked Della Street what she looked like, and Della said she looked like a synthetic virgin.”

“All wrong, Mason,” Oxman interrupted. “You must have been smoking marihuana.”

“Young man,” she said, taking her cigar from her mouth and staring at him with snapping gray eyes, “I’ve lived sixty-eight years. I lived my girlhood in an age

of universal hypocrisy. I found it was necessary for me to lie. I’ve had exactly fifty years of practice in extemporaneous prevarication.