“Your name is Don B. Ralston? You reside at 2935 Creelmore Avenue in this city?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you knew Carver L. Clements in his lifetime?”

“Yes.”

“In a business way?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, on the night—or, rather, early in the morning—of the 10th of this month, did you have occasion to go to Carver Clements’s apartment, being Apartment Number 702 in the Mandrake Arms Apartments in this city?”

“I did, yes, sir.”

“What time was it?”

“Around—well, it was between one and two in the morning—I would say around one thirty.”

“Were you alone?”

“No, sir.”

“Who was with you?”

“Richard P. Nolin, who is a business associate—or was a business associate—of Mr. Clements; Manley L. Ogden, who handled some of Mr. Clements’s income tax work; and a Miss Vera Payson, a friend of—well, a friend of all of us.”

“What happened when you went to that apartment?”

“Well, we left the elevator on the seventh floor, and as we were walking down the corridor, I noticed two people coming down the corridor toward us.”

“Now, when you say ‘down the corridor,’ do you mean from the direction of Apartment 702?”

“That’s right, yes, sir.”

“And who were these people?”

“Mr. Perry Mason and his secretary, Miss Street.”

“And did you actually enter the apartment of Carver Clements?”

“I did not.”

“Why not?”

“When I got to the door of Apartment 702, I pushed the doorbell and heard the sound of the buzzer on the inside of the apartment. Almost instantly the door of an apartment across the hall opened, and a woman complained that she had been unable to sleep because of people ringing the buzzer of that apartment, and stated, in effect, that other people were in there with Mr. Clements. So we left immediately.”

“Now, then, Your Honor,” Stewart Linn said, “I propose to show that the two people referred to by the person living in the apartment across the hallway were none other than Mr. Mason and Miss Street, who had actually entered that apartment and were in there with the dead man and the evidence for an undetermined length of time.”

“Go ahead and show it,” Judge Jordan said.

“Just a moment,” Mason said. “Before you do that, I want to cross-examine this witness.”

“Cross-examine him, then.”

“When you arrived at the Mandrake Arms, Mr. Ralston, the door to the street was locked, was it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do?”

“We went up to the seventh floor and—”

“I understand that, but how did you get in? How did you get past the entrance door? You had a key, didn’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then how did you get in?”

“Why you let us in.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”