The young woman who advanced to the stand was very different from the disheveled and nervous individual who had been so angry at the time Mason and Della Street had pressed the button of Apartment 702.

“Your name is Shirley Tanner, and you reside in Apartment 701 of the Mandrake Arms Apartments?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And have for how long?”

She smiled, and said, “Not very long. I put in three weeks apartment hunting and finally secured a sublease on Apartment 701 on the afternoon of the eighth. I moved in on the ninth, which explains why I was tired almost to the point of hysterics.”

“You had difficulty sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“And on the morning of the tenth did you have any experiences which annoyed you—experiences in connection with the ringing of the buzzer in the apartment next door?”

“I most certainly did, yes, sir.”

“Tell us exactly what happened.”

“I had been taking sleeping medicine from time to time, but for some reason or other this night I was so nervous the sleeping medicine didn’t do me any good. I had been unpacking, and my nerves were all keyed up. I was physically and mentally exhausted but I was too tired to sleep.

“Well, I was trying to sleep, and I think I had just got to sleep when I was awakened by a continual sounding of the buzzer in the apartment across the hall. It was a low, persistent noise which became very irritating in my nervous state.”

“Go on,” Linn said. “What did you do?”

“I finally got up and put on a robe and went to the door and flung it open. I was terribly angry at the very idea of people making so much noise at that hour of the morning. You see those apartments aren’t too soundproof and there is a ventilating system over the doors of the apartments, The one over the door of 702 was apparently open and I had left mine open for night-time ventilation. And then I was angry at myself for getting so upset over the noise. I knew it would prevent me from sleeping at all, which is why I lay still for what seemed an interminable time before I opened the door.”

Linn smiled. “And you say you flung open the door?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you find?”

“Two people across the hall.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“I didn’t know them at the time but I know them now.”

“Who were they?”

She pointed a dramatic finger a Perry Mason. “Mr. Perry Mason, the lawyer for the defendant, and the young woman, I believe his secretary, who is sitting there beside him—not the defendant, but the woman on the other side.”

“Miss Della Street,” Mason said with a bow.

“Thank you,” she said.

“And,” Linn went on, “what did you see those people do?”

She said, “I saw them enter the apartment.”