Tragg frowned, looked at Mrs. Gentrie, and said, “Mrs. Gentrie, I’m going to ask you . . .”

  “You don’t need to,” she flared. “I’ve put up with a lot of official stupidity and a lot of bungling in this case. I realize that people can’t be perfect, but I’ve never seen such utter ignorance as . . .”

  Mason interrupted to say to Lieutenant Tragg, “Of course, she’ll make all sorts of denials—now. She wanted to lure me down here so that she could kill me—probably not here in the house, but maybe as I left my apartment. You see, she’d got that message and believed what it said. And, in case you haven’t as yet figured out the code . . .”

  “I have,” Tragg interposed.

  “Then you understand what I was trying to do?”

  Tragg nodded slowly. “I didn’t realize it was a trap at the time,” he said. “I thought you were holding out on me, and I was planning to do something about that.” Mason yawned, said, “Well, as soon as the telephone rang, I began to stall her along. I made her think I was pretty drunk. You see, Tragg, only two persons have the number of my private unlisted telephone. They are Paul Drake and Della Street; but, in an emergency the other night, we gave the number to the woman who was pretending to be Mrs. Sarah Perlin. That person must have murdered Mrs. Perlin. So when my telephone rang and it wasn’t either Della Street or Paul Drake, I knew I was talking to the murderer. I pretended that the champagne I’d taken at Rodney Wenston’s wedding had been too much for me.”

  “Wenston’s wedding!” Tragg exclaimed in surprise. “Is he married?”

  “You didn’t know?” Mason asked.

  Tragg shook his head.

  Mason said, “He married Doris Wickford. You can rest assured Wenston would never have permitted Doris Wickford to have made a claim against a full half of Elston Karr’s property without having seen to it that she couldn’t give him the horselaugh afterwards.”

  “You mean Wenston was back of that?” Tragg asked.

  “Of course, he was,” Mason said with an amused smile. “Karr had some money that would have belonged to Tucker’s heirs. He didn’t know, however, his dead partner had left an heir until he found it out by accident. He advertised to try and find her.

  “That, of course, was too good an opportunity for Wenston to miss. He knew that he had only to fake a few letters, putting in facts which he already knew from his intimate association with Karr in order to make a pretty good claim. If he could have the claimant produce a picture of her father which would tally with that of Dow Tucker, it would make the case absolutely ironclad.

  “The probabilities are that Wenston stumbled on to the person he planted as the daughter by accident, and before he got the idea of palming her off as the heiress. In all probability, Doris Wickford’s father actually did go to China, and wrote her a few letters. As a stamp collector, she had saved the envelopes. Wenston probably happened to be looking over her stamp album, and, seeing the entire envelope with its postmark and canceled stamp, got the idea. Well, Lieutenant, I’ll leave you with your case. If you’ll take Mrs. Gentrie into custody, I feel quite certain you’ll be able to work out a good case against her. And now, if you’ll pardon me, I’ll go back and try to get some sleep.”

  Mason turned and started for the door.

  “Look here,” Tragg said, coming after him, “you can’t walk out on me this way. I’m not certain you’ve even got a good case against Mrs. Gentrie. As far as that telephone business is concerned, it’s your word against hers.”

  Mason said, “Well, I’ve given you enough stuff to work on, Lieutenant. The obvious facts are now in your command. You can let them all go now, except Mrs. Gentrie.”

  One of the children began to cry. Mrs. Gentrie got slowly to her feet. “You’re not going to do this in front of my children. You’re not. . .”

  One of the radio officers put a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Sit down,” he said.

  Arthur Gentrie pushed back his chair. “Now, you listen . . .”

  Two officers held him.

  Mason said, “That’s all there is to it, Lieutenant. Good night.”

  He opened the door and ran rapidly down the steps.

  Tragg shouted after him, “Hey, you! Mason! You’re not leaving now!” He jerked open the door and ran down the steps after the lawyer.

  Perry Mason paused by the curb. Tragg came running up to him, his manner bristling with indignation. “You look here,” he said in a loud voice. “You’ve given me some ingenious theories, but . . .” He drew close to the lawyer, suddenly lowered his voice, said, “What is this, a trap?”

  “Uh huh,” Mason said. “Come on, Tragg. We should be in at the finish.”

  “Where?”

  “This way.”

  Mason ran lightly around the corner by the garages. “Give me a boost up the fence, Tragg,” he said, “and then I’ll pull you up.”

  Tragg boosted Mason up the high board fence. Once on top, Mason reached down and gave Tragg a hand up. Together, the two men dropped silently into the dark yard between the Gentrie house and the two-flat building.

  “Now what?” Tragg whispered.

  “Wait,” Mason said.

  They waited in the darkness for almost a minute. Then quietly the door in the garage opened, and a dark figure tiptoed silently across the yard to the side door of the Hocksley flat. A key clicked against the lock. The door was opened, and the figure slipped inside.

  Mason and Tragg moved cautiously across the lot. The door was still ajar. Motioning for silence, Mason led the way into the warm darkness of the flat. Listening intently, they could hear the sound of the dial on a telephone; then, after a moment, a woman’s voice sharp with emotion said, “What kind of a game do you think you’re playing? What’s this I heard about you marrying that little devil, that . . . Yes, you did, too! You were married to her this morning. Well, last night then. Don’t lie to me! After all I’ve done for you, don’t think I’m going to let you get away with that. The minute you try anything like that, you’re all finished. . . . Well, he said so. . . . Mr. Mason. . . . I don’t think it was a trap. No. I didn’t say a word. . . . You wouldn’t lie to me? You darling No-o-o-o-o. I didn’t really believe it, not down in my heart, but I wanted to find out. I—I must get back. The officers are over there. Mason is getting awfully close to what actually happened. You’ll have to do something about him at once. Remember now, I’ve taken care of the others for you. You’ve got to do this for me. All right, lover.”

  The receiver clicked. There was the sound of rustling garments as a figure approached them.

  “Okay,” Mason said in a low whisper.

  Lieutenant Tragg’s flashlight sent a pencil of white brilliance through the darkness, a pencil which stabbed the white, frightened face of Rebecca Gentrie, and held it in a pitiless glare.

  Chapter 19

  Morning sun was touching the tips of the tall buildings as Mason, emerging from the Gentrie residence, helped Della Street into his automobile and said, “Well, I guess we’re entitled to play hookey today. Putting you on a day and night schedule and then having you type a confession afterwards is a little too much of a strain, isn’t it?”

  She said, “Wouldn’t it be swell to take a plane over to Catalina, put on bathing suits, and just lie around in the sun, sleeping and eating hot dogs?”

  “Temptress!” Mason charged.

  She said, “If you’d drive right to the beach, we could catch the first plane over.”

  Mason turned the steering wheel of his automobile toward Wilmington. “I think,” he said, “this is the direction of the office, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, keep going straight ahead,” she said.

  “I’m a little dopey this morning,” Mason confessed, “so I’ll have to rely on you. If we should get lost, we’d have to telephone the office and explain to Gertie.”

  “Gertie’s a good sport. You don’t have to explain things to her. She’ll stall off any clients.”

  “You’re acting as though we were going to get lost,” Mason said.

  “No, indeed. You’re headed for the office right now. Listen, you’ve been holding out on me again.”

  “No. Honest I haven’t.”

  “On Rebecca?”

  Mason laughed. “Believe it or not,” he said, “after having all of the factors for a solution in my hands, I couldn’t put them together.”

  “What do you mean, all the factors of the solution?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Mason said. “We talked it over and decided that the two people who were involved must be persons who couldn’t afford to be seen together, and who couldn’t communicate by telephone, but who both had access to that basement. We thought about a person being deaf or being so crippled he couldn’t get to a telephone, but the true solution never occurred to me.”

  “Which was?” she asked.

  “Exceedingly simple. Rebecca could get to the telephone all right when she was called, but only after the children had answered the phone first, and she couldn’t put through outside calls without arousing suspicions because she had lived so much as a recluse.”

  “But why couldn’t Wenston simply have called and asked for—oh, I see,—that lisp of his. Anyone would have noticed it at once, and then after the case developed, it would have been commented on. His lisp is sufficiently pronounced so no one would ever forget it, once they had heard it.”

  Mason said, “That is it. And, having laid down all of the basic factors for a solution I simply failed to apply them.”

  “But I thought you said the voice of the woman who called you was very cultured and . . .”

  “Don’t forget,” Mason said, “Rebecca has remarkable powers of mimicry. Remember the way she imitated Opal Sunley’s voice? She even tried to mimic Mrs. Gentrie’s voice, but she was smart enough to know that she would have to make it sound as though she were in great agony, to cover up any little defects in impersonation. Read me her confession, Della. I want to check certain details.”

  Della Street said, “I’ll have to read it from my shorthand notes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She opened her notebook, read, “I, Rebecca Gentrie, make this voluntary confession so Lieutenant Tragg will see how stupid he was. He thought he could flatter me and pull the wool over my eyes. All the time I was laughing at him. I take the full responsibility for the murders. I don’t want Rodney Wenston to be charged with them. He didn’t have anything to do with them.

  “Rodney and I met by accident after Karr took the flats next door. It was a case of love at first sight. I have always enjoyed fake photography. With a little practice, a person can transpose negatives in an enlarging camera so faces can be changed from one person to another. I had made a picture of myself and put Hedy LaMarr’s face on it. I happened to have it in my hand when I stepped out in the yard between the flats. Mr. Wenston was there. I showed him the picture, and he became interested in my photography. I took him into my darkroom and showed him around and told him how skillful I’d become in switching faces around. I thought perhaps I could do something with it commercially because lots of times when a person is being photographed, he’ll like one picture of his face, but not the pose of the body.

  “Rodney told me afterwards he fell desperately in love with me then and there, although he didn’t show it at all until three days later, when I saw him again. Then he couldn’t conceal it.

  “I have always hated my sister-in-law. I never wanted to live with her. I hated the children. I wanted a car. I could never even learn to drive while I was living there. I couldn’t get a chance at the car. Then Rodney told me a soheme by which he could make enough money to marry me, and we could live in style, and go around the world taking pictures. All I had to do was to take an old photograph of Doris Wickford’s family and place the head of another man on the body of the father in the picture. I told him I could do it if I could get both of the negatives. He gave me one of the negatives and explained that the other was kept in the safe over in Hocksley’s flat. He said Hocksley was a blind, that his stepfather had rented that flat under the name of Hocksley. Rodney wasn’t supposed to know this. They kept that lower flat so closely guarded he couldn’t ever get in to the safe. There was a housekeeper who was really in on the secret, and a secretary who didn’t know too much. There was also his stepfather’s bodyguard, Johns Blaine, and Gow Loong, the Chinese. These people used the back stairs to go up and down from the lower flat. They claimed they were doing some business with this man Hocksley. Rodney found out that it was no such thing. Hocksley had been one of the partners in the gun-running business they’d had twenty years ago. Hocksley had sold out then. Afterwards, he’d done some gun-running and double-crossed his Chinese customers, tipping the Japs off to when and where the guns were going to be put on Chinese junks. As a result, the Japanese were letting all of Hocksley’s business go through, so Karr simply took the name of Hocksley.

  “Once, when Rodney flew his stepfather to San Francisco, Karr went very sound asleep and Rodney was able to get a notebook from his pocket. There was a string of figures in this notebook, and Rodney decided it was the combination of the safe. He told me to go over and try it. He said I’d better take a gun just in case anything happened. Rodney was the only one who could manufacture an emergency which would take everyone out of the house except the old cripple. In order to do that, he had to leave himself. It was going to take quite a little planning to make it work. He fixed the time as midnight and agreed that he’d leave an empty can on the shelf as a signal. If anything turned up, he’d scratch a code message on the inside of the tin. If there was no message it simply meant everything was fixed for midnight the night the tin was placed on the shelf.

  “We had to communicate that way because I couldn’t get to a telephone very well, and if Rodney called me, his voice would have been recognized.

  “The yard between the Gentrie house and the flat was sort of common property. Rodney had access to that and had had a key made which would fit the door in the garage. Because the housekeeper didn’t like him and was suspicious of him, Rodney thought it would be better if we were never seen together, so he arranged this signal and the code. Occasionally, when I’d see him in the yard, he’d bow and smile, and I’d also bow and smile very impersonally, although I could feel my heart pounding until I grew dizzy.

  “The night of the shooting, everything went wrong. In the first place, my sister-in-law found the can Rodney had placed as a signal. This was before I had gone downstairs. I was afraid she’d be suspicious, but I kept commenting about the tin, and I saw she had no idea that it might be a signal. I intended to get down afterwards, find where she’d left the can, and see if there was a code message scratched in it. Then I found Arthur had used it for paint. Apparently, there wasn’t any message. I got Steele to look at the can. Of course, Steele didn’t know why. I simply told him that I wanted to find out about the can because I thought it was a very peculiar circumstance. I didn’t know then Steele was a detective. I found that out later.

  “Because of a mistake, I didn’t get the message about disconnecting the burglar alarm. I went over shortly after midnight and got the safe open. I got a lot of papers out of the safe, and then I heard steps coming, slow, halting, ominous steps. I hid behind the safe. Karr entered the room and came directly toward me. At first, I thought he didn’t know I was there; then he told me to come out. I shot. He fell over, and then I was completely paralyzed with fright. After a few moments, I started out of the house, and then I saw Junior coming in, lighting matches. I almost killed him. I kept backing away. He couldn’t see me because the light of the matches was dazzling his eyes. I moved back and hid behind the safe. He telephoned that little floozy with the painted fingernails, wanting to know if she was all right. When he found she was, he went back out. I was trapped in that room. Karr was lying there unconscious, but I didn’t dare to go out, right on Junior’s heels. I waited for several minutes. I took the negative I wanted out of the envelope and put the rest of the things back in the safe, closed and locked the safe; then I started out.

  “I was near the door when I heard a key click in the lock. The door opened and the housekeeper came in. I should have shot her then, but I tried to rely on surprise and rush past her in the dark. She grabbed at me. I struck at her with the gun. She tore a piece of cloth from my dress, but I fought free and slammed the door. Then I sneaked in and went to bed. I didn’t know a piece was gone from my dress until the next day. She’d seen that dress. Sooner or later she’d identify the piece she’d torn out.

  “I heard people from next door take the car out of the garage. I knew they were driving the old man to a doctor. Rodney had told me about the housekeeper having her own place at East Hillgrade Avenue. I went out there the next night to try and make a deal with her. She knew she’d seen the pattern on the dress somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. That was all that had saved me. She’d have thought of it later. She was going to turn me in to the police. She pointed a gun at me. I struggled with her. The gun went off in the struggle. I really didn’t intend to kill her.

  “I wasn’t the least bit panic-stricken. I thought I could ring up Mr. Mason and Opal Sunley and pretend to be the housekeeper, confessing to the murder, and then make it seem logical she’d committed suicide. It almost worked. I did intend to kill Steele, the snoop. He’d been prowling around. He knew too much. I found a telegram in his pocket sending him to San Francisco. I knew I had to kill him to save Rodney. I didn’t care for myself, but I couldn’t let Rodney be dragged into it. I love Rodney as I have never believed it possible for a woman to love.

  “Afterwards, when the message in the second can said that Perry Mason had fingerprints, I thought of a marvelous scheme to clean up the whole business. I have always hated my sister-in-law. Lots of times I’ve thought I’d like to kill her. I rang up Mason, pretended to be Florence, confessed to the murders, and said I was going to kill myself. Then I only needed to go quietly to Florence’s room, tell her that I had heard the phone ringing and had answered it, that Mason wanted to talk with her and was holding the line. Arthur sleeps so soundly I could have done this without waking him. When she came down to the telephone, I’d have shot her and then put the gun in her hand.