“But why was the clock twenty-five minutes slow when it was first found?” Drake asked.
Mason grinned. “Because, in order to make the thing work right, Burt Strague wanted to have his alarm clock synchronized with Rodney Beaton’s watch, and Rodney Beaton’s watch was notoriously inaccurate, so Burt made an excuse to get the time from Beaton and then set his own watch accordingly, and subsequently set the alarm clock according to that time... Once the clock was discovered, we might have tumbled to what it was all about if it hadn’t been for the fact that I, myself, mixed the case up by injecting this angle of sidereal time. Having done this to fool the police and the district attorneys of Kern and Los Angeles Counties, I then proceeded to get fooled by it myself, because the murderer promptly picked up my idea and adopted it as his own... And now, we’re going to quit talking about the case and have a drink of good old brandy.”
“What will they do?” Della Street asked.
“They’ll figure the thing out, give Burt Strague the third-degree, and probably get a confession,” Mason said. “Strague is something of a weakling, an introvert — the type that is emotional. He won’t be a hard nut to crack. I feel sorry for his sister, though. She couldn’t have known anything about it, and she’s a nice kid... Well, here’s to crime.”
The door from the outer office opened. Gertie said, “Mr. Vincent Blane is here. He says he must see you at once.”
“Show him in,” Mason said.
As Vincent Blane entered the office, Mason took another glass from the drawer of his desk.
“You’re just in time,” Mason said.
Blane was so excited he could hardly talk. “He confessed,” he said. “They got him. He told them all about it, and where he hid the ninety thousand he hijacked from the mine — and about planting that picture. It was an alibi so he could get into Jack’s home and—”
Mason said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Blane, we just finished a postmortem on the case, and decided we weren’t going to talk about it until we’d had one good drink.”
Vincent Blane seemed somewhat annoyed for a moment, then he grinned and dropped wearily into the big overstuffed leather chair. “At times, Mr. Mason,” he said, “you get some remarkably fine ideas. If there’s enough of that stuff in the bottle, let’s make it two good drinks.”