“Sure, it was,” Mason said. “But there was no date on the card, only on the postmark. People seldom date picture post cards. Don’t you see? There’s only one explanation. It was a card he’d written Helen when he and Matilda Shore had been visiting there the winter before. He’d probably slipped it in the pocket of one of his suits and had forgotten to mail it. Matilda found it when she was cleaning out his closet soon after his disappearance. It gave her a chance to ring in an artistic touch to the whole case. So six months after the ‘disappearance’ Helen gets a card mailed from Florida. I don’t know how Matilda got it mailed, but it could have been done in any number of ways. Too, that gave her a chance to concoct this story of the mysterious double, which would confuse the police even more when she wanted to arrange for a ‘reappearance’ and make it seem Franklin Shore had really killed Leech.” Mason sucked in a prodigious yawn. “I’m getting sleepy.”
Della Street said, “I think you’re the most baffling and the most exasperating individual I’ve ever known.”
“What’s wrong now?”
She said, “All these clues are so plain once you explain them. That’s what makes it so particularly exasperating. They’re so very, very plain. The answer is obvious, once you really look at them properly arranged. But somehow I can’t ever arrange them and interpret them.”
Mason said, “But it’s all there. The kitten jumping onto the warm bed, the handkerchief with a laundry mark ten years old, the watch that was wound at four o’clock in the afternoon — a time when no person would normally wind a watch. The post card sent in summer, but obviously written in winter...”
“And you’re not going to help Hamilton Burger figure this out?”
“Not a bit of it. Let him fry.”
“Are you going to let her get away with this, and...”
“She won’t get away with it,” Mason said. “Tragg will eventually figure it out. He probably has the kitten angle straight already. He’ll go digging up the body of Phil Lunk, and find it’s really that of Franklin Shore. He’ll begin to wonder who could have driven the car that struck down Tom Lunk, and will reason it out that it must have been the person who had killed Leech, trying to silence the lips of a man who might talk too much. And you have to hand it to Lunk. He played that most deadly efficient of all parts — that of a witness who is smart, but pretends to be stupid. His lying about Franklin Shore’s visit was a masterpiece. But that, of course, is one of the things an investigator has to remember. A murderer will naturally lie, and a person who is clever enough to work out an ingenious murder plan will be clever enough to work out an ingenious lie. Matilda had, of course, helped him. They’d worked that all out in detail. But if it hadn’t been for that kitten, they’d have fooled us — for a while, anyway.
“And believe me, darling, the next time I get in on a case, Hamilton Burger and Tragg won’t tell me the proper place for me is in my office waiting for clues to turn up. They’re going to be in a hot, hot spot for some time now, and when they finally do get it solved, they’ll realize I had the answers all along.”
Della Street confessed, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You had me scared.”
“Afraid you were going to get convicted?”
“I... I didn’t know. It seemed so darn hopeless when I saw all that circumstantial evidence piling up.”
Mason took one hand from the steering wheel to slip around her shoulders. “My dear, you should always have confidence in your lawyer,” he told her gravely.