"Because the letters are anonymous. No addressee. No signature. It's got to be a secret between two people. Yes?"
"I'll buy it."
"Whoever's sending those letters knows the right man will recognize them as soon as he sees them. All right. I know how to tag the one out of the eight who's getting the threats."
"How?"
"They're all in the business. Mixed up, neurotic, sick in the head like this sunny straight-jacket crowd in here right now. You have to be sick to like this rat-race. The higher up you rise in the spiral, the more precarious your balance becomes ... like a kid on ten-foot stilts."
"I think of them balancing like tightrope walkers."
"But balance is the gimmick, Kitten." Lennox pounded his point like a piledriver. "Balance. Balance. Balance. Suppose I pulled these letters on them in private, one after the other. Mason. Sachs. Stacy. Kay Hill. Plummer. Charlie Hansel. Took the letters out and said: 'This was sent to you. Read it.' Watched them read it. You know how precariously they're balanced. On twenty-foot stilts. Living on nerves. Wouldn't the impact knock them off? Wouldn't the right one give himself away?"
I thought that over. "The trouble with your idea," I objected, "is that if they're all precarious like you—"
"They are. You know that. The whole damned business is. That's what I hate about it. I feel like a visitor in a booby-hatch."
"Then they'd all be knocked off balance, guilty or not guilty. They'd all fall off their tightrope."