“Exactly,” Mason said. “I don’t see any other way out of it. The secretary has to be lying.”
“Why?”
Mason said, “Your guess is as good as mine, but let’s look at the thing from a viewpoint of sound common sense. To begin with, we’re pretty safe in assuming that Tidings wasn’t dead when he was taken into the house. He was mortally wounded. Apparently he died very shortly after he was stretched out on the bed. Whoever helped Tidings into the house, and stretched him out on the bed, turned on the gas heat to warm up the room, probably went into the bathroom to get some towels to stop the flow of blood, or perhaps ran to the telephone to get a doctor — and Tidings died.
“Then they got in a panic, surveyed the situation, and decided to skip out; and having made that decision, whoever it was had every reason to believe that it would be a considerable period of time before the body was found — that it would be difficult if not impossible to fix the exact time of death. So off came Tidings’ shoes.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you see?” Mason said. “The shoes furnish a valuable clue.”
“To what?”
“To the time of death.”
“No,” Drake said, “I don’t see.”
Mason said, “I think the shoes were taken off after Tidings died, and that the person who took them off was a woman.”