“It wasn’t something on the spur of the moment?”
“I think the thing that caused him to call on me was something that happened rather unexpectedly, and apparently he’d decided some time ago that if he ever needed a lawyer he’d call on me, and he blueprinted his plans for reaching me and filed them away in the back of his mind. It’s indicative of the man’s character.”
“But how about that elevator business?” Della Street asked.
“That,” Mason said, “was a case where luck played into his hands. He owns a controlling stock interest in this building. He probably has duplicate keys to everything. Just as a matter of precaution, I didn’t leave that fragment of the ten-thousand-dollar bill in the office overnight. I figured a man who had a key to the elevator would very probably have a passkey to my office.”
“How about the woman? Do you think he’d planned to consult you in connection with her?”
“No. I think that was something that developed rather unexpectedly,” Mason said musingly. “Take that mask for instance. I’m virtually certain it had been part of a costume at a masquerade ball. It was a black mask with tinsel trimming. Evidently, it had been made to go with a masquerade costume — one of the things a woman would file away in a drawer of keepsakes.”
“Couldn’t you tell anything about her, Chief?”
“I’d say she was not over thirty,” Mason said, “and that she had a good figure. Her hands were small, but she was wearing gloves much too large. There were a couple of rings on the right hand, and one on the left. You could see the outlines through the gloves. She’d turned them so that the stones were on the inside.”
“Wedding ring?” she asked.
“I don’t think there was a wedding ring. And she was afraid to let me hear her voice.”