“Who?”
Mason grinned. “The one who pulled the trigger.”
Drake reached for the telephone, said to the switchboard operator, his voice low-pitched from sheer physical fatigue, “Get me the airport. I want to rent a good cabin plane for a rush trip to San Francisco.”
Mason nodded to Della Street. “Okay, Della, let’s go tackle the other end of this case.”
Driving out to Mrs. Gentrie’s, Mason said, “I should have had Steele spotted a long time ago.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Simple,” Mason said. “Remember when we were talking over the case, I said that the person in the house who was getting the messages must have been someone who had easy access to the dictionary, and who, for some reason, couldn’t very well be called to the telephone. Remember, Mrs. Gentrie told me right at the start that Steele had his room and was treated as one of the family, except that he didn’t have the privilege of using the telephone. There were too many people using it already. She has three children, all of whom are at the age of making dates of one kind or another. Whenever the phone rings, there’s a mad scramble to see which one gets there first. When anyone wants to call out, one of the children is nearly always using the phone. Remember what she said.”
Della nodded.
“Here I was,” Mason said whimsically, “looking for someone who couldn’t use the telephone, and I was thinking in terms of some physical handicap, such as a man who was deaf or crippled. It never occurred to me to consider the simplest possible solution — a man who was living at a place where he didn’t have the privilege of the telephone, yet who couldn’t put in a phone of his own without attracting too much attention.”
“But why was Steele killed, if he was the one for whom the messages were intended?”