“You don’t need to,” she flared. “I’ve put up with a lot of official stupidity and a lot of bungling in this case. I realize that people can’t be perfect, but I’ve never seen such utter ignorance as...”
Mason interrupted to say to Lieutenant Tragg, “Of course, she’ll make all sorts of denials — now. She wanted to lure me down here so that she could kill me — probably not here in the house, but maybe as I left my apartment. You see, she’d got that message and believed what it said. And, in case you haven’t as yet figured out the code...”
“I have,” Tragg interposed.
“Then you understand what I was trying to do?”
Tragg nodded slowly. “I didn’t realize it was a trap at the time,” he said. “I thought you were holding out on me, and I was planning to do something about that.”
Mason yawned, said, “Well, as soon as the telephone rang, I began to stall her along. I made her think I was pretty drunk. You see, Tragg, only two persons have the number of my private unlisted telephone. They are Paul Drake and Della Street; but, in an emergency the other night, we gave the number to the woman who was pretending to be Mrs. Sarah Perlin. That person must have murdered Mrs. Perlin. So when my telephone rang and it wasn’t either Della Street or Paul Drake, I knew I was talking to the murderer. I pretended that the champagne I’d taken at Rodney Wenston’s wedding had been too much for me.”
“Wenston’s wedding!” Tragg exclaimed in surprise. “Is he married?”
“You didn’t know?” Mason asked.
Tragg shook his head.
Mason said, “He married Doris Wickford. You can rest assured Wenston would never have permitted Doris Wickford to have made a claim against a full half of Elston Karr’s property without having seen to it that she couldn’t give him the horselaugh afterwards.”