Karr said, “I don’t think I can add anything to what Mr. Mason has said.”
“I’ve been talking it over with him,” Mason observed easily, “and he isn’t certain of a thing, Tragg. That’s why I told you I didn’t think he could help you much.”
Tragg said to Karr, “What do you know about this man, Hocksley, who lived in the flat below you?”
“Not a thing,” Karr said. “I’ve never so much as set eyes on the man. You see, I’m confined to my wheelchair and bed. I’m not interested in the neighbors, and I don’t particularly care about having them interested in me. Even if Hocksley had lived a completely normal, ordinary life, I probably would never have seen him; but he didn’t.”
“In what way didn’t he?”
“I think,” Karr said, “the man must have slept most of the day, because I’d heard him up at all hours of the night. He did a lot of talking down there. It sounded as though it was dictation he was pouring into a dictating machine...”
“Why not to a stenographer?” Tragg asked.
“It may have been,” Karr said, “but it sounded more like a dictating machine, a steady, even monotone of fast dictation with virtually no pauses. I’ve noticed that when people dictate to stenographers, they pause every little while — that is, most of them do. Then they’ll have intervals of real long pauses while they’re waiting for ideas. Something about a dictating machine which speeds up a man’s concentration. He feeds the stuff right into it. Anyway, that’s the way I’ve always thought about it.”
Tragg frowned and looked down at the toes of his shoes. After a while he said, “Humph,” then turned to regard Mason thoughtfully.
“Oh, well,” Mason said cheerfully, “it’ll probably work out all right. It’s been my experience there are always these little discrepancies in a case. What happened, Tragg?”