“No one knows. Apparently he slept most of the day and spent the nights dictating. He’d use a dictating machine. The girl would come in and find anywhere from two to fifteen records waiting to be transcribed. Sometimes she’d have an easy day. Sometimes she’d have a hard day. Occasionally she wouldn’t be able to even finish the work that was laid out for her. She says it was virtually all correspondence, and that she didn’t pay much attention to the contents of the letters, simply typed them out, made sure there were no typographical errors, and left them for Hocksley to sign. She also made one carbon copy. She left that for Hocksley. She doesn’t know what he did with them. The point is there aren’t any files in the house, just a dictating machine, a cylinder-shaving machine, a transcribing machine, cylinders, a big stock of stationery, envelopes, postage stamps, a pair of scales, and that’s about all in the line of office equipment — except the safe.”
“What about the safe?”
“The safe is apparently the key to the whole situation,” Drake said.
“Tragg seemed very evasive about that safe when I talked with him,” Mason said.
“He would be. It’s a safe that cost money. It stands in the corner of Hocksley’s bedroom. It isn’t the sort of safe you’d pick up second hand somewhere and use to keep the ordinary bunch of office junk. It’s a safe that has individuality and distinction.”
“What was in the safe?” Mason asked.
“That’s another thing,” Drake said. “When the police got there, there were fifty dollars in cash, about a hundred dollars in postage stamps, and not another damned thing in the safe.”
“Was it locked?”
“It was locked. Opal Sunley gave Tragg the combination.”
“Then if a burglar had been working on it, he hadn’t done himself any good.”