“Exactly,” he said.
She was laughing now. “Well, it’s a good idea. More the philosophy one would expect to hear in a taxicab driving home than in a law office. How about that code message?”
Mason said, “You would bring my nose back to the grindstone. Well, I’ll bite. What about the code?”
“Given it any thought?”
“Lots of thought, probably too much.”
“Look, Chief, if it’s a cipher, couldn’t you read it? There are nine words in the message, and I’ve always understood any cipher can be solved if there’s a long enough message.”
Mason said, “I guess that’s right, but I don’t think it’s an ordinary cipher in which letters are transposed.”
“Why not?”
“Let’s analyze this. There are nine words. Five of them begin with the letter c. The letter c is in every single word at least once.”
“Wouldn’t that indicate it was either e or a?”