“She didn’t pack. She left that for Rita to do. And the body was in Walter’s bedroom, not hers.”
“Well, after Rita came to the house, then what happened?”
“That,” Mason said, “is something else. Of course, Rita might or might not have gone into Walter’s bedroom. Rosalind would have left the dress in her bedroom. Rita could have gone there and changed, then gone down and clipped the claws on the canary. Naturally, she was thinking more of registering with Mrs. Snoops than of what she was doing, so she clipped the right foot twice, without noticing that the right foot had been finished, while the left foot hadn’t.”
“One thing, Chief,” Della Street said, as she stared at him through thought-slitted eyes: “Why do you say Rosalind Prescott said, ‘I’m going to Reno’?”
Mason grinned and said, “That’s a break. I went down to talk with Karl Helmold about the canary. Rita Swaine had told him I sent her, but she’d given him the name of Mildred Owens and the address as General Delivery, Reno. You see, Della, she intended to leave the canary there temporarily, but to send for him later on. Perhaps she knew that her name was going to be in the papers. Perhaps she’d already picked the alias of Mildred Owens and wanted to have it so the canary could be sent to her under her alias without any trouble, and whenever she wrote for it.”
Della Street, staring at him, said, “And that means you’re going to Reno?”
He nodded. “We’re going.”
“Going to try to beat the cops to it?”
Again he nodded, “And it may be dangerous, Della. We’re playing with legal dynamite.”
She scooped up a notebook, pencils, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”