“Well,” Drake said. “Something happened to cause Sabin to send Waid to New York. We don’t know what that something was. We don’t know where the pay station was that Sabin telephoned from, but in all probability it was the nearest one to the cabin. We can tell more when we check up on calls; but suppose that it was twenty minutes or half an hour away from the cabin.”
“What are you getting at?” Mason asked.
“Simply this,” Drake said. “If the telephone was out of order from four o’clock on, and Sabin telephoned Waid to go to New York, Sabin must have received some information between the hours of four o’clock in the afternoon and probably nine-thirty at night which convinced him that Mrs. Sabin would be in New York on the evening of Wednesday the seventh to surrender a certified copy of the divorce decree and pick up the money.
“Now then how did he get that information? If the telephone was out of order, he couldn’t have received it over the telephone. He evidently didn’t have it at four o’clock. In other words, Perry, that information must have been obtained from someone who came to the cabin.”
“Or sent Sabin a message,” Mason said. “That’s a good point, Paul. Of course, we don’t know that the telephone went out of commission immediately after four o’clock.”
“No,” Drake said. “We don’t, but on the other hand it’s hardly probable that the telephone would have been in commission when Sabin received word that the divorce was going through all right and then gone out of commission as soon as he tried to telephone the news to Waid — which would have been immediately afterwards.”
“You forget,” Mason pointed out, his eyes narrowing into thoughtful slits, “that the telephone line was tapped.”
“By George, I do at that!” Drake exclaimed.
“Anything may happen on a tapped line,” Mason said. “The wire-tappers could have thrown the telephone out of commission at a moment’s notice, and may have done so.”
“What would have been their object?” Drake asked.