“What do you mean, all the factors of the solution?”
“Don’t you remember?” Mason said. “We talked it over and decided that the two people who were involved must be persons who couldn’t afford to be seen together, and who couldn’t communicate by telephone, but who both had access to that basement. We thought about a person being deaf or being so crippled he couldn’t get to a telephone, but the true solution never occurred to me.”
“Which was?” she asked.
“Exceedingly simple. Rebecca could get to the telephone all right when she was called, but only after the children had answered the phone first, and she couldn’t put through outside calls without arousing suspicions because she had lived so much as a recluse.”
“But why couldn’t Wenston simply have called and asked for — oh, I see, — that lisp of his. Anyone would have noticed it at once, and then after the case developed, it would have been commented on. His lisp is sufficiently pronounced so no one would ever forget it, once they had heard it.”
Mason said, “That is it. And, having laid down all of the basic factors for a solution I simply failed to apply them.”
“But I thought you said the voice of the woman who called you was very cultured and...”
“Don’t forget,” Mason said, “Rebecca has remarkable powers of mimicry. Remember the way she imitated Opal Sunley’s voice? She even tried to mimic Mrs. Gentrie’s voice, but she was smart enough to know that she would have to make it sound as though she were in great agony, to cover up any little defects in impersonation. Read me her confession, Della. I want to check certain details.”
Della Street said, “I’ll have to read it from my shorthand notes.”
“Go ahead.”
She opened her notebook, read, “I, Rebecca Gentrie, make this voluntary confession so Lieutenant Tragg will see how stupid he was. He thought he could flatter me and pull the wool over my eyes. All the time I was laughing at him. I take the full responsibility for the murders. I don’t want Rodney Wenston to be charged with them. He didn’t have anything to do with them.
“Rodney and I met by accident after Karr took the flats next door. It was a case of love at first sight. I have always enjoyed fake photography. With a little practice, a person can transpose negatives in an enlarging camera so faces can be changed from one person to another. I had made a picture of myself and put Hedy LaMarr’s face on it. I happened to have it in my hand when I stepped out in the yard between the flats. Mr. Wenston was there. I showed him the picture, and he became interested in my photography. I took him into my darkroom and showed him around and told him how skillful I’d become in switching faces around. I thought perhaps I could do something with it commercially because lots of times when a person is being photographed, he’ll like one picture of his face, but not the pose of the body.
“Rodney told me afterwards he fell desperately in love with me then and there, although he didn’t show it at all until three days later, when I saw him again. Then he couldn’t conceal it.
“I have always hated my sister-in-law. I never wanted to live with her. I hated the children. I wanted a car. I could never even learn to drive while I was living there. I couldn’t get a chance at the car. Then Rodney told me a scheme by which he could make enough money to marry me, and we could live in style, and go around the world taking pictures. All I had to do was to take an old photograph of Doris Wickford’s family and place the head of another man on the body of the father in the picture. I told him I could do it if I could get both of the negatives. He gave me one of the negatives and explained that the other was kept in the safe over in Hocksley’s flat. He said Hocksley was a blind, that his stepfather had rented that flat under the name of Hocksley. Rodney wasn’t supposed to know this. They kept that lower flat so closely guarded he couldn’t ever get in to the safe. There was a housekeeper who was really in on the secret, and a secretary who didn’t know too much. There was also his stepfather’s bodyguard, Johns Blaine, and Gow Loong, the Chinese. These people used the back stairs to go up and down from the lower flat. They claimed they were doing some business with this man Hocksley. Rodney found out that it was no such thing. Hocksley had been one of the partners in the gun-running business they’d had twenty years ago. Hocksley had sold out then. Afterwards, he’d done some gun-running and double-crossed his Chinese customers, tipping the Japs off to when and where the guns were going to be put on Chinese junks. As a result, the Japanese were letting all of Hocksley’s business go through, so Karr simply took the name of Hocksley.
“Once, when Rodney flew his stepfather to San Francisco, Karr went very sound asleep and Rodney was able to get a notebook from his pocket. There was a string of figures in this notebook, and Rodney decided it was the combination of the safe. He told me to go over and try it. He said I’d better take a gun just in case anything happened. Rodney was the only one who could manufacture an emergency which would take everyone out of the house except the old cripple. In order to do that, he had to leave himself. It was going to take quite a little planning to make it work. He fixed the time as midnight and agreed that he’d leave an empty can on the shelf as a signal. If anything turned up, he’d scratch a code message on the inside of the tin. If there was no message it simply meant everything was fixed for midnight the night the tin was placed on the shelf.
“We had to communicate that way because I couldn’t get to a telephone very well, and if Rodney called me, his voice would have been recognized.
“The yard between the Gentrie house and the flat was sort of common property. Rodney had access to that and had had a key made which would fit the door in the garage. Because the housekeeper didn’t like him and was suspicious of him, Rodney thought it would be better if we were never seen together, so he arranged this signal and the code. Occasionally, when I’d see him in the yard, he’d bow and smile, and I’d also bow and smile very impersonally, although I could feel my heart pounding until I grew dizzy.
“The night of the shooting, everything went wrong. In the first place, my sister-in-law found the can Rodney had placed as a signal. This was before I had gone downstairs. I was afraid she’d be suspicious, but I kept commenting about the tin, and I saw she had no idea that it might be a signal. I intended to get down afterwards, find where she’d left the can, and see if there was a code message scratched in it. Then I found Arthur had used it for paint. Apparently, there wasn’t any message. I got Steele to look at the can. Of course, Steele didn’t know why. I simply told him that I wanted to find out about the can because I thought it was a very peculiar circumstance. I didn’t know then Steele was a detective. I found that out later.
“Because of a mistake, I didn’t get the message about disconnecting the burglar alarm. I went over shortly after midnight and got the safe open. I got a lot of papers out of the safe, and then I heard steps coming, slow, halting, ominous steps. I hid behind the safe. Karr entered the room and came directly toward me. At first, I thought he didn’t know I was there; then he told me to come out. I shot. He fell over, and then I was completely paralyzed with fright. After a few moments, I started out of the house, and then I saw Junior coming in, lighting matches. I almost killed him. I kept backing away. He couldn’t see me because the light of the matches was dazzling his eyes. I moved back and hid behind the safe. He telephoned that little floozy with the painted fingernails, wanting to know if she was all right. When he found she was, he went back out. I was trapped in that room. Karr was lying there unconscious, but I didn’t dare to go out, right on Junior’s heels. I waited for several minutes. I took the negative I wanted out of the envelope and put the rest of the things back in the safe, closed and locked the safe; then I started out.