“You didn’t tell me anything about this,” Mason said.
“No, I didn’t. I felt rather cheap about the whole business. I realized that a man in my position couldn’t afford to admit having broken in on something of that sort. I didn’t see the woman’s face, and she hadn’t seen mine. I thought no one knew who I was.”
“Did they?”
“Some woman who lived next door. She’d heard some talk, and evidently she’s one of those curious people who peek out through window shades, and pry into other persons’ business.”
“She saw you?”
“Not when I went in, but when I came out,” Witherspoon said. “She identified the car. She’d even jotted down the license number. Why, is more than I know, but she had.”
“Didn’t she give any reason for writing down the license number?”
“I don’t know. She tells the police that she thought a woman came in with me. Probably because she heard the voice of a woman in the apartment next to hers.”
“Did some woman go in there with you?”
“No,” Witherspoon said. “Of course not. I was alone.”
“Lois wasn’t with you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Nor Mrs. Burr?”
Witherspoon shifted his eyes. “I want to talk with you about Mrs. Burr in a minute. That’s another one of those damnable things.”
“All right,” Mason said. “Tell it in your own way. It’s your funeral. You may as well make the oration.”
“Well, that woman next door reported my license number to the police. Naturally, if that duck in the goldfish bowl was my duck, and it came from my place, and Marvin Adams hadn’t brought it, the police thought perhaps I had.”
“Rather a natural assumption,” Mason commented dryly.
“I tell you it’s the damnedest combination of coincidences,” Witherspoon stormed angrily. “I get angry every time I think of it.”
“Suppose you tell me about Burr.”
“Well, this morning, of course, I told Mrs. Burr about the excitement in El Templo and about how Milter had been murdered. Roland Burr was feeling better, and he wanted to see me, so I went in and had a talk with him.”
“And you told him about it?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he was curious — the way anyone would be.”
“Did you tell him anything about Milter?” Mason asked.
“Well, a little something, not much. I’ve grown rather fond of Roland Burr. I felt that I could trust him.”
“He knew I was at the house?”
“Yes.”
“Did he know why?”
“Well — well, I think some of those things were discussed in a rather general way.”
“Then what?”
“This morning Roland Burr asked me to bring him his favorite fishing rod. I told him that I would as soon as I could get to it.”
“Where was it?”
“He said he’d left it in my den. I believe I told you that I’m particular about that den of mine. There’s a lock on the door, and I have the only key to it. I never let the servants go in there except when I unlock the door and stand around watching them. I keep quite a stock of liquor in there, and that’s one thing about these Mexicans. You can’t trust them around tequila.”
“And Burr had left his fishing rod in there?” Mason asked.
“Apparently so — that is, he said he had. I don’t remember that he did, but he must have.”
“When?”
“He was in there with me, chatting. That was the day he broke his leg, and he’d had his fishing rod with him. But I can’t remember that he left it there. I can’t remember that he didn’t. Well, anyway, he asked me to get it for him, said there was no particular hurry about it, but he’d like to have it to sort of play around with it. He’s a regular nut about fishing rods, likes to feel them, whip them in his hands, and all that sort of thing. Plays with them the way a man will play with some favorite gun, or camera, or other toy.”
“And the police know about that rod?” Mason asked.
“Oh, yes. Mrs. Burr and the doctor were there at the time. I promised I’d get it for him, and then the doctor left to drive into town; and Mrs. Burr said she’d like to go in with him. I told her I was going to be in town later on, and I’d pick her up and drive her back.”
“So she went in with the doctor?”
“Yes... That left me there in the house alone, except for the servants.”
“And what did you do?”
“Well, I fooled around for a while with some odds and ends, and intended to go into the den to get Burr’s fishing rod, as soon as I got a chance.”
“What time was this?”
“Oh, around eighty-thirty or nine o’clock I guess. I had a lot of things to do around the place, getting the men started on their work, and so forth. Burr had told me he was in no hurry for the fishing rod. Sometime in the afternoon, I think he said.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said. “Get to the point.”
“Well, about an hour later one of the servants passed by the room. You know where his room is. It’s on the ground floor, and the windows open on the patio. The servant looked through the window and saw Burr sitting in bed, and from the position in which he was sitting — well, dammit, the Mexican saw he was dead.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“The servant came and called me. I dashed to the door, opened it, saw Burr there on the bed, and immediately saw a vase sitting on the table about ten feet from the bed. I got a whiff of some peculiar gas, and it keeled me over. The Mexican dragged me out into the corridor, slammed the door shut, and called the police.
“The sheriff came out, took a look through the window, came to the conclusion the man had been killed in the same way that Milter had been killed, and smashed in the windows and let the place air out. Then the officers went in. There’s no question about it. He’d been killed in the same way — cyanide of potassium dropped into the vase of acid. The poor devil had never stood a chance. He was there on the bed with his leg in a cast and a weight on the leg suspended from a pulley. He couldn’t possibly move out of bed.”
“Where was the nurse?” Mason asked.
“That’s just it,” Witherspoon said. “That damn nurse was at the bottom of the whole business.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, she got temperamental — or Burr did. I don’t know which. The nurse is telling an absolutely preposterous story.”
“Well, where was she?” Mason asked. “I thought Burr was to have someone in constant attendance.”
Witherspoon said, “I told you that they caught Burr trying to get out of bed, that Burr said someone was trying to kill him. The doctor said it was a plain case of nervous reaction after the administration of narcotics. No one paid very much attention to it — not then. Of course, later on, when this thing happened, his words had the effect of a prophecy. So the police got in touch with the nurse. The nurse said that Burr had told her in confidence that I was the someone he expected to try and kill him.”
“The nurse hadn’t said anything about that to the authorities?”
“No. She also thought it might have been a reaction from the narcotics. The doctor was certain of it. You know how a nurse has to defer to the doctor on a case. Under the circumstances, if she’d said anything to anyone, she’d have been guilty of all sorts of professional misconduct. She had to keep her mouth shut — so she says — now.”
Mason said, “That still isn’t answering my question as to where the nurse was when all this happened.”