“That may be a problem. After all, you were with Rose Pogue, so you can hardly go on record as being with me, and I was alone all the time, which is impossible to prove.”
“Don’t be dull, sugar. As a lawyer, you surely realize that you don’t have to prove that you weren’t in Dreamer’s Park. It will be entirely up to the police to prove that you were.”
She made it sound remarkably simple and sensible and even honorable, as if candor and deceit had somehow exchanged places with one another, and I was diagnosing this with the intent of further discussion when there was suddenly a soft, dry sound from a rear corner of the house behind us, and I turned my head and looked back there to see who or what had made the sound, and it was no one but Wilson Thatcher who had made it by coughing to attract our attention. I stood up with a queer feeling to face him, and he came across from the house to the terrace with a long-legged stride that appeared to be a kind of slow-motion lope.
Sid had said that he looked like a deacon, although possibly not always acting like one, and I guess that’s what he looked like if a deacon is tall and thin with lank black hair and a dyspeptic face with pale blue eyes tending to project. I thought to myself, watching him approach, that he had surely been no match for Beth, who had surely given him a bad time while it lasted, and I felt sorry for him all at once and hoped that his trouble, if he had any, was no worse than mine, which might be bad enough.
“Hello, Wilson,” I said.
He held out a dry hand, which I took and released, and he looked over my shoulder at Sid, who had risen and turned, and relaxed his face in a thin smile.
“I rang at the front door,” he said, “but no one answered, and so I took the liberty of walking around the house. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all. Come over and sit down.”
“Thanks. Gideon.” He stood for a moment with an air of abstraction, staring off into the dusky yard and popping his knuckles by flexing his fingers. “Perhaps I should have wailed and come to your office tomorrow, but what I want to talk about is urgent and delicate. I preferred coming here, if you don’t mind.” He folded into a chair in a kind of boneless surrender to it. “The truth is, I may need a lawyer.”
“You already have several lawyers,” I said. “What do you need with another?”
“Company lawyers. They’re all right for business matters, but this is something different. Personal. To be frank, I’ve committed an indiscretion that may prove extremely troublesome.”
I wondered if he was referring to murder, the slipping of a long, thin blade into Beth from behind, and I thought that indiscretion, if he was, was a discreet word for it.
“Indiscretions sometimes have a way of proving troublesome,” I said.
“Yes,” said Sid, “don’t they?”
“My indiscretion,” Wilson said, “was the telling of a lie.”
“That’s very interesting,” Sid said. “We were discussing the telling of lies as a matter or prudence just before you came.”
“A lie,” I said, “is scarcely a legal problem unless it was told under oath.”
“It wasn’t told under oath,” Wilson said, “but it was told to the police, which is the next thing to it. Now I’ve been compelled to retract it as a result of a later development, and my position has become difficult if not precarious.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me directly what it’s all about,” I said. “That is, if you’re serious about wanting my opinion. Not that I’d recommend me in this case. I may need a lawyer myself pretty soon.”
“Well, you may have guessed that it concerns someone we have both known quite well.”
“Beth, you mean. I’ve guessed.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He cleared his throat and popped his knuckles. “I’ve been told that you saw her and talked with her at the Carson yesterday.”
“That’s right. She told me she had come to town to ask you for money.”
“She told you that? Beth was an incredible person. I was never able to understand her at all. I can’t imagine any other woman on earth who would openly imply that she was attempting blackmail”
“Did you say blackmail?”
“Oh, that wasn’t what Beth called it, but you know how Beth was. She had a genuine belief in euphemisms. Anything was what you called it. She was perfectly charming, and she was surprised and hurt to discover that I wasn’t anxious to give her twenty thousand dollars.”
Sid made a derisive sound, but I made no sound at all for several seconds, because I believed what he said was true, and I was trying to understand why in the devil he had said it, to me or to anyone, for it gave him a motive for murder that even Cotton McBride would be able to appreciate.
“Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” I said, “It ought to pay for a pretty big mistake.”
Wilson sighed and seemed to sag a little more in his chair. “I was simply stupid, and I suppose stupidity is always expensive. You remember when Beth and I separated out in California? I made a very generous settlement, it seems to me, for I don’t mind telling you that I could have gotten off without paying her a penny. Not a single penny. It would have entailed a lot of unpleasantness, however, and I was glad enough to settle.
“Anyhow, she took what I gave her and went off to get a divorce, which was part of our understanding. Soon after she left, I came back here, and later on I got notice from her that the divorce had been granted. I married again, and everything seemed to be satisfactorily settled and almost forgotten until Beth showed up here yesterday and told me that I was a bigamist.”
“A what?”
“A bigamist. She said that she hadn’t ever actually gotten the divorce, but it wasn’t really anything to worry about, for she was willing to go away quietly again, and all that was required of me was to give her twenty thousand dollars to go on.”
“Didn’t you sign any divorce papers or anything, for God’s sake?”
“Yes, I did, but she said they were phony. She had them drawn up by a disbarred lawyer she met somewhere, because, she said, being married made her feel a little more secure in case something came up to make having a husband handy. I admitted in the beginning that I was stupid.”
“I hope you haven’t been stupid enough to tell this to anyone else.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I told Cotton McBride that I refused to see Beth, but then he found the five thousand dollars in her room, and later I had to admit that I’d seen her and given her the money, because he was sure to find it out one way or another, and it would only have looked worse for me if I kept on lying. But I didn’t say anything about my being a bigamist, or blackmail, or that the five thousand, which was all I had in the office safe, was only an initial payment on twenty. Now I’m afraid it will all come out, and I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to tell it voluntarily in my own way.”
“Do you realize the probable consequences if you do?”
“Yes. I’ll he suspected of killing her. I may even he arrested.” He got up abruptly from his chair with an unfolding motion and stood looking into the darkening yard, and I could hear once more that soft, measured popping of knuckles. “It was damn inconsiderate of Beth to let me go on thinking I was divorced, getting married again and all, but it was even more inconsiderate to come back here and get herself killed. Still, you know, I can’t seem to feel any malice toward her for it. I wish that things had turned out better for her than they did, but there’s no use in wishing to change what is over and done with. Her father died when she was a young girl, you know, and her mother died several years ago, while Beth and I were in California. Do you happen to know if there are any other relatives living?”