“I don’t think so.”
“Well, she must be buried, of course, and I guess I’m the logical one to see that it’s done. I’ll buy a little place for her in the cemetery and make the arrangements. It can be done quite simply and cheaply, I think. There’s no sense in making a great fuss about it.”
Sid and I had stood up with him, and now he suddenly made a jerky half-turn toward us and an odd little half-bow from the waist that somehow managed to give an effect of great courtliness.
“Thank you for tolerating my intrusion. It’s been a relief to talk to someone, but I’ll have to decide for myself, after all, what I must do. I won’t ask you to treat this as a privileged communication if you feel that you shouldn’t. Now I’ll say good night.”
He completed his turn, now away from us, and walked to the house and out of sight around the corner. There was a kind of lanky, loping dignity about him that was touching, and he was quite a puzzlement besides.
“I wonder why he really came here,” I said, “and I wonder why he told us what he did. I can’t see any sense in it. If Beth made a bigamist of him, it seems to me that the sensible thing would simply have been to keep quiet about it. Chances are, now that Beth’s dead, that no one would ever have known.”
“Well,” said Sid. “I’m most relieved to know that there is a fatter suspect in this business than you, and I’m pleased, moreover, to discover that he has behaved, all in all, with even less intelligence.”
“He seemed sad and confused,” I said. “I felt sorry for him.”
“If he had popped his knuckles just one more time,” Sid said, “I’d surely have screamed.”
On Saturday we buried Beth. Charlie Paley moved her up from the rear room to the chapel for the occasion, and I don’t think it took more than twenty minutes to get the service finished from first to last. There was a minister who said a few words about hope everlasting, and a semi-pro tenor about town sang a song with organ accompaniment, and the song he sang was “Somewhere the Sun Is Shining.”
Well, it was shining right outside, although not for Beth, and after the service I drove out in it to the cemetery. Sid was with me, and maybe a dozen other people in other cars. Wilson Thatcher was there, but not his wife, and Cotton McBride was there, and so was Sara Pike. The grave was in a corner of the cemetery where the graves came to an end, and just across a fence there was a field full of white clover. Altogether, it was as pretty a place as one could wish to be dead in, although I’m sure Beth wouldn’t have wished, if she could have, to be dead in any place whatever.
Sid stood beside me and held my hand, and when it was all over we turned and left. I still didn’t feel, walking away, that I had said good-by to anyone, or that I had finished anything that needed finishing. What I felt was at odd ends, the strange disconsolate sense of leaving undone what I would never get back to do. Sid and I had not spoken since leaving Charlie Paley’s Chapel, and we didn’t speak now until we had left the cemetery and were back into town. Then she asked me if there was anything I especially wanted to do, and I said that I especially wanted to go home.
“I thought you might feel like going somewhere and doing something,” she said.
“Home is somewhere,” I said, “and anything I want to do can be done there.”
“Do you have anything particular in mind?”
“Yes, I do. I have in mind to mow the yard.”
“In order to keep you company. I’ll do something outside, too. Perhaps I could clip around the edges of things while you’re mowing.”
“Good. I’ll appreciate the company.”
We rode along silently until we turned onto our street and approached our drive. Sid was sitting with her legs folded under her and her nylon knees showing below the skirt of the plain black dress she had worn in deference to a funeral, and I could see from the corners of my eyes that she looked, in silence, a trifle sad and pensive.
“She looked much younger than I thought she would,” she said suddenly. “What happened is just too damn bad.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s just too bad.”
I turned into the drive and stopped, and we got out and went into the house together. Sid peeled off toward the kitchen, and I climbed the stairs to our room and changed into old clothes. Then I went downstairs and into the garage and started the power mower and began to mow the front yard. After a while, Sid came out in short shorts and began clipping along the brick border of a flower bed in front of the house. She looked altogether charming and distracting, and not at all domestic.
I finished the front yard and then went on into the back. After a couple of times to the alley and back, I killed the engine under a tree with the idea of going into the kitchen for something cold and wet, but then I saw Sid coming with two cans of beer, which met the specifications perfectly. We sat under the tree, flank to flank and drinking slowly, and it was by way of being a pretty good time after some bad ones until Cotton McBride appeared at the side of the house and came on back to where we were.
“Hello, Cotton,” I said. “It’s a hot day.”
“Ninety-eight in the sun,” Cotton said. “Those beers look mighty inviting. I’ll tell you that. If I wasn’t on duty. I might have a good cold beer myself.”
“I shouldn’t think one beer would interfere with your duty,” Sid said. “My experience has been that one beer doesn’t interfere with much of anything.”
“What I came out for, Gid,” Cotton said, “was to have a private talk about something important.”
“Let me tell you something,” Sid said. “There isn’t going to be any private talk that doesn’t include me as one of the private parties, and so you may as well get any notion to the contrary out of your head.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cotton said. “You can’t he intruding on police business, Mrs. Jones.”
“Sid,” I said, “go get Cotton a beer, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not at all sure that I care to give him a beer,” Sid said.
“That’s all right,” Cotton said. “I don’t believe I want one after all.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “I’m about through with mine, and I’ll have another one with you. Go get the beers, Sid, please.”
“I’ll go only on condition that I’m included in the private talk,” Sid said.
“How about it, Cotton?” I said. “Can Sid be included?”
“I guess it won’t do any harm,” Cotton said, “although I can’t imagine that it will do any good, either.”
“In that case,” Sid said, “I’ll go.”
She stood up and tugged at her short shorts and started for the house, and Cotton sank down onto the grass and took off his stained straw hat, exposing pale limp hair plastered damply to his skull. He sat there in a wilted heap with his legs crossed before him at the ankles. In a couple of minutes, the screen door banged and Sid came back with the beers. She passed one to Cotton and one to me and sat down with the third.
“What has been said while I was gone?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“We were waiting to include you,” Cotton said.
“Then there’s no sense in waiting any longer.”
“No, there isn’t.” Cotton had been looking at Sid’s brown legs, but now he took a swallow of beer and began looking at me. “You remember what I told you in your office? How Wilson Thatcher denied seeing Beth or giving her any money?”
“I remember. You said you were going to talk to him again.”
“I talked to him all right. He claims he lied the first time about not seeing her, because it might incriminate him or something, but he changed his mind and decided to tell the truth, and the truth is, according to him, that he arranged to meet her and give her the five grand.”