“Where did he meet her?”
“He says he picked her up on a corner, and they just drove around a few minutes, and then he let her out on the same corner, but I’ve got a notion it’s a lie.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Hell, I just can’t see any good reason why he should give her five grand if he was going to kill her afterward. Besides being a waste of money, which isn’t like Wilson, it would make us think of him first thing.”
“Then maybe he didn’t kill her. The fact that he gave her the money, if it is a fact, is the best evidence of his innocence.”
“You think so? I might agree if it wasn’t for something else that I know and you don’t.” He paused and swallowed more beer and looked at me with a sly expression in which there was a touch of smugness. “Did you know Wilson Thatcher was a bigamist?”
This was clearly intended to be a bomb, which it had been at the time Wilson exploded it on the back terrace, but now it barely popped.
“Oh, cut it out,” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a fact, just the same. At least Wilson says it is, and I can’t see why a man would say something like that about himself unless it was true.”
“I can’t see why he’d say it at all, true or otherwise.”
“He was afraid we’d find it out ourselves, and then it would look all the worse because he hadn’t told. He didn’t even know it himself until Beth Thatcher came to town to put the squeeze on him. The five grand, Wilson says, was just a down payment on twenty, and he was going to get the rest of it for her the next day. There’s a couple of pretty good motives for murder. You get rid of a wife who makes you a bigamist while you’re saving fifteen good grand that would otherwise have to go after five bad.”
“Oh, sure, Cotton. Two wonderful motives. And so he just handed them to you out of pure charity and a natural desire to be hanged.”
“All right, Gid. You don’t have to go on with it. It looks like the guy’s going out of his way to make trouble for himself, and that’s just the thing that bothers me. Fact is, I’m wondering why he doesn’t just confess to the murder and be done with it.
“He doesn’t, though. He swears he never saw her again after paying the five grand, but I’m still not convinced that he actually paid her anything at all. Damn it, he didn’t have to make any down payment, like he said, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that he would have done it if he intended to kill her. Besides, what the hell kind of a reason for killing someone is this bigamy business? Or even for paying blackmail? It wasn’t deliberate, and he could have proved it. He could even have proved that Beth tricked him into it by a kind of fraud or something, which would have put her in a hell of a lot more trouble than he was in. The most it would have meant to him in the end, I suspect, was a little scandal and humiliation and the inconvenience of getting his second marriage legalized. I can maybe see a rich man laying out a bundle to avoid a scandal and all, but I can’t see him committing murder over it. Not if he’s got any brains whatever, which Wilson Thatcher has.”
“Speaking of brains,” Sid said, “you have almost convinced me that you may have some yourself.”
“What’s that?” Cotton said.
“Well,” Sid said, “you have obviously thought everything through, and weighed one thing against another, and you’ve come up finally with all of these brilliant deductions, and it seems to me that this requires a certain amount of brains, however inadequate.”
Cotton’s ears had turned red, and I could see that he was somewhat hotter than the hot day. “Thanks very much for the compliment, however inadequate.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” Sid said. “I don’t agree, however, that your final conclusion regarding Wilson Thatcher is sound. The weight of evidence surely indicates that he is sadly deficient in brains, if not totally without them. I’ll concede, however, that he must have had the glimmering of intelligence required to keep him from getting into a great sweat over the silly bigamy business, but I can tell you another person who would have got into the greatest sweat imaginable, even if she had all the brains in the world, and the person I mean is no one but Mrs. Wilson Thatcher.”
Cotton was looking at her with his mouth open, and so was I. Finally Cotton drained his can of beer and then began to read the label, at least the big print, as if it were something instructive or comforting, possibly a short prayer.
“Now what in hell, exactly,” he said, “made you say that?”
“What made me say it,” she said, “is being a woman with a husband, and I don’t mind admitting that I would be considerably upset, to put it mildly, if another woman came along suddenly and told me that he had been her husband first and still was. Moreover, if this happened to be the result of a deliberate dirty trick, I’m sure I would try my best to make her sorry or dead. Although I have more brains than I need, and am not given to behaving as if I needed more than I have, I’m bound to say that my own reaction would be more emotional than intelligent in such a case.”
Cotton was still reading the label, forming with his lips the shapes of the words. He did this silently, his expression rather imbecilic, but I could tell that he was listening intently and thinking as furiously as his inadequate brains permitted.
“There’s something else I’ll tell you, if you care to listen,” Sid said.
“I don’t believe I care to,” I said.
“As for me,” Cotton said, “I’m listening.”
“It is apparent,” Sid said, “that someone who is emotional about something is more vulnerable to threats than someone who isn’t, and if I were married to a man who was also married to someone else, and if I wanted to make a good thing of it in the way of getting some money, I’d surely give serious consideration to the woman as the one to get it from. You might be surprised to know how absolutely neurotic a woman who thought she was a wife would feel about having it known by everybody that she wasn’t really, and had been sleeping practically publicly with someone else’s husband.”
Cotton turned his beer can, now empty, around and around in his hands. He seemed to be trying to find his place among the words, which he had apparently lost. Suddenly, giving it up, he lay the can gently in the grass and got onto his knees and then to his feet.
“By God,” he said. “Oh, by God.”
Turning without another word, he walked away and around the house and out of sight.
“What’s the matter with him?” Sid said. “Is he mad or something?”
“I don’t think he’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s just a little disturbed.”
“It was damn impolite of him, if you ask me, not to thank us for the beer.”
“He didn’t intend to be impolite. He was abstracted. ‘Stunned’ may be the word.”
“Oh, nonsense. I only pointed out a few things he should have thought of himself.”
“It was a deft job of directing suspicion toward a woman who is probably as innocent as you are.”
“Well, if she’s innocent, it will do her no harm in the end, and I’m convinced that it will be favorable to our own cause. In order to keep you out of jail, if possible, we must have as many suspects as can be arranged.”
“I see. Sort of a calculated confusion. Well, as Voltaire said, let us tend our garden.”
I got up and started the mower and finished mowing the back yard, and Sid sat under the tree and watched me do it.