Monday was a bad day. It started out all right, a brisk walk to the office and Millie already there in a good humor with her bright head cocked like a woodpecker’s, and it stayed all right, if not exceptional, until mid-morning, which was about the time that Millie took a call from the county attorney, who wanted to talk to me. The county attorney’s name was Hector Caldwell. We were about the same age, and he had always been a friend of mine, but he was compelled in his professional capacity, as it turned out, to treat me in an unfriendly fashion.
I took up the phone and said, “Hello, Hec,” and he said, “Hello, Gid,” and I said, “What can I do for you?” and he said, “I wonder if you could get over to my office right away?” and I said, “Well, I don’t think I can make it right away,” and he said, “I think maybe you’d better,” and I knew in an instant, although his voice was pleasant, that I had no choice.
In the outer office, Millie was waiting for me when I passed by. “You be careful what you say to that Hector Caldwell.”
“You’ve been listening on the extension again,” I said.
“Don’t admit anything,” she said.
“You’re just a crazy redhead. What makes you think that I’ve got anything to admit?”
“I don’t think you necessarily have, although I wouldn’t bet on it, but I think he thinks you have. Who does he think he is to be ordering you around?”
“He thinks he’s the county attorney, that’s who, and I think you’d better quit listening in on my telephone conversations.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go talk to that Hector Caldwell at all. I’ll let you hide out in my apartment if you want to.”
“When I married Sid, she made me promise to give up staying with girls in their apartments. She’s unreasonable about such trifles.”
“I was only trying to help. I have a notion for some reason that you may need all you can get.”
Which was a correct notion, as I shortly learned.
I went downstairs to the street, bright and hot with sunlight, and I worked up a quick sweat walking three blocks to Hec Caldwell’s office. When I got there, Hec was waiting for me behind his desk, and Cotton McBride was standing at a window with his back to the room and looking down into the street through the upper section of the window above a one-ton air-conditioner installed in the lower. Hec stood up and asked me to sit down, which I did. Cotton turned away from the window and stood there, looking at me with an expression that suggested a bad taste in his mouth, while Hec sat down again and started looking at me, too, and between the pair of them, staring like that, they made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
“Well,” I said, “you asked me to come over, and here I am.”
“So you are,” Hec said. “Thanks for coming.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. Just something that’s come up. We hope you’ll be able to help us with it.”
“Anything to oblige. What do you want me to do?”
“What we want you to do,” Cotton said, “is quit playing fancy with me and everyone else and tell the truth for a change.”
“Who says I haven’t been telling the truth, and who says what it is that I haven’t been telling it about?”
“I say it, that’s who says it, and what it’s about is the murder of Beth Thatcher, and I’m the one who says that, too. Anyhow, you haven’t been telling all the truth, if any part of it, and you’d better start telling it right now if you know what’s good for you.”
“I’m not so sure about that. I’ve just recently had advice from two pretty shrewd characters, and one of them presented a convincing case for the advantages of telling lies, and the other one said not to admit anything.”
“No need to get excited,” Hec said. “Gid, Cotton’s somewhat annoyed with you, as you can see, and maybe he’s justified, and maybe he isn’t. That’s what we want to find out.”
“I’m all for that,” I said. “Let’s.”
“All right.” Hec opened the belly drawer of his desk and took out an envelope. “This was delivered to the police station this morning. Regular mail. You’d better read it.”
He passed it across the desk, and I took it. It was a cheap envelope, addressed with a typewriter. Pica type. Local postmark. I removed a single sheet of paper from the envelope and read what was on it: Ask Gideon Jones what he was doing in Dreamer s Park the night Beth Thatcher was killed. Don’t let him tell you he wasn’t there, because he was, and I saw him. No signature, of course. No X’s and O’s for love and kisses. I put the sheet back into the envelope and handed it across the desk to Hec.
“I thought you said this was no occasion,” I said. “I beg to differ. I’ve just been accused of murder for the first time in my life, and in my judgment that’s an occasion as big as any there is.”
“Who accused you of murder?”
“Whoever wrote that note.”
“No. The note just said to ask you what you were doing in Dreamer’s Park, and we’re asking. What were you doing there?”
“Assuming that I was there at all to be doing anything?”
“True. I’ll put that question first. Were you there?”
Well, what the hell! Sid had told me to lie and had patiently explained the advantages of it, and I wanted to lie and had the lie all ready on my tongue, a single, lousy little two-letter word beginning with n and ending with o, but I couldn’t pronounce it. All I had to do was to get a consonant and a vowel off my tongue in proper order, but I couldn’t do it, I simply couldn’t. And so I told the truth and made an admission at the same time in spite of the sagest advice from separate sources to do neither.
“Yes,” I said.
Hec looked surprised and uncomfortable, and Cotton looked something I couldn’t see, for I wasn’t looking at him. I could hear him, though, and I heard him make a little wet smacking sound with his lips that seemed to have in it a quality of satisfaction.
“Why didn’t you say so before?” Cotton said.
“You didn’t ask me,” I said.
“It’s your duty to tell something like that to the police without being asked,” Cotton said.
“That’s right, Gid,” Hec said. “You know it is. You should have told Cotton. Why didn’t you?”
“That should be obvious,” I said. “I wanted to avoid being suspected of killing someone I didn’t.”
“I don’t know that you’re suspected of killing anyone yet,” Hec said.
“As for me,” Cotton said, “I don’t know that he isn’t.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
“You’d better tell us why you went there and what you did there,” Hec said.
“I’ll be happy to,” I said. “I went there to met Beth at her request, but I didn’t meet her because she was dead.”
“Why didn’t you report her death to the police?” Cotton said.
“I didn’t report it because I didn’t know it.”
“You mean to say she might have been dead in that old bandstand all the time you were there and you didn’t even see her?”
Having considered my answer carefully for a split second, I retreated to Sid’s prepared position.
“I mean to say,” I said.
“What I can’t figure out,” Hec said, “is why you agreed to meet her in Dreamer’s Park at night. There doesn’t seem to me to be any good reason for it.”
“As for me,” Cotton said, “I can think of two good reasons, and the other one’s murder.”
“You aren’t even half right,” I said. “Dreamer’s Park is a place of sentiment, and we were going to say good-by, and it seemed appropriate to say it in a sentimental place. Besides, I had been listening to cicadas and drinking gin.”