The next morning, with this on her mind, Sid went to the Thatcher home. It was a big house on an old street, and it sat well back from the street behind a deep yard. Sid pushed a bell button beside a heavy door flanked by narrow panes of leaded glass. Soon, the door was opened by a maid, who asked Sid what she wanted.
“I want to see Mrs. Wilson Thatcher,” Sid said. “Please tell her that Mrs. Gideon Jones is calling.”
The maid, after a quick recovery from a startled expression, said that she would see if Mrs. Thatcher was in. Sid was allowed to wait in the hall until the maid returned with Mrs. Thatcher’s regrets that she was feeling indisposed and unable to receive anyone.
“In that case,” Sid said, “I would like to see Miss Thelma Bleeker.”
“Who?” the maid said.
“Miss Thelma Bleeker.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no one here with that name.”
“Nevertheless, I’d appreciate it if you would go and tell Mrs. Thatcher that Mrs. Gideon Jones wishes to speak with Miss Thelma Bleeker.”
“If you will just wait here,” the maid said.
She went away again and came back again. Mrs. Thatcher, she said, had decided to see Mrs. Jones after all, and so Mrs. Jones followed the maid into a small room off the hall, where she was left, and pretty soon Mrs. Thatcher came to join her there, and with Mrs. Thatcher was no one but Mr. Thatcher.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jones,” Wilson Thatcher said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“As a matter of fact,” Sid said, “it clearly isn’t, and we will probably all feel more comfortable if no one tries to pretend that it is.”
Thelma Thatcher (at least by squatter’s rights) examined Sid intently. She herself was rather tall and angular, with large hands and feet and a long upper lip that gave her a kind of squirrelly look. She must have represented, Sid thought, a typical reaction from Beth. Old simple Wilson, having had too much of one extreme, had palpably taken on too much of the other.
“Perhaps we had all better sit down,” Wilson Thatcher said.
“No, thank you,” Thelma Thatcher said. “I don’t wish to.”
“I don’t either,” Sid said.
“It is evident from her use of my maiden name,” Thelma Thatcher said, “that Mrs. Jones intends to exploit information that was foolishly divulged to her, and I think she had better tell us exactly what she wants. There’s no sense in politely skirting the matter.”
“What I want,” Sid said, “is simply to get Gid out of jail, where he has been put by a pair of idiots without a brain between them.”
“You seem to feel that we can help you. Please tell me how.”
“By telling the truth, that’s how. It was all in the paper about Gid, but there was nothing there, not a single word, about how Beth Thatcher came here to blackmail one or both of you for bigamy. In my opinion, that’s as good evidence for murder as going somewhere you shouldn’t have gone at a time when you had much better have been anywhere else.”
“We have no obligation to tell you anything whatever.”
“If you don’t want me to tell everything I know to everyone I meet, you will.”
“It’s apparent that you have no sense of decency.”
“That’s right. All I have is Gid in jail, and I want him out.”
“What do you want to know?” Wilson Thatcher said.
“I want to know exactly what Beth wanted, and I want to know why you came deliberately to our house and told us a lot of things that there was no need to tell anyone, let alone us.”
“I came because I was afraid. I was merely trying to divert to myself suspicions that I erroneously thought would fall upon my wife.”
“I prefer to judge for myself whether they were erroneous or not.”
“I didn’t want to go to the authorities, I although I later did, because I thought they might consider it odd for me to confess so much without reason. I wanted them to know, however, in order to keep their attention away from my wife, and so I chose to tell Gideon because he was the one person, aside from me, who would have the greatest personal interest in Beth’s death, and because I could talk to him under the pretense of seeking legal advice. As you probably guessed. I told several lies. I suppose I was pretty transparent.”
“What you were.” Thelma Thatcher said, “was a fool. Wilson, if you will kindly keep quiet. I’m sure I can relate what happened much more quickly and clearly than you would find possible.”
“Quickly and clearly is the way I want it,” Sid said, “whoever relates it.”
“Very well,” Thelma Thatcher said. “One of the first things this little witch did after arriving in town, apparently, was to call Wilson at his office, but he had the good sense to refuse to see her, and I must admit that it was the only occasion in this whole affair when he showed any sense whatever. I doubt that she cared, however, for it was me she really wanted to see. As a woman with a sense of shame and pride, I would almost certainly be willing to pay handsomely to avoid being publicly humiliated and disgraced, whereas Wilson is reluctant to pay anything for any reason unless interest or dividends are assured.
“She came here to see me, and there was no doubt that she was telling the truth about never having gotten the divorce, for she even invited me to check the records in the place where the divorce had supposedly been granted. She spoke as if it were all a kind of party game which everyone should accept in the best of humor, and then she said she only wanted twenty thousand dollars to go away. She promised to go somewhere and finally get a genuine divorce, after which Wilson and I could quietly get married again, and everything would be all right.”
“It wasn’t necessary to give her a cent,” Wilson said. “There wasn’t a thing she could have done that wouldn’t have been more unpleasant for her than it would have been for us.”
“Do you think so?” Thelma Thatcher said. “Well, I am naturally reluctant to be known publicly as an extralegal concubine to a bigamist. I preferred to pay the money, and I did. At least, five thousand dollars that I happened to have in the house. I gave it to her with the promise that I would give her the rest that night. She left then, and I went to the bank and got the fifteen thousand dollars from my personal account. It may seem like a lot of money to give someone with no guarantee that she wouldn’t be back for more, but twenty thousand dollars isn’t really very much money to Wilson and me, however much it may be to some people. I’m sure that Wilson could have found some way to deduct most of it from his income tax. He’s clever at such things.”
“I don’t think we’d better talk too much about that,” Wilson said.
“What I want to know,” Sid said, “is if she came back for the rest of the money.”
“No, she didn’t. I told her to come around nine, for I knew Wilson had a business meeting at that time, but she didn’t come, and now, of course, it is apparent why she didn’t.”
“Is it?” Sid said. “It may be apparent to you, but it isn’t to me. She called Gid at nine thirty, which was half an hour after she was supposed to have come here for the money, and I would like to know why she was fooling around making a date with my husband and neglecting business in hand that was a lot more urgent and important. In fact, I would like to know just where she went and what she did between the time she left Gid in the Kiowa Room and the time she went wherever she was killed and met whoever killed her.”