“I said nothing was done to Sara. What was done to Sherm was something else, and it amounted to damn little. Sherm was a brilliant sort of boy, and a very nice one. There were no hard feelings. Besides, he died right away, and none of it made any difference to him then, one way or another.”
“Well, there it is. You have said it yourself.”
“Said what?”
“That he died right away. Dying is surely something.”
“Oh, come off, Sid. He’d had rheumatic fever. He died of heart failure.”
“Who was his doctor? Do you remember?”
“Yes, I do. Old Doctor Weinsap is who. He was the Pikes’ family doctor.”
“I don’t know any Doctor Weinsap.”
“No wonder. He’s dead.”
“That’s too bad, for I’d like to talk with him. Old family doctors are inclined to make mistakes, and sometimes they will even say deliberately, out of a feeling of affection, that dying was the result of one thing when it was actually the result of something else entirely.”
“There is no reason whatever to suspect that Sherman Pike died of anything but what Doctor Weinsap said he died of.”
“You’re far too credulous, sugar. You’ll believe anything fantastic, even when the truth is as clear as can be.”
“What, precisely, is the truth?”
“The truth is that Sherman Pike committed suicide. That’s now evident. It’s the only thing that explains why Sara Pike would do what she has done to Beth Thatcher and you.”
“I’m not sure, but something in your reasoning seems wrong. Maybe you’re starting with a basic assumption that isn’t proved.”
“You had better leave the reasoning to me, sugar. You’ll see. It will turn out that Sherman Pike committed suicide because Beth Thatcher threw him over for you, and all this time Sara has been brooding about it, knowing the truth, and when Beth came back to town, Sara met her and suddenly cracked up and killed her. Something like that is extremely hard on the mind. Everyone knows it.”
“Sara took Sherm’s death hard, all right, but that was natural. She was nuts about him. For a long time after he died, she was practically a recluse.”
“There you are again. You keep trying to argue one way, but everything you say goes the other. Sara did it, and it only remains to find out how.”
“It seems to me that it also remains to prove it.”
“You’re right for once. Idiots like Hec Caldwell and Cotton McBride must have everything done for them.”
I walked over to the window and looked out, and after a while I turned and walked back to where she was standing, she having slipped off the table while I was gone.
“Look,” I said, “will you do something for me? Will you please do it?”
“I may or may not. It depends.”
“Go home. Go home and say a prayer or curse or cry, but let me come out of this in my own way.”
“It’s plain that you have no faith in me.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt or into trouble.”
“I thought I was doing so well, too.”
“You’ve done fine. Now let someone else do the rest.”
“All right. I can see that it’s no use. I was foolish to try.”
It was time for her to go, and she went as far as the door, where she stopped. She looked very small and somehow beaten, looking back, and there was something shining in her eyes. Then she left, but she didn’t go home. She went, instead, to the office, where Millie Morgan was.
“Hello, Sid,” Millie said. “How’s the investigation going?”
“Very well, as a matter of fact. Are you still available?”
“I was about to ask if you couldn’t make use of me in some way. What do you want me to do?”
“First I had better brief you on developments. It has become apparent that whoever called Gid on the telephone and arranged to meet him in Dreamer’s Park was not Beth Thatcher. Beth was already dead at the time, and whoever called had killed her and wanted to incriminate Gid. The killing was probably done somewhere besides the park, and the body taken there afterward. From some other significant things, it was easy to decide who did the killing and the telephoning, but the trouble is that I can’t prove it.”
“Proof would be helpful. I can see that.”
“It will be absolutely essential, and the only way I can think of to prove it is to get a confession by some kind of deception.”
“I’m pretty good at deception, and I may be able to help you work something out. Incidentally, am I allowed to know who did the killing?”
“Didn’t I say? It was Sara Pike who did it.”
“The hell she did! It’s almost incredible. What makes you think so?”
“Well, I don’t want to take the time to go into it now. As I admitted, I can’t prove it yet, but it’s perfectly apparent, as you’ll understand later.”
“How do you propose to deceive Sara into confessing?”
“We must keep in mind, to begin with, that someone who has killed someone is bound to be uneasy and vulnerable. What I propose to do, if you agree, is to call Sara without identifying myself and claim to have seen her commit the murder. What I intend to do then is pretend to be a blackmailer who wants money to keep quiet about it. I’ll arrange to meet her alone someplace where you can be hiding as a witness, and it will be up to me to get her to convict herself by what she says.”
“Do you think I’ll be acceptable to Hec Caldwell as a witness? I doubt it.”
“He may be a little dubious, I admit, but once he and Cotton McBride are put onto her, even they should discover the truth.”
“Nevertheless, I think it might be a good idea to have one or both of them there to hear it with me.”
“I won’t risk it. They might reject the plan and not let us go through with it.”
“Another thing that bothers me a little is the feeling that it might be dangerous. Sara’s probably unstable, and in fact I consider it likely that she may be secretly as mad as the March Hare.”
“There’s some danger, all right, but I’m prepared to face it for Gid.”
“Well, I’m not quite so dedicated to Gid as you are, but I’ll face it with you. When do you intend to call Sara?”
“Now is as good a time as any. Please look up her number in the directory.”
Millie looked it up and told it to Sid, and Sid dialed. The phone at the other end of the line rang twice and was answered. It was answered by Sara, who lived alone.
“Is it Sara Pike speaking?” Sid said.
“Yes,” Sara said. “Who’s this?”
“You don’t know me, but I know you, and I know what you’ve done, because I saw you do it.”
“What’s that? What did you say?”
Sara’s voice, Sid said later, was suddenly shrill and almost frenzied, and it was obvious that she was, as Sid had predicted, extremely vulnerable.
“You heard what I said, and you know what I mean,” Sid said.
“Tell me who you are and what you want. Why have you called me?”
“I’ve called to tell you that I saw you kill Beth Thatcher. Don’t hang up, or I’ll go straight to the police.”
“What do you want?”
“We had better meet somewhere and talk about that.”
“I don’t even know who you are. Are you afraid to tell me your name?”
“Never mind that. Do you agree to meet me? If you don’t, I’ll hang up myself and you can take the consequences.”
There was a long silence on the line, and Sid had an uneasy feeling that there was a great deal of furious and crafty thinking going on at the other end, and this turned out to be true from what was next said.
“I’ll meet you in one place only,” Sara said. “It must be there or nowhere.”
“Where is that?” Sid said.
“At the place where you say you saw me kill Beth Thatcher, and you must tell me right now where that place is.”