“Why should you hate Gid? He never deliberately hurt your brother or you or anyone else.”
“He took that little blonde tramp and made my brother die. Now I have killed the tramp and destroyed her consort. The waiting was long, very long, but in the end it was so easy. She came here willingly with me, to visit the grave out of shallow sentiment, and I’m not really sure that I intended to kill her in the beginning. I only intended. I think, to tell her the truth. How Sherm died, and why, so that it would be on her conscience the rest of her life. That was foolish of me, wasn’t it? To imagine that she would have a conscience? Do you know what she said when I told her? We were standing right here beside the grave, and I told her, and she said, Well, what a perfectly ridiculous thing to do! That was when I picked up the vase and stabbed her in the back. The Voice told me suddenly to do it. It was getting late, and I had to do something with her, of course, and the Voice kept telling me what to do. First I hid her body over there in the tall grass of that field, but then I was told to take her to Dreamer’s Park and incriminate her consort, who helped her kill my brother. I drove around as close as I could to where she was in the grass, and then I carried her to the car and took her to the park and put her in the bandstand under the seat. It was quite a dangerous thing to do, I suppose, but ever so exciting and satisfying. She was quite easy to carry, for I am much stronger than I look, and it was even easier to deceive her consort later and persuade him to meet her there. He must be a very credulous person. A fool.”
“He had been drinking Gimlets.”
“It looked for a while, however, as if the consort might escape suspicion, and so I wrote the note to the police, and now everything is working out as beautifully as I wanted it to and as the Voice said it would.”
“Is it? Perhaps you are being a bit too optimistic.”
“Because of you? Oh, no. It was a mistake for you to come here, or to meddle at all, for now I must kill you, as you must surely see.”
“How? Is there a gun in one of your pockets? Is that why you keep your hands there?”
“Not a gun. I know nothing about guns. A knife. I can use a knife quite well. There is no use for you to scream, because there is no one to hear you, nor to run, because I can run faster, nor to struggle, because I am far stronger.”
“If you kill me, you will surely be caught.”
“No, no. Never. The Voice has assured me that I will not. The Voice comes to me and tells me what to do. Maybe it is the Voice of God. Someday, it will tell me if it is or not, and in the meanwhile it has told me that you must be killed, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, nothing at all.”
“As to that,” Sid said, “it seems to me that I have already done much more than my share in this investigation, and in my opinion it is high time that Cotton McBride begins doing his.”
Cotton came out from behind the mausoleum then, on the run, and began doing his share to the best of his ability. Sara shrieked and clawed and fiercely struggled, but then, all at once, she became perfectly quiet and stood looking with an air of abstraction across the clustered headstones as if she were listening again to the Voice, which may have been telling her to give up.
“Damn it, Millie,” Sid said, “I told you that Cotton was not to be in on it, but you brought him in anyhow, in spite of all my instructions.”
“Fortunately for both of us, I did,” Millie said. “The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it would be helpful to have some muscles present, even of an idiot.”
“I admit that you were right,” Sid said, “and I, for a change, was wrong.”
A few evenings later, we had a little party on the back terrace to celebrate my getting out of jail.
We had Gimlets to drink because Sid said it was important that I not develop a thing about them.
In addition to Sid and me, Millie was there with her engineer, who was still trying desperately with a kind of restrained frenzy.
Hec Caldwell was there with his wife, just to show that there were no hard feelings, much.
Even Cotton McBride was there, a limp and lonely stag because he had never had any luck with the girls and still wasn’t having any.
The Jack Handys were not invited, but they drifted around the hedge and got into it.
Everything is clear up to a point, and then nothing is, and what I remember most clearly is Sid saying that I had become much more interesting to her since she had discovered that I was once a blonde tramp’s consort.
Another thing I remember pretty clearly is someone saying that he or she wondered what would become of Sara Pike, and Sid saying in response that she would probably plead crazy and be sent for a while to an institution and then be released in due time as all right again.
Which she did and was and probably will be.