I stood up and walked across the bandstand to the other side, my steps a truncated series of hollow sounds on the rotting boards. The last step brought the toe of my right foot into the space beneath the circular bench, and it made contact suddenly with something soft but substantial down there on the floor. I stood for a moment with breath and motion suspended, and then I breathed and backed away a step and bent down. There was something down there, all right, under the bench, and I touched reluctantly what felt like flesh. Soft flesh beneath my fingertips. Nose, eyes, mouth. Sinking down all the way onto my knees, I struck a match and looked at Beth beneath the bench. Beth’s face with open, empty eyes, and somehow I was not in the least surprised. The match burned my fingers, and I let it fall.
What did I think? Well, I thought that it was just like Beth, by God, to come to such a sticky end, and that she had surely come in amiable innocence to die with utter wonder that anyone on earth would wish her dead. I thought that it was too bad to kill her, and that whoever had done it should be ashamed of himself. I thought that now I would never have the chance to say good-by to her properly, never in this world. I thought that I had better get the hell away from there if I knew what was good for me.
I stood and turned and went, leaving her lying where she was, a long way in the end from Miami and Rio and Acapulco and places like that. I walked directly home, and the cicadas were silent in the trees, and the sad summer night was sour. The house was dark, and I went upstairs and undressed in the dark and got into bed and lay there under a sheet, thinking. My thinking, however, was not very clear or coherent, and the truth is that I didn’t know what to do, or if I had been smart or stupid in doing what I had already done.
What I was in, plainly, was a mess. Someone had killed her, and I had walked into it full of gin and nostalgia, with nothing more on my mind than a minor infidelity, and who had done it, for whatever reason, was something that might never be known if I became involved and placed at the scene, for it might be decided that I was as logical as anyone else could be, besides being convenient. If this developed, as it might, it would be advisable to have alternate suspects in mind, and I tried to think of some, but the best I could do on short notice was Wilson Thatcher, who wasn’t very convincing in the part.
Most likely, it was a local glandular nut who had followed her to the park or had simply discovered her there by accident in the dark bandstand. Still, as I remembered her in the brief and tiny flare of the match, she had shown no signs of struggle or abuse. No bruises or abrasions or torn clothing. Neither had her face in its final expression shown any of the agony or distortions that are supposed to be left by strangulation, which would have been a reasonable technique in a murder that no one had anticipated or planned. There had been only the expression of wonder that this was actually happening to Beth Webb Thatcher, who had lately been living well in various pleasant places.
It occurred to me then that I had no acceptable evidence, aside from her being dead, that she had been killed at all. And being dead is really no evidence of having been killed, for it is possible to be dead from merely having died. I could recall no blood, no wound, not even any bumps. Was it possible that Beth had simply and suddenly died? The odds against it, I thought, were far too great to discount for even so unpredictable a long shot as she. She had been lying on her back, under the bench where she must have been pushed, and somewhere on her back where I couldn’t see it, there was surely the mark of whatever had killed her.
I wished Sid would come home. I was in no mood for conversation or entertainment, hut I was more than ready to welcome a warm and comforting presence. Just someone around. Someone to lie lightly and breathe softly and sleep sweetly beside me. Not just someone, either. Sid or no one. Specifically Sid, and here she came.
I heard the car in the drive and her steps on the stairs. She came into the room and, after lighting a small lamp on her dressing table, stood looking at me with her hands on her hips. I could see her fuzzily through slits and lashes.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
She walked over to the bed and bent over and examined me thoroughly. She bent nearer and sniffed.
“Stoned,” she said.
She went away into the bathroom, and pretty soon she came back barefooted, having kicked off her white flats, and got out of what she was in, and into what passed for a nightgown. In the gown, a blue shortie with tiny white rosebuds here and there, she returned to the bed and sat down on the edge and again examined me critically.
She shook me by the shoulder, but I kept my eyes closed in simulation of the stupor she had charged me with. I kept on lying there with my eyes closed, but then there was a small and painful explosion on my left cheek which was repeated instantly on my right cheek, and it seemed to me that simulation had become entirely too risky to sustain. I groaned and opened my eyes and groaned again.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, sugar?” she said.
“I’m sick,” I said.
She laced her hands around a knee and rocked back on her pretty pivot with a derisive expression.
“Sick! You’re loaded, sugar. That’s what you are.”
“Nothing of the sort. I had a few more Gimlets, I admit, but I’m not loaded.”
“Where are you sick?”
“It’s my stomach. Something terrific is going on down there.”
“Well, you can hardly expect to drink Gimlet after Gimlet for hour after hour without having something go on in your stomach. What you need is a big dose of Kaopectate.”
“Like hell I do.”
“Nonsense. You’ll take a big dose immediately, and later you’ll be glad.”
She got up and went into the bathroom again and rattled around and came back with bottle and spoon. She poured a spoonful of Kaopectate and poked it at me, and in order to avoid getting soaked, I sat up and opened my mouth and permitted her to pour it down my throat.
“There you are,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Bad enough.”
She went away with the bottle and spoon and came back without them. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the same place and position, she watched me for a while without speaking, and I began to feel uncomfortable.
“Are you feeling any better yet?” she said.
“Not yet.”
“It’s a shame that I must treat you like a baby and be with you every minute. It does seem that you should be able to behave yourself without being under constant surveillance. The wonder is, I suppose, that you weren’t into more mischief than you were.”
“The mischief I was in was mischief enough, believe me.”
“What do you mean? I don’t like the sound of it. What did you do besides drink and drink and get your belly in an uproar? What else?”
I hadn’t intended to go off in this direction, and I was simply gone before I knew it. I admit freely that I just wasn’t made for the solitary bearing of bad trouble and grim possibilities.
“What else I did,” I said, “was meet Beth Thatcher in the old bandstand in Dreamer’s Park. At least I went there to meet her, although I didn’t, as it turned out. She called and said she wanted to see me, and a lot of things were working together to make me go. She was the one who suggested Dreamer’s Park, and I went there to meet her, but I didn’t because she was dead.”
We sat there looking at each other after my confession, and she didn’t appear to be exceptionally angry, hardly at all, but I wasn’t fooled by this, having known her pretty well for some time now. She was probably thinking, in spite of her deceptive, serene gravity, what a pleasure it would be for her to attend my funeral after having personally got me ready for it.