“At any rate, you clearly admit that she was not above blackmailing him, which is very enlightening, to say the least, and I must say that you certainly picked a sweet bitch in your first heat.”
I thought about this, about trying to explain it, but I knew it would be hopeless, besides being disastrous, and so I didn’t try. How can you possibly hope to explain someone who could surely have made blackmail seem like an amiable and reasonable negotiation, conducted without malice in the friendliest fashion with the most sincere wish for no hard feelings? That was the way Beth had surely done it, if she did it at all, but I didn’t think she had for the reasons I cited to Sid. I was silent for quite a while, having nothing convincing or even safe to say, and after quite another while Sid said something more.
“Never mind, sugar,” she said. “It’s not fair of me to be so critical, for everyone understands that men don’t know any more about women than what’s used for what, and I’m only interested in protecting you from the consequences of your foolishness, whether it was seven years ago or last night. Did Cotton McBride have any notion that you went to Dreamer’s Park?”
“I don’t think so. I’m sure he didn’t. Why should he?”
“Do you think it would make things difficult for you if he found out about it?”
“I think it would.”
“In that case, we must be prepared to lie about it convincingly if necessary, and we had better agree at once on the lies we will tell. It wouldn’t do at all for one of us to say one thing while the other was saying something else.”
“I can see that it wouldn’t make a particularly favorable impression. I’m wondering, though, if it might not be better to tell the truth.”
“Certainly not. Put any such nonsense right out of your head. The truth is so ridiculous that even I, as you will recall, had difficulty in believing it, and I have no doubt that the police would find it absolutely impossible. They’d clap you right into jail without hesitation. Besides, you’ve waited far too long. If you were going to tell about going to Dreamer’s Park, you should have told immediately. At this point, you could hardly avoid an effect of duplicity, to say nothing of positive imbecility.”
“Thanks.”
“We have to be realistic, sugar. Although I’m your wife and in love with you and all that, I’m bound to say that you haven’t been especially brilliant in this matter. You had better consider my opinions carefully if you want to escape some unpleasant consequences, and it’s my opinion that we must lie, if necessary, to keep you from becoming more involved than you already are.”
“It may be a problem in a pinch to make a good story stick. After all, you were with Rose Pogue discussing Zoroaster, so you can hardly go on record as being with me, and I was alone all the time, which is impossible to prove.”
“Don’t be dull, sugar. As a lawyer, you surely realize that you don’t have to prove that you weren’t in Dreamer’s Park. It will be entirely up to the police to prove that you were. All you have to do is repeat earnestly that you were at home all the time, and I’ll insist that you were here when I returned, which happens to be the truth and no lie at all.”
She made it sound remarkably simple and sensible and even honorable, as if candor and deceit had somehow exchanged places in the scale of values, and I was diagnosing this with the intent of further discussion when there was suddenly a soft, dry sound from a rear corner of the house behind us, and I turned my head and looked back there to see who or what had made the sound, and it was no one but Wilson Thatcher who had made it by coughing to attract our attention. I stood up with a funny feeling to face him, and he came across from the house to the terrace with a long-legged stride that appeared to be a kind of slow-motion lope.
Sid had said that he looked like a deacon, although possibly not always acting like one, and I guess that’s what he looked like, if a deacon is tall and thin with lank black hair and a dyspeptic face with pale blue eyes tending to project. Actually, he was not a bad fellow, pleasant enough most of the time, and I’d always rather liked him in an unenthusiastic way, even though our associations, such as they were, had been somewhat strained for reasons stated. Right now, he looked uncertain and apologetic, holding one hand in an odd position before his mouth, as if he were keeping prepared to cover another cough. I thought to myself, watching him approach, that he had surely been no match for Beth, who had surely given him a bad time while it lasted, and I felt sorry for him all at once and hoped that his trouble, if he had any, was no worse than mine, which might be bad enough.
“Hello, Wilson,” I said. “Glad to see you.”
This wasn’t quite true. It was true that I was curious, but I wasn’t really glad, and I was prepared, in fact, to be the contrary. He held out a dry hand, which I took and released, and he looked over my shoulder at Sid, who had risen and turned, and relaxed his face briefly in a thin, dyspeptic smile.
“I rang at the front door,” he said, “but no one answered, and so I took the liberty of walking around the house. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all. Come over and sit down.”
“Thanks, Gideon.” He stood for a moment with an air of abstraction, staring off into the dusky yard and popping his knuckles by flexing his fingers, and then he moved over to a chair and stood beside it politely, waiting for Sid to sit down again before sitting down himself. “Perhaps I should have waited and come to your office tomorrow, but what I want to talk about is rather urgent and delicate. I preferred coming here, if you don’t mind.”
“You’re welcome to come,” Sid said, “but I don’t intend to leave, however delicate whatever you have to say may be.”
“No, no.” Wilson did not seem surprised or distressed by Sid’s blunt statement of position, and I could hear the soft popping of knuckles, one, two, three, four, as he folded into his chair in a kind of boneless surrender to it. “Since I’ve invaded the privacy of your home, so to speak, you are both perfectly within your rights to hear what I have to say.”
We waited for him to begin saying it, and after another brief interval of soft popping sounds, he did.
“The truth is,” he said, “I’m afraid I may need a lawyer.”
“You already have several lawyers,” I said. “What do you need with another?”
“Company lawyers. They’re all right for business matters, but this is something different. Personal. To be frank, I’ve committed an indiscretion that may prove extremely troublesome. It has put me, I confess, in a difficult position.”
I wondered if he was referring to murder, the slipping of a long, thin blade into Beth from behind, and I thought that indiscretion, if that was what he meant, was a discreet word for it.
“Indiscretions sometimes have a way of proving troublesome,” I said.
“Yes,” said Sid, “don’t they!”
“My indiscretion,” Wilson said, “was the telling of a lie.”
“That’s very interesting,” Sid said. “We were discussing the telling of lies as a matter of prudence just before you came.”
“A lie,” I said, “is scarcely a legal problem unless it was told under oath.”
“It wasn’t told under oath,” Wilson said, “but it was told to the police, which is the next thing to it. I told it to Cotton McBride, to be exact, and now I’ve been compelled to retract it as a result of a later development, and my position has become, as I said, difficult if not precarious.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me directly what it’s all about,” I said. “That is, if you’re serious about wanting my opinion. Not that I’d recommend me under the circumstances. I may need a lawyer myself pretty soon.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d listen to me. I shouldn’t blame you, however, if you refused. You may have guessed that it concerns someone we have both known quite well.”
“Beth, you mean. I’ve guessed.”
“Yes. Yes, o
f course.” He cleared his throat and popped knuckles. “I’ve been told that you saw her and talked with her at the Carson yesterday.”
“That’s right. She told me she had come to town to see if you would give her some money. She said she was broke.”
“She told you that? Beth was an incredible person. I was never able to understand her at all. I can’t imagine any other woman on earth who would openly imply that she was attempting blackmail.”
“Did you say blackmail?”
“Well, that wasn’t what Beth called it, and I really doubt that she recognized it as such, but you can’t call it anything else if you want to be realistic. You know how Beth was. She had a marvelous capacity for rationalization, and a genuine belief in euphemisms. Anything was what you called it. She was perfectly agreeable, absolutely without any apparent malice, and she was surprised and hurt to discover that I was not anxious to give her twenty thousand dollars. I’m sure she thought I was unreasonable and parsimonious to protest.”
Sid made a derisive sound, but I made no sound at all for several seconds, because I believed what he said was true, and I was trying to understand why in the devil he had said it, to me or to anyone, for it gave him a motive for murder that even Cotton McBride could appreciate, and it had much better been left unsaid so far as I could see.
“Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” I said. “It ought to pay for a pretty big mistake.”
“It wasn’t anything I did deliberately.” Wilson sighed and seemed to sag a little more in his chair, and I found myself feeling for him again the sympathy and strange liking that I had felt before, in spite of what he had once done to me, which really hadn’t been deliberate either. “In fact, it wasn’t anything I did at all. I was simply stupid, that’s what I was, and I suppose stupidity is always expensive. You remember when Beth and I separated out in California? Well, of course you do. You also remember that we settled things amicably between us out of court. I made a very generous settlement, it seems to me, for I don’t mind telling you that I could have gotten off without paying her a penny. Not a single penny. It would have entailed a lot of unpleasantness, however, and I was glad enough to settle. Anyhow, she took what I gave her and went off to get a divorce, which was part of our understanding. Soon after she left, I came back here to manage the main factory, and later on I got notice from her that the divorce had been granted. In a couple of years, I married again, and everything seemed to be satisfactorily settled and almost forgotten until Beth showed up here yesterday and told me that I was a bigamist.”
“A what?”
“A bigamist. A man with more than one wife at the same time. She said she hadn’t ever actually gotten a divorce. She intended to at first, but somehow she kept putting it off, and finally she decided it would be unnecessary to get one at all. She hadn’t meant to cause me any inconvenience or trouble, but it wasn’t really much of a problem, after all, for she was willing to go away quietly again, and all that was required of me was to give her twenty thousand dollars to go on.”
“Didn’t you sign any divorce papers or anything, for God’s sake?”
“Yes, I did, but she said they were phony. She had them drawn up by a disbarred lawyer she met somewhere, because, she said, being married made her feel a little more secure in case something came up to make a husband handy. I should have had my lawyers check it out, of course, but I guess it just didn’t occur to me seriously that she might do something like that. It looked perfectly in order and all, but I admit that I know practically nothing about such matters. I admitted in the beginning that I was stupid.”
“I hope you haven’t been stupid enough to tell all this to anyone else.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I told Cotton McBride that I refused to see Beth, but then he found the five thousand dollars in her room, and later I had to admit that I’d seen her and given her the money, because he was sure to find it out one way or another, and it would only have looked worse for me if I kept on lying. I still didn’t quite tell the truth, though, not all of it, for I merely said I gave her the money because she needed it. I didn’t say anything about my being a bigamist, or blackmail, or that the five thousand, which was all I had in my office safe, was only an initial payment on twenty. Now I’m afraid it will all come out sooner or later in the investigation of what happened to Beth last night, and I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to tell it voluntarily in my own way.”
“Do you realize the probable consequences if you do?”
“Yes. I’ll be suspected of killing her. I may even be arrested, and I suppose I must be prepared to face it. It’s odd, isn’t it, how something like this can develop all of a sudden with no warning whatever?” He got up abruptly from his chair with an unfolding motion and stood looking into the darkening yard, and I could hear once more that soft, measured popping of knuckles. “It was damn inconsiderate of Beth to let me go on thinking I was divorced, getting married again and all, but it was even more inconsiderate to come back here and get herself killed the way she did. Still, you know, I can’t seem to feel any malice toward her for it. I can’t even feel that she really meant me any harm. Maybe you’ll understand that. I don’t know. I always thought a lot of Beth. I kept wishing that she’d change enough so that things could go on between us, but she didn’t, and they couldn’t, and now I wish that things had turned out better for her than they did, but there’s no use in wishing to change what is over and done with. Her father died when she was a young girl, you know, and her mother died several years ago, while Beth and I were in California. Do you happen to know if there are any other relatives living?”
“I don’t think so. None who would care or concern themselves.”
“Well, she must be buried, of course, and I guess I’m the logical one to see that it’s done in good order. I’ll buy a little place for her in the cemetery and make the arrangements. It can be done quite simply and cheaply, I think. There’s no sense in making a great fuss about it.”
Sid and I had both stood up with him, and now he suddenly made a jerky half-turn toward us and an odd little half-bow from the waist that somehow managed to give an effect of great courtliness.
“Thank you for tolerating my intrusion. It’s been a relief to talk to someone, but I’ll have to decide for myself, after all, what I must do. I won’t ask you to treat this as a privileged communication if you feel that you shouldn’t. Now I’ll say good night.”
He completed his turn, now away from us, and walked over to the house and out of sight around the corner. There was a kind of lanky, loping dignity about him that was pretty touching, and he was quite a puzzlement besides.
“I wonder why he really came here,” I said, “and I wonder why he told us what he did. I can’t see any sense in it. If Beth tricked him about the divorce and made a bigamist of him, it seems to me that the sensible thing would simply have been to keep quiet about it, and chances are, now that Beth’s dead, that no one would ever have known. Some people can’t live peacefully alone with something like that on their mind, however. They just have to get rid of it by talking, and maybe Wilson’s one of them. It’s a kind of catharsis.”
“Well,” said Sid, “I’m most relieved to know that there is a fatter suspect in this business than you, and I’m pleased, moreover, to discover that he has behaved, all in all, with even less intelligence. It’s very encouraging.”
“He seemed sad and confused,” I said. “I felt sorry for him.”
“If he had popped his God-damn knuckles one more time,” Sid said, “I’d surely have screamed.”
CHAPTER 9
On Saturday we buried Beth.
Charlie Paley moved her up from the rear room to the chapel for the occasion, and I don’t think it took more than twenty minutes to get the service finished from first to last. There was a minister who said a few words about hope everlasting, which I had heard before with mi
nor variations, and a semipro tenor about town sang a song with organ accompaniment, and the song he sang was “Somewhere the Sun Is Shining.”
Well, it was shining right outside, although not for Beth, and after the service I drove out in it to the cemetery. Sid was with me, and maybe a dozen other people in other cars. Wilson Thatcher was there, but not his wife, and Cotton McBride was there, and so was Sara Pike. The others were people who had known her and may have been sorry that she was dead, and we all gathered around the fresh grave in the little place that Wilson had provided. It was in a corner of the cemetery where the graves came to an end, and just across a fence there was a field full of white clover. A locust tree cast a pattern of light shade on the clipped grass and turned earth, and altogether it was as pretty a place as one could wish to be dead in, although I’m sure Beth wouldn’t have wished, if she could have, to be dead in any place whatever.
Sid stood beside me and held my hand, and when it was all over we turned and left. I still didn’t feel, walking away, that I had said good-by to anyone, or that I had finished anything that needed finishing. What I felt was at odds ends, the strange disconsolate sense of leaving undone what I would never get back to do. Sid and I had not spoken since leaving Charlie Paley’s Chapel, and we didn’t speak now until we had left the cemetery and were back into town. Then she asked me if there was anything I especially wanted to do, and I said I especially wanted to go home.
The Irrepressible Peccadillo Page 8