The Irrepressible Peccadillo

by Fletcher Flora

  “As a lawyer,” I said, “I decline to give an opinion without consulting a lawyer.”

  Cotton turned his beer can, now empty, around and around in his hands. He seemed to be trying to find his place among the words, which he had apparently lost. Suddenly, giving it up, he laid the can gently in the grass and got onto his knees and then to his feet. He stood looking for a few seconds over our heads toward a redbud tree at the rear of the yard.

  “By God,” he said. “Oh, by God.”

  Turning without another word, he walked away and around the house and out of sight.

  “What the hell’s the matter with him?” Sid said. “Is he mad or something?”

  “I don’t think he’s mad,” I said. “I think he’s just a little disturbed.”

  “What about? Because I tried to get him to consider things reasonably?”

  “That might be it. I’ve got a notion you made quite an impression.”

  “It was damn impolite of him, if you ask me, not even to thank us for the beer.”

  “He didn’t intend to be impolite. He was abstracted. Stunned may be the word.”

  “Oh, nonsense. I only pointed out a few things he should have thought of himself. I wonder why he didn’t?”

  “That’s what he’s wondering. Anyhow, you were admirable and irresistible. I want to congratulate you.”

  “It isn’t necessary to congratulate me for not being an idiot.”

  “True. Nevertheless, it was a deft job of directing suspicion on a woman who is probably as innocent as you are.”

  “Well, if she’s innocent, it will do her no harm in the end, and I’m convinced that it will be favorable to our own cause. In order to keep you out of jail, if possible, we must have as many suspects as can be arranged.”

  “I see. Sort of a calculated confusion. Well, as Voltaire said, let us tend our garden. To be more precise, let us finish the yard.”

  “I don’t believe I’ll clip around any more edges. I’m rather tired of it.”

  “I sympathize. Clipping is not a job to sustain one’s interest very long.”

  I got up and started the mower and finished mowing the backyard, and Sid sat under the tree and watched me do it.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was raining when I woke the next morning, the morning of Sunday, and it rained gently without stopping until about five o’clock in the afternoon, and in the meanwhile, between waking and five, it was a quiet and undemanding day that Sid and I spent pleasantly in various ways without intrusions. After the rain stopped, between five and six, we considered going out somewhere to get something to eat, but we decided that going out was something we didn’t particularly want to do, having had a pretty good time staying in, and so we found some cold chicken in the refrigerator, which we ate at the kitchen table with bread and butter and beer. It was clearing and cool outside after the rain, and we went out onto the back terrace before dark and sat there while darkness came, and the stars were out among what was left of the clouds. I went to sleep in my chair and woke up after ten, almost eleven, and Sid was asleep in her chair beside me. I woke her, and we went inside and had a drink and went to bed and to sleep after a while. What I’m trying to say is that it was a good day of its kind, and I was glad to have it to remember later, for the next one was bad.

  It started out all right, a brisk walk to the office and Millie already there in a good humor with her bright head cocked like a woodpecker’s, and it stayed all right, if not exceptional, until mid-morning, which was about the time that Millie took a call from the county attorney, who wanted to talk to me. The county attorney’s name was Hector Caldwell. We were about the same age, and he had always been a friend of mine, which he was still, so far as I knew, but he was compelled in his professional capacity, as it turned out, to treat me in an unfriendly fashion. When Millie announced who it was wanted to talk to me, I took up the phone and said, “Hello, Hec,” and he said, “Hello, Gid,” and I said, “What can I do for you?” and he said, “I wonder if you could get over to my office right away,” and I said, “Well, I don’t think I can make it right away,” and he said, “I think maybe you’d better,” and I knew in an instant, although his voice was pleasant, that I damn well had no choice one way or the other. I did have the alternative of leaving town in a hurry, of course, but the alternative did not appeal to me, hurried or not, and so I left my office on the way to Hec’s and was almost to the hall when Millie stopped me.

  “You be careful what you say to that Hector Caldwell,” she said.

  “You’ve been listening on the extension again,” I said.

  “Don’t admit anything,” she said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I don’t trust that son of a bitch. He wants to be governor or something someday.”

  “You’re just a crazy redhead. What the hell makes you think I’ve got anything to admit?”

  “I don’t think you necessarily have, although I wouldn’t bet on it, but I think he thinks you have, and I could tell by the snotty tone of his voice.”

  “Snotty? It sounded normal enough to me, except possibly right at the end.”

  “Well, it’s normally snotty, that’s why, but it’s right at the end that I’m mainly talking about. Who the hell does he think he is to be ordering you around?”

  “He thinks he’s the county attorney, that’s who, and I think you’d better quit listening in on my telephone conversations. Don’t you have any sense of shame at all?”

  “It isn’t nearly as keen as my sense of trouble, and the trouble I sense is something you’re in, whatever it may be precisely. Maybe you shouldn’t go talk to that Hector Caldwell at all. I’ll let you hide out in my apartment if you want to.”

  “The invitation suggests certain intriguing possibilities, but I’ll have to decline. When I married Sid, she made me promise to give up staying with other girls in their apartments. She’s unreasonable about such trifles.”

  “I was only trying to help. I have a notion for some reason that you may need all you can get.”

  Which was a correct notion, as I shortly learned.

  I went downstairs to the street, bright and hot with sunlight again after yesterday’s rain, the heat more bothersome now than it had been before because the comfort index was way up close to the temperature, and I worked up a quick sweat walking three blocks to Hec Caldwell’s office. It was his private office, a couple of rooms above a men’s clothing store, and when I got there Hec was waiting for me behind his desk, and Cotton McBride was standing at a window with his back to the room and looking down into the street through the upper section of the window above a one-ton air conditioner installed in the lower. Cotton’s presence was all I needed to confirm my feeling that something was surely up, or rather out, and I had a pretty certain idea that what was out was my nocturnal idiocy in Dreamer’s Park, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how Cotton and Hec had learned about it. Hec stood up and asked me to sit down, which I did. Cotton turned away from the window and stood there looking at me with an expression that suggested a bad taste in his mouth, while Hec sat down again and started looking at me too, and between the pair of them, staring like that, they made me damn uncomfortable.

  “Well,” I said, “you asked me to come over right away, and here I am.”

  “So you are,” Hec said. “Thanks for coming.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion. Just something that’s come up. We hope you can help us with it.”

  “Anything to oblige. What do you want me to do?”

  “What we want you to do,” Cotton said, “is quit playing fancy with me and everyone else and tell the truth for a change.”

  “Who says I haven’t been telling the truth, and who says what it is that I haven’t been telling it about?”

  “I say it, that’s who says it,
and what it’s about is the murder of Beth Thatcher, and I’m the one who says that too. Anyhow, you haven’t been telling all the truth, if any part of it, and you’d better start telling it right now if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. I’ve just recently had advice from two pretty shrewd characters, and one of them presented a convincing case for the advantages of telling lies, and the other one said not to admit anything.”

  “There’s no need to get excited,” Hec said. “Gid, Cotton’s somewhat annoyed with you, as you can see, and maybe he’s justified, and maybe he isn’t. That’s what we want to find out.”

  “I’m all for that,” I said. “Let’s.”

  “All right.” Hec opened the belly drawer of his desk and took out an envelope, which he held between a thumb and index finger. “This was delivered to the police station this morning. Regular mail. You’d better read it.”

  He passed it across the desk, and I took it. The envelope was perfectly dry, of course, but it gave me in my fingertips a sensation of unpleasant dampness. It was a cheap envelope, about 3½ by 6½, addressed with a typewriter. Pica type. Local postmark. I removed a single sheet of paper from the envelope and read what was on it, and this was what: To the police: Ask Gideon Jones what he was doing in Dreamer’s Park the night Beth Thatcher was killed. Don’t let him tell you he wasn’t there, because he was, and I saw him. No signature, of course. No X’s and O’s for love and kisses. I put the sheet back into the envelope and handed it across the desk to Hec, who took it and dropped it on his blotter. I wiped my hands on the legs of my pants.

  “I thought you said this was no occasion,” I said. “I beg to differ. I’ve just been accused of murder for the first time in my life, and in my judgment that’s an occasion as big as any there is.”

  “Who accused you of murder?”

  “Whoever wrote that note.”

  “No. The note just said to ask you what you were doing in Dreamer’s Park, and we’re asking. What were you doing?”

  “Assuming that I was there at all to be doing anything?”

  “True. I’ll put that question first. Were you there?”

  Well, what the hell! Sid had told me to lie and had patiently explained the advantages of it, and I wanted to lie and had the lie all ready on my tongue, a single lousy little two-letter word beginning with n and ending with o, but I couldn’t pronounce it. It wasn’t that I was shaken up or confused or anything like that, for I was thinking clearly and could see that the chances were good for lying and getting away with it, and the reason the chances were good, as I saw it, was because the writer of the note had not signed it. This meant that he or she did not wish to be indentified and would probably never come forward to testify, and this was understandable when you stopped to consider all the implications, for in order to have seen me in Dreamer’s Park, the writer, he or she, would have necessarily had to be in it too, or near it, and why should the police make any more of my having been there the night Beth was killed than of his or her having been there the same night? All I had to do was get a consonant and vowel off my tongue in proper order, but I couldn’t do it, I simply couldn’t, and so I told the truth and made an admission at the same time in spite of the sagest advice from separate sources to do neither.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Hec looked surprised and uncomfortable, and Cotton looked something I couldn’t see, for I wasn’t looking at him. I could hear him, though, and I heard him make a little wet smacking sound with his lips that seemed to have in it a quality of satisfaction.

  “Do you know what you’re saying?” Hec said.

  “Certainly I know,” I said. “I said I was in Dreamer’s Park, and I was.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you say so before?” Cotton said.

  “You didn’t ask me,” I said.

  “It’s your God-damn duty to tell something like that to the police without being asked,” Cotton said.

  “That’s right, Gid,” Hec said. “You know it is. You should have told Cotton. Why didn’t you?”

  “That should be obvious,” I said. “I didn’t tell because I wanted do avoid exactly what I haven’t. I wanted to avoid being suspected of killing someone I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know that you’re suspected of lolling anyone yet,” Hec said.

  “As for me,” Cotton said, “I don’t know that he isn’t.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said.

  “You’d better tell us why you went there and what you did there,” Hec said.

  “I’ll be happy to,” I said. “I went there to meet Beth at her request, but I didn’t meet her because she was dead.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you report her death to the police?” Cotton said. “Don’t you know there’s a law about reporting bodies when you find them?”

  “I didn’t report it because I didn’t know it.”

  “God-damn it, you just said she was dead. Now you say you didn’t know it.”

  “Oh, come off, Cotton. Why don’t you quit trying to be a detective every minute? I said she was dead because she was later found dead. Putting that fact with the fact that she failed to meet me after arranging the meeting herself, I merely assumed that the failure was the result of her being dead.”

  “You mean to say she might have been dead in that old bandstand all the time you were there and you didn’t even see her?”

  I considered my answer carefully for a split second, and I decided that the truth was fine as far as it went, but it was possible to try to make it go too far. Having reached this decision, I retreated to Sid’s prepared position.

  “I mean to say,” I said.

  “What I can’t figure out,” Hec said, “is why you agreed to meet her in Dreamer’s Park in the middle of the night, of all places and all times. There doesn’t seem to me to be any good reason for it.”

  “As for me,” Cotton said, “I can think of two good reasons, and the other one’s murder.”

  “You aren’t even half right,” I said. “Dreamer’s Park is a place of sentiment, and we were going to say a proper good-by, and it seemed appropriate to say it in a sentimental place. Besides, I had been listening to cicadas and drinking gin.”

  “It’s a fact, Cotton, that Dreamer’s Park is a place of sentiment,” Hec said. “In my time, I’ve made a few connections there myself.”

  “Well,” Cotton said, “nooky is one thing, and murder’s another, and I don’t think we ought to be mixing them up in our thinking.”

  “Cotton’s right, Gid,” Hec said. “We’ve got to keep sentiment out of this. Maybe you’d better just tell us what happened in your own words.”

  “To begin with,” I said, “I was pretty restless, the evening coming on for what it was plainly going to be, and then I met Beth after a lot of years in the Kiowa Room.”

  “We know all about that,” Cotton said.

  “Yes, Gid,” Hec said, “just skip along to a little later. Tell us how it happened that you agreed to meet her.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened at all,” I said, “if Sid hadn’t gone off to talk with Rose Pogue about Zoroaster.”

  “About who?” Cotton said.

  “About whom?” Hec said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Who or whom, off she went to talk, and I was alone in the house drinking gimlets and listening to Death and Transfiguration. Then the phone rang, and it was Beth. She said she was going away the next day, and would I come to meet her and say good-by, and I asked where. That was when she thought of Dreamer’s Park, and it seemed like a fine place to say good-by, with sentimental connections and all, and I agreed to go there to meet her.”

  “What time was this?” Cotton said. He had a little notebook out, and was taking notes.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “As I explained, I’d been drinking gimlets. I’m pretty sur
e it was pretty late, though. About nine-thirty.”

  “Go on, Gid,” Hec said.

  “There isn’t much farther to go. Just across town to Dreamer’s Park. When I got there, I sat in the bandstand and waited for Beth, but she didn’t come, and finally I decided that she had simply found someone else to do something more interesting with. I went home and went to bed, and the next day I heard she’d been murdered, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “I’ve got a feeling,” Cotton said, “that there may be more.”

  “Did you see anyone at all while you were in the park?” Hec said.

  “No one,” I said, “except a few people at a distance passing along the streets. No one in the park itself.”

  “What I was wondering specifically,” Hec said, “is whether you saw anyone who might have seen you who might have written this note.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “That’s too bad. I don’t care too much for anonymous notes, if you want to know the truth. You got any enemies who might want to get you involved in a murder out of pure meanness?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “You’d better think hard. Someone you put in jail or something?”

  “I’ve never put anyone in jail. My talents have been employed in trying to keep everyone out. I’ve sued a few for modest amounts, but never for enough to justify this kind of retaliation. In fact, the only person I’ve offended recently is Mrs. Roscoe Burdock, and I’m reasonably certain that she can’t write, even on a typewriter.”