She poured a spoonful of the stuff and poked it at me. In order to avoid getting soaked, I sat up and opened my mouth and permitted her to pour it down my throat. The taste of kaopectate is really not so bad as tastes go, but I was excessively offended by it this time because it was unnecessary, my claim to a sick stomach being a plain lie.
“There you are,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Bad enough.”
“You’ll be feeling much better shortly. Wait and see.”
“There being nothing else I can do, I will.”
She went away with the bottle and spoon and came back without them. Sitting down 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 too bad of you to make such a pig of yourself. It’s evident that nothing of interest can be expected of you tonight. You’ve spoiled everything.”
“I might point out that matters would have been different if you had been willing to give up Rose Pogue and Zoroaster.”
“I suppose I must treat you like a baby and be with you every minute. It does seem, however, 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.”
“It would be impossible for me to be in more mischief than I was, and 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 had not intended to go off in this direction, and I was simply gone before I knew it. I scrapped deception without considering the consequences, and I think the reason I did it was because I had to have a confidant even at the risk of losing a wife. 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. I had been drinking gimlets and listening to Death and Transfiguration, and then the phone rang, and I answered it, and it was Beth. She said she was leaving tomorrow and wanted to see me tonight to say a proper good-by, 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.”
I was still sitting up against the headboard in the position I had assumed for taking kaopectate, and she was still sitting on the edge of the bed in her blue shortie with white rosebuds, and we sat there looking at each other after my confession, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to get absolution at the moment, if ever. 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, and she was probably thinking, in spite of her deceptive, serene gravity, what a pleasure it would be to attend my funeral after having personally got me ready for it.
“As for me,” she said at last, “I am not so concerned with your having found her dead as I am with what you would have done if you hadn’t.”
“There’s no use speculating about that, so far as I can see. She was dead, and nothing was done.”
“On the contrary, there’s a great deal of use in speculating about it. One could very easily reach some interesting conclusions, although the range of possibilities of what could be done in a dark park is so broad that it almost staggers the imagination. One thing seems certain to begin with. It would scarcely have been necessary to meet there to say a proper good-by. It would be, in my judgment, far more appropriate to an improper good-by.”
“Oh, come off, Sid. Beth’s dead, and I’m in trouble, and all you can think about is some damn peccadillo that didn’t even happen.”
“You’re in trouble, all right, sugar. You’re perfectly right there. Unless, that is, you can explain satisfactorily why it was necessary to say good-by in a dark park instead of some place like a hotel lobby or a lighted street corner or the reading room of the YWCA.”
“Damn it, there was nothing of any consequence intended. You know how this town is, and what would have been said about us if we had been seen together even in a crowded tabernacle. We merely wanted to avoid gossip, that’s all, and Dreamer’s Park was just a place that occurred to her and seemed reasonable to me because it’s a place we had been before, a long time ago, and a place where couples still go now and then.”
“I know that couples go there, and I know what for. Not, as a regular thing, to say a proper good-by. Your explanation, however, is just ridiculous enough to seem characteristic, and I’ll consider accepting it. But now, I suppose, I had better consider the rest of the matter. You’ve made a mess of things by drinking gin and sneaking off in the night to meet someone who turned up dead, and it’s plain that I must consider what’s to be done about it. Isn’t it expected of a person who finds a body to report it to the police or someone?”
“Yes, it is. It’s expected.”
“Then why, may I ask, didn’t you do what was expected?”
“Because she was dead from having been killed. Because I wanted to avoid offering myself up to suspicion of having killed her. It would probably be difficult to explain to a cop how
