“That’s true. It’s even difficult to explain it to me.”
“Oh, well, I’ve told you the truth. I couldn’t tell it to anyone else without stirring up a lot of wrong ideas.”
“I’m not so sure your confidence in me is justified, sugar. You have certainly stirred up a lot of ideas, at any rate, wrong or not. Wouldn’t it have shown you were innocent if you reported finding the body?”
“Not necessarily. They’d be sure to think it might be a trick.”
“I doubt that you’d be seriously considered a suspect, sugar. A man who is too cowardly to take a dose of kaopectate would hardly commit a murder.”
“That may be true, but the police are not aware of the intimate details of my relationship with kaopectate.”
“How was she killed, by the way?”
“I don’t know. I only saw her for a few seconds by the light of a match, and I didn’t see any wound or anything.”
“Then how the hell do you know she was killed at all?”
“I’ve thought about it, and it seems probable.”
“I agree that it does. Dreamer’s Park in the middle of the night is hardly a place where one would go deliberately to die naturally. Do you know what I think?”
“No. What?”
“I think that there is nothing to be done except let things work out as they will. Perhaps everything will be settled without any great unpleasantness to anyone except the murderer, if they catch him, and if bad comes to worse, you are at least a lawyer and can defend yourself competently.”
“Thanks. That’s very reassuring.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“Cheerful and confident. I always feel cheerful and confident after finding a body under incriminating circumstances.”
“I mean your stomach, sugar.”
“Oh. My stomach’s all right. It’s fine.”
“You see? Kaopectate works wonders.”
She went over and turned off the little light on her dressing table and came back and lay down beside me in the darkness. I could hear her breathing evenly, and smell the light sweet scent of her, and after a while feel the soft warmth of her, and we lay there for a while quietly before she spoke again.
“Sugar,” she said, “is it possible that you killed her after all?”
“No.”
“One could conceivably believe it.”
“A few minutes ago you said that one couldn’t.”
“I know, but I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided that it’s possible. After all, I am as unlikely a murderer as you, and if she were here alive at this moment, I’m sure I would kill her with pleasure.”
CHAPTER 6
I woke early after going to sleep late. Sid was still asleep on her side, curled like a cold child in a sprinkling of white rosebuds, and I got out of bed quietly and stood for a minute watching her, and I was sorry for what had happened, and I wished that it hadn’t, but it had. There was a bad taste in my mouth, and an ache between my eyes. Outside, in the bright light of morning, a cardinal was screeching his pointed red head off, and I remembered a book about birds that I used to have when I was a kid that said the call of the cardinal was telling everyone to cheer up, cheer up, and I thought to myself now, listening to this one, Like hell I will.
I went into the bathroom and bathed and shaved and brushed, and then I returned to the bedroom and dressed, and all the while Sid kept on sleeping on her side. It seemed to me that she was a little too perfectly the picture of sleeping, her body so still and her breath so measured, and I wondered if she was only pretending, as I had tried to do last night, until I was gone the hell away. I didn’t have the heart to blame her if she was, and if there had been any feasible and physical way to accomplish it, I’d have gone the hell away from myself. Since there was none, I decided that I would at least find myself a little more tolerable if I were full of hot coffee, and so I went downstairs to the kitchen and put on the pot.
I drank the coffee black, two cups, after which I went out into the hall to the foot of the stairs and stood listening for some sound of life above, but there wasn’t any. There didn’t seem to be anything left to do but go, and so I went, walking, and it was still pretty early when I reached my office. It was a substantial hour before Millie was scheduled to report, and it would probably be longer than that this morning because of the engineer last night. This meant that I would have a considerable while to spend with myself, who had come with me in spite of not being wanted, and I spent it watching the Rexall sign across the street and wondering when Beth would be found, if she hadn’t been found already, and who would find her if someone else hadn’t. An hour and a half had passed when Millie came, half an hour late, and it took her ten minutes more to get from her desk to mine. She looked fairly fresh and alert, and smug enough to justify the assumption that something pleasant had recently happened to her.
“Good morning, Mr. Jones,” she said.
“Is it?” I said. “Or is it afternoon?”
“Oh, oh.” She cocked her red head and looked at me warily. “You’ve got bags under your eyes.”
“So have you.”
“I was up all hours. Were you?”
“Never mind. How was the engineer?”
“Determined. Original, too. He was interesting and challenging but not entirely successful. I think he’ll be back to try again.”
“Next time, give in. That way you’ll get to bed earlier and to work on time.”
“Well, aren’t we sour this morning! What the hell happened to you last night?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Then that explains everything. That’s the worst kind of night of all.”
In my opinion, she
