“Pretty well.”
“That’s what I thought. As I recall, that was one of the times your luck was bad. Or maybe it was good, after all. She was born to be trouble, that one was. Maybe you were lucky out of it.”
“Maybe so. I’m happy enough with the way things have turned out.”
“They’ve turned out a lot better for you than they have for her, that’s certain. Still, when you think back on it, that was a pretty dirty trick she played on you. Something like that can sometimes do peculiar things to a fellow. It sticks. Maybe he thinks he’s forgotten all about it, and then all at once something brings it back, and it’s as bad as ever. Maybe worse.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Cotton. She got married and went away, and she was gone seven years. She quit being important quite a while back.”
“No, she didn’t, Gid. She was killed last night, and that makes her still important. Anyhow, it makes her important all over again. What I’ve been wondering is, why did she come back to town?”
“I can answer that. She had been living well in various places where living well is expensive, and she was broke. She needed some money, and she thought that Wilson Thatcher might be willing to give her some for old time’s sake.”
“The hell she did! How do you know all this?”
“She told me so herself. I saw her yesterday evening in the Kiowa Room, as you probably know. We had a couple of gimlets apiece and talked about this and that. Nothing significant.”
“Isn’t that just like a God-damn crazy woman? What the hell would make her think Wilson Thatcher would just give her some money for the asking?”
“I told you. Old time’s sake.”
“If you ask me, that’s a hell of a poor reason for giving away money.”
“If I know Wilson Thatcher, he would agree with you.”
“Maybe you don’t know him so well. It’s beginning to look to me like he might have thought it a reason good enough.”
“Is that so? Why?”
“Because you said she was broke, but she wasn’t. Not when we checked her room at the hotel this morning. There was a purse of hers in the top drawer of a chest, and there was five grand in the purse. I thought it was a damn careless way to treat a bundle like that, but I guess you’re naturally careless with things that come that easy.”
“What makes you think she got it from Wilson?”
“Who else? Did you give it to her?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve been paying her five grand a month for years. She was blackmailing me.”
“You’re trying to be funny, I guess, but I’m always open to good suggestions, and you’ve made one that may not seem so bad after I’ve looked it over for a while.”
“Blackmail? Don’t be a damn fool, Cotton.”
“I’ll try not to be. It wasn’t you I had in mind, though. Hell, I know you don’t have the land of money you need to pay blackmail. Wilson Thatcher’s different. Wilson has most of the money in the world. You said what you said about her coming to ask him for some of it, and maybe that was just a nice way of putting it. I talked with Wilson this morning, but I’ve got a notion I’d better talk with him again.”
“Did Wilson see her before she died?”
“He says not. He says she called him out at the factory early yesterday afternoon and tried to make an appointment with him, but he told her to go to hell. She must have given old Wilson a pretty rough time out there in California. He had a bellyful. He hadn’t heard about her being dead until I told him, but he didn’t seem particularly surprised. That could be because he already knew without being told, though. What do you think?”
“You’re the detective, Cotton. You do the thinking.”
“I’ve done plenty already, and I’ll do plenty more. Don’t you worry about that. Seems to me, however, that you might be willing to help. It might turn out to be in your own interest if you did.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“It’s plain enough. As far as anybody knows right now, there’s as much reason for suspecting you as anyone else, and the quicker it turns out to be someone else, the better for you.”
“Oh, nuts. Is that what you came here to say? If it is, you’ve said it, and I want to go home.”
“You needn’t get sore about it, Gid. As a detective, it’s my business to figure that anyone might be guilty until it proves otherwise, and you ought to expect it. Why I really came is because you probably knew her better than anyone left around here, except maybe Wilson, and I thought you might know something that happened in the past that might help us now. Look at it this way. She came here to town yesterday morning on the train, and the night of the day she came she was killed out there in Dreamer’s Park. The way that looks to me, she was sure as hell killed, for whatever reason, by someone right here in town, and probably you and I both know whoever it was.”
“Not necessarily. Someone could have followed her.”
“Not necessarily, sure, but most likely. There aren’t any suspicious strangers in town that I know of. You know of any?”
“He could have come and gone. Murderers don’t usually hang around after the murder.”
“It could have happened that way, and I won’t say it couldn’t have, but I don’t believe it. What’s bothering me right now as much as anything else is why she was out there in that park at night. It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable place to be at night unless you’re a kid after nooky, and she wasn’t any kid, and she had a hotel room at her disposal besides.”
“She may have just walked out there for sentimental reasons. Dreamer’s Park
