“A small price to pay for it. I agree.”
“Oh, well, it’s of no importance any longer, and I only mentioned it to point out that Wilson Thatcher may not have always acted like a deacon just because he looks like one. Suppose he did something once that he doesn’t want known, and your precious Beth tried to blackmail him because of it. Wouldn’t that be an acceptable reason for his killing her if it could be proved?”
“Acceptable, indeed. I can detect a couple of flaws in the supposition, though. In the first place, why pay her five grand and kill her afterward? Why not kill her before and keep the five grand in the bank?”
“Perhaps he felt compelled to give her the money as a land of down payment or something until he could get her in a position to do what he wanted to her.”
“I concede the possibility, but I have no faith in it. Flaw number two, in my judgment, is even more critical. In spite of the precedent of the commissioner and the mayor’s elderly sister, I consider it extremely unlikely that Wilson deviated from propriety a sufficient degree to make him a subject for blackmail. Having known him and Beth both from away back, I’m satisfied that the deviations, whatever they may have been, were on the distaff side. The view is supported by the nature of their divorce. Wilson, as you pointed out, is only slightly poorer than Croesus and could have been tapped for a steady increment of magnificent proportions if he had been vulnerable. Nothing like this happened, however. A settlement was made quietly, and Beth went off quietly for her divorce. A few years later, she turns up broke. I submit that any major diversion by Wilson, felonious or merely scandalous, would have kept her living well in Miami and Rio and Acapulco and places like that indefinitely.”
“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
