Sid had said that he looked like a deacon, although possibly not always acting like one, and I guess that’s what he looked like, if a deacon is tall and thin with lank black hair and a dyspeptic face with pale blue eyes tending to project. Actually, he was not a bad fellow, pleasant enough most of the time, and I’d always rather liked him in an unenthusiastic way, even though our associations, such as they were, had been somewhat strained for reasons stated. Right now, he looked uncertain and apologetic, holding one hand in an odd position before his mouth, as if he were keeping prepared to cover another cough. I thought to myself, watching him approach, that he had surely been no match for Beth, who had surely given him a bad time while it lasted, and I felt sorry for him all at once and hoped that his trouble, if he had any, was no worse than mine, which might be bad enough.
“Hello, Wilson,” I said. “Glad to see you.”
This wasn’t quite true. It was true that I was curious, but I wasn’t really glad, and I was prepared, in fact, to be the contrary. He held out a dry hand, which I took and released, and he looked over my shoulder at Sid, who had risen and turned, and relaxed his face briefly in a thin, dyspeptic smile.
“I rang at the front door,” he said, “but no one answered, and so I took the liberty of walking around the house. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all. Come over and sit down.”
“Thanks, Gideon.” He stood for a moment with an air of abstraction, staring off into the dusky yard and popping his knuckles by flexing his fingers, and then he moved over to a chair and stood beside it politely, waiting for Sid to sit down again before sitting down himself. “Perhaps I should have waited and come to your office tomorrow, but what I want to talk about is rather urgent and delicate. I preferred coming here, if you don’t mind.”
“You’re welcome to come,” Sid said, “but I don’t intend to leave, however delicate whatever you have to say may be.”
“No, no.” Wilson did not seem surprised or distressed by Sid’s blunt statement of position, and I could hear the soft popping of knuckles, one, two, three, four, as he folded into his chair in a kind of boneless surrender to it. “Since I’ve invaded the privacy of your home, so to speak, you are both perfectly within your rights to hear what I have to say.”
We waited for him to begin saying it, and after another brief interval of soft popping sounds, he did.
“The truth is,” he said, “I’m afraid I may need a lawyer.”
“You already have several lawyers,” I said. “What do you need with another?”
“Company lawyers. They’re all right for business matters, but this is something different. Personal. To be frank, I’ve committed an indiscretion that may prove extremely troublesome. It has put me, I confess, in a difficult position.”
I wondered if he was referring to murder, the slipping of a long, thin blade into Beth from behind, and I thought that indiscretion, if that was what he meant, was a discreet word for it.
“Indiscretions sometimes have a way of proving troublesome,” I said.
“Yes,” said Sid, “don’t they!”
“My indiscretion,” Wilson said, “was the telling of a lie.”
“That’s very interesting,” Sid said. “We were discussing the telling of lies as a matter of prudence just before you came.”
“A lie,” I said, “is scarcely a legal problem unless it was told under oath.”
“It wasn’t told under oath,” Wilson said, “but it was told to the police, which is the next thing to it. I told it to Cotton McBride, to be exact, and now I’ve been compelled to retract it as a result of a later development, and my position has become, as I said, difficult if not precarious.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me directly what it’s all about,” I said. “That is, if you’re serious about wanting my opinion. Not that I’d recommend me under the circumstances. I may need a lawyer myself pretty soon.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d listen to me. I shouldn’t blame you, however, if you refused. You may have guessed that it concerns someone we have both known quite well.”
“Beth, you mean. I’ve guessed.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He cleared his throat and popped knuckles. “I’ve been told that you saw her and talked with her at the Carson yesterday.”
“That’s right. She told me she had come to town to see if you would give her some money. She said she was broke.”
“She told you that? Beth was an incredible person. I was never able to understand her at all. I can’t imagine any other woman on earth who would openly imply that she was attempting blackmail.”
“Did you say blackmail?”
“Well, that wasn’t what Beth called it, and I really doubt that she recognized it as such, but you can’t call it anything else if you want to be realistic. You know how Beth was. She had a marvelous capacity for rationalization, and a genuine belief in euphemisms. Anything was what you called it. She was perfectly agreeable, absolutely without any apparent malice, and she was surprised and hurt to discover that I was not anxious to give her twenty thousand dollars. I’m sure she thought I was unreasonable and parsimonious to protest.”
Sid made a derisive sound, but I made no sound at all for several seconds, because I believed what he said was true, and I was trying to understand why in the devil he had said it, to me or to anyone, for it gave him a motive for murder that even Cotton McBride could appreciate, and it had much better been left unsaid so far as I could see.
“Twenty thousand dollars is a
