“I’ll go only on condition that I’m included in the private talk,” Sid said.
“How about it, Cotton?” I said. “Can Sid be included?”
“I guess it won’t do any harm,” Cotton said, “although I can’t imagine that it will do any good, either.”
“In that case,” Sid said, “I’ll go.”
She stood up and tugged at her short shorts and started for the house, and Cotton sank down onto the grass and took off his stained straw hat, exposing pale limp hair plastered damply to his skull. He sat there in a wilted heap with his legs crossed before him at the ankles.
“That’s a remarkable little woman,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a woman so determined about something that she didn’t even know anything about.”
“Her deepest female instincts have been aroused. She’s fighting for her mate.”
“Why the hell did she have to pick me to fight with? I haven’t done anything to her mate. Not yet.”
“There’s that ominous appendage again. Not yet. I agree with Sid that there seems to be a suspicion of threat in it.”
“Maybe so. I may know a few things I’m not talking about.”
“Oh? Shall I call my lawyer?”
The screen door banged at that instant, and Sid came back with the beers. She passed one to Cotton and one to me and sat down with the other.
“What has been said while I was gone?” she said.
“Nothing of importance,” I said.
“We were waiting to include you,” Cotton said.
“Then there’s no sense in waiting any longer, since I’m here.”
“No, there isn’t.” Cotton had been looking at Sid’s brown legs, but now he took a swallow of beer and began looking at me. “You remember what I told you in your office? How Wilson Thatcher denied seeing Beth or giving her any money?”
“I remember. You said you were going to talk to him again.”
“Well, I talked to him, all right, and in my judgment he told me a damn lie.”
“Does he still claim he didn’t see Beth or give her the money?”
“No. Just the other way around. He claims he lied the first time about not seeing her, because he thought it might incriminate him or something, but he changed his mind and decided to tell the truth, and the truth is, according to him, that she called him out at the factory, and he arranged to meet her and give her the five grand.”
“Where did he meet her?”
“He says he picked her up on a corner, and they just drove around a few minutes, and then he let her out on the same corner, but as I said, I’ve got a notion it’s a damn lie.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Hell, I just can’t see any good reason why he should give her five grand if he was going to kill her afterward. Besides being a waste of money, which isn’t like Wilson, it would make us think of him first thing.”
“You think he was telling the truth the first time and lying the second?”
“Damned if I know what I think, to tell the truth. It’s all mixed up. Assuming that he did give her the money, why the hell should he tell us about it?”
“Because he’s not a fool and assumes that you aren’t either.”
“Which could easily be a mistake,” Sid said.
“Thanks,” Cotton said, ignoring Sid and concentrating on me. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind developing that a little.”
“Well, it’s your position that he would never have given her the money and then lolled her afterward, and it’s my position that Wilson was perfectly capable of anticipating this. If you look at it this way, the fact that he gave her the money, if it is a fact, is the best evidence of his innocence.”
“You think so? I might agree if it wasn’t for something else that I know and you don’t.” He paused and swallowed more beer and looked at me for a few seconds with a sly expression in which there was a touch of smugness. “Did you know Wilson Thatcher was a bigamist?”
This was clearly intended to be a bomb, which it had been at the time Wilson exploded it on the back terrace, but now it barely popped, and I had trouble in looking as incredulous as circumstances demanded. The only element of shock, so far as I was concerned, was that Wilson had been so rash as to spill his insides without restraint.
“Oh, cut it out,” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a fact just the same. At least Wilson says it is, and I can’t see why a man would say something like that about himself unless it was true.”
“By God, I can’t see why he’d say it at all, true or otherwise.”
“He was afraid we’d find it out ourselves, and then it would look all the worse because he hadn’t told. He didn’t even know it himself until Beth Thatcher came to town, and that’s why she came. To tell him she’d never really gotten the divorce he thought she had, and to put the squeeze on him. The five grand, Wilson says, was just a down payment on twenty, and he was going to get the rest of it for her the next day. There’s a couple of pretty good motives for murder, if you ask me. You kill one person and get rid of a wife who makes you a bigamist while you’re saving fifteen good grand that would otherwise have to go after five bad.”
“Oh, sure, Cotton. Two wonderful motives. And so he just handed them to you out of pure charity and a natural desire to be hanged.”
“All right, Gid. You don’t have to go on with it. It looks like the guy’s going out of his way to make trouble for himself, and that’s what bothers me. Fact is, I’m wondering why the hell he doesn’t just confess to the murder and be done with it. He doesn’t, though. He swears he never saw her
