“The invitation suggests certain intriguing possibilities, but I’ll have to decline. When I married Sid, she made me promise to give up staying with other girls in their apartments. She’s unreasonable about such trifles.”
“I was only trying to help. I have a notion for some reason that you may need all you can get.”
Which was a correct notion, as I shortly learned.
I went downstairs to the street, bright and hot with sunlight again after yesterday’s rain, the heat more bothersome now than it had been before because the comfort index was way up close to the temperature, and I worked up a quick sweat walking three blocks to Hec Caldwell’s office. It was his private office, a couple of rooms above a men’s clothing store, and when I got there Hec was waiting for me behind his desk, and Cotton McBride was standing at a window with his back to the room and looking down into the street through the upper section of the window above a one-ton air conditioner installed in the lower. Cotton’s presence was all I needed to confirm my feeling that something was surely up, or rather out, and I had a pretty certain idea that what was out was my nocturnal idiocy in Dreamer’s Park, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how Cotton and Hec had learned about it. Hec stood up and asked me to sit down, which I did. Cotton turned away from the window and stood there looking at me with an expression that suggested a bad taste in his mouth, while Hec sat down again and started looking at me too, and between the pair of them, staring like that, they made me damn uncomfortable.
“Well,” I said, “you asked me to come over right away, and here I am.”
“So you are,” Hec said. “Thanks for coming.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“No occasion. Just something that’s come up. We hope you can help us with it.”
“Anything to oblige. What do you want me to do?”
“What we want you to do,” Cotton said, “is quit playing fancy with me and everyone else and tell the truth for a change.”
“Who says I haven’t been telling the truth, and who says what it is that I haven’t been telling it about?”
“I say it, that’s who says it, and what it’s about is the murder of Beth Thatcher, and I’m the one who says that too. Anyhow, you haven’t been telling all the truth, if any part of it, and you’d better start telling it right now if you know what’s good for you.”
“I’m not so sure about that. I’ve just recently had advice from two pretty shrewd characters, and one of them presented a convincing case for the advantages of telling lies, and the other one said not to admit anything.”
“There’s no need to get excited,” Hec said. “Gid, Cotton’s somewhat annoyed with you, as you can see, and maybe he’s justified, and maybe he isn’t. That’s what we want to find out.”
“I’m all for that,” I said. “Let’s.”
“All right.” Hec opened the belly drawer of his desk and took out an envelope, which he held between a thumb and index finger. “This was delivered to the police station this morning. Regular mail. You’d better read it.”
He passed it across the desk, and I took it. The envelope was perfectly dry, of course, but it gave me in my fingertips a sensation of unpleasant dampness. It was a cheap envelope, about 3½ by 6½, addressed with a typewriter. Pica type. Local postmark. I removed a single sheet of paper from the envelope and read what was on it, and this was what: To the police: Ask Gideon Jones what he was doing in Dreamer’s Park the night Beth Thatcher was killed. Don’t let him tell you he wasn’t there, because he was, and I saw him. No signature, of course. No X’s and O’s for love and kisses. I put the sheet back into the envelope and handed it across the desk to Hec, who took it and dropped it on his blotter. I wiped my hands on the legs of my pants.
“I thought you said this was no occasion,” I said. “I beg to differ. I’ve just been accused of murder for the first time in my life, and in my judgment that’s an occasion as big as any there is.”
“Who accused you of murder?”
“Whoever wrote that note.”
“No. The note just said to ask you what you were doing in Dreamer’s Park, and we’re asking. What were you doing?”
“Assuming that I was there at all to be doing anything?”
“True. I’ll put that question first. Were you there?”
Well, what the hell! Sid had told me to lie and had patiently explained the advantages of it, and I wanted to lie and had the lie all ready on my tongue, a single lousy little two-letter word beginning with n and ending with o, but I couldn’t pronounce it. It wasn’t that I was shaken up or confused or anything like that, for I was thinking clearly and could see that the chances were good for lying and getting away with it, and the reason the chances were good, as I saw it, was because the writer of the note had not signed it. This meant that he or she did not wish to be indentified and would probably never come forward to testify, and this was understandable when you stopped to consider all the implications, for in order to have seen me in Dreamer’s Park, the writer, he or she, would have necessarily had to be in it too, or near it, and why should the police make any more of my having been there the night Beth was killed than of his or her having been there the same night? All I had to do was get a consonant and vowel off my tongue in proper order, but I couldn’t do it, I simply couldn’t, and so I
