“Thanks so much.”
“But I reserve the right to think that there might have been more bleeding elsewhere.”
“There wasn’t. There wasn’t an elsewhere, and there wasn’t any more bleeding. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t even enough bleeding to wash away all the dirt.”
“Dirt? Did you say dirt?”
“That’s what I said. There must have been some dirt on the weapon, because there was some at the edge of the wound, and a little inside.”
“Well, this is getting more odd and interesting all the time, and it seems to me that you’ve given far too little attention to details that deserve more.” Sid stood up and smoothed her skirt over her hips, leaving her hands on them afterward as she looked down at Cotton. “I gave you a significant lead only last Saturday, for instance, when you were at our house drinking one of our beers. Have you done the least thing about it?”
“It doesn’t appear now that it will be necessary.”
“It may not appear necessary to you, but it does to me.”
“I’d better warn you not to interfere with police business.”
“Anything I do will not be interference. It will only be what you should have done yourself and didn’t.” She turned and walked away a couple of steps and looked back over her shoulder. “By the way,” she said, “if you actually plan to waste time searching our yard and house, be sure you bring a warrant with you when you come to do it.”
“I know,” Cotton said sourly. “Otherwise, you’ll shoot me as a trespasser.”
CHAPTER 12
The next morning Sid got up early and dressed and made coffee. While she was drinking the coffee alone at the kitchen table, she began to plan what she would do that day, and what she planned to do, first of all, was to go out to the Thatcher home and talk with Mrs. Thatcher. She thought in the beginning that she would call and make an appointment, but then she reconsidered and thought that it might be better and more effective just to go on out. She had no reason to believe that she would be particularly welcome at any time, and even less so under existing conditions, and she did not wish to be told on the phone by a maid or someone that Mrs. Thatcher had a sick headache or had suddenly left town or anything like that. She was certain, however, that Mrs. Thatcher would not be an early riser, and that nine o’clock, or possibly ten, would be about the right time to go. It was only seven-thirty when she was thinking this, and so she would have to do something else for a couple of hours, to compromise between nine and ten, before leaving.
She went out into the living room where she had left yesterday’s edition of the local newspaper after reading it last night. She took the paper back to the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee and began to read again on the front page, continued on page three, the startling account of how Gideon Jones, prominent young local attorney, had been detained by authorities on suspicion of murdering Beth Webb Thatcher, formerly the wife of Wilson Thatcher, prominent young business executive. She read the account carefully from beginning to end, as she had already done once before, and although the grounds for suspecting Gideon Jones were made perfectly clear in short words that could be understood even on the fringes of literacy, there was not the slightest suggestion that Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Thatcher were legally Wilson Thatcher and Thelma Bleeker, unwed and unchaste, or that they had been blackmailed as a result by the legal Mrs. Wilson Thatcher, who was dead from having been killed, and might, therefore, quite reasonably be considered suspicious themselves. Sid felt that this was discriminatory and unfair, and she suspected the connivance of Cotton McBride and Hec Caldwell.
There was clearly, at any rate, a minor conspiracy to spare the Thatchers public embarrassment unless it became absolutely unavoidable, and it was Sid’s opinion, hotly held in indignation, that the Thatchers were not a damn bit more worthy of being spared than the Gideon Joneses, who had not been spared at all. There was even a bad picture of the suspect, me, and a more than slightly-sexy-one of the victim, Beth, and it was a safe bet that nine out of ten people who saw the latter came immediately to the conclusion that the subject of the former had been up to something considerably more interesting and entertaining than murder before murder was committed.
After a couple of tedious hours, about nine-thirty, Sid went on out to the Thatcher home. It was a big, high house on an old street, and it sat well back from the street behind a deep yard. There was an iron picket fence around the yard with a pair of stone deer inside it. A driveway approached the house in a flat curve from the street, running under a side portico and on to garages in the rear. The house was built, I think, in the early twenties, but it had about it an ugly Victorian air of pretentious elegance. There was not actually any gingerbread on it, but it looked as if there should have been.
Sid parked in the portico and went up side steps onto a high porch. She pushed a bell button beside a heavy door flanked by narrow panes of leaded glass, and pretty soon, as she had anticipated, the door was opened by a maid, who asked her what she wanted.
“I want to see Mrs. Wilson Thatcher,” Sid said. “Please tell her that Mrs. Gideon Jones is calling.”
The name produced an effect that it would not have produced before yesterday’s newspaper,
