“In that case,” Sid said, “I would like to see Miss Thelma Bleeker.”
“Who?” the maid said.
“Miss Thelma Bleeker.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no one here with that name.”
“Nevertheless, I’d appreciate it if you would go and tell Mrs. Thatcher that Mrs. Gideon Jones wishes to speak with Miss Thelma Bleeker, and I don’t mind telling you that it will be in her best interests if you do as I say.”
“If you will just wait here,” the maid said.
“I’ll wait,” Sid said, “but I don’t care to wait quite as long as I did before. Try to be a little quicker, if you please.”
The maid went away again and came back again, this time quicker. Mrs. Thatcher, she said, had decided to see Mrs. Jones after all, and so Mrs. Jones followed the maid into a small room off the hall, where she was left, and pretty soon Mrs. Thatcher came to join her there, and with Mrs. Thatcher, somewhat to Mrs. Jones’s surprise, was no one but Mr. Thatcher.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jones,” Wilson Thatcher said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“As a matter of fact,” Sid said, “it clearly isn’t, and we will probably all feel more comfortable if no one tries to pretend that it is.”
“Well, it’s a difficult time for you, I know, and I would like you to believe, at least, that you have our sympathy.”
“So far as that goes, the time is not nearly so difficult for me as some later time is going to be for someone else, and it is, moreover, a little too early for sympathy when it is not yet known who is really going to need it.”
Thelma Thatcher (at least by squatter’s rights) was smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and she took a deep breath of smoke and held it for a moment in her lungs and let it escape slowly between her lips as she examined Sid intently. She was rather tall and angular, with large hands and feet and a long upper lip that gave her a kind of squirrelly look. She must have represented, Sid thought, a radical reaction from Beth. Old simple Wilson, having had too much of one extreme, had palpably taken on too much of the other. Now she began to frown, in no mood for amenities, and this suited Sid exactly, for neither was she.
“Perhaps we had all better sit down,” Wilson Thatcher said.
“No, thank you,” Thelma Thatcher said. “I don’t wish to.”
“I don’t either,” Sid said.
“It is evident from her use of my maiden name,” Thelma Thatcher said, “that she intends to exploit certain information that was foolishly divulged to her, and I think she had better tell us exactly what she wants.”
“What I want,” Sid said, “is simply to get Gid out of jail, where he has been put by a pair of idiots without a brain between them, even if it means putting someone else there in his place.”
“You seem to feel that we are in a position to help you. Please tell me how.”
“You can help me by telling the truth, that’s how. Gid is in jail on suspicion of murder, simply because he happened to be in the place where the murder was supposedly done within the time some doctor thinks it happened, and it was all in the paper for everyone to read, but there was nothing there, not a single damn word, about how Beth Thatcher, after letting Wilson commit bigamy, came here to blackmail one or both of you for it. In my opinion, that’s as good a motive for committing a murder as being foolish enough to go somewhere you shouldn’t have gone at a time when you had much better have been anywhere else.”
“We have no obligation to tell you any thing whatever.”
“That’s true. But it may turn out to be more a matter of self-interest than obligation. It’s easy to see that you are being protected by the authorities from public embarrassment, and if you don’t want me to tell everything I know to everyone I meet, you’ll damn well humor me in all that I ask.”
“It’s apparent that you have no sense of decency.”
“That’s right. All I have is Gid in jail, and I want him out.”
“What do you want to know?” Wilson Thatcher said.
“What I want to know,” Sid said, “is exactly what Beth wanted from one or both of you. Besides that, I want to know why you came deliberately to our house and told us a lot of things that there was no need to tell anyone, let alone us, and which were probably lies.”
“I came and told you what I did,” Wilson said, “because I was afraid. To be completely honest, I was afraid my wife had made a tragic mistake, and I was merely trying to divert to myself suspicions that I erroneously thought would fall upon her.”
“I prefer to judge for myself,” Sid said, “whether they were erroneous or not.”
“I didn’t want to go directly to the authorities,” Wilson said, “because I thought they might consider it odd for me to confess so much when it was not necessary. I wanted them to know, however, in order to keep their attention away from my wife, and so I chose to tell Gideon. I did so for two reasons. In the first place, he was the one person, aside from me, who would have the greatest personal interest in Beth’s death. In the second place, as a lawyer, he was someone I could talk to under the pretense of seeking advice. As you guessed, I told several lies.
