“Darling,” Thelma Thatcher said, “it was just too manly of you.”
“And why,” Sid said, “are you now so sure that what you originally thought wasn’t perfectly correct?”
“As to that,” Thelma Thatcher said, “it is probable that the murderer has already been found.”
“If I were in your place,” Sid said, “I’m sure I would find it comforting to think so. I’d still like to know, however, why someone with fifteen thousand dollars waiting for her did not even take the trouble to pick it up before getting involved with someone else’s husband, and incidentally with a murderer. In fact, I would like to know just where she went and what she did between the time she left Gid in the Kiowa Room and the time she went wherever she was killed and met whoever killed her.”
“Personally,” Thelma Thatcher said, “I have no interest in that at all. If you want to know, why don’t you go somewhere else and ask someone who might be able to tell you?”
“I intend to,” Sid said. “Thank you for helping me, however reluctantly.”
“Not at all. I only hope that you will keep your part of the agreement and not expose us to public humiliation for an unfortunate mistake that was in no way our fault, except to the extent, perhaps, that Wilson was at fault in being incredibly gullible from first to last.”
“Was there an agreement? I don’t recall any. To tell the truth, I am no more concerned about your difficulty, or the humiliation you may suffer as a consequence, than you are about getting Gid out of jail. It’s largely a matter of one’s interests, isn’t it? However, I won’t tell anyone about you immediately, or ever if it isn’t necessary for Gid’s sake. If it is, I’ll tell whatever I know wherever it will do the most good.”
She turned and walked out into the hall, Wilson loping after her to the door and holding it for her as she left.
“Every word Thelma told you is perfectly true,” Wilson said. “I assure you it is.”
“For the sake of your privacy,” Sid said, “let us hope so.”
Driving downtown, she reviewed events as Thelma Thatcher had related them, and although she had perversely refused to admit it to the Thatchers, she was convinced, in fact, that every word of the version was true.
She was convinced of this simply because it so perfectly accorded with her own preconceived notions of what had probably happened, which she had expressed, indeed, to Cotton McBride himself on the afternoon of Saturday last.
When she got downtown, she parked in the lot beside the Hotel Carson and went into the lobby. The clerk at the desk was young and overflowing with ideas and the juices of glands, both of which were stimulated by Sid, who was an adequate stimulant at all times and an expert one when she gave it her full attention. She was compelled to do so in this instance because the clerk, although susceptible, was reluctant to give out information about a guest, even a dead one, that might be considered confidential, especially to a woman, however stimulating, who happened to be the wife of the man who was suspected of having made the guest dead. Finally, though, with hope high and hormones flowing, he confided that Beth Thatcher had checked her key at the desk late in the afternoon before the night she was killed, and that she had not picked it up again, and therefore could be assumed never to have returned to her room. Wherever she had gone, whatever to do, she had apparently gone directly from the Kiowa Room after drinking gimlets with Gideon Jones, and this was what Sid had wanted to know, and she went, knowing it, to see Chauncy at the bar.
A pair of waitresses were laying out the buffet in the lounge, and Chauncy’s attitude indicated disapproval. Aloof and scornful behind the bar, he expressed in his withdrawal a deep conviction that luncheon buffets were an intolerable intrusion that attracted the excessive patronage of women, who were collateral intruders tending to complicate life by ordering fancy concoctions that were difficult and time-consuming to mix, and were not, besides, fit to drink. Chauncy was, in fact, a Swiss chocolate anachronism with a profound and mute longing for an earlier and simpler day of nickel beers and brass rails and men only, when lunch was served, if served at all, properly at the bar as a house treat for paying customers. This mute longing was not based on simple memory, for Chauncy was hardly old enough to remember the time when such conditions prevailed. It went much deeper than that. It was a kind of vestigial ache, scarcely diagnosed for what it was and passed along in mystic transmission from primitive ancestral bartenders.
Sid sat on a stool at the bar and claimed his attention. The soft light of appreciation in his limpid eyes was qualified by the unfortunate fact that she was a woman out of place, but that it was there at all was at the same time a concession, aesthetically, to the kind of woman she was. Chauncy had a pure and lustless love of pretty things that simple looking satisfied, and his sterner convictions could always be compromised by anything in this category—a bottle, an electric beer sign, a certain face. He moved into position opposite Sid, brown hands with polished nails placed flat on the bar.
“Yes, ma’m?”
“I believe I’ll have a bourbon on the rocks, if you please.”
The stark simplicity of the order spoke well for the quality of her character, and Chauncy, after filling it, lingered in the vicinity and watched her discreetly.
“Do you know who I am?” she said.
“Yes, ma’m. Some faces I forget easy, and some I forget hard.”
“Well, what an absolutely nice thing to
