“But my husband was murdered. Remember? Where, exactly does he fit in?”
“He fits in the trunk. The gray sedan’s trunk. He was killed here, in this house, sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon, late enough to satisfy the estimate of time of death, which allowed considerable latitude. After losing me in the traffic, you drove out, put him behind the wheel, and left him where he was later found.”
“You’re ignoring something, aren’t you?” It was Martin Farmer again, and I turned to look at him. There was an air of indolence about him, and he was smiling faintly, but his eyes were cold and wary. “Dulce and I were at the Country Club. We played golf and had drinks and dinner. We were seen by a dozen people who remember.”
“No.” I shook my head and began to wonder, now that I was almost finished, if I could ever get out alive. “Your alibi is the most precarious bit of all. To have a car handy, you drove your car out to the club before noon and left it in the parking area. But you didn’t stay. I imagine that Mrs. Coon followed you and brought you back here, where you had work to do, having arranged in advance for the necessary privacy in which to do it. You know the work I mean. Your golf bags were put into the sedan, along with a change of clothing. After parking Coon’s car on that dead-end road, it was a simple matter to change, and pack into the golf bags that you carried away with you the clothes you removed. It was only a matter of minutes to cross that undeveloped land between the end of the road and the back of the golf course. Risky, of course, but you were ready to take the risk, and you made it. Then you came on into the clubhouse, a pair of innocent golfers with a car to ride home in, and witnesses to testify for you. But I can’t remember anyone’s saying that you were seen before coming off the course. It was simply assumed that you had been playing. Brady Baldwin’s a smart cop, and he’ll be interested in that.”
“This is very interesting speculation,” Dulce Coon said. “Even rather clever. I advise you, however, not to repeat it. It’s actionable, you know, and you would have to account to my lawyer.”
“I predict that you will have to account to a lawyer yourself. The prosecuting attorney, I mean. Don’t forget that the gray sedan is still in custody. The police lab is working over the trunk right now, and you can lay odds that they’ll find something to show that your husband took a ride in it—a thread, a scraping of skin, a hair or two, a smear of blood, something. It’s miraculous, the things that can be done in labs these days. Brady will be along after awhile. You can depend on it. In the meanwhile, since you brought your lawyer into this, I’d recommend calling him early.”
I had started moving toward the door, and I kept on moving, and no one tried to stop me. I slipped past the shirttail cousin and out and away.
At least, I thought, I had finally earned my fee.
* * * *
At dinner, we were three. I was there, and Hetty was there, and Brady Baldwin was there. Brady was included because he had finished the case and earned a dinner, and because I was feeling expansive. Three assorted fiddles and a piano made music, and it was, altogether, very fancy and satisfying. After dinner, Brady’s ulcer began to bother him a little.
“I’ve got to go home and take something,” he said, “and so I’d better humor you immediately and have it over with. I’ll admit you acted practically like a genius in this business, once you got going, but there’s one thing that must have been pure boneheaded luck, a wild guess, at best. How did you tumble to the fact that it was Martin Farmer that Dulce Coon met in that bar? Maybe it wasn’t even a guess, though. Maybe, when you met Farmer later, you simply recognized him.”
“Nothing of the sort. Brady, don’t try to belittle me. There was a strong resemblance between Farmer and Coon, and I never got a good enough look to see any difference. Farmer saw to it that I didn’t. So far as I knew, it was Benedict Coon at the bar, and Benedict Coon who left with his wife. It was only later that I learned something that convinced me that it was really someone else. Under the circumstances, the shirttail cousin, being suspiciously handy, was indicated.”
“All right, I’ll bite. What did you learn?”
“Thanks to Hetty, I learned that Benedict Coon had a serious heart condition. Not that he couldn’t have lived for a long time, too long to suit our Dulce, apparently. Especially since, according to reports, he stuck strictly to his diet and took damn good care of himself.”
“Come off it, Percy. You can’t tell that a man has heart trouble just by looking at him. You trying to tell me that the man at the bar looked like he didn’t have heart trouble?”
“It wasn’t how he looked. It was what he did. Hetty checked it out for me, and she reported that Benedict Coon’s specific heart condition was something called cardiorenal disease. People who have it are put on a very strict salt-free diet. And the man at the bar, all the time he was waiting, kept eating salted peanuts.”
Hetty was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, and looking at me through the smoke with a very promising expression.
“Isn’t he remarkable? You said it yourself, Brady. Practically a genius, you said. It makes me all over prickly just to know him.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Brady shoved back his chair and stood up and looked
