Violently I went to work. Cleaning. That’s what my intentions were: to clean. I pushed away to the back of my mind all wonder as to how Mrs. Garr had died, naturally or otherwise, and if otherwise, who had done it and why. Questions such as that, I said to myself, were for the police. All I had to do was wait. Sooner or later all the mysteries would be solved, and I, like the rest, would know the truth. It wasn’t any of my business anyway. All I had to do was keep my nose at home, and they’d see how innocent I was, forget suspicion of me, concentrate on the real criminal.
If there was a criminal.
That was what I thought I thought.
But you’ll notice I didn’t think of getting away, of moving out of Mrs. Garr’s house.
I couldn’t have, of course; the police wouldn’t have let me.
But I didn’t even think of moving.
That shows you how a girl who thinks she is completely honest with herself can be an awful liar.
Because I hadn’t any more than started scrubbing the kitchen floor when my mind was biting into the mystery around me as if it was a steam shovel. By the time I had finished, I was already so intent on digging out the answers to some of my questions that you couldn’t have deflected me with guns.
Weeks afterward, when this whole thing was over, I began reading about homicides in the newspapers closely; murder stories in books, too. The big difference I noticed was how understandable the work of the police was in those other stories. The reporters in the newspapers and the characters in the fiction always seemed to comprehend what the police were working toward.
I don’t see how they do it. From beginning to end, in the case of Mrs. Garr, I never knew what the police were going to do or think, and when I did find out, afterward, I usually disagreed strenuously. Every time they jumped on anyone, it was a complete surprise to me. I learned a lot about the case from them, because they did all the routine work, and we usually heard the results sooner or later.
On the whole, though, they didn’t seem nearly as keen, as pushing, as intuitive, as right as they should have been. Not nearly as much so as detectives in stories, for instance.
I suppose it’s discouraging to work on a case when you haven’t even a decent corpse to go on, and the details are so gruesome, the papers won’t print them and you can’t get any publicity.
By nine p.m. of that Friday, June fourth, my rooms were shining clean again. The Irish policeman had stuck his head in a couple of times and grinned to see me go at it, but no one else had been near me.
I didn’t know if the Tewmans had come back or not; I hadn’t heard a sound below. I’d heard the Wallers move about overhead, seen Miss Sands drag herself in at six o’clock; she must have been dead to the world by the time I finished cleaning. Mr. Grant had slid quietly out at the dinner hour, and as quietly back again.
Had Mr. Grant killed Mrs. Garr? He alone had admitted seeing her that Friday night. Had he been quietly opening, closing things in her kitchen there below when she came in; had he sprung at her . . . ? Blinking little old Mr. Grant.
Or the Wallers. They’d been having trouble with Mrs. Garr.
She’d asked them to leave. Funny, I’d forgotten to tell that to Lieutenant Strom.
Miss Sands. She had lived in the house with Mrs. Garr for twelve years. You can work up a lot of hate in twelve years.
Or Mr. Buffingham. Bad blood. His son was already engaged with criminals, was in jail. Mr. Buffingham himself had been held by the police for a week. But then, criminals’ parents were usually innocent, though some, like Ma Barker . . . Lawyers and trials were costly, too; he must be hard-pressed for money. He might have been hunting money, the pitiful little worn bills a poor old lodging-house keeper might have hidden . . .
“I don’t believe in banks . . .” A ghost was whispering it in my ears. Was that why she’d listened, was that why she’d suspected people of snooping, because she had poor little heaps of savings hidden here and there around the house?
I was practically shaking with excitement, like a dog at a gopher hole, by the time I’d thought that out.
I tried to calm myself; after all, I didn’t want to spend my time at the wrong gopher hole. I needed someone to talk it over with; I needed to talk to someone who had been in the house longer than I had.
I wished Mr. Kistler were home.
Mr. Kistler.
I was pretty sure, wasn’t I, that he wasn’t the one?
Of course I was sure.
Was I?
It might be well, before I allied myself with Mr. Kistler, to think a little about it.
Mr. Kistler.
He had awfully strong hands.
I walked over to the west bay of my living room, where Mr. Kistler had stood so much of the time during the night before. I stared out of the middle window.
What I saw wasn’t the windy June night outside, the one scraggly tree, the light of the streetlight; what I saw was Mr. Kistler chinning himself on the bar that first night I talked to him, pulling himself up and up by those heavily muscled arms.
He’d held my hand, once or twice since then. His hands had calluses across the palms. From the chinning bar, he said.
Fancy a printer, a publisher, with calluses on his palms!
I tried to picture those hands as the hands on my neck, choking me that night. But I couldn’t make myself believe it.
Mrs. Garr, the police obviously believed, had died on Friday night, exactly a week ago. Hodge Kistler had been working that Friday night. So he’d said.
