The Irrepressible Peccadillo

by Fletcher Flora

“Maybe so. I’m happy enough with the way things have turned out.”

  “They’ve turned out a lot better for you than they have for her, that’s certain. Still, when you think back on it, that was a pretty dirty trick she played on you. Something like that can sometimes do peculiar things to a fellow. It sticks. Maybe he thinks he’s forgotten all about it, and then all at once something brings it back, and it’s as bad as ever. Maybe worse.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Cotton. She got married and went away, and she was gone seven years. She quit being important quite a while back.”

  “No, she didn’t, Gid. She was killed last night, and that makes her still important. Anyhow, it makes her important all over again. What I’ve been wondering is, why did she come back to town?”

  “I can answer that. She had been living well in various places where living well is expensive, and she was broke. She needed some money, and she thought that Wilson Thatcher might be willing to give her some for old time’s sake.”

  “The hell she did! How do you know all this?”

  “She told me so herself. I saw her yesterday evening in the Kiowa Room, as you probably know. We had a couple of gimlets apiece and talked about this and that. Nothing significant.”

  “Isn’t that just like a God-damn crazy woman? What the hell would make her think Wilson Thatcher would just give her some money for the asking?”

  “I told you. Old time’s sake.”

  “If you ask me, that’s a hell of a poor reason for giving away money.”

  “If I know Wilson Thatcher, he would agree with you.”

  “Maybe you don’t know him so well. It’s beginning to look to me like he might have thought it a reason good enough.”

  “Is that so? Why?”

  “Because you said she was broke, but she wasn’t. Not when we checked her room at the hotel this morning. There was a purse of hers in the top drawer of a chest, and there was five grand in the purse. I thought it was a damn careless way to treat a bundle like that, but I guess you’re naturally careless with things that come that easy.”

  “What makes you think she got it from Wilson?”

  “Who else? Did you give it to her?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ve been paying her five grand a month for years. She was blackmailing me.”

  “You’re trying to be funny, I guess, but I’m always open to good suggestions, and you’ve made one that may not seem so bad after I’ve looked it over for a while.”

  “Blackmail? Don’t be a damn fool, Cotton.”

  “I’ll try not to be. It wasn’t you I had in mind, though. Hell, I know you don’t have the land of money you need to pay blackmail. Wilson Thatcher’s different. Wilson has most of the money in the world. You said what you said about her coming to ask him for some of it, and maybe that was just a nice way of putting it. I talked with Wilson this morning, but I’ve got a notion I’d better talk with him again.”

  “Did Wilson see her before she died?”

  “He says not. He says she called him out at the factory early yesterday afternoon and tried to make an appointment with him, but he told her to go to hell. She must have given old Wilson a pretty rough time out there in California. He had a bellyful. He hadn’t heard about her being dead until I told him, but he didn’t seem particularly surprised. That could be because he already knew without being told, though. What do you think?”

  “You’re the detective, Cotton. You do the thinking.”

  “I’ve done plenty already, and I’ll do plenty more. Don’t you worry about that. Seems to me, however, that you might be willing to help. It might turn out to be in your own interest if you did.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “It’s plain enough. As far as anybody knows right now, there’s as much reason for suspecting you as anyone else, and the quicker it turns out to be someone else, the better for you.”

  “Oh, nuts. Is that what you came here to say? If it is, you’ve said it, and I want to go home.”

  “You needn’t get sore about it, Gid. As a detective, it’s my business to figure that anyone might be guilty until it proves otherwise, and you ought to expect it. Why I really came is because you probably knew her better than anyone left around here, except maybe Wilson, and I thought you might know something that happened in the past that might help us now. Look at it this way. She came here to town yesterday morning on the train, and the night of the day she came she was killed out there in Dreamer’s Park. The way that looks to me, she was sure as hell killed, for whatever reason, by someone right here in town, and probably you and I both know whoever it was.”

  “Not necessarily. Someone could have followed her.”

  “Not necessarily, sure, but most likely. There aren’t any suspicious strangers in town that I know of. You know of any?”

  “He could have come and gone. Murderers don’t usually hang around after the murder.”

  “It could have happened that way, and I won’t say it couldn’t have, but I don’t believe it. What’s bothering me right now as much as anything else is why she was out there in that park at night. It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable place to be at night unless you’re a kid after nooky, and she wasn’t any kid, and she had a hotel room at her disposal besides.”

  “She may have just walked out there for sentimental reasons. Dreamer’s Park has played a part in most of our lives around here, Cotton, all the kids that have grown up to their gonads, and Beth was actually a sentimental person in her own way, although it wasn’t always apparent.”

  “I don’t believe that, either. It doesn’t explain why she was killed there.”

  “Assume a nut. There she was in the dark park for sentimental reasons, and there at the same time for reasons of his own was a psycho. It just happened.”

  “That’s possible, and it would probably be a big relief to someone if we bought it, but we don’t. Not me, anyhow. For one thing, the killing was too neat. Nuts are generally messy. Whoever did this just slipped a long thin blade into her from behind, and that was all of it. The coroner says the blade reached the heart, and she probably died fast without ever knowing exactly what happened to her.”

  I remembered her face in the light of a match, the fixed wonder that was almost an expression of serenity, and it was in that instant, for the first time since finding her dead in the old bandstand, that I realized fully that dying had not made her someone else with nothing to do with anything that had happened, and that she was still, although dead, the same person I had known and loved and ached for and wanted once to marry. I wasn’t sorry now, after the temporary illusion of yesterday’s sad evening, that she had made a jilted jackass of me, and in fact I was grateful that she had, since she had left, in leaving, a vacancy for Sid, but I was sorry for a lot of other things, and most of all I felt sorry and guilty for having agreed to meet her in the place where she was lolled. I had said that she had quit being important a long time ago, which was true in a way, but Cotton McBride had said that dying made her important all over again, which was also true in another way that wasn’t the way that Cotton had meant. I wasn’t quite sure of the way myself, but I suddenly hoped with all my heart, which was hurting, that someone even guiltier than I turned out to be even sorrier than I that she had died in the particular way that she had.

  “What’s the matter?” Cotton said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

  “You’re looking funny.”

  “Am I? I don’t feel funny. Not by a damn sight. I was wondering what you’ve done with her.”

  “The body? It’s over in a back room of Paley’s Funeral Parlor. The coroner’s finished with it. Maybe Paley is too. You might be able to see it if you’re interested.”

  “Thanks. I might be interested. I’m also interested in going home, Cotton, if you’re agreeable. I was just getting ready to leave when you came
in.”

  “All right. I’m finished for now, I guess. You haven’t been much help, to tell the truth. If you get any better ideas, you let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  He retrieved his stained hat and left, and I went out and told Millie to go home, or wherever she wanted to go, which she did willingly after being convinced that I hadn’t been arrested. It was three-thirty then, and I returned to my office and stood by my desk looking down at the phone. Sid was home, organizing her notes on Zoroaster and waiting for me to call, and I wanted to call at once, without further delay for any reason, but I didn’t. After a minute or two, I went out and downstairs and east on the street three blocks and two blocks south to Charlie Paley’s Funeral Parlor. Excuse me. Chapel, he called it. There was a little chapel, all right, with an organ, and I had a fancy when I went in that I could hear “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” coming out of the pipes, but actually the organ was silent and the chapel was empty. I found Charlie’s office, Charlie in it, and he said it was all right to see Beth, she was ready, and he took me back to see her.

  She was lying in this little room just off the alley, and it seemed to me a bleak and depressing room to lie in, even dead, but Beth didn’t seem to mind, her face serene and still fixed in wonder, although it was now apparently the wonder of a dream, for her eyes were closed. Charlie went away and left me with her, and I stood there and tried to say silently the proper good-by that we had never said, but it was simply something that couldn’t now be wrapped up neatly after being and ending in such disorder, and after a fair trial that came to nothing I went back to the Rexall drugstore across from my office and called Sid.

  She said she was just getting ready to come, and I crossed the street and stood on the curb until she came, and we went home.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was something like seven, thereabouts, and we were out on the back terrace in a couple of sling chairs, holding hands in one of those prolonged aftermaths, almost apathetically tender, which sometimes follow, assuming an appropriate pair, a busy and pleasurable time of greater intensity. The cicadas were up there in the trees, under which the shadows had a land of blue transparency, and I was looking at the martin house on a tall pole at the rear of the yard, remembering how I used to lie on my back in a shady place for nearly a whole afternoon at a time in order to watch the slim birds gliding on still wings against the blue and white of sky and clouds. You may think that I had more immediate and significant things to think about, which I did, but they were things that I didn’t want to think about, and so, as an evasion technique, I thought about other things more agreeable, including martins. As a matter of fact, all the afternoon since Sid had picked me up at the curb downtown had been devoted, from love to Aves, to the evasion of unpleasant reflections on death in general and a certain death in particular. In spite of my best efforts and the most effective distractions, however, I had found myself, now and then, standing again in the bleak and bare little room at the rear of Charlie Paley’s Funeral Parlor.

  “Sugar,” Sid said, “hasn’t it been a pleasant evening?”

  “Yes, it has. It has been an evening to remember.”

  “Including part of the afternoon.”

  “True. Afternoon and evening alike.”

  “It makes me happy when I am able to show you a good time.”

  “You show me the best time of anybody. Nobody could possibly make a time half so good as you.”

  “Well, I should hope not. Not in the same way, anyhow. Do you think I’m rather clever at it?”

  “Clever is not the word. I’d say that you have a rare and natural talent.”

  “Really? Sugar, it’s very nice of you to say so. I was wondering, though, if I had been entirely successful.”

  “Why should you wonder?”

  “For the past half hour you’ve been silent and sad-looking. Are you becoming depressed about something?”

  “I’m a little depressed, but not excessively under the circumstances.”

  “I understand, sugar. You are certainly entitled to a little depression if anyone is. It may become worse, however, if you just continue keeping everything to yourself. The psychological consequences of something like that can sometimes be quite bad. What happens is, you break out with all sorts of nasty traits that nobody can understand but that are really the results of whatever it is you’re keeping to yourself.”

  “I surely wouldn’t want that to happen to me.”

  “Neither would I. A certain number of nasty traits are natural and expected in anyone, but it would be difficult, to say the least, to keep on being in love with someone who kept breaking out with more than his share.”

  “I promise that I’ll do my best to avoid anything of the sort.”

  “Well, there’s very little you can do about it, once you have repressed something long enough to cause the damage. It’s much better to talk about things truthfully before it is too late. Besides, I’m dying of curiosity to know if anything special has developed. Has there?”

  “Something has developed, all right, but I don’t know how special it is. Cotton McBride came to see me in the office this afternoon.”

  “Cotton McBride? Isn’t he that faded-looking little man who is some kind of policeman?”

  “Yes. He’s a detective, and that’s a kind of policeman.”

  “Why on earth did he come to see you in the office?”

  “He thought maybe I could tell him something that would help him find whoever killed Beth.”

  “That seems rather ridiculous to me. Why should he just assume that you could tell him anything of the sort?”

  “Oh, he’s simply working in the dark, I think. I used to know her pretty well, and he had a notion I might remember something about something or someone in the past that might be significant. As a matter of fact, it happened that I was able to tell him something that may help, although it wasn’t from any farther in the past than yesterday.”

  “What were you able to tell him?”

  “Beth was broke. She came to town to see Wilson Thatcher. She wanted him to give her some money to live on. She didn’t see anything unreasonable in this, even though Wilson’s married again, but, then, Beth was always assured that anyone would be happy to give her anything she wanted whenever she wanted it.”

  “How do you know she was broke? Did she tell you so?”

  “Yes. When we were having gimlets in the Kiowa Room.”

  “Well, we mustn’t dwell on that. It’s too dangerous. I’d like to know, however, if Wilson gave her the money. In my opinion, he wouldn’t have been such a fool.”

  “In my opinion, you’re right. Anyhow, Wilson said he didn’t. He said he refused to see her when she asked him to. That’s according to Cotton McBride. Cotton wasn’t so sure about it, though.”

  “Not so sure? Why not?”

  “Because, as it turned out, Beth had five grand in her room at the hotel. Cotton found it when he searched the room this morning.”

  “Five thousand dollars? That’s quite a lot of money for someone to have suddenly just after being broke.”

  “Not so much for someone who liked to live well in places where living well was expensive. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as much as the amount Beth had in mind.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s quite a bit of money to most people, including Wilson Thatcher. He may have more money than is decent, which he does, but I’ve never known him to display exceptional generosity when it comes to giving any of it away, and I’m willing to bet two to one that he didn’t voluntarily give any to an ex-wife for nothing more than the asking.”

  “I’m inclined to agree. So is Cotton.”

  “Do you think he gave it to her because she forced him in one way or another?”

  “This is one line of reasoning that seems indicated.”

 
“It’s absolutely fascinating, isn’t it? What do you suppose Wilson could have done to make him susceptible?”

  “I can’t imagine. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he cheats on his income tax, but I can’t see him doing anything really juicy.”

  “You never can tell, however. Some people are deceptive in such matters. I remember a commissioner in my home town who was discovered in his underdrawers with an elderly sister of the mayor.”

  “Was the elderly sister of the mayor in her underdrawers too?”

  “No. To be precise, she was out of them.”

  “I suppose the commissioner was ruined politically?”

  “Not at all. Surprisingly enough, he ran against the mayor in the next election and defeated him.”

  “That’s a refreshing commentary on the tolerance of the electorate, if you ask me. I shouldn’t wonder if the elderly sister voted for the commissioner.”

  “Well, she owed him something, after all. It wasn’t often that she received that kind of attention from anyone.”

  “A small price to pay for it. I agree.”

  “Oh, well, it’s of no importance any longer, and I only mentioned it to point out that Wilson Thatcher may not have always acted like a deacon just because he looks like one. Suppose he did something once that he doesn’t want known, and your precious Beth tried to blackmail him because of it. Wouldn’t that be an acceptable reason for his killing her if it could be proved?”

  “Acceptable, indeed. I can detect a couple of flaws in the supposition, though. In the first place, why pay her five grand and kill her afterward? Why not kill her before and keep the five grand in the bank?”

  “Perhaps he felt compelled to give her the money as a land of down payment or something until he could get her in a position to do what he wanted to her.”

  “I concede the possibility, but I have no faith in it. Flaw number two, in my judgment, is even more critical. In spite of the precedent of the commissioner and the mayor’s elderly sister, I consider it extremely unlikely that Wilson deviated from propriety a sufficient degree to make him a subject for blackmail. Having known him and Beth both from away back, I’m satisfied that the deviations, whatever they may have been, were on the distaff side. The view is supported by the nature of their divorce. Wilson, as you pointed out, is only slightly poorer than Croesus and could have been tapped for a steady increment of magnificent proportions if he had been vulnerable. Nothing like this happened, however. A settlement was made quietly, and Beth went off quietly for her divorce. A few years later, she turns up broke. I submit that any major diversion by Wilson, felonious or merely scandalous, would have kept her living well in Miami and Rio and Acapulco and places like that indefinitely.”