“I thought you might feel like going somewhere and doing something,” she said.
“Home is somewhere,” I said, “and anything I want to do can be done there.”
“Do you have anything particular in mind?”
“Yes, I do. I have it in mind to mow the yard.”
“That’s a rather odd thing to want particularly to do. Why do you?”
“There are several reasons. For one thing, I find mowing the yard a comfort. It is almost mathematically neat, and you can always measure so exactly what is left to be done by what has been done already. For another thing, the grass is getting high. Finally, mowing is a domestic task, and I’m feeling domestic. It’s a kind of recession, I think. A need for sanctuary. A modified retreat to the womb. Only the other evening I was wanting to live in a jungle or on a beach or corruptly in someplace like Paris, but now Hoolihan’s Addition suits me fine as a place to live and someday die. Provided, of course, that you agree to live there with me and let me die first.”
“I don’t know about that. I may insist upon dying first myself. I don’t believe I’d care much for Hoolihan’s Addition as a place to live alone.”
“Never mind. The decision may not be left in our hands, and so there is no need for us to disagree about it. I don’t want to disagree with anybody about anything. All I want to do is mow the yard and be domestic.”
“Now that you’ve made such a case for it, I feel inclined to be domestic too. You have made it sound delightful.”
“Aren’t you afraid being domestic will make you feel like a wife?”
“Not necessarily. It’s a matter of attitude and inner control. One may feel like a wife at a spring dance and like a mistress in the kitchen. You only need a little ingenuity.”
“I’d say that ingenuity is something you have more than a little of. I’ve noticed it more than once. What particular form is your domesticity going to take?”
“In order to keep you company, I plan to do something outside. Perhaps I could clip around the edges of things while you’re mowing.”
“Good. That will be constructive, as well as domestic, and I’ll appreciate the company.”
We rode along silently until we turned onto our street and approached our drive. Sid was sitting with her legs folded under her and her nylon knees showing below the skirt of the plain black dress she had worn in deference to a funeral, and I could see from the corners of my eyes that she looked, in silence, sad and pensive.
“She looked much younger than I thought she would,” she said suddenly. “What happened is just too damn bad.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s just too bad.”
I turned into the drive and stopped, and we got out and went into the house together. Sid peeled off toward the kitchen with a cool drink of something in mind, and I climbed the stairs to our room and changed from the light worsted I was wearing to an old pair of denims cut off above the knees in imitation of Bermuda shorts. With these I wore a seasoned T-shirt and a pair of loafers with part of the heels remaining, and the effect was comfortable if not fashionable. In my opinion, half the fun of being domestic is in looking disreputable, like a bum, and I’ve often defended this opinion against Sid, who does not share it. She tolerates it, however, Sid being in most matters a tolerant person, and I have even suspected her of secretly approving it, in spite of what she says, for she is mildly disreputable herself in more respects than a few.
And so, looking disreputable, like a bum, I went downstairs and into the garage and started the power mower and began to mow the front yard. It was a fairly deep yard from street to house, and you could get a pretty free and easy feeling of being in the stretch every time you made a turn and started from one to the other. I took my time, because it was a hot day and I was in no hurry, and I had only cut about a quarter of the yard, working from one side toward the center, when Sid came out to clip around edges. She was wearing cotton gloves and short shorts, and she waved at me with her clippers from a distance as if she had not seen me for a long time and was surprised and delighted to see me now. She began clipping along the brick border of a flower bed in front of the house, and she looked altogether charming and distracting, but not at all domestic.
I kept right at it until I had finished the front yard, after which I cut the narrow stretch beside the house on the east and then went on into the back. It was a hot day, as I said, very hot in the sun and not much less so in the shade, and by this time my T-shirt was soaked and my mouth was full of cotton. After a couple of times to the alley and back, I killed the engine under a tree with the idea of going into the kitchen for something cold and wet, but then I saw Sid coming out of the house and across the yard with two cans of Schlitz, which met the specifications perfectly, and so I sat down with my back against the tree and waited for Sid to come on with the beer and sit down beside me. We sat there in domesticated contentment under the tree, flank to flank and drinking the cold beer slowly, and it was by way of being a pretty good time after some bad ones until Cotton McBride appeared at the side of the house and came on back to where we were. If it had been necessary at the moment to name the last person in the world I wanted to see, it might not have been Cotton that I named, but he would surely have been in contention. There, however, he was, last or next to last, and I thought under the circumstances that I had better be polite. “Hello, Cotton,” I said. “It’s a hot day.”
“Ninety-eight in the sun,” Cotton said. “I see you’ve been mowing the yard.”
“I’ve been mowing and Sid’s been clipping. We stopped to have a beer.”
“How are you, Mrs. Jones? Those beers look mighty inviting, I’ll tell you that. If I wasn’t on duty, I might have a good cold beer myself.”
“I shouldn’t think one beer would interfere a great deal with your duty,” Sid said. “My experience has been that one beer doesn’t interfere with much of anything.”
“Come on and have one, Cotton,” I said. “It’ll do you good.”
“Well, I shouldn’t, it being against regulations and all, but I may have one at that. Thanks.”
“I’ll go get it and be right back,” Sid said.
“What I came out for, Gid,” Cotton said, “was to have a private talk about something important.”
“Let me tell you something,” Sid said. “There isn’t going to be any private talk that doesn’t include me as one of the private parties, and so you may as well get any notion to the contrary out of your head.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cotton said. “You can’t be intruding on police business, Mrs. Jones.”
“If it’s police business, you had better, in my opinion, be conducting it in a police station, or somewhere besides my backyard.”
“That could be arranged, I guess, if you insist on it.”
“What do you mean, arranged? Are you threatening to arrest Gid? Is that what you mean?”
“I didn’t intend to arrest him. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Not yet? Is that what you said? Not yet?”
“Sid,” I said, “go get Cotton a beer, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not at all sure that I care to give him a beer now,” Sid said. “You may give a beer to someone who is threatening to arrest you if you choose, but I’m not quite so charitable.”
“Oh, come on. Please don’t be unreasonable. Cotton’s only doing his duty as he sees it.”
“It’s a peculiar way to see it, if you ask me. There’s no excuse that I can see for accepting someone’s beer and hospitality with one breath and threatening to arrest him with the next.”
“Never mind the beer,” Cotton said. “I don’t believe I want one after all.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “I’m about through with mine, and I’ll have another one with you. Go get the beers, Sid, please.”
“I’ll go only on condition that I’m included in
the private talk,” Sid said.
“How about it, Cotton?” I said. “Can Sid be included?”
“I guess it won’t do any harm,” Cotton said, “although I can’t imagine that it will do any good, either.”
“In that case,” Sid said, “I’ll go.”
She stood up and tugged at her short shorts and started for the house, and Cotton sank down onto the grass and took off his stained straw hat, exposing pale limp hair plastered damply to his skull. He sat there in a wilted heap with his legs crossed before him at the ankles.
“That’s a remarkable little woman,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a woman so determined about something that she didn’t even know anything about.”
“Her deepest female instincts have been aroused. She’s fighting for her mate.”
“Why the hell did she have to pick me to fight with? I haven’t done anything to her mate. Not yet.”
“There’s that ominous appendage again. Not yet. I agree with Sid that there seems to be a suspicion of threat in it.”
“Maybe so. I may know a few things I’m not talking about.”
“Oh? Shall I call my lawyer?”
The screen door banged at that instant, and Sid came back with the beers. She passed one to Cotton and one to me and sat down with the other.
“What has been said while I was gone?” she said.
“Nothing of importance,” I said.
“We were waiting to include you,” Cotton said.
“Then there’s no sense in waiting any longer, since I’m here.”
“No, there isn’t.” Cotton had been looking at Sid’s brown legs, but now he took a swallow of beer and began looking at me. “You remember what I told you in your office? How Wilson Thatcher denied seeing Beth or giving her any money?”
“I remember. You said you were going to talk to him again.”
“Well, I talked to him, all right, and in my judgment he told me a damn lie.”
“Does he still claim he didn’t see Beth or give her the money?”
“No. Just the other way around. He claims he lied the first time about not seeing her, because he thought it might incriminate him or something, but he changed his mind and decided to tell the truth, and the truth is, according to him, that she called him out at the factory, and he arranged to meet her and give her the five grand.”
“Where did he meet her?”
“He says he picked her up on a corner, and they just drove around a few minutes, and then he let her out on the same corner, but as I said, I’ve got a notion it’s a damn lie.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Hell, I just can’t see any good reason why he should give her five grand if he was going to kill her afterward. Besides being a waste of money, which isn’t like Wilson, it would make us think of him first thing.”
“You think he was telling the truth the first time and lying the second?”
“Damned if I know what I think, to tell the truth. It’s all mixed up. Assuming that he did give her the money, why the hell should he tell us about it?”
“Because he’s not a fool and assumes that you aren’t either.”
“Which could easily be a mistake,” Sid said.
“Thanks,” Cotton said, ignoring Sid and concentrating on me. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind developing that a little.”
“Well, it’s your position that he would never have given her the money and then lolled her afterward, and it’s my position that Wilson was perfectly capable of anticipating this. If you look at it this way, the fact that he gave her the money, if it is a fact, is the best evidence of his innocence.”
“You think so? I might agree if it wasn’t for something else that I know and you don’t.” He paused and swallowed more beer and looked at me for a few seconds with a sly expression in which there was a touch of smugness. “Did you know Wilson Thatcher was a bigamist?”
This was clearly intended to be a bomb, which it had been at the time Wilson exploded it on the back terrace, but now it barely popped, and I had trouble in looking as incredulous as circumstances demanded. The only element of shock, so far as I was concerned, was that Wilson had been so rash as to spill his insides without restraint.
“Oh, cut it out,” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a fact just the same. At least Wilson says it is, and I can’t see why a man would say something like that about himself unless it was true.”
“By God, I can’t see why he’d say it at all, true or otherwise.”
“He was afraid we’d find it out ourselves, and then it would look all the worse because he hadn’t told. He didn’t even know it himself until Beth Thatcher came to town, and that’s why she came. To tell him she’d never really gotten the divorce he thought she had, and to put the squeeze on him. The five grand, Wilson says, was just a down payment on twenty, and he was going to get the rest of it for her the next day. There’s a couple of pretty good motives for murder, if you ask me. You kill one person and get rid of a wife who makes you a bigamist while you’re saving fifteen good grand that would otherwise have to go after five bad.”
“Oh, sure, Cotton. Two wonderful motives. And so he just handed them to you out of pure charity and a natural desire to be hanged.”
“All right, Gid. You don’t have to go on with it. It looks like the guy’s going out of his way to make trouble for himself, and that’s what bothers me. Fact is, I’m wondering why the hell he doesn’t just confess to the murder and be done with it. He doesn’t, though. He swears he never saw her again after paying the five grand, but I’m still not convinced that he actually paid her anything at all. Damn it, he didn’t have to make any down payment, like he said, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that he would have done it unless he honestly planned to give her the rest later. In that case he might have done it, because it wouldn’t have made any difference one way or another. If he intended to kill her, though, he would’ve simply put her off until the next day for the full amount. It would’ve been easy enough to do, and as I’ve said before, he wouldn’t have had the money turning up later to suggest a blackmail motive. Besides, what the hell kind of a reason for lolling someone is this bigamy business? Or even for paying blackmail? It wasn’t deliberate, and he could have proved it. He could even have proved that Beth had tricked him into it by a kind of fraud or something, which would have put her in a hell of a lot more trouble than he was in. The most it would have meant to him in the end, I suspect, was a little scandal and humiliation and the inconvenience of getting his second marriage legalized. I can maybe see a rich man laying out a bundle to avoid a scandal and all, but I’m damned if I can see him committing murder over it. Not if he’s got any brains whatever, which Wilson Thatcher has.”
“Speaking of brains,” Sid said, “you have almost convinced me that you may have some yourself.”
“What’s that?” Cotton said.
“Well,” Sid said, “you have obviously thought everything through, and weighed one thing against another, and come up finally with all these brilliant deductions and everything, and it seems to me that this requires a certain amount of brains, however inadequate.”
“It’s kind of you to say so,” Cotton said. His ears had turned red, and I could see that he was somewhat hotter than the hot day. “Thanks very much for the compliment, however inadequate.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” Sid said. “I don’t agree, however, that your final conclusion regarding Wilson Thatcher is sound. The weight of evidence surely indicates that he is sadly deficient in brains, if not totally without them. He has certainly talked like an idiot, saying first one thing and then another, and I consider it likely that he may have acted like one. For the purpose of being compatible, however, I’ll concede that he must have had the glimmering of intelligence required to keep him from getti
ng into a great sweat over the silly bigamy business, but I can tell you another person who would have got into the greatest sweat imaginable, even if she had all the brains in the world, and the person I mean, if you want to know, is no one but Mrs. Wilson Thatcher.”
Cotton was looking at her with his mouth open, and so was I, even though I knew her somewhat better than Cotton and shouldn’t have been particularly surprised by what was comparable to what had often happened before. Finally Cotton drained his can of beer and then began to read the label, at least the big print, as if it were something instructive or comforting, possibly a short prayer.
“Now what in hell, exactly,” he said, “made you say that?”
“What made me say it,” she said, “is being a woman with a husband, and I don’t mind admitting that I would be considerably upset, to put it mildly, if another woman came along suddenly and told me that he had been her husband first and still was. Moreover, if this happened to be the result of a deliberate damn dirty trick, I’m sure I would try my best to make her sorry or dead. Women are more inclined to be sensitive to deceit and humiliation than men are, especially if they are practiced and imposed on by another woman. Although I have more brains than I need, and am not given to behaving as if I needed more than I have, I’m bound to say that my own reaction would be more emotional than intelligent in such a case.” Cotton was still reading the label, forming with his lips the shapes of the words. He did this silently, his expression rather imbecilic, but I could tell that he was listening intently and thinking as furiously as his inadequate brains permitted.
“There’s something else I’ll tell you, if you care to listen,” Sid said.
“I don’t believe I care to,” I said.
“As for me,” Cotton said, “I’m listening.”
“It is apparent to anyone who has ever taken the trouble to consider it,” Sid said, “that someone who is emotional about something is also vulnerable and likely to be more susceptible to threats than someone who isn’t, and if I were married to a man who was also married to someone else, and if I wanted to make a good thing of it in the way of getting some money, I’d surely give serious consideration to the woman as the one to get it from. What I mean is, there is a good chance in my opinion that the man would simply tell me to go fly a kite or something, especially if he happened to be perfectly innocent so far as his intentions went, but you might be surprised to know how absolutely neurotic a woman who thought she was a legal wife would feel about having it known by everybody that she was really an illegal one and had been sleeping practically publicly with someone else’s husband. She would feel a perfect fool, which is the worst way a woman can possibly feel. Or maybe there’s no such thing as an illegal wife. Is there? Maybe she would simply not be a wife at all.”
The Irrepressible Peccadillo Page 9
