“Yeah. Now listen to this,” and I told him what I had seen and heard while waiting in Donald Willsson’s house the previous night.
When I had finished the chief bunched his fat mouth, whistled softly, and exclaimed:
“Man, that’s an interesting thing you’ve been telling me! So it was blood on her slipper? And she said her husband wouldn’t be home?”
“That’s what I took it for,” I said to the first question, and, “Yeah,” to the second.
“Have you done any talking to her since then?” he asked.
“No. I was up that way this morning, but a young fellow named Thaler went into the house ahead of me, so I put off my visit.”
“Grease us twice!” His greenish eyes glittered happily. “Are you telling me the Whisper was there?”
“Yeah
He threw his cigar on the floor, stood up, planted his fat hands on the desk top, and leaned over them toward me, oozing delight from every pore.
“Man, you’ve done something,” he purred. “Dinah Brand is this Whisper’s woman. Let’s me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow.”
We climbed out of the chief’s car in front of Mrs. Willsson’s residence. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crêpe hanging over the bell. Then he said, “Well, what’s got to be done has got to be done,” and we went up the steps.
Mrs. Willsson wasn’t anxious to see us, but people usually see the chief of police if he insists. This one did. We were taken upstairs to where Donald Willsson’s widow sat in the library. She was in black. Her blue eyes had frost in them
Noonan and I took turns mumbling condolences and then he began:
“We just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. For instance, like where’d you go last night?”
She looked disagreeably at me, then back to the chief, frowned, and spoke haughtily:
“May I ask why I am being questioned in this manner?”
I wondered how many times I had heard that question, word for word and tone for tone, while the chief, disregarding it, went on amiably:
“And then there was something about one of your shoes being stained. The right one, or maybe the left. Anvways it was one or the other.”
A muscle began twitching in her upper lip.
“Was that all?” the chief asked me. Before I could answer he made a clucking noise with his tongue and turned his genial face to the woman again. “I almost forgot. There was a matter of how you knew your husband wouldn’t be home.”
She got up, unsteadily, holding the back of her chair with one white hand.
“I’m sure you’ll excuse–”
“‘S all right.” The chief made a big-hearted gesture with one beefy paw. “We don’t want to bother you. Just where you went, and about the shoe, and how you knew he wasn’t coming back. And, come to think of it, there’s another– What Thaler wanted here this morning.”
Mrs. Willsson sat down again, very rigidly. The chief looked at her. A smile that tried to be tender made funny lines and humps in his fat face. After a little while her shoulders began to relax, her chin went lower, a curve came in her back.
I put a chair facing her and sat on it.
“You’ll have to tell us, Mrs. Willsson,” I said, making it as sympathetic as I could. “These things have got to be explained.”
“Do you think I have anything to hide?” she asked defiantly, sitting up straight and stiff again, turning each word out very precisely, except that the s’s were a bit slurred. “I did go out. The stain was blood. I knew my husband was dead. Thaler came to see me about my husband’s death. Are your questions answered now?”
“We knew all that,” I said. “We’re asking you to explain them.”
She stood up again, said angrily:
“I dislike your manner. I refuse to submit to–”
Noonan said:
“That’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Willsson, only we’ll have to ask you to go down to the Hall with us.”