per's woman! Let's me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow."
VI
We climbed out of a police department touring car in front of Mrs. Willsson's. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crepe 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 our lady sat in the library. She was dressed 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 asked 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. Anyway it was one or the other."
A muscle began to twitch in her upper lip.
"Was that all?" the chief asked me. Before I could reply 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 rose a little unsteadily, holding the back of her chair with one hand.
"Under the circumstances, 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 wouldn't be home. And, come to think of it, there's another—what Thaler wanted here this afternoon."
The woman sat down again, very rigidly. The chief looked at her—a tender smile making funny curves and lines in his fat face. After a little while her shoulders began to relax, her chin went lower, a curve came into her back. I moved a chair over to face her and sat in it.
"You'll have to tell us, Mrs. Willsson," I said, making it as gravely sympathetic as I could. "It's all hopelessly muddled without these things explained."
Her body jerked stiff and straight in the chair again, and if her eyes were half so hard as they looked you could have cut diamonds with them.
"Do you think I have anything to conceal?" She turned each word out very precisely, except that the slight foreign accent slurred the "s" sound. "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 question's answered now?"
"Not fully." I shook my head. "We knew all that. Please, Mrs. Willsson, this is as distasteful to us as to you. Won't you help us get it over with?"
"Very well!" Her blue eyes looked cold defiance into mine. She took a deep breath and spat out words like rain pattering on a tin roof. "While we were waiting for Donald I had a phone call. It was a man who wouldn't give his name. He said Donald had gone to the house of a woman named Dinah Brand with a five-thousand dollar check. He gave me her address. I drove out there and waited down the street in the machine until Donald came out.
"While I was waiting I saw Thaler, whom I knew by sight. He went to that woman's house, but did not go in. He went away. Then Donald came out and walked down the street. I intended to drive home before he could get there.
