but I couldn’t make myself go to the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they’d think. So I—You can twist it around so it’ll look as if I hadn’t known about the woman, can’t you?”
“Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. That right?”
“Yes.”
“Where was he going?”
“Coming home, I suppose; but I don’t know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven’t found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half-past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours.
“Wasn’t that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?”
“Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight.”
“Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?”
She shook her head with emphasis.
“No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don’t seem to know where he went that night.”
That wasn’t unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company’s work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn’t altogether unheard-of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician-contractor doesn’t always move in the open.
“How about enemies?” I asked.
“I don’t know anybody that hated him enough to kill him.”