“Got any more questions?” I asked O’Gar.
“No. Let’s give the place the eye, and see if the Siamese left any leads behind ’em.”
The eye we gave the house was thorough. We didn’t split the territory between us, but went over everything together—everything from roof to cellar—every nook, drawer, corner.
The cellar did most for us: it was there, in the cold furnace, that we found the handful of black buttons and the fire-darkened garter clasps. But the upper floors hadn’t been altogether worthless: in one room we had found the crumpled sales slip of an Oakland store, marked “1 table cover”; and in another room we had found no garters.
“Of course it’s none of my business,” I told Richter when O’Gar and I joined the others again, “but I think maybe if you plead self-defense you might get away with it.”
He tried to jump up from the davenport, but his shot leg failed him.
The woman got up slowly.
“And maybe that would leave an out for you,” O’Gar told her. “Why don’t you try to persuade him?”
“Or maybe it would be better if you plead the self-defense,” I suggested to her. “You could say that Richter ran to your help when your husband grabbed you, that your husband shot him and was turning his gun on you when you stabbed him. That would sound smooth enough.”
“My husband?”
“Uh-huh, Mrs. Rounds-Molloy-Dawson. Your late husband, anyway.”
Richter got his mouth far enough closed to get words out of it.