“Bebe” and were addressed with deplorable monotony to “My cave man.” Endicott must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it amounted to: raving. What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.
Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts— Mrs. Endicott—the housekeeper—Hollander—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered everyone else but one’s self insane. But no one was ever truly normal under disagreeable and terrifying circumstances; at least, he had never found anyone who was so.
The letters were meaningless as possible clues to a motive; just a sticky conglomeration of lust, greed, dullness, and execrable taste. He shoved them aside.
He watched the strengthening light of day as it came through the window across the desk before him. Such sky as he saw was of rubbed emerald, and the backs of the houses across the intervening gardens were mauve and dark gray, with lines of lemon yellow running thinly along their roofs.
He thought of Bohême —dawn always made him think of Bohême —and hummed a bar or two of it softly. Then he thought of Mrs. Endicott, and his thoughts were pastelled in the colours of the dawn: a woman of halftones and overlapping lacquer shades.
It became quite clear in his mind that she never would have killed her husband. Or Hollander. That, in fact, she never would have killed anybody at all. The belief became fixed, even in face of the sizeable amount of evidence against her.