Letting Noonan think Whisper killed Tim will keep them split. But if you don’t want to play with me, come on, we’ll play with Noonan.”
“You mean you won’t tell him?” he asked eagerly. “You promise?”
“I promise you nothing,” I said. “Why should I? I’ve got you with your pants down. Talk to me or Noonan. And make up your mind quick. I’m not going to stand here all night.”
He made up his mind to talk to me.
“I don’t know how much you know, but it was like you said, my wife fell for Tim. That’s what put me on the tramp. You can ask anybody if I wasn’t a good guy before that. I was this way: what she wanted I wanted her to have. Mostly what she wanted was tough on me. But I couldn’t be any other way. We’d have been a damned sight better off if I could. So I let her move out and put in divorce papers, so she could marry him, thinking he meant to.
“Pretty soon I begin to hear he’s chasing this Myrtle Jennison. I couldn’t go that. I’d given him his chance with Helen, fair and square. Now he was giving her the air for this Myrtle. I wasn’t going to stand for that. Helen wasn’t no hanky-panky. It was accidental, though, running into him at the Lake that night. When I saw him go down to them summer houses I went after him. That looked like a good quiet place to have it out.
“I guess we’d both had a little something to drink. Anyway, we had it hot and heavy. When it got too hot for him, he pulled the gun. He was yellow. I grabbed it, and in the tussle it went off. I swear to God I didn’t shoot him except like that. It went off while the both of us had our hands on it. I beat it back in some bushes. But when I got in the bushes I could hear him moaning and talking. There was people coming—a girl running down from the hotel, that Myrtle Jennison.