“Yeah. Now listen to this,” and I told him what I had seen and heard while waiting in Donald Willsson’s house the previous night.
When I had finished the chief bunched his fat mouth, whistled softly, and exclaimed:
“Man, that’s an interesting thing you’ve been telling me! So it was blood on her slipper? And she said her husband wouldn’t be home?”
“That’s what I took it for,” I said to the first question, and, “Yeah,” to the second.
“Have you done any talking to her since then?” he asked.
“No. I was up that way this morning, but a young fellow named Thaler went into the house ahead of me, so I put off my visit.”
“Grease us twice!” His greenish eyes glittered happily. “Are you telling me the Whisper was there?”
“Yeah.”
He threw his cigar on the floor, stood up, planted his fat hands on the desk top, and leaned over them toward me, oozing delight from every pore.
“Man, you’ve done something,” he purred. “Dinah Brand is this Whisper’s woman. Let’s me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow.”
We climbed out of the chief’s car in front of Mrs. Willsson’s residence. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crêpe 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.