The paper Judy had found might or might not refer to that knowledge.
Certainly one or the other of them possessed some knowledge or some physical property, or both, which had been desperately sought for in each case.
(i) According to Inspector Harrison, the two rooms had been searched by the same individual.
(j) The oil stain on the carpet of Jim’s car may not be suspicious in itself, but coupled with the above is highly evidential.
To this list I added certain queries:
(a) Would Jim, under any conceivable circumstances, have attacked Judy?
(b) Was he capable of such sustained cunning as had been shown throughout?
The planted footprints, for example?
(c) Had Jim actually worn golf clothes on the night of Sarah’s murder?
If not, had he had time after his telephone message to break into my house?
Fifteen minutes, or at most twenty, was all he had had.
(d) Was Sarah in Jim’s house for the three hours still unaccounted for?
And under the heading
“Florence Gunther”:
(a) Did Jim know her?
(b) Was Jim the visitor testified to by the colored woman at the Bassett house?
(c) Why had so cunning a murderer overlooked the oil stain in the car?
I studied this last.
Surely were Jim guilty, lying there in his bed he would have gone over inch by inch the ground he had covered; have thought of every detail, have followed his every act, searched for the possible loose thread in his fabric.
He knew he was under suspicion.
He had only to raise himself in his bed to see that figure across the street.
Then why would he have left that stain in the car?
Why not have burned the carpet?
Burned the car?
There was more than that. He was definitely under suspicion, and there had been a city-wide search for the “death car,” as the press called it.
But either the police had not found that stain, or they had chosen deliberately to ignore it.
Why?
Jim Blake and a box of matches could at any time destroy that evidence.
It was too much for me.
And to add to my anxieties Joseph told me that day that the maids were talking of leaving.
Ever since Norah had found the kitchen poker in the laundry the haunting of the house had been an accepted matter, and it was finally getting on their nerves.
Yet the remainder of the day was quiet enough, on the surface.
Since Wednesday night Judy and Dick had been working over the house clocks at intervals, and that Sunday was no exception.
I have no doubt that the servants thought them slightly mad.
One by one the clocks were taken into the library, and there investigated.
By and large, I had quite a collection of odd springs and wheels, and Dick would sit there over his wreckage, his hair rumpled, and try to reassort what Judy called “the innards.”
“Now where the devil does that go?”
“Don’t be such an ass!
Right there.”
“It doesn’t fit.
Try it yourself, since you know so much.”
And with this very wrangling, which was the cloak to hide their deeper feelings—after the fashion of youth today—they would be making love to each other.
They would jeer at each other, their mouths hard and their eyes soft.
“Keep quiet!
How can I do anything if you jerk my arm?”
“Well, you’re so damned clumsy.”
The final result, even the servants’ alarm clocks having been investigated, was that the establishment ran rather erratically.
Meals were at queer hours, and I remember that on that very Sunday, with nobody the wiser, we found that we had breakfasted at eleven o’clock and lunched at half past three.
Then that Sunday night at eleven o’clock, or as near that as our ruined time system allowed me to judge, Katherine called up from New York.
Howard had had another attack. He was better, but she wanted Judy at home.