Judy left the next morning.
Dick was working and so I took her to the station, and on the way there I gathered that she and Dick had reached an impasse in their love affair.
She stated it quite flatly, after her fashion.
“He’s crazy about me,” she said, “but I’m a child of the rich!
If he condescends to marry me I’m to live on his salary, and a bit he has outside!
It’s absurd!
It’s sublime!
It’s perfectly barbaric these days for a man to insist on supporting a wife.
It’s childish vanity; the great male ‘I am.’”
It was quite characteristic of her that she should be crying at the moment.
But she wanted no sympathy, and I gave her none.
“If you’d rather have things than have Dick—”
“Oh, to the devil with things.
It’s the principle of the thing.
He’d deprive me to nurse his own vanity.”
Well, it is a problem which is confronting a good many young people today, both of them right and both of them wrong.
I had no solution, and whatever their troubles it had not affected Dick’s feeling toward her, for he came in to see me that night, out of sheer habit.
“Tried to pass by,” he said, “but the old bus just naturally headed in and stuck its head over the hitching post.”
I was glad to see him.
I had been very lonely; missing Judy, even missing—to tell the truth—the Inspector, with his blue eyes and his toothpicks and his general air of competence. He had deserted me almost completely for several days.
And in the expansiveness of that hour, then and there, I told Dick about the carpet.
He was incredulous.
“But see here: the first car the police would examine would be that car.”
“So I think.
But they may know about it, at that.”
“You’re sure Amos hasn’t been carrying oil in it?”
That had not occurred to me.
I felt rather foolish, and the net result of the talk was that Dick saw Amos the next day and learned certain things.
On the night of Florence’s death, being a Sunday, he had been out and Jim was alone.
But he could not have taken the car out, for Amos carried the key to the small door of the garage from the garden. The main doors to the alley were bolted on the inside.
Not that Dick asked these direct questions.
He asked Amos where he was on Sunday night, and if any one could have got at the car.
But Dick was not satisfied.
He watched the negro leave the house on an errand, and then climbed the rear wall into Jim’s yard.
There he found two interesting facts; the side window into the garage had a broken pane, and it was possible to reach in and unlock the sash.
And there were marks on one of the newly painted garden chairs.
He got into the building and examined the car. The driving seat and the one next to it were leather and could be washed, but there were no blood stains.
“Amos doesn’t watch the mileage,” he said, “so he doesn’t know whether the car was out or not.
But he does suspect that the gas is lower than it ought to be.”
He did, however, discover that Amos had carried no oil in the rear of the car.
He had said to him:
“What’s all this about the carpet being missing?
You’ve done away with it yourself, haven’t you?
Spilled something on it?”
“No, sir!” said Amos.
“I never carry nothing back there.
Mr. Blake’s mighty particular about that car, sir.”
All of which, important as it was, did not help us at all.
Nothing was clearer than that Jim himself, locked out of the garage, might have placed a garden chair under the window, broken the pane, and taken his car out himself, on Sunday night.
That was on Tuesday, the tenth of May.