Sergeant Sellers looked at her and grinned. “How long ago were you out here?”
“Oh, perhaps thirty or forty minutes.”
Sellers nodded. “I’d say he’d been dead just about that long.”
“You mean—”
“I mean,” Sellers interrupted, “that the man can’t have been dead more than an hour. If you were out here forty-five minutes ago, it’s very possible that he was killed just about the time you got here. Don’t bother to say anything, Mrs. Cool. Just come in and look at the body.”
Bertha followed him on up the walk to the house. The men apparently had completed their investigations and were sitting on a wooden bench at the far end of the porch. Bertha could make them out as a dark huddle of humanity distinguished by three glowing red spots which marked the ends of their cigarettes, spots which streaked up and down occasionally as the men removed the cigarettes from their mouths.
“Right in this way,” Sergeant Sellers said, and switched on a powerful, five cell spotlight which turned the darkness into dazzling brilliance.
“Not over there,” he said, as Bertha turned. “We’ve moved him. Take a look.”
The body had been placed on the table, and seemed terribly inanimate as it sprawled in the immobility of death.
The beam of Sergeant Sellers’s flashlight slid along the man’s clothes, paused momentarily on the red-matted garments where the bullet had entered, then slid up to come to rest on the man’s face.