Sergeant Sellers said, “All right, we’ll go outside and talk in the car for a little while. This is the address Rodney Kosling gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Is there anything that you know that would make you think this man, Bollman, lived here?”
“No.”
“You don’t know where he lived?”
Bertha Cool said impatiently, “Of course not. Why ask me all that stuff? How about the man’s driving licence? How about his registration card? How about—”
“That,” Sergeant Sellers said, “is just the point. Either someone had frisked him and taken everything that could have possibly been a means of identification, or he emptied his pockets of everything except money. Apparently his money hasn’t been touched. It had evidently been taken from a wallet and pushed hurriedly down into the pockets. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Mrs. Cool?”
“Why should I?”
“I don’t know,” Sellers said. “It opens the door to some interesting speculation. The fact that the murder was committed with a trap gun indicates that the murderer wanted to claim his victim while he was far away, building up an alibi for himself. But quite evidently after the man’s death, someone went through his pockets — unless the man cached the stuff from his pockets somewhere. There couldn’t have been a very great margin of time, and you admit that you were here. Therefore, I ask you if you know anything about what was in his pockets?”
“No, I don’t.”