“Always remember that she could have done the shooting,” I pointed out. “She’s the logical suspect.”
“Well, damn it all,” Bertha said angrily, “don’t go taking up my time building air castles and then letting me down to the ground. Haven’t you anything that makes you think…”
“The only thing is that I called up the wife to find out where her husband was. I also asked about her sister. I didn’t look at the time, but that was after we’d got back to town and I’d checked on this Durham man in the Westchester Arms Hotel. He’d checked out a short time before. I telephoned the wife to ask if she had a sister and she said no.”
“Well, what about it?”
“She told Sergeant Sellers that call came in just about the time the police fix the hour when the shots were fired. But my call must have been a good hour and a half later.”
“What was her idea in saying that?”
“Perhaps she was trying to get an alibi. Perhaps she was sleepy and didn’t know what time it really was.”
“Any other thoughts?”
“Lots of them. Some of them Sergeant Sellers shares. He doesn’t like the idea of Stanwick Carlton, the husband who was being betrayed, coming here from Colorado just in time to check in at the hotel, look around and then go out somewhere at about the time the shooting took place.”
“I don’t like that, either,” Bertha said. “Wait a minute, I like it a lot. If it was murder we could make something of that.”