“Technically,” Sergeant Sellers said, “we’ll have a hell of a time proving it was murder. The woman died by her own hand — by her own carelessness, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Bertha interrupted. “There’s one other thing you overlooked. After she got the telephone call she went over to the portable typewriter and wrote out the directions so she wouldn’t forget them.”
Sergeant Sellers’ smile was patronizing. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “She wouldn’t have left the telephone and gone to the typewriter. In the first place, those directions were indelibly seared on her memory. She was working under such an emotional strain that her mind was working at high speed. But in case she had wanted to get the directions straight, she would have had a pencil and paper by the telephone. She’d have scribbled down the directions in her own handwriting, in a scrawl which would have shown the emotional tension under which she was labouring. But the murderer wants us to believe she went over to the typewriter, fed in a small sheet of paper and carefully typed out the directions. Phooey! That stuff is so raw that it smells.”
“You mean the murderer wrote out those directions and planted them with the body?”
“He must have.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you get it? So that it would be perfectly apparent, even to the dumb police the minute they found the body, that she had killed herself by her own carelessness.”
“And that’s the way it actually happened?” Bertha asked.
“That’s the way it actually happened,” Sellers said. “The gasoline tank is bone dry. The ignition switch is still on. The battery is dead. She must have asphyxiated herself within the first few minutes and then the motor went on running until it had used up all the gasoline there was in the tank. We know there were at least four gallons because Belder had put that much in Wednesday morning.”
“Then the murderer must have gone to the garage afterward and left this note.”