“Then the murderer must have gone out to the garage to make certain of what had happened and leave the note.”
“Correct.”
“Then why didn’t the murderer at that time pull the oakum out of the cracks that had been so carefully sealed up? That oakum in the cracks is a dead give-away.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Sellers said, “and it puzzled me for a while, but you can understand it if you put yourself in the shoes of the murderer.”
“How do you mean?”
“He had accomplished his purpose. He’d got the woman out of the way. He sneaked into the garage, probably in the dead of night, long enough to plant this note in the automobile so that the minute her body was discovered the newspapers would list it as death from carelessness rather than murder. The murderer dared to enter the garage long enough to plant that note, but he didn’t dare to stay there. He didn’t dare to be found there. If anything went wrong, and someone had seen him enter the garage and had telephoned the police that there was a prowler on the premises, and a radio car had come rushing out and caught this man in the garage — well, it was just the same as though he had been caught shooting her or sticking a knife into her. It would have been first-degree murder, and he knew it. Therefore, he didn’t dare to wait long enough to remove the caulking from the cracks. He perhaps hoped the police wouldn’t discover it, but even if they did, he felt perfectly safe, just so long as he wasn’t actually caught on the premises.”
“You mean if he wasn’t caught on the premises he couldn’t be convicted?”
“That’s right,” Sellers said. “Unless we can dig up some evidence that will show the whole thing as part of a consistent, carefully-thought-out, premeditated plan of campaign, we can never convict the murderer even if we put our finger on him, because he actually didn’t kill the woman. He could have been, and probably was, a mile away when it happened. It’s diabolical in its ingenuity and in its legal efficiency. A man simply gets a woman’s mind so preoccupied, gets her so emotionally excited, that she omits the precautions she might otherwise have taken, and brings about her own death by carelessness. Prove all those facts to a jury, and then try and get a conviction, or try and get a Supreme Court to uphold a first-degree verdict. The probabilities are, it can’t be done.”
“Have you,” Bertha asked, “some evidence pointing to the murderer?”
“Yes. Everett Belder. Mr. Belder,” Sergeant Sellers went on slowly, “the diabolically clever killer, the inventor, the perverted genius; the man who had his business ruined by economic changes, who had plenty of time to sit in his office and think; who used the imagination he has used in thinking out sales campaigns to think out a way of killing his wife by which he would be legally in the clear. The man who wrote the poison-pen letters accusing himself of affairs with various women, exposing love-affairs which would otherwise never have been discovered; the man who hired a detective so as to be absolutely certain that his wife would be shadowed to this garage. Don’t you get it, Bertha? If it hadn’t been for you tailing her, there might have been some doubt as to what happened, but as it is, we fix the time of death almost to the minute — a time at which Everett Belder was sitting in the barber’s shop having his face massaged, his nails manicured, his hair trimmed. A very pretty picture, isn’t it?”