“Gas,” Rondler said. “By the time they got him convicted, he had grown surly. He never would talk after that first night. He got hold of a lawyer, and the lawyer told him to clam up. They pleaded insanity, and they tried to keep that pose right up to the moment of execution, thinking perhaps he’d get a reprieve. I never have felt, though, that the Craig case was closed.”
“What’s your idea?” I asked him.
“I haven’t any. I don’t have enough facts to work on, but I’ll tell you what it could have been.”
“What?”
“That Fenn girl could have been crazy about him. She wanted him to marry her, and he wouldn’t. She tried all the old gags, and they didn’t work. He was in love with somebody else and was going to get married. She took him out for a last petting party, made an excuse to get out of the car, walked around on the driver’s side, pulled the trigger, ditched the gun, and ran down the road screaming. It was that simple.”
I said, “That could have been it all right.”
“Most of the murders that people get away with are just like that,” Sergeant Rondler went on. “They’re so damn simple that they’re foolproof. There’s nothing about them to go haywire. The more people plan, the more elaborately they try to work out something that will cheat the law, the more they leave a lot of loose threads they haven’t thought about and which can’t be tied up. The bird who commits the successful crime is the one who just has one main thread. He ties that in a good, tight square knot, then walks away and leaves it.”
I said, “How about that Craig murder? Any fingerprints or anything to go on?”
“Absolutely nothing except a description given by Roberta Fenn.”
“What was that?”