“Together, we got him out of the car and half carried, half dragged him into the house. We put him on the bed. I ran to the telephone, and was just on the point of putting through the call when Bob called to me. He said, ‘It’s too late now, Nadine. He’s dead.’
“I ran back to the bed. There was no question about it. I suppose that in moving him, we’d started the hemorrhage — making it more severe. Anyway, he was dead. There wasn’t the faintest pulse.”
“What did you do?” Mason asked.
“Bob told me that I couldn’t be dragged into it, that he would skip out and keep in hiding, that this would tend to direct suspicion to him, that it would be better for me to put my car in a garage somewhere and take a plane to Reno where I had friends. I could claim that I’d driven up there. By leaving the house door open and unlocked, it would make it appear he’d broken in in my absence.
“We talked things over and decided that here in the house it might be quite a while before the body was discovered, that I might be able to build up an alibi that would hold water. It would help my alibi to have the time of death appear to be as late as possible. There was mud on his shoes, mud stains on the counterpane of the bed. We realized that these might help fix the time of murder. So we took off his shoes and topcoat, pulled the mud-stained counterpane out from under him, and wrapped them up in a bundle.”
“What became of them?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know. Bob took them. He said he’d take care of them.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Then I drove Bob’s car, and Bob drove Albert’s car. He wanted the car discovered as far away from the house as possible. We parked the car and then telephoned you. Bob said you could protect me if anyone could, but he pointed out that if my alibi in Reno held up, I wouldn’t have any need for an attorney, that if they didn’t discover Albert’s body for four or five days, no one could tell exactly when he’d died, and that if I could get a lucky break, I might be able to keep absolutely out of it.
“We’d managed things very circumspectly. No one in the world had any idea that Bob and I were… were… that we cared for each other.”