“What’s wrong with her husband?” the lawyer inquired.
“Drink!” she sniffed. “When he’s sober he’s all right, but when he’s drunk he starts looking for trouble. He’s always beating someone up or getting beat up. Land sakes, he came in while I was there telling about it. He was reeking of whiskey, staggering all over the place, and he’d been in an awful fight. Well, perhaps that’ll be a lesson to him. He got the worst of this one.”
“Did he admit it?” Mason asked, smiling.
“He didn’t have to admit it. He’d had a bloody nose and a cut cheek and a couple of black eyes. It was bad enough so he’d had to go to a doctor and have his face bandaged. A pretty how-d’y-do when a man can leave a sweet, refined little woman like Mrs. Weyman sitting home crying her eyes out, while he makes a sodden nuisance of himself.”
Mason nodded sympathetically.
“Getting back to what happened over in the Prescott house,” he glanced casually out of the window and observed the square-shouldered, short-necked individual who was plodding his purposeful way toward the Anderson residence, “you say you had a good look at Rita Swaine — that is, you saw her clearly enough so you couldn’t be mistaken?”
“Of course I did. Later on she caught the canary and came and stood right at the window. She seemed to want to get a lot of light on what she was doing. My Heavens, you’d think she’d been a surgeon doing a brain operation, the fuss she made over that bird’s claws!”
“I’m wondering,” Mason said, “whether you are good at remembering details.”
“I think my powers of observation are quite normal, young man.”
“Could you, for instance, tell me which foot she was clipping when she was so careful to get the light on her work?” Mason asked.