“But that wasn’t done?”
“Well, some persons sleep sounder than others.”
“You mean that he wasn’t wakened until after the alarm had run down?”
“Yes.”
“But after an alarm runs down, it ceases to make any sound, does it not, Sergeant?”
“Oh, all that stuff isn’t getting you anywhere,” Sergeant Holcomb said. “The alarm was run down. He certainly got up. He didn’t lie there and sleep, did he? He got up and went out and caught a limit of fish. Maybe the alarm ran down and didn’t wake him up, and he woke up half an hour later, with a start, realizing that he’d overslept.”
“And then,” Mason said with a smile, “despite that realization, he paused to get himself breakfast, washed the breakfast dishes, made the bed, changed the sheets on the bed, laid the fire in the fireplace, and took the soiled bedclothes in his car down to the city to be laundered. Then he drove back to go fishing.”
Sergeant Holcomb said, “All that stuff is absurd.”
“ Why is it absurd?” Mason asked.
Sergeant Holcomb sat in seething silence.