“We’ll begin at the beginning,” Davis said. “We’ll tell you exactly what you did and when you did it. There are a few details still missing, of course — we haven’t had time to check everything since this afternoon — and if you want to help us out with those, maybe we can help you out a little. Might even make some sort of a deal. Sergeant Bauer seems to think you rate a break.”
“That’s very kind of him,” Conway said.
“It starts in the drugstore, when you went over to get that cup of coffee because you were early for the picture. You had to ask your wife for money to pay the check. She was careless and you saw that she had a roll. You asked where she’d gotten it, and, because she wasn’t sticking with you much longer anyway, and didn’t care what you thought about it, she told you. She told you that she’d cleaned out your joint account, and, naturally, you got sore, and you had a fight. That we label Motive Number One.”
“One hundred per cent wrong so far,” Conway said. “I knew about the money an hour after she’d withdrawn it. I got a little upset because she was carrying it around. I told the sergeant all this.”
“Yeah,” Bauer said. “You told me.”
Davis appeared not to have heard the interruption. “Naturally, after that, you were in no mood to go to a movie. Nor was she. So you went back to the car. Somehow — this is one of the details you can help with — you found out about the affair with Taylor. I imagine that she probably taunted you with it — she was through with you, anyway. Motive Number Two.”
“Wait a minute,” Bauer broke in. “I got it. That red scarf she was wearing, that you didn’t like—” He turned to Davis. “He told the waitress he couldn’t stand it, and they were arguing about it. I don’t know if I told you before, but Taylor gave her that. So here’s what happened. Conway’s beefing about the scarf, and she says, ‘You got good reason not to like it — if you only knew.’ So he wants to know what she’s talking about, and she lets him have it. One thing leads to another, and” — he turned to Conway — “that’s when you killed her, figuring the scarf made it poetical justice.”
“I think that’s probably just about it, Sergeant,” Davis said. “How about it, Conway?”
“You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried,” Conway said. “But I guess you are trying, at that. For your information, until this moment, I didn’t know anything about that scarf.”
“There seem to have been a lot of things you didn’t know about,” Ramsden interjected.