I was dumbfounded. Was she just being coy? Was I supposed to say please? Offer her money? She knew that the books had been donated on Mr. Honeycut's death to the library. Why not tell me where she hid them? So I asked her.
"You have to help me find Mr. Honeycut's murderer." She simply said that. She didn't make it sound dramatic or emphatic. Of course, she had had a lot more time to accept the fact that the old man had been murdered than I had. In fact, I hadn't thought of it much at all.
"Look, I don't want to interfere in any way with Mr. Honeycut's being murdered. I don't care. The police handle that kind of thing. I just want the books that he promised the library. Then I'll run along home and you can find the murderer without my interference."
"I don't want your interference. I want your help. I'm not going to get anywhere with the police, they've already made up their minds. He was an old man, and he had a stoke and he died. That's it. But he was my friend and I don't want Clinton to get away with it."
Clinton? Oh yeah, the boyfriend. A woman scorned, that's what this was. He got tired of her and made her mad. Although for the life of me I couldn't see why anyone would ever get tired of her. Still, it was my turn and the only question I could think of to ask was the obvious one, "How do you know Clinton did it?"
"I don't know how I know. I just know." Clinton wanted the books and couldn't think of any other way to get them except by murdering George. Then he searched the house. Murdering George was the only way he could get him out of the house. George never left it any more, except to go out on the porch. Clinton was sure the books were in the house, and wanted to steal them."
Well, people do steal books, and the more valuable they were to the library, the more valuable they would be to a thief. But this was happening much too fast for me to keep up with it.
"So how am I supposed to help?", I asked.
"I don't know", she responded immediately. "But I can't think of anything to do by myself, and Clinton knows me. He will know if I'm trying to snoop around asking questions. He might not know you yet."
"He might not? Why would he? Have we met?"
"I don't know. Probably not. But I do know he is watching this house and would surely have noticed your van yesterday. He still wants the books, and still doesn't know where they are, so he still thinks they might be in the house, somewhere."
I was catching on to this zany conversation a little bit. A thought came to me. I thought it was about time. Why does she care if Clinton watches the house? For that matter, so what if he takes it apart board by board looking for the books? Because they are still in the house. It was about time for something else, too. I knew one thing she didn't know.
"I had a visitor last night. Somebody in the small hours tried the second door over there and all the windows on the ground floor. He wanted to get in."
This had the desired effect. Now it was her turn to ask the obvious question. "What did you do?"
"Cowered in my sleeping bag, shivering in fear. Look, you might want to get involved in a murder, with a murderer, but I am not cut out for that. I never even played sports in school. I'm not going to be your bodyguard."
"No, I don't expect you will."
She said that cynically, and perhaps a bit wistfully. I couldn't tell.
"It's just that I don't know what to do, and I thought that the two of us could maybe be more successful than just me alone. Your visitor was Clinton, I'm sure. He wanted to search the house, again. He probably guessed that you knew where the books were hidden and were taking them back to the library. He saw your van for sure."
"OK, here's what we do." I said, "We put a sign on a closet door saying 'Books In Here', and when he goes in the house and opens the closet door we call the cops from across the street and they come and arrest him."
"And he gets maybe 30 days, and probably probation, for breaking and entering. What does that get us? Besides, I don't want to catch him stealing the books. I don't care squat about the books. I want him in prison for killing George."
I didn't like the part about the books. I did care for them. They were why I was here. I needed to remember that as all this progressed. We seemed to be getting farther and farther from the books. I said, "How did he murder George? You never did tell me."
"I don't know. But he did. And we're going to find out how he did it."
Same question. Same answer. I tried a different tack. "How did he do it?" I got the same answer as before. I tried my question again. "How do you make a guy have a stroke?" Same answer. This was getting pretty boring. But then I thought "What if we're asking the wrong guy? Asking each other won't help much, neither of us knows, but asking a doctor might. And I knew a doctor. I mean, I knew a doctor that I could talk to without insurance, or even an appointment, if I could catch him. I had a friend who was a doctor. We went to school together, up to a point. He opted for medicine, I opted for disappointing my family by going liberal arts. I could call him.
I did so. His receptionist took a message. We waited. He called back. I asked him what would cause a stroke. He first wanted to know if someone was showing symptoms. I said no, then he said he was busy and what was this about. I asked him what could cause a stroke for sure, that could be relied upon to cause a stroke. He asked me if I meant something like a poison. I said yes, I guessed so. He said he would call me back.
He called me back again. Said there were any number of things that would act on the heart and very likely cause a stroke, especially in someone old and weak, but nothing for sure. I asked him what they would look like, powder, liquid, scary pictures. He said any of it could be in a powder form. I thanked him and told him I would call him back in a day or so to tell him what this was about, but that whatever it was, it wasn't happening in his state, so he had nothing to worry about.
"Yeah, there are things in powder form that can likely cause a stroke, especially in the old and infirm. Is that useful? Did someone poison the old man?"
"Not someone. Clinton. And I can guess how. Clinton was very keen on coming to the house to chat up George. The first few times he pumped George about his book collection, then the last couple of times he seemed not to care about that any more, and we just talked about things in general. We had coffee and George liked his with milk and sugar in it.
He made a mess trying to spoon the sugar once and after that he used the little packets of sugar. Clinton could have put his own doctored packets in the sugar bowl while I was out of the room and George would have never noticed. He wouldn't have noticed it when he used them, either. The last month or so he really was pretty blind. We have that last cup of coffee, George takes one of the doctored packets, Clinton says goodbye and leaves. I go up to bed and the next morning George is found dead in his chair. Pretty neat, isn't it?
Yeah, it was neat. And perfect.
"We can guess that. We can guess forever, but we can never prove it. George did die from a stroke. The evidence is long gone. If Clinton did do it that way, he has had plenty of time to throw everything away. We aren't going to look for tainted sugar packets in his trash, are we?"