Sorry for the second post but I wasn't clear before. I know several house elapsed before Cheney spoke directly with the police but it WAS reported right away.
Somehow the article's sentence struck me as deceptive, as I explained in my initial post about this.
If you were involved in a shooting where you pulled the trigger, would you get to tell the police to come back fourteen hours later when you had time to talk to them because you had a dinner party to attend to, and you wanted to get a good night's sleep?
I think there was considerably more than one beer consumed, and those 14 hours were used to hide that.