Leona was in the studio with another man.
They say Le Clair actually fainted from the shock. That Leona’s infidelity occurred in his studio made the wound all the more agonizing. For some time afterward Le Clair avoided everyone.
I’ll have to tell you the rest of the story as Leona told it to me from her hospital bed.
Le Clair forgave her, then hurled himself into his work as never before. The two of them lived like hermits in their apartment. They agreed never even to mention what had happened, agreed it would never happen again. Still, the memory of the incident ate away at Le Clair like drops of acid; it was the one imperfection in his life.
You have to understand, he had the unrestrained ego of the pure artist. He loved Leona as before; yet how could he love the only blemish on his otherwise spotless existence? It was a paradox that tore at his soul, and it came to dominate him. If that one element of his unshakable faith had crumbled, could not the rest? Perhaps the critics were right. What held up the remainder of his house of cards?
Le Clair’s taut mental state began to affect him physically. He seldom slept, and he became pale and thin. A love so delicately balanced as his could be tipped by the lightest touch toward hate.
One morning, while Leona was preparing breakfast, Le Clair broke. He sat at the kitchen table, his head buried in his slender arms, trembling and sobbing. Leona sat down beside him, trying to console him, trying desperately to calm him.
Suddenly, violently, he straightened and sniffed the air.
The bacon and eggs were burning!
They would be inedible!
Le Clair sprang from his chair, and his hand closed on the handle of the hot frying pan. Without hesitating he hurled the sizzling bacon grease into Leona’s face. Screaming in pain and disbelief, she tumbled backward in her chair. And Le Clair, too, screamed, a tortured cry for what could never be undone.
But it wasn’t the screams that brought the police. It was the shot that followed.
Leona wasn’t quite dead. They took her away in an ambulance.
Strickland stopped talking and looked over our shoulders. Then he smiled, a strangely luminescent smile that quickly faded.
“My wife,” he said. “I’ll have to leave.”
A woman stood just inside the door. She was tall and finely boned, with a natural beauty’s perfect proportion and graceful carriage. She wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat pulled low to conceal most of her face. There was no doubt in our minds as to her identity.
I gripped Strickland’s arm as he rose to leave.
“What happened to Le Clair?” I asked.
In a softly modulated voice Strickland said, “That morning in his kitchen, he shot himself. One inch in front of the ear and at exactly the correct angle.”
Strickland and the tall woman walked out the door. They seemed perfectly happy together.
Nevo the bartender walked over with the bar towel tucked in his belt. “Mr. Strickland forgot to pay for that last round of drinks,” he said.
I found out later that Strickland’s wife was from Cleveland, possessed a homely but unscarred face and had never heard of Leona Le Clair.
Jigsaw Puzzle
by Stephen Wasylyk
Why was Toper wandering around at 3 A.M.?...
Toper Kelly died on the main street of Fox River at three o’clock on a chilly October morning, his life finished by a hit-and-run driver.
Swashbuckling with Errol Flynn across the Spanish Main via early-morning television in his apartment above his souvenir shop, Merv Groves was brought back to reality by the sickening thud and the tinkling of broken glass. He rushed to the window too late to do much except call the Sheriff’s Office.
If Groves hadn’t heard the impact, the time of the accident might never have been established. On an October morning in Fox River, very few people were stirring. Most of the bars closed early. The summer visitors were long gone, the snow that would bring the skiers to the resorts was still far over the horizon, and hunting season was weeks away, so the only people in Fox River were the locals, whose activities at that hour, whatever they might be, were confined within four walls.
At seven I sat at my desk in the Sheriff’s Office and listened to Julio explain that all he could do was send Toper’s body to the hospital for examination by Dr. Blenheim and pick up the broken glass from the shattered headlight, which was the only physical evidence to be found. He stood at the window, his hands in his uniform pockets. He was wide-shouldered and black-haired, with a fierce black moustache and soft voice, and it didn’t take a sensitive man to realize Toper Kelly’s death affected him deeply.
Several years before, Toper Kelly had stepped off a Greyhound bus for a rest stop. Something about Fox River must have pleased him or he was tired of traveling, because he let the bus leave without him. He was a short thin man with a full beard, a great capacity for liquor, and a penchant for sleeping it off in the back seat of the nearest available car, thereby frightening many a resident or summer visitor who opened his car door in the morning to find a bearded gnome curled up inside.
As long as the temperatures were bearable, he earned a few dollars doing odd jobs, but once the really cold weather and snow came, his income touched zero long before the thermometer, a problem he solved by blatantly walking out of the supermarket with his pockets full of canned dog food, receiving as a result a ninety-day sentence for shoplifting. The judge and I had reached an understanding that he would never serve his time in county prison. He occupied an unlocked cell in the sheriff’s building and for three months was almost an ex officio member of my staff, answering the phone and the radio if we were all out and playing devastating chess with Julio while pointing out the deficiencies of my deputy’s strategy in fluid Spanish.
Julio turned from the window. “The bum should have stopped. All right, anyone can have an accident and Toper probably stepped in front of him, but he should have stopped.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “We’ll just have to find him and ask why he didn’t. You have the pieces from the smashed headlight. Blenheim will tell us if the clothes show any paint scrapings. The car will have to be repaired somewhere. There are only a half-dozen body shops near here where that could be done.” I glanced at my watch. “Get on the phone and alert them all. I’ll see if Blenheim has found anything that will help.”
Julio’s voice was careful. “I’d like to handle this one myself.”
The grey light of dawn coming through the window modeled his face into harsh planes and I realized Julio hadn’t smiled yet that morning. “I think not,” I said gently. “You weren’t the only one who liked Toper.”
While the operator paged Blenheim, I waited in his office, looking at the framed certificate on the wall whose Latin proclaimed him to be a graduate of one of the finer schools of medicine. Blenheim was no older than I was, but his dark hair already showed grey and I sometimes had the feeling that because of our jobs we were the two oldest men in Fox River.
He spread his thin hands when he entered. “What can I say, Gates? I’m sure you don’t want a list of the multiple injuries caused by the impact of an automobile on the human body. I don’t know how much longer Toper could have continued anyway. He was determined to drink himself into his grave.”
“Did you find anything I can use?” I asked.