“You’re saying she was anorexic?” I asked.
Steve shrugged. “Anorexia, bulimia, how should I know? I never saw her vomiting on purpose, but I didn’t see her eat very much either. I mean, we could go out to dinner at the nicest restaurant in town and she’d order thirty dollars’ worth of steak and lobster and eat three bites. Five, if I twisted her arm. I mean verbally. I wouldn’t really— Oh, you know. That kind of thing. And the drinking — I knew she was depressed. I got her to go to a doctor and he put her on some kind of antidepressant—”
“Prozac?”
“No, just some sort of — I don’t remember, it ended with ‘ine.’ He said it would take about three weeks for it to work. She took it three days and flushed the rest down the toilet. Said she hated to take stuff.”
“So she was depressed and she wouldn’t do anything about the depression. And she was drinking heavily.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “And she — she’d been acting like she hated me, like it was all my fault she felt like hell. Well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t know what she wanted. It wasn’t my fault she fought with all her friends until she didn’t have any left. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t get along with her parents and didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I couldn’t make her take antidepressants. I couldn’t make her stop drinking. I couldn’t create a job for her when there wasn’t one. If I tried to take her out — dancing, or movies, or something — she wouldn’t go.”
“And that’s the background,” I said.
“That’s the background,” he agreed.
“So getting back to today — she started spewing out all this stuff, and you said you were going to leave and come back when she was sober, and she shot at you, and then?”
“And then — she was pointing the gun at me, and I could see that she was cocking it again — she didn’t need to, it was double-action, but I guess she wasn’t strong enough to fire it double-action, and I tried to take it away from her and I got hold of her hand and the gun went off and she went limp and there was blood everywhere—”
He was trained to deal with emergencies. But this was his own personal emergency, of a kind no one ever expects to have to deal with, and he was shaking all over.
Making my voice as impersonal as possible, I asked, “Was the gun still in her hand?”
“Yes, and she was still breathing, so I tried to call an ambulance and the phone was dead, so I ran next door to get the neighbors to call an ambulance, but they weren’t home, so I had to run around to the resident manager’s office and I guess I should have told her to call the police, but I didn’t even think of it, I did it myself—”
“Reporting Evelyn already dead.”
“Lorene, with that much blood—”
“All right, go on,” I said, this time wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.
“So then I ran back to the apartment to see if I could do anything about the bleeding before the ambulance got there, and she was dead.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“A twenty-two. A crummy little R.G., I think. I saw it when we were fighting over it. I never looked at it afterwards — I didn’t want to — but I’m pretty sure it was an R.G.”
“Steve,” I pointed out, “that’s not murder. If it happened the way you said—”
“I never said it was murder. I said I killed her.”
“I’m not even sure of that, from what you’ve said. Anyway, let me get a typewriter in here and let’s get it down on paper. Do you mind if the sergeant sits in?”
“Not now.”
“Then why didn’t you want him to start with?”
“Because I knew he wouldn’t believe me. You might. And the reason — it doesn’t make sense to me, so why should it to him? And if I started crying — Lorene, I knew he was going to watch and listen anyway.” He looked bitterly at the one-way window. “But if I started crying at least I wouldn’t have to look at him watch me.” Not totally unpredictably, he did start crying then. “I just wish I’d known she hated me that much — she talked about it, but I thought at least half of it was talk — there should have been something I could do, even if it was only get the hell out of there—”
“Steve,” I said, “she could have left if she’d wanted to. Couldn’t she?”
“Yeah. She had money. She had charge cards. She could have found a job in a bigger town, easy. And — I wouldn’t have gone chasing after her to bring her back. And she sure as hell knew that.”
“Now can he go home?” I asked thirty minutes later, as Sergeant Collins looked with some visible satisfaction at the written and signed statement.
“Go home? Hell, no, he can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“This is a very pretty fairy tale.” Collins laid the paper down on his desk. “But the woman was shot once with a thirty-eight. There wasn’t even a twenty-two in the room. And no bullet holes in there either, except the one in her.”
“Maybe the other bullets went out the window. And there are R.G. thirty-eights. Maybe he was mistaken.”
“You’re telling me an FBI agent can’t tell the difference between a twenty-two and a thirty-eight?”
“You ever look at a gun from the front end?” I asked softly. “I mean, a gun in business, not one that you’re cleaning? A twenty-two looks like a cannon.”
He looked at me. “You know?”
“I know.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll have to take your word for it. But there wasn’t an R.G. thirty-eight in there either. There was no gun of any description whatsoever except his service revolver. And it’s an apartment. There aren’t any windows in the living room that open, which means a bullet would have to break glass to go out, which means it didn’t happen because there’s no broken glass. And that service revolver, which he says hasn’t been fired since he cleaned it after going to the range two weeks ago, was lying on the couch with a fouled barrel. Oh yes, that phone. You can bet it was out of order. The wire was cut where it came into the house and taped back together... Now would you like to go break the news to your buddy that I’m taking out a warrant for him for capital murder?”
I let myself in with Steve’s key, which he had slipped into my hand while the sergeant was gone to get the warrant signed and nobody was watching from the other side of the fake mirror. Then he’d laughed at himself, because he didn’t have to give me the key so stealthily and because there were other things he had to give me too, things that couldn’t be hidden.
The stench of blood, of death, hung over the room. I told myself it was a crime scene, no more than a crime scene. I knew crime scenes; I’d coped with plenty of them. I’d read the reports, and I knew nothing had been carried away except the body and the revolver.
I also knew I was breaking the rules, and I didn’t care. It was only department rules, not the ones that matter.
No fingerprint powder, of course. Steve lived here, and there had been no reason to look for anybody else’s. A yellow chalk outline where the body had lain on its back on the beige carpet. Blood — it was a lot of blood; I’d seen shotgun killings bleed less than that. It appeared to me she’d fallen back on the couch bleeding and then rolled onto the floor still bleeding. If the bullet had cut an artery, and then her heart had gone on pumping even after her brain was dead — that happens, of course, I’d once seen a heart go on beating for half an hour after the brain had been literally blown out of the skull from a shotgun blast.