“An R.G. you will,” I answered. “And you’re lucky if it’s not shaving lead.” I had a long scar across my thumb from test-firing a misaligned R.G. 22. I would not soon forget the gunpowder that accompanied the sliver of lead thrown backwards toward my hand.
“So you want me to have somebody—”
“Not now,” I said, standing again. “I’ll do it myself. Come on, I know what happened here. Have you got—” And I went on giving orders, as I had done for years up until seven months ago, and neither the sergeant nor I quite noticed. “I don’t know what kind of equipment you have here, do you have a trace-metal kit, because if you don’t we’re going to have to—”
“We have one,” Sergeant Collins said slowly, “but I don’t think I ever saw it used. What do you mean, you know what happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s get a gunpowder-residue kit and a trace-metal kit and go to the morgue.”
“What are you trying to prove?”
“You’d never believe me, so I’m just going to have to show you.”
“You want me to turn off all the lights in the morgue?” the attendant asked incredulously, thirty minutes later. “What are you, some kind of—” He shut up then, catching the sergeant’s eye fixed on him.
“After I spray this stuff on her hands and turn on the black light,” I said, “I sure do. Okay, now — look.”
In the darkness, the dead woman’s hands glowed eerily. On her right palm, outlined with the glow, were the initials “R.G.” from the metal inset on the plastic grips of an R.G. 22. And on her left palm, also glowing, was the horse insignia of a Colt .38. Her right index finger and left thumb both glowed with the outlines of triggers.
“She shot herself,” I said.
“But how?” Steve demanded an hour later, sitting at the sergeant’s desk in blue jail coveralls.
“Once we knew what we were looking for, it was easy to find,” I told him. “She knew theater. She knew props. You load a bullet with soft wax and a primer, and it makes a satisfactory pop and does little or no damage. In a box that had been opened and resealed, we found an entire case of prop bullets — and she’d used at least two. The wax was spattered on the wall about three feet from the front door, and on the ceiling above the couch. You can fill a balloon with animal blood and puncture it — we got the lab people out of bed, and they said the blood on the couch was beef blood.”
“But how—”
I went on to tell him how I’d pulled the balloon and the nail file she’d used to puncture it out from under the cushions. “She’d disabled the phone on purpose, after she called you. Her fingerprints were on the roll the tape came from; we found them as soon as we thought to look. She knew where you always put your gun when you came in. She knew how you’d react, thinking she was hurt. When you ran for the phone, she stuffed the balloon behind the sofa cushions and threw the twenty-two behind the records — it’s got her prints on it and nobody else’s. Then she grabbed your gun — her prints are on it too, overlaying yours — and sat on the couch facing in towards the back of it, held the pistol at arm’s length so there wouldn’t be muzzle burns and so that the gun would be on the couch when she landed on the floor, and pulled the trigger.”
“But why?” Steve demanded. “I mean— All right. I knew she was suicidal. That was why I wouldn’t have a pistol in the house other than mine, why I never left it where she could get it. And before she filled that prescription I called the doctor to be sure there wasn’t enough in it to be fatal. I wouldn’t have been surprised if — but — why in the hell would she want to set me up? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
I looked at Sergeant Collins, who stood abruptly and turned to look out the high barred window at the side of his desk. We’d argued about who was going to tell Steve the rest of it; neither of us wanted to.
“She hated you,” Collins said abruptly. “She hated you a lot more than you knew. As you said, she blamed you for her depression. And she wanted you to be as miserable as she’d been the last few years.”
“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “How do you know all this?”
“She kept a diary,” I said. “We found it. She blamed you — said she’d have been perfectly happy if—”
“If I’d been willing to live the way she wanted to live, yeah,” Steve said. “I heard that from her quite a few times — that, and I was boring and unimaginative— Oh hell. Thing is — I couldn’t live the way she wanted to. And the combination — she wanted to party every night and she wanted children and a decent job — all those don’t combine very well. Nobody has that much time. I wouldn’t do the partying, and she couldn’t find the job, and the children didn’t come. What was I supposed to do about all that?”
It made sense. It also sounded as if I had heard more than enough on this topic. “Steve,” I asked, “why did you say you killed her?”
“Because I thought it was the twenty-two. And big as I am, I ought to be able to take a gun away from a woman without hurting her. So — if I couldn’t — if I didn’t — then I thought I must’ve somehow subconsciously wanted to kill her.”
“Baloney,” I said. “I’d like to see either one of you take a gun away from me— Hey, I didn’t say both at once, dammit, give me back my gun!”
Sergeant Collins laid the pistol, which I continue to maintain he would never have gotten one on one, down on his desk. “Why did you tell me not to have them do a gunpowder residue on her, and then you went and did one?”
“Because you can do a trace metal first and then a gunpowder residue, but if you do it the other way around the acid in the gunpowder-residue kit destroys the trace metal and then you get a negative trace metal. Everybody knows that.” I wasn’t even ashamed of the smugness I could hear in my voice.
Both men were staring at me. “Everyone?” Stephen Hallett asked.
Another Grave Tone
by James Holding