“She freaked out when she saw Tommy had been stabbed,” Mark answered. “She recognized the knife and wanted to kill him.”
“So I assume her fingerprints are on the knife.”
“Of course. From when she pulled it from Tommy’s body to attack D’Amato.”
“I’m afraid that’s where we disagree,” Isaac said, stroking his sideburn. “I think she grabbed the knife and attacked D’Amato in front of all of you to disguise the fact that her prints were already on the knife — from having stabbed Tommy.”
“What?!”
“But how? When?”
“When Tommy conveniently fell out of the closet, into her arms.”
“But D’Amato’s knife killed Tommy.”
“I know. She was holding it in her hand at the time.”
We were all talking at once. Isaac waved us down. “Look, what do I know? I wasn’t even there. Mark was.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And she couldn’t have planned it. I saw Tommy’s body fall out of the closet—”
“Did I say she planned it? Look...” Isaac ticked his thoughts off on stubby fingers. “Here’s a tough girl, angry at Tommy for cheating on her. D’Amato sweats her till she tells him where Tommy is. She’s probably feeling very mixed emotions — hurt, rage, a desire for revenge, guilt... But she’s a realist, too. What does she think Tommy’s going to do when he finds out she led D’Amato to the hideout?”
“So now you’re saying the murder was planned?”
“No,” he replied calmly. “I’m saying that the opportunity presented itself. I’m suggesting that when Tommy fell out of his hiding place, into her arms, in that darkened room, it would only take a moment’s thought for her to conceive of stabbing him... right there and then...”
“I get it,” Bill said excitedly. “Then screaming as his body hits the floor, as though in shock—”
Isaac shrugged. “Maybe in real shock... in horror at what she’d done... Who knows? But she kept her wits enough to know her fingerprints would be on the murder weapon.”
“So she pulled the knife from his chest and attacked D’Amato... thus creating the impression it was at that moment she first touched the knife...”
“Like George in the locker room, only in reverse,” said Isaac. “Pulling out the knife disguised the fact that she’d been the one who put it in.” Isaac folded his hands on his ample stomach.
“But how did she get the knife in the first place?” Mark asked.
“You said yourself, she ran from D’Amato’s car and joined the rest of you, clambering up the stairwell. In all that confusion, a girl with Carla’s street background and criminal record could certainly lift the knife from D’Amato’s belt.” He closed his eyes reflectively. “After all, she needed some kind of weapon — some way to defend herself in case things got nasty up there. Remember, she was playing a very dangerous game... both sides against the middle.” He smiled. “Moreover, she is a thief. Thieves do take things.”
Bill scratched his chin. “You might be onto something, Isaac. But there’s still one thing I don’t understand. How come Tommy fell out of his hidden closet? — He did fall, right, Mark?”
“Hell, yeah... kinda crumpled, pushing the door open as he fell. But if Isaac is right, he hadn’t even been stabbed yet...”
“So what happened to him?” Fred asked.
Isaac looked at Mark. “You said Tommy’d had the closet built for just such an emergency — small, flush with the wall, airtight seal... Tommy’s man said he’d seen him get in the closet at the first sign of trouble... and that the door never opened till Tommy fell out. That’s about ten minutes, right, Mark?”
“More like fifteen.”
“Well, fifteen minutes in a small, airtight compartment... I think Tommy merely passed out from lack of air, fell forward—”
“Pushing the door open as he fell,” I said excitedly. “Right into Carla’s arms...”
There was a long pause. Finally, Mark turned from Isaac to the rest of us. “Well, that makes as much sense as anything else.”
“Pardon me,” Isaac said. “But it makes more sense than anything else.”
Fred chuckled drily. “I think he’s got us there.”
Mark was on his feet, heading for the wall phone. “I’m gonna run all this past Vince... If he presses Carla hard enough, she might come clean.”
“Especially if that nut case D’Amato wises up and pleads innocent,” Bill said. “Him and his magic knife...”
I shook my head. “I still think it’ll bother him that somebody else got Tommy Slick after all...”
“Who cares?” Fred was smiling at Isaac. “The important thing was you! That was really something, Isaac.”
The old man gave a quick nod. “My friends’ll tell you, modesty’s not my strong suit. But it’s nice to know I can still rub two thoughts together.”
“Are you kidding?” Bill raised his drink. “I say a toast is in order... I think we’ve found a new member of the Smart Guys Marching Society.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said.
“Works for me,” Fred chimed in. He tossed a beer to Mark, standing at the wall phone. “Raise one with us, Mark. We’re initiating Isaac into the Smart Guys.”
Mark toasted him. “Sorry about that, Isaac.” Then, turning to the phone, he said, “Vince?... You got a minute? You’re not gonna believe this, but...”
The Woman Who Loved Polar Bears
by Suzanne Jones
© 1996 by Suzanne Jones
When she is not turning out fiction, Suzanne Jones writes freelance for a medical firm in Colorado. Colorado settings frequently appear in her stories, especially the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the author herself was once a student.
At first Hal had to use oxygen only at night. Sarah moved to her daughter’s old room so as not to disturb him, since he had difficulty sleeping. One night as she stayed up, too restless herself to sleep, she chanced to see part of a movie on the disastrous Nobile expedition to the Arctic. She had been fascinated by the story of the Italian airship that had crashed on its overfly of the North Pole and by the sacrifice of the great explorer Amundsen in his search for the wreck of the dirigible. Of white spaces so vast they pushed at the corners of her mind. But the image that remained with her was that of the polar bear, the solitary hunter, roaming over a landscape like nowhere else on earth, as remote from her patch in Boulder as if it were on the moon.
Now Hal trailed his oxygen tube throughout the house like a tendril of himself, slowly dragging it through every room. Sarah thought of it as a horrid kind of umbilical, this hose which supplied his laboring lungs. She found it lying everywhere like the golden track of a great snail, marking his passing by shiny lengths of itself on rug and up stair, disappearing beneath the closed door of the bathroom or the bedroom when he went down for his nap. She had an aversion to stepping on it, as if she could collapse it with her weight and cut off his very breath, though she knew very well that she could not. It was more a squeamishness which caused her to avoid it, as she would avoid earthworms on the walk after a heavy rain, rather than some concern for trampling a defenseless part of him.
Then one day, he simply stopped. Stopped moving with his painful tread. Stopped breathing. Stopped.
There was no very good reason for him to continue, though she had been warned that he might go on as he was for years. “Congestive heart failure due to complications from emphysema” is what his physician told her, his great gray eyes swimming sympathetically, like the yolks of petrified eggs on eyeballs of fishy white. He too will be dead soon, she thought.