Unfortunately, the scene played out exactly like the one in the Greenstreet movie. The serial number of Wilfong’s Browning didn’t match. He’d won a lead falcon in that crap game after all. I put the Browning back in the shoe box, or tried to.
“Take that with you,” Rosemary said.
“It’s not one of the Sarajevo guns,” I said. “Nobody will come after it.”
“I don’t care. It’s the gun that killed Wally. Not whatever he used down in Mexico.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either,” Rosemary said. “I mean, I’ll never understand why Wally wouldn’t let any of that go. Why he had to stay in the one town in America where he was a failure when he could have gone anywhere else and been a success. Why the things he’d lost meant so much more to him than the things he still had.
“You said Patrick Skidmore told you that Wally got upset when he realized he’d pawned a gun that might be worth a few dollars more than he’d gotten for it. Did that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. I watched Wally fret himself into a whole new man over his lost chances. It was a man I couldn’t live with, not even for the love of the man he’d once been. Take the gun, please.”
I pocketed the automatic, and Rosemary saw me to the door. When I was on the front step, she asked who she could call about bringing Wally home to be buried. I told her I’d set it up.
She said, “Of course you will,” and smiled again, adding, musingly, “Scott Elliott. From Paramount.”
12
Something about Rosemary Wilfong’s parting words kept prodding me in the gut as I drove away. I decided it was the mention of our old employer, hers and mine and Wilfong’s, Paramount. My showing up on her doorstep had revived the past for her, as Skidmore’s call had done for her ex. For him, it had been one more reminder of lost chances and, as it turned out, one reminder too many. But for Rosemary, closing the circle had been comforting somehow. I was a messenger from happier times, from a world of make-believe and Hollywood endings. I’d even promised to deliver one of those endings, in the form of a dead husband she could bury, perhaps with his Bronze Star pinned to his chest.
I found myself hoping that burying the past would work out for Rosemary. It was what her ex-husband should have done. Wilfong should have taken that phony Browning he’d bought from Nackenhorst and thrown it into Santa Monica Bay as a symbol of all the past chances he was putting behind him, once and for all.
On impulse, I decided to do it for Wilfong, using the Browning he’d left behind. Or maybe I was doing it for myself. My postwar life had turned out differently, thanks to Ella and Paddy, but I still had my share of regrets to bury in the form of a likely proxy.
I was a long way from the bay, but I happened just then to be passing a cross street that ended in midair. A new freeway overpass was being built, an everyday occurrence around greater Los Angeles. This effort was fairly far along. The foundation walls were already up on the far side of the cut. On the side where I parked my car, a form of plywood and scaffolding was awaiting its convoy of cement trucks, which would probably arrive right after the Christmas break.
Access to the site was controlled by a sawhorse painted yellow and a length of chain-link fencing that was a foot or two short of what they’d needed. I squeezed through the resulting gap and walked to the end of the pavement, where I could look down into the big mold.
Inside was a web of reinforcing steel, so tightly woven that Tiny Tim himself couldn’t have climbed to the bottom. I waited for a break in the traffic behind me before I pulled out the Browning. I didn’t say a prayer for Wilfong, though he probably could have used one. I knew Rosemary would take care of that. I just tossed the gun in, listened to it rattle its way down through the rebar, and headed back to work.
The Wood Thief
by Liza Marklund
Swedish journalist, columnist, and publisher Liza Marklund is also one of Sweden’s (and Europe’s) bestselling novelists. She is best known for her novels about the series character of this story, journalist Annika Bengtzon. Her latest book to see print in the U.S. is a novel she co-wrote with bestselling American writer James Patterson. Entitled The Postcard Killers, it became the number one bestseller in Sweden and was published in the U.S. in August 2010.
Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
The dark figure slipped like a shadow among the trees, silent, breathless, watchful. The moon shone cold and blue over the forest, exposing every movement.
She looked around cautiously as she hurried along, shivering. Warmth was a long way off.
When she reached the glade, she stopped behind a fir tree. Nothing was moving. The chimneys pointed up towards the night sky, cold and mute. No smoke rising towards the stars.
It must be bloody freezing for the old man, she thought.
She stared at the kitchen window for a long time, watching the moon glittering on the uneven, hand-blown glass. Not a single movement.
She made her decision, walked calmly over to the shed, and pulled out the sack.
The old man was woken by the cold; it had crept through the blanket and down into his lungs, heavy and damp. Slowly he allowed the pain to reach his brain; he groaned and coughed quietly. Then he took a few harsh, deep breaths as he lay there on the sofa bed listening to the clock. The starlight outside the window splintered the darkness into myriad shades of black and grey, sometimes almost blue. He bent his head and peered over at the box of wood by the iron stove, the tiles above it catching the light.
“Blackie,” he said.
The cat emerged from the shadows by the stove, took two agile leaps across the kitchen floor, and landed on the man’s chest. He laughed out loud.
“You’re getting fatter and fatter, puss.”
The cat stomped around in circles several times on top of the blanket before settling down with her nose tucked in the hollow at the base of the man’s throat. He could feel the heat of the little body radiating down through the blanket, easing the pain in his chest. They lay like that for a while, the old man and the cat. His bladder was bursting; he would have to get up soon.
There was a rustling noise over by the wood box and the cat shot up. With an enormous leap the animal landed on the floor and started chasing the mouse. The rugs ended up in a heap as the old man lay motionless, listening with great concentration as the hunt unfolded. Then came the terrified squeak of pain and death, the cat’s triumphant yowl, and the subsequent crunching of the mouse’s bones. The old man chuckled.
“Good girl, Blackie.”
But there was nothing for it — he had to get up. He pushed aside the blanket and carefully lifted his legs over the edge of the bed, using his right hand to help. He stepped straight into his trousers; he kept his long johns and thick socks on in bed. With an enormous effort he pushed with his hands and managed to get to his feet, his back aching. The situation was urgent now. He staggered onto the porch, pulled on his Helly Hansen top, his cap, and his boots, and headed for the steps.