“For what it’s worth,” I said finally, “I don’t think you did it, either.”
He smiled sadly. “I don’t deserve friends like you two. I really don’t.”
We were silent again for a time. The aquarium bubbled. Cars went by in the rain outdoors. The wood of the house started to smell sweet and damp, the way old wood does in rainstorms. The fishies didn’t say a damn word.
“You going to tell me about it?” I asked gently.
“Not much to tell.” He ran a hand across his face. “Actually, I don’t remember much at all. After the show tonight, I went back to my hotel room and really started feeling sorry for myself. I ordered a bottle up from room service and started in on it. Somewhere during that time I got the bright idea of trying to make amends with Reeves. I’m not kidding myself, Dwyer; if word gets back to Hollywood that I fell off the wagon during a show, I’m done. All done, my friend.” He shrugged. “So anyway — you know how you get bright ideas while you’re very drunk — I thought maybe if I came over and personally apologized to Wade, he’d come around. I was so drunk that I completely overlooked that he’d throw me out the minute he saw how drunk I was.” He passed his hand over his face again. The .45 was still in his hand. “But I came over. I dimly remember taking a cab. I came up to the door here — I’d been here once before for a party — and the rest of it I’m not sure about. I’m afraid it’s lost in the booze.”
I tried to keep the anxiety out of my voice, but I couldn’t. “Stephen, you’ve got to think hard about it. Very hard.”
“It’s a blank. A complete goddamn blank except for a couple of images.”
“Images of what?”
“I think — I wish I could be sure of this — I think when I came in I just sort of opened the door and walked right in and that’s when somebody pushed me down.”
“Knocked you out?”
“No. That’s not my impression, anyway. More like pushed me out of the way.”
“And then what?”
“Then the next thing I’m sure about is waking up and not knowing where I was at first and then finding Reeves in the bedroom. With the knife in his back.”
“Did you touch him?”
“Reeves? I think so.”
“Try to think, Stephen. It’s important.”
“I think when I saw him I went a little crazy and tried to pull the knife out.”
“Shit.”
“Bad, huh?”
“Real bad. Your prints are on the knife.”
“Could we wash them off with something?”
“From what you’re saying, I’m not sure it would matter. You took a cab over here, which means there’s a cabbie who will testify to bringing you here, and any number of Reeves’s neighbors could have seen you here.” I nodded to the .45. “So where did the weapon come from?”
“I always carry it.”
“Always?”
“Yeah. Too many creeps in the world.”
“Not smart, Stephen. Not smart at all. Particularly with your problems with the bottle.”
There was a tiny knock on the door. I got up. Wade raised the .45.
Donna came in with a big white Pizza Hut paper bag. She was wet and shivering. After she handed us our coffees she went into the bathroom. I heard a blow drier.
Wade sat in the light of the aquarium and drank his coffee and held the .45 in firing position and looked worse and worse. I was sitting there staring at the floor when he started crying.
Maybe because he always plays the patriarch, maybe because in person he’s so traditionally manly, I’d just never thought of Wade as crying. But he did and it was terrible to watch and hear because he didn’t know shit about crying; he was worse at it than I was. He’d start to cry and then he’d stop and then he’d start again. He sounded more as if he were choking or starting to vomit than crying, but he kept on and finally I could see that his cheeks were wet. That was just when Donna came out and you can imagine how she reacted.
“Oh, God, Stephen, oh, God,” she said and plopped herself down next to him and threw her arms around him. His coffee spilled all over the floor but she kept hugging him anyway. That seemed to help in the crying department, but by then he was sobbing and there was a kind of enviable freedom in the noise of it. It was sort of like getting all your past sins and shame out and starting life all over again.
“I’ve fucked it up, I’ve fucked it all up,” he said over and over again, and she only held him tighter.
I sat there watching and sipped my coffee. Every once in a while Donna would look over at me and shake her head as if Wade was our baby and he had the measles bad or something. I couldn’t help but agree with him; he had fucked it up — four marriages, enough children to fill an orphanage, fistfights and paternity suits and broken contracts, all the while doing very little to nourish the enormous talent God or his genes had given him gratis. As much as I liked him, I almost couldn’t forgive him for the waste he’d made of his talent.
When he finished he was very calm — almost eerily so. He got up and went into the john. Then we heard him piss, and we heard the water run for a long time.
“God, Dwyer, I don’t know what to do,” Donna said. With the water running we didn’t need to whisper.
“Neither do I.”
“You don’t really think he did it, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“But if he had a gun, why would he have stabbed him?”
“That’s a good question, Donna.”
“You’re going to call the cops, aren’t you?”
She made it sound as if I’d said I was going to hand our baby over to the A-1 Child Molestation Agency.
“I have to,” I said.
She sighed. “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t ever been a cop. You know?”
“Yeah.” She understood why I had to call the police.
“Well, at least call Edelman.”
Donna and Edelman liked each other.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
Wade came out. He had shaved and used some goop on his hair and straightened his clothes. He looked sober and ready for a night on the town. The .45 remained in his hand.
“I’m going,” he announced.
I’d half expected him to say that. “Stephen, that’ll just make things worse.”
“I don’t have any choice. They’re going to wrap it up nice and tidy and not even consider the possibility that I’m innocent.”
Donna got up and went to him. This time he wouldn’t let her near. “I couldn’t ask for better friends than you two. I really couldn’t. But for now I’m going to have to operate on my own.”
I got up, too. I had a vague idea about lunging at him and getting the gun.
He raised the .45. “I wouldn’t kill you, Dwyer, because you’re a pal, you really are. But I would shoot you in the leg or something.” He looked at me. He was sad and scared and confused. “You better take my word for it, kid, ’cause I fucking mean it.”
I didn’t doubt him at all.
He opened the door. He looked at me and then at Donna. She broke into horrible tears. And then he was gone.
I got her over to the couch and helped her lie down and tried holding her to stop the tears — she was shaking in a way that terrified me. Then I went to the phone and woke up Edelman.
4
Edelman arrived half an hour later, ten minutes behind two other men from Homicide Division, half a dozen uniformed officers, a trio from the medical examiner’s, and two baffled-looking young people from the press. At this time of night they were usually sitting at word processors entering a bunch of stuff that stringers provided them. They’d never handled a felony before, let alone a murder involving a famous actor from Hollywood.