I was in the neighborhood, as they say in New Hampshire when you are within ten miles of a place, photographing birds in winter scenery at a state park not far from A.’s home, and as it was still early in the afternoon when I finished, I decided to stop by for a brief visit. I rarely visited him unannounced or uninvited, but for reasons too vague and smokily intuitive to go into here, I decided that this time it would be permitted and perhaps even welcomed.
When I arrived, I noticed immediately that he had parked his car in the driveway outside the garage, which was not his habit. At that time he was driving a pale green Chrysler. It was an airport limousine, an unusually long vehicle that he took considerable pride in being able to park wholly inside his garage. Swinging open the garage door, raising it like the curtain at a stage play and revealing the blunt green tail of an automobile that, like a dragon, seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the far, cavernous darkness of the converted barn, was an exquisite pleasure for him. As a matter of fact, on several occasions I myself, as the audience, had found the experience oddly satisfying and had broken spontaneously into applause.
But on this day the car was parked outside the garage, and the garage door was locked. I walked quickly around to the side door at the porch, knocked, and then called. That door, too, when I tried it, was locked. It was a cold, diamond-clear day, with about eight inches of dry, week-old snow on the ground, and there were hundreds of footprints in the snow, most of them probably A.’s. But fresh prints could not be distinguished from week-old ones. A narrow path had been tramped from the porch down to the fence in front of the house, and on the other side of the fence was a waist-high pyramid of the last week’s garbage and trash, most of it frozen solid. Across the snow-covered, bumpy fields in front and into the woods behind the house and on either side were numerous chains of footprints — but it was impossible to tell when in the previous week any of the chains had been laid down. Beyond the woods hunched the mountain, mute, seeming almost smug.
It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t understand A.’s absence as that I could not understand both his absence and the car’s presence. Except under severe duress or drunkenness, he never rode in anyone else’s vehicle. I knew he must still be on the premises. On the other hand, if he were just out for a walk in the woods, a normal activity on such a crisp, clear afternoon, why did he leave his car parked outside the garage? That was not normal. (Rather, it was not usual. Nothing about A. was normal.)
I decided to examine the car more closely. Perhaps there was a note, or a clue. After circling the enormous green Chrysler twice, I finally noticed the three holes in the front window on the driver’s side, holes surrounded by interconnected cracks, like spider webs, holes that could have been made only by high-powered rifle bullets.
This was certainly a curious, if not ominous, development.
I called out his name several times, doubtless with fear in my voice and surely with urgency. No answer. Silence — except for the whisper of the cold wind riffling through the pines and the distant, harsh cries of a pair of crows from somewhere in the woods behind the house.
What could I do? I couldn’t ask any of A.’s neighbors, those folks in the trailers and shacks back along the road, if they had seen him recently. The mere mention of his name and myself as a concerned friend would have invited any of those folks to slam his door in my face, or worse. Years of living in A.’s proximity had aroused in his neighbors a certain amount of anger. I couldn’t call the police. To a stranger, especially to a law enforcement official, the circumstances simply weren’t that ominous. The police chief, A.’s brother-in-law, but no help for that, doubtless would have advised me to drop by again in a day or two, and if A. still hadn’t moved his car, then perhaps an inquiry could begin. And though at this time his divorce from “Number Five,” as he called her, had been legally consummated, A. nevertheless was still living alone, so there was as yet no new spouse, no proper “next-of-kin” to alert and interrogate.
Feeling puzzled, helpless and, increasingly, alarmed, I got back into my car and started the long drive home to Northwood. I had not gone many miles when I imagined, successively, three separate events, or eventualities, which, successively, I believed true — that is, I believed in turn that each event sufficiently explained the peculiar circumstances surrounding A.’s absence.
Event #1: UPON arriving at my home in Northwood, I built a fire in the library and was about to fix myself a cognac and soda when the phone rang. It was A. His voice was sharp, harsh, annoyed with me, as if he had been trying to reach me for several hours.
I tried to explain that I had spent most of the day photographing jays and chickadees in the snow and had stopped by his house on the way home, but he interrupted me, barking that he didn’t give a damn where I’d been; he’d been arrested by his own brother-in-law, Chub Blount, and had been charged with the murder of Dora, his fifth wife. He told me that he’d been permitted one call, and he’d called me, and then, when I hadn’t answered the phone, he’d decided I was probably in on the arrest somehow, so now he was calling to let me know what he thought of that kind of betrayal.
I was shocked. I assured him that I was shocked. “I didn’t even know Dora was dead, for God’s sake! And you know what I think of your brother-in-law,” I reminded him. “If I had known that Dora was dead, murdered, I mean, and if for whatever reason I had thought you were responsible, you know I’d never have called Chub in. I probably would have called the state police, not that idiot,” I reassured him. “Assuming, of course, that I would’ve called anyone. I mean, what the hell, A., you know what I thought of Dora,” I said.
Apparently my words soothed him, as good sense inevitably did. Above all else, even in distress, A. was a reasonable man. In a calm voice now, he said that he wanted me to hire a lawyer for him.
“Did you do it? I mean, you know, kill her?” I asked. Perhaps he’d shot her with his 30.06 while she was sitting in his car — though I could not imagine any circumstance under which Dora might have ended up sitting in the driver’s seat of A.’s Chrysler while he stood outside with his rifle. But I did want those bullet holes explained.
For several uncomfortable seconds A. snarled at me, literally snarled, like a bobcat or cougar interrupted at a meal. Then he shouted that he hadn’t called me so he could confess to me, and he hadn’t called to protest innocently that he was being framed by his brother-in-law. He’d called, first, to tell me what he thought of me if I had been a party to his arrest, and then to instruct me to hire a lawyer for him. Not a shyster, a lawyer, he bellowed. He figured it was a job that fitted my natural and acquired skills rather well. (A.’s sarcasm rarely failed to make a point, though often an obscure one.) As to whether or not he had in fact murdered his ex-wife, A. told me that if the lawyer I hired was able to convince a jury that he didn’t do it, that would be the truth. If he failed, that would be the truth too, A. explained. That was why he wanted the best lawyer in the state of New Hampshire, he shouted. Did I understand?
“Yes, I understand. How do you think it happened, though? I mean, how do you think Dora was killed? How does Chub, the police, explain those bullet holes in the Chrysler?”
A. uttered a low, sneaky-sounding giggle, almost a cackle, except that he was genuinely amused. He was intrigued, he said, by my knowledge of those holes. Until now, until I had asked about them, he himself had wondered who killed Dora. But now … and his voice drifted back into that low, sneaky giggle.