“And Richie, Richie was running… I don’t know why he didn’t scream. Maybe he was too scared to… but he ran, ran down the stairs, out of the house, and I caught him outside, and he was crying, just blubbering, and he made me mad, for some reason, he just made me mad, made my head throb for a second, and my face felt hot, cold as it was out there, and me not in a coat… and suddenly I was… it was happening, but I was watching it happen. I was detached, somehow, distant and close at the same time, doing and watching, and you know something funny? I didn’t get any blood on me… not when I lashed out and cut Harry, not when I took Richie in the shed and cut his throat. There was a lot of blood, but none of it got on me… not until my wife.”
And here he paused again and his eyes were watery and his voice was wavery, like poor TV reception.
“She put up with a lot from me, Millie did. She did a lot for me. She even stayed by me, when she found out about those snuff things I handled… the idea of them, it sickened her. She was really… very sensitive. She wasn’t tough enough for this business… she.. you have to be willing to do whatever you have to.”
He stopped. He began to cry. He didn’t make any noise as he did; that part he held in. But the tears flowed, and after a while I kicked him a little and he went on.
“She gave me money… financed me, my career… it was all her doing. She fucked people on the screen, for me, because I asked her to. She’d do anything for me. She believed in me. She wasn’t any angel… I mean, she was in it for herself, too… wanted a career in aboveground movies, wanted to be a real star… and that was going to be a problem for me. I needed to leave all my ties to the porno industry behind, and she was going to be something of an embarrassment, expecting parts in the post-porno films I’d make. She knew things about me… about things I’d done, to get ahead in the business… the snuff films, for instance… that meant I couldn’t get her out of my life, a divorce was out of the question. Very soon our marriage would’ve turned into a sort of blackmail situation… she was capable of that Still… I liked her. I did. She was important to me… do anything for me… but this.. this was too much… she couldn’t couldn’t… I couldn’t.. ”
He stopped again. Took in a couple breaths. He wasn’t crying any more.
“She knew I’d killed Harry. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out. She told me she knew. I didn’t deny it. I told what I’d done and I told her about Richie. I said I was sorry but that it had just… happened… that things had just… got out of hand. She just looked at me. I told her no one would ever have to know I’d done it.. we could cover it up somehow, I said, I knew we could…
“And she started beating on me with her fists. She’d been very quiet till now, that surface calm that hysteria hides behind sometimes, and she just… attacked me, but she was saying things, not screaming, almost whispering… not this, she said, not murder, not that… and she said this is exactly what she said, hitting me
… she said, I can’t live with that.
“The razor was in my hand and I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back and her eyes were… they were sad… not full of pain or anger or hatred or anything… they were sad… and I cut her throat.
“This time there was blood. On my hands. On my arms. I went into the bathroom and I washed my hands.”
He smiled. The practiced smile I’d seen so much of lately.
“It’s like I told Millie,” he said. “It just got out of hand… things just started happening… quickly… it was like somebody else was doing those things… it was unreal… like the movies.”
And then he laughed at what he’d just said, and the laughter turned into a racking sound and when he stopped making the racking sound, his head hung loose above the DIRECTOR shirt, his body slack again, the cables holding him in like a man in an electric chair that’s done its work already.
I switched off the recorder.
“That’s all I need,” I said.
“Tell me…” he said, coming back to life a little. “Tell me something, Murphy, or whoever the fuck you are… how did you put this together so fast? How did you know it wasn’t your Turner who killed Harry and Richie and Waddsworth?”
“Harry probably killed Waddsworth,” I said. “But there’s no way to know for sure. Not with all three of them dead.”
“You mean… it was an argument… love triangle thing.. ”
“I’m sure of it. But whether Harry freaked and murdered Waddsworth or whether it was accidental, just a fight that got out of control.. no one will ever know. Janet heard them arguing, remember, and that’s as close to the truth as we’ll come. “
“What about the rest of it? How did you pick up on me?”
I shrugged. “It was obvious enough what had happened outside, out in the snow. You told me you’d seen Turner in the hall, that it was Turner you’d chased out there… but the footprints outside told a different story than yours of going out and looking around for Turner and seeing nothing and getting scared and coming back in. There were two sets of prints ending in a smoothed-out area, where you pulled Richie down and struggled a little, then a long smooth trail where you dragged him unconscious to the shed, and then one set of footprints going back to the house.”
“And based on that, you came in and hit me with whatever it was you hit me with?”
“It was a crow bar. No. When I looked in the tool chest for my gun and it wasn’t there, I knew it was you had taken it. You were the only person who knew I even had a gun. I told you I hid it outside… you were smart enough to know that that meant in the shed. You took a quick look and turned it up, after you finished with Richie… or maybe you went out and found it earlier. Doesn’t matter. Either way, could only have been you.”
“It could’ve been Turner who found the gun.”
“Why would he be looking for it? Besides, there was a silencer for the gun, in the tool chest, too… I’d hidden it in there, loose. You left it behind. You probably didn’t know what the hell it was. Turner, obviously, would’ve.”
“Still… Turner might’ve been doing all the things I did… I don’t see how you knew…”
“Turner has a silenced gun. He wouldn’t go around making noises with a straight razor. Besides, I asked him.”
“What?”
“Turner was down in that farmhouse, at the bottom of the hill. I saw smoke from its chimney earlier tonight. My car was hidden in the barn, and while you were tied in the chair, sleeping it off, I took Janet down there and had her stay in the barn while I went in the house to talk to Turner. He was asleep. I woke him up.
“He was surprised to see me. Didn’t know I was anywhere around. And that was enough to tell me he wasn’t running around doing things at the lodge, which I didn’t think he was, anyway. He’s dead now.”
“He’s… you killed him? Why?”
“There was a woman named Wilma. I liked her. You’ve eaten at her place yourself… you mentioned it, remember? I value few people in this life… but she was one. He killed her. And in doing that, he was being careless. Careless about me… I lived almost next door, and had been in the place shortly before Wilma’s death, and his doing that could… still could… cause me trouble. He was always doing thoughtless fucking things like that. He almost got me killed once. I didn’t like him. And now this. You see, people in Turner’s business… the business I used to be in, and still am, marginally
… don’t go around carelessly destroying life. To you murder’s a hobby… Turner was in business. In my way of thinking, that’s what separates me from the psychopaths like you. But that’s just a rationalization, so the hell with it. Anyway, Turner was careless.. he killed Wilma as thoughtlessly, as casually as he’d humped her sixteen-year-old niece, and… well. What am I doing boring you for? There’s no reason for you to have to listen to all this.”
I switched the tape recorder back on, took his nickel-plated. 38 out of my belt-I’d loaded the gun with ammunition I’d found upstairs, with my nine-millimeter — and swung the gun up toward him. Some light reflected off the shiny barrel as he opened his mouth to say no and I slid the barrel in and squeezed the trigger.