I knelt at his side. His glassy eyes stared into mine. “What… happened?” he asked.
“You tell me, pal. Your wife got murdered just minutes ago. If you know the score, you better cough it up before you meet your maker.”
He spat up a mouthful of blood. “I got her, then…” He managed a weak and bloody grin. “But this…” He grimaced in pain. “This… shouldn’t be happening to me… You’re supposed to be… my alibi…”
“Dorothy’s too, by the looks of it. Your wife was playing the same game you were, by God,” I said, finally getting the big picture. “She also hired me for protection today-had somebody ready to punch your ticket just like you did hers.”
“No…”
“Yeah. She set me up to be her alibi the same as you.”
“I don’t… believe it…”
“Believe it.”
“That devious… little bitch…” Then he shuddered and breathed his last.
I got to my feet. The two redheads were whimpering and blubbering even louder now that Harold was dead.
“Aww, shuttup!” I told them.
Then I waited for the cops. There being nothing else to do in the meantime, I went to the now empty bar and helped myself to a shot of Chivas Regal, the most expensive Scotch in the house. But like everything else, it tasted off.
I hate domestic cases. I hate feeling sorry for myself. I hate having no good reason to feel sorry for myself. I hate drinking half a bottle of Scotch and having it do absolutely nothing to make me feel any better.
It was all crap and bound to get crappier, especially when the newspapers inevitably picked up the story. I could see the headline now-Local Private Eye’s Clients Murdered Right Under His Nose. It would do my reputation a whole world of good.
The only thing that hadn’t gone south on this case was the big moola I’d gotten for taking it in the first place. I had the eleven C-notes fanned out on my desk like so many playing cards. But the longer I stared at them, the worse they looked. I’d never had so much dough look so bad. Like everything else, even the damned money was tainted. Yeah, I’d earned it, but I didn’t want any part of it. Yet there wasn’t any choice-I had to keep at least some of it, I was flat broke. I needed a couple hundred for the radios and a hundred for Heine. The rest, well, I’d just as soon eat beans for a month than hold onto it: all it would do is serve as a constant reminder of what a rank and amateur sucker I’d been.
I swilled a little more booze and wondered what I was going to do. I was giving serious consideration to donating the remaining eight-hundred bucks to charity when the realization struck me. A wonderful, happy realization that gave me such good cheer it put bells on my toes. It was so obvious.
I scooped up the dough and gladly put it into my wallet. Of course I’d keep it. This had been no ordinary domestic case. Far from it. In fact, it was a model of what a domestic case could and should be. It even had a happy ending.
After all, it was the first case I’d seen where each of the spouses trying to get out of a bad marriage got exactly what they wanted and deserved.
THE BEST VIEW IN TOWNBY PAUL S. PIPER
Leschi
There was not a more beautiful sight in Seattle. For the present at least, I owned it: Keri seated legs crossed on the metal heater as she stared out my window. A cigarette smoldered in her hand, its smoke drifting lazily to the ceiling. Her crystal-blond hair snatched the moon and starlight and magnified it. I had some Miles Davis-Bitches Brew, to be exact-on the Goodwill stereo, a little scratchy, but to my liquor-besotted ears it sounded good enough. It sounded fine. And this woman… Damn! She wasn’t the kind of woman who gave me a second look, but here she was sitting in my room.
Beyond her the night stretched back and away, dropping from the 30th Street ridge onto the glittering surface of Lake Washington. Diamonds, diamonds everywhere. And beyond that blinked the golden lights of Bellevue; and much further to the east were the Cascades, towering snow-capped peaks. Above them the sky was radiant with stars.
It made me dizzy staring at it all. I looked back at Keri and felt even more dizzy. Then the room began swaying, and that was a different kind of dizzy altogether. I grabbed the Cutty bottle off the table for balance.
“Wanna nother drink?” I slurred, giving her my sexiest smile.
She turned and gazed at me with the same distant look she gave to the stars. “You’ve had enough.”
“But this isn’t about me,” I said, feigning indignation.
She turned back to the window.
“Ish beautiful isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, taking another drag off her cigarette. I didn’t normally let people smoke in my apartment, a second-floor duplex on 30th atop the ridge just off Yesler, but I wasn’t going to damage my odds with her. This woman could spray the whole place with skunk juice for all I cared.
“What the hell is he doing?” Her voice had a sexy rasp to it. Like Dietrich, I thought, though I couldn’t remember if I’d actually ever heard Dietrich talk.
“Who?” I was sitting on a beat-up swivel chair in front of the doorless closet I used for an office. A couple of Paul Klee prints stared at my back, and my cat, Lady Chatterley, was curled on a pillow. Her tail twitched as she chased after dream mice.
I spun the chair around, coming to rest a bit off-kilter, but Keri was still in view. I swung the chair around again. This was fun.
Divorced thirteen months yesterday, I’d been on a downward spiral with life and love ever since. Thirty-eight and working as a dishwasher at the Lakeside Broiler. I used to say I was a writer. Now I didn’t even bother. I couldn’t even say I was much of a reader. I was rapidly becoming what I did nine to twelve hours a day: a dishwasher. And believe me, that’s not how I had pictured it when I stepped onto the graduation stage in Palo Alto to receive my Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford.
I’d met Keri earlier that evening at a bar in Fremont. I’d traveled by bus to see my favorite all-women bluegrass band, The Coal Miner’s Daughters. The friend I was supposed to meet never showed, so I began a slow beer crawl toward the end of the night. I was already toasted, which loosened me up enough to dance alone, when Keri stepped in from out of the blue and took my hand, swinging me into a haphazard rendition of the lindy hop. We ended up back at my table where I immediately ordered more drinks and launched into a nonstop narration of my life, with a few detours into Charlemagne, Pépin the Short, Redburga, and the flaws in Einhard’s biography. It was the sort of rant that usually left me talking to an empty chair, but this time, when I came up for air, a gorgeous woman was listening attentively with the hint of a smile on her lips. I ordered more drinks but she declined. I waited for her rendition of her life but that never came either. My leading questions, “Where did you grow up?” “What do you do?” “Was your mother a model?” were met with curt, polite responses. So we listened to music, and danced sloppy jitterbugs.
The band finally shut it down around 1:45, and although I could still dance, after four or five additional drinks I could barely walk. When she offered to drive me home in her rusted gray Taurus, I figured we must have something in common.
“Hey, I own a shit car too,” I said. “A Honda Shivic.”
“It’s a loaner,” she said. “My Beamer’s in the shop.” She looked at me and smiled. “That’s a joke.”
As we drove, she searched the night radio realm for tunes, homing in on those lonely calls for love. This woman was playing my song.
“My parents grew up in this neighborhood somewhere,” she said as we climbed the hill toward 30th. The streetlights dropped circles of yellow light onto the street, and an occasional hooker walked her walk in them. Bobby Vinton, of all people, was singing “Mr. Lonely” when we pulled up in front of the eighty-seven steps that led to my flat.