What it was a soft hissing.
Roger Hume’s body was discovered three days later by his twice-weekly cleaning lady. But when the police arrived at her summons, it was not Hume’s death which interested them quite so much as that of the second man, whose corpse was found during a routine search of the premises.
This second “victim” lay on the floor of the wine cellar, amid a rather astonishing carnage of broken wine bottles and spilled wine. His wallet identified him as Norman Tolliver, whose name and standing were recognized by the cleaning lady, if not by the homicide detectives. The assistant medical examiner determined probable cause of death to be an apoplectic seizure, a fact which only added to the consternation of the police. Why was Tolliver locked inside Roger Hume’s wine cellar? Why had he evidently smashed dozens of bottles of expensive wine? Why was he dead of natural causes and Hume dead of foul play?
They were, in a word, baffled.
One other puzzling aspect came to their attention. A plain clothes officer noticed the faint hissing sound and verified it as forced air coming through a pair of wall ducts; he mentioned this to his lieutenant, saying that it seemed odd for a wine cellar to have heater vents like the rest of the rooms in the house. Neither detective bothered to pursue the matter, however. It struck them as unrelated to the deaths of the two men.
But it was, of course, the exact opposite: it was the key to everything. Along with several facts of which they were not yet aware: Norman’s passion for wine and his high blood pressure, Roger Hume’s ignorance in the finer arts and his hypersensitivity to cold — and the tragic effect on certain wines caused by exposure to temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
No wonder Norman, poor fellow, suffered an apoplectic seizure. Can there be any greater horror for the true connoisseur than to find himself trapped in a cellar full of rare, aged, and irreplaceable wines that have been stupidly turned to vinegar?
Out Behind the Shed
There was a dead guy behind the parts shed.
I went out there to get a Ford oil pan for Barney and I saw him lying on his back in the weedy grass. He didn’t have a face. There was blood and bone and pulp and black scorch marks where his face used to be. I couldn’t even guess if he was anybody I knew.
I stood there shivering. It was cold... Jesus, it was cold for late March. The sky was all glary, like the sun coming off a sheetmetal roof. Only there wasn’t any sun. Just a shiny silver overcast, so cold-hot bright it hurt your eyes to look at it. The wind was big and gusty, the kind that bums right through clothing and puts a rash like frostbite on your skin. No matter what I’d done all day I couldn’t seem to get warm.
I’d known right off, as soon as I got out of bed, that it was going to be a bad day. The cold and the funny bright sky was one thing. Another was Madge. She’d started in on me about money again even before she made the coffee. How we were barely making ends meet and couldn’t even afford to get the TV fixed, and why couldn’t I find a better-paying job or let her go to work part-time or at least take a second job myself, nights, to bring in a little extra. The same old song and dance. The only old tune she hadn’t played was the one about how much she ached for another kid before she got too old, as if two wasn’t enough. Then I came in here to work and Barney was in a grumpy mood on account of a head cold and the fact that we hadn’t had three new repair jobs in a week. Maybe he’d have to do some retrenching if things didn’t pick up pretty soon, he said. That was the word he used, retrenching. Laying me off was what he meant. I’d been working for him five years, steady, never missed a day sick, never screwed up on a single job, and he was thinking about firing me. What would I do then? Thirty-six years old, wife and two kids, house mortgaged to the hilt, no skills except auto mechanic and nobody hiring mechanics right now. What the hell would I do?
Oh, it was a bad day, all right. I hadn’t thought it could get much worse but now I knew that it could.
Now there was this dead guy out here behind the shed.
I ran back inside the shop. Barney was still banging away under old Mrs. Cassell’s Ford, with his legs sticking out over the end of the roller cart. I yelled at him to slide out. He did and I said, “Barney... Barney, there’s a dead guy out by the parts shed.”
He said, “You trying to be funny?”
“No,” I said. “No kidding and no lie. He’s out there in the grass behind the shed.”
“Another of them derelicts come in on the freights, I suppose. You sure he’s dead? Maybe he’s just passed out.”
“Dead, Barney. I know a dead guy when I see one.”
He hauled up on his feet. He was a big Swede, five inches and fifty pounds bigger than me, and he had a way of looming over you that made you feel even smaller. He looked down into my face and then scowled and said in a different voice, “Froze to death?”
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t got a face anymore. His face is all blown away.”
“Jesus. Somebody killed him, you mean?”
“Somebody must of. Who’d do a thing like that, Barney? Out behind our shed?”
He shook his head and cracked one of his big gnarly knuckles. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the cold garage. Then, without saying anything else, he swung around and fast-walked out through the rear door.
I didn’t go with him. I went over and stood in front of the wall heater. But I still couldn’t get warm. My shoulders kept hunching up and down inside my overalls and I couldn’t feel my nose or ears or the tips of my fingers, as if they weren’t there anymore. When I looked at my hands they were all red and chapped, like Madge’s hands after she’s been washing clothes or dishes. They twitched a little, too; the tendons were like worms wiggling under a handkerchief.
Pretty soon Barney came back. He had a funny look on his moon face but it wasn’t the same kind he’d had when he went out. He said, “What the hell, Joe? I got no time for games and neither do you.”
“Games?”
“There’s nobody behind the shed,” he said.
I stared at him. Then I said, “In the grass, not ten feet past the far comer.”
“I looked in the grass,” Barney said. His nose was running from the cold. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his overalls. “I looked all over. There’s no dead guy. There’s nobody.”
“But I saw him. I swear to God.”
“Well, he’s not there now.”
“Somebody must of come and dragged him off, then.”
“Who’d do that?”
“Same one who killed him.”
“There’s no blood or nothing,” Barney said. He was back to being grumpy. His voice had that hard edge and his eyes had a squeezed look. “None of the grass is even flattened down. You been seeing things, Joe.”
“I tell you, it was the real thing.”
“And I tell you, it wasn’t. Go out and take another look, see for yourself. Then get that oil pan out of the shed and your ass back to work. I promised old lady Cassell we’d have her car ready by five-thirty.”
I went outside again. The wind had picked up a couple of notches, turned even colder; it was like fire against my bare skin. The hills east of town were all shimmery with haze, like in one of those desert mirages. There was a tree smell in the air but it wasn’t the usual good pine-and-spruce kind. It was a eucalyptus smell, even though there weren’t any eucalyptus trees within two miles of here. It made me think of cat piss.
I put my head down and walked slow over to the parts shed. And stopped just as I reached it to draw in a long breath.... And then went on to where I could see past the far corner.
The dead guy was there in the grass. Lying right where I’d seen him before, laid out on his back with one leg drawn up and his face blown away.