The detective turns, sensing me, and smiles, nodding toward the picture. "I grew up on boats," he says. "My father's a great sailor. Mr. Devore?"
"Yes?"
He extends a hand and we shake, as he says, "Detective Burton, state CID. I hope I'm not interrupting anything?"
"Not at all. Sit down."
He does, on the sofa, twisting around to look at the Homer again, while I sit on the armchair across from him, trying to conceal my worry, reassured a bit by his friendly manner.
He turns away from the picture at last, saying, "You a sailor, Mr. Devore?"
"No," I say, regretfully. I wish I could say yes, so we'd have a kinship. I say, "My wife loved the picture."
"I grew up on Long Island Sound," he says, taking a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. Chuckling, he says, "And sometimes in it." Opening the notebook, he studies something written in there, then looks seriously at me and says, "Do you know a Herbert Everly?"
It is me he's after! How did I ever think I'd get away with it? But what can I do but pretend innocence, ignorance, disconnectedness? "Everly?" I say. "I don't think so."
"How about somebody named Kane Asche?"
"Kane Asche. No, doesn't ring a bell."
He says, "You worked for Halcyon Mills, didn't you, for a long while?"
"Were they there?"
"No, no," he says, grinning at the misunderstanding. "But they did work at paper mills. Different ones from you."
I spread my hands. I say, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you want."
"Neither do we, Mr. Devore, to be perfectly frank," he says, with his guileless smile. Can I trust him? He's still holding that notebook. He says, "We got a very strange call the other day from the personnel officer with a paper company called Willis and Kendall."
"I applied for a job there, a few weeks ago."
"That's right," he says. "And you were one of the people they interviewed."
"I didn't get a callback, though, so I guess I didn't get that job."
"There were four people they called for a second interview," Burton tells me, "and turned out, two of them had just been killed. They'd both been shot to death."
"Good God!"
"It's these two, Everly and Asche." Burton taps his notebook. "And now," he says, "ballistics tells us they were both killed with the same gun."
I say, "Was it somebody they worked with?"
"They didn't know each other," Burton says, "so far as we can tell. There's no link we can find between these two men except they both applied for the same job."
I say, "Do you mean, you think somebody's going to come shoot me?"
"It's probably simple coincidence," Burton says, "those two getting callbacks for the same job. A number of people applied, and so far everybody else is perfectly fine, like yourself. They hired somebody now—"
"I thought they must have."
He grins in sympathy and says, "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
"No, you get used to it," I say.
"It can get rough, I know," he says. "My brother was laid off down at Electric Boat, and his wife was laid off one week later from the insurance company. They're going nuts."
"I'm sure they are."
"What we think," Burton says, "is that Everly and Asche must have met somewhere, sometime. Maybe a trade conference, or a job referral outfit, who knows. They met each other, and they met somebody else, and something went wrong. So the Willis and Kendall connection's just a coincidence."
"The man the company hired," I say. "Is he all right?"
"He's fine. No threats against him, no mysterious strangers lurking around."
"So it probably doesn't have anything to do with that company," I say.
"That's right. If there's a link, it's somewhere in the past. That's why I'm here, we're canvassing everybody with any connection at all to either of the victims."
"Mine's not much of a connection," I say. "We all applied for the same job."
"But it's the phone call from that employer that got us started on this," he points out. "We don't know what we're looking for, so we've got to look everywhere we can think of. Like, if we could find some place, some time, when people like you in your industry got together, somewhere you all might have been at, a trade fair—"
"I ran a product manufacturing line," I say. "I almost never went to sales conferences, things like that."
"Would you mind," he says, "taking a look at a couple photos, see if they jog your memory? See if you ever met either of these people anywhere."
I say, "It's not — they're not pictures of them dead, are they?"
He laughs: "We wouldn't do that to you, Mr. Devore. They're perfectly ordinary photos. All right?"
"Sure," I say.
He has the photos in his notebook, and now he shakes them out and extends them toward me.
Here they are, my resumes one and four, with their faces intact, before I shot the bullets into them. I look at the photos and feel a great sadness swelling up inside me, so that my eyes sting. I feel so sorry for these two men. They seem like decent guys. I shake my head, and when I look toward Burton I'm aware of that stormy Winslow Homer sea above his head. "They just seem like nice guys," I say. "Excuse me, it's making me teary or something. They look so ordinary."
"Sure," he says. "You're identifying, I understand that. Things like that aren't supposed to happen to folks like us. Unfortunately, they do."
Handing the photos back, I say, "I really don't think I ever met them. Either of them."
"Okay," he says, and puts the photos in the notebook and the notebook away in his inner jacket pocket.
Is this it? All of it? Am I still free, uncaught, unsuspected? I say, "I'm sorry I couldn't help."
"Oh, you helped," he says, and gets to his feet, and so do I. He says, "We never like coincidence, but sometimes it happens. If it never happened, we wouldn't have a word for it."
"I guess that's true," I say.
From his side trouser pocket he takes a wallet, and from the wallet a card, which he hands me, saying, "If you think of anything, or if anything weird happens around here in the next week or so, call me, okay?"
With a shaky smile, I say, "Weird, like me getting shot?"
"Whatever it was," he says, "two seems to be it. I really don't think we're going to come across a third. I think you're safe, Mr. Devore."
"That's good news," I say.
30
I'm back in my office. Burton has gone, I've described the reason for his visit to Marjorie, I've had more conversation with Marjorie on the subject of the two murders than I wanted but I felt I shouldn't cut it short, and now I'm back in my office, and I'm shaking with the realization of the close call I've had.
These two dead men, and their link to job-hunting, could be a coincidence, that's true. Two might be a coincidence or not a coincidence, and pretty soon they're going to come to the conclusion that coincidence is the only answer that fits these two.
But not three.
If I'd found Garrett Blackstone. If he hadn't been given that tin can label job. If I'd shot him either time this week that I'd been to his house, Detective Burton and the other detectives would now have three job-hunting paper mill managerial types shot in the same state with the same gun, and it wouldn't be a coincidence, and they'd start thinking about possible motives, and they wouldn't rest until they found me.
The same gun. I've been incredibly stupid, and incredibly lucky. It never occurred to me that they could — or would think to — link these separate murders by showing they came from the same gun. (If Willis & Kendall's personnel man hadn't stuck his oar in, they might very well not have.)
But I don't know why I didn't think of it. I've seen so many cop shows on television, and so many movies, too, where they talk about ballistics and finding the gun that fired that particular bullet, and all that, but I never once made the connection. All I thought was, this gun has not been fired by anybody in over fifty years, it has never been fired anywhere on the North American continent, there's no record of its existence, so it's anonymous.