“What was that, Fred?”
“Find the man who murdered Karen.”
Kaprelian had been listening with rapt attention. What DeBeque had turned into wasn’t a bum or a corpse but the kind of comeback hero you see in television crime dramas and don’t believe for a minute. When you heard it like this, though, in real life and straight from the gut, you knew it had to be the truth — and it made you feel good.
Still, it wasn’t the most sensible decision DeBeque could have reached, not in real life, and Kaprelian said, “I don’t know, Fred, if the cops couldn’t find the guy—”
DeBeque nodded. “I went through all the objections myself,” he said, “but I knew I still had to try. So I came back here to the city and I started looking. I spent a lot of time in the Tenderloin bars, and I got to know a few street people, got in with them, was more or less accepted by them. After a while I started asking questions and getting answers.”
“You mean,” Kaprelian said, astonished, “you actually got a line on the guy who did it?”
Smiling, DeBeque said, “No. All the answers I got were negative. No, Harry, I learned absolutely nothing — except that the police were wrong about the man who killed Karen. He wasn’t a junkie or a sneak thief or a street criminal of any kind.”
“Then who was he?”
“Someone who knew her, someone she trusted. Someone she would let in the apartment.”
“Makes sense, I guess,” Kaprelian said. “You have any idea who this someone could be?”
“Not at first. But after I did some discreet investigating, after I visited the neighborhood again a few times, it all came together like the answer to a mathematical equation. There was only one person it could be.”
“Who?” Kaprelian asked.
“The mailman.”
“The mailman?”
“Of course. Think about it, Harry. Who else would have easy access to our apartment? Who else could even be seen entering the apartment by neighbors without them thinking anything of it, or even remembering it later? The mailman.”
“Well, what did you do?”
“I found out his name and I went to see him one night last week. I confronted him with knowledge of his guilt. He denied it, naturally; he kept right on denying it to the end.”
“The end?”
“When I killed him,” DeBeque said.
Kaprelian’s neck went cold. “Killed him? Fred, you can’t be serious! You didn’t actually kill him—”
“Don’t sound so shocked,” DeBeque said. “What else could I do? I had no evidence, I couldn’t take him to the police. But neither could I allow him to get away with what he’d done to Karen. You understand that, don’t you? I had no choice. I took out the gun I’d picked up in a pawnshop, and I shot him with it — right through the heart.”
“Jeez,” Kaprelian said. “Jeez.”
DeBeque stopped smiling then and frowned down into his ginger ale; he was silent, kind of moody all of a sudden.
Kaprelian became aware of how quiet it was and flipped on the TV. While he was doing that the two workers got up from their stools at the other end of the bar, waved at him, and went on out.
DeBeque said suddenly, “Only then I realized he couldn’t have been the one.”
Kaprelian turned from the TV. “What?”
“It couldn’t have been the mailman,” DeBeque said. “He was left-handed, and the police established that the killer was probably right-handed. Something about the angle of the blow that killed Karen. So I started thinking who else it could have been, and then I knew: the grocery delivery boy. Except we used two groceries, two delivery boys, and it turned out both of them were right-handed. I talked to the first and I was sure he was the one. I shot him. Then I knew I’d been wrong, it was the other one. I shot him too.”
“Hey,” Kaprelian said. “Hey, Fred, what’re you saying?”
“But it wasn’t the delivery boys either.” DeBeque’s eyes were very bright. “Who, then? Somebody else from the neighborhood... and it came to me, I knew who it had to be.”
Kaprelian still didn’t quite grasp what he was hearing. It was all coming too fast. “Who?” he said.
“You,” DeBeque said, and it wasn’t until he pulled the gun that Kaprelian finally understood what was happening, what DeBeque had really turned into after those three grieving, alcoholic months. Only by then it was too late.
The last thing he heard was voices on the television — a crime drama, one of those where the guy’s wife is murdered and he goes out and finds the real killer and ends up a hero in time for the last commercial...
Man Cave
It was the smallest room in the house, at the rear behind the kitchen and pantry. Katie’s room until her eighteenth birthday, when she’d moved to an apartment in San Francisco. The understanding had always been, or so Wyatt had believed, that when Katie left it would become his den. But Ruth said no, insisting they keep it the way it was “in case the silly girl decides to move back home.” That would never happen; like Tom before her, Katie had suffered too long under her mother’s grinding thumb to ever return to the nest. (Laura hadn’t waited until she was eighteen to gain her freedom; she’d gotten herself pregnant and then married at sixteen. She and the boy were now living in Minneapolis with a daughter and a son Wyatt had never seen.) But it was only an excuse anyway. The truth was, Ruth didn’t want him to have a room of his own.
“You don’t need a den,” she kept saying. “Isn’t the living room enough for you?”
No, it wasn’t. The living room wasn’t his, it was hers. So were the master bedroom and the kitchen and the never-occupied guest room (Tom’s bedroom) and her sewing room (Laura’s old room). And so were the rose garden and vegetable garden in the backyard, the flower beds and lawn in front. All Ruth’s. He had been reduced to the role of tenant, and not a rent-free one: it was his pension and social security checks that paid the bills.
He had no one to blame but himself, of course. He’d passively allowed her to take control of the house, the kids, himself. Mild-mannered, non-confrontational, easily manipulated, easily controlled — that was Wyatt Potter in a nutshell. He knew it, chafed at it, and yet his placid nature held him powerless. If you looked in the dictionary under the word milquetoast, Ruth had said to him once, it would be his photograph you’d find to illustrate the definition.
She was the exact opposite. Iron-willed, domineering, merciless in her need to have things her way, bend everyone to her will. She had not only alienated her son and daughters with her coldness, her inflexible rules and demands, but nearly all of a dwindling succession of friends. He would have fled from her, too, if only he’d had the gumption. Now it was too late. He was sixty-two years old, not in the peak of health, had been pensioned out of his assistant manager’s job at the bank just in time to collect social security, and none of his children was emotionally or financially equipped to care for him. He simply had nowhere else to go.
Thirty-three years — that was how long he’d been married to Ruth. It was difficult after so many years to remember what it was that attracted her to him in the first place. Certainly not her looks; she was as plain as he was, and stout even before her eating habits added another fifty pounds. Her willful self-assurance, probably. The type of alpha female his sort of man naturally gravitated to.