“Mr. Stevens.”
“Was this his idea?” I said, with a gesture that included McGee and myself.
“He didn’t say I shouldn’t talk to you.”
“Okay, McGee, what’s on your mind?”
He lay still watching me. His mouth was twitching, and his eyes held a kind of beseeching brightness. “I don’t know where to start. I’ve been living in my thoughts for ten years – so long it hardly seems real. I know what happened to me but I don’t know why. Ten years in the pen, with no chance of parole because I wouldn’t admit that I was guilty. How could I? I was bum-rapped. And now they’re getting ready to do it again.”
He gripped the polished mahogany edge of the bunk. “I can’t go back to ‘Q’, brother. I did ten years and it was hard time. There’s no time as hard as the time you do for somebody else’s mistake. God, but the days crawled. There weren’t enough jobs to go round and half the time I had nothing to do but sit and think.
“I’ll kill myself,” he said, “before I let them send me back again.”
He meant it, and I meant what I said in reply: “It won’t happen, McGee. That’s a promise.”
“I only wish I could believe you. You get out of the habit of believing people. They don’t believe you, you don’t believe them.”
“Who killed your wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who do you think killed her?”
“I’m not saying.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and taken quite a risk, to get me out here and tell me you’re not saying. Let’s go back to where it started, McGee. Why did your wife leave you?”
“I left her. We had been separated for months when she was killed. I wasn’t even in Indian Springs that night, I was here in the Point.”
“Why did you leave her?”
“Because she asked me to. We weren’t getting along. We never did get along after I came back from the service. Constance and the kid spent the war years living with her sister, and she couldn’t adjust to me after that. I admit I was a wild man for a while then. But her sister Alice promoted the trouble between us.”
“Why?”
“She thought the marriage was a mistake. I guess she wanted Constance all to herself. I just got in the way.”
“Did anybody else get in the way?”
“Not if Alice could help it.”
I phrased my question more explicitly: “Was there another man in Constance’s life?”
“Yeah. There was.” He seemed ashamed, as if the infidelity had been his. “I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years, and I don’t see much point in opening it up now. The guy had nothing to do with her death, I’m sure of that. He was crazy about her. He wouldn’t hurt her.”
“How do you know?”
“I talked to him about her, not long before she was killed. The kid told me what was going on between him and her.”
“You mean your daughter Dolly?”
“That’s right. Constance used to meet the guy every Saturday, when she brought Dolly in to see the doctor. On one of my visiting days with the kid – the last one we ever had together, in fact – she told me about those meetings. She was only eleven or twelve and she didn’t grasp the full significance, but she knew something fishy was going on.
“Every Saturday afternoon Constance and the guy used to park her in a double-feature movie and go off by themselves someplace, probably some motel. Constance asked the kid to cover for her, and she did. The guy even gave her money to tell Alice that Constance went to those movies with her. I thought that was a lousy trick.” McGee tried to warm over his old anger but he had suffered too much, and thought too much, to be able to. His face hung like a cold moon over the edge of the bunk.
“We might as well use his name,” I said. “Was it Godwin?”
“Hell no. It was Roy Bradshaw. He used to be a professor at the college.” He added with a kind of mournful pride: “Now he’s the Dean out there.”
He wouldn’t be for long, I thought; his sky was black with chickens coming home to roost.
“Bradshaw was one of Dr. Godwin’s patients,” McGee was saying. “That’s where he and Connie met, in Godwin’s waiting room. I think the doctor kind of encouraged the thing between them.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Bradshaw told me himself the doctor said it was good for them, for their emotional health. It’s a funny thing, I went to Bradshaw’s house to get him to lay off Connie, even if I had to beat him up. But by the time he was finished talking he had me half-convinced that he and Connie were right, and I was wrong. I still don’t know who was right and who was wrong. I know I never gave her any real happiness, after the first year. Maybe Bradshaw did.”
“Is that why you didn’t inject him into your trial?”
“That was one reason. Anyway, what was the use of fouling it up? It would only make me look worse.” He paused. A deeper tone rose from a deeper level of his nature: “Besides, I loved her. I loved Connie. It was the one way I had to prove I loved her.”
“Did you know that Bradshaw was married to another woman?”
“When?”
“For the last twenty years. He divorced her a few weeks ago.”
McGee looked shocked. He’d been living on illusions for a long time, and I was threatening his sustenance. He pulled himself back into the bunk, almost out of sight.
“Her name was Letitia Macready – Letitia Macready Bradshaw. Have you ever heard of her?”
“No. How could he be married? He was living at home with his mother.”
“There are all kinds of marriages,” I said. “He may not have seen his wife in years, and then again he may have. He may have had her living here in town, unknown to his mother or any of his friends. I suspect that was the case, judging from the lengths he went to to cover up his divorce.”
McGee said in a confused and shaken voice: “I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
“It may have a very great deal. If the Macready woman was in town ten years ago, she had a motive for killing your wife – a motive as strong as your own.”
He didn’t want to think about the woman. He was too used to thinking about himself. “I had no motive. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of her head.”
“You did, though, once or twice.”
He was silent. All I could see of him was his wavy gray hair, like a dusty wig, and his large dishonest eyes trying to be honest:
“I hit her a couple of times, I admit it. I suffered the tortures of the damned afterward. You’ve got to understand, I used to get mean when I got plastered. That’s why Connie sent me away, I don’t blame her. I don’t blame her for anything. I blame myself.” He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly.
I offered him a cigarette, which he refused. I lit one for myself. The bright trembling patch of sunlight was climbing the bulkhead. It would soon be evening.
“So Bradshaw had a wife,” McGee said. He had had time to absorb the information. “And he told me he intended to marry Connie.”
“Maybe he did intend to. It would strengthen the woman’s motive.”
“You honestly think she did it?”
“She’s a prime suspect. Bradshaw is another. He must have been a suspect to your daughter, too. She enrolled in his college and took a job in his household to check on him. Was that your idea, McGee?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t understand her part in all this. She hasn’t been much help in explaining it, either.”
“I know,” he said. “Dolly’s done a lot of lying, starting away back when. But when a little kid lies you don’t put the same construction on it as you would an adult.”
“You’re a forgiving man.”
“Oh no I’m not. I went to her with anger in my heart that Sunday I saw her picture in the paper, with her husband. What right did she have to a happy marriage after what she did to me? That’s what was on my mind.”