Nodding to his left, where a woman lay slumped against the wall while her blood pooled on the floor around her. You didn’t need to take her pulse to know she was gone.
And that was the moment, frozen in time. The man with his hands in the air, that grin on his face, mocking his captor with his act of surrender.
But a good collar, a great collar. Too late to do the woman any good, but there had never been a chance to do anything for her, and at least he could take in the man who’d killed her. Get him to put his hands on the wall, get him to move his feet away from the wall, grab his hands one at a time, cuff them behind his back.
And call it in.
That grin, that fucking grin on his face— The .38 bucked in his hand.
“Three times,” he said. “I pulled the trigger three times, bam-bam-bam, I put three in his chest, grouped them so close together your hand could have covered all three at once. Did I say he didn’t have a shirt on?”
“Yes.”
“Hardly any hair on his chest, just maybe a dozen wispy hairs right in the middle. He was such an animal you’d expect him to have a pelt like a bear, but no. His skin was fishbelly white, too, like he never left the house in the daytime.”
She sat there, letting him tell it.
He said, “I made a conscious decision. I knew what to do — cuff the fucker, call it in — and instead I went ahead and shot him dead. Bam-bam-bam, and I got him in the heart, and I think he must have been dead before he even knew he’d been shot.
“I looked around, half-expecting to see the copywriter from next door in the hallway. But she’d had the sense to stay where she was, in fact she’d locked herself in. I was all by myself with a dead man and a dead woman. He’d killed her and I killed him and nobody saw a thing.
“He’d tossed the gun halfway across the room. I didn’t put it in his hand but I did the next best thing, nudging it with my foot, steering it to where it might have fallen if he’d been holding it when he was shot.
“Then I called it in and waited for the place to fill up with cops.
“I probably would have been all right anyway, but I caught a break. It turned out there were two live cartridges in his gun. It was a six-shot revolver, and I don’t know if he spun the cylinder at some point or if he’d only loaded some chambers, but when the gun clicked on a spent cartridge, all he had to do was keep pulling the trigger and he’d have hit a live one.
“If he’d known that he might have killed me. But he didn’t and he tossed the gun, and when they examined the weapon there was no way to guess what had actually gone down, because the loaded gun fit the story I was telling. Which is that he was shooting at me, and they dug the one round out of the wall in the hallway, and that he’d have kept on firing at me if I hadn’t shot him first.”
“So you were all right.”
“Any time you discharge your weapon,” he said, “there’s a lot of shit you go through. They take it away, and you’re in for a stretch of desk duty until the formal inquiry’s completed. As far as the tabloids were concerned I was a hero cop, at least for a couple of days. And I got through the inquiry without any real trouble. Why hadn’t I called for backup? Because I never had a chance. I’d been doing routine canvassing, looking for a witness to the Raisin Little shooting, and my partner was off doing the same thing in a building across the street, because it didn’t take two people to knock on a door when there was no reason to expect anything other than a law-abiding citizen on the other side of it. So yeah, I was all right. I’d justifiably used deadly force in self-defense.”
“But you don’t think it was self-defense.”
“I think it’s fine they called it that way, and there really wasn’t any other way they could have called it. But no, it wasn’t self-defense, not once he tossed the gun.”
“You were already set to fire, and it was too late to hold yourself back.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ve thought about this enough to be able to say for sure. I had time to think about it, just a second or two but that was plenty of time. And I knew not to pull the trigger, and I went ahead and did it anyway.”
“Three times.”
“Uh-huh. Bam-bam-bam. One of the hoops they made me jump through was a series of sessions with a department psychiatrist. She didn’t get the story you’re getting, she got the official version. She asked me how I felt about it, and I told her what I figured she wanted to hear. Glad to be alive, sorry I’d had to take a life, sorry I couldn’t have been there in time to prevent the woman’s death. That last line was true, anyway.”
“And not the others?”
“Well, it’s true I was glad to be alive. The only problem she had with me is she was concerned by my lack of affect. When I saw the report I read it wrong, I thought she meant I was ineffective, and I didn’t see how it applied. But I think she meant my attitude didn’t match my words, that I didn’t seem to have processed the experience.”
“How did you feel?”
“Glad he was dead, glad I’d made him that way. I’d have been just as happy not to go through all the crap that came after it, but it was worth it.” He thought for a moment. “How I felt — it didn’t have all that much to do with who he was and what he did. Here’s what you have to know. I liked it.”
“You liked—”
“I liked the feeling. I liked pulling the trigger, I liked watching the man die. It was like coming.”
“Honestly?”
“I don’t know if I can describe it properly. It was like an orgasm, but it wasn’t sexual. It had nothing to do with my dick, nothing to do with sex, really.”
“Jesus,” she said.
“Yeah, really. So if I lacked affect when I talked to the shrink, maybe that had something to do with it. What I did, I wound up putting in for retirement a little earlier than I’d planned. My marriage coming apart was a factor, plus I got caught up in something unrelated, an Internal Affairs investigation of a former partner of mine that got me a little bit tarred with the same brush. But the shooting, which absolutely went into the books as a righteous use of deadly force, it played a role.”
“How?”
“Because once they gave me my gun back,” he said, “I figured I’d look for an excuse to use it. Or I’d be afraid I was looking for an excuse, and that would hold me back and keep me from defending myself when I really needed to. If you walk around questioning yourself—”
“Yes, I can see what that would be like.”
“So now you know something about me you didn’t know an hour ago. Am I really on board for killing your husband? When the time comes, will I be able to pull the trigger? Hell, yes, I’ll be up to it. I’ll enjoy it.”
Twenty-four
Murder was easy. The tricky part was getting away with it.
He spent the next several days trying to work out a way. The problem, of course, was that her willingness to pay to have her husband murdered was already a matter of record.
The script he’d written, the lines he’d given her, had amended the record so that she’d called off the putative killer and denied that she’d ever been serious about it. And Sheriff Radburn bought the scene he’d staged, or part of it. Yes, she’d called it off, but that hadn’t convinced him that she didn’t actively desire George Otterbein’s death, and wouldn’t eventually try to make it happen.
And when it did, she was the first person they’d want to talk to. That was basic, you always looked first to the surviving spouse, and with a far more skeptical eye than the NYPD shrink had turned on Doak’s affect, or lack thereof. Did the Widow Otterbein seem unaffected? Did she profess shock, but never shed a single tear? Did the tears flow like an open faucet, but remain somehow unconvincing? Was she too emotional? Was she not emotional enough?