“Now a low-powered small-caliber slug two inches north of a man’s navel is enough to get his attention, but it’s not gonna pick him up and bounce him off the back wall. He didn’t even bother to take the gun away from her, just went on squeezing her throat until he choked her out. Broke the hyoid bone, left those petechial hemorrhages on her eyes and damn well crushed that little gal’s throat.
“So she’s dead and he’s been shot, and he leaves her lying there with the gun in her hand, and it looks as though he walked around a little, got his blood here and there. Pours himself a big glass of whiskey, or maybe he poured it earlier, but he doesn’t drink it, because it was full to the brim when we found it.
“Now a glass of whiskey’s not the best choice for something to pour into a stomach that’s already got a bullet in it, but I don’t know that he thought it through. If I was to guess it’d be that he poured the whiskey and then forgot about it for having other things on his mind.
“Like taking her framed massage diploma off the wall and smashing it, and picking things up and throwing them around. Which is the sort of thing a man might do in his situation, but then he did something I never heard of before. Wrote on the wall. ‘God forgive me.’
“I don’t mean I never heard of anybody writing that or something like it. Man loses it, does something horrible, then has this moment where he realizes what he’s done. Right about then, I’d have to say asking for forgiveness had to be a pretty natural response.
“What I never heard of before is how he did it. Took his finger and stuck it in the hole where she shot him and wrote the letters on the wall in his own blood. ‘God forgive me.’ Well, you’d about have to, wouldn’t you, if you was the Lord? Man goes to that kind of trouble to ask, you got to figure he means it.
“Then he may have been trying to go upstairs, but the staircase was as far as he got, because that’s where we found him. Sitting on the third step, leaning back against the wall, one foot braced against the newel post. He had another gun, not the one he gave her. This was a revolver, a thirty-two, and he must have just picked it up because he doesn’t seem to have gotten around to registering it. Maybe took it from one of his colored tenants against back rent. Wouldn’t make him the first landlord to do so.
“Well, you get the picture. Barrel in his mouth, fingers wrapped around the butt, thumb on the trigger. Blam!
“All it took. Blew out the back of his head, left blood and brains on the wall behind him.
“Makes you wonder. Well, about no end of things, but one of them’s the wife, Lisa. A woman looks to hire a pro to kill her husband, it’s hard to work up a lot of sympathy for her. And George is an affluent businessman, important in his community, so you don’t right off assume he was the kind of husband who had it coming.
“But spend a little time at the murder scene and your perspective shifts some. I wouldn’t want to guess what he might have put that woman through over the course of a couple of years.
“Even so, there’s things you have to do. I went over first thing in the morning and got the maid to wake her. Then I sat down with her and told her what had happened. She said she didn’t know about any girlfriend, but you got the feeling that she might have had an inkling, and that this wouldn’t have been the first young friend of George’s to get a little help with the rent.
“Everything else shocked her, though. Murder and suicide, even if there’s no love left in a marriage, that’s not something to take in your stride. She came across as seriously shaken, and if she was faking it, Meryl Streep’s got herself some serious competition.
“She was at the restaurant for her full shift. Not that there’s a way on earth she could have barged in on the two of them and made that happen. Or hired it done. Hit men are professionals, whether they’re Frankie from New Jersey or that guy they made the movie about. The Iceman? Something like that.
“Man’s in that line of work, last thing he wants to do is get fancy. He makes the kill and goes home.”
Thirty-four
For that day and the two days following, he never left the house. He spent hours at the computer, checking every site that might conceivably have news of the murder-suicide on Stapleton Terrace. There wasn’t much news, and it was always the same.
And if there was a break in the case, he wouldn’t learn about it on his computer. There’d be a knock on his door.
That’s what he was waiting for, a knock on the door. A couple of cars outside, one from the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office, another from the state police.
Maybe a whole fleet of them. Men standing around looking grim, wearing vests, holding automatic rifles.
Or maybe it would just be Radburn, all by himself, with nothing but the holstered Colt he wore on his hip. Just stopping by with a couple of questions...
Because one thing was sure. He wasn’t going to get away with it.
He was so sure of this that his behavior might have been designed to make it come true. Waiting for them, anticipating their arrival at any moment, he kept changing his mind about the nature of his eventual response.
At first he planned to meet them at the door, hands out in front of him, waiting for the cuffs. The words playing in his mind were variations on a theme, all of them admissions of guilt. “I did it.”
“Okay you got me.” And, as the hours stretched, “What took you so long?”
At some point during the evening of the first day, he went to the closet and came back with the Smith & Wesson revolver. He made sure it was loaded and put it on the table to the right of his computer. His hand found the mouse and he checked a website; when he found nothing of interest, his hand moved of its own accord from the mouse to the gun butt.
He took the gun along when he stationed himself in front of the television set. He watched a local newscast, then turned to TCM, where they were showing D.O.A. He’d seen it several times over the years, with Edmund O’Brien unforgettable as the doomed poisoning victim who walks into the police station to report his own murder.
It matched his mood even if it didn’t help it any, and as he watched he toyed with the gun like a monk with a string of worry beads.
When he went to bed he put the gun on the night table. He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and the next thing he knew the room was bright with dawn. He bolted out of bed, reaching for the gun with one hand while the other groped for something to cover himself from the watching eyes.
But there were no eyes on him, no invaders in his house.
Nor was the gun where he’d left it, and that gave him another moment of panic until he located it under his pillow. Sometime during the night he’d evidently felt a need to have it closer.
He swung out the cylinder, confirmed that the weapon was still fully loaded. He closed the cylinder and put the gun under the pillow, then moved it to the night table. Neither place seemed right to him, and he carried the thing into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the sink while he showered.
And kept an eye on it while he shaved.
When he moved to the computer, the gun went with him. When he split an English muffin and dropped it in the toaster, the gun was a few feet from his hand.
A little later, when he heard a car on Osprey Drive, he grabbed for the gun and held it with his finger on the trigger. The car pulled into his driveway, and he took a step toward his front door, determined to hold onto the gun but not yet sure what he was going to do with it.