“I know it was crazy, but I couldn’t stand never seeing her, or hardly ever, and I started going out to where she lived and standing around across the street just in hopes of seeing her for a minute from a distance when she came or left.
“That’s how I happened to be there last night, about the time the paper says she was killed, when this man she was going around with came and then left in a hurry a little later. A funny thing about it is, this man’s wife was killed only last month.”
Trajan had been staring sourly into a corner of the room, his position and attitude an expression of disgust and boredom. Now, in an instant, without moving in the slightest, he was wholly alert and intently listening in utter silence to a voice that only he could hear.
“What man?” he said.
“His name is Cannon. He’s a professor at the college.”
For a long, long minute Trajan was silent again, listening to his voice. Then he slipped off the desk and belched and rubbed his belly. On his face, despite the sour gas, there was an expression of religious exaltation.
“By God, I’ve got him!” he whispered. “I’ve got the son of a bitch good!”
20
At first Brad had been angry, and then he had been frightened, but now, near the end of the exhausting ordeal of evasions and lies and damning admissions, he was only very tired.
“All right.” He drew a hand across his forehead, pressing hard against the dull pain above his eyes. “I went there, to the apartment, but I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I arrived. She was lying on the floor, and I could see immediately that she was dead.”
“Sure.” Trajan’s voice came from shadows beyond the perimeter of focused light. “She was lying on the floor, and she looked dead. So you just turned and left. You didn’t call a doctor. You didn’t call the police. You didn’t do anything an innocent man would have done. You just turned and left.”
“I was frightened. I’ve told you that. I could think of nothing but getting away as quickly as possible.”
“Why did you go there in the first place?”
“I wanted to talk with Maggie. Miss McCall.”
“Did you go there often?”
“No. It was only the second time.”
“But you saw Miss McCall often. Isn’t that true?”
“I suppose so. Fairly often.”
“You were having an affair. Isn’t it true that you were having an affair even before the death of your wife? Don’t try to lie. We have the evidence.”
“It’s true. We were going to be married after a while.”
“Is that why you killed your wife? So you could marry Maggie McCall?”
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“So you didn’t. You were somewhere else when it happened. What you did was hire someone to kill her.”
“No. That’s not true. I hired no one.”
Trajan’s bulk shifted in the shadows. His voice was assured and soft and almost gentle, the harsh dyspeptic hatred apparently having diminished or drained away in its hour of triumph.
“Well, Dr. Cannon, no matter. No matter at all. You killed Maggie McCall, and that’s enough. You were seen entering the building at the time of the murder, and you were seen running away. We have the witness, and we have you, and motives are a dime a dozen in a mess like this. We could almost take our pick. You get the picture, Dr. Cannon? You’re dead. You’re guilty and you’re dead.”
Brad’s mind was sluggish, moving uncertainly in a fog of dull pain, and it was only with the greatest effort of concentration that he could think coherently about what he should say or not say, or if there was anything left to be said at all.
He sat staring at the floor, and one thing, after a while, seemed assured. He had walked blindly into a trap — the littered little apartment where Maggie had lain dead, and there was no escape. No escape for Bradley Cannon.
He considered dully the possible advantages of confessing the truth about Madelaine’s death, which would reduce him to a conspirator instead of a murderer. This would really accomplish nothing, of course, for he was not charged with Madelaine’s murder, and now that Maggie was dead, could never be. It would help nothing to confess, nothing at all, and in fact it would only make matters worse, for it would give him a damning motive for killing Maggie, whom he had not killed.
Trajan, and later the prosecutor, would surely take the position that he had killed her, after the murder of Madelaine, because she was a menace to his security. It was ironical, being untrue, but he could not laugh. He was so tired, his head so filled with dull pain, that he couldn’t for the present even care.
He had acquired in the slow and painful consummation of his ruin a kind of immunity to further fear, and although this would pass and fear return, he felt now only a dumb wonder that Bradley Cannon had come at last to this bad end. He couldn’t believe it. It was surely no more a vivid delusion, a fantastic trick of the mind, and it must be someone else, some other man, who sat here on a hard chair in bright light without hope.
He looked up from the floor to test the delusion, and Trajan’s face was a livid smear against the shadows beyond the light.
21
Buddy Jensen was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He had never wasted his time speculating about any life other than the one in which he was enmeshed, and he did not waste it now.
There was, indeed, very little time left for anything, since he had made up his mind to die, but it was not for this reason that he refused to speculate about his possible future, if any. It was simply that the speculation did not interest him. If he had any conviction along that line at all, it was only that matters could hardly be worse for him elsewhere than they already were where he was. He had his tragic aspects, but he was no Hamlet compounding his despair by anticipation.
His decision to die had nothing of the character of grim resolution. Dying was something he had to do, and he had neglected to accomplish it sooner because he was simply too apathetic.
This morning, however, he had wakened with the realization that this was the day, his day for dying, and that there was absolutely no point in hanging around any longer in a world where he was wanted by no one, and no one was left to want.
He owned a.22 caliber revolver, a small gun he had picked up long ago in a pawn shop, but he had no bullets for it. Therefore he had been compelled to go to a hardware store to buy some, and then he had kept on walking out of town with the gun and the bullets in his pocket, and here he was now, early in the afternoon, sitting on the bank of a small creek.
The gun was in his hand, and six of the bullets were in the gun. He would only need one, of course, but it seemed neater to fill the cylinder. Now, before shooting himself, he was waiting for a minute or two, taking his time, but he didn’t really know why he was waiting, for there was really nothing worth waiting for.
There was quite a lot of water in the creek as a result of spring rains. A tree had fallen across the stream onto the lower bank on the opposite side, forming a rude and sharply-inclined bridge. In a field beyond there was a small hay barn. Between the barn and the creek, moving slowly closer,’ was a woman walking.
The sight of the woman acted upon Buddy as a mild catalyst. Her approach gave him a kind of measure of time — the few minutes it would take her at her present rate to reach the creek — in which he must rouse himself sufficiently from his lethargy to do what he must do.