“Are you sure he’s dead?” Susan said.
“He was shot through the head,” Ingrid said.
“He might not be dead though. Maybe we should go see.”
“He’s dead. No doubt about that.”
“I think someone should look at him just in case.”
“Not me.”
Not me either, Tony’s thought repeated when she turned to him. They stood in the door and watched while the policeman’s young cousin whom he and Ray had both considered a prostitute but who seemed to be rather only a kind of child in her miniskirt went out with the flashlight and gingerly approached the dark shape by the river and watched while she crouched down courageously and studied him, her knees pale in the black. They saw the spot from the flashlight as she moved it over the man’s body and saw her hands touching his face. When she came back her face was wan. “His eyes are open,” she said.
“That’s what they do when they die,” Ingrid said. “They open their eyes but can’t see.”
Things go sour. Food spoils, milk curdles, meat rots. In the dim light of the camp there’s this feeling of accident and breakage. The death of Lou Bates was not a right death. Tony wondered if he had caused it by having failed to stop Ray and Lou with his gun. But the only way to stop them would have been to shoot them, which would have made him rather than Bobby the killer, and that would have been worse. Therefore it wasn’t his fault. The reason for his dumb rage burst into light: if Bobby had intended him to be the executioner of Ray and Lou. The question was intolerable. Whatever went wrong, he insisted, he was only a witness, not an actor.
Susan yawned again. Tony remembered how he walked through the woods and along the roads without sleep a whole night until he found a farmer getting up in the earliest dawn.
“You want to go in the bedroom, lie down?” Ingrid said.
“I can’t sleep with him out there,” Susan said.
“Me neither,” Ingrid said. “Bobby’ll be back soon.”
“Will he? I thought he was going to try catch that guy.”
“If he does that, I’ll kill him.”
But Bobby Andes was already back. They heard the car in the driveway, the sweep of its headlights through the window again, the car door. They saw Bobby Andes striding up to the cottage, fast into the room, transformed.
“That was quick,” Ingrid said. “Are they coming?”
“I got to go to town,” he said.
“No, Bobby, not again.”
Notice the change in him, leather face, no debilitating liquid sickness now, only the harder more permanent kind.
“Wickham’s got the phone. I got to see Ambler myself.”
No panic, but urgent. Everything under control, but effort needed to keep on course. No catastrophe if we keep our heads.
“Before I go,” he said. He looked around at the three of them, as if waiting for their attention, though he already had their attention. “You need to know what happened tonight.”
“What happened?”
“What happened here. What you saw.”
“I saw what happened,” Ingrid said.
“Did you?” He gave her a look.
“Oh,” she said. A silence, queasy.
“You want us to lie?” Ingrid Hale said. “Please, Bobby, don’t make us lie.”
“You don’t want to lie? You want to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God, everything you saw tonight? That what you want?”
She looked miserable. Tony was full of palpitation. She said, “Oh Bobby, dear.”
Bobby dear had droopy bloody eyes, his mouth gaped like a fish for air. It always had, but Tony had not noticed it before.
“I don’t give a shit,” he said. “I thought you’d like to have a story. If you don’t want one, the hell with it.”
She slumped in her chair. “All right. So what story are we supposed to tell? Are you going to tell us?”
“That was Ray Marcus who shot Lou Bates. Shot him twice. Once in the body, once in the head.”
“My God,” Ingrid said.
“Shot him because Lou had agreed to testify in court.”
Quiet while they think this over. Ingrid gave Tony a desperate look, help, help, though he avoided it.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ingrid said.
“It makes all the god damn sense you’ll need.”
Tony was trying to visualize Ray Marcus shooting Lou Bates.
“You want to know how he did it?” Bobby said. “You do want to know, don’t you? You can’t just have Ray popping up suddenly with a gun when he’s a prisoner here, right? You want to know?”
“You’d better tell us then,” Ingrid said.
“I’ll tell you. He wasn’t a prisoner. I mean he was here but he left. He left after we had a conversation and I dropped him off at the road on my way to pick up Bates. Only he didn’t go home. Or he went home and got his gun, or got a gun somewhere and hitchhiked back, and that’s when he did it. Ambush. Lay in wait outside the cabin, shot him as I was taking him into the house, caught me by surprise, pow pow.”
“You’ve got it all figured out,” Ingrid said.
“It’s enough.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“Naw it ain’t.”
“You can’t get away with it. Can you?”
“What’s to get away with? I got Ambler, I got George. All we need is you guys to agree, not tell more than you need.”
“Perjury?”
“Jesus, girl. Think of it as the potential in the situation. It would have happened, given enough time.”
“Come on, Bobby.”
“What do you mean, come on? I’m offering you scandal-free days for the rest of my life, whatever that may be. If you think that’s perjury, turn me in, I don’t give a shit.”
She looked at Tony, at Susan. “Can you go along with this?”
“Me?” Susan said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to say that Ray Marcus person wasn’t here,” Ingrid said.
“He left before you came,” Bobby said.
She got it. “Oh. And then he came and shot the other guy with the beard?”
“That’s right. If they ask you, that’s what you saw. Only, wait, you didn’t actually see him. You didn’t see the guy with the beard either. All you heard was shots as I was bringing the guy with the beard in from the car.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to say, huh?”
“That’s what you’re supposed to say.”
He seemed relieved and pleased with himself. Tony, thinking if I object to this I destroy Bobby Andes, was scrambling through his mind for questions he could be asked on the witness stand.
Ingrid said, “He’ll deny it.”
“His denial ain’t worth shit. He denied killing Tony’s folks.”
“He’ll go to the police and report it.”
“He’s not that dumb.”
“He’ll go to the police and tell what he saw. He’ll tell everything, Bobby. How you kidnapped him and the handcuffs and how you killed Lou.”
“Nah, he won’t.”
“How do you know? If it was me I would.”
“He won’t because he knows they would arrest him for killing Lou. He knows because he knows me and he knows my friends and he knows you three are witnesses. That’s why he won’t go to the police. But if he does go, that’s what he’ll find. He’ll find out no one believes him.”
“It’s so cynical, Bobby.”
“What’s cynical? Don’t argue with me. If that’s cynical, give me an alternative. Tell me the non-cynical thing to do.” He was melodramatic, full of opera.