I was standing at the top with an old memory playing in color and sound. My partner was a skinny guy named Willie Mott, who was giving me the lowdown on Vicks VapoRub. This one’s ripe…put a little glop of Vicks up each nostril and you won’t notice it so much .
I stood at the door of hell and nobody had brought the Vicks.
I touched the wood with my knuckles. Found the knob. Gripped it carefully by the edge, with the joints of my fingers and thumb.
The latch clicked: the door creaked open and the warm moist air sucked me in.
I retched.
I backtracked and stumbled and almost fell down the stairs.
On the third try, I made it into the room. I cupped my hand over my nose and got past the threshold to the edge of a ratty old sofa.
A single lamp near the window was the only source of light…a forty-watter, I figured by the dim interior. Dark curtains covered the window. I couldn’t see the body yet, but the room was full of flies. The music poured out of an old radio. It wasn’t “Rigby,” just something he’d been listening to when he finally ran out of time. I moved toward it, still fighting my gut. I hadn’t seen much of anything yet.
There was the one window.
A closed door across the room.
A pile of books on the table.
A typewriter…a pile of magazines…a roll of clear sealing tape…and a bottle of lighter fluid.
I moved around the table, watching where I walked. A wave of rotten air wafted up in a cloud of flies.
I tasted the bile. What I didn’t need now, after compromising the first scene, was to throw up all over this one.
The lighter fluid might help. I know it’s an evil solvent; I’ve heard it can get in your blood through the skin and raise hell with your liver. But it’s stronger by far than Vicks, and even the smell of a cancer-causing poison was like honeysuckle after what I’d been smelling.
I put my handkerchief on the table, then turned the plastic bottle on its side and pried open the squirt nozzle. Liquid flowed into the rag. I touched only the ribbed blue cap, so I wouldn’t mess up any prints on the bottle itself.
I made the wet rag into a bandanna. Found a roll of cord and cut off a piece, then tied it over my mouth and nose.
I was breathing pure naphtha. It was cold and bracing and it had an immediate calming effect on my stomach.
If it didn’t kill me, I could function like a cop again.
I found him sprawled on the far side of the table. He had been there most of a week from the looks of him. His face was gone, but I could guess from the wispy white hair that he had probably been Otto Murdock.
I didn’t know what had killed him: there wasn’t enough left to decide. What there was was hidden under a carpet of flies.
Let the coroner figure it. Whatever they pay him, it’s not enough, but let him earn it…and in the end tell supercop what I already knew.
Murdock hadn’t keeled over and died of old age.
And Janeway hadn’t done it. This would break his super heart, but when the reaper came cal-ling, Janeway was still in Denver, doing what came naturally. Trying to fit John Gardner into his proper shade of orange, with murder the last thing on his mind.
I didn’t see any weapon. Nothing on the table looked promising as a motive or a clue.
There were no ashes.
No sign of a struggle. Even the chair he had been sitting in was upright, pushed back slightly as if he’d been getting up to greet a visitor.
I went to the far door and opened it.
His bathroom. Nothing out of place there.
I was feeling lightheaded by then: the naphtha was doing its dirty work. The skin under my eyes felt like blisters on the rise.
I ripped off the rag and got out of there.
Downstairs, I looked through his rolltop.
Some of the notes in the pigeonholes were three years old.
I looked through the drawers.
Bottle of cheap bourbon, with not much in the bottom.
Letters…bills…
The sad debris of a life that didn’t matter much to anybody, not even, finally, to the man who had lived it.
Pushed off to one side was the canvas bag. Eleanor had wanted to look inside, but I wouldn’t let her.
I opened it now and hit the jackpot.
A thick notebook, old and edgeworn…
I seemed to be holding Darryl Gray son’s original subscriber list. With it was a manuscript, a dozen pages of rough draft on yellow legal paper. I knew the handwriting, I had seen it on other papers in Amy’s attic. The top sheet was a title page, aping Vic-toriana.
JOHN DUNNING
THE CRAVEN
A Tragic Tale of a God’s Downfall
Told in Verse by Richard Grayson,
A Witness
I took it all and went back to Aandahl’s and read it. I read it many times. I was reading it again at midnight when Trish came home.
41
She had returned almost a full day early. There was a click and the dogs swarmed her at the front door.
She looked at me across the room, as if she hadn’t expected me to be there and didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. “You’ve changed,” she said, and I gave her an old man’s grin. She threw her raincoat over a wicker basket, came slowly around the couch, and sat facing me with an almost schoolmarm-ish primness.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “Been running it through my head all the way home from Albuquerque, trying to figure out what I ought to do.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“I’m in it now.”
“I thought you always were.”
“It’s different now. I’m in it with you.”
This was happy news. I felt a warm glow at the sound of it.
She said, “Whatever happens, we go together.”
We didn’t need to hash out the ground rules. When you connect with someone, things like that are understood. Suddenly we were like police partners, comparing notes, poring over evidence. There was a lot to be done, and the first commandment was the test of fire. You never hold out on your partner.
We ate a late supper and talked into the morning. For the first time in a long time I broke bread with a good-looking woman without thinking of Rita.
42
She had covered a lot of ground in two days. She had flown out of Sea-Tac at nine-forty Pacific time on Saturday night. Her destination was St. Louis, where she arrived in light snow at two-twelve in the morning. She had a room reserved, but her old companion, insomnia, was along for the ride. She filled the dead time reading. At nine a.m. she was in the homicide room downtown, looking at photographs and evidence from an old murder case. Stuff that was once under tight wraps was shared with her, off the record, by the man on duty Sunday morning. It had been a long time, years, since anything exciting had been added to the file, and they didn’t have much hope of cracking it now. She had flown two thousand miles and that impressed them. She had observed the proper protocol, speaking first by telephone with the chief, and they let her see the file.
The victim was Joseph Hockman, fifty-two, a bachelor. She looked at the pictures, including the close-ups. It didn’t bother her: she had been a reporter for a long time and had seen it all many times.
The victim lay in a pool of blood in a library room. Pictures had been taken from every angle, so she could see the shelving and the arrangement of books on all four walls. The black and whites were vivid and sharp, clear enough that the titles could be read and the jacket formats identified. Her eyes traveled along one row and she saw some famous old books.
All the King’s Men.