I think it took something like two weeks to lever myself to my feet. I know I dropped to my knees a few times in the process. Then I saw the clothesline pole and crawled over to it. Good old clothesline poles. They never let you down. I wrapped my arms around it and began to pull myself to my feet. Good old clothesline pole. I hung on to it like a drunk in an old vaudeville sketch hanging on to a street light.
I stood there a good long time. I wasn’t sure if the pain lessened or I was simply adjusting to it. Still a raw bitch of malice and mendacity and torture. But not quite as bad as it had been when I’d first come to.
I managed to light a cigarette. And after a few minutes I saw the rock. It took me a few more minutes to reach it, to grasp it in my hand. It was the size of a hardball but jagged. One edge of it had a healthy sampling of my hair, blood and scalp on it. A perfect weapon.
I let it drop to the ground and then I turned to face the house. I needed to go back in there and finish looking around. Maybe my assailant had left something behind.
I moved carefully, trying not to generate more pain.
The lights were out. I went into the darkness. The door of a small metal fusebox was open in the kitchen. I was able to see what my assailant had done. Had run out the back door, circled around to the front of the house, come back inside just as I was leaving, pulled the fuse from the box and got rid of it, and then eased outside where he launched the rock. The Cubs could use a pitcher this good.
I finished looking through the house with my flashlight.
There wasn’t any shock when I found him. I’d pretty much expected to find him. I couldn’t tell you why. Just some sense of where this whole thing was going, all the information of the past two days starting to assume a recognizable shape.
I found Ross Murdoch sitting on the toilet with the lid down. I was glad that my beam was narrow. I wouldn’t have wanted to see it all. He’d used a .38 and a good half of his head was adhered to the wall behind him in patches of hair and slime and streaky splashes of blood. What remained of his head was angled to the right, resting on his shoulder as if his neck had been snapped in some remarkable way. The gaze of the dead eyes was a roadkill gaze—that awful look of eternal shock and terror you see on possums and raccoons and squirrels that have been run over.
His right arm was flung across the sink. The .38 dangled from his finger.
I looked around for a note he might have left, even though I was pretty sure this hadn’t been any suicide. No note, of course.
I looked for footprints, fingerprints, smudges, anything that would help tell the story of what had happened in this bathroom. The roomness suddenly got to me. The ghosts of it. Pretty ladies daubing on makeup in the mirror above the sink. Adulterous men taking nervous stock of themselves in the same mirror. Women crying, drunks trying to sober up with face splashes of ice-cold water, somebody being sick. And now this dead man. This would alter the small room forever. The energy of it, those ghosts that record every single moment of every single room they haunt.
I went to the kitchen and worked on my wound as well as I could. It hurt like hell to touch it even with a warm wet rag. I sat down and smoked another cigarette and consciously tried to gather myself. There was no phone. I would have to go back to town to find one. I’d put the top down. I’d freeze but it would sharpen my senses.
There wasn’t any point in looking at him again. There wasn’t any point in staying around. There wasn’t any point in denying the thought that had been taking shape since I’d been in Peggy Leigh’s office earlier—and since I’d gotten the phone call from Janice Wilson. That Deirdre could easily have left the hospital at any time during her scheduled hours—and come back without anybody noticing. Especially if she moved quickly enough.
As I pulled away from the front of the summer house, I remembered the sound of a car that had been pulling away as I’d lain there with my head smashed in. I put on my high beams and crawled along the narrow road slowly, examining every foot of the road on either side of me. I was nearly at the end of it before I saw what I needed to see.
I stopped, got out, went over to where a car had angled between two widely spaced trees to hide in deep undergrowth. It had been a rough entrance and an even rougher withdrawal. The whole area looked as if a piece of heavy equipment had smashed it down. I could still smell the fumes of the gasoline needed to push the car through the nearly impenetrable undergrowth.
I spent several minutes examining brush and trees alike. There were two places where you could see that the car had scraped up against a coarse surface. I took out my Cub Scout knife and took a sample of the scrape and then set the sample inside my handkerchief.
I put my flashlight beam on the scrape. Easy enough to see who the car belonged to. The same yellow paint on a certain little foreign car.
NINETEEN
I FOUND A PHONE BOOTH next to “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a honky-tonk visited at least once a week by cops and an ambulance. Them there boys do like their fightin’.
I called Spellman and told him what I’d found and what I’d figured out. He argued against what I had planned next. I told him to give me an hour. I told him this was the best way, the surprise method. He still didn’t like it but he agreed to an hour, at which point he was calling Cliffie if he didn’t hear from me otherwise.
A man in a black leather jacket and a face shiny with blood came staggering out of the door along with his equally drunken pal. A country singer with the unlikely name of Ferlin Husky wailed on the night, accompanied by some very nice picking on the slide guitar.
The man’s friend, who was walking along next to him, said, “Tried to tell you she was his wife, dummy. That’s why he got so mad.”
“All I did was grab her tit. I didn’t even grab both of ’em.”
I could hear this one in court. Your honor, my client grabbed but one of her tits, not both. I ask you, is a one-tit-grabber really a menace to society? Judges are very sympathetic, as you know, to such brilliant pleas.
I made up some pretty good speeches on the drive out there. The accusation, the denial, the final confession. My parts in them, anyway. She’d have to come up with her own and I was sure she would.
I was beginning to understand it, the motive I mean. Maybe I was even a little sympathetic about it.
I’d been spared the kind of household atmosphere she’d grown up in, so I couldn’t judge her. I might have reacted the same way. I had a friend whose mother had an affair years ago and it seemed to have had a permanent effect on every member of the family. The husband was never quite able to forgive the wife; the wife was bitter because the husband would never acknowledge how many times he’d let her down before she had the affair; and the three kids had to listen to their mother being called a whore a couple times a week. They also had to minister—like ambulance drivers—to whichever parent was in the more mental anguish at the moment. They went on to have terrible marriages themselves, the kids. Too glibly Freudian to say that this was because of what they’d gone through with their own parents—but then it must have given them a pretty dark and scary view of marriage.
The lights were on. I knocked. I waited two minutes. No response. I rang the bell. Two minutes. No response. And then suddenly the door was opening and she was there.
If she suspected why I was here, she disguised it well. “I’d say winter’s not far away.”