“It sure isn’t.”
“It’s good to see you. C’mon in.”
I followed her inside.
She wore a white blouse and black slacks. Her bottom was tops. She had put a red ribbon in her dark hair, the red of it matching the rich red of her lipstick. A little touch of the exotic.
“Anything to drink, Sam?”
“No, thanks.”
“Any news?”
“Not anything you don’t already know.”
I think she knew, then. Our eyes met, held.
“Listen to the wind, Sam.”
We were in the den. She was fixing herself a drink at the dry bar. I’d declined. She kept her back to me.
“Autumn wind always sounds so lonely, don’t think you, Sam? Like a little girl crying.”
I was standing. Now I sat. “A little girl crying because her father was rarely home. A little girl crying because her father spent all his time with other women. Driving the little girl’s mother into depressions so bad that she had to be hospitalized.”
She still hadn’t turned around. “Sounds like a novel you’re writing.”
“The father would have left them but he wanted to be governor someday. No way a divorced man would ever be governor in this state. Somehow the girl found out about her father’s indiscretions—maybe stumbled across some letters; maybe eavesdropped on a phone call, could’ve been a number of ways—and realized that this was what was destroying her mother. The mother got worse and worse. The girl pleaded with her father to give up his women, to live a decent life. But the father just kept right on living the way he always had. And the girl grew up hating him for what he’d done to her mother. She didn’t care about herself and what he’d done to her. Her hatred made her strong. All she cared about was her mother and how she’d been destroyed. The girl was strong. The mother wasn’t.”
She walked from the dry bar to the leather couch that faced my leather chair. She sat down, put her head back against the chair, closed her eyes.
She was right about the wind. In the silence you could hear a child crying. A lonely little girl, say—a lonely little girl who didn’t really care much about the fact that she was attractive and rich and clever. She just wanted her mother to be happy. That was all.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the chair. “I don’t suppose it was all that difficult to figure out, was it, Sam?”
“Not after I realized that you’d found out about the blackmail money Karen Hastings wanted. And about the relationship she had with your father and those three other men. You had dinner that night at the Embers with Karen Hastings, didn’t you? I imagine that’s when you told her how much you were afraid of a scandal and that you’d pay her what she wanted even if the men wouldn’t. A week later you called her and told her to come to your house and collect her money. You killed her in the basement and put her in the bomb shelter. You knew everybody would think your father killed her. You didn’t want to prevent a scandal. You wanted to create one. You knew that when the body was discovered, the whole story would come out and he would be destroyed. You wanted him to suffer. And you pulled it off, kiddo. He suffered all right. He was a scandal and a dirty joke and he’d never be able to walk down the streets of this town again without somebody smirking at him. Of course, walking down the street was sort of a moot point, wasn’t it? He’d be in prison for murder.”
We listened to the wind some more.
“You going to say anything?” I said.
“Nothing to say, Sam.”
“What made you decide to kill him tonight?”
Her eyes were still closed. Her breasts rose and fell with her soft sighs. I imagined that she’d spent a lot of sad hours like this, trying to shut out the world.
“Deirdre?”
“Do we have to talk, Sam?” Then: “I read this story once. About this little girl and all these terrible things happened to her. But then somehow she figured out that she was just part of a dream the man upstairs was having. The entire universe existed only in his mind. She was miserable and so was everybody in the world. So she went upstairs with a butcher knife and killed him.”
She was silent for a time.
“Then what happened, Deirdre?” I said softly.
“Then there was just—nothing. She didn’t exist because the terrible man couldn’t have his terrible dreams any more.”
“That’s pretty sad.”
“Maybe not, Sam. Maybe it was better that she didn’t exist. That nobody existed. Then they couldn’t hurt each other or betray each other.”
She began to cry, then, in little spasms of delicate grief. “Why don’t you just call the police, Sam, and we’ll get it all over with.”
“I can give you a little more time.”
“No, Sam.” She sat up in the chair and looked at me. “Please. Now. We’ll just get it over with.”
I called all the people I needed to call, including Cliffie, and then went over to the bar in the den and had a drink. I went to the bottom of the stairs twice and shouted up to Deirdre. I doubted she’d try to escape. She answered both times.
There were two cop cars. Cliffie came on his motorcycle. All three had sirens blaring. The first contingent of press wasn’t far behind. Cliffie had obviously called them.
He came up to me where I stood on the steps, in the glare of patrol car headlights. He’d had time to put on his white Stetson and his swagger.
“I figured it was her all along,” he said.
“Sure you did. That’s why you arrested her father.”
“Ever think I was trying to set a trap for her?”
“The mind boggles,” I said.
“Where the hell is she?”
“I’ll go get her.”
He turned and waved at a cop with a shotgun. “Earle, get over here.” To me he said, “Earle’n me’ll go inside with you.”
I couldn’t fault the police procedure but I knew why he was doing it. So he could bring her out on the porch personally. In handcuffs. His hand on her arm. Cliffie Sykes, Jr. Bad-ass.
“All right,” I said.
“Nice of you to give me permission and all,” Cliffie said.
I couldn’t tell you today which came first, the scream or the gunshot. I don’t believe I’d ever heard a scream or a gunshot that sounded quite as loud as these did. They seemed to paralyze everybody for long seconds.
And then Cliffie, Earle and his shotgun, and I were running inside to the staircase. Cliffie and I reached the first step at the same time. I pushed him out of the way and took the stairs two at a time.
The weeping guided me to the master bedroom. The door was closed. I flung it open. What I saw didn’t make sense at first. Deirdre’s mother hadn’t gone to the hospital after all.
Irene sitting on the chair of her enormous makeup table, her face in all four mirrors. She wore a simple blue dress. Her right hand was on the table and in her right hand was a large handgun. Above her there was a large oval crack in the ceiling plaster. A snowfall of the stuff was all over her hair and shoulders.
Cliffie damned near knocked me down getting into the room. He had his gun drawn.
The weeping came from Deirdre, who was in a chair by the fireplace. Curled up in a fetal position.
The other cops were crammed in the doorway, watching.
Cliffie said, “You take your hand off that gun, Missus. You’re just gonna make everything worse for everybody. I came here to arrest your daughter for murder. And I’d advise you not to get in the way.”
She didn’t do it right away. Instead, she just looked up at him. I had a sense that she was lost to reality for all time. There was a sadness about her that you see in the faces of the hopeless on the wards of mental hospitals. They’re so sedated they walk zombie-style down the halls, slippers slapping, heads down.