Dill assumed that Clyde Brattle had ordered the wiring of the place where the meeting with Senator Ramirez would take place, and nothing Brattle might do would ever surprise Dill. He smiled at Snow and said, “Harold, just to show how much I appreciate your efforts, you don’t have to pay next month’s rent either.”
Instead of looking pleased, Snow again frowned. He has to work the angle, Dill thought. He has to give it another twist. “Don’t tell Cindy,” Snow said. “I mean, we’ll tell her about not having to pay this month’s rent, but not about next month’s. Okay?”
“Fine.”
“Well, I guess we might as well sit down,” Snow said and waved Dill to the cream-colored chair where Cindy McCabe had sat painting her toenails. After Dill sat down, Snow sat on the couch opposite. The couch wore a slipcover patterned with monarch butterflies. Snow leaned forward, his elbows on his bare knees, his expression and tone confidential. “All this has got something to do with your sister, right?”
“Wrong,” Dill said.
Snow’s expression went from confidential to skeptical. But before he could outline his doubts, Cindy McCabe came back, carrying a tray with four open cans of beer. Anna Maude Singe followed with two glasses in each hand.
“I brought glasses, if anybody wants one,” she said.
Nobody did. McCabe served the beer and sat next to Harold Snow on the couch. Singe sat in the room’s only other easy chair. Cindy McCabe looked at Snow. “What about the rent?” she said.
“We don’t have to pay this month’s.”
“No shit. How come?”
She asked the question of Dill, but Harold Snow answered. “He wants us to sort of look after the place until he decides what to do with it. Even show it maybe, you know, to people who might wanta buy it.” He looked at Dill. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Hey, that’s okay,” Cindy McCabe said and smiled.
“But we gotta pay next month’s,” Harold Snow said.
“Well, sure, but one month free’s nothing to sneeze at.” Something else occurred to her. “You thank him?”
“Of course I thanked him.”
“Well, sometimes you forget.”
The doorbell rang and Harold Snow said what everyone says when the doorbell rings after the sun goes down. He said, “Who the hell can that be?”
“Bill collectors maybe,” Cindy McCabe said and tittered.
Snow rose, holding his beer, crossed the living room, and disappeared into the small foyer. They could hear him opening the front door. They could also hear him say, “Yeah, what is it?”
Then they heard the first shotgun blast. Then the second one. After that, it was absolutely quiet until Cindy McCabe began to scream. She didn’t get up off the couch. She simply sat there, slowly crushing her beer can with both hands, and screamed again and again. The beer spilled out of the can and onto her bare legs. Anna Maude Singe rose quickly, hurried over to McCabe, and slapped her across the face. The screaming stopped. Singe knelt by McCabe, pried away the crushed beer can, and held the now sobbing woman in her arms.
Dill was up. He moved slowly to the foyer. I don’t want to look at him, he thought. I don’t want to see how he looks. He swallowed when he saw Harold Snow and then took four very deep breaths. Snow lay on his back in the foyer. The beer can was still in his left hand. The right side of his face was gone, although the left eye remained, still open. But it no longer looked clever. Much of Snow’s upper chest was a red wet depression. The blood, bone and flesh had splattered the walls and the mirror that hung on the farthest one. Dill knelt by the body and tried to remember which pocket Snow had put the thousand dollars in. He decided it was the left one. But after he put his hand into it, he discovered he was wrong, tried the right pocket, and found the money. He put it into his own pocket and rose, realizing he had not breathed once since kneeling by Harold Snow. You didn’t want to smell him, he thought. You didn’t want to smell the corruption and the blood. You didn’t want to smell the death.
Dill went back into the living room. Cindy McCabe, still sobbing, lifted her head from Anna Maude Singe’s shoulder. “Is… is he…”
“He’s dead, Cindy,” Dill said.
“Oh shit, oh God, oh shit,” she wailed, dropped her head back down on Singe’s shoulder, and started sobbing again.
Dill looked around the room and spotted Cindy McCabe’s purse on top of the television set. He walked over, opened the purse, took the ten hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, made sure there was no blood on them, and tucked them down into the purse. Then Dill went to the phone and called the police.
First to arrive were two young uniformed officers in a green-and-white squad car. They arrived with siren blaring and bar lights flashing. Neither was much over twenty-five. One of them had a large handsome nose. The other had an out-sized chin. They told Dill their names, which he promptly forgot, and thought of them as the Chin and the Nose. The Chin took one glance at Harold Snow’s body and then looked quickly away — as if for a place to vomit. The Nose stared at the body with fascination. He finally looked up at Dill.
“Sawed-off, huh?”
“Sounded like it,” Dill said.
“Gotta be,” the Nose said and turned to his partner, who now seemed extremely interested in the small crowd of neighbors who had gathered outside at a safe, respectful distance. “Go talk to ’em,” the Nose told his partner. “Get their names. See if they heard or saw anything — and check around in back, too.”
“What for?”
“Maybe the whoever with the sawed-off’s still back there.”
“The whoever’s long gone.”
“Check anyhow.”
After the Chin headed for the neighbors, the Nose looked at Dill. They were still standing in the foyer. “Who’re you?” the policeman asked.
“Ben Dill.”
“Bendill?”
“Benjamin Dill.”
“Right,” the Nose said and wrote it down. “Who’s he?”
“Harold Snow.”
After he wrote that down, the young policeman indicated the living room. “Who’s in there making all the noise?”
“His girl friend and my lawyer.”
“Your lawyer?” That made the Nose suspicious momentarily, but he passed over it and turned his attention back to the body of Harold Snow. It still seemed to fascinate him. “What’d he do — the deceased?”
Dill shook his head. It was a small commiserative gesture. “He answered the doorbell after dark, I guess.”
The real questioning didn’t begin until the homicide squad arrived, headed by Detective Sergeant Meek and Detective First Grade Lowe. After Dill identified himself, Meek looked at him quizzically. “Felicity’s brother?”
Dill nodded. “You knew her?”
Meek stared thoughtfully down at the floor before answering. Then he looked up at Dill and said, “Yeah, I knew her pretty good. She was — well, Felicity was okay.”
It was Meek who took over the interrogation and Detective Lowe who handled the technical side. Meek was a tall, almost skinny man in his late thirties. Lowe was not much more than thirty-one or thirty-two, of a bit more than medium height and weight, and if he had one distinguishing characteristic, it was his completely bored expression — except for his eyes. His gray-blue eyes seemed interested in everything.
The medical examiner had come and gone, the photographer had finished, and they were about to cart away the body of Harold Snow when Homicide Captain Gene Colder came into the living room dressed in a navy-blue jogging outfit and Nike running shoes and carrying a pint of ice cream that he said was fudge ripple. He handed the sack to Detective Lowe and told him to put it in the freezer. The Chin volunteered to do it and Detective Lowe looked grateful.