But I didn’t get outdoors all that much.
The drive was a long slope of gravel leading to a two-stall garage with one car in it and a huge water tank. I went past them and on to the house.
No dog. Out here, on the edge of town and on every farm, there’s a dog. There are just enough prison breaks, just enough roaming intruders to make a dog a good investment. But there was no dog.
I knocked on a screen door that ricocheted each time I struck it. Nothing. But the car in the garage told me she was in there.
I walked around the house peeking in windows. The furnishings were new but not expensive or noteworthy. Just good solid stuff. There was a cuckoo clock somewhere that celebrated the half hour. Four-thirty.
I went back to the screen door. Tried the front door behind it. Unlocked. I pushed in and called her name several times. There was an interior silence that bothered me, and as I looked around at the furniture, the silence became more pronounced.
I tried to put the size and ferocity of Mike Carlyle out of my mind. Cute little tricks-kicking guys in the balls chief among them-cd buy you a few cheap victories from time to time. But not with men like Carlyle. You’d never get close enough to kick him.
I decided an inspection was required and I decided that it was best if I could pull it off in less than. 0000038 seconds.
I went room to room and found nothing other than the same good solid unremarkable furnishings I’d found in the living room. The bedroom wall was interesting. Several framed photos of Brenda in various bikinis over a span of several years. Kind of a grotto to one sexy body.
She’d put on weight at about midpoint in the span of pictures but it was the kind of weight that somehow only enhanced her sexuality. I got a pleasant little ache in my groin looking at the later ones. Mike was nowhere to be found in the photos.
I found her in the john and even though she was naked I didn’t get any little ache in my groin, pleasant or otherwise.
She’d been taking a bath when somebody had struck her on the side of the skull, much as Sara Griffin had been struck. The bath water was filthy with her blood and the pink-tiled bathroom stank of her dying and her death. Her left hand, resting on the edge of the bathtub’s side, was crabbed into a claw. Her green eyes glared up at me. A tiny trickle of blood had wormed its way from her nostril to her upper lip.
You could see the wide swaths of dried soap and water on the sink, walls, doorknob. The place had been wiped down thoroughly.
I haven’t seen that many corpses in my young life but I’ll tell you one thing, that old Irish maxim is true. When you see a dead person, one of your first thoughts is how you’ll look when you’re dead. There’s your mortality staring right up at you.
After that moment passed, I realized two things.
I needed a cigarette and I needed to get out of this house.
As I got to the end of the hall, a heavy vehicle popped gravel and came to a rumbling stop somewhere near the front door. Mike and the big Chevrolet pickup he drove for the lumberyard. I was sure of it. I went to the curtained front window, peeked out. He had just left the truck, toting a large cardboard box in both hands.
I had some alternatives. I could hide, I could run, or I could confront him.
Just as the front door was shoved inward, I thought of a fourth alternative. There was a black telephone sitting on a dry bar. I picked up the receiver and dialed the police station.
Mike Carlyle saw me just as Mooney, the asthmatic man who answers the phone in the daytime, wheezed, “Police station.”
“Mooney, this is Sam McCain. Tell the chief that I just found Brenda Carlyle dead in her bathtub. He’d better get out here fast.”
Carlyle dropped the heavy box on the floor and made a sound deep in his throat that combined shock and rage and loss. The noise paralyzed me, forced me for the first time to see him as a human being, the eloquence of his stunned pain.
Then he came rushing at me.
Part III
Nineteen
His shoulder collided with mine. He was big enough and crazed enough to knock me several feet across the living room without even being conscious of it.
He was on his way to the bathroom and to his wife. I’d expected violence from him, verbal and physical. What was I doing here? Had I been sleeping with her? Why had I killed her?
He didn’t walk out of the bathroom. He exploded at me, this gigantic crazed animal ducking his head as if he were going to attack me the way a bull attacks a matador. “You killed her and now I’m gonna kill you!”
“I didn’t kill her, Mike. I didn’t have any reason to. Now calm down.”
I grabbed a fifth of whiskey from the bar and got ready for him. I figured he wouldn’t calm down. When he got about two feet from me, I smashed it into the side of his head and stepped aside. And then I decided we were in a Warner Brothers cartoon where the good guy, the extremely psychotic sadist Bugs Bunny, slams somebody over the head with an anvil, only to see the bad guy shrug it off and keep right on charging.
Which is just what happened.
While he grabbed me by the throat, I had time to swipe a fifth of scotch from the bar top. And then he was running with me right back into the wall.
There is nothing good to say about strangling.
Somebody can knock you out and do you a favor. You don’t have to be awake while they stomp you. But strangling folks takes a relatively long time and you’re awake until near the very end.
He’d clamped his hands on me so tight I forgot everything except trying to breathe.
Instinctively, though, I knew enough to hold on to the fifth of scotch.
I dangled about two feet off the carpet.
He alternated between choking me and slamming my head into the wall. It was hard to tell which I enjoyed more. I kept kicking him in the shins because that’s where my toes were. He’d curse when I’d get him a good one but his hands never let up on their pressure.
“You killed her, you bastard. You killed her.”
I wasn’t in any position to argue, much as I wanted to. Hell, I was a lawyer. I could argue my case.
I don’t know how long it was before I started losing consciousness. Couple minutes, maybe.
But suddenly I was hot and cold-shivering cold -and I started losing strength and I kept trying to gasp down some air and-And then I did it. I gathered enough strength and intelligence to raise the scotch bottle and smash the neck of it against the wall behind me.
If he heard the smashing glass, he didn’t let on. He just kept pressing my larynx harder. He knew he was almost home.
I stabbed him in the head.
Not all that deep but enough so that there was a lot of blood immediately. Enough so that the pain forced him to drop me and to fall away. Enough so that he tripped backward over the coffee table and sprawled face up on the couch.
“Now listen to me, you big stupid ape,” I said, advancing toward him with the smashed bottle.
The jagged parts ran with his blood. “I didn’t kill your wife. I didn’t know your wife. I talked to her once. That’s all. And that’s all we did was talk. You understand?”
I don’t know what I expected. But whatever I expected, it wasn’t this awful stretching silence with him looking up at me like a sad lost child. Just this awful stretching silence broken finally by a single sob.
“You really didn’t kill her?”
“No, Mike, I really didn’t kill her.”
“I’m not any big stupid ape.”
“No, I don’t guess you are.”
“There’re a lot of smart football players.”
He didn’t want to think about his dead wife so he led us off the trail. A little diversion.
“There was this fullback who had a doctorate in-”
“Mike.”
I looked at him.