“What?”
“Sit up. I’ll get you a drink.”
“I think you broke all the bottles.”
“Just two. Now sit up on the couch and I’ll get you a drink.”
I got him his drink and he said, “You see her in there?” I set the bottle of sour mash on the coffee table in front of him.
“Yeah. That’s why I called the police station.”
He finished off the second drink and helped himself to a third. “She was sleeping around on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I never even hit her when I found out.” He got up clumsily and stalked over to the drapes and yanked on a cord. A rose-colored, dusk sky filled the room with more melancholy than it could rightly tolerate. “She promised me she’d never fall in love with any of them. And she kept her word.”
He put his drink down on the top of the Tv cabinet. He put his head in his big hands. He wept.
A couple of times he sounded as if he were going to vomit. A couple of times I had the sense that he was going to let go and start smashing things. A couple of times I forgot myself and felt sorry for him. It’s hard to hate somebody when you see that they’re not any stronger than you are, and break just as easily.
The sirens sounded lonely in the early nightfall. Most people would be sitting down to the evening meal, Dad home from the factory or the store, Mom serving the food, and the kids ready to bolt as soon as their stomachs were full. Mom and Dad would watch Tv and a couple of times during the course of the evening they’d remember why they married each other, those sweet pure remembrances that buttress good marriages, and for those moments they wouldn’t be old married folks, they’d be the kids they’d once been, all full of hope and excitement and each other.
I wondered if Mike had ever had nights like that with Brenda. I somehow doubted it. They’d always been reckless people-he loved to fight, to play high-stakes poker, to tell you how much better-looking his wife was than yours-and he’d liked to parade her in front of other men, almost daring them to approach her.
And this is where it all came to an end. You always wonder where and when your own life will end, I guess. But you don’t wonder where and when the life of the woman you love will end. Now he knew.
I left him there and went out and heated up the half pot of coffee that was still on the stove.
I was just pouring a cup when the reenactment of World War Ii began. It sounded that way, anyway. Later on, I counted the emergency vehicles. Six of them. Including Cliffie on his Harley. The way he backed off his pipes I wondered if he was literally trying to wake the dead.
Cliffie allowed the two men who actually knew what they were doing to take over. Their biggest problem was keeping Cliffie from spoiling evidence.
Because Mike was a well-known former jock, we got Tv people as well as newspaper and radio ones. Cliffie called one of his press conferences and proceeded to say all sorts of stupid and unprofessional things into several microphones.
But he had his khaki uniform and his badge on his person and images of Glenn Ford dancing in his mind, so he was off and flying. If the county attorney, who would have to prosecute this case, was hearing Cliffie he was probably considering suicide.
The crowd came soon after. There must be people who drive around at night looking for accidents and tragedies. They’re just there, suddenly, vampires who live not on blood but on the misery of others. This was a remote area and yet here they were. They know enough to speak discreetly, they know enough not to interfere with the police activities, and they know enough to move here or there when the officials ask them. They don’t want to jeopardize their feeding.
I saw a doctor give Mike an injection that I assume was a sedative; I saw Mike’s lawyer walk through the front door; and I saw a man from the county attorney’s office trying not to smirk while Cliffie shouted various theories at him. They were standing out on the front lawn, off to the side, isolated from the vampires and the press.
I was just about to leave when Cliffie roped me into the conversation with Jim McGuire, a very lowly lawyer in the county attorney’s little fiefdom.
McGuire was scrawny and dressed himself as I often did in suits from the Paris Men’s Shop available only at Sears Roebuck.
He had blue eyes, red lips, and pipe-smoker yellow teeth.
Cliffie said, “Here’s a guy who can back me up. Tell him, Counselor. You know, about how she slept around.”
I said, “She slept around.”
“A lot of women sleep around,” McGuire said.
“In this town?” Cliffie sounded shocked.
“Yes,” McGuire said, winking at me, “in this very town, Chief.”
But Cliffie was always good on his feet.
“Yeah, well, maybe so, but how many of them got themselves murdered this afternoon?”
“With a mind like that, Chief,” McGuire said, “you should’ve been a trial lawyer.”
Cliffie caught the sarcasm. “Sure, and let killers go free the way McCain here does?” Then, “You know anybody she was sleeping with, McCain?”
“I don’t know this for a fact. But I think David Egan was one of them. I know for sure he spent time with her. I can’t say positively that he slept with her.”
“He slept with everybody,” Cliffie said.
“But he’s dead, so we can eliminate him for this.”
“Good point,” McGuire said. “Being dead is about the best alibi you can have.”
“I’m gonna tell your boss what a wise guy you are,” Cliffie said. “So knock it off.”
McGuire knew that he’d reached Cliffie’s invisible line in the sand. He said, “This is my first murder, Chief. I’m just trying to sound tough by making jokes. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Cliffie slid his arm around McGuire’s shoulder. “See how nice he talks when he wants to, Counselor? Maybe you could take lessons from him.”
“How much you charge an hour for lessons, McGuire?” I said.
But he knew better than to join in the fun.
“I think I’ll go see how the investigation is going. Thanks, Chief.”
We watched him go and Cliffie said, “I’ve got Mike’s ass nailed on this one. Too bad, too, because he’s one hell of a nice guy.”
“Mike didn’t do it.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was here before he got home.”
“Maybe he came here earlier, killed her, went back to work and then drove back here and pretended to be out of his mind when he found her. You were here so he put on a little show for you.”
“Whoever killed Sara Griffin and Egan killed Brenda.”
He made a face. “That sounds like the judge talking.”
“That’s me talking. First of all, Mike’ll have an alibi. He was at work all afternoon. And second of all, she was with Egan the night you had him killing Sara Griffin.”
“That was the alibi he wouldn’t tell us about?
Brenda?”
“That’s right.”
“Hell, no wonder he wouldn’t talk.
Mike would’ve killed him.” He shrugged. “So Mike found out about Egan and he killed her.
Simple as that, Counselor. It all ties together-Sara Griffin causes Egan to commit suicide; Mike finds out Brenda was shacking up with Egan and he kills her. A dope could figure that one out.”
And a dope just has, I wanted to say. But Cliffie’d had enough abuse for today.
“If you say so, Chief,” I said.
Somebody called for him from the front door of the house. I walked back to my car and headed back to town.
On the dance floor, she said, “You smell good.”
“New aftershave.”
“Oh.”
“You smell good, too.”
She smiled nervously. “Same old perfume.”
“But it’s a good one.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
You know how it goes when you’re both thinking about one thing-in this case how far we’d go tonight-while you’re talking about something else.
So far tonight, over pizza and three mild drinks each, we’d talked about Cliffie pestering her for more information, her mom wanting to get a dog, her sister in Indianapolis worried that her husband was having an affair, how she was able to smell winter on the air this afternoon, how most people never believed her when she said she could smell winter, and how there was a new intern at the hospital who wasn’t so hot at washing his hands and how a couple of the nurses had decided to say something to one of the staff doctors about the matter.