It started to come back. I remembered the bar, and I remembered bouncing around in Flynn’s car, but that was all.
“I managed to get you upstairs,” he explained. “We left your car downtown. I thought you might need a ride in this morning.”
Reaching into his shirt pocket, Flynn pulled out a small tin case. He opened it with a flick of his thumbnail and removed an oblong-shaped green pill. In one fluid motion, without using either hand for support, he rose straight up from the chair. His weight on the balls of his feet, he walked in the pigeon-toed fashion of someone once trained to make each movement as efficient as possible. He tossed what was left of the coffee into the sink and filled the cup with water.
“Take a look at page three,” he said as he put the pill in his mouth. He took a drink of water, then threw his head back and swallowed hard. “Would have been interesting to know why he did it,” he added. Staring out the window, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Resting his other hand on the sink, he turned and looked directly at me. “If he did it.”
I had that vague feeling you get when someone tells you something you think you should know. I picked up the paper and turned to page three. My eye drifted across the stories above the fold, and then, in the bottom right corner, I found it. The story was not very long, four column inches at most, the short report of a suicide.
When I glanced up, Flynn was looking down at the floor, his left hand gripping tight on to the edge of the sink. He was clenching his jaw so hard, the muscles rippled down the side of his face.
“Are you all right?”
He managed to nod once, and then, lifting his head, took a deep breath and seemed to relax. “Yeah. Nothing,” he said with an expression that was part grin, part grimace. He tapped his right hand against his chest. “Little angina, that’s all.” Gesturing toward the newspaper, he asked, “What do you think?” Before I could answer, he added, “It’s all a little too easy, isn’t it? They find the guy who killed Jeffries, and he still has the knife he did it with. Instead of denying it, he gives them a full confession-
doesn’t even bother to ask for a lawyer-and then, as if he hadn’t been helpful enough, he kills himself in his cell before he had spent so much as a single night in jail.”
Suddenly it came back to me. “You told me about this last night, didn’t you?”
“It was on the eleven o’clock news. He killed himself sometime around eight-thirty or nine. That’s all they reported last night, and they don’t say much more about it in the papers, either. All they say is that he killed himself. They don’t say how.”
“He hung himself,” I guessed.
Flynn came back to the table and sat down. Leaning forward on his arms, he twisted his mouth first to one side, then the other.
“I talked to a few people.” He lowered his eyes and with his finger traced an invisible line back and forth in front of him. “Never saw a suicide like this. He gets on the top bunk in the cell. There was a guy in the cell opposite. He wasn’t paying much attention.
Then the metal bunk started to shake, making a lot of noise, and he started swearing at the guy, telling him to knock it off. The guy is standing on top of the bunk, jumping up and down on it.
The other guy can’t believe it, and he starts to say something, but the next thing he knows the guy has jumped.”
“Jumped?” I asked blankly.
“He jumped off, head first, smashed his head on the concrete floor. But the thing is, he didn’t just jump, he held his hands behind his back, held them while he threw himself head first onto the floor. How could anyone do that, hold your hands like that and not let go? Wouldn’t you throw your hands out at the last minute, try to break your fall? And why would he want to kill himself like that, anyway? Why didn’t he just hang himself? Easy enough to do. Make a noose out of your shirt, your pants; that’s the way most jail suicides happen. Never heard of anyone doing this. It’s strange. The whole thing is strange, if you ask me.”
I poured myself a second cup of coffee. Across the yard a bushy-tailed squirrel launched itself in full flight from the oak tree that hung over the spiked fence to the top of the umbrella that covered a glass table at the end of the brick patio. It slid down the blue canvas, regained its balance just before it reached the edge, leaped onto a chaise lounge, then scurried across the lawn and out of view.
“What is so strange about it?” I turned around, the cup in my hand, and waited until Flynn lifted his eyes. “You have a random killing by someone who was probably demented or stoned out of his mind, he gets caught, and he decides to do away with himself instead of spending the next ten or twelve years in a cell waiting for his own execution? I admit that the way he killed himself wasn’t exactly normal, but-”
“It wasn’t random,” Flynn interjected.
“What?”
“It wasn’t random,” he repeated. “I told you, I talked to a few people. He confessed. He knew who he killed.”
“Then it must have been revenge. Jeffries must have put him in prison at some point, right?”
Flynn shrugged his shoulders. The lines in his forehead deepened. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a rumpled cigarette pack, and wiggled his index finger inside the opening. With a disgusted look, he crushed the empty pack in his hand and shoved it back in his pocket.
“Don’t know. He wouldn’t say why he did it. Jeffries must have done something that made him want to kill him. It would have been interesting to know what it was, and now we never will.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “The investigation is over. It’ll be a while before they get the DNA results on the blood left on the knife, but it’ll belong to Jeffries,” he said with complete assurance. “They have the knife, and they have the confession, and, as if that wasn’t enough, they have the suicide. People don’t go around killing themselves for something they didn’t do. No question, the guy did it. Now he’s dead. Case closed.”
Late that afternoon, after I caught up on all the work that, as Helen repeatedly reminded me, I should have done that morning, I called Harper Bryce to see if he knew anything more than what Flynn had found out. Harper had heard none of the details of the suicide and knew nothing about what the killer had said.
When I told him that it had not been a random killing, that the killer had intended to murder Jeffries, he expressed regret at the suicide, because, as he put it, “the trial might have been worth watching after all.”
It only seemed callous. Harper’s professional appraisal was exactly right. The murder of Calvin Jeffries had riveted the public’s attention because of who he was and because of the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his death. But once the killer had been caught and it appeared to have been a random act of violence committed by someone desperate enough to kill for a few dollars, it became for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any one of the thousands of accidental deaths that happen every year. Drunk drivers killed people they did not know, and people without names who lived on the street might at any moment decide to stick a knife in someone who did not give them what they asked for. It was one of the unfortunate facts of city life, and while it was always to be condemned, it held none of the same fascination as the deliberate, purposeful, intentional murder of someone you had a reason to want dead. That was what made people read newspapers and follow trials, not that someone had been killed, but that someone had actually taken that last, ir-revocable step, and, in that ancient phrase, “with malice afore-thought,” taken someone’s life. I agreed with Harper: It would have been an interesting trial. And now there would never be one.
There was a story in the next day’s paper about yet another political scandal, but there was nothing about the murder of Calvin Jeffries. There were stories about the state of the econ-omy and stories about what was happening on the other side of the world, but there was not so much as a line about the suicide of his killer. There were new things to read about, new things to talk about, and a day or two later the only people who thought about Calvin Jeffries anymore were the people who had actually known him, and perhaps not all of them.