“The bullets?”
“The bullets, yes. And do you know where I found it?”
“In the gun?”
“That’s where I would have expected to find it,” he said, “and that’s where I looked for it, but it wasn’t there. And then I patted his pants pockets, and there it was.” And, still using the handkerchief to hold it, he tucked the cartridge clip into the man’s right-hand pocket.
“You don’t understand,” he told the woman. “How about you, Matt? You see what happened?”
“I think so.”
“He was playing a joke on you, ma’am. He took the clip out of the gun and put it in his pocket. Then he was going to hold the unloaded gun to his head and give you a scare. He’d give the trigger a squeeze, and there’d be that instant before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, that instant where you’d think he’d really shot himself, and he’d get to see your reaction.”
“But he did shoot himself,” she said.
“Because the gun still had a round in the chamber. Once you’ve chambered a round, removing the clip won’t unload the gun. He forgot about the round in the chamber, he thought he had an unloaded weapon in his hand, and when he squeezed the trigger he didn’t even have time to be surprised.”
“Christ have mercy,” she said.
“Amen to that,” Mahaffey said. “It’s a horrible thing, ma’am, but it’s not suicide. Your husband never meant to kill himself. It’s a tragedy, a terrible tragedy, but it was an accident.” He drew a breath. “It might cost him a bit of time in purgatory, playing a joke like that, but he’s spared hellfire, and that’s something, isn’t it? And now I’ll want to use your phone, ma’am, and call this in.”
“That’s why you wanted to know if it was a revolver or an automatic,” Elaine said. “One has a clip and one doesn’t.”
“An automatic has a clip. A revolver has a cylinder.”
“If he’d had a revolver he could have played Russian roulette. That’s when you spin the cylinder, isn’t it?”
“So I understand.”
“How does it work? All but one chamber is empty? Or all but one chamber has a bullet in it?”
“I guess it depends what kind of odds you like.”
She thought about it, shrugged. “These poor people in Brooklyn,” she said. “What made Mahaffey think of looking for the clip?”
“Something felt off about the whole thing,” I said, “and he remembered a case of a man who’d shot a friend with what he was sure was an unloaded gun, because he’d removed the clip. That was the defense at trial, he told me, and it hadn’t gotten the guy anywhere, but it stayed in Mahaffey’s mind. And as soon as he took a close look at the gun he saw the clip was missing, so it was just a matter of finding it.”
“In the dead man’s pocket.”
“Right.”
“Thus saving James Conway from an eternity in hell,” she said. “Except he’d be off the hook with or without Mahaffey, wouldn’t he? I mean, wouldn’t God know where to send him without having some cop hold up a cartridge clip?”
“Don’t ask me, honey. I’m not even Catholic.”
“Goyim is goyim,” she said. “You’re supposed to know these things. Never mind, I get the point. It may not make a difference to God or to Conway, but it makes a real difference to Mary Frances. She can bury her husband in holy ground and know he’ll be waiting for her when she gets to heaven her own self.”
“Right.”
“It’s a terrible story, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a good story as a story, but it’s terrible, the idea of a man killing himself that way. And his wife and kids witnessing it, and having to live with it.”
“Terrible,” I agreed.
“But there’s more to it. Isn’t there?”
“More?”
“Come on,” she said. “You left something out.”
“You know me too well.”
“Damn right I do.”
“So what’s the part I didn’t get to?”
She thought about it. “Drinking a glass of water,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“He sent you both out of the room,” she said, “before he looked to see if the clip was there or not. So it was just Mahaffey, finding the clip all by himself.”
“She was beside herself, and he figured it would do her good to splash a little water on her face. And we hadn’t heard a peep out of those kids, and it made sense to have her check on them.”
“And she had to have you along so she didn’t get lost on the way to the bedroom.”
I nodded. “It’s convenient,” I allowed, “making the discovery with no one around. He had plenty of time to pick up the gun, remove the clip, put the gun back in Conway’s hand, and slip the clip into the man’s pocket. That way he could do his good deed for the day, turning a suicide into an accidental death. It might not fool God, but it would be more than enough to fool the parish priest. Conway’s body could be buried in holy ground, regardless of his soul’s ultimate destination.”
“And you think that’s what he did?”
“It’s certainly possible. But suppose you’re Mahaffey, and you check the gun and the clip’s still in it, and you do what we just said. Would you stand there with the clip in your hand waiting to tell the widow and your partner what you learned?”
“Why not?” she said, and then answered her own question. “No, of course not,” she said. “If I’m going to make a discovery like that I’m going to do so in the presence of witnesses. What I do, I get the clip, I take it out, I slip it in his pocket, I put the gun back in his hand, and then I wait for the two of you to come back. And then I get a bright idea, and we examine the gun and find the clip missing, and one of us finds it in his pocket, where I know it is because that’s where I stashed it a minute ago.”
“A lot more convincing than his word on what he found when no one was around to see him find it.”
“On the other hand,” she said, “wouldn’t he do that either way? Say I look at the gun and see the clip’s missing. Why don’t I wait until you come back before I even look for the clip?”
“Your curiosity’s too great.”
“So I can’t wait a minute? But even so, suppose I look and I find the clip in his pocket. Why take it out?”
“To make sure it’s what you think it is.”
“And why not put it back?”
“Maybe it never occurs to you that anybody would doubt your word,” I suggested. “Or maybe, wherever Mahaffey found the clip, in the gun or in Conway’s pocket where he said he found it, maybe he would have put it back if he’d had enough time. But we came back in, and there he was with the clip in his hand.”
“In his handkerchief, you said. On account of fingerprints?”
“Sure. You don’t want to disturb existing prints or leave prints of your own. Not that the lab would have spent any time on this one. They might nowadays, but back in the early sixties? A man shoots himself in front of witnesses?”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “So what happened?”
“What happened?”
“Yeah, your best guess. What really happened?”
“No reason it couldn’t have been just the way he reconstructed it. Accidental death. A dumb accident, but an accident all the same.”
“But?”
“But Vince had a soft heart,” I said. “Houseful of holy pictures like that, he’s got to figure it’s important to the woman that her husband’s got a shot at heaven. If he could fix that up, he wouldn’t care a lot about the objective reality of it all.”
“And he wouldn’t mind tampering with evidence?”
“He wouldn’t lose sleep over it. God knows I never did.”
“Anybody you ever framed,” she said, “was guilty.”
“Of something,” I agreed. “You want my best guess, it’s that there’s no way of telling. As soon as the gimmick occurred to Vince, that the clip might be missing, the whole scenario was set. Either
Conway had removed the clip and we were going to find it, or he hadn’t and we were going to remove it for him, and then find it.”
“ ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’ Except not really, because either way it comes out the same. It goes in the books as an accident, whether that’s what it was or not.”
“That’s the idea.”
“So it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other.”
“I suppose not,” I said, “but I always hoped it was the way Mahaffey said it was.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to think ill of him? No, that’s not it. You already said he was capable of tampering with evidence, and you wouldn’t think ill of him for it, anyway. I give up. Why? Because you don’t want Mr. Conway to be in hell?”
“I never met the man,” I said, “and it would be presumptuous of me to care where he winds up. But I’d prefer it if the clip was in his pocket where Mahaffey said it was, because of what it would prove.”
“That he hadn’t meant to kill himself? I thought we just said . . .”
I shook my head. “That she didn’t do it.”
“Who? The wife?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That she didn’t do what? Kill him? You think she killed him?”
“It’s possible.”
“But he shot himself,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Or did I miss something?”
“That’s almost certainly what happened,” I said, “but she was one of the witnesses, and the kids were the other witnesses, and who knows what they saw, or if they saw anything at all? Say he’s on the couch, and they’re all watching TV, and she takes his old war souvenir and puts one in his head, and she starts screaming. ‘Ohmigod, look what your father has done! Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, Daddy has killed himself!’ They were looking at the set, they didn’t see dick, but they’ll think they did by the time she stops carrying on.”
“And they never said what they did or didn’t see.”
“They never said a word, because we didn’t ask them anything. Look, I don’t think she did it. The possibility didn’t even occur to me until sometime later, and by then we’d closed the case, so what was the point? I never even mentioned the idea to Vince.”
“And if you had?”
“He’d have said she wasn’t the type for it, and he’d have been right. But you never know. If she didn’t do it, he gave her peace of mind. If she did do it, she must have wondered how the cartridge clip migrated from the gun butt to her husband’s pocket.”
“She’d have realized Mahaffey put it there.”
“Uh-huh. And she’d have had twenty-five thousand reasons to thank him for it.”
“Huh?”
“The insurance,” I said.
“But you said they’d have to pay anyway.”
“Double indemnity,” I said. “They’d have had to pay the face amount of the policy, but if it’s an accident they’d have had to pay double. That’s if there was a double-indemnity clause in the policy, and I have no way of knowing whether or not there was. But most policies sold around then, especially relatively small policies, had the clause. The companies liked to write them that way, and the policy holders usually went for them. A fraction more in premiums and twice the payoff? Why not go for it?”
We kicked it around a little. Then she asked about the current case, the one that had started the whole thing. I’d wondered about the gun, I explained, purely out of curiosity. If it was in fact an automatic, and if the clip was in fact in his pocket and not in the gun where you’d expect to find it, surely some cop would have determined as much by now, and it would all come out in the wash.
“That’s some story,” she said. “And it happened when, thirty-five years ago? And you never mentioned it before?”
“I never thought of it,” I said, “not as a story worth telling. Because it’s unresolved. There’s no way to know what really happened.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s still a good story.”
The guy in Inwood, it turned out, had used a .38-caliber revolver, and he’d cleaned it and loaded it earlier that same day. No chance it was an accident.
And if I’d never told the story over the years, that’s not to say it hadn’t come occasionally to mind. Vince Mahaffey and I never really talked about the incident, and I’ve sometimes wished we had. It would have been nice to know what really happened.
Assuming that’s possible, and I’m not sure it is. He had, after all, sent me out of the room before doing whatever it was he did. That suggested he hadn’t wanted me to know, so why should I think he’d be quick to tell me after the fact?
No way of knowing. And, as the years pass, I find I like it better that way. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.
Almost Perfect
He was already at the ballpark when I got there, and that was unusual for Tommy. Of course he was scheduled to pitch that afternoon, going up against the Bobcats in the last game of a three-game home stand, but even when he pitched he tended to show up a lot closer to game time. He’d make it in time to warm up properly, and he’d generally be there for the batting practice that Hairston makes his pitchers take along with everybody else, seeing as our league has escaped the goddam designated hitter rule. But he was basically a last-minute kind of guy, and I’m the opposite, like most catchers. So it was a surprise to walk in and see him already suited up.
But not a big surprise, because Tommy Willis was a southpaw, and it’s true what you’ve heard about them. Pud Hairston was a pitcher himself for twelve years and has been a pitching coach for better than twenty, and he swears they’re all knuckleballs, meaning you never know which way they’re going to break. I don’t know why it should be true, why you can predict a man’ll have a wild hair on the basis of which arm he uses to throw the ball, or why it only seems to work that way with pitchers, while a left-handed outfielder or first baseman will be as regular as the next person, or at least the next ballplayer. A southpaw has an edge against left-handed batters and gives up the same edge to righties, and I can see why that would be, same as I or anybody else can see why he’d have an advantage throwing over to first. But what has all of this got to do with what goes on in his head? That makes no sense to me, but I’ve known enough of them and caught enough of them to be able to swear it’s true.
I said he was early for a change, and he grinned that lazy grin of his. “Gotta get them Bobcats,” he said. We went out and threw a few, and then he put on a jacket and sat down while I went and took my turn in the cage. I love batting practice. You just stand there and you hit. I’d do it all day if they let me.
Around the time the ground crew got to smoothing out the base paths, I checked the stands and spotted my wife sitting where she generally did. I waved, but she was deep in conversation with Sally Peres and didn’t see me. There were rumors that we were looking to trade Reynaldo Peres, and for Kathy’s sake I hoped they weren’t true, as Sally was her closest friend among the wives. (Other hand, if I was the general manager, Peres would have been gone by now. He’s always behind in the count, and that means every hitter’s a struggle for him.)
“I don’t see Colleen,” I said to Tommy, and he said she wasn’t coming.
“She gets tired of baseball,” he said.
Anybody’ll tire of baseball from time to time, even the men who play it, and I can see how a wife could get sick of it, especially if she wasn’t too crazy about hanging out with the other wives. And the TV cameras pan those rows all the time, so you have to make sure you look interested, and that the camera doesn’t catch you yawning, or picking your nose. Kathy doesn’t come to every home game, not by any means. Still, a pitcher doesn’t start but one game in five, so when he’s up his wife’s usually there to see him.
I didn’t say anything, and he said, “Hard to believe. I mean, how could a human being get tired of baseball? But she does. She even gets tired of the Bobcats.”
They were the defending world champions, and a good bet to repeat this year, an
d our attendance was never higher than when they came to town. So his remark was natural enough, but it had a little extra on it, and I wondered about that. But not for any length of time. We were just minutes away from the first pitch, which he’d be throwing and I’d be catching, and I was more interested in whether his fastball had a little extra on it, and how his curve was breaking.
Introductions went like they always do, with cheers for us and boos for the Bobcats, with the loudest round of boos for Wade Bemis. He had two strikes against him, as far as our fans were concerned. Number one, he was hitting .341, and neck and neck with Clipper DeYoung of the Orioles in the home-run race. Number two, he played for us for four years, jumping to the Bobcats as a free agent. That’s fans for you. The better you are, the more they hate you, and it goes double if you used to play for their team. It never made sense to me, but there’s not much about fans that does.
After Bemis was introduced, the boos dropped to a more cordial level, and Pud Hairston came over and asked how Tommy was throwing. “He should be fine,” I told him.
But we both knew you could never tell for sure. Not until the game got started, and even then you might not know right away.
Early on, I thought fine was the one thing Tommy wasn’t going to be that day. His first three pitches to their leadoff batter, Jeff Coleman, were all off the plate, all in the same spot, and each one a little farther from being a strike than the one before it. I was calling for inside pitches, and he was missing away, and that’s not a good sign. The next one was right down the middle, with Coleman taking all the way. If I’d been coaching the Bobcats I’d have had him take the next pitch, too, the way Tommy had started him off 3–0, but he swung at a bad pitch and popped to short.
Tommy went to 3–1 on the second batter. The biggest mistake a pitcher can make is to get behind in the count, and that’s especially true for a hard-throwing kid like Tommy, who can have a problem with control. His next pitch caught the corner. The batter lined the next one, really got good wood on it, but it went straight into the third baseman’s glove like it had eyes.
Tommy started the next hitter off with two balls, the second one in the dirt, and I dug it out and walked it back to the mound. Bemis was in the on-deck circle, looking eager, and he’d be batting from the right-hand side of the plate today, since Tommy was a southpaw. His on-base average was about the same lefty or righty, but he had more power as a right-hander.
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