The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I never heard you come in. I was with the children. They’re in a state, as you can imagine.”

  “You’re Mrs. Conway?”

  “Mrs. James Conway.” She glanced at her late husband, but her eyes didn’t stay on him for long. “He was talking and laughing,” she said. “He was making jokes. And then he shot himself. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Had he been drinking, Mrs. Conway?”

  “He’d had a drink or two,” she said. “He liked his drink. But he wasn’t drunk.”

  “Where’d the bottle go?”

  She put her hands together. She was a small woman, with a pinched face and pale blue eyes, and she wore a cotton housedress with a floral pattern. “I put it away,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”

  “Did you move anything else, ma’am?”

  “Only the bottle,” she said. “The bottle and the glass. I didn’t want people saying he was drunk when he did it, because how would that be for the children?” Her face clouded. “Or is it better thinking it was the drink that made him do it? I don’t know which is worse. What do you men think?”

  “I think we could all use a drink,” he said. “Yourself not least of all, ma’am.”

  She crossed the room and got a bottle of Schenley’s from a mahogany cabinet. She brought it, along with three small glasses of cut crystal. Mahaffey poured drinks for all three of us and held his to the light. She took a tentative sip of hers while Mahaffey and I drank ours down. It was an ordinary blended whiskey, an honest workingman’s drink. Nothing fancy about it, but it did the job.

  Mahaffey raised his glass again and looked at the bare-bulb ceiling fixture through it. “These are fine glasses,” he said.

  “Waterford,” she said. “There were eight, they were my mother’s, and these three are all that’s left.” She glanced at the dead man. “He had his from a jelly glass. We don’t use the Waterford for every day.”

  “Well, I’d call this a special occasion,” Mahaffey said. “Drink that yourself, will you? It’s good for you.”

  She braced herself, drank the whiskey down, shuddered slightly, then drew a deep breath. “Thank you,” she said. “It is good for me, I’d have to say. No, no more for me. But have another for yourselves.”

  I passed. Vince poured himself a short one. He went over her story with her, jotting down notes from time to time in his notebook. At one point she began to calculate how she’d manage without poor Jim. He’d been out of work lately, but he was in the building trades, and when he worked he made decent money. And there’d be something from the Veterans Administration, wouldn’t there? And Social Security?

  “I’m sure there’ll be something,” Vince told her. “And insurance? Did he have insurance?”

  There was a policy, she said. Twenty-five thousand dollars, he’d taken it out when the first child was born, and she’d seen to it that the premium was paid each month. But he’d killed himself, and wouldn’t that keep them from paying?

  “That’s what everybody thinks,” he told her, “but it’s rarely the case. There’s generally a clause, no payment for suicide during the first six months, the first year, maybe even the first two years. To keep you from taking out the policy on Monday and doing away with yourself on Tuesday. But you’ve had this for more than two years, haven’t you?”

  She was nodding eagerly. “How old is Patrick? Almost nine, and it was taken out just around the time he was born.”

  “Then I’d say you’re in the clear,” he said. “And it’s only fair, if you think about it. The company’s been taking a man’s premiums all these years, why should a moment of wrong thinking get them off the hook?”

  “I had the same notion myself,” she said, “but I thought there was no hope. I thought that was just the way it was.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s not.”

  “What did you call it? A moment of wrong thinking? But isn’t that all it takes to keep him out of heaven? It’s the sin of despair, you know.” She addressed this last to me, guessing that Mahaffey was more aware of the theology of it than I. “And is that fair?” she demanded, turning to Mahaffey again. “Better to cheat a widow out of the money than to cheat James Conway into hell.”

  “Maybe the Lord’s able to take a longer view of things.”

  “That’s not what the fathers say.”

  “If he wasn’t in his right mind at the time …”

  “His right mind!” She stepped back, pressed her hand to her breast. “Who in his right mind ever did such a thing?”

  “Well …”

  “He was joking,” she said. “And he put the gun to his head, and even then I wasn’t frightened, because he seemed his usual self and there was nothing frightening about it. Except I had the thought that the gun might go off by accident, and I said as much.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “That we’d all be better off if it did, himself included. And I said not to say such a thing, that it was horrid and sinful, and he said it was only the truth, and then he looked at me, he looked at me.”

  “What kind of a look?”

  “Like, See what I’m doing? Like, Are you watching me, Mary Frances? And then he shot himself.”

  “Maybe it was an accident,” I suggested.

  “I saw his face. I saw his finger tighten on the trigger. It was as if he did it to spite me. But he wasn’t angry at me. For the love of God, why would he …”

  Mahaffey clapped me on the shoulder. “Take Mrs. Conway into the other room,” he said. “Let her freshen up her face and drink a glass of water, and make sure the kids are all right.” I looked at him, and he gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Something I want to check,” he said.

  I went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Conway wet a dish towel and dabbed tentatively at her face, then filled a jelly glass with water and drank it down in a series of small sips. Then we went to check on the children, a boy of eight and a girl a couple of years younger. They were just sitting there, hands folded in their laps, as if someone had told them not to move.

  Mrs. Conway fussed over them and assured them everything was going to be fine and told them to get ready for bed. We left them as we found them, sitting side by side, their hands still folded in their laps. I suppose they were in shock, and it seemed to me they had the right.

  I brought the woman back to the living room, where Mahaffey was bent over the body of her husband. He straightened up as we entered the room. “Mrs. Conway,” he said, “I have something important to tell you.”

  She waited to hear what it was.

  “Your husband didn’t kill himself,” he announced.

  Her eyes widened, and she looked at Mahaffey as if he’d gone suddenly mad. “But I saw him do it,” she said.

  He frowned, nodded. “Forgive me,” he said. “I misspoke. What I meant to say was that the poor man did not commit suicide. He did kill himself, of course he killed himself — ”

  “I saw him do it.”

  “ — and of course you did, and what a terrible thing for you, what a cruel thing. But it was not his intention, ma’am. It was an accident.”

  “An accident!”

  “Yes.”

  “To put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. An accident?”

  Mahaffey had a handkerchief in his hand. He turned his hand palm up to show what he was holding with it. It was the cartridge clip from the pistol.

  “An accident,” Mahaffey said. “You said he was joking, and that’s what it was, a joke that went bad. Do you know what this is?”

  “Something to do with the gun?”

  “It’s the clip, ma’am. Or the magazine, they call it that as well. It holds the cartridges.”

  “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 t
here. 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.”