“I don’t want to hear crap like this,” she said.
“You go into the house and you find Ida Boyd. Maybe she is still unconscious, but she is still breathing. You see she is going to live after all. But she is weak, and she is vulnerable. And I think you take her head in your hands and line it up and take aim and I think you hit her head on the tub again, as hard as you can.”
Sharon Doans inhaled sharply. The memory of Ida’s last breath.
“Now, I don’t think you knew that a pathologist can tell the difference between one blow and several blows. I don’t think you banged her head just once because of that. You did crack off some of the rough edges which the first break left, but you lined her head up so well and hit it so hard that I think she must have died right away and obviously, so you didn’t feel you needed to hit her again. So,” I said, “so I believe what you say about Billy. It’s what you say about you that I don’t believe.”
“It’s horrible,” she said.
“I agree.”
“You can’t prove anything,” she said, raging and fearful at once.
“Well,” I said, “I’m not so sure about that. We’ve got quite a lot of bits and pieces. You were seen. And I’m particularly interested to have the forensic scientists go over the clothes you wore. Navy-blue anorak with a hood, wasn’t it? I’d be very surprised if we don’t find a little blood or hair or something on it.”
Inadvertently her eyes darted to a closet.
“There we are,” I said. “In the closet. And on top of that, we have whatever oblique references you might have made about it in your book. Got to be a big event for you and you’re bound to have referred to it. What you wrote might not mean much by itself, but it likely wouldn’t sound too good read out in court at the trial of someone accused of murder. Especially the main beneficiary of the victim’s main beneficiary. And then we can start looking for other people who might have seen you. When we tell the story to the papers and get everybody in the county thinking about it, who knows what we will turn up.”
She flew at me, screaming. “You’re horrible! Horrible!” She swung her beer bottle, overturned the table. Clawed at me. Bit. Kneed. Spat. Pulled at my ear.
I just tried to protect myself until she was spent. I tried to feel lucky that at least she didn’t have a gun in hand to point at me, to shoot me with. It made a change.
I would have been safe enough anyway. Once the screaming started, Jeanna Dunlap left her listening position to come full face into the window. We had arranged that she would come back, quietly, as soon as Pynne left. And she had her gun out.
When I sensed a little of Doans’ energy subsiding, I tried to surround her, wrap my arms around to pin hers.
She suddenly gave up.
She said, “She was probably dying anyway.”
It was said in as cold and clear and feelingless a way as anything I have ever heard. I let her go. We stood limp for a moment, leaning on one another. Then she drew away.
I didn’t know what the hell was going through her head, or what she was doing. I didn’t care. In a matter of an hour, I had faced two different murderers who felt no guilt.
I was thinking that, of the two, I preferred neither.
I preferred not to have known about any of it. I preferred to have stayed an indigent anachronism, getting ready to explain my unemployability to a welfare office somewhere in the security of a murky gray-green government office due for repainting when the inflation rate dropped. I preferred to have been anywhere and anything else. I preferred to have hung up my gumshoes and learned a dishonest trade.
I preferred not to see a crazy-eyed little woman hurtling toward me like a fastball.
I wished all such ugly things, all such visions, to go away.
I swung at this one with the back of my doubled-up hand. And I hit it for a home run. I’ve never hit a pitch so hard in my life. The sweet solid contact felt good and felt like the first good thing I’d felt since I could remember.
At first I thought the crack was her neck breaking. I thought I’d killed her.
But I hadn’t.
Jeanna Dunlap had. She shot her dead.
Chapter Forty One
There was a lot of commotion after that. Shouting voices, some scuffling.
But I didn’t make it out at the time.
I just kind of decided to sit down, on the floor.
Then I lay down.
The noise, I learned later, was because Frank Pynne had reappeared outside Doans’ house.
He hadn’t been supposed to do that.
He’d been meant to be speeding toward Columbus in the full flush of thinking he would get his money back.
Only he’d gone home, instead, to call the hospital.
I guess he’d suspected that I, Albert R. Samson, bonded private detective of this state, wouldn’t drop a wounded lady into a visit from the likes of him. In the course of the legal shakeout he would inevitably locate his wife, but it wasn’t my job to help him. Not part of what he was paying me for. His lawyer’s secretary had told me as much.
And when he did find his wife, when she was stronger, he’d have to decide whether he could afford to try to get his cash repaid. What with the cloud over where it came from.
Naw. He never would.
I don’t know why I lay down just when I did.
Jeanna said later she’d been afraid Sharon Doans’ sewing shears had got to me. That I was dead too.
I hadn’t seen the scissors.
Naw. I wasn’t dead. Just tired, I guess.
I stayed tired a long time.
Fatigue is a funny business. Which doesn’t always have much to do with sleep. In the Second World War scientists tried to define it, determine the chemical components or the fundamental conditions which make people “tired.” The idea was maybe to find a pill for it. They didn’t do very well. Not even on the definition. The closest they got was to say that if someone was tired, he must be kind of bored. No pills for that.
For my tiredness I rested. Guarding the glass.
And at first I spent a lot of time abusing myself about my way of life. It was not because of the financial precariousness this time. It was because of the ugliness it got me into.
I couldn’t stop ugliness happening in the world. But I didn’t have to volunteer to take part in it.
I bought a set of paints.
I guarded the glass well.
But gradually I was drawn back into the world.
First it was through Hogue’s trial. He made it as simple for them as it could be, and stood without expression as he drew a sentence for life.
By that time, he had decided it was just as well that his heart was still working, because he got it in mind to start a fund to raise enough money to buy he Boyd’s land for the B.C.T.
I know this because lie sent me a letter with the money I was owed for my rendered services on behalf of Frank Pynne. In it he said that he would be administering the fund appeal from prison and that he had sold all his own assets to launch it with. He even suggested that I might want to donate my check for the noble purpose of saving this land for posterity.
I cashed my check the same day.
I guess when you’re tired you just don’t feel noble.
The second thing that brought me back into the world was a visit from Glass Albert.
It was December and there was snow. I suspected right away that be hadn’t stopped to see if I could come out to play.
“I’m calling in a few of the days you owe me,” he announced.
I was at my easel at the time.
“Oh, yeah? Someone finally wants to marry your daughter?”
“Not exactly.”
I put my brush behind my ear. “What, then?”
“It’s my wife,” he said.
“Someone finally wants to marry your wife?”
“She’s lost a lot of weight,” he said. “It’s not medical—I talked to her doctor—and she’s not on a diet, because those neve
r work for her. So I want her followed around for a while.”
“Suspicious mind you have.”
“I find myself asking questions. And if you can’t have them answered, what’s the point of being rich?”
“Something I ask myself often,” I said.
“So when can you start?”
“As soon as I finish this painting,” I said.
He walked over to have a look.
It was the first time I had known him to be speechless.
And while I was waiting for him to find words, I felt the first inklings of curiosity that I’d felt in a long time.
I thought about Priscilla Pynne. Her putting on weight, taking it off. I wondered about her post-gunshot career. I didn’t see why she shouldn’t carry on at college. She’d wanted it badly enough to over-come a lot of other things.
I made the decision to make the effort, to find out for sure.
Curiosity is the pill for fatigue.
“Wife’s been losing weight, eh?” I asked, giving Glass Albert the chance to be relieved of the tiredness of looking at the outpourings of my undiscovered primitive genius.
Perhaps I was only undiscovered and primitive. But. I was suddenly more willing to settle for two out of three. Not a bad percentage in most things life has to offer.
About the Author
MICHAEL Z. LEWIN is the award-winning author of many mystery novels and short stories. Most have been set in and around Indianapolis, Indiana, where he grew up. Albert Samson is a low-key private eye and the stories focus on humane understanding of the cases and problems Samson encounters. Leroy Powder is an irascible Indy police lieutenant who truly wants his colleagues to become better cops. They’re bound to be grateful, right? Both central characters have an abiding wish to see justice done. One of the features of the series novels, and some stand-alones, is that that main characters from one book often appear in lesser roles in other books.
Since 1971 Mike has lived in the West of England, currently in Bath where his city-centre flat overlooks the nearby hills. Both his children have made careers in the arts. Masses more information and silly stuff is available on www.MichaelZLewin.com.
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Copyright
First published in 1981 by Harper & Row, Publishers
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