Eight Million Ways To Die

I tried to remember. "I left the hotel around eight and got back a little after ten. The message was waiting for me. I don't know what time it came in. They're supposed to put the time on the message slip but they don't always bother. Anyway, I probably threw away the slip."

"No reason to hang onto it."

"No. What difference does it make when she called?"

He looked at me for a long moment. I saw the gold flecks in the deep brown eyes. He said, "Shit, I don't know what to do. I'm not used to that. Most of the time I at least think I know what to do."

I didn't say anything.

"You're my man, like you're working for me. But I don't know as I'm sure what that means."

"I don't know what you're getting at, Chance."

"Shit," he said. "Question is, how much can I trust you? What I keep coming back to is whether I can or not. I do trust you. I mean, I took you to my house, man. I never took anybody else to my house.

Why'd I do that?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, was I showing off? Was I saying something along the lines of, Look at the class this here nigger has got? Or was I inviting you inside for a look at my soul? Either way, shit, I got to believe I trust you.

But am I right to do it?"

"I can't decide that for you."

"No," he said, "you can't." He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. "I called her last night.

Sunny. Couple of times, same as you, didn't get no answer. Well, okay, that's cool. No machine, but that's cool, too, 'cause sometimes she'll forget to put it on. Then I called again, one-thirty, two o'clock maybe, and again no answer, so what I did, I drove over there. Naturally I got a key. It's my apartment.

Why shouldn't I have a key?"

By now I knew where this was going. But I let him tell it himself.

"Well, she was there," he said. "She's still there. See, what she is, she's dead."

Chapter 22

She was dead, all right. She lay on her back, nude, one arm flung back over her head and her face turned to that side, the other arm bent at the elbow with the hand resting on her rib cage just below her breast.

She was on the floor a few feet from her unmade bed, her auburn hair spread out above and behind her head, and alongside her lipsticked mouth an ellipse of vomit floated on the ivory carpet like scum on a pond. Between her well-muscled white thighs, the carpet was dark with urine.

There were bruises on her face and forehead, another on her shoulder. I touched her wrist automatically, groping for a pulse, but her flesh was far too cold to have any life left in it.

Her eye was open, rolled up into her head. I wanted to coax the eyelid shut with a fingertip. I left it alone.

I said, "You move her?"

"No way. I didn't touch a thing."

"Don't lie to me. You tossed Kim's apartment after she was dead.

You must have looked around."

"I opened a couple of drawers. I didn't take anything."

"What were you looking for?"

"I don't know, man. Just anything I ought to know about. I found some money, couple hundred dollars. I left it there. I found a bankbook.

I left it, too."

"What did she have in the bank?"

"Under a thousand. No big deal. What I found, she had a ton of pills. That's how she did this here."

He pointed to a mirrored vanity across the room from the corpse.

There, among innumerable jars and bottles of makeup and scent, were two empty plastic vials containing prescription labels. The patient's name on both was S. Hendryx, although the prescriptions had been written by different physicians and filled at different pharmacies, both nearby. One prescription had been for Valium, the other for Seconal.

"I always looked in her medicine chest," he was saying. "Just automatically, you know? And all she ever had was this antihistamine stuff for her hay fever. Then I open this drawer last night and it's a regular drugstore in there. All prescription stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"I didn't read every label. Didn't want to leave any prints where they shouldn't be. From what I saw, it's mostly downs. A lot of tranks.

Valium, Librium, Elavil. Sleeping pills like the Seconal here. A couple things of ups, like whatchacallit, Ritalin. But mostly downs." He shook his head. "There's things I never heard of. You'd need a doctor to tell you what everything was."

"You didn't know she took pills?"

"Had no idea. Come here, look at this." He opened a dresser drawer carefully so as not to leave prints.

"Look," he said, pointing. At one side of the drawer, beside a stack of folded sweaters, stood perhaps two dozen pill bottles.

"That's somebody who's into this shit pretty heavy," he said.

"Somebody who's scared to run out. And I didn't know about it. That gets to me, Matt. You read that note?"

The note was on the vanity, anchored with a bottle of Norell cologne. I nudged the bottle aside with the back of my hand and carried the note over to the window. She'd written it in brown ink on beige notepaper and I wanted to read it in decent light.

I read:

Kim, you were lucky. You found someone to do it for you, I have to do it myself.