Eight Million Ways To Die

"Jesus, I need a shave," Durkin said. He'd just dropped what was left of his cigarette into what was left of his coffee, and he was running one hand over his cheek, feeling the stubble. "I need a shave, I need a shower, I need a drink. Not necessarily in that order. I put out an APB

on your little Colombian friend.

Octavio Ignacio Calderón y La Barra. Name's longer'n he is. I checked the morgue. They haven't got him down there in a drawer. Not yet, anyway."

He opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a metal shaving mirror and a cordless electric shaver. He

leaned the mirror against his empty coffee cup, positioned his face in front of it and began shaving. Over the whirr of the shaver he said, "I don't see anything in her file about a ring."

"Mind if I look?"

"Be my guest."

I studied the inventory sheet, knowing the ring wouldn't be on it.

Then I went over the photographs of the death scene. I tried to look only at her hands. I looked at every picture, and in none of them could I spot anything that suggested she was wearing a ring.

I said as much to Durkin. He switched off the shaver, reached for the photographs, went through them carefully and deliberately. "It's hard to see her hands in some of these," he complained. "All right, there's definitely no ring on that hand. What's that, the left hand? No ring on the left hand. Now in this shot, okay, definitely no ring on that hand. Wait a minute. Shit, that's the left hand again. It's not clear in this one. Okay, here we go. That's definitely her right hand and there's no ring on it." He gathered the photos together like cards to be shuffled and dealt. "No ring," he said. "What's that prove?"

"She had a ring when I saw her. Both times I saw her."

"And?"

"And it disappeared. It's not at her apartment. There's a ring in her jewelry box, a high school class ring, but that's not what I remember seeing on her hand."

"Maybe your memory's false."

I shook my head. "The class ring doesn't even have a stone. I went over there before I came here, just to check my memory. It's one of those klutzy school rings with too much lettering on it. It's not what she was wearing. She wouldn't have worn it, not with this mink and the wine-colored nails."

I wasn't the only one who'd said so. After my little epiphany with the bit of broken glass, I'd gone straight to Kim's apartment, then used her phone to call Donna Campion. "It's Matt Scudder," I said. "I know it's late, but I wanted to ask you about a line in your poem."

She'd said, "What line? What poem?"

"Your poem about Kim. You gave me a copy."

"Oh, yes. Just give me a moment, will you? I'm not completely awake."

"I'm sorry to call so late, but—"

"That's all right. What was the line?"

"Shatter / Wine bottles at her feet, let green glass / Sparkle upon her hand."

"Sparkle's wrong."

"I've got the poem right here, it says—"

"Oh, I know that's what I wrote," she said, "but it's wrong. I'll have to change it. I think. What about the line?"

"Where did you get the green glass from?"

"From the shattered wine bottles."

"Why green glass on her hand? What's it a reference to?"

"Oh," she said. "Oh, I see what you mean. Her ring."

"She had a ring with a green stone, didn't she?"

"That's right."

"How long did she have it?"

"I don't know." She thought it over. "The first time I saw it was just before I wrote the poem."

"You're sure of that?"

"At least that's the first time I noticed it. It gave me a handle on the poem, as a matter of fact. The contrast of the blue of her eyes and the green of the ring, but then I lost the blue when I got working on the poem."

She'd told me something along those lines when she first showed me the poem. I hadn't known then what she was talking about.

She wasn't sure when that might have been. How long had she been working on one or another version of the poem? Since a month before Kim's murder? Two months?

"I don't know," she said. "I have trouble placing events in time. I don't tend to keep track."

"But it was a ring with a green stone."

"Oh, yes. I can picture it now."

"Do you know where she got it? Who gave it to her?"

"I don't know anything about it," she said. "Maybe—"

"Yes?"

"Maybe she shattered a wine bottle."

To Durkin I said, "A friend of Kim's wrote a poem and mentioned the ring. And there's Sunny Hendryx's suicide note." I got out my notebook, flipped it open. I read, " 'There's no way off the merry-go-round.

She grabbed the brass ring and it turned her finger green. Nobody's going to buy me emeralds.' "

He took the book from me. "She meaning Dakkinen, I suppose," he said. "There's more here.

'Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.' Dakkinen wasn't pregnant and neither was Hendryx, so what's this shit about babies? And neither one of them had her life saved." He closed the book with a snap, handed it across the desk to me. "I don't know where you can go with this,"