Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“But why?” Steve demanded. “I mean— All right. I knew she was suicidal. That was why I wouldn’t have a pistol in the house other than mine, why I never left it where she could get it. And before she filled that prescription I called the doctor to be sure there wasn’t enough in it to be fatal. I wouldn’t have been surprised if — but — why in the hell would she want to set me up? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

I looked at Sergeant Collins, who stood abruptly and turned to look out the high barred window at the side of his desk. We’d argued about who was going to tell Steve the rest of it; neither of us wanted to.

“She hated you,” Collins said abruptly. “She hated you a lot more than you knew. As you said, she blamed you for her depression. And she wanted you to be as miserable as she’d been the last few years.”

“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “How do you know all this?”

“She kept a diary,” I said. “We found it. She blamed you — said she’d have been perfectly happy if—”

“If I’d been willing to live the way she wanted to live, yeah,” Steve said. “I heard that from her quite a few times — that, and I was boring and unimaginative— Oh hell. Thing is — I couldn’t live the way she wanted to. And the combination — she wanted to party every night and she wanted children and a decent job — all those don’t combine very well. Nobody has that much time. I wouldn’t do the partying, and she couldn’t find the job, and the children didn’t come. What was I supposed to do about all that?”

It made sense. It also sounded as if I had heard more than enough on this topic. “Steve,” I asked, “why did you say you killed her?”

“Because I thought it was the twenty-two. And big as I am, I ought to be able to take a gun away from a woman without hurting her. So — if I couldn’t — if I didn’t — then I thought I must’ve somehow subconsciously wanted to kill her.”

“Baloney,” I said. “I’d like to see either one of you take a gun away from me— Hey, I didn’t say both at once, dammit, give me back my gun!”

Sergeant Collins laid the pistol, which I continue to maintain he would never have gotten one on one, down on his desk. “Why did you tell me not to have them do a gunpowder residue on her, and then you went and did one?”

“Because you can do a trace metal first and then a gunpowder residue, but if you do it the other way around the acid in the gunpowder-residue kit destroys the trace metal and then you get a negative trace metal. Everybody knows that.” I wasn’t even ashamed of the smugness I could hear in my voice.

Both men were staring at me. “Everyone?” Stephen Hallett asked.

Another Grave Tone by James Holding

Detectiverse