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

“All right,” I said. “I have worked killings, and I wouldn’t move her yet either. And I never covered up a corpse in my life, unless it was outside. You’ve worked crime scenes. To them this is just another crime scene. Now will you please tell me—”

“All right. All right.” Oddly, reminding him it was just another crime scene seemed to calm him a little. “I was working on a— You don’t need to know that.”

Bureau security, even now, I thought irrelevantly.

“Anyhow, I was working and I called my office to check in and they said Evelyn wanted me to call her, and I did. She asked me to come home for lunch. I didn’t know why. We hadn’t been getting along very well, and we’d agreed, oh, a year or so ago, that when I got transferred she’d just stay there. The only reason she changed her mind and came with me after all, when I did get transferred last month, was she’d lost her job about then and thought maybe she could find one here. Did you know I was here?” he asked irrelevantly.

“Yes. I saw you three weeks ago.”

“How come you didn’t yell at me or something, when I didn’t see you?”

“Why should I?”

He looked hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

“Then how come you didn’t know where I went?”

“I was out of town for a trial,” he said. “And when I got back, I... when I got back I went in the detective bureau and was talking to people and you weren’t there and I figured you were on leave or something. But you kept on not being there. And then I asked Ransom where you were and he said, ‘Gone.’ I said, ‘Gone where?’ and he said, ‘She’s not with us anymore.’ He acted like he didn’t know where you went. Or didn’t want to tell me. And so I shut up. I’d have found out if I needed to, but I didn’t, and I figured if you didn’t tell me you must not want me to know. So—”

He shut up suddenly, tightening his lips together, as if by doing that he could stop the slow drip of tears from his eyes.

“I wanted you to know,” I said, afraid even that was saying too much. “But right now—” I nodded to the tape recorder.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Today. Right. She, uh, she thought she could find a job here but she didn’t. At least not yet.”

“Go on.”

“So I didn’t know why she wanted me home for lunch.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t connect, does it, Lorene? What I mean is, she didn’t love me, she didn’t even like me anymore, so why the hell did she want to have lunch with me? But I had time, and so I said okay. When I got there she was lying on the couch; that was nothing new, she’d been doing that a lot lately. She said, ‘Hi, Steve,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Evie,’ and I turned around to lay my pistol on top of the bookcase just like I always do first thing when I get home, and then when I turned back toward her she had a pistol in her hand.”

“Yours?”

“No, I don’t have but the one. I don’t know where she got it from. I’d never seen it before. I asked her what she was doing and she said — real conversational, like she was telling me what the weather was — she said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ So I thought she’d been drinking again — she’d been drinking a lot the last few months, claiming it was because she had a headache, like there was anybody in the world could drink that much and not have a headache — and I said, ‘I’ll come back later when you’re sober,’ and I started to head for the door.”

“Without your gun.”

“Yeah. Like that would really make any big difference. How often do I need a gun? So I started to head for the door, and she shot at me.” It was evident the memory was still more startling to him than frightening. “That’s the only time I’ve ever been shot at. She missed, of course. She’s... she was — a very bad shot. I’d tried to teach her, back before we got married.”

“Where’d the slug hit?”

“I didn’t notice. Somewhere high to my right, I think.”

“Too scared to notice?”

“Too startled. I didn’t have the time to get scared till later. You know.”

Of course he was right. I did know. “Then what?”

“Then of course I asked her why she did that, and she said, ‘You aren’t leaving this room.’ I asked why again, and she told me. In... in somewhat thorough detail, only none of it made sense.”

“In what way?” He shook his head instead of answering, and I said, “Steve, you’re going to have to tell me.”

“She said—” He shook his head again. “Look, I told you we weren’t getting along. And so we weren’t sleeping together. And I’m not saying it was all her fault but it damn sure wasn’t all mine either. Things like that just happen. That’s why divorce courts stay full.” He paused; I wondered if he’d decided that was all he was going to say.

The pause continued, and I said, “I know. I’ve been in one myself lately. Go on.”