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

“Have you?” He looked briefly interested at that, and then continued. “She was saying it was all my fault — all my fault she always had to work even when she didn’t want to, and that wasn’t true. I make a decent living and she didn’t have to work, but she always said she wanted to, and for the last couple of weeks she’d been mad all the time because she couldn’t find a job she wanted. And she said it was my fault we don’t have any children. Okay, when we first got married we were both still in school and we didn’t want a family until that was behind us. And for the last couple of years, well, you don’t acquire kids by spontaneous combustion. Look, I’d have been ready to have children, but not the way she was drinking, and we weren’t sleeping together and she didn’t want to anyway. But there were about three years between, and I don’t know why she didn’t get pregnant. Maybe one of us was sterile, I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t anybody’s fault. It could be my problem, it could be hers, but guessing at it is stupid. I really always thought it was because she was so thin; she never would eat right, and she ran all the time, it was like she was living on Scotch and air, but that’s beside the point.”

“You’re saying she was anorexic?” I asked.

Steve shrugged. “Anorexia, bulimia, how should I know? I never saw her vomiting on purpose, but I didn’t see her eat very much either. I mean, we could go out to dinner at the nicest restaurant in town and she’d order thirty dollars’ worth of steak and lobster and eat three bites. Five, if I twisted her arm. I mean verbally. I wouldn’t really— Oh, you know. That kind of thing. And the drinking — I knew she was depressed. I got her to go to a doctor and he put her on some kind of antidepressant—”

“Prozac?”

“No, just some sort of — I don’t remember, it ended with ‘ine.’ He said it would take about three weeks for it to work. She took it three days and flushed the rest down the toilet. Said she hated to take stuff.”

“So she was depressed and she wouldn’t do anything about the depression. And she was drinking heavily.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “And she — she’d been acting like she hated me, like it was all my fault she felt like hell. Well, it wasn’t. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t know what she wanted. It wasn’t my fault she fought with all her friends until she didn’t have any left. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t get along with her parents and didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I couldn’t make her take antidepressants. I couldn’t make her stop drinking. I couldn’t create a job for her when there wasn’t one. If I tried to take her out — dancing, or movies, or something — she wouldn’t go.”

“And that’s the background,” I said.

“That’s the background,” he agreed.

“So getting back to today — she started spewing out all this stuff, and you said you were going to leave and come back when she was sober, and she shot at you, and then?”

“And then — she was pointing the gun at me, and I could see that she was cocking it again — she didn’t need to, it was double-action, but I guess she wasn’t strong enough to fire it double-action, and I tried to take it away from her and I got hold of her hand and the gun went off and she went limp and there was blood everywhere—”

He was trained to deal with emergencies. But this was his own personal emergency, of a kind no one ever expects to have to deal with, and he was shaking all over.

Making my voice as impersonal as possible, I asked, “Was the gun still in her hand?”

“Yes, and she was still breathing, so I tried to call an ambulance and the phone was dead, so I ran next door to get the neighbors to call an ambulance, but they weren’t home, so I had to run around to the resident manager’s office and I guess I should have told her to call the police, but I didn’t even think of it, I did it myself—”

“Reporting Evelyn already dead.”

“Lorene, with that much blood—”

“All right, go on,” I said, this time wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.

“So then I ran back to the apartment to see if I could do anything about the bleeding before the ambulance got there, and she was dead.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“A twenty-two. A crummy little R.G., I think. I saw it when we were fighting over it. I never looked at it afterwards — I didn’t want to — but I’m pretty sure it was an R.G.”

“Steve,” I pointed out, “that’s not murder. If it happened the way you said—”

“I never said it was murder. I said I killed her.”

“I’m not even sure of that, from what you’ve said. Anyway, let me get a typewriter in here and let’s get it down on paper. Do you mind if the sergeant sits in?”

“Not now.”

“Then why didn’t you want him to start with?”