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

“Because I knew he wouldn’t believe me. You might. And the reason — it doesn’t make sense to me, so why should it to him? And if I started crying — Lorene, I knew he was going to watch and listen anyway.” He looked bitterly at the one-way window. “But if I started crying at least I wouldn’t have to look at him watch me.” Not totally unpredictably, he did start crying then. “I just wish I’d known she hated me that much — she talked about it, but I thought at least half of it was talk — there should have been something I could do, even if it was only get the hell out of there—”

“Steve,” I said, “she could have left if she’d wanted to. Couldn’t she?”

“Yeah. She had money. She had charge cards. She could have found a job in a bigger town, easy. And — I wouldn’t have gone chasing after her to bring her back. And she sure as hell knew that.”

“Now can he go home?” I asked thirty minutes later, as Sergeant Collins looked with some visible satisfaction at the written and signed statement.

“Go home? Hell, no, he can’t go home.”

“Why not?”

“This is a very pretty fairy tale.” Collins laid the paper down on his desk. “But the woman was shot once with a thirty-eight. There wasn’t even a twenty-two in the room. And no bullet holes in there either, except the one in her.”

“Maybe the other bullets went out the window. And there are R.G. thirty-eights. Maybe he was mistaken.”

“You’re telling me an FBI agent can’t tell the difference between a twenty-two and a thirty-eight?”

“You ever look at a gun from the front end?” I asked softly. “I mean, a gun in business, not one that you’re cleaning? A twenty-two looks like a cannon.”

He looked at me. “You know?”

“I know.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll have to take your word for it. But there wasn’t an R.G. thirty-eight in there either. There was no gun of any description whatsoever except his service revolver. And it’s an apartment. There aren’t any windows in the living room that open, which means a bullet would have to break glass to go out, which means it didn’t happen because there’s no broken glass. And that service revolver, which he says hasn’t been fired since he cleaned it after going to the range two weeks ago, was lying on the couch with a fouled barrel. Oh yes, that phone. You can bet it was out of order. The wire was cut where it came into the house and taped back together... Now would you like to go break the news to your buddy that I’m taking out a warrant for him for capital murder?”

I let myself in with Steve’s key, which he had slipped into my hand while the sergeant was gone to get the warrant signed and nobody was watching from the other side of the fake mirror. Then he’d laughed at himself, because he didn’t have to give me the key so stealthily and because there were other things he had to give me too, things that couldn’t be hidden.

The stench of blood, of death, hung over the room. I told myself it was a crime scene, no more than a crime scene. I knew crime scenes; I’d coped with plenty of them. I’d read the reports, and I knew nothing had been carried away except the body and the revolver.

I also knew I was breaking the rules, and I didn’t care. It was only department rules, not the ones that matter.

No fingerprint powder, of course. Steve lived here, and there had been no reason to look for anybody else’s. A yellow chalk outline where the body had lain on its back on the beige carpet. Blood — it was a lot of blood; I’d seen shotgun killings bleed less than that. It appeared to me she’d fallen back on the couch bleeding and then rolled onto the floor still bleeding. If the bullet had cut an artery, and then her heart had gone on pumping even after her brain was dead — that happens, of course, I’d once seen a heart go on beating for half an hour after the brain had been literally blown out of the skull from a shotgun blast.

But I didn’t remember even that one having so much blood.

I forced my attention away, to the investigation I’d come here to do. What was that on the wall? If it was a bullet hole, to corroborate Steve’s story — no. Damn. Something waxy, like a kid’s crayon, except that it was pretty high for a kid to reach, and white besides.

“If I have to,” I’d told Steve, “I’ll work it all over there from the beginning on my own. But if I go over there, I’m going to search. Really.”

He’d answered, “Search,” and he’d known what I meant when I said it. He’d even insisted on signing a consent to search form, to make sure everything was legal — well, semi-legal; nobody had witnessed the document — even if it didn’t follow departmental rules.

I had to give him one more warning. “If you’re lying, Steve, I’ll find it out.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I want you to go.”