Small Town

“That sounds like genuine imagination, not a memory slipping out the back door because your conscience has the front one blocked. John, I don’t think it proves anything. You know you were in her apartment, you know you were with her. You already knew that.”

“I didn’t know there were holes in my memory. I thought I was a little vague about leaving her place and getting back to mine, but if I was so far gone I picked this little critter up and brought him home without remembering any of it, I must have had a hole in my memory big enough to drive a truck through.”

Or stick your hands through, she thought, and fit them around a woman’s throat.

“If you’d found the rabbit the morning after...”

“And I could have, when I put my socks on. What would I have done? I’d have picked it up and stared at it and wondered where the hell it came from.”

“And when the cops came the first time?”

“They weren’t looking for the rabbit. Oh, would I have made the connection? I don’t know. I might have thought, oh, that’s where the damn thing came from. But I might just as easily have thought someone gave it to me years ago and I’d managed to forget the gift and the giver.”

“When they came back a second time—”

“The rabbit was listed on the search warrant. So what would I have done? Either pulled it out right away and showed it to them or prayed they wouldn’t find it. But all this is hypothetical. They didn’t find it, and I didn’t find it myself until long after they’d come and gone.”

“And now it’s eating up all your stone-ground cornmeal.”

“That’s why it stayed hidden until I got the big contract.”

“Why? Oh, then it knew you could afford to feed it.”

“You got it.”

She said, “John, everybody knows the Carpenter killed her. Maury told me they offered to let you walk. That was very brave, turning them down.”

“It shows moral strength if I didn’t do it. I’m not sure what it shows if I did.”

“If they had one more piece of evidence, one more link—”

“But they don’t.”

“The cleaning person, I forget his name...”

“Jerry Pankow. That looks like a link, but is it? The Carpenter reads the papers, he learns how this poor guy cleaned up the crime scene and then discovered the body. Let’s give him a few more to find, he says to himself. Let’s see what other potential crime scenes he cleans. That might appeal to his sense of humor.”

“You think he has one?”

“The nail in that woman’s forehead in Brooklyn? Call me the Carpenter and I’ll sign my work for you. Yes, I think he has a sense of humor. He’s not the Joker, laughing at Batman while he terrorizes Gotham City, but he’s got a sense of humor.”

“Couldn’t the same sense of humor lead him to take something from her apartment and put it here?”

“Toward what end? So the cops’ll think I did it? They think that already. Besides, I’m a light sleeper. And he’d have had to break in while I was sleeping, because the rest of the time I was holed up here.”

“You left a few times.”

“Only a very few, and only briefly. How would he get in the door? He’s the Carpenter, not the Locksmith.”

“Do you always double-lock your door?”

“Except when I forget. Okay, I could have forgotten, or not bothered if I was only going to be gone for a minute, and yes, it locks when you pull it shut, but if you know what you’re doing you can open it with a credit card. I used to do it myself when I forgot and locked myself out.”

“So he could have done that. You used to do it? But then you stopped locking yourself out?”

He laughed. “Well, no, once in a while I’m lost in thought and go out for cigarettes with my keys still on the dresser. Another thing I don’t have to worry about now that I’m an ex-smoker.”

“But when you did lock yourself out, then what?”

“There’s a key under the mat.”

“Which the Carpenter could have used.”

“If he thought to look there. Susan, come on. Remember Occam’s razor?”

“From college, but I forget what it is.”

“A philosophical principle. When you hear hoofbeats, don’t look around for zebras. Because it’s probably horses. That’s my example, not that of the bishop of Occham, but you get the idea. When there’s a simple and obvious explanation, it’s generally on the money.”

She nodded slowly, looked at the rabbit in the palm of her hand. She asked if anyone else had seen it. No one, he said. She alone had been in his apartment since the rabbit turned up.

“And you’re the only person I’ve said a word to. You notice I checked first to make sure you weren’t wearing a wire.”

“Checked very thoroughly, too.”

“Well, you can’t be too careful.”

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you...

She said, “John? Thank you.”

“For letting you know you might be sleeping with a murderer?”

“I already knew that.”

She closed her fingers around the rabbit, reached out with her other hand to touch him. She had to have her hand on him while she said this.

She said, “I told you everything about myself, all the fucking, all the weird shit in my mind. But I held one thing back.”

“You don’t have to—”