Time to Murder and Create

"The hell," he said, "it's the cop in me, I want to get to the bottom of things.

No offense, I hope."

"None at all," I said. I don't suppose I sounded very convincing.

"They probably hauled Ethridge out of bed by now. I'll get back and see what she's got to say. It should make good listening. Or maybe they didn't haul her out of bed. These pictures, you'd have more fun hauling her into bed than out. Ever get any of that, Scudder?"

"No."

"I wouldn't mind a taste myself. Want to come back to the station house with me?"

I didn't want to go anywhere with him. I didn't want to see Beverly Ethridge.

"I'll pass," I said. "I've got an appointment."

Chapter 17

I spent half an hour under the shower with the spray as hot as I could stand it. It had been a long night, and the only sleep I'd had had been when I dozed off briefly in Birnbaum's chair. I had come close to being killed, and I had killed the man who'd been trying for me. The Marlboro man, John Michael Lundgren. He'd have been thirty-one next month. I would have guessed him at younger than that, twenty-six or so. Of course, I'd never seen him in particularly good light.

It didn't bother me that he was dead. He had been trying to kill me and had seemed pleased at the prospect. He had killed Spinner, and it wasn't unlikely that he'd killed other people before. He might not have been a pro at killing, but it seemed to be something he enjoyed. He certainly liked working with the knife, and the boys who like to use knives usually get a sexual thrill out of their weaponry.

Edged weapons are even more phallic that guns.

I wondered if he'd used a knife on Spinner. It wasn't inconceivable. The Medical Examiner's office doesn't catch everything. There was a case a while ago, a then-unidentified floater they fished out of the Hudson, and she was processed and buried without anyone's noticing that there was a bullet in her skull.

They found out only because some yoyo severed her head before burial. He wanted the skull for a desk ornament, and ultimately they found the bullet and identified the skull from dental records and found out the woman had been missing from her home in Jersey for a couple of months.

I let my mind wander with all these thoughts because there were other thoughts I wanted to avoid, but after half an hour I turned off the shower and toweled myself off and picked up the phone and told them to hold my calls, and to put me down for a wake-up call at one sharp.

Not that I expected to need the call, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep. All I could do was stretch out on the bed and close my eyes and think about Henry Prager and how I had murdered him.

* * *

HENRY Prager.

John Lundgren was dead and I had killed him, had broken his neck, and it did not bother me at all,

because he had done everything possible to earn that death. And Beverly Ethridge was being grilled by the police, and it was very possible that they would wind up with enough on her to put her away for a couple of years. It was also possible that she would beat it, because there probably wasn't all that much of a case, but either way it didn't matter much, because Spinner would have his vengeance. She could forget about her marriage and her social position and cocktails at the Pierre. She could forget about most of her life, and that didn't bother me either, because it was nothing she didn't deserve.

But Henry Prager had never killed anybody, and I had pressured him enough to make him blow his brains out, and there was really no way I could justify that. It had bothered me enough when I'd believed him guilty of murder. Now I knew he was innocent, and it bothered me infinitely more.

Oh, there were ways to rationalize it. Evidently his business had turned sour.

Evidently he had made a lot of bad financial judgments recently. Evidently he had been up against several different kinds of walls, and evidently he had been a marginal manic-depressive with suicidal tendencies, and that was all well and good, but I had put extra pressure on a man who was in no position to handle it and that had been the last straw, and there was no rationalizing my way out of that one, because it was more than coincidence that he had picked my visit to his office to put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

I lay there with my eyes closed and I wanted a drink. I wanted a drink very badly.

But not yet. Not until I kept my appointment and told an up-and-coming young pederast that he didn't have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars, and that if he could just fool enough of the people enough of the time he could go right ahead and be governor.