Burn

42

The roses on the iron trellis that was the entrance arch to the old apartment building on Fourteenth Street looked vividly red and fresh after last night’s rain. Carver noticed there was even a shallow, greenish layer of water on the bottom of the tile pond, as if the maimed and perpetually leaping concrete swordfish had at last found its element.

Willa Krull answered his knock in her usual fashion, by staring out through the crack available when she opened her door on the chain lock. Even through the narrow opening, Carver could smell the scent of gin. It wasn’t yet noon and she’d obviously been drinking heavily. She’d apparently been crying, too. The single red-rimmed eye that peered out at him was open barely wide enough to see.

“Sorry, don’ wanna talk to anyone today,” she said.

He unobtrusively moved the tip of his cane forward so she wouldn’t be able to close the door. She was going to hear what he had to say, even if he had to tell her standing there in the hall. “I just came from Marla Cloy’s house.”

“What’s left of it, you mean.”

“I know most of what happened,” he said.

“’Course. It was in the papers, on the TV news. And you were there, right?”

“You were there, too.”

She didn’t say anything. The eye didn’t change.

“Am I coming in?” Carver asked.

She nodded. He moved the cane out of the way quickly as she closed the door to remove the chain, then opened it just wide enough for him to enter.

She looked even worse than she had the last time he’d seen her, like someone who’d gotten dressed in a hurry at gunpoint. She was wearing wrinkled jeans that made her bony figure appear even more angular, and a stained white blouse that was buttoned crookedly. Her mousy hair was in disarray as usual. She was barefoot and holding a cracked water tumbler with ice and gin in it.

Carver moved past her into the apartment. The place was a mess. Unfolded and creased newspapers were scattered on the floor, as if she’d been reading the news so frenetically she hadn’t had time to refold the pages. Her gun magazines were littered over the coffee table, next to an almost empty gin bottle. Carver saw that the display case with the Russian handgun was gone from the wall. Only the plastic crucifix remained.

Willa closed the door and reattached the chain lock. Then she walked unsteadily to the center of the room, not seeming to notice that one foot was on the front page of the Gazette-Dispatch, and stood staring at him. She unconsciously waved the glass around as she talked, almost spilling out gin. “You said I was someplace you were last night.” A note of fear rang in her voice; the booze couldn’t insulate her from reality completely.

“Where’s the Russian handgun?” he asked, motioning with his head toward the faint, clean rectangle on the wall where the gun’s case had been.

“What’s the difference?”

He drew the 7.62-millimeter shell casing from his pocket and held it up for her to see. “I found this on Marla’s front porch this morning.”

She stared at it, her pinched features screwing up in fear, then in desperate defiance. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not without the gun.”

“That’s true,” Carver agreed. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Three reasons. You’re safe from the law. I need to know. And most of all, you need to tell somebody.”

She stared at the floor, then tugged at a strand of her lank hair and laughed sadly. “She liked me, too, you know. No, it was much more than that. We were fond of each other as more than friends.”

“I know.”

“She told me she was going to leave me. For a man. She didn’t tell me his name.”

“You had to know it wasn’t Brant.”

“Of course.”

“Then how did it happen?”

“The evening of-the evening after she told me she was going to Orlando so she’d be safe, Brant came here. I’d never seen him, didn’t know who he was. But he was sneaky. He used a different name, acted as if he and Marla were close. He told me he was searching for her, had to find her. What was I supposed to think? I figured he was the one Marla was leaving me for. He wouldn’t have known about us, wouldn’t have dreamed he wasn’t the only one with a relationship with Marla.”

“You were jealous of him,” Carver said.

“Oh, I was more than jealous. I wanted to kill him. To kill both of them. I’m not-I mean, Marla was the first woman I’d ever been intimate with. She needed money and I worked free for her, did anything for her. Maybe she was only using me, but it killed me that she was deserting me for one of them … a man. I phoned her in Orlando and arranged to meet her at her house that night, told her it was important. I took Brant with me, still not knowing who he really was, thinking he was Marla’s other lover. I didn’t find out I was wrong until the next day.”

“Wasn’t Marla surprised to see Brant when she opened her door? Didn’t she say anything?”

“She was astounded, but I thought it was the shock of seeing me with the man she was leaving me for. She just stood there with her mouth open, and as soon as we were in the house, I shot both of them to death before I could change my mind. She never really had time to do anything but stammer. I used the Tokarev because I knew it would be difficult to trace, and I could dispose of it without arousing suspicion or having to replace it. Then I fired some rounds with the gun I’d talked Marla into buying and knew she kept in her nightstand, hoping that in the aftermath of the fire it would appear the two of them had become locked in a struggle for it and killed each other in a burst of gunfire.”

“The thirty-two-caliber revolver the police found,” Carver said.

“Yes. I meant for them to find it. I thought if the fire was hot enough, the bullets would melt and become misshapen so there couldn’t be any ballistic tests, and the police would think they all could have come from Marla’s gun. After planting the gun, I went outside and got the spare gasoline can I kept in my car.”

“You left the can behind, along with the brass casing from the Russian gun.”

“I’m not an experienced arsonist, Mr. Carver. I was planning as I went. The flames shot up faster than I imagined and I panicked and ran. I didn’t realize until later I’d dropped the gas can in my flight. And I thought I’d picked up all the 7.62-millimeter shells ejected by the Tokarev. But I counted them later and realized I’d missed one.”

“You’re not an experienced killer, either,” Carver said.

“Experienced now,” she said sadly, and shivered.

“Tell me the truth about Marla and Brant,” Carver said. “Was he really stalking her?”

Willa seemed to be talking to the floor, her head still bowed, her voice a dull monotone. “No. Marla was rejected by her adoptive family, especially her father, and it left a void and a restlessness in her, a yearning. She told me once she’d been molested by her father, but she never talked about it again. She’s a journalist and knows how to do research, so she decided to find her real family. She contacted Portia Brant and identified herself as her sister shortly before Portia’s death. Portia was frightened, and because Marla was her sister she confided in her. She told Marla she suspected Joel was planning to murder her for her life insurance money so he could pay off gambling debts.”

“That’s Marla’s version. Did you believe her?”

“Of course. But before Marla could learn more, Portia was dead. Marla did some investigating. She was sure the air bag on the passenger side of the Brants’ car had been tampered with so it inflated a precious second too late after impact. The driver would be relatively safe in a head-on collision, but the passenger would die.”

“Why didn’t she go to the police?”

“She probably would have, but while she was considering it, the salvage yard crushed the car and destroyed the evidence.”

“So Marla decided to avenge her sister’s death,” Carver said. “She was going to murder Joel Brant by setting him up, convincing the police he was fixated on her and stalking her, so she could make it look as if she’d killed him in self-defense.”

“Marla was the one with the fixation,” Willa said. “She lived with the conviction that Joel Brant had murdered her sister, but she did nothing about it. Then, three months ago, a woman named Gail she was involved with in Orlando died in a fire. First her sister, then her lover, gone. I think that’s when Marla became mentally unhinged with grief and obsessed with Joel Brant’s execution. She never called it murder. She was going to shoot him. I gave her the gun, taught her how to use it. I guess I was going to be a murderer either way.” She raised her head and stared at him beseechingly, as if she craved absolution. He couldn’t give it to her. “Do you understand now?” she asked.

He nodded silently.

She saw that he wasn’t going to forgive her. “I’m basically a good person,” she said, her voice an agony of guilt and a plea for understanding if not mercy. “Deeply religious.” She glanced with a terrible longing at the crucifix on the wall. “A good person. Nothing like any of this ever happened to me before. I lost my way. I only made one, horrible mistake that I’ll never be free of inside. But I disposed of the murder gun, and the shell casing you found doesn’t mean anything by itself. There’s no way you can prove what I just told you. No way a jury could convict me even I did have to go to trial.”

He knew she was right.

About everything but justice.

“In your case,” he said, “I don’t think it matters about the law or the jury.”

He gently removed from her hand the half-full glass of gin that was tilting sharply and about to spill, then he placed it next to the bottle on the table. On a glossy copy of Shooter’s World.

Then he left her to the truth.