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

Evelyn Lying There by Anne Wingate

The authenticity of Anne Wingate’s police stories is a legacy of the seven years she herself spent in law enforcement before taking a PhD. in English literature and pursuing her dual career as professor and writer. The author now lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and four children...

When you see an FBI agent and two detectives coming in the door of the police station, you figure they’re working on something.

At least, I did, and I said, “Hi, Steve.”

For a minute he looked as if he didn’t even recognize me — no wonder, in this dumb uniform, and after all, I knew he was here but he didn’t know I was here. He’d had no reason to know. But it had only been seven months, and after a moment his eyes focused on me and he said, “Lorene?”

Then he stopped, so suddenly one of the detectives bumped into him, and said, “Are you working here now?”

I started to say yes, but before I quite got the words out one of the detectives growled, “Come on, Hallett,” which didn’t sound too friendly to me, and Steve and the detectives went on.

I headed for the master room to sort out my paperwork, angry tears stinging the back of my eyes. Seven months ago I could have said, “What’ve you got?” and he’d have told me and we’d have talked it over. Or, more likely, he’d have said, “Lorene, come help me with this, would you?”

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, and no use reminding myself that life isn’t usually. Then I’d been a detective myself, four hundred miles away, but Allen had been transferred, and after all, I was Allen’s wife even if I was beginning, off and on, to wonder if I really wanted to be. So I’d come here, too, and started over as a rookie in this two-bit department, doing routine door-shaking and writing parking tickets, because I was the first female officer this small town had had and they didn’t know what to do with me, never mind that it had been eight years since I’d written a parking ticket or shaken a door.

And to really top things off, Allen and I wound up divorced after all and he’d gone off somewhere else, leaving me stuck here with this Mickey Mouse job and no way at all to go home and no use anyway, they’d filled my slot by now.

And Steve... well, if he hadn’t been married, it would have been very nice to know Steve was here, because let’s face it, he’s an interesting guy, but he was most thoroughly married and the FBI frowns on its agents playing around.

So I went on sorting parking tickets, and never mind the tears in my eyes. Policemen can cry in uniform if they want to. Policewomen can’t.

“Lorene?”

“Sir?” I answered mechanically, before looking up at Sergeant Collins. Detective sergeant, not uniform sergeant.

“Do you know Stephen Hallett?”

“Yes, sir, why?” Was there some reason why I shouldn’t?

“What do you know about him?” Collins sat down companionably on the corner of the table, but his posture was anything but relaxed.

“What do you mean, what do I know? I know a lot of stuff.”

“Tell me some of it.”

“Well, he’s a super-good investigator, one of the best I ever met from the FBI. I mean — oh, you know, most of them don’t really—”

“Investigate. I know. Go on.”

“He’s a nice guy. By that I mean when he’s tired and cross he makes sure whoever’s around knows he’s cross because he’s tired, not because somebody did something. But he doesn’t get cross much.”

“What about his personal life?”

I shrugged. “He’s married. So was I, then.”

“What kind of marriage?”

“Why on earth do you want to know that?”

“Because two hours ago he called 911 and said, ‘You better send somebody out here. I think I just killed my wife.’ And we did, and he had. Now, what kind of marriage?”

Numbly, I bent over to pick up the ticket book I seemed unaccountably to have dropped on the floor. “Okay,” I said, with, I suppose, some vague hope that telling the truth would help him, “okay, okay — kind of marriage. They — I don’t know, Steve isn’t the sort of person to go around crying on people’s shoulders, but I had the feeling it — just wasn’t working, not as a marriage anyway. The only time he said anything to me, we were talking one day and he’d just lost one in court that he should have won, and I said he must have had a lousy jury. And he said he wished Evelyn would say that, but she’d probably just say he was stupid, so he wouldn’t tell her about it at all. And one day — the guys were talking. We had a series-type rapist, and you know how guys talk, and they’d forgotten I was there. Steve said the rapist was getting more than he was. So I said since he was married he ought to be able to solve that problem, and he sort of grinned, but his eyes looked — funny.”

Sergeant Collins looked at the table, and then he got off it and quit trying to pretend we were buddies. “You like him?” he asked, standing straight beside me.

“I like him.”

“Even if he did kill his wife?”

“I don’t know that he killed his wife.”

“He says he did.”

“I still don’t know that he did. Why did you come tell me this anyway? I’m no detective, not here, not now.”

“Because,” Sergeant Collins said, “he says he’ll sign a rights waiver and tell what happened if he can tell you, and only if. Will you get a statement from him?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll tape-record it. Be sure you understand that. Just because he’s your friend doesn’t mean—”

“Look,” I flared at him, “I’m not going to cover up for him and he knows it and he wouldn’t ask me to. And if you feel that way, you’d better sit in on it.”

“Not necessary,” Collins said. “But what I’m afraid of is — he’s smart. You know that. And I’m afraid he’ll on purpose blurt out something as soon as you go in, because he knows you, and then turn around later and claim he wasn’t advised of his rights. So I told him, and I’m telling you, that if either of you says one damn word to the other, even if it’s just hello, before I get that tape recorder turned on, you go right back out the door. And I want the rights waiver signed before I leave the room.”

“You should have already got it signed,” I pointed out not very politely.

Collins sighed, deliberately audibly. “We got one at the scene. But I don’t want him to be able to claim later he was too shocky to know what he was signing. So we get another one signed now.”

“Right,” I said, wondering why he was sounding so belligerent to me. I hadn’t done anything, after all... But then I stopped wondering and followed him into the little interrogation room that looked just exactly like the one at home. Steve was sitting in that straight chair that’s always reserved for suspects, the chair that’s not quite uncomfortable, but certainly not quite comfortable either.

He looked just the way he always looked, his coat neat and his tie straight, but his eyes when he turned toward me seemed almost as empty as his holster. Don’t speak, I reminded myself, but impulsively I reached for his hand. He looked startled. Then, with a long shuddering sigh, he leaned forward, pulling me toward him, burying his face in the blue serge of my shirt. Unexpectedly, I found my hands on his shoulders.

Dragging my hands away, Sergeant Collins caught him by the left shoulder and shoved him back into the chair. “Take off your gunbelt,” he ordered me curtly. “Put it in my office.”

“Right,” I said, seething inside. What did he expect, that Steve was going to grab my pistol and use it to escape? But then I glanced at Steve and realized that was exactly what Sergeant Collins expected, and Steve realized that even if I didn’t. So I walked out the door and into the small office next to it, took off my black basketweave belt, wrapped it around my still-holstered revolver, laid it on Sergeant Collins’s desk, and returned, to smile at Steve with one corner of my mouth. He lifted an eyebrow at me and tried to smile back, but he kept both hands on the table, quite still.

The tape recorder was running now. Sergeant Collins gave the date. “Offense, homicide,” he said. “Victim, Evelyn Hallett. Suspect, Stephen Hallett. Interviewer, Policewoman Lorene Taylor. Now, go ahead.” He shoved the rights waiver over to me. Apparently I was in charge of getting it signed. He hadn’t mentioned that before.

I looked over at Steve, wondering how I was supposed to handle this if I was also not supposed to say one word until after the rights waiver was signed, and then I slid it on over to Steve. He looked at it, looked at the tape recorder, and looked back at me.

This was assuming the proportions of surrealism. It was some kind of bloody awful, rotten joke. Steve and I together had read people their rights; we’d worked together on a lot of cases. In a town just big enough to have two or three federal agents, but not big enough for a regular field office, the federal agents rely on local police support. I hate this, I thought bitterly, and then reminded myself that Steve undoubtedly was hating it a lot more. So I made the little speech, winding up with the usual “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Stupid question. This guy had a law degree. “Yes, I do.” Very formal. Steve’s voice, the first time I’d heard it in seven months, oddly husky, but with his usual strength.

“Do you wish to give up the right to remain silent?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then sign right there, please.”

Sergeant Collins signed under Steve and then departed, closing the door very quietly. I wondered who he thought he was kidding. I’d already noticed that the “mirror” in this holding room was a window from Sergeant Collins’s office, and Steve certainly knew it, too. Anybody who didn’t realize Sergeant Collins was putting that window into use — well, that person hadn’t been in police work as long as I had.

But of course I had to pretend I didn’t know it, and so did Steve. “What happened?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, swallowed, reopened his eyes. “I killed Evelyn.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He paused, as if to think about it, and his voice sounded rambling as he began to reply. “I’m six foot three. She’s — she was — five foot two and ninety-five pounds... I don’t know why, Lorene. I shouldn’t have — I shouldn’t have needed to.”

“Did you need to?”

“I guess I must have.” The voice wondering as well as wandering. “I did, didn’t I? So I guess I must have needed to, or at least I thought then I did.”

I know how to question prisoners. You don’t show any impatience, you take as long as it takes, you ask questions right — but this wasn’t just any prisoner hauled in off the street, this was Steve. “Look, darn it,” I said, “I don’t know anything at all about this except they told me to come in here and take a statement from you, and Steve, you ought to have sense enough to know I’m confused enough as it is. Now, will you for cryin’ out loud tell me what happened?”

He jumped as if I’d awakened him from a half-sleep, and tears began to form in his eyes as if only his daze had kept them at bay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I... look, I’m sorry, Lorene, I just — they’re out there at my house, the crime-scene people, and — Evelyn’s just lying there and they say they won’t move her for hours, and I never worked a killing for cryin’ out loud, but how they can just leave her — and they brought me up here and — and — they won’t even put a sheet over her, and I... I quit loving her a long time ago but I did love her once— It’s Evelyn, and she’s dead — like that — and they won’t even cover her up.”

“You’re not there to see it.”

“But I know.”

“All right,” I said. “I have worked killings, and I wouldn’t move her yet either. And I never covered up a corpse in my life, unless it was outside. You’ve worked crime scenes. To them this is just another crime scene. Now will you please tell me—”

“All right. All right.” Oddly, reminding him it was just another crime scene seemed to calm him a little. “I was working on a— You don’t need to know that.”

Bureau security, even now, I thought irrelevantly.

“Anyhow, I was working and I called my office to check in and they said Evelyn wanted me to call her, and I did. She asked me to come home for lunch. I didn’t know why. We hadn’t been getting along very well, and we’d agreed, oh, a year or so ago, that when I got transferred she’d just stay there. The only reason she changed her mind and came with me after all, when I did get transferred last month, was she’d lost her job about then and thought maybe she could find one here. Did you know I was here?” he asked irrelevantly.

“Yes. I saw you three weeks ago.”

“How come you didn’t yell at me or something, when I didn’t see you?”

“Why should I?”

He looked hurt. “I thought we were friends.”

“Then how come you didn’t know where I went?”

“I was out of town for a trial,” he said. “And when I got back, I... when I got back I went in the detective bureau and was talking to people and you weren’t there and I figured you were on leave or something. But you kept on not being there. And then I asked Ransom where you were and he said, ‘Gone.’ I said, ‘Gone where?’ and he said, ‘She’s not with us anymore.’ He acted like he didn’t know where you went. Or didn’t want to tell me. And so I shut up. I’d have found out if I needed to, but I didn’t, and I figured if you didn’t tell me you must not want me to know. So—”

He shut up suddenly, tightening his lips together, as if by doing that he could stop the slow drip of tears from his eyes.

“I wanted you to know,” I said, afraid even that was saying too much. “But right now—” I nodded to the tape recorder.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Today. Right. She, uh, she thought she could find a job here but she didn’t. At least not yet.”

“Go on.”

“So I didn’t know why she wanted me home for lunch.” He shook his head. “That doesn’t connect, does it, Lorene? What I mean is, she didn’t love me, she didn’t even like me anymore, so why the hell did she want to have lunch with me? But I had time, and so I said okay. When I got there she was lying on the couch; that was nothing new, she’d been doing that a lot lately. She said, ‘Hi, Steve,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Evie,’ and I turned around to lay my pistol on top of the bookcase just like I always do first thing when I get home, and then when I turned back toward her she had a pistol in her hand.”

“Yours?”

“No, I don’t have but the one. I don’t know where she got it from. I’d never seen it before. I asked her what she was doing and she said — real conversational, like she was telling me what the weather was — she said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ So I thought she’d been drinking again — she’d been drinking a lot the last few months, claiming it was because she had a headache, like there was anybody in the world could drink that much and not have a headache — and I said, ‘I’ll come back later when you’re sober,’ and I started to head for the door.”

“Without your gun.”

“Yeah. Like that would really make any big difference. How often do I need a gun? So I started to head for the door, and she shot at me.” It was evident the memory was still more startling to him than frightening. “That’s the only time I’ve ever been shot at. She missed, of course. She’s... she was — a very bad shot. I’d tried to teach her, back before we got married.”

“Where’d the slug hit?”

“I didn’t notice. Somewhere high to my right, I think.”

“Too scared to notice?”

“Too startled. I didn’t have the time to get scared till later. You know.”

Of course he was right. I did know. “Then what?”

“Then of course I asked her why she did that, and she said, ‘You aren’t leaving this room.’ I asked why again, and she told me. In... in somewhat thorough detail, only none of it made sense.”

“In what way?” He shook his head instead of answering, and I said, “Steve, you’re going to have to tell me.”

“She said—” He shook his head again. “Look, I told you we weren’t getting along. And so we weren’t sleeping together. And I’m not saying it was all her fault but it damn sure wasn’t all mine either. Things like that just happen. That’s why divorce courts stay full.” He paused; I wondered if he’d decided that was all he was going to say.

The pause continued, and I said, “I know. I’ve been in one myself lately. Go on.”

“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?”

“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.”

So I was here, in a two-bedroom apartment. There was nothing in the living room of great interest. A beige couch, unimaginative decorator style, the kind rental places supply, with no cushions except those that came with it. No plants, no china ornaments, no pictures on the walls. End tables, chairs — Steve, unlike most men with whom I’d come in contact, didn’t have a recliner, not that that meant anything. Stereo, TV, a few books.

Most of the little that was in the room looked as if it was Evelyn’s. Some college textbooks, her diploma and transcripts lying on an end table, dust on top of them as if they’d been lying there for several weeks. Well, of course she was job hunting, but what a funny double major, drama and political science. I couldn’t imagine what kind of work she’d done — or expected to do — with that combination.

I made myself dig down in the sides and back of the chair despite the lack of plastic gloves and my own squeamishness, which has, for I hope obvious reasons, become more pronounced of late. I might as well not have bothered; all I found was a balloon and a fingernail file, both very bloody. Laying them down, I went to wash my hands. The bathroom off the hall was just a bathroom. A toothbrush, an electric razor, pre-shave and aftershave lotion, towels and washcloths and soap. This must be Steve’s bathroom. Evelyn must have used the one off the master bedroom.

Bedrooms. Master bedroom first. King-size bed, unmade. Dresser — I wasn’t used to crime scenes involving my friends, and this felt more like prying than investigating. But I found no gun hidden in Steve’s underwear, or in Evelyn’s, or in the bathroom, which contained talcum powder, Lady Shave, bubble bath, and a lot of makeup, most of it dusty, as if it hadn’t been used in weeks.

The smaller bedroom, Steve’s, I suppose, was mostly filled with boxes, still unpacked, many of them taped shut. A single bed, sheet thrown back, with a man’s undershirt and a towel lying on it, and an alarm clock and a shoeshine kit (not dusty) on the table beside it. A few of Steve’s clothes had been in the second closet in the larger room, but most of them were in here. No dresser, which explained why his underwear was in Evelyn’s dresser. The boxes of .38 wadcutters on a closet shelf, right beside the box of .38 copper jackets was totally expected; Steve was conscientious about going to the firing range two or three times a month.

The boxes were all neatly labeled — books, dishes, theatrical props — for all that meant, and some of them appeared, from the condition of the tape, never to have been unpacked even the last time they had moved.

I went back into the living room. A stereo cabinet full of records — I wonder, I thought, and knelt in front of it.

“Looking for something, Lorene?”

It was at that moment — until I realized it was Sergeant Collins behind me, speaking to me, and my heart slowed its gallop just a little bit — that I realized what people meant when they said they nearly jumped out of their skin.

“I expected to find you over here, as soon as we booked him in and found out his door key was gone. Still convinced he didn’t do it?”

“I can see why you think he did do it,” I said, “but he didn’t. Though I’ll agree his version isn’t accurate either.”

“He did shoot her, Lorene, there’s no getting around that.”

“I’m even beginning to doubt that.”

“Look, I’d be willing to agree maybe there was some kind of struggle, only not quite the way he tells it. Or I’d be willing to agree she somehow goaded him into shooting her, and he’s scared to admit it. Or I’d be willing to agree he’s so shook up he doesn’t even really know what happened. But if the first is true, then where the hell is the twenty-two? And if the second is true, then why is he telling such a silly story? And if the third is true — and it’s really the most likely — then why does he go on insisting he’s telling the exact truth?”

“The way I see it,” I replied, “is that if what he thinks happened didn’t, and if what you think happened didn’t, then there should be something here to say what did happen. And for starts, I’m looking for that twenty-two.”

“You really believe him, don’t you?” Collins said.

“Yes. I do.”

“And you know him. I don’t, not really. But you’re telling me somebody like you and me, somebody that carries a pistol all the time, isn’t capable of killing?”

“I didn’t say that.” My head was aching abominably. “I’m sure he’s capable of killing — just like you and me. If it had been the way he told it, yes, that could happen. Or even, if he’d shot back reactively when she shot at him, that could happen, but he wouldn’t lie about it. But — what you say happened — that’s not killing. That’s murder. And no. He’s not capable of that. And what are you doing here?”

“Search warrant,” Collins said, waving it at me. “Because I got to thinking. You believe him. And you’re a good cop.”

“Somebody noticed?”

“Somebody noticed. And I’ll admit I don’t know the man and you do, and sometimes I do jump to conclusions. He’s got to be smart to have the job he has, and a smart man isn’t going to think we’d mistake a thirty-eight slug for a twenty-two. Even if he panicked, he’d tell a better lie than that. And if he was too shocky to remember what happened, he’d admit it. So — I want to know what really happened.”

“He’s shocky,” I said. “But he knows what he did and what he saw. So...” I broke off, turned back to my search.

Sergeant Collins leaned forward. “Back up, that record you just tipped out, what’s—”

I was way ahead of him, and I intercepted his hand, automatically taking command of the scene because I’d done it so many times before. “Don’t touch it until I’ve photographed it.”

It was an R.G. twenty-two. It contained two rounds, both empty. Sergeant Collins, holding it gingerly, so as not to disturb fingerprints, sniffed at it. “Umm-hmm,” he said.

“I told you—”

“All right, you told me, but the fact remains she was killed with a thirty-eight and it’s about a hundred percent sure it was his. Anyhow, if that gun was fired in here, where’d the bullets go? For that matter, where’d they come from? I didn’t find any twenty-two ammo here, and if you had, you’d have told me already.”

I looked slowly around the room, up at the ceiling, across the walls, down at the bloody mess on the couch and the floor, and quite suddenly I knew what happened, knew exactly what happened just as well as if I’d been here watching. Now all I had to do was prove it, but that depended on a lot of things. “Did they do a gunpowder residue on her hands?” I asked.

“No, just on his. Do you want one on her? You don’t usually get anything from a twenty-two, don’t you know that?”

“An R.G. you will,” I answered. “And you’re lucky if it’s not shaving lead.” I had a long scar across my thumb from test-firing a misaligned R.G. 22. I would not soon forget the gunpowder that accompanied the sliver of lead thrown backwards toward my hand.

“So you want me to have somebody—”

“Not now,” I said, standing again. “I’ll do it myself. Come on, I know what happened here. Have you got—” And I went on giving orders, as I had done for years up until seven months ago, and neither the sergeant nor I quite noticed. “I don’t know what kind of equipment you have here, do you have a trace-metal kit, because if you don’t we’re going to have to—”

“We have one,” Sergeant Collins said slowly, “but I don’t think I ever saw it used. What do you mean, you know what happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s get a gunpowder-residue kit and a trace-metal kit and go to the morgue.”

“What are you trying to prove?”

“You’d never believe me, so I’m just going to have to show you.”

“You want me to turn off all the lights in the morgue?” the attendant asked incredulously, thirty minutes later. “What are you, some kind of—” He shut up then, catching the sergeant’s eye fixed on him.

“After I spray this stuff on her hands and turn on the black light,” I said, “I sure do. Okay, now — look.”

In the darkness, the dead woman’s hands glowed eerily. On her right palm, outlined with the glow, were the initials “R.G.” from the metal inset on the plastic grips of an R.G. 22. And on her left palm, also glowing, was the horse insignia of a Colt .38. Her right index finger and left thumb both glowed with the outlines of triggers.

“She shot herself,” I said.

“But how?” Steve demanded an hour later, sitting at the sergeant’s desk in blue jail coveralls.

“Once we knew what we were looking for, it was easy to find,” I told him. “She knew theater. She knew props. You load a bullet with soft wax and a primer, and it makes a satisfactory pop and does little or no damage. In a box that had been opened and resealed, we found an entire case of prop bullets — and she’d used at least two. The wax was spattered on the wall about three feet from the front door, and on the ceiling above the couch. You can fill a balloon with animal blood and puncture it — we got the lab people out of bed, and they said the blood on the couch was beef blood.”

“But how—”

I went on to tell him how I’d pulled the balloon and the nail file she’d used to puncture it out from under the cushions. “She’d disabled the phone on purpose, after she called you. Her fingerprints were on the roll the tape came from; we found them as soon as we thought to look. She knew where you always put your gun when you came in. She knew how you’d react, thinking she was hurt. When you ran for the phone, she stuffed the balloon behind the sofa cushions and threw the twenty-two behind the records — it’s got her prints on it and nobody else’s. Then she grabbed your gun — her prints are on it too, overlaying yours — and sat on the couch facing in towards the back of it, held the pistol at arm’s length so there wouldn’t be muzzle burns and so that the gun would be on the couch when she landed on the floor, and pulled the trigger.”

“But why?” Steve demanded. “I mean— All right. I knew she was suicidal. That was why I wouldn’t have a pistol in the house other than mine, why I never left it where she could get it. And before she filled that prescription I called the doctor to be sure there wasn’t enough in it to be fatal. I wouldn’t have been surprised if — but — why in the hell would she want to set me up? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

I looked at Sergeant Collins, who stood abruptly and turned to look out the high barred window at the side of his desk. We’d argued about who was going to tell Steve the rest of it; neither of us wanted to.

“She hated you,” Collins said abruptly. “She hated you a lot more than you knew. As you said, she blamed you for her depression. And she wanted you to be as miserable as she’d been the last few years.”

“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “How do you know all this?”

“She kept a diary,” I said. “We found it. She blamed you — said she’d have been perfectly happy if—”

“If I’d been willing to live the way she wanted to live, yeah,” Steve said. “I heard that from her quite a few times — that, and I was boring and unimaginative— Oh hell. Thing is — I couldn’t live the way she wanted to. And the combination — she wanted to party every night and she wanted children and a decent job — all those don’t combine very well. Nobody has that much time. I wouldn’t do the partying, and she couldn’t find the job, and the children didn’t come. What was I supposed to do about all that?”

It made sense. It also sounded as if I had heard more than enough on this topic. “Steve,” I asked, “why did you say you killed her?”

“Because I thought it was the twenty-two. And big as I am, I ought to be able to take a gun away from a woman without hurting her. So — if I couldn’t — if I didn’t — then I thought I must’ve somehow subconsciously wanted to kill her.”

“Baloney,” I said. “I’d like to see either one of you take a gun away from me— Hey, I didn’t say both at once, dammit, give me back my gun!”

Sergeant Collins laid the pistol, which I continue to maintain he would never have gotten one on one, down on his desk. “Why did you tell me not to have them do a gunpowder residue on her, and then you went and did one?”

“Because you can do a trace metal first and then a gunpowder residue, but if you do it the other way around the acid in the gunpowder-residue kit destroys the trace metal and then you get a negative trace metal. Everybody knows that.” I wasn’t even ashamed of the smugness I could hear in my voice.

Both men were staring at me. “Everyone?” Stephen Hallett asked.