Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The Breaks by Timothy Williams

Short stories by Timothy Williams have previously appeared in several literary quarterlies, including the Greensboro, Colorado, and Texas Reviews;and his story “Something About Teddy” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). The author lives in western Kentucky, where he teaches English at a local college. This is his first contribution to EQMM.

The day that Willie Boyd died was as gray and tattered as the sheets on the motel bed where I found him. I stood outside room nineteen, smoking and watching sheets of rain roll towards the Mississippi while a couple of state troopers and a West Memphis homicide detective tromped around in the room, grousing about the late-November weather. This morning the Trucker’s Paradise Motor Lodge was short on bliss but loaded with truckers. Their eighteen-wheelers sat nose to tail in the parking lot like cattle heading through a slaughterhouse chute. One cockroach shy of being condemned, the motel’s coffee shop was packed with burly, pot-bellied long-haulers and truck-stop hookers who seemed to think white boots, pastel-colored miniskirts, and imitation-fur jackets were suitable breakfast attire. The rooms themselves offered vibrating beds, puke-stained carpets, rusted tubs, and “premium” pay-per-view cable that showed adult movies twenty-four hours a day. All in all, the Trucker’s Paradise seemed to be a suitable place for a man to die with a half-empty bottle of Gordon’s gin on the nightstand, a .22 revolver on the floor, and bullet holes in his chest and head.

I smoked one Kool to its butt and lit another, wondering idly if the ache in the pit of my stomach was grief. Then I decided that if I had to wonder, it probably wasn’t. Back in high school, Willie Boyd and I had been friends, but I’d turned forty-two just a couple of weeks earlier. High school seemed a lifetime away, and the freckled, undergrown kid we’d called Wee Willie at Southaven High didn’t have a lot in common with the pudgy, moon-faced corpse inside room nineteen.

The two state troopers stepped from the room, their felt hats in their hands, nodded briskly at me, and then hurried to the cruiser. They looked almost like identical twins with their brush cuts, broad shoulders, and narrow waists, and I wondered if there wasn’t a secret lab in the middle of Iowa where scientists genetically engineered batches of them at a time.

I pitched my cigarette away and stepped back into the room. Harry Jewell, a West Memphis homicide detective I’d worked with a few times before leaving the Memphis City Police to start my own private investigator’s office, grunted and shook his head.

“Bad Luck Boyd,” he said. “I reckon the poor bastard lived up to his name.”

“You knew him?”

“Every cop in the Tri-State area knew him. Not a bad guy, really, but his name’s always turning up in the Rolodexes of bookies and loan sharks.”

“People have Rolodexes these days?

“In computers, then. Way I’ve heard it, the guy hasn’t been on a winning streak since the first Bush was in the White House.”

“We called him Wee Willie in high school,” I said. “He was a runt but a tough runt, you know? Tried out for the football team in our freshman year and, Jesus, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred fifteen pounds.”

“How’d that work out?”

“He got knocked down a lot. Big guys loved to cream him.”

“But he got up?”

“He got up, spitting blood and dirt, lowered his head, and tried again. He finally ended up with a broken collarbone and a concussion.”

Jewell shook his elephantine head and grimaced. “He ain’t getting up this time. Bad Luck Boyd. The name fits,” he said sourly. “Looks like a professional hit, doesn’t it? One in the chest and one in the head, with a throwaway .22.” Jewell had a coughing fit and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “I’m taking this one personal, though. If the jerk had just shot Bad Luck once, I could have written this off as a suicide and been back in the office with a hot cup of coffee and a cheese Danish by now.” He shook his head. “Why in God’s name did Bad Luck drive across the bridge to get himself killed in my jurisdiction three weeks before I retire? And what in the hell are you doing here, Raines?”

“Willie was lying low over here, waiting for me to handle a problem. When I called his room a couple of times this morning and he didn’t answer, I got worried and decided to check up on him.”

“Oh yeah? Y’all were that close.”

“Used to be.”

Four days ago, Willie Boyd had walked into my office with change jingling in his pockets and a line of b.s. as long as an I-40 traffic jam trailing behind him. I’d heard bits of news and gossip about him over the years. Somehow Willie had managed to marry Linda Pate, a cheerleader and the dream girl of half the football team, the summer of our high-school graduation. That she’d settled on Willie seemed unbelievable. The fact that she hadn’t left him was nothing short of a miracle. I’d heard stories of his gambling — Willie being banned from the casinos down in Tunica; Willie dropping hundreds at the dog track; Willie taking loans and blowing the money on college football, professional baseball, and boxing. But until four days ago, I hadn’t really talked to him in twenty-four years.

“He was a client,” Jewell said. “Wife cheating on him?”

“No,” I said. “He needed protection.”

Jewell’s eyes twinkled. “Oh yeah? Looks like you did a real first-class job.” He coughed and then wheezed that he was just joking. “Who wanted to scramble Bad Luck’s eggs this time?”

“Ray Brady,” I said. “Willie was into him for seventy-five thousand.”

“Razor Ray Brady? Tell me you got something, Raines. Something that we could use to put that stone-cold psychopath away for good.”

“I’ve got a tape,” I said. “Willie wanted to wear a wire. He thought if he had Ray on tape threatening him it might buy him some time.” I shook my head at Willie’s wide-eyed, staring face. “Doesn’t seem like it worked.”

“Razor Ray, huh,” Jewell said. “I’ll be damned. Maybe old Bad Luck Boyd did me a favor after all.”

After I left Willie Boyd’s body to the West Memphis coroner’s boys and his soul to whatever spirit looks after chronic gamblers and hustlers, I drove back across the bridge into Memphis and then south to Mississippi and the Boyds’ two-story frame house just a few blocks from the neighborhood where Willie and I had grown up. With its green shutters and flecking paint and small yard, the house was indistinguishable from a dozen others on the block. Linda Pate had inherited the place from her mother twenty years ago, and as far as I knew, the house was the only thing Willie hadn’t managed to gamble away.

Linda answered the door so quickly that I thought she’d been waiting. She wore jeans and a sweater, had her jet-black hair pulled into a ponytail. Despite a handful of wrinkles and the bags under her eyes, she was as beautiful as she’d been in high school. From the bleariness of her eyes and the blankness of her expression, I knew that her phone had already rung.

“Charlie,” she said softly, as if it had only been a few days instead of a couple of decades since we’d last met. “Did you see him? He didn’t suffer, did he?”

“No,” I said. “It was quick.”

She nodded solemnly and then stepped back to let me inside. The house was warm and comfortable with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. I followed her to the kitchen and sat at the table while she filled two mugs and then stood still as if she’d momentarily forgotten what she was supposed to do next. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then turned around, a twitchy smile on her lips. She set my mug on the table and glanced at the refrigerator.

“There’s caramel coffeecake if you’d like some.” She frowned and shook her head. “I think there is, anyway. Eric’s seventeen now and eats like a couple of full-grown elephants. But I can check.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“Willie loved peaches, so I always tried to keep a couple of cans cold for when he came in late and wanted a snack. Three-quarters of the time, though, Eric would beat him to them.” She smiled. “Willie never complained. Not once. My dad would have hit the roof.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking that it was the most inadequate phrase in the English language. “I did what I could, but it wasn’t enough.”

She stared into her coffee for a second. “We all did what we could for Willie and it was never enough. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted to. You don’t have any idea how bad he wanted to stop. Nights he’d come home and sit at the table and weep.” She shook her head sadly. “He hated himself, Charlie. He never realized how good a man he was.”

“And you did?”

“It wasn’t easy sometimes. God, you have no idea what it’s like to cringe every time the phone rings or someone knocks on the door. I’ve been too ashamed to look my mailman in the eye for the last ten years.”

“Your mailman?”

“He knows how many final notices we’ve gotten, how many credit bureaus are chasing us. We’ve had three cars repossessed in the last five years.” She smiled. “Willie even pawned my vacuum cleaner. He got twenty-five bucks and hit the quarter slot machines in Tunica. He won that night, came home with three hundred and eighty dollars, and swore it was a sign that his luck was changing. But of course it never did.”

I asked how much Willie had told her about what was going on. Linda shrugged, traced the rim of her mug with a long red fingernail.

“Not a lot. He said that someone was threatening him and that he’d gone to you for help. Yesterday morning, he came in, packed an overnight bag, said he wanted to stay away from the house for a couple of days until you handled his problem. He said he didn’t think Eric and I were in danger, but he didn’t want to take the chance.” This time her smile was wan and bitter. “He told me not to worry, everything would work out fine.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“So what happened, Charlie? What was going on?”

I told her what I knew. A few days ago Willie had come to my office to ask a favor. He’d been on a hot streak, had left the dog track with close to five grand and then talked his way into a high-stakes craps game run by Ray Brady. The next thing Willie knew, it was six in the morning and he was seventy-five thousand dollars in the hole. Linda shuddered — at the size of the debt or the mention of Ray Brady or, most likely, at both. I didn’t tell her that Razor Ray Brady was the biggest and meanest of Memphis’s non-Sicilian bookies, pimps, and extortionists, or that he’d earned his nickname during his days as an enforcer for the Dixie Mafia, or that there were at least two dozen men walking around Memphis who resembled the title character in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein thanks to Ray’s fondness for straight razors. I could tell from the look on her face that I didn’t have to. Ray had been one grade ahead of us at Southaven High. He’d been a tall, husky kid with chronic acne and shifty eyes, and he’d been dangerous even back then. Ray sold pot and speed, pulled smash-and-grab jobs on the weekends, beat younger boys for their lunch money and the sheer pleasure of the act.

“I stopped by one of Ray’s clubs to talk with him, but he had me thrown out as soon as I mentioned Willie’s name. Then Willie suggested that he wear a wire so we could get Ray on tape threatening him. He called it an insurance policy. Afterwards, I called Ray, warned him that I had the tape and if anything happened to Willie it was going to the police. Evidently he didn’t listen.”

She closed her eyes. “Did you turn the tape over to the police?”

“A West Memphis homicide detective has it.” I glanced at my watch. “I’d say they were picking up Ray for questioning about now.”

“Thank God,” she said.

“If you need anything...” I said.

She shook her head. “We’ll survive,” she said. “Eric and I will get by. Willie knew that.” Then she stood and dumped the remains of her coffee down the drain. “I’ve got to get on with the business of doing that, Charlie. I’ve got phone calls to make and Eric will be home from school soon. There are a million things to do.”

I stood and kissed her cheek. On my way out of the kitchen, I turned to look back at her. Linda had sat down at the table, her head in her hands. She looked as if she might never move again.

By the time I made it to my office on Union, the rain was coming down harder and the wind gusting. The forecast called for temperatures to drop into the thirties, with freezing rain possible before morning. I killed the engine, stepped out into the rain, pulled my coat tighter against the wind, trying to shrug off the nagging feeling that something about Willie’s murder didn’t make sense. I was still trying when a black Lincoln pulled to a stop at the curb and splashed my ankles with water. The passenger’s door opened and a large blockheaded guy with a broad and grinning face stepped out.

“You want to take a ride with us, Mr. Raines?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Mickey. It’s been a long day.”

“Hey, Charlie,” Mickey Neal said. “That wasn’t a question, okay. Ray wants to talk with you.”

“He knows where my office is.”

Mickey shook his big head. “Please, Charlie. Let’s make this easy, okay? Just come talk with Ray.”

Thirty minutes later, we pulled off Brooks Road and into the parking lot of the Bottom’s Up Gentleman’s Club, a barnlike building with darkened windows and a flashing neon sign that promised the prettiest girls in Memphis. Razor Ray Brady ran a quarter of the illegal book in town, owned a half-dozen bars, a few bowling alleys, and a dry-cleaning franchise, but he spent three-quarters of his time in the strip bar, perched on a stool with a half-dozen G-string-wearing dancers on his arm. Ray claimed he liked the ambiance. I figured it had more to do with the fact that back in school, Ray had been a pimple-ridden freak who couldn’t even convince his own sister to be his date at the senior prom.

Mickey Neal led me past the bouncers, the half-dressed waitresses, and glass-eyed patrons into a roped-off private room. Ray Brady sat at a small, round table with a bottle of bourbon, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and a thin, semi-nude brunette by his side. Time had cured his acne, but Ray was still an odd-looking guy — tall and gangly and hard-boned. Looking at him, I thought of a six foot six inch spider.

“You want a drink?” Ray asked as I sat down.

“No thanks,” I said. “What’s shaking, Ray?”

He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You know what’s shaking, Charlie. I spent two hours of my afternoon in a West Memphis police station that smelled like B.O. and Old Spice, thanks to you and your freak pal, Willie Boyd.”

“I warned you that if anything happened to Willie the tape would go to the cops. You never struck me as a dumb guy before, Ray. But maybe I was wrong.”

He poured two fingers of bourbon into his glass, downed it, and then poured himself a double this time. “Listen to me, Raines. I don’t know what you think was going on, but your pal Willie was a nut. He came here a couple of days ago babbling about seventy-five grand. I tell him to get out of my face, okay? I tell him he’s freaking crazy. All right, maybe I have a bouncer pitch him out and warn him not to come back. That’s the last I hear of Bad Luck Boyd until that fat detective picks me up today on suspicion.” He held up his hands. “I swear to God.”

“You’ve got a good lawyer. Tell him your story.”

“I did, and he reamed that fat Arkansas detective a new one, but something ain’t right here, Charlie. Someone’s setting me up. Given the fact that you and Willie Boyd seemed to be best buddies, I started thinking it might be you.”

“You should have given him time, Ray.”

“Time?” Brady said. “What are you talking about, Charlie? You got cotton in your ears? Willie Boyd didn’t owe me any money. You think I’d be stupid enough to front a line of credit to a deadbeat degenerate gambler like Bad Luck Boyd? The reason I threw him out of here was because we got a history, you know? We had a run-in over a personal matter a couple of years back. I think it’s over with, but about a week ago he comes in here half drunk, starts screaming at me, waving a gun around.”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

He laughed. “Right. That little runt comes in here waving an unloaded gun in my face and I’m the crazy one.”

“What happened?”

“I took his gun away, found out it wasn’t loaded, slapped him upside the head, pitched him and his frigging gun out the front door.” He refilled his glass. “You’d think that would be the end of it, right? But no. Couple of days ago he comes in here babbling about seventy-five grand. Then you call me warning me if anything happens to Willie a tape’s going to the police.” He gulped his whiskey, let his breath out in a rush. “Now, I’m giving you a warning. I don’t know what’s going on, but you don’t want to play games with me, Charlie. If you don’t believe that, drive up to Millington, pay a visit to a guy named Ron Tompkins who tried to get cute with me a few years back. Way I heard it described, his face looks like hamburger that’s been run over by a pickup truck.”

After Willie Boyd’s funeral, a few dozen friends and family members gathered at the Boyds’ house, their cars parked along the curb, in the drive, and in the weedy and soggy yard. The funeral had been quiet and concise. There were no wails of grief, no moans or sobs. Willie’s son Eric sat in the front row of the church looking grim and determined in a suit that seemed a couple of sizes too small. Linda Boyd sat beside him, holding his hand. I didn’t spot a teary eye in the entire crowd. In my days on the force, I’d attended a lot of services for a lot of murder victims, but Willie Boyd’s funeral felt like none of them. The atmosphere that hung over the small Baptist church wasn’t one of shock or outrage or horror but one of relief, as if Willie Boyd had spent years suffering from a terminal disease.

Now, a bleary-eyed woman with hairspray-stiff hair and deep wrinkles greeted me at the door and led me into a living room crowded with red-faced, middle-aged men and women balancing paper plates heaped with sliced ham, fried chicken, potato salad, and rolls. The woman patted my shoulder absently and told me to help myself to something to eat. It was only after she’d slipped away that I realized she was Willie’s aunt Theresa. When Willie and I were in high school, I’d been half in love with her and spent torturous afternoons staring out of Willie’s bedroom window at his aunt and his mother sunbathing in the backyard. For a second it seemed impossible that the wrinkled, weary woman crawling towards her seventies could be Theresa Parrish. Then I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in a hall mirror — receding hairline, hollow eyes, and beer gut — and I knew it wasn’t impossible at all.

The kitchen was warm and cheery despite the occasion, the table piled with baked ham and turkey, platters of fried chicken and cold cuts, bowls of mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and collard greens. Apple pies, peach and blackberry cobblers, and chocolate cake lined the counters, and there were gallons of coffee and tea and coolers filled with soft drinks and beer. Linda Boyd leaned against the stove, her smile tight and thin, her eyes wary. I hugged her and she patted my back, told me to help myself to something to eat or to a beer, and then excused herself to go lie down. I grabbed a bottle of Sam Adams, passed a few words with people I vaguely remembered from my childhood, and then went back to the living room.

People were telling Willie Boyd stories. I listened for a while and then tuned out when I realized that all of the stories of Willie’s good humor, his determination, his practical jokes took place when he was a kid or a teenager. It was as if the real Willie Boyd, the one that people wanted to remember, anyway, had died the day he graduated from high school and we were holding his wake twenty-four years too late. I was guilty of that, too. The memory that I kept replaying was of Wee Willie dragging himself onto the football field in suffocating heat, ignoring the ridicule of the coaches and the players, to spend a couple of hours being pounded by two-hundred-and-sixty-pound morons who thought there was no better sport than unloading on an undersized but determined kid who wanted to be one of them. Thinking about it depressed me, so I finished my Sam Adams and decided to head for home. Before I could get up, a balding man with a beer gut and a thick brush moustache hauled a chair beside me and asked how I was doing these days. It took a minute for me to recognize him as Buck Greenwood, Willie’s best friend in high school.

“Shame that something like this has to happen for people to see each other again,” he said.

I agreed that it was, asked questions about his family, and answered questions about my own. Buck said he’d heard I was a private detective. I admitted that it was true.

“Just like Magnum P.I., huh?” he asked.

I said sure, except the surfing was lousy in Memphis, I drove a 1985 Firebird, and Magnum got a hell of a lot more girls. Buck laughed and handed me a business card.

“Insurance is my game,” he said. “Home, auto, health, and life.”

I thanked him for his card and prepared myself to deflect a sales pitch. But it didn’t come. Instead, Buck shook his balding head and sighed deeply.

“Poor old Willie,” he said. “God forgive me for saying it, but Linda and Eric are going to be better off without him.”

He went on to say that it couldn’t have been easy for them. The casinos were bad. Willie had outstanding markers in nearly every casino in Tunica. But the bookies were worse. In the last ten years, Willie had maxed a dozen credit cards, took short-term loans on their cars and then defaulted on them all. I told him I’d heard as much, and tried to think of an excuse to get away from him.

“Only thing they owned free and clear was this house,” he said. “Linda inherited it from her mom. Then Willie took a mortgage on the place six months ago. Seventy-five thousand from one of those semi-legal outfits that charge four times the bank’s interest rates. I told him he was crazy.”

I sat up a little straighter. “Seventy-five thousand?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I told him just because they were willing to loan him half the house’s value didn’t mean he needed to take the money. God forgive me for saying it, but maybe everything worked out for the best. At least now, Linda and Eric will still have a roof over their heads.”

“Willie had a life-insurance policy,” I said.

“Half a million dollars.” He nodded his head sagely. “You ask me, it was the smartest thing he ever did.”

Then he sighed and shook his head and went for a fresh beer. I said my goodbyes. Outside, I stopped at the front door. A black Lincoln idled at the curb on the far side of the street. Ray Brady leaned against the rear fender, his head bent forward as he talked with Linda. Ray said something but she shook her head and stepped away from him. He glanced at me, scowling. Then Linda hurried back across the street and Ray’s shoulders sagged; he climbed back into the car, and sped away.

Linda grimaced and averted her eyes when she approached me. Then she stopped with her hand on the door.

“He said he wanted to give me his condolences,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “Ray’s always been a special kind of guy. You could call the police, tell them he’s been bothering you.”

She shook her head. “There’s no point.”

“I could talk with him.”

“Just let it be, Charlie. He won’t come back again.”

Then she smiled and crossed her fingers and hurried back inside. I thought two things almost simultaneously: Linda looked guilty, and she was beautiful when she smiled.

The next morning I woke with a world-class hangover and a phone ringing in my ear. I snared the phone on the third ring, grimaced at a lightning bolt of pain behind my eyes. After I’d left Linda’s house, the nagging feeling that she had lied to me about her conversation with Ray Brady and the troublesome grating in my head that had started while Buck Greenwood was talking about life insurance wouldn’t leave me alone. Like the Einstein I am, I decided the best way to quiet what was bothering me was to drown it with Budweiser and Jim Beam. Now I growled a hello and winced when Harry Jewell’s voice boomed in my ears.

“We got him,” he said. “You believe it? We got the son of a buck dead in the water. Let’s see if his smarmy lawyer can get him out of this.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Nearly noon,” Jewell said. “It doesn’t matter what time it is. I’m looking at a lab report right here on my desk. Want to guess whose prints were on the .22 that killed Bad Luck Boyd?”

“Ray’s,” I said.

“Give the man a cigar,” he said. “Way it looks, Brady put the gun in Willie’s hand, fitted his finger on the trigger, and fired. But he got sloppy. We got four clean compares. Razor Ray’s going to take the fall. In fact, he’s in the backseat of a squad car as we speak.”

I sat up in bed, tried to wipe the sleep from my eyes. “He put the gun in Willie’s hand? Why would he do that to shoot him twice?”

“I’m figuring he shot Bad Luck in the chest, missed his heart by a couple of inches, and then forced the gun into Boyd’s hand for the final shot in the head.”

“That doesn’t make sense, either. Why would he go to the trouble?”

“Who knows? Maybe he got a kick out of forcing Boyd to do it. Guys like Ray Brady aren’t exactly normal.”

“Maybe,” I said. “How many murders you think Ray’s responsible for?”

“A dozen at least, probably more.”

“But there’s never been a real piece of evidence to tie him to any of them. He’s slick and he’s a professional. Doesn’t it seem odd that he’d be careless enough to leave his prints on the gun and leave the gun at the scene? This is almost too easy.”

“Look,” Jewell said, and sighed. “You’re driving down the highway at sixty miles an hour and a big old rattlesnake crawls right out in the middle of the lane. Maybe you’re the kind of guy who stops and wastes half an hour pondering why the thing was dumb enough to crawl out of its hole. What I do is gun the engine and run right over its head. See what I’m saying?”

I did and I told him so. But as I rolled out of bed and stumbled towards my coffeepot, the certainty that something was wrong wouldn’t leave me alone. Razor Ray Brady was a lot of things — a lowlife, a psychopath, and a stone-cold killer — but he was also very good at what he did. Professional killers didn’t make amateur mistakes, not when they were as smart, as ruthless, and as successful as Ray Brady. I filled a mug with coffee and lit a cigarette and told myself it didn’t matter. Maybe Ray had been distracted, maybe Willie had pushed his buttons so hard that he hadn’t been thinking straight. Maybe, I thought, Ray had a secret wish to be caught, a hidden bit of conscience that demanded he be punished for his crimes. Sure, I thought. Then I dumped my coffee into the sink and headed out the door.

Linda Boyd looked tired and haggard and every bit forty-two years old. With the mourners and well-wishers gone, the house seemed empty and quiet and lifeless.

“Is Eric home?” I asked.

She blew on her coffee before taking a sip. “He wanted to go back to school. I told him he didn’t have to, but I didn’t stop him.” She sighed. “Maybe if I’d known how quiet it would be here without him I would have made him stay home.”

“They arrested Ray Brady this morning.”

She looked away and then asked if she could have a cigarette. I lit it for her, watched her take a deep drag and grimace.

“That man belongs in jail, Charlie.”

“Yes, he does,” I said. “But not for killing Willie.” I reached for her hand. “Why didn’t you leave him, Linda?”

“Because I loved him,” she said as if it should have been self-evident. “And he was sick, Charlie, really ill. If you love someone, you don’t leave him when he gets sick with cancer or Parkinson’s or something. You stay and you do the best you can, even if it isn’t easy.”

I nodded and squeezed her hand softly. “Those are terminal diseases, aren’t they?”

“So is gambling,” she said.

“Then Willie’s death could be seen as a mercy killing. But how did you set up Brady for your husband’s murder? I don’t understand how you pulled it off unless you and Ray were working together and you double-crossed him.

She jerked her hand away and grimaced. “I didn’t murder my husband,” she said. “And you’re right. Ray Brady didn’t, either, but he’s a wicked man, Charlie. A couple of years ago Willie lost money he didn’t have on a college basketball tournament. Ray held the markers and was threatening to hurt him, so I went to see Ray about it. I knew he liked me in high school and I thought he might listen.” She gave me a bitter, angry smile. “He listened. Then he said he’d take it out in trade.” She shivered. “I slept with him for a month. When I finally told him I couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t stand it, he beat me and raped me. Willie swore he’d get even.” She stood from the table, went to a kitchen drawer, and pulled out a cassette tape. “You need to listen to something.”

I followed her into the living room and sat on a sofa while she hunkered in front of a stereo and put on the tape. After a brief hum, Willie Boyd’s voice filled the living room.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said. “You must have been asking the right questions. Congratulations. I always knew you were a smart guy, and decent, too. You always stuck up for your friends, Charlie. That’s why I knew I could count on you.”

“Wee Willie,” I said, shaking my head. “He always had a line.”

“Shut up,” Linda said, surprising me by the harshness of her tone. “Just listen to the tape.”

“All right, Charlie. Here’s the deal. I got myself in a bind. Another run of bad luck in a lifetime of them, huh? I don’t know. I try and try to stop, but I can’t do it. Not for Linda or Eric or even myself.” There was a cough and then the sound of Willie gulping a drink. “Doesn’t matter now. Eric’s college fund is gone, there are beggars in Calcutta who’ve got better credit ratings than we do, and the bank is thirty days away from foreclosing on our house. I’m not trying to bore you with our problems, but I want you to see. This was the only way. With the life-insurance policy, the house will be safe and Eric will get a free ride to college. They’ll be okay.” Another cough and then the flick of a cigarette lighter. “I never could quit anything, Charlie. Not cigarettes or booze or betting on long shots. It’s like the wires got crossed in my head. Anyway, here’s the thing. The life insurance will take care of my family. But the policy won’t pay on a suicide.”

“And that’s where I came in,” I said.

“So that’s why you’re here,” Willie said on the tape. “I needed insurance for my insurance, you know? Someone who would help finger Ray Brady for my murder. And you want to know how I feel about setting up Ray? It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Ask Linda to tell you about Ray if she hasn’t already. Or if that ain’t enough for you, go talk to a few people Ray and his goons have pushed around.” There was another cough. “So there you have it, Charlie. Think it over and I know you’ll do the right thing.” A laugh. “You might say I’m betting on it.”

And then the tape and Willie Boyd fell silent forever. Linda looked at me, twisting the wedding band on her finger.

“The night before he killed himself we went to the Rendezvous for dinner and took a walk along the river and then we came home and made love. It was wonderful. It was like it was when we first married, back when we thought the world was ours for the taking. I didn’t want to let him go. I told him it wouldn’t work, that the police would figure it out. But Willie said he would make it work.” When she looked up at me her eyes blazed. “And that’s exactly what he did.”

“He pulled the trigger twice,” I said.

She nodded with a grim and defiant pride. “People always underestimated him. Back in school you all called him Wee Willie as if he was a sideshow freak instead of a boy. Then people started calling him Bad Luck Boyd like he was born to be a loser. To hell with all of you. Deep down inside, where it counts, Willie was always a winner. My husband was a hell of a man.”

It was my turn to close my eyes, trying to imagine the effort it must have taken Willie to hold on to the gun after the first shot seared his chest and then to lift the barrel to his head and squeeze the trigger again. I thought of him on that football practice field being knocked down and picking himself up over and over again. And what about Ray Brady? Calling him an innocent man would have bordered on the ridiculous. I thought of the girls he pimped from his clubs, the women he’d beaten and raped, the faces he’d slashed with razors, the corpses he’d strewn across three states. For twenty-five years, Ray Brady had been on a winning streak, but it was about to end.

“You’re right,” I told Linda. “Willie was a hell of a man.”

On the tape Willie had said he was betting that I would do the “right” thing. As I left the Boyds’ house for the last time, I wasn’t sure that I’d call framing a man for murder the “right” thing to do. But I knew that for once, Willie Boyd’s luck had held.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Timothy Williams.