The Ax

29

Saturday morning. I'm in my office, and I've just taken out of the file drawer the last resume, I'm just reaching for the road atlas, when Marjorie knocks on the door. I place the road atlas on top of the resume, and say, "Yes?"

She opens the door. She looks worried, and a bit confused. She says, "Burke, there's a policeman here. He wants to talk to you. A detective."

Terror closes my esophagus. I'm caught, I know it, and everything was in vain. And I was so close. Standing, trying to find a reaction I can share with Marjorie, I say, "Billy? Is it something about Billy?"

"I don't think so," she says. "I don't know what it is, Burke. He's in the living room."

"All right."

I step into the hall. The Voyager is closer the other way than the living room is this way. But there's no point in that. I walk down the hall, while Marjorie goes back to whatever she was doing.

He's in the living room, a slender young guy in a gray suit, on his feet, facing the sofa as he smiles at the framed print that hangs above it. It's a Winslow Homer seascape, very turbulent, and I don't know why we have it. Marjorie saw it for sale years ago, at a frame shop, and bought it, with some embarrassment. "I just love it," she told me. "I don't really like prints, but we'll never have a real Winslow Homer. Is it all right, Burke?"

Of course I told her it was all right, and I drove the nail into the wall and hung the framed print, and it reminds me that other people are mysterious, no matter how much we get to know them. I will never understand why that picture spoke to Marjorie, that picture more than any other, but it's all right; that's the lesson. The surface of the print is flat, it can't hide what it is, a print and not a painting, but the subject is this roiling sea, over vast unknowable depths. That's what we all are for one another, flat surfaces on which some turbulence can be seen, but unknowable depths. It doesn't matter that I'll never know Marjorie very deeply; I know her enough to know I love her, and that's enough.

And would I like her to know my depths?

The detective turns, sensing me, and smiles, nodding toward the picture. "I grew up on boats," he says. "My father's a great sailor. Mr. Devore?"

"Yes?"

He extends a hand and we shake, as he says, "Detective Burton, state CID. I hope I'm not interrupting anything?"

"Not at all. Sit down."

He does, on the sofa, twisting around to look at the Homer again, while I sit on the armchair across from him, trying to conceal my worry, reassured a bit by his friendly manner.

He turns away from the picture at last, saying, "You a sailor, Mr. Devore?"

"No," I say, regretfully. I wish I could say yes, so we'd have a kinship. I say, "My wife loved the picture."

"I grew up on Long Island Sound," he says, taking a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. Chuckling, he says, "And sometimes in it." Opening the notebook, he studies something written in there, then looks seriously at me and says, "Do you know a Herbert Everly?"

It is me he's after! How did I ever think I'd get away with it? But what can I do but pretend innocence, ignorance, disconnectedness? "Everly?" I say. "I don't think so."

"How about somebody named Kane Asche?"

"Kane Asche. No, doesn't ring a bell."

He says, "You worked for Halcyon Mills, didn't you, for a long while?"

"Were they there?"

"No, no," he says, grinning at the misunderstanding. "But they did work at paper mills. Different ones from you."

I spread my hands. I say, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you want."

"Neither do we, Mr. Devore, to be perfectly frank," he says, with his guileless smile. Can I trust him? He's still holding that notebook. He says, "We got a very strange call the other day from the personnel officer with a paper company called Willis and Kendall."

"I applied for a job there, a few weeks ago."

"That's right," he says. "And you were one of the people they interviewed."

"I didn't get a callback, though, so I guess I didn't get that job."

"There were four people they called for a second interview," Burton tells me, "and turned out, two of them had just been killed. They'd both been shot to death."

"Good God!"

"It's these two, Everly and Asche." Burton taps his notebook. "And now," he says, "ballistics tells us they were both killed with the same gun."

I say, "Was it somebody they worked with?"

"They didn't know each other," Burton says, "so far as we can tell. There's no link we can find between these two men except they both applied for the same job."

I say, "Do you mean, you think somebody's going to come shoot me?"

"It's probably simple coincidence," Burton says, "those two getting callbacks for the same job. A number of people applied, and so far everybody else is perfectly fine, like yourself. They hired somebody now—"

"I thought they must have."

He grins in sympathy and says, "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."

"No, you get used to it," I say.

"It can get rough, I know," he says. "My brother was laid off down at Electric Boat, and his wife was laid off one week later from the insurance company. They're going nuts."

"I'm sure they are."

"What we think," Burton says, "is that Everly and Asche must have met somewhere, sometime. Maybe a trade conference, or a job referral outfit, who knows. They met each other, and they met somebody else, and something went wrong. So the Willis and Kendall connection's just a coincidence."

"The man the company hired," I say. "Is he all right?"

"He's fine. No threats against him, no mysterious strangers lurking around."

"So it probably doesn't have anything to do with that company," I say.

"That's right. If there's a link, it's somewhere in the past. That's why I'm here, we're canvassing everybody with any connection at all to either of the victims."

"Mine's not much of a connection," I say. "We all applied for the same job."

"But it's the phone call from that employer that got us started on this," he points out. "We don't know what we're looking for, so we've got to look everywhere we can think of. Like, if we could find some place, some time, when people like you in your industry got together, somewhere you all might have been at, a trade fair—"

"I ran a product manufacturing line," I say. "I almost never went to sales conferences, things like that."

"Would you mind," he says, "taking a look at a couple photos, see if they jog your memory? See if you ever met either of these people anywhere."

I say, "It's not — they're not pictures of them dead, are they?"

He laughs: "We wouldn't do that to you, Mr. Devore. They're perfectly ordinary photos. All right?"

"Sure," I say.

He has the photos in his notebook, and now he shakes them out and extends them toward me.

Here they are, my resumes one and four, with their faces intact, before I shot the bullets into them. I look at the photos and feel a great sadness swelling up inside me, so that my eyes sting. I feel so sorry for these two men. They seem like decent guys. I shake my head, and when I look toward Burton I'm aware of that stormy Winslow Homer sea above his head. "They just seem like nice guys," I say. "Excuse me, it's making me teary or something. They look so ordinary."

"Sure," he says. "You're identifying, I understand that. Things like that aren't supposed to happen to folks like us. Unfortunately, they do."

Handing the photos back, I say, "I really don't think I ever met them. Either of them."

"Okay," he says, and puts the photos in the notebook and the notebook away in his inner jacket pocket.

Is this it? All of it? Am I still free, uncaught, unsuspected? I say, "I'm sorry I couldn't help."

"Oh, you helped," he says, and gets to his feet, and so do I. He says, "We never like coincidence, but sometimes it happens. If it never happened, we wouldn't have a word for it."

"I guess that's true," I say.

From his side trouser pocket he takes a wallet, and from the wallet a card, which he hands me, saying, "If you think of anything, or if anything weird happens around here in the next week or so, call me, okay?"

With a shaky smile, I say, "Weird, like me getting shot?"

"Whatever it was," he says, "two seems to be it. I really don't think we're going to come across a third. I think you're safe, Mr. Devore."

"That's good news," I say.