The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Thirty-three

The phone. Radburn, and for a change the Sheriff had placed the call himself. “You met the man,” he said without preamble. “Saw him more recently than I did. You see this coming?”

He held on to the phone, drew a breath.

“Doak? You there?”

“I’m here,” he said, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about. What man, and see what coming?”

“You just woke up.”

“When the phone rang.”

“So you haven’t heard,” Radburn said.

The neighbor had phoned it in, the husband, up in the middle of the night, letting his wife sleep while he soothed a child with a bad dream.

Sitting in the living room, holding the little girl on his lap, trying to think of a story to tell her, he’d looked out the window and seen the big Lincoln in the driveway.

He’d see the car from time to time, but never much past midnight, and here it was getting on for dawn.

Still, nothing alarming about a car in a driveway, where it had every right to be. But when he’d put his daughter back to bed he was wide awake and felt like a cigarette, and his wife didn’t like him smoking in the house.

So he stepped outside, and saw all the lights on next door, and that was at least as unusual as the car in the driveway. He went over to the front door, and noted that the TV was on, and playing loud. He hadn’t been able to hear it inside his house, but he could hear it now.

Now you mind your own business, he told himself. But maybe somebody was hurt, maybe the old man’s heart went on him, and maybe this was his business, maybe there was some help he could offer. He knocked on the door, and when his knock went unanswered he rang the bell. Then he rang it a second time, and turned away when no one responded, but something made him try the knob, and the door opened to his touch.

He called out a few times, asking if anybody was home, asking if everything was all right. And then the smell reached him, and he knew that they were home, and that everything was definitely not all right.

“Her clothes were ripped,” Radburn said, “and she had bruises on her face and body, but her face was so distorted from strangulation that it was hard to tell how much of a beating she took.

“Ashley Hannon, that’s her name. His tenant, that’s how he had her listed, but there’s no record of her ever writing out a rent check. I’d say she paid her rent via the barter system, and he was there collecting it when something went wrong.

“He had a bottle there and he’d been drinking, and maybe one of ’em said something the other one didn’t like, but one way or another I guess they got into it.

“Hard to put things in sequence, but we know that he punched her and slapped her, and she picked up a gun and shot him. Thing is, it looked like a girl’s gun, this cute little toy with malachite grips, which I’ve seen on fancy knives but never before on a handgun. Pearl, yes — which is to say mother of pearl, and ivory, from back when you could import it, but never malachite. It’s a .25-caliber automatic, sized to fit in a vest pocket, and when we checked the registration it turns out he bought it himself almost four years ago.

“And when we look a little further, we find out George gave her the gun a day or two before. She told a friend all about it, how it was for protection from a prowler. I know you get prowlers in that neighborhood, and there was a call just last night when somebody spotted a young fellow in a hooded sweatshirt on the next block. So he gave her this to let her feel at ease, and within a day or so she went and shot him with it.

“Shot him in the upper abdomen, had the gun pressed right into his flesh, so it left powder burns on his shirt and right through into the wound itself. What we think, he had her pressed up against this little computer table, and she tried fighting him off. She kept her nails short on account of she was some kind of a massage therapist and had a diploma to prove it, but they were long enough for her to get some of his skin under them and leave a few good scratches on his face. DNA’ll confirm it, but you don’t need lab results to know what you’re looking at.

“Now a low-powered small-caliber slug two inches north of a man’s navel is enough to get his attention, but it’s not gonna pick him up and bounce him off the back wall. He didn’t even bother to take the gun away from her, just went on squeezing her throat until he choked her out. Broke the hyoid bone, left those petechial hemorrhages on her eyes and damn well crushed that little gal’s throat.

“So she’s dead and he’s been shot, and he leaves her lying there with the gun in her hand, and it looks as though he walked around a little, got his blood here and there. Pours himself a big glass of whiskey, or maybe he poured it earlier, but he doesn’t drink it, because it was full to the brim when we found it.

“Now a glass of whiskey’s not the best choice for something to pour into a stomach that’s already got a bullet in it, but I don’t know that he thought it through. If I was to guess it’d be that he poured the whiskey and then forgot about it for having other things on his mind.

“Like taking her framed massage diploma off the wall and smashing it, and picking things up and throwing them around. Which is the sort of thing a man might do in his situation, but then he did something I never heard of before. Wrote on the wall. ‘God forgive me.’

“I don’t mean I never heard of anybody writing that or something like it. Man loses it, does something horrible, then has this moment where he realizes what he’s done. Right about then, I’d have to say asking for forgiveness had to be a pretty natural response.

“What I never heard of before is how he did it. Took his finger and stuck it in the hole where she shot him and wrote the letters on the wall in his own blood. ‘God forgive me.’ Well, you’d about have to, wouldn’t you, if you was the Lord? Man goes to that kind of trouble to ask, you got to figure he means it.

“Then he may have been trying to go upstairs, but the staircase was as far as he got, because that’s where we found him. Sitting on the third step, leaning back against the wall, one foot braced against the newel post. He had another gun, not the one he gave her. This was a revolver, a thirty-two, and he must have just picked it up because he doesn’t seem to have gotten around to registering it. Maybe took it from one of his colored tenants against back rent. Wouldn’t make him the first landlord to do so.

“Well, you get the picture. Barrel in his mouth, fingers wrapped around the butt, thumb on the trigger. Blam!

“All it took. Blew out the back of his head, left blood and brains on the wall behind him.

“Makes you wonder. Well, about no end of things, but one of them’s the wife, Lisa. A woman looks to hire a pro to kill her husband, it’s hard to work up a lot of sympathy for her. And George is an affluent businessman, important in his community, so you don’t right off assume he was the kind of husband who had it coming.

“But spend a little time at the murder scene and your perspective shifts some. I wouldn’t want to guess what he might have put that woman through over the course of a couple of years.

“Even so, there’s things you have to do. I went over first thing in the morning and got the maid to wake her. Then I sat down with her and told her what had happened. She said she didn’t know about any girlfriend, but you got the feeling that she might have had an inkling, and that this wouldn’t have been the first young friend of George’s to get a little help with the rent.

“Everything else shocked her, though. Murder and suicide, even if there’s no love left in a marriage, that’s not something to take in your stride. She came across as seriously shaken, and if she was faking it, Meryl Streep’s got herself some serious competition.

“She was at the restaurant for her full shift. Not that there’s a way on earth she could have barged in on the two of them and made that happen. Or hired it done. Hit men are professionals, whether they’re Frankie from New Jersey or that guy they made the movie about. The Iceman? Something like that.

“Man’s in that line of work, last thing he wants to do is get fancy. He makes the kill and goes home.”