The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Clark Howard Breaking Even

In thirty years as a writer, Clark Howard has published twelve novels, four nonfiction books about crime, and 232 stories. He won an Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America for his New Orleans Dixieland story, “Horn Man ” in 1982 and has been nominated for five other Edgars.

Dewey Taylor arrived in New Rome, Alabama, just before noon on the last day of the Jack Strawn murder trial. He drove to New Rome’s only motel, the Overnighter (Color TV, Room Phones, Free Ice), and checked into the room that Grover, the city editor, had reserved by phone from Birmingham that morning. When he got his key, he also picked up a message to call Fred Simply, the paper’s New Rome stringer, who had been covering the trial during the two weeks since it started. In his room, with a plastic bucket of free ice to go with the bottle of Gordon’s gin in his garment bag, he called the stringer.

“Is your name really ‘Simply?” he asked. “Or did you make it up?”

“Uh, no, sir, it’s really ‘Simply,’ ” Simply said. “Uh, why, sir?”

“Just curious,” Taylor said vaguely. “Okay, what’s the line on the Strawn trial?”

“Jury’s still out,” the stringer said. “We’re waiting to see if they reach a verdict before lunch.”

“They won’t,” Dewey Taylor assured him.

“Uh, why not?”

“Because the lunch is free. They’ll reach a verdict after lunch.”

“Oh.”

“Now, listen, Simply, I have some important work to do here in my room. I want you to stay there at the courthouse and call me the minute the jury is ready with a verdict. Got that?”

“Uh, yessir, Mr. Taylor. Will do.”

Dewey hung up, shaking his head. Will do. Roger. V-for-Victory. Over and out. He grunted softly and rubbed a stiff place in his forty-year-old back. Youth, he thought. Always such confidence. Fred Simply wouldn’t be so eager in fifteen or twenty years, after he’d slipped down the ladder a few times.

Dewey took a long swallow of Gordon’s over ice, and stretched out on the bed to take a nap.

Twenty minutes after they got back from lunch, the Strawn jury sent word to the judge that they had reached a verdict. Fred Simply called Dewey and the reporter got over to the courthouse just as the bailiff was bringing the panel back into the courtroom.

“Good work, Simply,” Dewey said, slapping the stringer on the back. He had learned long ago to always slap stringers on the back. And wink at them confidentially. It made them feel like one of the boys. A real reporter. Fred “Scoop” Simply.

“Uh, Mr. Taylor, the assistant city editor said I should talk to you about getting a byline for myself. So far, all they’ve tagged my stories with is ‘From the Herald’s New Rome Correspondent.’ The assistant city editor said that since it’s your story, the byline credit is up to you.”

“Later, Simply,” said Taylor. “Right now I’ve got to study the faces of the jurors. You know, for color and human interest.” Dewey turned to the jury with feigned interest.

There were seven women and five men on the panel. Three of the men looked like farmers who were worrying more about their untended fields than whether to send Jack Strawn to Alabama’s electric chair. Most of the women looked like housewives, except for two who might have been employed at the local Levi Strauss factory, and whose glum expressions stated that they were acutely aware of the difference between the four dollars per hour they earned on the stitching line, and the six dollars per day the county paid them for jury duty. Dewey had been covering murder trials for fifteen years; he never failed to wonder how much personal economics had to do with sending people to the electric chair or the gas chamber.

Looking over at the defendant, Dewey saw that Jack Strawn had not changed much in the ten years since Dewey had last seen him. He was still broad-shouldered, trim-waisted, had a head full of thick, curly hair, obviously still the macho man he had always been. And apparently had the same temper, too, Dewey thought, seeing as how he was charged with murdering his employer with an ice pick.

The sounding of the judge’s gavel interrupted Dewey’s thoughts. “The clerk will read the jury’s verdict,” the judge instructed.

The clerk faced Jack Strawn and read, “We, the jury, find the defendant, Jack James Strawn, guilty of murder. We further find that it is murder in the first degree, and we fix his punishment at death.”

At the defense table, Strawn turned pale, shook his head in disbelief, and buried his face in his hands. From the front row of the spectator section, Dewey stared at him, thinking, You used that ice pick once too often, didn’t you, macho man?

Dewey’s thoughts went back to a decade earlier when he had covered another murder trial in which Jack Strawn had been the defendant. That trial, in Birmingham, had been for the ice pick murder of Strawn’s young wife. The prosecution had not been able to find the murder weapon, and there had been just enough reasonable doubt to allow Strawn to go free.

Dewey grunted softly to himself. The prosecution in the murder case just concluded had not found that murder weapon either, but apparently it had not hindered this jury in deciding that Jack Strawn was guilty.

“Let’s go, Simply,” said Dewey. “I’ll call in the preliminary story for the evening final while you type up about a thousand words for tomorrow’s sunrise edition. Then you can buy my supper on your expense account.”

“Uh, the assistant city editor doesn’t allow me to put meals on my expense account. Just gas and phone calls.”

“Well, that’s got to change,” Dewey said darkly. “You pay the supper tab tonight and I’ll use it as a test case to get that restriction lifted.”

“Uh, sure, if you say so, Mr. Taylor.”

“You’ve got a good attitude, Simply,” Dewey said, slapping him on the back.

When they were going down the courthouse steps, Jack Strawn’s lawyer hurried to catch them. “Are you Dewey Taylor of the Birmingham Herald?” he asked. Dewey said he was. “Jack Strawn wants to see you before they take him upstate to Death Row.”

“That so? What for?” Dewey asked.

The lawyer shrugged. “He wouldn’t say. Just that it might be well worth your while to come talk to him.”

After the lawyer left, Dewey thought about it for a moment, then draped an arm around Fred Simply’s shoulders. “You call in the prelim story for me, Simply. Tell the city editor—”

“I’m only allowed to talk to the assistant city editor,” Simply interjected.

“All right then, tell the assistant city editor that I’m trying to get an exclusive interview with the condemned man. Trying, Simply. Don’t tell him anything else, got me?”

“Uh, sure, Mr. Taylor.”

Dewey gave him a wink. “Good man. Reporters have to stick together; always remember that, Simply.” As he walked away, Dewey looked over his shoulder and added, “Pick someplace expensive for supper tonight. We’re going to make a real issue of this expense-account thing.”

A few minutes later, Dewey faced Jack Strawn through two layers of Plexiglas with a wire-mesh grille between them. They talked on telephone handsets.

“I’m Dewey Taylor of the Herald,” the reporter said. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Yeah,” Strawn said. His eyes flicked nervously. “You think these phones might be bugged?”

“These hicks down here aren’t smart enough to bug phones,” Dewey assured him. “Come on, what do you want?”

“I want to confess to a murder,” Strawn said. He waited for some kind of reaction from Dewey. When he got none, he continued, “I remembered you from ten years ago, when I was on trial for killing my wife. You impressed me as a pretty fair guy. When I was acquitted, you didn’t write about it like it was some great miscarriage of justice or something.”

“Okay, I’m a prince of a fellow. Get to the point.”

“So I want to give you a story. I want to confess to a murder.”

“Which murder?”

“My wife. The one I was acquitted of. I did it.”

“Most people thought you did. Why confess to it now?”

Strawn leaned forward urgently. “Because I am not guilty of this one. I didn’t do it.”

Dewey’s expression did not change. Strawn swallowed tightly.

“Listen, man, you’ve got to believe me. I am innocent Somewhere in this lousy little town, there’s a real murderer.”

“You’re a real murderer yourself, Strawn. You just admitted it.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the murderer in this case, man.”

“Maybe you’re not. But why tell me about it? It’s just another variation of the condemned-man-screaming-innocence story. They’re a dime a dozen, Strawn.”

“Yeah, but what if you could prove it? What if you could catch the right murderer?”

Dewey pursed his lips. Now that might be something. That might be Pulitzer-prize material. That might be, at long last, his ticket off the goddamned Birmingham Herald and onto one of the big dailies: a Miami sheet, maybe even D.C., or — dare he even think it? — New York itself. Back to the big time. After all these years.

“What makes you think I could catch the real murderer, assuming I believed there was such a person?”

“Because I think I know who it is?”

“Who?”

“The victim’s wife. Leonora Trane.”

Dewey weighed it in his mind for a moment and decided it had possibilities. “All right, give me the whole story,” he said.

Strawn sat back, visibly relieved. If nothing else, at least someone was going to listen to him.

“I moved to New Rome from Birmingham two years ago and got a job on the Trane estate as a gardener. George Trane himself hired me. He liked his lawn and flower beds and shrubbery to look manicured at all times. When I showed him what I could do, he was very pleased. I am a good landscape gardener, you know? I have a real feeling for the work. Trane and I hit it off real good because he was so proud of the grounds and the work I did for him. Hell, he used to give me a bonus every time I turned around—”

“All right, you’ve got a green thumb,” Dewey said impatiently. “Get to the important stuff.”

“Yeah, okay.” Strawn stared off into space for a moment, then said quietly, “It wasn’t long before Leonora Trane and I noticed each other. She was one of those good-looking wealthy women who’s left alone too much of the time. The Tranes didn’t have any kids, and Trane himself always seemed to be working late or going on business trips; the only time he was really around the place was on weekends, and then he paid more attention to the grounds and the landscaping than he did to his wife. After a while, Leonora came to rely more and more on me for companionship; I was with her more than her husband was. Eventually, we started an affair.”

“Was she in love with you?” Dewey asked.

“Yeah. She started talking about leaving Trane; she wanted us to run away together.”

“How’d you feel about that?”

“I wanted her to divorce him first,” Strawn told him candidly. “Hell, why just run off and leave all that alimony behind?”

“Real sentimental, aren’t you.” It wasn’t really a question.

Strawn shrugged. “Just practical.”

“What makes you think she killed her husband?”

“It just figures, man. There was nobody else in the picture. She must have figured that if she sued for divorce, he would countersue, maybe name me, and then she’d get nothing. If she got nothing, she wouldn’t get me either, because I wasn’t about to run off with her unless she had some dough.”

Dewey changed the subject from motive to method. If she did kill Trane, why would she use an ice pick? If she s so crazy about you, why choose a weapon that’s going to make you the instant prime suspect?”

“Leonora didn’t know about my first trial,” Strawn pointed out. “Nobody around here did. Even the local cops didn’t know until they ran my name through the state criminal-records computer. Hell, I wasn’t even arrested until two days after the body was found.”

Dewey mentally reviewed what he knew of the case from earlier stories that Fred Simply had sent in. “His wife testified that she found the body, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. Leonora said he hadn’t come home all night, that she had spent the evening alone in her bedroom, reading. She said the next morning when she got up, she called the cook to serve her breakfast on the east veranda. That was her favorite side of the house; I had ringed the whole patio with yellow roses, which were also her favorite. Anyway, she testified that she was having breakfast, looking across the east grounds of the estate, when she noticed a lot of activity among some blackbirds down where the boundary hedge separates the property from the road. She was curious, she said, so she walked across the lawn to see what the birds were so excited about. She claims she found her husband’s body just beyond the hedge, in a gully at the side of the road.”

“And you think she’s lying?”

Strawn shook his head. “I didn’t say she was lying. It’s probably all true. Except that she knew she’d find him there — because she left him there.”

“How would she have done it, do you think?” Dewey asked.

Strawn shrugged again. “Like I said, Trane was a real nut about the estate’s grounds. He used to walk around admiring the flower beds, the hedges, the lawn. Maybe he did come home that evening; maybe that much of Leonora’s story was a lie. Maybe he came home, and while it was still daylight he decided to walk around the grounds. Maybe that’s where he was when Leonora got him with the ice pick.”

“Wouldn’t the servants have seen him?”

“Not necessarily. There was only a housekeeper and a cook; they’re usually busy with their work.”

Dewey had been holding a question in the back of his mind, waiting for a good time to spring it. He decided now was the time. “Speaking of ice picks, the one you used to kill your wife was never found. What’d you do with it?”

“I put it in the foot of an old hunting boot,” Strawn admitted without hesitation. “Then I laced a brick in the uppers of both boots, tied them together, and dropped them in the Tarrant River in Birmingham. In the deepest part.”

“Now the same kind of weapon is missing in the Trane killing.” Dewey shook his head. “I don’t know, Strawn. It’s just too pat to be coincidence.”

“But it has to be coincidence!” the condemned man said desperately. “I’m innocent! I — didn’t — do — it!”

“All right, maybe you didn’t,” Dewey conceded. “But so what? Do you expect Leonora Trane to admit that she did? Or are you suggesting that I go out to the estate and beat a confession out of her?”

“I want you to investigate what I’ve told you,” Strawn said, suddenly calm again. “Everybody down here was so goddamned sure that the killer had to be me, nobody did any looking anywhere else. Maybe if you talk to Leonora, you can trick her into telling you where the goddamned ice pick is. Maybe if you look at the police report and the autopsy report and whatever the hell else you can get your hands on, something might point to her or to someone else. You can at least try, Taylor — to keep an innocent man from going to the chair.”

Dewey Taylor pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll do what I can, Strawn,” he said evenly. “But not for the reason you just gave. Because you and I both know you’re not an innocent man. You haven’t been for ten years.”

On his way out of the courthouse, Dewey stopped in at the county coroners office. “Dewey Taylor of the Birmingham Herald,” he told the clerk on duty. “I’d like to get a copy of the autopsy findings on George Trane.”

The report was a matter of public record; Dewey had his copy in ten minutes. He walked back to his motel room, ignored three messages from Fred Simply, and stretched out on the bed with another Gordon’s over free ice to read the report.

George Trane, according to the state medical examiner who had come down from Montgomery to do the autopsy, had died from a single puncture wound in the right ventricle. The wound was approximately three inches deep and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, indicating that it had been made by an ice pick or similar instrument. There was no other damage to the body except a small bruise on the right temple which may or may not have been sustained prior to death. The victim was described as an adult male of fifty-six years, five feet eleven in height, 155 in weight, minus his appendix and gall bladder but with all other organs intact. A minor benign tumor, of which he was not even aware, was found on his prostate gland. The stomach contained no undigested food.

Routine report, Dewey thought. He flipped to the last page to see if a crime lab analysis had been made. It had, and appeared to be just as routine as the autopsy. At death, the victim had been wearing a summer-weight tan business suit, tan shirt, brown-and-yellow-striped necktie, brown leather belt, white undershirt, white briefs, tan over-the-calf socks, and brown leather loafers. The suit coat, shirt, and undershirt bore common puncture holes similar in size to the death wound. They, as well as the belt, trousers, and briefs, were saturated with an estimated three and one-quarter pints of discharged blood. Examination of the outer apparel produced nine separate minute samples of lint and one of thread. The victim’s trouser and coat pockets had been vacuumed and found to contain specimens of lint, fuzz, paper waste, tobacco shreds, and minute quantities of dirt. The soles of the victim’s shoes were scraped and the resultant residue analyzed as common street and ground dirt with no unique qualities. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails produced ultra-minute particles of dirt, traces of hair oil, some slight rubber cement residue, a particle of dried table mustard, and several minuscule grains of sugar.

Real exciting, Dewey thought. He put the report aside and sipped his drink, staring at nothing. It would be so easy, he thought, to just file the story straight and forget the whole thing. Strawn was a desperate man; he’d say anything to anybody if there was even a remote chance that it would help him. And yet — there was something about him, something about his eyes, his voice, the way he begged for help, that had caught hold of Dewey Taylor and would not let go.

Dewey downed the rest of his drink and telephoned his stringer. “Simply? Taylor here. Meet me at the local library in thirty minutes.”

Hanging up, he grabbed his coat and left. He remembered passing the county library on his way to and from the courthouse, and he walked there now. It was only two blocks away, a neat, white-columned little building setting back off the street in its own little tree-lined park. Inside, it looked and smelled like every library Dewey had ever been in: neat, quiet, but somehow musty and not quite in sync with the world outside its walls. There was a plain woman behind the counter. She was in her late thirties and looked as if she belonged right there.

“Do you keep back issues of the Birmingham papers?” Dewey asked.

“Yes, we do.” Her voice was lower than Dewey expected, almost throaty. The sound of it seemed to change her appearance, making her not so plain after all. “Which date are you interested in?” she asked. Dewey told her and she nodded briefly. “Everything over two years old is on microfilm. If you’ll come this way, I’ll show you.”

She led him down to a basement room that contained a microfilm reader and several film cabinets. From one of the cabinets she took a numbered reel of film.

“Do you know how to thread a microfilm reader?” she asked.

“No,” Dewey lied. He had done it a hundred times. But he suddenly had an urge to watch her do it. He studied her fingers as they expertly inserted the reel and threaded the film into the viewer. His eyes moved up her bare arms to her shoulders, her neck, her ears. She had light, downy hair on her earlobes. When she finished threading the film, he said, “Thank you, Miss — uh—?”

“Elizabeth Lane,” she said in her throaty voice. “I’m the county librarian.”

She returned to the main floor and Dewey sat down in front of the reader. He wound the film to a Sunday-supplement feature he had written ten years earlier. In it he had recapped the entire story of the ice pick killing of Angela Strawn, the arrest of her husband, the futile search for the missing murder weapon, the trial of Jack Strawn, and his subsequent acquittal. Dewey did not know what he hoped to find in reviewing the story; probably nothing at all, he guessed; but the killing and missing weapon of a decade earlier were so similar to the recent killing and missing weapon that he thought it best to refresh his memory.

When he finished, Dewey left the film on the reader and started back upstairs. On his way he stopped and looked through an open door into another small room, this one furnished with a couch and club chair, end tables, a small refrigerator, coffee maker, and portable TV. In one comer was a worktable with a paper cutter, glue pot, and two small vises. In another, a book lift loaded with books to be hoisted upstairs. Between them was a small desk with a chair.

“That’s my little workroom, Mr. Taylor.”

Dewey whirled around at the sound of Elizabeth Lane’s voice. He had not heard her come back downstairs and she startled him.

“It isn’t much,” she continued, “but it’s a quiet place to work after hours. I do all the bookbinding and repairs myself. It saves on the library budget.”

“That’s very conscientious of you,” Dewey said, back in control of himself.

“Thank you. I came down to tell you that Fred Simply is waiting for you upstairs. He says you’re a famous newspaper reporter from Birmingham.”

“I’m not really that famous,” Dewey said, following her back upstairs. He liked the way she looked walking up the stairs.

“Hmmmmm. It surprises me that a newspaperman doesn’t know how to use a microfilm reader.”

Elizabeth Lane returned to her desk. Dewey suppressed a smile as he watched her walk away. She had long legs and a healthy, country-girl stride. Dewey liked that too. He felt a stirring inside that he had not felt in a long time.

“Uh, Mr. Taylor,” Simply said, touching his arm. “I, uh, I’m here.”

“Of course you are, Simply. I knew you wanted to take me to supper, that’s why I had you come over. Have you selected a nice place?”

“Well, I, uh—”

“I’m sure you have.” Dewey draped an arm around the stringer’s shoulders and guided him toward the door.

“Uh, about that byline, Mr. Taylor—”

“Later, Simply, later. Right now, I want you to tell me everything you know about your county librarian, Elizabeth Lane.”

As they left the library, Dewey glanced back at the desk. Elizabeth Lane was watching him leave. Dewey smiled a satisfied smile.

At ten the next morning, Dewey rang the bell at the Trane mansion. Leonora Trane herself answered the door. She was a tall, regal woman with perfectly coiffed hair and a splendid figure, wearing an ankle-length silk robe.

“Come in, Mr. Taylor,” she said easily. “We’ll talk on the veranda. There’s coffee.”

Dewey followed her through a dining room to a veranda laid in deep red Mexican rootstone, ringed by yellow roses. They sat and she poured coffee.

“Mr. Taylor,” she said, “the only reason I consented to see you was because you said on the phone that you had seen Jack and that he told you he believes I murdered George. If he told you that much, I’m quite certain he must have told you a great deal more. Such as the fact that he and I were lovers. And that I no longer loved my husband. All of which is true. But I assure you, I had nothing to do with George’s death. My late husband and I had an understanding: I went my way, he went his.”

“Did he know about you and Strawn?”

Leonora Trane shrugged elegant shoulders. “Possibly. No, probably.” She smiled slightly. “We didn’t discuss our affairs; we weren’t that decadent. But we were usually aware of what the other was doing, at least abstractly.”

“Was Mr. Trane having an affair at the time he was murdered?” Dewey asked.

“Oh, yes. George had a mistress. Someone he’d been seeing for several years.” She smiled again, in amusement this time. “I used to find all those telltale, silly little signs that wives notice: makeup smudges on his collar, a perfume scent on his coat and shirt. Jasmine fragrance, something I never use. It was so — well, mundane. Like afternoon television.”

“Do you know who his mistress is?”

“Was. No, I don’t. I never really cared to know.” She sipped her coffee, then said, “Shall we get to the main point of your visit? How can I convince you that I did not murder my husband?”

Now it was Dewey who shrugged. “Just tell me you didn’t.”

“All right. I didn’t. Anything else?”

“Why would Jack Strawn think you did?”

Again the amused smile. “Jack is the sort of man who thinks women would kill for him. You may have noticed that he’s quite impressed with himself.”

Dewey locked eyes with her. “You must have been a little impressed too. He was your lover.”

“One of my lovers, Mr. Taylor,” she said without the faintest unease. “Just one of them.”

Dewey sat back and nodded thoughtfully. “I see. You didn’t want to run away with him then?”

“Certainly not.”

“Or sue your husband for divorce?”

“No.”

“Did you ever tell Strawn you wanted to do either? Or lead him to believe you would?”

“Never.”

Dewey shook his head. Strawn, you lying macho bastard.

“Who do you think killed your husband, Mrs. Trane?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea. Frankly, I didn’t think for a moment that Jack had done it. Then that business came up about his wife being killed the same way.”

“You hadn’t known about that?”

“Heavens, no,” she said with genuine abhorrence.

“Did that change your mind about whether Jack might have done it?”

“Well, it certainly gave me pause for thought. But I’m still not sure. I don’t want to think that Jack did it, but it’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion.”

“What about the mistress?”

Leonora Trane shook her head. “If I know George, she was only someone he toyed with for his own amusement. Someone he could dominate. He couldn’t dominate me, you see. So I suppose he needed someone he could impress. But I’m sure there was no emotional involvement of the sort that would lead to murder. Besides, George was killed here, on the estate. What would his mistress have been doing here?”

“What about business associates? Did anyone dislike him?”

Again she shook her head. “He was very popular. Honest as the day is long, in business anyway. A community figure — served on the school board, the road commission, the library board, the city council.”

No wonder Strawn was convicted so quickly, Dewey thought. He finished his coffee and rose. “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Trane.”

“Not at all. I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m totally without conscience. I’m sorry that George is dead, and I’m sorry that Jack is in so much trouble. But there’s nothing I can do about either of them, is there? And life does go on.”

“It does that,” Dewey Taylor agreed.

This woman, he decided as he was leaving, would not kill for any man.

It was almost noon when Dewey got back to town. He went directly to the library. A young library assistant told him that Elizabeth Lane was downstairs in her workroom. Dewey went down and tapped on the open door. Elizabeth looked up from her desk.

“Oh, hello. Come in. What can I do for the famous reporter today?”

“I’ve come to take you to lunch in celebration of your fifteenth anniversary as the librarian for this splendid little community,” Dewey said glibly.

She smiled the slightest of smiles and continued working. “I take it you’ve been asking Fred Simply some questions. He must have told you that the anniversary to which you refer was three months ago.”

“Yes, he did. I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

Dewey thought for a moment. “Suppose I had been early? Would that have made a difference?”

“Perhaps.”

“All right, then, I’d like to take you to lunch to celebrate your sixteenth anniversary. I’m afraid I’m nine months early.”

She kept working, checking invoices and receipts, initialing them, spiking them on an old-fashioned spindle. But she did smile again. “How do you know I’ll be here in nine months?”

Dewey glanced around the little workroom she had fashioned for herself, the little sanctuary from the lonely nights, the refuge from whatever there was out there in the world that frightened her. “You’ll be here,” he said quietly.

Elizabeth Lane’s smile faded and she self-consciously put one hand on her throat. Their eyes caught in an instant of naked truth. Then the librarian put one more paper on the spindle and said, “All right, I’ll have lunch with you.”

They drove to a little café built on a pier out over the Chattahoochee River, and ordered fried catfish and hush puppies and a pitcher of iced tea. Their table was next to an open wall, and the river slapped gently at the pilings beneath them. In a nearby moss tree growing out of the water, a blue jay quarreled noisily and chased some sparrows from their limb.

“Reminds me of my city editor,” Dewey said, watching the bullying blue jay.

“How long have you been a reporter?” she asked.

“About a hundred years. Seems like, anyway.”

“You must love it.”

“Must I?” he asked dryly.

“Why keep doing it if you don’t?”

He shrugged. “Life’s rut. I have a feeling you know what that is. It’s that limbo state of mind that most humans fall into, where our lives aren’t good enough for us to be happy, but not bad enough for us to make a change. It’s a neutral existence where most days are like most other days, where there’s no excitement, no challenge, nothing to make your blood rush. It’s a life where you never sweat. That’s life’s rut. Sound familiar?”

“Should it?” She tilted her head. “I wonder what Fred Simply has told you about me.”

“Just the usual. You’re a New Rome girl who went to college thirty miles from here, then came back to run the library. Your parents are dead, you’ve never married, you live in the same house where you were bom, all alone except for three cats, and… His words trailed off.

“Go on,” she said evenly, “finish it.”

Dewey remained silent.

“And I’m the town old maid,” she finished it for him. “A dried-up, nearly forty-year-old virgin.” A low fire began to show in her eyes. “Do you believe that?”

Dewey looked at her bare arms, at a bed of freckles just below her throat, at the full lower lip that sometimes gave her an artificial pout. He did not answer her.

“Let’s see if you believe it,” she said. “Supper tonight. At my house.” Her words were clearly a challenge. And her voice was huskier than usual. Dewey felt his mouth go dry.

“All right,” he said. “Supper tonight. At your house.”

They finished lunch. Dewey walked close to her on the way out. He caught a trace of aroma from her.

“I like your perfume,” he said.

“It isn’t perfume, it’s bath oil, but it lingers. I’m glad you like it. It’s my favorite — jasmine.”

Dewey felt a sudden coldness along his spine.

“There s a mistress who may be involved in the Trane murder,” Dewey told Fred Simply later that day. “You and I are going to find out who it is.”

“Uh, sure, Mr. Taylor. How do we, uh, go about it?”

“The way good newsmen go about getting any story, Simply: legwork and investigation. This is your town, you probably know half the people in it; I want you to start talking to those people: quietly and discreetly, not like you’re asking questions, but like you’re just having a private, personal conversation. Trane had a mistress in this town; somebody had to know about it. They had to meet somewhere, so someone must have seen them. Think you can handle it, Simply?”

“Can do, Mr. Taylor. Uh, do you think I might get a byline if we find her?”

“You never can tell, Simply,” the reporter said, throwing him a confidential wink. “Now go to work.”

After Simply left, Dewey walked over to the library. He did not go in, merely sat on a bench under a tree, looking at the neat, white-columned little building, thinking about the woman inside. Elizabeth Lane, with her sensuous arms and dusty freckles and throaty voice, who had stirred old feelings in him; warm, liquid feelings, the kind he had known frequently as a younger man, but had experienced less and less often as he matured and found himself becoming jaded about the world and its creatures.

Resting his head back against the bench, Dewey mused about how unpredictable life was. He had come to New Rome on a routine assignment, to do nothing more than complete a routine story about a routine murder trial. Now here he was about to become involved with a lady librarian. And there was no doubt in his mind that there would be an involvement. No doubt in hers either. When their eyes met over lunch, they had communicated more in a split instant than some couples do in a lifetime. One fleeting moment, and they had registered an intimacy of each other that cried out for fulfillment. A fulfillment which would be consummated tonight in her home, her bed, her body.

And the fact that she used jasmine bath oil had to be nothing more than a coincidence.

Had to be.

After sitting on the bench for an hour, Dewey got up and walked back to the motel. The afternoon was hot and his lower back ached again; he had been on his feet too much the last couple of days. The realization made him grunt. In the old days, when he’d been a war correspondent during the Korean War, he could keep up with gung ho young marines on a thirty-mile forced march and still radio a good story at the end of the day. Now it seemed that his back and feet hurt with increasing regularity when he just thought about walking someplace.

In his room, Dewey poured gin over fresh ice and swirled it around with his finger. Those were the days, he thought, remembering Korea as he reached behind himself to massage his back. Whatever happened to that book I was going to write? he wondered. That great best-seller about the young marines of the Korean War. Did it just fall by the wayside like so many other things? Like the two wives, the failed marriages, the grown daughter he barely knew, the career, once so bright, that had gone from newspapers in Chicago to St. Louis to Springfield and finally to Birmingham, losing a little prestige each time.

“Yeah,” he said aloud. “By the wayside.” He took a long drink of gin and stretched out on the bed, holding the glass on his chest. But to hell with all that, he told himself firmly. That was then and this was now. All he wanted on his mind at the moment was the woman named Elizabeth Lane, who had great arms and freckles and who only coincidentally used jasmine bath oil.

He took another long drink.

Only coincidentally.

The next morning, from far, far away, someone was knocking insistently on Dewey’s motel room door. He dragged out of bed, pulled on a ratty, old red bathrobe which he never left home without, and opened the door. It was Simply.

“Why are you waking me at dawn, Simply?” he growled. “Are we under nuclear attack?”

“Uh, it’s not dawn, Mr. Taylor. It’s ten past ten. I’ve come to report on my investigation yesterday.”

Dewey’s eyes were red and swollen, his head had a giant pulse inside it, his body felt as if an elevator had dropped on him, and he was sure he would never be able to get into a kneeling position again. Squinting at Simply, he said, “Investigation?”

“Uh, yeah. You know, Trane’s mistress, who might be involved in the murder.”

For a moment, under all the wreckage, he felt a flicker of hope that Simply might have found someone completely unknown to him; and then a flicker of fear that he might have found out that it was—

Shaking the thought from his mind, Dewey asked, “What do you have to report?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Uh, that’s right, sir. I talked to sixteen people. Just like you told me to: discreetly and confidentially. I talked to everybody from the mayor and the banker to the barber and the town drunk. Not a single one of them ever heard of George Trane having a mistress. And none of them believed it was true.”

“It must not be true, then,” Dewey said.

Simply frowned. “Why not?”

“Truth is nothing more than popular opinion,” Dewey explained. “If nobody believes something, then it isn’t true.” He guided Simply back out of the room. “I’ll be leaving in a little while, Simply. It’s been nice working with you.” He started to close the door.

“Uh, Mr. Taylor, have you given any more thought to my byline?”

“Still considering it, Simply. I’ll let you know.” He closed the door on the young stringer and started sluggishly for the bathroom. Then he stopped, reconsidered, and opened the door again. “Fred!” he called, using Simply’s given name for the first time. The stringer looked back from the motel parking lot. “Whip out two thousand words recapping the Strawn trial for the Sunday supplement. I’ll see you get an exclusive byline on it.” Without waiting for Simply to gush his thanks, Dewey slammed the door.

In the bathroom, his thrashed image glared back at him from the mirror. He thought of the previous night, the hours spent with Elizabeth, the food, the liquor, the unbridled passion. God, he thought, shaking his head, had that been him?

Dropping his robe, Dewey got under a stream of hot water in the shower and stood there for ten minutes. Eventually he reached out and got his toothbrush and used it. Then he lathered his face and shaved from memory, without a mirror. He was lucky; he only cut himself four times. But under the hot water he began to come alive again and the memory of the previous night came into sharper focus. The previous evening, he remembered vividly now, had been incredible — the food, the drink, the lovemaking — it had all been perfect.

He came out of the bathroom feeling great. From his garment bag he took fresh clothes and dressed. He combed his hair, gave his shoes a lick with the motel towel, packed the rest of his things, and checked out. He drove the two blocks to the library.

Elizabeth was in her workroom again. She looked up and smiled as he came in. “Good morning, Dewey.”

“Good morning.”

She stretched luxuriously. “Do you feel as wonderful as I do?”

“I feel pretty good,” he admitted.

“If you’re here to take me to lunch, it’s a little early, but I don’t mind if you don’t—”

“I’m not here to take you to lunch,” he interrupted. He rubbed his fingers around the glue pot on her worktable and they picked up dried particles of rubber cement. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails… some slight rubber cement residue…

He touched a slight indented mar in one comer of the table. Other damage to the body…a small bruise on the right temple…

Moving over to her desk, he caught some of the fragrance of her still-fresh bath oil. A perfume scent on his shirt and coat… jasmine fragrance…

From the desk, he picked up her old-fashioned spindle with its ice pick point.

“Why did you kill him, Elizabeth?” he asked quietly.

Elizabeth Lane sighed a helpless little sigh and shook her head. “I don’t know. He was standing there, getting ready to leave, as he had so many countless times before. He had a little smirk on his face that he always seemed to have after he had… used me. It never bothered me much before, but for some reason on that particular night—” She shook her head again. “I just picked up the spindle and stabbed it into his chest. He started to fall, then he hit his head on the table and kind of staggered back and actually sat right in the book lift over there. I used it to move him upstairs. Then I rolled him onto a library cart and pushed him to the back door where I keep my car. I drove him out to his home and dropped him there.” She half shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

“That was as good as any place, I guess,” Dewey said. He put the spindle back on the desk.

“I had no idea about that gardener and what happened with his wife ten years ago. It’s been very heavy on my mind.”

“Don’t let it be. Strawn is right where he belongs; you can believe that. But you shouldn’t stay in New Rome, you know. If I found out, someone else could also.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking of moving away,” she told him. “I’ve been offered a head librarian job in a little town in Florida, near the ocean. I’ve always wanted to live near the ocean.”

“Funny, so have I,” said Dewey. “There’s a book I always thought I’d write someday, living near the ocean.”

“Really?” An excitement came into her eyes. “I have some money, you know. A small inheritance from my parents. And the house they left me. And my own savings; I’ve saved plenty in the last fifteen years; nothing to spend, it on in New Rome. And of course he gave me gifts: expensive jewelry, mostly; I have a drawer full of it, because naturally I couldn’t wear it around town.”

“Naturally.”

“We could live near the ocean and I could run the library and you could stay home and write your book.” She got up and came around the desk. As she did, she picked up the spindle. Dewey tensed slightly at the sight of it in her hand. But she only stood holding it.

“What do you think I should do with this?” she asked.

He relaxed. “Let’s drop it in the Chattahoochee River on our way to lunch.” He took her arm. “Come on, we’ve got lots of planning to do.”

On their way out to his car, she said, “Dewey, do you suppose we could get married?”

“I guess so. Why do you want to?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never been very pretty. Maybe I just want to tell people my name is Elizabeth Taylor.”

Dewey laughed and put his arm around her. “Sure,” he said, “why not?”

They were laughing together as they drove away from the library.