“On this phone, you mean.”
“On any phone. And we’re done with these phones. We can’t use them anymore, and owning them is dangerous. Do you have any saved messages?”
“Just one. In case I needed to hear your voice.”
And what would happen when someone else heard it? He said, “Well, the first thing you do is delete the message.”
And he told her the rest—how to dismantle the phone, how to get rid of it. He’d be doing the same with his, he said.
But how would they be able to talk?
“We won’t,” he said. “Not for a while.”
After their last visit to the love nest, he’d watched the Lexus drive off, then spent a few minutes buying some things for cash at J. C. Penney’s. Black wash pants, a black hoodie, a pair of black sneakers.
He was wearing his purchases when he left the house. The Baby Browning with its green stone grips was in one pocket. The Taurus revolver, all its chambers loaded, was in another. His own lawfully registered Smith stayed behind on the closet shelf, while the Ruger nine remained out of easy reach in the kitchen cupboard.
Got in his car, sat behind the wheel with the key unturned in the ignition, going over it all in his mind. Knew it was time, knew what he would do and how he would do it. It wasn’t a terribly complicated plan, but the best ones never were.
He had it figured out. He could do it.
He started the car, drove off, turned left at the end of Osprey Drive.
He had a full tank of gas. He had a few hundred dollars in his wallet, a couple of credit cards that were nowhere near maxed out. He could cut east and pick up I-75 and just drive. Be safe to use the credit cards, because nobody would have any reason to be looking for him. Because he hadn’t done anything, and he didn’t have to do anything, did he?
He’d already ditched the Lisa phone. Wished he’d saved a message, wished he could have heard her voice one more time, but he hadn’t, and now he couldn’t because the phone was dismantled and discarded.
Just get on the Interstate and go. Forget everything else, blue eyes included, before it was too late.
But it was already too late, wasn’t it? Really, truly, wasn’t that the final message of all the films he’d been watching? Hadn’t it been too late from the beginning?
Thirty-two
* * *
On Stapleton Terrace, the neighbors’ minivan was parked at the curb. No little Hyundai stood next to it, no Lincoln Town Car hogged the driveway.
He kept going, turned left at the corner, turned left again.
He’d circled the block on an earlier visit. The houses here on this street were all single-family units, with several sporting For Sale signs. One had looked unoccupied, and he was not surprised to find it dark this evening, with no car in its driveway or at the curb.
He parked in front of it, took his keys but left the car unlocked. He skirted the house, walked through back yards and gardens in his dark pants and hoodie, moving lightly in his sneakers, staying in the shadows as much as he could. Here and there a yard had been fenced to confine a child, but he didn’t have trouble threading his way through the yards to the rear of the duplex.
He walked around the side, noted the continuing absence of the Hyundai and the Lincoln, then returned to try his key on Ashley Hannon’s back door. It fit and turned in the lock, but the door, secured by a separate bolt, wouldn’t budge.
Always something, he thought. And it was his own fault. He’d been in the kitchen before, he’d seen the door, and why hadn’t he seen the bolt and done something about it?
Why? Because he hadn’t thought to look for it. You couldn’t think of everything, could you?
You couldn’t just stand there, either, or you’d miss your chance to be the first one inside.
He looked through the neighbors’ kitchen window, saw through the kitchen to a room where a flat-panel TV was entertaining the whole family.
Good.
He walked around to the front of the house, careful not to make any noise. The screen door stuck, and for a moment he thought it was latched, but how had she managed to leave the house with a door latched in front and another bolted in the back? She was lithe, she was athletic, she could no doubt climb out a window, but why on earth—
No, he discovered, the screen door wasn’t latched. It was just stuck, and a slightly firmer pull drew it open.
His key turned the lock without a sound. He slipped inside, drew the door shut.
And stood still, waiting, listening. Nothing.
He couldn’t hear the neighbors moving around. He knew they had the TV on but couldn’t swear it wasn’t muted, as no sound reached him through the wall. A side-by-side duplex had a great advantage over a more conventional two-family house; you could figure on a barrier of concrete block between the two apartments, enough to insulate each tenant from the sound created by the other.
Not much chance anyone could hear him, not with the windows closed and the air conditioning on.
An hour and a half later he drew the bolt that had kept him from opening the kitchen door. He retraced his steps through the back yards, and he had almost reached his entry point when a dog started barking.
He dropped to the ground, rolled into a patch of deeper shade. The dog kept it up, and a light went on above the back door two houses over. The door opened, and a man stepped out onto his brightly lit back stoop and shined a flashlight this way and that.
Then the flashlight went out, and the man went back inside and turned off the exterior light. Doak could hear him cursing the dog for barking at nothing.
He went to his car, took a couple of minutes to catch his breath, and headed home.
He sat up late, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for a knock on the door.
Nothing.
He went to bed, couldn’t sleep, got up and put the TV on. Watched without watching. Cracked a beer, drank half of it, poured the rest down the sink.
Went to bed again, a few hours before dawn, and this time he slept.
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.”
Thirty-four
* * *
For that day and the two days following, he never left the house. He spent hours at the computer, checking every site that might conceivably have news of the murder-suicide on Stapleton Terrace. There wasn’t much news, and it was always the same.
And if there was a break in the case, he wouldn’t learn about it on his computer. There’d be a knock on his door.
That’s what he was waiting for, a knock on the door. A couple of cars outside, one from the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office, another from the state police.
Maybe a whole fleet of them. Men standing around looking grim, wearing vests, holding automatic rifles.
Or maybe it would just be Radburn, all by himself, with nothing but the holstered Colt he wore on his hip. Just stopping by with a couple of questions . . .
Because one thing was sure. He wasn’t going to get away with it.
He was so sure of this that his behavior might have been designed to make it come true. Waiting for them, anticipating their arrival at any moment, he kept changing his mind about the nature of his eventual response.
At first he planned to meet them at the door, hands out in front of him, waiting for the cuffs. The words playing in his mind were variations on a theme, all of them admissions of guilt. “I did it.”
“Okay you got me.” And, as the hours stretched, “What took you so long?”
At some point during the evening of the first day, he went to the closet and came back with the Smith & Wesson revolver. He made sure it was loaded and put it on the table to the right of his computer. His hand found the mouse and he checked a website; when he found nothing of interest, his hand moved of its own accord from the mouse to the gun butt.
He took the gun along when he stationed himself in front of the television set. He watched a local newscast, then turned to TCM, where they were showing D.O.A. H
e’d seen it several times over the years, with Edmund O’Brien unforgettable as the doomed poisoning victim who walks into the police station to report his own murder.
It matched his mood even if it didn’t help it any, and as he watched he toyed with the gun like a monk with a string of worry beads.
When he went to bed he put the gun on the night table. He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and the next thing he knew the room was bright with dawn. He bolted out of bed, reaching for the gun with one hand while the other groped for something to cover himself from the watching eyes.
But there were no eyes on him, no invaders in his house.
Nor was the gun where he’d left it, and that gave him another moment of panic until he located it under his pillow. Sometime during the night he’d evidently felt a need to have it closer.
He swung out the cylinder, confirmed that the weapon was still fully loaded. He closed the cylinder and put the gun under the pillow, then moved it to the night table. Neither place seemed right to him, and he carried the thing into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the sink while he showered.
And kept an eye on it while he shaved.
When he moved to the computer, the gun went with him. When he split an English muffin and dropped it in the toaster, the gun was a few feet from his hand.
A little later, when he heard a car on Osprey Drive, he grabbed for the gun and held it with his finger on the trigger. The car pulled into his driveway, and he took a step toward his front door, determined to hold onto the gun but not yet sure what he was going to do with it.
The car backed out, headed off in the direction it had come from. People lost their way in the maze of creek-bound culs-de-sac, and now and then one of them used his driveway to turn around.