THE BACK DOOR WAS locked. I smashed one of the fractional windowpanes with the butt of my .45, then reached inside past the cotton curtains and found the doorknob. I pushed on the door and followed it inward.
I’d always been curious about the place—every year the local paper ran a photo spread on its most recent improvements—but now wasn’t the time to pause and gawk. I needed to get upstairs.
But I only got as far as the living room. Susan lay on her back on the floor. She wore a modest white terry-cloth robe. There was blood all over the front of it. There was blood on her face, too. The bottoms of her feet were dirty. I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did. It’s the kind of thing doctors record at autopsies. They’d made some pretty crude jokes, the times I’d sat in. I’d wanted to defend the dead people they were making fun of. Maybe it’s the lawyer in me.
My first impulse was to kneel down, check her out. But what was the point? By the looks of things, she was long dead. Her face was starting to discolor badly.
Silence from upstairs. Maybe he’d pulled it off. He’d been lucky at everything else. Why not lucky at his suicide attempt?
I went upstairs, moving carefully. If he wasn’t dead, he might want to start shooting at me again. The stairway was enclosed. I took the steps slowly, carefully, and then I reached the top. I smelled floor polish. And then the fresh smell of rifle fire. The floor creaked as I stepped on to the hallway. Two doors on one side, three on the other. I gripped my .45 harder, feeling self-conscious. You see so much gunplay on private eye TV shows that you think it feels natural to have a gun in your hand. But it doesn’t. You’re carrying such quick-and-easy death in your hand. There’s so much responsibility, and fear. At least for me.
A bathroom. Watery blood smeared all over the white porcelain sink. A bedroom that I sensed—given its neatness and slightly impersonal accouterments—was a guest room. Another bathroom, this one huge compared to the other one. And then another bedroom. Or a monument to bedrooms. This had everything, including a large TV, stereo speakers on the wall and yet another bathroom. Everything in this bedroom was sumptuous, from the carpeting to the silver-handled hairbrushes on the dressing table. This was how rich people lived, at least around here. Except for the two fresh bullet holes in the ceiling and the raw smell of cordite. He hadn’t done so well by his suicide attempt.
I was just turning around to leave the bedroom when I saw him in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him in some time and at first I hardly recognized him. The chiseled face was fleshy now, as was his waistline. The eyes were alarming, tinted red from sleeplessness and whiskey and grief, and underscored with deep dark half-moons of loose and wrinkled flesh. His hair had started to thin. He was my age. This kind of aging didn’t just happen; you had to go out and earn it. The white oxford button-down shirt he wore had traces of blood on the sleeves and the cuffs. His chinos showed even more blood. His feet were bare.
He held a Remington hunting rifle on me. He said, “I’ve got some whiskey downstairs.”
Then he quietly laid the rifle against the door frame and led the way back down the hallway to the stairs.