“Hello, Daddy.”
“If it isn’t the kid. Hello, kid.”
“Lieutenant Miller is outside, but he said I could come in first just for a minute. You’re better today, aren’t you?”
“I’m awake. They tell me I’ve been unconscious for two days.”
“It’s Sunday. They found you early Friday morning.”
“So I understand,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” Sam said. She began to snuffle.
“Sorry? What for?”
“Grandma said that you went out looking for me. That you thought I’d been kidnapped or something.”
“It crossed my mind.”
“And that’s why you got involved with those people.”
“I was already involved with them. They didn’t like me very much.”
“No,” she said.
We both stopped talking for a moment. I was thinking that physically I’d come out pretty whole. Some cuts and a couple of broken fingers.
“I’m supposed to go now. They only gave me a minute.”
“O.K., honey,” I said. “Look after your grandmother for me.”
“I will.” She kissed me and left.
Miller entered as Sam left. He didn’t kiss me. He didn’t even hold my hand.
“Nice of you to stop in,” I said. “What’s new in the Indianapolis police department? You chief yet? Or are they holding the appointment open for me?”
“We don’t usually appoint murderers to be chief of police,” he said.
“Murderers?”
He mistook my question, thought I was emphasizing the plural. “That’s right. Marcia Merom died thirty-six hours ago.”
“I didn’t murder anyone,” I said.
“What do you call shooting unarmed people to death?” “Unarmed people who were about to kill me. I call it self-defense.” “Well,” he said.
I waited.
“I call it self-defense, too, but Captain Gartland wasn’t very happy about it.”
“Gartland’s not happy when he gets two prizes in his Cracker Jacks, but it doesn’t change the facts.”
“Fortunately there are some supporting details. Rope marks on your wrists and ankles. Bruising where you may have been beaten. Window glass in your hands.”
“Along with broken bones.”
“And broken bones. The fact that the gun was Merom’s and not yours.”
“I don’t own one. Maybe I should.”
“Everybody else in the world has one.”
“You’ve talked me out of it.”
“You know Seafield bent the gun barrel when he hit it with that wine bottle?” Miller asked. He was showing me that he’d reconstructed much of what had happened.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Doctor says he must have hit the gun with the bottle. Broke your fingers on reverberations. If he’d hit your hand, we’d still be picking up the pieces. And all that with three holes in him.”
“Three!”
“That’s the number after two and before four.”
“I couldn’t have shot him three times. I wasn’t sure I’d shot him once.”
“You mean after you finished off the couch arm and the picture on the wall?”
“No comment.”
“The gun does hold six shots, you know. And good thing you didn’t fire the last one.”
“Why?”
“Because with a bent barrel the gun would have blown up on you, that’s why. The bullet wouldn’t have got out. Things get nasty when that happens.”
I lowered my head. “I don’t remember very well.”
“Gartland may get your license,” Miller said. “But you should be all right on any charges.”
“You’re trying to cheer me up, are you?”
“Don’t worry about the cop outside the door. Just a precaution.” “What cop?”
“Well,” he said. “We’ve got a guy out there, that’s all. Gartland’s orders.”
“Terrific,” I said. I was getting tired.
Miller saw my eyes fluttering. “You should know that we found those letters.”
“What letters?”
“The letters from the F.B.I. to Rush, in your jacket pocket.” As he told me I remembered. “The F.B.I. here says they don’t think they can be real, but we’re checking them out.”
“What about Rush?”
“He’s been in all day answering questions.”
“And Walker?”
“The guy with Rush and Seafield when they caught you in Rush’s house? We’re looking for him.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t let him get away, Jerry.”
“Is he important?”
“Damn right He’s the linkman. He’ll be away if you give him the chance.”
Miller got up. “I’ll let you rest now.”
I drifted in and out of sleep. Half my waking periods I thought about happier days. The other half I spent trying to reconstruct how I’d got myself into this.
In the middle of the afternoon, I realized that Linn Pighee was dead. Dead. Linn Pighee, who had slept in my bed, been cared for by my crippled daughter.
“Nurse! Nurse!” I called, I cried, I rang the bell.
A child in white appeared. “What’s wrong?”
“She can’t be dead,” I said. “She can’t be.”
The child hovered, not knowing whether there was anything she should do, could do. Comfort me, get someone to doctor me, or wait me out. Indecision made her wait. And I subsided.
Later in the afternoon I woke up properly. I asked a nurse to send me someone in authority. I had the head nurse in mind. Instead they sent me Miller.
“You ready to make your statement?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
“I can see why you wanted someone to mark the occasion.” “John Pighee’s wife, Linn Pighee. She died the other day.”
“I heard she died,” Miller said.
“I need to talk to the guy that did the autopsy.”
“You need to! Just who the hell are you, then?”
“I’ve got to know why she died.”
“You shot her, too, or something?”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not making any statement until you arrange for the guy that did the autopsy to come up here.”
“People are supposed to mellow when they get to your age.”
“Or get cantankerous. I feel pretty cantankerous.”
“All right, all right, I’ll go arrange it. But you get your strength up. I’ve got a stenographer outside. When I get back, we take your preliminary statement, before you shoot yourself. You been shoot¬ing everybody else lately.”
Forty minutes later, fortified by a glass of orange juice, I started telling them, step by step, how being hired by Mrs. Thomas had led me to the people John Pighee was involved with. It was a long and grisly interview and when I got to the last bit it hit me, hard, for the first time, just what a slender thread of circumstance had made the difference between my being alive and being dead.
“You won’t get me knocking the power of prayer now,” I told them.
I woke up in the night. I remembered things. I was due to be evicted. My license was in real danger from Gartland. My savings had been stolen. Sam would have to go back soon. I had killed two people.
Killed two people. I couldn’t fathom how that had come to happen. I couldn’t—in the abstract—conceive how I could do any such thing. But I had. It had just happened. I’d killed to save my own life. It drove home the fact that I was mortal. That Linn Pighee was dead. That Sam would die one day.
I must have been crying out. Somebody came to my bedside in the night. I remember my forehead being wiped, being soothed. I felt better for it. Comforted.
I dreamed again later, but without the same anxieties. Mrs. Thomas burst into my room. I saw her come to my bedside and take my hand and smile from beneath the leather folds of her face. She said, “Job well done,” and she patted my head. She didn’t say it, but I knew she was congratulating me for shooting Marcia Merom. “She was no better for John than Linn was,” Mrs. Thomas said in my dream. “She’s well out of the way. When John gets well, we’ll try to find him someone else,” she said, “someone more like me.”