27.

I had imagined all the things that Mel might say in this situation, and how I would respond. So his first reaction didn’t surprise me.

“You can’t fire it,” he said. “The safety lock’s on.”

“These guns don’t have safety locks, Mel. That’s why you cops like them. You don’t have to grope for the safety lock while the bad guy puts a bullet in you. When you pull the trigger, you release the safeties and the gun fires. No fumbling around. I pull this trigger and the bullet comes out. Simple as that. Right, Mel?”

“Gabe teach you that?” I hated the way he said it.

“No. Gabe hated guns. A little time on the Internet. That’s all it took.”

“Is that where you got this crazy story about me shooting Gabe?” He sat back as though trying to move out of range. He looked calm, except for a small twitch at the corner of one eye.

“It’s not a crazy story,” I said. “And it didn’t come from the Internet. It came from you and Hayashida and Walter Freeman and Mike Pilato—”

He forced himself to laugh. “Mike Pilato? You’re believing the biggest gangster in the city?”

“—and Glynnis Dalgetty—”

“Who?”

“—and Andrew Golden and two snooty women who got their Louis Vuitton purses mixed up. You killed him, Mel. You shot Gabe while he was waiting for me, naked on the blanket inside the bushes, and before that you shot Dougal Dalgetty, and later you killed Wayne Weaver Honeysett, trying to cover up everything with your story about drugs missing from the police locker and Gabe suspecting Walter, which was when I really started wondering about you. Gabe wouldn’t take home a two-dollar notepad, and you tell me he might have been taking drugs from a police locker? Walter knew it too, in the depths of his stupid soul. He knew Gabe was no thief, so he started believing I was. You killed Gabe, Mel. I know how you did it, and I have a good idea why you did it, and if I don’t put a bullet first in your balls and then in your brains before the cops get here, we’re going to go over all the details. Right here. Right now.”

“You’ve got officers coming?” Mel twisted to look around. “That’s good. Because when they see you with my weapon, they will either shoot you or arrest you, and probably both. And whatever story you come up with will be the product of a delusional woman who can’t believe her husband killed himself because his wife didn’t want to fuck him.”

He looked directly at me, and I saw the flash of anger that Gabe had told me about, so long ago, the one I had seen in small doses. Mel has the ability to think and act simultaneously. Gabe had said that. And: The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper.

He was speaking to me again.

“Right, Josie? Isn’t that right? A drunken man finds out his wife’s been screwing his partner, and when she doesn’t show up as promised, he loses it and turns the gun on himself. That’s what happened, right?”

I wanted to scream and shoot, not necessarily in that order. I spoke instead, in a calm voice that continued to surprise me, while Mel listened, too interested or perhaps too frightened to interrupt me. “No,” I said. “You shot Dougal Dalgetty because he started to squeeze you. He was turning the tables on you after you’d been squeezing him and Mike Pilato, threatening to arrest Dougal for drug dealing unless he and Pilato paid you off. How much did they pay you, Mel? Enough to buy that place by a lake and do what, Mel? Just lie around and spend the money you took from Pilato and Dalgetty and maybe some others? Or maybe take me or some other woman to that inn in New England? The Griswold Inn, right? Eugene Griswold, innkeeper. Two hundred years after Eugene died, he gives you a name for a drug dealer that never existed. You make him up as a big dealer, telling Gabe this Eugene Griswold is new in town and throwing his weight around, going up against Mike Pilato and killing one of Pilato’s dealers, Dougal Dalgetty. And when Gabe starts checking on his own, talking to people like Mike Pilato, trying to find Griswold, he realizes there is no Griswold or Grizz, and since you were the only person saying there was, you must be lying, which meant you were hiding something.”

Mel opened his mouth to speak, but I knew what he was going to say and interrupted him before he could say it.

“How much did Dalgetty and Pilato pay you before they decided they’d paid you enough, and if you didn’t knock it off they’d drop the word about you to Walter Freeman? Especially when you didn’t lift a finger to get the charges against Dalgetty dropped? How scared were you about that, Mel? Did you think Dalgetty would turn on you in court, saying he’d been paying you off? Or maybe they paid you in more than cash. Were they slipping you bags of dope, Mel? Cocaine? Heroin? What was it?”

Mel wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “It was Gabe,” he said. “Check it out, Josie. It was Gabe’s gun that killed Dalgetty. Gabe. Not me.”

“It was you, Mel. And it was you who was under the lift bridge when Wayne Honeysett told me he had seen everything.”

He turned to face me. “That’s crazy.”

“Your cell phone records say so. The date, the time, the location …”

The sun had set, and the light inside the car and all around us was weighing down with the greyness of dusk, but I could still make out Mel’s expression and pallor. His expression was concern. His pallor was as grey as the dying light. “You don’t have my cell phone records,” he said in a voice that sounded like high noon in Death Valley.

“No,” I agreed. “Hayashida has them. Got them this morning. I called from Vancouver, asked him to check them out. He did, and confirmed what I suspected. The night Wayne Honeysett died, you were within a hundred yards of right here. You saw him, Mel. You saw him because you were trailing him, right? You were trailing him because you started checking the interviews with all the local perverts, like the good cop you pretended to be, because you realized he might have been in the garden shed the night you shot Gabe. You figured Honeysett was the peeper who hid in the garden shed, the poor sap who fell all over himself when he became infatuated with women like Glynnis Dalgetty, and me, I guess, and a bunch of other women he gave gifts to. He was too shy, too totally screwed up to give me the ring he made for his wife, so he gave it to Gabe and asked him to give it to me, and Gabe did, probably because he felt sorry for Honeysett and wanted me to wear it. What happened, Mel? Did Honeysett start talking about what he knew, what he saw, the night Gabe died? Is that why you had to kill him?”

Mel, still thinking about his cell phone records while staring through the windshield, muttered that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

The silence made me uncomfortable, so I kept talking, waiting for what I knew I had to do, and it all spilled out of me in a torrent.

“Honeysett didn’t go to the police because he was afraid they would charge him with being a pervert again, and he probably would have gotten a jail term. What happened, Mel? Did you see him run from the shed after you shot Gabe? Or maybe as you were coming into our house, through the garden? Did you decide you had to kill him before he figured out what you had done, before somebody like Walter Freeman took the miserable little guy seriously? You must have been under the bridge when I scattered Gabe’s ashes. Is that where you were, Mel? Hiding under the bridge, waiting to talk to Honeysett? Did he know you’d be there? Were you going to shoot him like you shot Dalgetty and …” I had to swallow the lump in my throat. “Like you shot Gabe?”

He turned to look at me. For the first time, he appeared truly frightened, because he understood how much I knew.

I had more to say, not to impress Mel as much as to finally speak aloud all the things I had been telling myself for the past twelve hours.

“Did you panic, Mel? Did you lose it and shoot Honeysett in some kind of … of unthinking knee-jerk reaction? Or did you wait until the bridge went up, so the noise would hide the sound of the gunshot? Which was it, Mel? Never mind, I don’t care. Afterwards you lifted his body and set his head, with the bullet from your gun in it, on the bridge support and held it there while the bridge came down on it. Jesus, Mel, don’t you have nightmares about that? What kind of sound does a man’s skull make when a bridge comes down on it and crushes it like an eggshell and squeezes the brains into jelly? Sure works to hide a bullet, though, doesn’t it? Sorry, a projectile. The pro-jec-tile becomes just another piece of junk off the bridge supports, like a flattened penny, and who the hell would look for that among crushed brains, right, Mel?”

He looked away and down, one hand squeezing the bridge of his nose.

“What’s that, Mel? I couldn’t hear you. Say it louder. I’m really interested in what you have to say.”

He raised his head to look through the windshield again. “I said you have no proof. And it was Gabe’s gun that shot Dalgetty and Gabe’s gun that he used to kill himself.” He turned to look at me. “Because he discovered you had been screwing his partner.”

Which might have been enough for me to shoot him there and then. But I didn’t. I was too damn proud of myself to miss the chance to show him how clever I was. And how stupid I had been.

“I don’t know if he knew that.” I wanted to close my eyes, to lower my arms, and to think about Gabe, but I couldn’t. Not yet. “But he knew you shot Dougal Dalgetty.”

There’s something else, Gabe had said when he called, wanting to make love on the blanket, and I said, I know, and Gabe asked me how I could know. He meant how could I know about Mel shaking down Dalgetty and Pilato and making up the story about Eugene Griswold, because that’s what he wanted to tell me, that he believed Mel had killed Dalgetty.

“And Mike Pilato figured it out as well. That you shot Dougal. When I told him the forensics matched. The bullet that killed Dalgetty and the one that killed Gabe. They matched. Pilato knew Gabe hadn’t shot Dalgetty, and now he knew you had. He suspected you all along, because you were the one shaking him and Dalgetty down. It fell into place with the forensics report, first with Pilato, then with me. So you take your choice, Mel. You get me sitting here, or you get Mike Pilato looking for your ass, ready to punish you for shooting his good buddy Dougal.”

Mel actually smiled. “Mike Pilato doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“He’d better. And what were you doing at our house that night, anyway, Mel? Did you learn that Gabe knew who killed Dalgetty, and why? Were you looking for me? Never mind. Gabe went into the bushes, wrapped in a blanket, you followed him, maybe you talked to him while he was there on the blanket, trying to get him to go along with you, and Gabe wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cover for you, and he wouldn’t have been on his knees when you shot him either. Not for you, not for anybody. I think he was getting up off the blanket, ready to kick your ass, and that’s when you lost it and shot him with your gun—”

“It was Gabe’s gun.” Mel sounded tired, resigned. “Forensics says so. Hayashida signed the form. The paraffin test was positive—”

“No, no, no, no, no, Mel. You were so ‘upset’ about Gabe’s death, so intent on ‘investigating what really happened,’ that you insisted on filling out the forensics forms yourself. You were the one who read the serial number of Gabe’s gun aloud to Hayashida, who entered it on the form before the gun was fired. Except it wasn’t Gabe’s gun you fired into the water tank to get …” I couldn’t resist saying it the same way again. “… the pro-jec-tile for the forensics lab. It was your gun. A Glock G22 identical to Gabe’s, identical to the one carried by everybody else in the department. Boy, I hope they got a volume discount for all those ass-ugly guns. And you sure as hell deserve a medal for thinking fast in a tight situation, like Gabe said you could. You shoot Gabe, drop the gun in the right place, get the hell out from inside those bushes before anybody on the beach can see you, and walk through the garden and into our house, where you get Gabe’s gun out of the kitchen. Then you put it together, slip it in your holster and leave by the front door, maybe already thinking about how you can convince Hayashida or whoever that your gun is really Gabe’s until you get a chance to switch them again. Brilliant.”

I waited for a reaction. There was none, except for a slight glistening on his brow. He was beginning to sweat. Good.

“Oh, and you shook his hand too, didn’t you, Mel?”

He looked at me. I had surprised him again.

“You grabbed his hand, his right hand, with your own. Just a quick grab and release. Shaking hands goodbye, Mel, while Gabe lay dying? No, transferring some of the gunshot residue from your hand to his. Just enough, Mel, for the paraffin test to find some. Just a trace, that’s all you needed. Where’d you pick that up, Mel? At the police academy? Or from that case in Baltimore, where a suspect and his lawyer proved the residue on the suspect’s palm came from shaking hands with the real killer? Nobody thought of doing a paraffin test on your hand, did they? Or even to check the gun for fingerprints. Why should they? Everybody believed Gabe had shot himself with his own weapon. Why waste time on fingerprint tests? Boy, you were good, Mel. Really good. You almost got away clean, except that Wayne Weaver Honeysett was in the garden shed, waiting for me to come home so he could watch me undress in our bedroom—maybe I’d be near the window, where he could see me. He heard the shot and watched you instead. Watched you go into the house and get Gabe’s gun. Poor Wayne. Jerking off among rusty rakes and a bag of topsoil.”

I leaned forward, trying to look Mel in the eye.

“You also grabbed our notepad from the kitchen counter as you were leaving. What was in the notebook, Mel? Was there something in there about you and Dalgetty, maybe? Is that why you took it with you, why I couldn’t find it? Or maybe he just wrote that he loved me. Is that what Gabe wrote on it?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Mel sat up straight, his back against the seat. “Something like that.”

“What did it say, Mel?”

“Go to hell.”

“You know what I think? I think there was something about you in it that didn’t add up with Gabe. Something my friend Dewey saw him writing a day earlier. Is that what it was?”

“Fuck you.”

“Not anymore, Mel. Not you, not ever.”

He looked over and actually smiled. “None of this matters. Either you shoot me now, which you can’t, or you just get the hell out of here while you can.”

“Or Walter Freeman and some other cops show up and take over.” The flashing red and blue lights appeared on the bridge. Bubble gum lights, Gabe used to call them.

Mel twisted in his seat to look at the cruisers on the bridge, the officers spilling out and heading along the canal toward us. “They’ll shoot you when they see you with the gun,” he said.

“Or I’ll shoot you first,” I said, and I took aim and pulled the trigger.