I told the nurse I was an old friend and wanted to say goodbye. She told me to be brief, saying it was doubtful King Landau could hear me.
I promised her I would only take a moment.
I walked into the room.
King was attached to a tangle of tubes and wires, but he was breathing on his own. There was the ever-present catheter bag tied to the side of the bed, and the TV was showing a game show with the sound off. Everywhere there were flowers and get-well cards, but there was no getting well for this man. This was the end of the line for King Landau.
I pulled a chair close to the bed and pressed into King’s thin, gnarled hand the dirty heart-shaped metal button off Dixie’s dress she had worn on the day she was murdered. I closed his fingers over it. “King,” I whispered. “I know you can hear me. Feel that button. It’s Dixie’s button, King—from the dress she was wearing on the day you murdered her with a hammer. What did Dixie do wrong that day, King? Burn the meatloaf? Not starch your shirts stiff enough? Tell you she was leaving? Everybody knows, King—the secret you kept hidden for over sixty years is out in the open. Everybody knows you are a wife killer and that you had Shelby Carpenter killed as well. Tell the truth. Don’t take it to the grave with you.”
King stirred and struggled to open his eyelids, which fluttered like a butterfly’s wings in flight.
“I knew you could hear me.”
“She had it coming,” he rasped. “She had it coming.”
“And Shelby Carpenter?”
“No.”
“You’re dying. What does it matter now? Get it off your chest, man.”
“No.”
The nurse stuck her head in the door. “You’d better go, ma’am. His blood pressure is going through the roof.”
I glanced at the monitor and saw King’s heart was racing. “He’s all yours,” I said before walking out the door and never looking back, though I wondered if King was still clutching the little heart-shaped button that a woman had lovingly sewn on a feed sack dress over six decades ago. I wish I had kept it.