MRS. VANCE WITHERS DID NOT tell the police everything. Yes, she awoke during the night to find her husband dead in bed. No face. It was horrible. No. She had heard nothing. Nothing.
“You mean to tell us, lady, that somebody did that to your husband and you didn’t hear a thing?”
The detective sat on her new divan, his $75 suit on her $1,800 leather divan, and dared to speak gruffly to her as he pencilled things into a little notebook. He was only a sergeant or something.
“Does your colonel know you speak like this to people?”
“I’m a cop, lady, not a soldier.”
“Well, General Withers was a soldier,” said Mrs. Withers icily. She had thrown on a flimsy pink something and now wished she had worn something heavier. Like a suit. And perhaps conducted the interview on the porch. She did not like the sergeant being so familiar. It was akin to disrespect for the departed General Vance Withers.
Two white-clad attendants removed the general through the living room on a wheeled stretcher. A white sheet covered what was left of his head.
“Yes, ma’am. We are aware the general was a soldier.”
“I sense a certain disrespect in your voice, Sergeant. There is insubordination in manner, you know.”
“Lady, I am not a soldier.”
“That should be apparent to anyone.”
“You are the only one, Mrs. Withers, who was with the general when that terrible thing happened. I’m afraid that makes you a suspect.”
“Don’t be absurd. General Withers was a four-star general and a good candidate for five stars. Why should I kill him?”
“Rank is not the only relationship, lady. Like sometimes there are other things between men and women, you know?”
“You really aren’t a soldier, are you?”
“You still claim you heard nothing?”
“That is correct,” said Mrs. Vance Withers. She pulled her pink nightdress tighter around her shoulders. She was an attractive woman with the sexuality of incipient middle age, a last longing fling of a body no longer designed to bear children.
Only—Mrs. Withers had a little secret. But she had no intention of sharing it with an enlisted man. So she listened to the grubby police corporal or whatever he called himself and remembered just a few hours before, thinking she heard something and turning in bed. And then she felt those delicious hands quiet her eyes gently, just the fingertips on her eyelids, and then the strong but velvet smooth hands awakened her body until, almost as if electrically shocked, she was alive with desire, throbbing, demanding, needing and then there was fulfillment as she had never dared dream fulfillment. Shrieking in sudden and complete ecstasy.
“Vance. Vance. Vance.”
And the magnificent hands were still there, to keep her eyes gently shut and in blissful satisfaction. Complete, she returned to sleep, and awoke again only when she thought she felt Vance salivating on her shoulder.
And she turned and her husband’s pillow was a mass of blood. What she had felt was his blood.
“Oh,” she had said. “Oh, no. No.”
And then she phoned the police and here she was, somehow not totally distressed. Although Vance was destined for a fifth star. She just knew it. What a way to die, on the threshold of your fifth star. She grieved with her husband’s memory,
“I’m going to ask you again, Mrs. Withers. Your husband’s head was literally taken off and you heard nothing? Not even a scream?”
“No,” she said. “I heard nothing. One cannot hear hands move.”
“How do you know it was hands?”
Hmmm, she thought that was a mistake.
“Well, lady,” said the policeman, “don’t think we think human hands could do that.”
Mrs. Withers shrugged. These enlisted men were so stupid really.