Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

I shared someone’s car to the cemetery. At graveside, with a wind blowing that chilled the edge of thought, I let the gloom slip free as a body into an envelope of earth, and I did what I’d come to do; I looked into the face of Dean Avery.

He was a tall man, thick in the shoulders, broad in the forehead, his hair swept straight back without a part, forming upon his head like a crown. I watched his eyes when he did not know that anyone watched him, and I watched the curl of his lip and the way he placed his feet and what he did with his hands. Before long I knew he mourned her not at all, and soon after that I knew the old man was right. He had killed her as sure as the wind blew.

They would have given me a ride back to his house, but I slipped away when the service ended, and spent time walking around, back and forth. By the time I was back at her grave, it had already been filled in. I wondered at the men who do such work, if they feel a thing at all. I turned from her grave and walked back through the town to Bane’s house.

I found him in the kitchen with coffee and toast. I sat with him and told him about it, quickly, and he made me go back over all of it in detail so that he could feel he had been there himself. We sat in silence awhile, and then went to the living room. I built up the fire and we sat before it.

“You know now,” he said. I nodded, for I did; I’d seen for myself, and knew it and felt it. “Knowing is most of it,” he said. “Computers can never replace us, you know. They need facts, information. What’s the term? Data. They need data. But sometimes men can make connections across gaps, without data. You see?”

“Yes.”

“So we know.” He drank, put down his glass. “But now we have to have our data. First the conclusion, and then backward to the proof.”

My eyes asked the question.

“Because it all must round itself out,” he said, answering the question without my giving voice to it. “This man killed and seems to have gotten away with it. This cannot be.”

“Should we call the police?”

“Of course not. There’s nothing to say to them, and no reason they should listen.” He closed his eyes briefly, opened them. “We know what he did. We ought to know how, and why. Tell me the men at the funeral, Tim, as many as you remember.”

“I don’t remember much before the cemetery. I paid them little attention.”

“At the cemetery, then. That’s the important question, anyway.”

I pictured it again in my mind and named the ones I knew. He listened very carefully. “Now there are others who might have been there,” he said, “some of whom you may not know, and some you may not remember. Think, now, and tell me if any of these were there.”

He named names, five of them, and it was my turn to listen. Two were strangers to me and I could not say if I’d seen them. One I remembered had been there, two others had not.

“Get a pencil and paper,” he told me. “Write these names down. Robert Hardesty, Hal Kasper, Roy Teale, Thurman Goodin. Those will do for now.”

The first two had been at the funeral, and at the cemetery. The other two had not.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“She had a lover, of course. That was why he killed her. Robert Hardesty and Hal Kasper should not have been at the funeral, or at least not at the cemetery. I don’t believe they’re close to her family or his. Thurman Goodin and Roy Teale should have been at the funeral, at the least, and probably should have been at the cemetery. Now a dead woman’s secret love may do what you would not expect him to do. He may stay away from a funeral he would otherwise be expected to attend, for fear of giving himself away, or he might attend a funeral where his presence would not otherwise be required, out of love or respect or no more than morbid yearning. We have four men, two who should have been present and were not, and two who should not have been present but were. No certainty, and nothing you might call data, but I’ve a feeling one of those four was Rachel Avery’s lover.”

“And?”

“Find out which one,” he said.

“Why would we want to know that?”

“One must know a great many unimportant things in order to know those few things which are important.” He poured himself more bourbon and drank some of it off. “Do you read detective stories? They always work with bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, find out trivia until it all fits together.”

“And what might this fit into?”

“A shape. How, why, when.”

I wanted to ask more, but he said he was tired and wanted to lie down. He must have been exhausted. He had me help him upstairs, change clothes, and into bed.

I knew Hal Kasper enough to speak to, so it was his shop I started in that night. He had a cigar store near the railroad terminal and sold magazines, paperbound books, candies, and stationery. You could place a bet on a horse there, I’d heard. He was thin, with prominent features — large hollow eyes, a long, slim nose, a large mouth with big gray-white teeth in it. Thirty-five or forty, with a childless wife whom I’d never met, I thought him an odd choice for a lover, but I knew enough to realize that women did not follow logic’s rules when they committed adultery.

He had been at the funeral. Joseph Cameron Bane had found this a little remarkable. He had no family ties on either side with Rachel or Dean Avery. He was below them socially, and not connected through his business. Nor was he an automatic funeral-goer. There were such in the town, I’d been told, as there are in every town; they go to funerals as they turn on a television set or eavesdrop on a conversation, for entertainment and for lack of better to do. But he was not that sort.

“Hi, Irish,” he said. “How’s the old man?”

I thumbed a magazine. “Asleep,” I said.

“Hitting the sauce pretty good lately?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no.”

“Well, he’s got a right.” He came out from behind the counter, walked over to me. “Saw you this afternoon. I didn’t know you knew her. Or just getting material for that book of yours?”

Everyone assumed I was going to write a novel set in the town, and that this was what had led me to live with Mr. Bane. This would have made as much sense as visiting Denmark in order to rewrite Hamlet. I’d stopped denying it. It seemed useless.

“You knew her?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. You know me, Irish. I know everybody. King Farouk, Princess Grace—” He laughed shortly. “Sure, I knew her, a lot better than you’d guess.”

I thought I’d learn something, but as I watched his face I saw his large mouth quiver with the beginnings of a leer, and then watched the light die in his eyes and the smile fade from his lips as he remembered that she was dead, cold and in the ground, and not fit to leer over or lust after. He looked ever so slightly ashamed of himself.

“A long time ago,” he said, his voice pitched lower now. “Oh, a couple of years. Before she got married, well, she was a pretty wild kid in those days. Not wild like you might think; I mean, she was free, you understand?” He groped with his hands, long-fingered, lean. “She did what she wanted to do. I happened to be there. I was a guy she wanted to be with. Not for too long, but it was honey-sweet while it lasted. This is one fine way to be talking, isn’t it? They say she went quick, though; didn’t feel anything, but what a stupid way, what a crazy stupid way.”

So it was not Hal Kasper who had loved her; not recently, at least. When I told all this to Joseph Cameron Bane he nodded several times and thought for some moments before he spoke.

“Ever widening circles, Tim,” he said. “Throw a stone into a still pool and watch the circles spread. Now don’t you see her more clearly? You wouldn’t call Kasper a sentimental man, or a particularly sensitive man. He’s neither of those things. Yet he felt that sense of loss, and that need to pay his last respects. There’s purpose in funerals, you know, purpose and value. I used to think they were barbaric. I know better now. He had to talk about her, and had also to be embarrassed by what he’d said. Interesting.”