Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Now what happens?”

“Goodin calls Avery.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, Tim! I’ll call Goodin and tell him how my car’s broken down, or that he’s won a football pool, or something inane, and do the same thing with his voice. And call Avery for him, and accuse him of the murder. That’s all. They’ll take it from there. I expect Avery will crack. If I get enough words to play with, I can have Goodin outline the whole murder, how it happened, everything.”

His fingers drummed the table top. “Avery might kill himself,” he said. “The killers always do in that woman’s stories about the little Belgian detective. They excuse themselves and blow their brains out in a gentlemanly manner. There might be a confrontation between the two. I’m not sure.”

“Will it wait until morning?”

“I thought I’d call Goodin now.”

He was plainly exhausted. It was too late for him to be awake, but the excitement kept him from feeling the fatigue. I hated playing nursemaid. I let him drink too much every day, let him die as he wished, but it was not good for him to wear himself out this way.

“Goodin will be shaken by the call,” I told him. “You’ll probably have trouble getting him to talk. He may have closed the station for the night.”

“I’ll call and find out,” he said.

He called, the recorder at the ready, and the phone rang and went unanswered. He wanted to wait up and try again, but I made him give it up and wait until the next day. I put him to bed and went downstairs and straightened up the kitchen. There was a half inch of whiskey in a bottle, and I poured it into a glass and drank it, a thing I rarely do. It warmed me and I’d needed warming. I went upstairs and to bed, and still had trouble sleeping.

There were dreams, and bad ones, dreams that woke me and sat me upright with a shapeless wisp of horror falling off like smoke. I slept badly and woke early. I was downstairs while he slept. While I ate toast and drank tea, Mrs. Dettweiler worried aloud about him. “You’ve got him all worked up,” she said. “He shouldn’t get like that. A sick man like him, he should rest, he should be calm.”

“He wants the excitement. And it’s not my doing.”

“As sick as he is...”

“He’s dying, and has a right to do it his own way.”

“Some way to talk!”

“It’s his way.”

“There’s a difference.”

The radio was playing, tuned to a station in Harmony Falls. Our town had one FM station but the radio did not get FM. Mrs. Dettweiler always played a radio unless Mr. Bane was in the room, in which case he generally told her to turn it off. When she was upstairs in her own room, the television was always on, unless she was praying or sleeping. I listened to it now and thought that he might have used it for his taping and editing and splicing. If you wished to disguise your voice, you might do it that way. If Dean Avery had never heard Thurman Goodin’s voice, or not well enough to recognize it, you could work it well enough that way. With all those words and phrases at your disposal...

Halfway through the newscast they read an item from our town, read just a brief news story, and I spilled my tea all over the kitchen table. The cup fell to the floor and broke in half.

“Why, for goodness...”

I turned off the radio, thought better, and reached to pull its plug. He never turned it on, hated it, but it might occur to him to tape from it, and I didn’t want that. Not yet.

“Keep that thing off,” I said. “Don’t let him hear it, and don’t tell him anything. If he tries to play the radio, say it’s not working.”

“I don’t...”

“Just do as you’re told!” I said. She went white and nodded mutely, and I hurried out of the house and drove into town. On the way I noticed that I held the steering wheel so tightly my fingers had gone numb. I couldn’t help it. I’d have taken a drink then if there’d been one about. I’d have drunk kerosene, or perfume — anything at all.

I went to the drugstore and to the barbershop, and heard the same story in both places, and walked around a bit to relax, the last with little success. I left the car where I’d parked it and walked back to his house and breathed cold air and gritted my teeth against more than the cold. I did not even realize until much later that it was fairly stupid to leave the car. It seemed quite natural at the time.

He was up by the time I reached the house, wearing robe and slippers, seated at the table with telephone and tape recorder. “Where’d you go?” he wanted to know. “I can’t reach Thurman Goodin. Nobody answers his phone.”

“Nobody will.”

“I’ve half a mind to try him at home.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No? Why not?” And then, for the first time, he saw my face. His own paled. “Heavens, Tim, what’s the matter?”

All the way back, through snow and cold air, I’d looked for a way to tell him — a proper way. There was none. Halfway home I’d thought that perhaps Providence might let him die before I had to tell him, but that could only have happened in one of his novels, not in this world.

So I said, “Dean Avery’s dead. It happened last night; he’s dead.”

“Great God in heaven!” His face was white, his eyes horribly wide. “How? Suicide?”

“No.”

“How?” he asked insistently.

“It was meant to look like suicide. Thurman Goodin killed him. Broke into his house in the middle of the night. He was going to knock him out and poke his head in the oven and put the gas on. He knocked him cold all right, but Avery came to on the way to the oven. There was a row and Thurman Goodin beat him over the head with some tool he’d brought along. I believe it was a tire iron. Beat his brains in, but all the noise woke a few of the neighbors and they grabbed Goodin on his way out the door. Two of them caught him and managed to hold him until the police came, and of course he told them everything.”

I expected Bane to interrupt, but he waited without a word. I said, “Rachel Avery wanted him to run away with her. She couldn’t stand staying with her husband, she wanted to go to some big city, try the sweet life. He told the police he tried to stop seeing her. She threatened him, that she would tell her husband, that she would tell his wife. So he went to her one afternoon and knocked her unconscious, took off her clothes, and put her in the bathtub. She was still alive then. He dropped the radio into the tub to give her a shock, then unplugged it and checked to see if she was dead. She wasn’t so he held her head under water until she drowned, and then he plugged the radio into the socket again and left.

“And last night he found out that Avery knew about it, about the murder and the affair and all. So of course he had to kill Avery. He thought he might get away with it if he made it look like suicide, that Avery was depressed over his wife’s death and went on to take his own life. I don’t think it would have washed. I don’t know much about it, but aren’t the police more apt to examine a suicide rather carefully? They might see the marks on the head. Perhaps not. I don’t really know. They’ve put Goodin in jail in Harmony Falls, and with two bloody murders like that, he’s sure to hang.” And then, because I felt even worse about it all than I’d known, “So it all comes out even, after all, the way you wanted it, the loose ends tied up in a bow.”

“Good heavens!”

“I’m sorry.” And I was, as soon as I’d said the words.

I don’t think he heard me. “I am a bad writer and a bad man,” he said, and not to me at all, and perhaps not even to himself but to whatever he talked to when the need came. “I thought I created them, I thought I knew them, I thought they all belonged to me.”