Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I never heard you come in. I was with the children. They’re in a state, as you can imagine.”

“You’re Mrs. Conway?”

“Mrs. James Conway.” She glanced at her late husband, but her eyes didn’t stay on him for long. “He was talking and laughing,” she said. “He was making jokes. And then he shot himself. Why would he do such a thing?”

“Had he been drinking, Mrs. Conway?”

“He’d had a drink or two,” she said. “He liked his drink. But he wasn’t drunk.”

“Where’d the bottle go?”

She put her hands together. She was a small woman, with a pinched face and pale blue eyes, and she wore a cotton housedress with a floral pattern. “I put it away,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”

“Did you move anything else, ma’am?”

“Only the bottle,” she said. “The bottle and the glass. I didn’t want people saying he was drunk when he did it, because how would that be for the children?” Her face clouded. “Or is it better thinking it was the drink that made him do it? I don’t know which is worse. What do you men think?”

“I think we could all use a drink,” he said. “Yourself not least of all, ma’am.”

She crossed the room and got a bottle of Schenley’s from a mahogany cabinet. She brought it, along with three small glasses of cut crystal. Mahaffey poured drinks for all three of us and held his to the light. She took a tentative sip of hers while Mahaffey and I drank ours down. It was an ordinary blended whiskey, an honest workingman’s drink. Nothing fancy about it, but it did the job.

Mahaffey raised his glass again and looked at the bare-bulb ceiling fixture through it. “These are fine glasses,” he said.

“Waterford,” she said. “There were eight, they were my mother’s, and these three are all that’s left.” She glanced at the dead man. “He had his from a jelly glass. We don’t use the Waterford for every day.”

“Well, I’d call this a special occasion,” Mahaffey said. “Drink that yourself, will you? It’s good for you.”

She braced herself, drank the whiskey down, shuddered slightly, then drew a deep breath. “Thank you,” she said. “It is good for me, I’d have to say. No, no more for me. But have another for yourselves.”

I passed. Vince poured himself a short one. He went over her story with her, jotting down notes from time to time in his notebook. At one point she began to calculate how she’d manage without poor Jim. He’d been out of work lately, but he was in the building trades, and when he worked he made decent money. And there’d be something from the Veterans Administration, wouldn’t there? And Social Security?

“I’m sure there’ll be something,” Vince told her. “And insurance? Did he have insurance?”

There was a policy, she said. Twenty-five thousand dollars, he’d taken it out when the first child was born, and she’d seen to it that the premium was paid each month. But he’d killed himself, and wouldn’t that keep them from paying?

“That’s what everybody thinks,” he told her, “but it’s rarely the case. There’s generally a clause, no payment for suicide during the first six months, the first year, maybe even the first two years. To keep you from taking out the policy on Monday and doing away with yourself on Tuesday. But you’ve had this for more than two years, haven’t you?”

She was nodding eagerly. “How old is Patrick? Almost nine, and it was taken out just around the time he was born.”

“Then I’d say you’re in the clear,” he said. “And it’s only fair, if you think about it. The company’s been taking a man’s premiums all these years, why should a moment of wrong thinking get them off the hook?”

“I had the same notion myself,” she said, “but I thought there was no hope. I thought that was just the way it was.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s not.”

“What did you call it? A moment of wrong thinking? But isn’t that all it takes to keep him out of heaven? It’s the sin of despair, you know.” She addressed this last to me, guessing that Mahaffey was more aware of the theology of it than I. “And is that fair?” she demanded, turning to Mahaffey again. “Better to cheat a widow out of the money than to cheat James Conway into hell.”

“Maybe the Lord’s able to take a longer view of things.”

“That’s not what the fathers say.”

“If he wasn’t in his right mind at the time...”

“His right mind!” She stepped back, pressed her hand to her breast. “Who in his right mind ever did such a thing?”

“Well...”

“He was joking,” she said. “And he put the gun to his head, and even then I wasn’t frightened, because he seemed his usual self and there was nothing frightening about it. Except I had the thought that the gun might go off by accident, and I said as much.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That we’d all be better off if it did, himself included. And I said not to say such a thing, that it was horrid and sinful, and he said it was only the truth, and then he looked at me, he looked at me.”

“What kind of a look?”

“Like, See what I’m doing? Like, Are you watching me, Mary Frances? And then he shot himself.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” I suggested.

“I saw his face. I saw his finger tighten on the trigger. It was as if he did it to spite me. But he wasn’t angry at me. For the love of God, why would he...”

Mahaffey clapped me on the shoulder. “Take Mrs. Conway into the other room,” he said. “Let her freshen up her face and drink a glass of water, and make sure the kids are all right.” I looked at him, and he gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Something I want to check,” he said.

I went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Conway wet a dish towel and dabbed tentatively at her face, then filled a jelly glass with water and drank it down in a series of small sips. Then we went to check on the children, a boy of eight and a girl a couple of years younger. They were just sitting there, hands folded in their laps, as if someone had told them not to move.

Mrs. Conway fussed over them and assured them everything was going to be fine and told them to get ready for bed. We left them as we found them, sitting side by side, their hands still folded in their laps. I suppose they were in shock, and it seemed to me they had the right.

I brought the woman back to the living room, where Mahaffey was bent over the body of her husband. He straightened up as we entered the room. “Mrs. Conway,” he said, “I have something important to tell you.”

She waited to hear what it was.

“Your husband didn’t kill himself,” he announced.

Her eyes widened, and she looked at Mahaffey as if he’d gone suddenly mad. “But I saw him do it,” she said.

He frowned, nodded. “Forgive me,” he said. “I misspoke. What I meant to say was that the poor man did not commit suicide. He did kill himself, of course he killed himself—”

“I saw him do it.”

“—and of course you did, and what a terrible thing for you, what a cruel thing. But it was not his intention, ma’am. It was an accident!”

“An accident.”

“Yes.”

“To put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. An accident?”

Mahaffey had a handkerchief in his hand. He turned his hand palm up to show what he was holding with it. It was the cartridge clip from the pistol.

“An accident,” Mahaffey said. “You said he was joking, and that’s what it was, a joke that went bad. Do you know what this is?”

“Something to do with the gun?”

“It’s the clip, ma’am. Or the magazine, they call it that as well. It holds the cartridges.”