Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Of something,” I agreed. “You want my best guess, it’s that there’s no way of telling. As soon as the gimmick occurred to Vince, that the clip might be missing, the whole scenario was set. Either Conway had removed the clip and we were going to find it, or he hadn’t and we were going to remove it for him, and then find it.”

“ ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’ Except not really, because either way it comes out the same. It goes in the books as an accident, whether that’s what it was or not.”

“That’s the idea.”

“So it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other.”

“I suppose not,” I said, “but I always hoped it was the way Mahaffey said it was.”

“Because you wouldn’t want to think ill of him? No, that’s not it. You already said he was capable of tampering with evidence, and you wouldn’t think ill of him for it, anyway. I give up. Why? Because you don’t want Mr. Conway to be in hell?”

“I never met the man,” I said, “and it would be presumptuous of me to care where he winds up. But I’d prefer it if the clip was in his pocket where Mahaffey said it was, because of what it would prove.”

“That he hadn’t meant to kill himself? I thought we just said...”

I shook my head. “That she didn’t do it.”

“Who? The wife?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That she didn’t do what? Kill him? You think she killed him?”

“It’s possible.”

“But he shot himself,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Or did I miss something?”

“That’s almost certainly what happened,” I said, “but she was one of the witnesses, and the kids were the other witnesses, and who knows what they saw, or if they saw anything at all? Say he’s on the couch, and they’re all watching TV, and she takes his old war souvenir and puts one in his head, and she starts screaming. ‘Ohmigod, look what your father has done! Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, Daddy has killed himself!’ They were looking at the set, they didn’t see dick, but they’ll think they did by the time she stops carrying on.”

“And they never said what they did or didn’t see.”

“They never said a word, because we didn’t ask them anything. Look, I don’t think she did it. The possibility didn’t even occur to me until sometime later, and by then we’d closed the case, so what was the point? I never even mentioned the idea to Vince.”

“And if you had?”

“He’d have said she wasn’t the type for it, and he’d have been right. But you never know. If she didn’t do it, he gave her peace of mind. If she did do it, she must have wondered how the cartridge clip migrated from the gun butt to her husband’s pocket.”

“She’d have realized Mahaffey put it there.”

“Uh-huh. And she’d have had twenty-five thousand reasons to thank him for it.”

“Huh?”

“The insurance,” I said.

“But you said they’d have to pay anyway.”

“Double indemnity,” I said. “They’d have had to pay the face amount of the policy, but if it’s an accident they’d have had to pay double. That’s if there was a double-indemnity clause in the policy, and I have no way of knowing whether or not there was. But most policies sold around then, especially relatively small policies, had the clause. The companies liked to write them that way, and the policy holders usually went for them. A fraction more in premiums and twice the payoff? Why not go for it?”

We kicked it around a little. Then she asked about the current case, the one that had started the whole thing. I’d wondered about the gun, I explained, purely out of curiosity. If it was in fact an automatic, and if the clip was in fact in his pocket and not in the gun where you’d expect to find it, surely some cop would have determined as much by now, and it would all come out in the wash.

“That’s some story,” she said. “And it happened when, thirty-five years ago? And you never mentioned it before?”

“I never thought of it,” I said, “not as a story worth telling. Because it’s unresolved. There’s no way to know what really happened.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s still a good story.”

The guy inInwood, it turned out, had used a .38-caliber revolver, and he’d cleaned it and loaded it earlier that same day. No chance it was an accident.

And if I’d never told the story over the years, that’s not to say it hadn’t come occasionally to mind. Vince Mahaffey and I never really talked about the incident, and I’ve sometimes wished we had. It would have been nice to know what really happened.

Assuming that’s possible, and I’m not sure it is. He had, after all, sent me out of the room before doing whatever it was he did. That suggested he hadn’t wanted me to know, so why should I think he’d be quick to tell me after the fact?

No way of knowing. And, as the years pass, I find I like it better that way. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.

He was alreadyat the ballpark when I got there, and that was unusual for Tommy. Of course he was scheduled to pitch that afternoon, going up against the Bobcats in the last game of a three-game home stand, but even when he pitched he tended to show up a lot closer to game time. He’d make it in time to warm up properly, and he’d generally be there for the batting practice that Hairston makes his pitchers take along with everybody else, seeing as our league has escaped the goddam designated hitter rule. But he was basically a last-minute kind of guy, and I’m the opposite, like most catchers. So it was a surprise to walk in and see him already suited up.

But not a big surprise, because Tommy Willis was a southpaw, and it’s true what you’ve heard about them. Pud Hairston was a pitcher himself for twelve years and has been a pitching coach for better than twenty, and he swears they’re all knuckleballs, meaning you never know which way they’re going to break. I don’t know why it should be true, why you can predict a man’ll have a wild hair on the basis of which arm he uses to throw the ball, or why it only seems to work that way with pitchers, while a left-handed outfielder or first baseman will be as regular as the next person, or at least the next ballplayer. A southpaw has an edge against left-handed batters and gives up the same edge to righties, and I can see why that would be, same as I or anybody else can see why he’d have an advantage throwing over to first. But what has all of this got to do with what goes on in his head? That makes no sense to me, but I’ve known enough of them and caught enough of them to be able to swear it’s true.

I said he was early for a change, and he grinned that lazy grin of his. “Gotta get them Bobcats,” he said. We went out and threw a few, and then he put on a jacket and sat down while I went and took my turn in the cage. I love batting practice. You just stand there and you hit. I’d do it all day if they let me.

Around the time the ground crew got to smoothing out the base paths, I checked the stands and spotted my wife sitting where she generally did. I waved, but she was deep in conversation with Sally Peres and didn’t see me. There were rumors that we were looking to trade Reynaldo Peres, and for Kathy’s sake I hoped they weren’t true, as Sally was her closest friend among the wives. (Other hand, if I was the general manager, Peres would have been gone by now. He’s always behind in the count, and that means every hitter’s a struggle for him.)

“I don’t see Colleen,” I said to Tommy, and he said she wasn’t coming.

“She gets tired of baseball,” he said.

Anybody’ll tire of baseball from time to time, even the men who play it, and I can see how a wife could get sick of it, especially if she wasn’t too crazy about hanging out with the other wives. And the TV cameras pan those rows all the time, so you have to make sure you look interested, and that the camera doesn’t catch you yawning, or picking your nose. Kathy doesn’t come to every home game, not by any means. Still, a pitcher doesn’t start but one game in five, so when he’s up his wife’s usually there to see him.