Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“A woman in a passing car saw you carrying the boy to the house. She didn’t spot the vanity plate, but she furnished a good description of the car, and of you, Ms. Belgrave. She thought it was odd, you see. The way you were carrying him, as if he was unconscious, or even dead. Was he dead by then?”

“Yes.”

“You killed him first thing? Smothered him?”

“With a pillow,” she said. “I wanted to do it right away, before he became afraid. And I didn’t want him to suffer.”

“Real considerate.”

“He struggled,” she said, “and then he was still. But I didn’t realize just how much he suffered. It was over so quickly, you see, that I told myself he didn’t really suffer a great deal at all.”

“And?”

“And I was wrong,” she said. “I found that out in the dreams. And just now, holding the bear...”

He was saying something but she couldn’t hear it. She was trembling, and the headache was too much to be borne, and she couldn’t follow his words. He brought her a glass of water and she drank it, and that helped a little.

“There were other witnesses, too,” he said, “once we found the body, and knew about the car and the license plate. People who saw your car going to and from the construction site. The chief wanted to have you picked up right away, but I talked him into waiting. I figured you’d come in and tell us all about it yourself.”

“And here I am,” she heard herself say.

“And here you are. You want to tell me about it from the beginning?”

She told itall simply and directly, how she’d selected the boy, how she got him to come into the car with her, how she’d killed him and dumped the body in the spot she’d selected in advance. How she’d gone home, and washed her hands, and waited through three days and nights of headaches and bad dreams.

“Ever kill anybody before, Ms. Belgrave?”

“No,” she said. “No, of course not.”

“Ever have anything to do with Eric Ackerman or his parents?”

“No.”

“Why, then?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Second sight,” she said.

“Second...”

“Second sight. Vanity plates. Vanity.”

“Vanity?”

“All is vanity,” she said, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I never made more than a hundred fifty dollars a week,” she said, “and nobody knew me or paid me a moment’s attention, but that was all right. And then Melissa Sporran was killed, and I was afraid to come in but I came in anyway. And everything changed.”

“You got famous.”

“For a little while,” she said. “And my phone started ringing, and I raised my rates, and my phone rang even more. And I was able to help people, more people than I’d ever helped before, and they were making use of what I gave them, they were taking it seriously.”

“And you bought a new car.”

“I bought a new car,” she said, “and I bought some other things, and I stopped being famous, and the ones who only came because they were curious stopped coming when they stopped being curious, and old customers came less often because they couldn’t afford it, and...”

“And business dropped off.”

“And I thought, I could help so many more people if, if it happened again.”

“If a child died.”

“Yes.”

“And if you helped.”

“Yes. And I waited, you know, for something to happen. And there were crimes, there are always crimes. There were even murders, but there was nothing that gave me the dreams and the headaches.”

“So you decided to do it yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Because you’d be able to help so many more people.”

“That’s what I told myself,” she said. “But I was just fooling myself. I did it because I’m having trouble making the payments on my new car, a car I didn’t need in the first place. But I need the car now, and I need the phone ringing, and I need—” She frowned, put her head in her hands. “I need aspirin,” she said. “That first time, when I told you about Melissa Sporran, the headache went away. But I’ve told you everything about Eric Ackerman, more than I ever planned to tell you, and the headache hasn’t gone away. It’s worse than ever.”

He told her it would pass, but she shook her head. She knew it wouldn’t, or the bad dreams, either. Some things you just knew.

One rarely thoughtof golf as a waiting game. Oh, to be sure, it was a game of considerable preparation, a game even of contemplation. One spent untold hours on the driving range, additional hours on the putting green. And, before actually hitting the ball, one took time to judge the distance, to assess the wind direction and velocity, and thus to select the right club and to envision the ideal shot. Then one took the indispensable practice swing, and in the follow-through one watched the imaginary ball sail to its intended landing place. Then and only then did one address the ball and take a cut at it.

But one did not in the ordinary course of things spend a great deal of time standing around and waiting. If, as sometimes happened, one was stuck in a foursome of dullards who spent half their time knocking the ball into the rough and the other half looking for it, then a certain amount of waiting was inevitable. But Nicholson rarely found himself in such company. He generally avoided playing with men he didn’t know. Better to go out by oneself and play through the duffers and dawdlers.

Today, though, waiting seemed inescapable. At the first tee, a man named Jason Hedrick was waiting for someone to play a round with him, and, a hundred yards away in his car, Roland Nicholson waited for Hedrick to get tired of waiting. There was a bad moment when a car pulled up and golfers piled out of it, but Nicholson relaxed when he saw there were four of them. Their group was complete, and they wouldn’t be asking Hedrick to join them.

The four men teed off in turn while Hedrick went on practicing on the putting green. By the time they had disappeared down the fairway, another car pulled up and two golfers emerged, a man and a woman. Nicholson didn’t think such a couple would invite a single man to join them, nor could Hedrick politely invite himself. Still, anything could happen on a golf course, so Nicholson held his breath until the two had teed off and left Jason Hedrick with his putter in his hand.

The man, Nicholson noted, teed off twice. He topped his first drive and sent a little dribbler fifty yards down the middle of the fairway, and promptly teed up a second ball, driving it just as straight but three or four times as far. He’d taken a mulligan, obviously rejecting (and not troubling to count) his first effort. You couldn’t do that in a tournament, or in any halfway serious game of golf, but a disheartening number of players allowed themselves a mulligan in noncompetitive social play, especially off the first tee.

Not Roland Nicholson. He was a far cry from a scratch golfer, and it was no rare thing for him to top a grounder off the tee, or slice the ball into deep woods. As far as he was concerned, that was part of the game. You could take all the practice swings you wanted, but once you actually hit the ball, you went where it went — and hit it again. That, after all, was the game those funny-talking men in skirts had invented at St. Andrew’s. If you weren’t going to play it by the rules, why play it at all?

When a thirdcar arrived, Nicholson thought the day was lost. Two men got out of it and strode toward the clubhouse. Hedrick, who had to be heartily sick of the putting green by now, would feel free to ask if he could join them, and they’d have no reason to turn him down.