Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

The night was shadow haunted again as I ran in a crouch toward the side terrace. I did not see the woman until I was only a few feet from where she lay in a dip in the lawn beyond the bricks, facedown with both arms outflung.

I veered that way, dropped to one knee beside her — and my stomach churned even though I was braced for the worst. The slug from the shot I’d heard had opened up the back of her head just above the neck; spatters of blood and bone and brain matter matted her black hair. Melanie Vinson. I did not need to touch her to verify it.

Over in the summerhouse, the wailing stopped and Erskine’s voice bellowed, “You can’t force me this time, I won’t let you! Go back where you came from, go to hell!” Then the gun banged loud again.

I ducked instinctively, but the round hadn’t been directed my way. Almost immediately, there was another outburst from Erskine in the summerhouse darkness, rising above the noises made by the wind. “Not me, goddamn you, not me, not me!”

The cries were soaked in such visceral terror they drove me up onto my feet, sideways to the path that led over there. Erskine spewed something else, but the wind gusted just then and tore away the sense of it. The wildly flailing tree branches and running clouds created a gyrating dance of shadows, surreal, like images in a madman’s dream.

The gun went off a third time.

I was looking straight at the summerhouse and I saw the muzzle flash, saw the shape of him as he went down. An instant later, I saw something else, or thought I did — a different kind of flare, so brief it was like a subliminal image of a comet’s tail streaking across the night sky. Gone in an eyeblink, if it had ever been there in the first place.

I stepped farther away from the path, to keep out of the amber glow from the lanterns. But nothing else happened. Silence, now, inside the summerhouse. The only sounds anywhere were the whistles and moans of the wind and the rattling tree branches.

I kept on going, slow, getting the pencil flash out of my pocket with my left hand as I went. At the summerhouse steps I paused again to listen — still nothing to hear — and then climbed them carefully with the .38 extended.

Needless precaution. What was left of Peter Erskine lay on the floor next to one of the chaise lounges, his head as much a bloody mess as Melanie Vinson’s, the weapon he’d used, a .357 Magnum, clutched in one hand. The pencil light showed something else, too: scratches on his neck and back, rips in his shirt in half a dozen places.

And no one else was there.

The official police verdict, based on what I’d witnessed that night and on the evidence corroborating my suspicions about Marian Erskine’s fatal coronary, was murder-suicide. Of course.

That was my verdict, too. Of course.

Peter Erskine had had a psychotic break, brought on by factors that could only be guessed at: fear of punishment for the murder of his wife, uncontrollable rage against his co-conspirator, an unstable psychological makeup. He’d killed Melanie Vinson because she wanted more money, or had threatened him in some way, or for no rational reason at all — love and lust flaring into sudden hatred, sudden violence. Then he’d cracked up completely, run screaming to the summerhouse, and blown himself away on the second try.

He’d been the only one in there, all three bullets fired had come from his Magnum, and the only fingerprints found on the weapon were his. It was inconceivable that another person could have been on the property, chased him after he shot the woman, dodged the first bullet, taken the weapon away and used it on Erskine, then escaped without my seeing any sign of him. The figure that had seemed to be clinging to Erskine was simply a distortion of shadows created by the scudding clouds and the wind-tossed evergreens. The torn shirt and the scratches on his back and neck had been done by Melanie Vinson during the struggle I’d heard on the terrace. The first shot from inside the summerhouse had been aimed at himself, only he’d been in such a state he’d missed completely; that slug had been found lodged in one of the support posts. And the words I’d heard him shouting were nothing more than deranged babblings.

The other explanation that crawled into my head, the supernatural one, I dismissed immediately as absurd. And did not mention to anybody, not even Tamara and Jake Runyon. Antanas Vok’s spirit had returned after all to exact vengeance by means of assault and demonic possession? Erskine’s blatant, contemptuous mockery of the powers of darkness had provoked sufficient wrath to permit it to happen? No. Hell, no. The only demons at work that night were the ones that existed inside Peter Erskine’s psyche.

Never mind that a ruthless control freak who had put together a murder plan requiring cold, steel-nerved calculation is about as unlikely a candidate for mental breakdown and willful self-destruction as there is. Never mind that he believed he’d gotten away with it, and therefore had fifteen million reasons to maintain his emotional balance and to go on living. Never mind that the bullet in the support post had been at belt level, opposite where he’d been standing, as if he had fired not at himself but at someone or something in front of him. Never mind that neither skin nor blood had been found under Melanie Vinson’s fingernails. And never mind the subliminal flare I thought I’d seen just after the second shot in the summerhouse; it was either my imagination or a retinal anomaly, an afterimage of the gun flash. There are always inconsistencies, unanswerable questions in cases like this. People go off the deep end all the time, for no clear-cut reasons. I’d seen it happen before, on more than one occasion.

Murder-suicide, period.

Because I can’t, I won’t, believe the dead can harm the living in any way for any purpose.

Because there is no such thing as a revenant.

“Zigzag” copyright © 2016 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust. An original novella.

“Grapplin’” copyright © 2014 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the title “Who You Been Grapplin’ With?”

“Nightscape” copyright © 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust. First published in slightly different form in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the title “The Winning Ticket.”

“Revenant” copyright © 2016 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust. An original novella.