Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

“Well,” I said. “There won’t be a trial after all.”

He looked up at me very quickly. “What happened?” He started standing up.

“Peanuts Morgan killed himself,” I said. “Hung himself in his cell last night, with the belt that the stupid jailer forgot to take away from him.”

Billy sat down slowly. “Now why would he do a thing like that?”

“I guess he finally sobered up enough to realize what he’d done, to understand that he was going to die in the electric chair,” I said. “Either that, or be sent to the hospital for the criminally insane.”

Billy put his hands over his face. I could see that he was shaking. “That poor guy,” he said.

“Don’t let it throw you,” I said. “It’s just one of those things.”

He looked at me in a peculiar sort of way. “I guess I’d better be on my way,” he said. “I want to thank you, Mr. John, for all that you’ve done.” He shivered. “If it hadn’t been for you, it would have been me in that cell.”

I looked into his face. “You don’t have to go,” I said. “I can find you a job here, a good job. You can stay out here with me until you get on your feet. You’ve got to quit rambling one of these days, son. It might as well be here and now. Maybe the next trouble you get into...”

His face sobered. “You’re right, Mr. John,” he said. “But I’m going home.” He lifted his head, looking at me. “I owe it to my family, Mr. John. Go back and show them I’m through with living the way I’ve been living. Maybe one of these days I can come back here.”

I hated to see him go. But it satisfied me. He went inside and packed his old suitcase. Then I volunteered to drive him out to the highway. I could have offered him money for a bus ticket, but I knew he wouldn’t take it.

We were silent in the car. There wasn’t much to say, I guess. It had been a good time, having that boy staying with me, and now it was over and I was still a tough cop in a small town.

I stopped the car at a good place for hitchhiking and got out of the car when he got out. He hefted his suitcase in one hand.

“Goodbye, Mr. John,” he said.

“Goodbye, son,” I said. “Keep your nose clean now. You might not be so lucky next time.”

I don’t know why. Maybe he just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Maybe he couldn’t bear me not knowing what I’d done. Maybe he wanted to show me how soft I’d gone inside.

“You’re right,” he said. His face did not change at all — it stayed open and friendly and handsome as all hell; the face of a nice kid that even a tough old cop like me couldn’t help but like. “It would be hard to find another cop as stupid as you are.”

It was like a blow in the face.

I shocked back an involuntary step, the way a man does when he’s hit by a bullet.

“You killed her,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “I knocked off the old lady.”

I took a step toward him. “You...”

“What are you going to do about it?” he said. “Take me back and tell them you made a little mistake, that you beat a confession out of the wrong man and now that man has killed himself? You’re hooked, copper. You’re hooked good and solid. You can’t ever tell anybody what you did.”

He was dead-right I could never tell them how wrong I’d been. Besides, Peanuts was dead now. Dead and gone. With his signed confession that I guess any man, dim-witted and addled with whiskey or not, would have signed to stop what I was doing to him.

But my boy Billy forgot one thing. I’m tough enough for the job. For any job that comes along. He forgot that one thing.

I shot him right between the eyes. And I watched him kick and fall.

Mrs. Dearly got a special joy out of living — everything contributed to her heightened sense of excitement and exhilaration and sheer sensuous delight.

After what had been done last night, it was mostly a day of waiting for something to happen. Waiting, however, can be a great excitement If one possesses the quality of character to sustain composure, the excitement all inside and growing, waiting can be the most exhilarating experience imaginable.

The day began consciously for Mrs. Dearly at exactly nine o’clock, when she wakened. She had left her windows open and the drapes drawn back before going to bed, and her room was now, at nine o’clock in the morning, full of warm and golden light. It was clearly going to be one of those andante days expiring through minutes and hours to slumberous summer sounds.

Mrs. Dearly loved that kind of day, so softly sensuous and replete with drowsy dreams, and she was aware of this one instantly in her flesh and bones. She yawned and stretched, lifting golden arms into the golden light. Looking down the length of her body, its senses astir in a sheer mist of blue nylon, she felt a kind of innocent narcissistic delight. Holding herself in child-like affection, quite uncorrupted by vanity, she was truly grateful for being what she was — so perfectly made for love and lovely things; but her gratitude was unformed and undirected, and she hadn’t the faintest notion to whom it was owed, or how it might be acknowledged.

She lay in bed for perhaps another half hour, absorbing and transforming all the subtle manifestations of the day, and then she stretched again and got up and shed the blue mist on the way to the bathroom. It lay on the floor like something conjured out of her dreams, a giant handful of the bubble bath foam in which she soaked until ten. Returning then to the bedroom, she began to remove the bright enamel from her fingernails, and when this was accomplished she began, with equally meticulous attention, to put on another coat of enamel.

Inasmuch as the new coat was the same color and shade as the old, the effect, when she was finished, was identical with the one it replaced; but in the meanwhile she had measured the heightening of her anticipation and excitement by the precise performance of a small task that occupied her pleasantly and brought her so much closer to where the day was taking her.

It was almost noon when she was finally dressed in a tan sleeveless dress, tan stockings and shoes, and a tiny hat of deeper shade. She inspected herself in her full-length mirror with the same child-like innocence and delight with which she had looked at herself earlier in the blue mist, turning slowly now for the effect from all sides; and then, carrying her purse and a pair of white gloves, she went downstairs prepared to leave the house, going out the back way to a terrace where she expected her husband to be — and there he was, sure enough, reclining in a blue and yellow sling chair.

Mrs. Dearly crossed the terrace and kissed him lightly over one eye, patting his head at the same time with a display of that kind of affection one generally bestows on small boys and dogs.

“Good morning, dear,” she said.

“Morning? In case you don’t realize it, it’s noon.”

The words alone, unqualified by inflection, had a carping connotation; but his voice was, in fact, amused and indulgent — as if it were understood and agreed that she should be immune to the imposition and demands of time, and that it would, really, be rather absurd if she were otherwise.

“Oh, I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Honestly I have.”

“You’re dressed for the street,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“I have some shopping to do downtown. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least. But don’t you want some lunch before you go? I suppose it’s too late for breakfast.”

“I hardly ever eat breakfast, as you know, and I’ll have lunch downtown. What will you do?”