Рон Гуларт - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

Hanley bent over the painting and squinted at a signature in the lower right-hand comer. “His name Edouard Vuillard?” As Hanley was straightening up, St. John made a dash for the door, the skirts of his pajama top billowing out behind him and one slipper flying. Lean and long-legged, he was halfway to the door before Bunk realized what was happening.

“Whoa there, fellow,” said Russo sticking out a foot. St. John’s arms flew out, and he hit the floor and slid on his stomach like a body surfer. There was a whack as his head hit the base of the door.

“Ouch,” he said. Slowly he got to his feet. Bunk snapped cuffs around his wrists, and Russo read him the Miranda Act.

St. John gave a scornful laugh when she told him he didn’t have to say anything until he’d seen his attorney. “I’ve always thought that was absurd. I don’t have an attorney, for one thing. Unless you count the one the state’s assigned to me. You want to know something else, young lady?”

Russo eyed him skeptically, probably expecting a sexist remark.

“I killed Temple Buchanon.”

“You don’t have—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t have to talk about it until I can lie to my lawyer. The fact of the matter is—” St. John stopped, a tear appeared on his lower lid. “Don’t laugh, good people, but the aging cynic is actually remorseful for what he’s done. Excuse me, if you will. I’m afraid a rather lachrymose situation is developing.” He turned stumbling toward the bed and sat down, and for two minutes sobbed like a baby.

“Well,” he said finally. “I haven’t cried like that in twenty years. Yes, I killed the woman I once loved. Maybe still do.” He told how, two weeks ago, he went to see Temple. He was desperate for money, hadn’t had a part in over eight months. He pleaded with her to take him back in. “I told her the usual baloney about turning over a new leaf, that from now on things would be different. She declined. I insisted. We were standing in the living room. I shouted that she was a coldhearted, barren woman, and she lashed back. Said I was a failed actor and a failed human being and if I didn’t leave she would call the police. She started shoving me toward the door, pushing me, the great Sprague St. John, America’s equivalent of Sir Laurence Olivier—” here followed a despairing laugh “—and that’s when I lost it. I took her by the shoulders—” He closed his eyes and let out an anguished groan. “Afterwards, realizing I couldn’t sink any lower than I already had, I took this painting, which is worth probably forty thousand — if you can find a way to unload it. And there you have it.”

There was silence in the room. Something big and hissing — a pulp truck or oil tanker — rumbled by on the street below. The cat peered down from its perch, its bony shoulders hunched over its head.

Sprague St. John stood with his cuffed hands in front of him. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“Hi, guys,” said Tracy, skipping down the steps of the trailer she lived in with her mother. Bunk and Jeff had just turned into the dirt drive and stepped out of their Crown Victoria. “Did you find that actor?”

“We did,” said Jeff. “Thanks to you.”

The girl looked at him.

“You want to join the department?”

Tracy grinned. “No, thanks. I’m going to be a music teacher.”

“We’ve got something for you,” said Bunk. He reached into the back seat, took out a gray pet carrier, and opened the gate. A marmalade cat stepped out, looked around, and went straight to Tracy.

“Look at that,” said Jeff with a sigh. “Love at first sight. Do you think that’ll ever happen to me?”

Bunk was watching Tracy as she picked up the cat. He started to shrug and then stopped himself. “Sure it will, Jeff. When you least expect it.”

It was a Sunday in Fort Smith, at the end of a double-header which I went 0 for 9 and struck out five times off this Dominican name of Rodriguez, that I decided to kill Jiggs Holloway.

Jiggs was the manager of the Joplin Jets of the Class A Tri-State League, the Tri-States being Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Class A? Well, it’s one of the levels of the minor leagues. Triple-A is the highest, then Double-A, then A. Below that is the rookie leagues and the instructional leagues. Basically, Class A is where you send your young talent to get experience, so that eventually we will move up to the show, which is what we call the big leagues. This means that your basic minor league manager, when he is nurturing young talent, is supposed to be helpful. What my girlfriend Janice, who works at the Crisis Intervention thing they have back in Eufaula, calls “supportive.”

Well, Jiggs was not supportive. He was, if you will excuse the expression, about the foulest, meanest, evillest S.O.B. ever to spit tobacco juice on his cleats. He was short, dumpy, and bald, with little ferret eyes and pink lips in his doughy face and the kind of snaggly brown teeth you get when you dip snuff for about fifty years.

And he loved to ride me. When I got promoted to the Jets last year, after having done real good in the rookie league (.304 with five home runs), he started to get on me, calling me “Hayseed” and “Rube,” saying I was dumb. One game when I misjudged a fly ball, which anyone would have done the way it was hit and coming right out of the sun so you couldn’t see it, he tore into me like dogs on a possum, which I felt was an overreaction, if that’s the word.

Not a day went by that he didn’t say something to rag me. Even when I started good in the first few games this year, he was always on me about something, not paying attention, or being slow, or missing a sign, or not being in position.

It was bad enough when I was doing okay. But when the slump started, it was pure hell.

The slump? I don’t want to talk about it. Baseball is a streaky game. All ballplayers have slumps, even Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron had weeks and months when they could not hit a barn if they were standing inside it. Sometimes you go 9 for 15 with three home runs, sometimes you go 0 for 15. It tends to even out over a season. But the slump I went into at the beginning of May was the worst one I had ever been in. The worst I had ever seen anyone in, if you want to know the truth. On the twenty — ninth of April I went 2 for 4 with three r.b.i.’s at Cape Girardeau and was hitting.285, but after that, as my dad says, the wheels came off. From then to the middle of May I went 1 for 25, and Jiggs settled down to make my life miserable.

It’s a funny thing. When a ballplayer is in the groove, the ball looks as big as a basketball when it comes up to the plate, and the fielders fall down running after it when you’ve hit it. When you’re in a slump, the ball looks like a BB and the bat feels like it’s the wrong shape. When you swing, you miss. When you don’t miss, you hit it right at somebody.

It gets to you. You keep thinking about it, and pretty soon you can’t think of anything else. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. Nobody in the clubhouse wants to talk to you because they’re afraid it’s contagious, like leprosy or cancer or something, and they don’t want to get too close to it. Reporters write about it, finding it funny, like that peabrain from Neosho who wrote that column which everyone thought was so humorous, which all I can say is if he’s so good why is he working for some rat bag paper in Neosho, Missouri?

It was the most awful time of my life. And every day of the slump, Jiggs was on me like flies on horse manure. Every game I’d come back to the dug-out after going 0 for 3, 0 for 4, he’d swear at me, using language I’d be ashamed to repeat. Saying I was stupid, shiftless, no-talent. Saying that I was a fairy, which anyone will tell you I am not, and you can ask Janice.