Max Collins: Quarry's cut

… she said, I can’t live with that.

“The razor was in my hand and I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back and her eyes were… they were sad… not full of pain or anger or hatred or anything… they were sad… and I cut her throat.

“This time there was blood. On my hands. On my arms. I went into the bathroom and I washed my hands.”

He smiled. The practiced smile I’d seen so much of lately.

“It’s like I told Millie,” he said. “It just got out of hand… things just started happening… quickly… it was like somebody else was doing those things… it was unreal… like the movies.”

And then he laughed at what he’d just said, and the laughter turned into a racking sound and when he stopped making the racking sound, his head hung loose above the DIRECTOR shirt, his body slack again, the cables holding him in like a man in an electric chair that’s done its work already.

I switched off the recorder.

“That’s all I need,” I said.

“Tell me…” he said, coming back to life a little. “Tell me something, Murphy, or whoever the fuck you are… how did you put this together so fast? How did you know it wasn’t your Turner who killed Harry and Richie and Waddsworth?”

“Harry probably killed Waddsworth,” I said. “But there’s no way to know for sure. Not with all three of them dead.”

“You mean… it was an argument… love triangle thing.. ”

“I’m sure of it. But whether Harry freaked and murdered Waddsworth or whether it was accidental, just a fight that got out of control.. no one will ever know. Janet heard them arguing, remember, and that’s as close to the truth as we’ll come. “

“What about the rest of it? How did you pick up on me?”

I shrugged. “It was obvious enough what had happened outside, out in the snow. You told me you’d seen Turner in the hall, that it was Turner you’d chased out there… but the footprints outside told a different story than yours of going out and looking around for Turner and seeing nothing and getting scared and coming back in. There were two sets of prints ending in a smoothed-out area, where you pulled Richie down and struggled a little, then a long smooth trail where you dragged him unconscious to the shed, and then one set of footprints going back to the house.”

“And based on that, you came in and hit me with whatever it was you hit me with?”

“It was a crow bar. No. When I looked in the tool chest for my gun and it wasn’t there, I knew it was you had taken it. You were the only person who knew I even had a gun. I told you I hid it outside… you were smart enough to know that that meant in the shed. You took a quick look and turned it up, after you finished with Richie… or maybe you went out and found it earlier. Doesn’t matter. Either way, could only have been you.”

“It could’ve been Turner who found the gun.”

“Why would he be looking for it? Besides, there was a silencer for the gun, in the tool chest, too… I’d hidden it in there, loose. You left it behind. You probably didn’t know what the hell it was. Turner, obviously, would’ve.”

“Still… Turner might’ve been doing all the things I did… I don’t see how you knew…”

“Turner has a silenced gun. He wouldn’t go around making noises with a straight razor. Besides, I asked him.”

“What?”

“Turner was down in that farmhouse, at the bottom of the hill. I saw smoke from its chimney earlier tonight. My car was hidden in the barn, and while you were tied in the chair, sleeping it off, I took Janet down there and had her stay in the barn while I went in the house to talk to Turner. He was asleep. I woke him up.

“He was surprised to see me. Didn’t know I was anywhere around. And that was enough to tell me he wasn’t running around doing things at the lodge, which I didn’t think he was, anyway. He’s dead now.”

“He’s… you killed him? Why?”

“There was a woman named Wilma. I liked her. You’ve eaten at her place yourself… you mentioned it, remember? I value few people in this life… but she was one. He killed her. And in doing that, he was being careless. Careless about me… I lived almost next door, and had been in the place shortly before Wilma’s death, and his doing that could… still could… cause me trouble. He was always doing thoughtless fucking things like that. He almost got me killed once. I didn’t like him. And now this. You see, people in Turner’s business… the business I used to be in, and still am, marginally

… don’t go around carelessly destroying life. To you murder’s a hobby… Turner was in business. In my way of thinking, that’s what separates me from the psychopaths like you. But that’s just a rationalization, so the hell with it. Anyway, Turner was careless.. he killed Wilma as thoughtlessly, as casually as he’d humped her sixteen-year-old niece, and… well. What am I doing boring you for? There’s no reason for you to have to listen to all this.”

I switched the tape recorder back on, took his nickel-plated. 38 out of my belt-I’d loaded the gun with ammunition I’d found upstairs, with my nine-millimeter — and swung the gun up toward him. Some light reflected off the shiny barrel as he opened his mouth to say no and I slid the barrel in and squeezed the trigger.

The chair went over backwards with him. Some of what used to be inside his head spattered against the brown brick fireplace and clung.

At this point the tape ran out and began flapping in the machine. I untied the cable from the chair and him and returned the cable to the rest of the black coils of cable and wire covering the area surrounding the movie set like an underbrush. The gun was still in his mouth. I moved his right arm up towards his face and made the fingers touch the gun. The straight razor I put in his pocket.

I almost tripped over Waddsworth on my way out.

The first weekend in June I had some men over to play poker. One of them was Bob Katz. He was the last to arrive; the other three men and I were already playing when he got there.

I got up and met him at the door. He was an intense little dark-haired man with glasses; he never seemed entirely at ease in sports clothes, like the red short-sleeve banlon and plaid bermuda shorts he was wearing now

Before he’d stepped in the door, he said, “My daughter’s down for the weekend. She dropped me off. I’ll catch a ride home with one of the others.”

“Fine,” I said.

“She’s waiting out there. Wants to say hello.” And he gave me a funny look, like he’d just figured out it hadn’t been so wise, that time, to entrust his daughter’s honor to me for an evening.

So I sent him over to the big round table I’d set up in the living room, and went outside.

It was a cool night. Overcast. No stars, no moon, for the lake to reflect: just the various color lights from the cottages and the few restaurants and such around the lake.

There’s a gravelled area alongside the A-frame, and Bob Katz’s big green Lincoln was pulled up there, parked, and Janet was standing by it-not leaning, standing-looking out at the lake.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello Jack,” she said. She was in a dark blue halter top with denims, a yellow scarf around her neck. She was pretty as ever, the brown arcs of hair framing her face, her glasses resting on top of her head, pushed up there, like she wanted to look out at the lake and see it through a soft-focus lens. Or maybe it was me she wanted to see that way.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d driven her back to Chicago, after we’d spent, half the day in that barn, in my GT, waiting for the snowplows to come along and clear the way. She’d huddled with me in the car, and it had been cold, because I hadn’t been able to turn on the heat, for fear of carbon monoxide poisoning in the enclosed barn.