C Corwin - Dig

I helped him gather up the sharp shards of glass. “Could have but didn’t,” I said.

Until now Gwen’s self-control had been, well, Gwen-like. Now tears were sliding down the sides of her nose, into the frown lines around her pale lips. “So you really don’t think my Rollie killed Gordon?”

“No, Gwen, I really don’t.”

She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. Left a puff of soapsuds on her cheek. “Why would he say he did?”

I forced myself to look her in the eye. “Because he figured you killed him, Gwen.”

Gwen said nothing. No one else did either. Including me. We all just stood there, with our chins on our chests, Gwen washing, me rinsing, Chick playing with the broken pieces of glass on the counter. We still might be standing there if Ike hadn’t come to the rescue-if that’s what you want to call it. “Give us your wisdom, Maddy. Did Rollie figure rightly or wrongly?”

I gave him the dirtiest look I could. He gave me his best smile. I turned back toward Gwen. “I don’t know if you and Rollie discussed the possibility of Gordon finding the trophy when he started his dig. My guess is you didn’t. In fact, my guess is you hadn’t said boo to each other about David Delarosa’s death since the night it happened. What was there to say? But when Gordon’s body was found out there, how could Rollie not conclude that you were the one who put that bullet in his head?”

Gwen didn’t object to a word I said. She just kept washing. The same goblet. Over and over.

“Rollie wasn’t just protecting you in that note,” I said. “He was apologizing to you. You’d protected him when he killed David and now you’d been forced to protect him again. Remember what he said? ‘There is no reason for us to live with my guilt any longer.’ It was a noble thing for him to say. But of course it wasn’t true. Because the guilt was yours. You slept with David. Your betrayal made Rollie lose his head. It’s so ironic and so sad. If Rollie hadn’t been so anxious to show you his trophy, hadn’t taken that early bus home, well, three dead men would be alive today, wouldn’t they?” I stopped my moralizing and returned to the evidence. “God only knows when you decided to murder Gordon, Gwen. But certainly by the night of the Kerouac Thing you had. You knew Chick and Gordon would get into it. They did every year. And this year they fought like a couple of little boys on the playground. In a room full of witnesses.”

I took the goblet from Gwen’s hand. Swished it in the rinse water. “When you found out I was snooping into Gordon’s murder, you got worried. You knew I was the one person in Hannawa with enough history in her noggin to link his murder with David’s. So you invited me to lunch. You made sure I knew how heated the argument between Chick and Gordon had been at the Kerouac Thing.”

Chick bleated at me like an angry goat. “It was not that heated!”

I shushed him with my finger and went on. “And then there was that horrible trip to Pettibones. It went right over my head at the time. But your invitation to tag along with you and Rollie had nothing to do with dog toys. It was about your guilt for trying to blame Chick for Gordon’s murder. You cleverly tried to put a bug in my ear about Gordon’s graduate assistant, Andrew Holloway. Remember what you said? ‘If Chick was going to shoot anybody, wouldn’t he shoot Andrew?’ Better for your conscience that I pin Gordon’s murder on a kid you never met than an old friend, I guess.”

Chick bleated at me like ten angry goats now. “Gordon and I were just friends!”

I handed him the goblet. “Take a pill, Chick. This is not about you and Gordon.”

I twisted back toward Gwen. “And then you called me out of the blue the other day to chat about your horrible summer. Your trouble finding the right tiles for your guest bathroom. The right therapist for your dogs. Good gravy, Gwen! You knew damn well I’d pointed the police in Rollie’s direction. You tried to make me have second thoughts. You put a bug in my ear about Sidney and Effie.”

Gwen didn’t say a thing. She just kept washing goblets.

“You’ve tried to put me on the wrong track from the start,” I said. “But there was one interesting fact you knew you couldn’t keep from me. And so you told me yourself. That you drove Gordon home from the Kerouac Thing. You wanted to make it sound as innocent as you could. Of course it was anything but innocent. You used that opportunity to seduce him. Not sexually. Not exactly. You soothed his battered ego. You showed interest in his dig. You asked him to show it to you sometime. Whether it was his idea or yours, the two of you agreed to drive out there the very next evening.

“Gordon was eager to show off his dig to anyone who showed even the slightest interest. He was especially eager to show it to you, Gwen. Gordon always had-what’s a good beatnik word for it? A thing for you? Remember that Halloween party at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house? When you both came as scarecrows? And did a lot of things scarecrows usually don’t do? I’m sure Gordon was remembering that night when you suggested that you meet at the ball fields and drive out from there.”

I was finally ready to describe the murder. “So you drove out to the landfill with Gordon. In his old station wagon. You followed Gordon up the hill. You shot him. Just once. In the back of the head. You stayed just long enough to make sure he was dead. Then you drove back to Hannawa.”

Gwen handed me the last goblet. She started washing the spoons. “Can you actually prove that’s what happened, Maddy?” she asked.

I had to admit that I couldn’t. “Have I found a witness or uncovered some physical evidence that the police haven’t? No, I haven’t done that. But I have managed to catch you in a big lie. Of sorts.”

She handed me the dripping spoons as if they were a bouquet of flowers. “Of sorts?”

“It was in the transcript of that second statement you gave the police,” I said. “You told them you didn’t know that Rollie had a gun. Which made me wonder why Rollie didn’t shoot himself in the head the way he shot Gordon. Why he took himself out of the picture in such a messy, uncertain way. With that bottle of your antidepressants.”

“Because he threw his gun away after shooting the professor?” Chick offered.

I handed him the bouquet of spoons. “Why didn’t he just buy another gun?” I asked.

“Because he knew he was under surveillance?” Chick asked back.

I did not want to get in a verbal Ping-Pong game with Chick. I moved on before he could serve another impossible-to-answer question. “I was quite ready to believe that Rollie committed both murders. Then I got to thinking. About the murders. About human nature. Gordon’s murder was very tidy. A well-planned execution. In the middle of nowhere. David Delarosa’s was messy as the dickens. In the hallway of an apartment building. It’s a miracle no one else saw it or heard it. Whoever killed Gordon was exercising a boatload of self-control. Whoever killed David Delarosa was acting out raw spontaneous rage.”

Chick was playing with the broken glass again. “Those murders were a half-century apart, Maddy. Couldn’t somebody who went loony in 1957, kill somebody cool as a cucumber now?”

“Oh, I suppose it’s possible,” I admitted. “But not likely. Sidney may call himself Shaka Bop these days, but he’s the same old Sidney. Effie’s the same Effie. You’re the same Chick. God help us, I’m the same Maddy. Sweet Gordon was Sweet Gordon until the day he died.”

Gwen’s quivering lips struggled into a melancholy smile. “Rollie the same Rollie? Me the same me?”

I turned my back to Chick. Spoke to Gwen as if she and I were the only two people in the room. “I went back over all the clippings I have on you. It’s quite a bundle. Then I went to City Hall and had a nice long lunch with my old friend Rosemary Hicks. She’s head clerk in the records department. Been there for years. Back in the eighties, when we had all those awful rapes, you organized those self-defense courses for women. Rosemary is just like me. Never throws anything out. You not only organized those courses. You took every one of them yourself. Including the gun safety course. It was held at the indoor shooting range at police headquarters. I found the sergeant who taught that course. He’s retired now. Dick Drake. He had some old records, too. And a good memory. You passed the course with flying colors. The gun you bought for the course was a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Like the one used to kill Gordon.”