Эд Горман - Murder on the Aisle

In his mind now he saw the two of them back in ’64, when they’d first met, as freshmen, at City College. They’d both been attending a showing of Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country , which some twinky professor who preferred foreign directors was saying good things about but in a twinky professor way. “It’s, um, a cut above Roy Rogers, but it’s a long way from Antonioni.”

Antonioni! That moron couldn’t direct traffic, let alone good films!

So Tobin, even then a mild-mannered and laid-back type, verbally attacked the professor with the ferocity of an Inquisition cardinal stumbling on a den of sin.

And before he was through, this much taller and quieter-spoken kid he’d seen around the film department a lot jumped in and started verbally pummeling the twinky professor, too, though in a somewhat more respectable manner.

That was how they met and, man, had they been good friends, the best friends in the world, and how did you get from there to here — to wrestling around on the floor in front of a live audience while the videotape was rolling?

He was just about to get up and get himself a drink when the knock came.

He had been deep enough in his memories that the knock had a startling quality, almost the quality of a summons. He raised his head — the beating he’d taken working with his day-long hangover to give him a headache of bitter hunger — and looked at the door.

“Who is it?” he called.

No answer.

Or no verbal answer anyway. But there was a sound. A sound of something falling against the door.

Instantly he knew that something was wrong. Dropping the ice pack on the dressing table, he went to the door and yanked it open.

And Richard fell into his arms.

Tobin got only a glimpse of Richard’s face but even that brief look told him of Richard’s condition.

By the time he’d dragged the man to the couch, he’d had his first good look at the knife sticking out of Richard’s back.

Dagger.

Blood.

Jesus.

“Richard, Richard,” Tobin began to say. His voice was like a mewl, some primitive human sound that tried uselessly to articulate shock and grief and dread.

“Richard,” he said again.

He had him face-down on the couch. Now he was afraid to move him. He crawled down Richard’s long body to where his face lay turned up.

“Richard,” Tobin said.

Richard had one eye open. Tobin imagined he saw recognition in it.

“Richard,” Tobin said. “Who did this to you?”

But when Richard tried to talk, blood bubbled from his mouth and then his eye closed.

Tobin went berserk. “Richard! Goddammit! Listen to me! None of our arguing meant shit to me! We’re still good friends! Still good friends, Richard!”

And then he began to shake him, as if life could fill Richard’s lungs, and start his heart again, if only Tobin shook him long enough and hard enough.

Finally, Tobin’s eyes fell on the common kitchen knife sticking up out of Richard’s back.

There was the culprit!

Maybe Richard would start breathing again if only Tobin could pull it out.

So Tobin bent down and put one hand against Richard’s back for leverage and wrapped the other hand around the wooden handle of the knife.

He was just pulling it out, his hands covered with blood by now, when Michael Dailey and Sarah Nichols appeared in the doorway.

Sarah Nichols screamed, “My God, Michael! Tobin’s killed him!”

9:23 P.M.

For all the cops-and-robbers movies he’d reviewed, Tobin had to admit he didn’t know much about actual police procedure.

What seemed like dozens of men and women, some in suits, some in white lab smocks, some in uniforms, came and went in his dressing room. Some knelt and did inscrutable things to various pieces of furniture (dusting for prints? looking for pieces of fabric?); some moved among the dozens of onlookers from the show and asked quiet and seemingly routine questions; and some had what appeared to be an arsenal of tools — flashlights, tiny whisk brooms, tape measures.

Tobin watched a great deal of all this backward at his dressing table, where he sat with a water glass half-filled with bourbon Frank Emory had supplied him. He had been told by the detective in charge, a perpetually amused kind of guy named Huggins, to “please wait right here.” There had been no mistaking the way he’d meant “please” — as an order.

So now he sat watching as, miraculously, the half-filled glass became one-third, then one-quarter gone. He just sat and stared at it, scarcely conscious he was emptying it. He was trying to figure out how to feel. Or, more precisely, what to feel. In books, shock victims were always said to feel “unreal,” in a dreamlike state. Then he sure wasn’t in shock because everything was too real, from the puddles of blood surrounding Richard Dunphy’s covered body to the tart odors of the various bottles and flasks and vials the police people used in their investigation.

Something made him raise his eyes and then he saw her. Jane Dunphy.

She stood in the doorway, taller than the two uniformed policemen in front of her, gazing inside with a curiously beatific expression. She looked younger, sadder, and more vulnerable than he’d ever seen her, as if she’d cracked completely, then been put painstakingly back together.

Then her eyes raised from the body of her dead husband and fell on Tobin’s in the mirror. They stared at each other a moment and then she eased herself past the two cops and came into the room.

When she reached the body, she paused. Then she walked around it as if she’d somehow convinced herself it wasn’t there in the first place.

When she reached him, she put a hand on his shoulder and startled him by laughing. “My God, Tobin, this isn’t a joke or something, is it?”

He looked at her carefully. “No. No, it isn’t a joke.”

“He’s dead?”

“I’m afraid he is.”

“My God.”

“Maybe you’d better go over there and sit down.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Right now there’s nothing to say.”

Now that he saw her tears, the reality of the moment seized him.

He started to take her hand, and then instantly realized that — no, that was the worst thing he could do.

An image of Sarah Nichols screaming “My God, Tobin’s killed him!” cut through his confusion.

A good policeman — hell, the dumbest policeman in the world — would get suspicious if he saw a suspect holding the hand of the deceased’s widow.

He stopped himself.

She said, in control of herself now, “I need to ask a question.”

“What?”

“Did you do it?”

“My God,” he said. “Are you serious?”

He searched her face for an unlikely hint of humor but of course there was none.

She was serious. Quite serious.

“No,” he said. “No I didn’t kill him.”

He watched as relief brightened her eyes. “Oh, thank God, Tobin. Thank God.”

Then she did the very last thing he wanted her to do in this circumstance: She bent over and took his face in her lovely hands and kissed him. Not on the mouth, true, but gently, gently, a familiar kiss and not in any way a casual kiss.

Which was just when Detective Huggins appeared, as if by magic, and stood by them.

He was there watching as Jane took her warm, teary face from Tobin’s. Watching carefully.

“You told me, Mrs. Dunphy, that you and Tobin here were old friends. I guess I just didn’t know how friendly.”

An eavesdropping uniformed cop smiled to himself. Apparently part of Huggins’s act was to provide snappy patter to keep the interrogations from getting dull.

Jane did just what Huggins wanted her to do. Got flustered. “We’re friends — good friends — we’ve known each other since college — we—”