John MacDonald - Fatal Accident

I had nothing to go on. Just a hunch.

I didn’t have a long wait. She probably met him for lunch. He came storming in at two o’clock. He looked down the hall behind him as he fumbled with the key. His face was white.

He went on in. I gave him three minutes. Then I took the passkey and let myself in. He was bending over the fireplace. I slammed the door behind me. As he spun around, his mouth open, I said, “Hot day for a fire, isn’t it?”

You’ve got to give him credit for spunk. He rushed me. I rolled away from his punch, feeling the wind of it on my cheek. I dug a left hook deep into his gut and crossed a right to his face as he bent over.

He dropped on his back and was still. I dragged the smoldering, stinking mess out of the fireplace and stamped on it until it no longer smoked.

I sat on the other side of Banning’s desk. He tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk and said softly, “I’ll be damned!”

“Yeah, he got tied up with this Miss Eletha Forrest and his wife didn’t like it a bit. She wouldn’t give him a divorce. He planned it nicely. What he forgot to do was to get rid of the gimmick while he had a chance. But I suppose it wasn’t too easy to get rid of, at that.

“He waited until another car was following him, and then he picked out a deserted locality. His wife had gone to sleep. That was essential. He had to slow down to about forty going off the road, and probably had it down to thirty-five when he hit the tree.

“He hadn’t figured on it tipping over. That made it tougher for him, but he managed. I was the sucker witness — to tell people that he was in the car when it happened. He came out babbling about having fallen asleep, you remember.

“As soon as he had the general locality selected, he reached down and got the gimmick — the big thick sheet of sponge rubber out of the compartment — and kept it ready by his feet. He slowed down to forty, and as he headed for the tree he yanked it up between him and the steering wheel, leaning hard against it to kill the shock. The nurse said he didn’t even get badly bruised.

“His wife was asleep. The smash into the tree threw her against the dashboard with killing force. The car turned over. He had a few minutes to wedge the sponge rubber matting back into the compartment under the seat. That’s why he didn’t want anybody poking around the car.

“He had read that people get killed when they hit unyielding surfaces. He made sure he had one with some give to it, and he probably realized that he had to force himself to relax against it. She had no protection at all.”

I found the tall blonde signing her statement. She looked up and saw me, and her lip curled. “You fixed everybody good — real good,” she said.

“I can’t help that. Isn’t it better to know?”

Her eyes were puffy and red. “I suppose so. I hate him, now. I hate him!”

“Come along and I’ll buy you a drink.”

She looked into my eyes and I saw that there was something about her that I hadn’t seen. A sort of integrity. She said, “I hate him, but I’m married to him. I’ll stick around and do what I can for him until the State of Pennsylvania electrocutes him. Maybe some day you can buy me that drink.”

I walked out, remembering the look in her eyes, adding it to the looks in other eyes, the expressions on other faces.

A cop never grows a hide that’s quite tough enough. You always end up hating yourself, too.