Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

At the doorway, Ameche said, “Kindly do not step into the blood, Mr. Stassen.”

I had no intention of so doing. There was a Fourth of July smell of cordite in the room, and the bland sick smell of blood, and the sharpness of vomit. John Pinelli lay face down on the floor by the foot of the bed where his wife and I had made love. He lay in an ocean of blood. A partial dental bridge lay three feet from his head, a small ship making sail across the sea.

I gagged. I looked for Kathy. I did not see her.

Ameche showed me a gun. I had not seen him pick it up. He held it by a yellow pencil he had inserted in the barrel. It was a hell of a big gun, a Colt .45-caliber revolver with walnut grips. He held it so I could read the silver plates set into each grip, first on one side and then on the other.

One side said, “The John P., fastest gun on location.”

The other side said, “From Wade, Joan and Sonny — ‘Action at Box Canyon.’ ”

I remembered seeing the movie a few years ago, a pretty good Western. I had not known Pinelli was connected with it in any way.

“Are you familiar with this firearm?” Ameche asked me.

“I’ve never seen it before.”

He laid the gun on the bed, retrieved his pencil. “I shall make a reconstruction for you, Mr. Stassen.” He walked to the wall, skirting the blood. He pointed out four widely spaced scars in the plaster, each about four feet off the floor.

“He stood about where my associate is standing, and he fired these four shots at the woman. She was dodging back and forth, screaming. One of them caused the wound upon her arm, here.” He touched his left arm just below the shoulder. “This spray of blood is from that minor wound. It is believed that she then sought refuge under the bed, still screaming. He knelt and crawled after her and placed the muzzle of the gun against her body, here.” He pressed his finger down against the top of his shoulder, near his neck. “The large slug ranged downward through her body, killing her. The impact slid her halfway out from under the bed. He stood up, walked around the bed, and turned her over onto her back and fired once again into the center of the stomach. He pulled her out from under the bed all the way to look at her face and be sure she was dead. The gun was men empty. He walked to the bureau there and took one more shell. He walked back and stood where he could see her, and shot himself in the throat and fell where you now see him.”

Yes, I could see John Pinelli. But as he had explained how it happened, I had grown more and more conscious of what I couldn’t see, what I didn’t want to see. I knew where it was. I took four slow steps. And I could see her. There had been much blood in her too. She lay naked on the tile, tiny and gray and shrunken, her hair lifeless, her cheeks sucked in, her eyes turned up out of sight, her small teeth showing. Her breasts had sagged flat. She looked like an old, old woman.

I backed until I could no longer see her. I heard voices in the other part of the house. More officials had arrived. White Jacket hurried out.

“This disturbs you?” Ameche asked. “We will talk on the little terrace.”

I was glad to get out of that room, and away from the stink of death. I pulled the outdoor air deep into my lungs.

He perched one tailored hip on a metal table, pulled out a pack of Kents and gave me one. He looked at me shrewdly.

“They employed you?”

“Just to drive them down.”

“But that was some months ago. Have you been working for them?”

“Just... the odd errand. A little driving. They haven’t been paying me. I’ve been a house guest, you could say.”

“Yes, of course. A guest. And providing... a very personal service for your hostess, no?”

“Is that illegal here?”

“No, of course not. But stupid carelessness should be made illegal. You were caught with her.”

“Yes.”

“So we have a murder and a suicide. Now I shall tell you some facts of life, Mr. Stassen. This is a resort place. We like... rumors of intrigue, but not dirty violence and scandal. Mr. Pinelli was in poor health. He was despondent. You are not in any way in this picture.”

“I’m not?”

“Your things will be packed. You will be out of this house in ten minutes. You will be out of Acapulco by the first aircraft. I cannot insist, but I would say it would be wise for you to leave Mexico. Go now and dress and leave here.”

I looked at him. I shrugged and turned away. After I had gone a dozen feet he said, “Mr. Stassen!” I looked back at him. “She was much too old for you, chico. ”

Kathy was under a great bed, screaming and screaming, holding her bleeding arm. John Pinelli, crawling, peered under at her, the big, ridiculous gun in his hand.

There was nothing in the world worth arguing about. I left. I had a thousand dollars when I arrived in Mexico City. I found a cheap hotel. I got blind, stupid drunk. Four days later I had eleven dollars left, and somebody had stolen my suitcase. I wired home for money. Ernie wired me a hundred dollars. I bought the clothes and toilet articles I needed. I fooled around the city for a while, living cheap, trying not to think about Kathy. I drank enough to keep the whole thing a little dulled, a little far back in my mind. When the money was dangerously low, I took a bus to Monterrey. There I ran into a family from Sonora, Texas. A man and wife and two small kids, traveling in a pickup truck.

He had a bad infection in his right hand, and his little Mexican wife couldn’t drive a car. So we made a deal.

I came back across the border at Del Rio on Sunday, the nineteenth day of July. He felt he could drive one-handed to Sonora. We parted company there, in Del Rio. I had a little over fifteen dollars left. I didn’t give a damn where I went or what I did. It was a blistering afternoon. I decided I might as well hitch-hike east. I walked a way east out of town on Route 90. I had no luck. I kept moving slowly as I tried. I came to a beer joint. I went in. After the glare outside I couldn’t see anything.

A high penetrating voice said, “And here is Joe College, seeing America first, having a great big fat adventure before he poops out and joins Rotary.”

That’s how I met Sander Golden, Nanette Koslov and Shack Hernandez.

In the fat Wolf Pack file, the first memorandum written by Riker Deems Owen about Nanette Koslov is perhaps the most pretentious one of the lot. As with most men who claim to be unable to understand women, Owen tends to overcomplicate his observations, to see devices and nuances where none exist.

Yet in spite of the somewhat fevered pace of his imagination in his account of this semi-attractive young woman, one cannot say that his observations would in any way impede the sales of the memoirs he plans to write some day.

Like most small-bore, pretentious men, Riker Owen shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasoned, philosophical conclusions.

One can see this device in action in the very first paragraph of the first Koslov memorandum:

It would be a most unprofessional attitude for a doctor, a psychiatrist or a defense attorney to believe that any individual is evil in the old-fashioned, Biblical meaning of the word. In my conferences with Nanette Koslov I have had to consciously fight to prevent myself from succumbing to this inaccurate oversimplification. I have, in fact, delayed my preparation of this memorandum until I could be certain in my own mind that I have established a completely objective attitude toward her, rather than an emotional or even semi-superstitious attitude.

She is but twenty years of age, but it is extraordinarily easy to overlook the fact she is a young girl.