Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

"Where did you get the green glass from?"

"From the shattered wine bottles."

"Why green glass on her hand? What's it a reference to?"

"Oh," she said. "Oh, I see what you mean. Her ring."

"She had a ring with a green stone, didn't she?"

"That's right."

"How long did she have it?"

"I don't know." She thought it over. "The first time I saw it was just before I wrote the poem."

"You're sure of that?"

"At least that's the first time I noticed it. It gave me a handle on the poem, as a matter of fact. The contrast of the blue of her eyes and the green of the ring, but then I lost the blue when I got working on the poem."

She'd told me something along those lines when she first showed me the poem. I hadn't known then what she was talking about.

She wasn't sure when that might have been. How long had she been working on one or another version of the poem? Since a month before Kim's murder? Two months?

"I don't know," she said. "I have trouble placing events in time. I don't tend to keep track."

"But it was a ring with a green stone."

"Oh, yes. I can picture it now."

"Do you know where she got it? Who gave it to her?"

"I don't know anything about it," she said. "Maybe-"

"Yes?"

"Maybe she shattered a wine bottle."

To Durkin I said, "A friend of Kim's wrote a poem and mentioned the ring. And there's Sunny Hendryx's suicide note." I got out my notebook, flipped it open. I read, " 'There's no way off the merry-go-round. She grabbed the brass ring and it turned her finger green. Nobody's going to buy me emeralds.' "

He took the book from me. "She meaning Dakkinen, I suppose," he said. "There's more here. 'Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.' Dakkinen wasn't pregnant and neither was Hendryx, so what's this shit about babies? And neither one of them had her life saved." He closed the book with a snap, handed it across the desk to me. "I don't know where you can go with this," he said. "It doesn't look to me like something you can take to the bank. Who knows when Hendryx wrote this? Maybe after the booze and the pills started working, and who can say where she was coming from?"

Behind us, two men in plainclothes were putting a young white kid in the holding cage. A desk away, a sullen black woman was answering questions. I picked up the top photo on the stack and looked at Kim Dakkinen's butchered body. Durkin switched on the razor and finished shaving.

"What I don't understand," he said, "is what you think you got. You think she had a boyfriend and the boyfriend gave her the ring. Okay. You also figured she had a boyfriend and he gave her the fur jacket, and you traced that and it looks as though you were right, but the jacket won't lead to the boyfriend because he kept his name out of it. If you can't trace him with a jacket that we've got, how can you trace him with a ring that all we know about it is it's missing? You see what I mean?"

"I see what you mean."

"That Sherlock Holmes thing, the dog that didn't bark, well what you got is a ring that isn't there, and what does it prove?"

"It's gone."

"Right."

"Where'd it go?"

"Same place a bathtub ring goes. Down the fucking drain. How do I know where it went?"

"It disappeared."

"So? Either it walked away or someone took it."

"Who?"

"How do I know who?"

"Let's say she wore it to the hotel where she was killed."

"You can't know that."

"Let's just say so, all right?"

"Okay, run with it."

"Who took it? Some cop yank it off her finger?"

"No," he said. "Nobody'd do that. There's people who'll take cash if it's loose, we both know that, but a ring off a murder victim's finger?" He shook his head. "Besides, nobody was alone with her. It's something nobody'd do with somebody else watching."

"How about the maid? The one who discovered the body?"

"Jesus, no way. I questioned the poor woman. She took one look at the body and started screaming and she'd still be screaming now if she had the breath left. You couldn'ta got her close enough to Dakkinen to touch her with a mop handle."

"Who took the ring?"

"Assuming she wore it there-"

"Right."

"So the killer took it."

"Why?"

"Maybe he's queer for jewelry. Maybe green's his favorite color."

"Keep going."

"Maybe it's valuable. You got a guy who goes around killing people, his morals aren't the best. He might not draw the line at stealing."

"He left a few hundred dollars in her purse, Joe."

"Maybe he didn't have time to go through her bag."

"He had time to take a shower, for Christ's sake. He had time to go through her bag. In fact, we don't know that he didn't go through her bag. We just know he didn't take the money."

"So?"

"But he took the ring. He had time to take hold of her bloody hand and tug it off her finger."

"Maybe it came off easy. Maybe it wasn't a snug fit."

"Why'd he take it?"

"He wanted it for his sister."

"Got any better reasons?"

"No," he said. "No, goddamn it, I don't have any better reasons. What are you getting at? He took it because it could be traced to him?"

"Why not?"

"Then why didn't he take the fur? We fucking know a boyfriend bought her the fur. Maybe he didn't use his name, but how can he be sure of what he let slip and what the salesman remembers? He took towels, for Christ's sake, so he wouldn't leave a fucking pubic hair behind, but he left the fur. And now you say he took the ring. Where did this ring come from besides left field? Why have I got to hear about this ring tonight when I never heard of it once in the past two and a half weeks?"

I didn't say anything. He picked up his cigarettes, offered me one. I shook my head. He took one for himself and lit it. He took a drag, blew out a column of smoke, then ran a hand over his head, smoothing down the dark hair that already lay flat upon his scalp.

He said, "Could be there was some engraving. People do that with rings, engraving on the inside. To Kim from Freddie, some shit like that. You think that's it?"

"I don't know."

"You got a theory?"

I remembered what Danny Boy Bell had said. If the boyfriend commanded such muscle, was so well connected, how come he hadn't shown her off? And if it was someone else with the muscle and the connections and the insufficient words to the wise, how did that someone else fit in with the boyfriend? Who was this accountant type who paid for her mink, and why wasn't I getting a smell of him from anywhere else?

And why did the killer take the ring?

I reached into my pocket. My fingers touched the gun, felt its cool metal, slipped beneath it to find the little cube of broken green glass that had started all of this. I took it from my pocket and looked at it, and Durkin asked me what it was.

"Green glass," I said.

"Like the ring."

I nodded. He took the piece of glass from me, held it to the light, dropped it back in my palm. "We don't know she wore the ring to the hotel," he reminded me. "We just said so for the sake of argument."

"I know."

"Maybe she left it at the apartment. Maybe someone took it from there."

"Who?"

"The boyfriend. Let's say he didn't kill her, let's say it was an EDP like I said from the beginning-"

"You really use that expression?"

"You get so you use the expressions they want you to use, you know how it works. Let's say the psycho killed her and the boyfriend's worried he'll be tied into it. So he goes to the apartment, he's got a key, and he takes the ring. Maybe he bought her other presents and he took them, too. He would've taken the fur, too, but it was in the hotel. Why isn't that theory just as good as the killer yanking the ring off her finger?"

Because it wasn't a psycho, I thought. Because a psycho killer wouldn't be sending men in lumber jackets to warn me off, wouldn't be passing messages to me through Danny Boy Bell. Because a psycho wouldn't have worried about handwriting or fingerprints or towels.