Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [174]
“And so I did. God, did I ever. But you were there that day, and you cut the brake rod and you killed them all. Just like you killed Leah Ginzberg and Mah and Micah Long, four months later.”
At this last pair of names a murmur sprang up, as several of the older residents recognised the Anglicised versions of the murdered couple's names. I walked around the motor until I was standing directly in front of Greenfield, and I wanted to murder him. Then and there, I wanted to gut him and leave him bleeding his life out on the street, for what he had done to six good and loving people. I might even have done so—I was on the very brink of snatching the gun from my pocket or bending for the knife in my boot-top—when something touched my arm. It was the gentlest touch imaginable, the mere brush of a bird's wings in weight, but the faint weight of it settled onto the taut muscles of my forearm and stopped them from moving. I looked down at the delicate old fingers, then into the face of Dr Ming.
“You do not wish to do this,” he said.
I did want to do it, I could almost taste the glory of revenge. And then suddenly I did not. The murderous impulse left me, the hand fell away, and as if by a stage cue, the police arrived, bluff and uncomprehending and requiring a great deal of attention, from all of us, for a very long time.
Epilogue
Late, late that night Holmes and I crept back to our rooms at the St Francis. We had persuaded Officialdom to let Long go home, and even Hammett, but at the cost of remaining and explaining, again and again, what it all meant: why Rosa Greenfield's finger-prints had been found on the toilet-pull of my house; why a bullet from Greenfield's gun would match one to be found in a fence in Pacific Heights; why Greenfield's finger-prints were going to be found on coins in the tin boxes in our hotel's safe.
Had it not been for Holmes' name, the bewildered police would have thrown us all out and let us sort it out on the street.
But in the end, Robert and Rosa Greenfield were charged, and we were free to go.
As we walked towards the lift, shortly before midnight, the night man came out from behind his desk and gave Holmes a packet. His hand reached out automatically for it, and as we rode the lift upwards, my eyes idled across the address on the label as if its letters contained some arcane message. It was, I realised only when we were in the room and he ripped open the paper, the urgent reproductions of Flo's photograph that he had left to be copied—only that morning yet many, many hours before.
I went through the motions of hanging up my coat and divesting myself of shoes and the like, then plodded into the bath-room to wash my face.
When I came out, Holmes was sitting with a photograph in his hand—not that of the Greenfields; he held it out in my direction.
“What is that?” I asked wearily.
“Another photograph I left the other day for copying. I'd all but forgotten it.”
I sat down to save myself from falling and took the picture from his hand.
A tent city. A woman, a blonde child with a book, a man trudging up the hill, looking as exhausted as I felt.
My family.
I took off my glasses to study my father's face. Too tired for the nightmares to reach me, he had written in the document; I wondered if all his dreams had been of the fire.
“Do I look like him?” I asked.
“You do somewhat, without a hat and your hair as it is. To a guilty mind, the resemblance would be startling.”
I picked up a copy of the other picture as well, showing the Greenfields at the Lodge, unscarred and not yet embarked on murder. They were standing by the lake, looking over the shoulder of the photographer at the log house that the young and carefree Greenfield had helped his friend Charles build.
“The sun was red,” I murmured.
“Sorry?”
“During the fire. Everything was a peculiar colour from the