Needful Things - Stephen King [199]
"Hello, Alan," Henry said. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news about your double murder."
"Oh, so all at once it's my double murder," Alan said. He closed his fist around the four cartwheels, squeezed, and opened his hand again. Now there were three. He leaned back in his chair and cocked his feet up on his desk. "It really must be bad news."
"You don't sound surprised."
"Nope." He squeezed his fist shut again and used his pinky finger to "force" the lowest silver dollar in the stack. This was an operation of some delicacy but Alan was more than equal to the challenge. The silver dollar slipped from his fist and tumbled down his sleeve. There was a quiet chink! sound as it struck the first one, a sound that would be covered by the magician's patter in an actual performance. Alan opened his hand again, and now there were only two cartwheels.
"Maybe you wouldn't mind telling me why not," Henry said.
He sounded slightly testy.
"Well, I've spent most of the last two days thinking about it,"
Alan said. Even this was an understatement. From the moment on Sunday afternoon when he had first seen that Nettle Cobb was one of the two women lying dead at the foot of the stop-sign, he had thought of little else. He even dreamed about it, and the feeling that all the numbers added up short had become a nagging certainty.
This made Henry's call not an annoyance but a relief, and saved Alan the trouble of calling him.
He squeezed the two silver dollars in his hand.
Chink.
Opened his hand. Now there was one.
"What bothers you?" Henry asked.
"Everything," Alan said flatly. "Starting with the fact that it happened at all. I suppose the thing that itches the worst is the way the time-table of the crime works or doesn't work. I keep trying to see Nettle Cobb finding her dog dead and then sitting down to write all those notes. And do you know what? I keep not being able to do it. And every time I can't do it, I wonder how much of this stupid goddam business I'm not seeing."
Alan squeezed his fist viciously shut, opened it, and then there were none.
"Uh-huh. So maybe my bad news is your good news. Someone else was involved, Alan. We don't know who killed the Cobb woman's dog, but we can be almost positive that it wasn't Wilma Jersyck. " Alan's feet came off the desk in a hurry. The cartwheels slid out of his sleeve and hit the top of his desk in a little silver runnel.
One of them came down on edge and rolled for the side of the desk.
Alan's hand flicked out, spooky-quick, and snatched it back before it could get away. "I think you better tell me what you got, Henry."
"Uh-huh. Let's start with the dog. The body was turned over to John Palm, a D.V.M. in South Portland. He is to animals what Henry Ryan is to people. He says that because the corkscrew penetrated the dog's heart and it died almost instantly, he can give us a fairly restricted time of death."
"That's a nice change," Alan said. He was thinking of the Agatha Christie novels which Annie had read by the dozen. In those, it seemed there was always some doddering village doctor who was more than willing to set the time of death as between 4:30 p.m. and quarter past five. After almost twenty years as a law enforcement officer, Alan knew a more realistic response to the time-of-death question was "Sometime last week. Maybe."
"It is, isn't it? Anyway, this Dr. Palm says the dog died between ten o'clock and noon. Peter jerzyck says that when he came into the master bedroom to get ready for church-at a little past tenhis wife was in the shower."
"Yes, we knew it was tight," Alan said. He was a little disappointed. "But this guy Palm must allow for a margin of error, unless he's God. Fifteen minutes is all it takes to make Wilma look good for it."
"Yeah? How good does she look to you, Alan?"
He considered the question, then said heavily: "To tell you the truth, old buddy, she doesn't look that good. She never did." Alan forced himself to add: "Just the same, we'd look pretty silly keeping this case open on the basis of some dog-doctor's report and a gap of-what?-fifteen