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“Can I ask a question?”

The lieutenant nodded.

“Are you sure, absolutely sure, there were no powder burns on von Grümh’s hands?”

With evident satisfaction, the sergeant shook his head slowly. “No way. I double-checked it. The GSR came up negative. Not a trace.”

The lieutenant looked puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

“Because he was suicidal.”

“I think you’ve got suicide on the brain,” the sergeant said with a sneer. “It was murder, pure and simple.”

Later I spoke on a phone through a barrier of reinforced glass to an attorney, a colleague of Felix Skinnerman. She was a brisk young woman in a business suit with an air of impersonality who told me she had arranged for a bail hearing that afternoon.

I was not interested in the lunch of chicken salad, potato salad, green salad, and ice cream. I was not interested in anything really, until, in a void deep enough to make me scream, I asked for paper and pencil, the original word processor, and wrote the following.

I feel in the wake of these admissions that I owe my readers an apology. In the relative privacy of this journal, I should have been completely candid. I really have no defense. I scarcely have an explanation. I did fear, I have to admit, that, were this document ever to be subpoenaed and placed in evidence, it and anything else I wrote could be used against me in court.

The truth will make you free. I understand and believe in that dictum. But the truth is not always self-evident. As it involves me in this matter, I am not entirely sure what the truth is. The fact is, I had fantasized more than once about murdering Heinie von Grümh. I had enacted on the stage of my mind precisely what happened to him in that car. I held my revolver to the side of his head, and, while he begged for his life, I taunted him.

Of course I would rouse myself from these dark dreams with an acute self-shame and a determination not to indulge them henceforth. But, once you’ve killed a man, as I have, it’s not difficult to conceive of doing it again, to feel in your hand the heft of the weapon, to trigger the jolt of deadly power, to watch someone disappear into death.

Thus does imagination conflate with and confuse memory. In the syntax of what may or may not have happened, I cannot parse what I did from what I dreamed of doing. But, I tell myself, I did not kill my wife’s lover. I’m sure of it. Until doubt, as right now, begins to seep in like a cold, deadly fog. Because, like Hamlet, I could accuse myself of such things it were better my mother had not borne me.

In brief, as I had the motive, the occasion, and the capacity to murder Heinie von Grümh, I must consider myself a suspect in this case until the murderer is found.

It pains me to realize that I have completely vitiated, through my lack of frankness, my friendship with Lieutenant Tracy. I fear I will also forfeit the trust the board has had in me as director. And while Diantha will no doubt continue to voice her support of me, I don’t blame her if she is having second thoughts.

As, no doubt, are you, my reader and, next to God, who probably doesn’t care, my final judge. Am I a reliable narrator? I am certainly not an omniscient one. Mostly, I fear that I have given you little basis to believe what I write in this account or, anywhere else, for that matter. To paraphrase a wordsmith far superior to me, if you don’t believe me, I won’t exist.

I would fain entreat you to consider me, at the very least, a naive narrator, one, that is, who doesn’t have all the facts or know what to do with the ones he has. But in my own defense, would it not have been a more egregious naïveté to reveal in this journal everything I knew about the circumstances of Heinie’s murder?

And was it really naive that I didn’t know that my young wife, in the confused aftermath of her liaison with this man, would be so foolish as to lend him my revolver? (And I’ll leave to those thus inclined to ponder the symbolistic implications therein.)

Even if the police believe Diantha’s story, and I’m not sure they