The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [41]
It rankled. But I would just have a couple of drinks, and then it wouldn’t rankle so much.
Angel Herrera pleaded guilty to burglary, and in return the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office dropped all homicide charges. He went upstate to serve five to ten.
And then I got a call in the middle of the night. I’d been sleeping a couple of hours, but the phone woke me and I groped for it. It took me a minute to recognize the voice on the other end.
It was Carolyn Cheatham.
“I had to call you,” she said, “on account of you’re a bourbon man and a gentleman. I owed it to you to call you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“He ditched me,” she said, “and he got me fired out of Tannahill and Company so he won’t have to look at me around the office. Once he didn’t need me to back up his story, he let go of me, and do you know he did it over the phone?”
“Carolyn — ”
“It’s all in the note,” she said. “I’m leaving a note.”
“Look, don’t do anything yet,” I said. I was out of bed, fumbling for my clothes. “I’ll be right over. We’ll talk about it.”
“You can’t stop me, Matt.”
“I won’t try to stop you. We’ll talk first, and then you can do anything you want.”
The phone clicked in my ear.
I threw my clothes on, rushed over there, hoping it would be pills, something that took its time. I broke a small pane of glass in the downstairs door and let myself in, then used an old credit card to slip the bolt of her spring lock.
The room smelled of cordite. She was on the couch she’d passed out on the last time I saw her. The gun was still in her hand, limp at her side, and there was a black-rimmed hole in her temple.
There was a note, too. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the coffee table, an empty glass beside it. The booze showed in her handwriting and in the sullen phrasing of the suicide note.
I read the note. I stood there for a few minutes, not for very long, and then I got a dish towel from the Pullman kitchen and wiped the bottle and the glass. I took another matching glass, rinsed it out and wiped it, and put it in the drainboard of the sink.
I stuffed the note in my pocket. I took the gun from her fingers, checked routinely for a pulse, then wrapped a sofa pillow around the gun to muffle its report. I fired one round into her chest, another into her open mouth.
I dropped the gun into a pocket and left.
They found the gun in Tommy Tillary’s house, stuffed between the cushions of the living-room sofa, clean of prints inside and out. Ballistics got a perfect match. I’d aimed for soft tissue with the round shot into her chest, because bullets can fragment on impact with bone. That was one reason I’d fired the extra shots. The other was to rule out the possibility of suicide.
After the story made the papers, I picked up the phone and called Drew Kaplan. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “He was free and clear; why the hell did he kill the girl?”
“Ask him yourself,” Kaplan said. He did not sound happy. “You want my opinion, he’s a lunatic. I honestly didn’t think he was. I figured maybe he killed his wife, maybe he didn’t. Not my job to try him. But I didn’t figure he was a homicidal maniac.”
“It’s certain he killed the girl?”
“Not much question. The gun’s pretty strong evidence. Talk about finding somebody with the smoking pistol in his hand, here it was in Tommy’s couch. The idiot.”
“Funny he kept it.”
“Maybe he had other people he wanted to shoot. Go figure a crazy man. No, the gun’s evidence, and there was a phone tip — a man called in the shooting, reported a man running out of there, and gave a description that fitted Tommy pretty well. Even had him wearing that red blazer he nears, tacky thing makes him look like an usher at the Paramount.”
“It sounds