The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [77]
“Because you wouldn’t want to think ill of him? No, that’s not it. You already said he was capable of tampering with evidence, and you wouldn’t think ill of him for it, anyway. I give up. Why? Because you don’t want Mr. Conway to be in hell?”
“I never met the man,” I said, “and it would be presumptuous of me to care where he winds up. But I’d prefer it if the clip was in his pocket where Mahaffey said it was, because of what it would prove.”
“That he hadn’t meant to kill himself? I thought we just said …”
I shook my head. “That she didn’t do it.”
“Who? The wife?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That she didn’t do what? Kill him? You think she killed him?”
“It’s possible.”
“But he shot himself,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Or did I miss something?”
“That’s almost certainly what happened,” I said, “but she was one of the witnesses, and the kids were the other witnesses, and who knows what they saw, or if they saw anything at all? Say he’s on the couch, and they’re all watching TV, and she takes his old war souvenir and puts one in his head, and she starts screaming. ‘Ohmigod, look what your father has done! Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, Daddy has killed himself!’ They were looking at the set, they didn’t see dick, but they’ll think they did by the time she stops carrying on.”
“And they never said what they did or didn’t see.”
“They never said a word, because we didn’t ask them anything. Look, I don’t think she did it. The possibility didn’t even occur to me until sometime later, and by then we’d closed the case, so what was the point? I never even mentioned the idea to Vince.”
“And if you had?”
“He’d have said she wasn’t the type for it, and he’d have been right. But you never know. If she didn’t do it, he gave her peace of mind. If she did do it, she must have wondered how the cartridge clip migrated from the gun butt to her husband’s pocket.”
“She’d have realized Mahaffey put it there.”
“Uh-huh. And she’d have had twenty-five thousand reasons to thank him for it.”
“Huh?”
“The insurance,” I said.
“But you said they’d have to pay anyway.”
“Double indemnity,” I said. “They’d have had to pay the face amount of the policy, but if it’s an accident they’d have had to pay double. That’s if there was a double-indemnity clause in the policy, and I have no way of knowing whether or not there was. But most policies sold around then, especially relatively small policies, had the clause. The companies liked to write them that way, and the policy holders usually went for them. A fraction more in premiums and twice the payoff? Why not go for it?”
We kicked it around a little. Then she asked about the current case, the one that had started the whole thing. I’d wondered about the gun, I explained, purely out of curiosity. If it was in fact an automatic, and if the clip was in fact in his pocket and not in the gun where you’d expect to find it, surely some cop would have determined as much by now, and it would all come out in the wash.
“That’s some story,” she said. “And it happened when, thirty-five years ago? And you never mentioned it before?”
“I never thought of it,” I said, “not as a story worth telling. Because it’s unresolved. There’s no way to know what really happened.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s still a good story.”
The guy in Inwood, it turned out, had used a .38-caliber revolver, and he’d cleaned it and loaded it earlier that same day. No chance it was an accident.
And if I’d never told the story over the years, that’s not to say it hadn’t come occasionally to mind. Vince Mahaffey and I never really talked about the incident, and I’ve sometimes wished we had. It would have been nice to know what really happened.
Assuming that’s possible, and I’m not sure it is. He had, after all, sent me out of the room before doing whatever it was he did. That suggested he hadn’t wanted me to know, so why should I think he’d be quick to tell me after the fact?
No way of knowing. And, as the years pass, I find I like it better that way. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.
“At first,” Mick Ballou said,