361 by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857683038
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-12-20T10:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

There were three cops I talked to. One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts.

I told them all about Bill’s having lost his wife two months ago in an automobile accident, and his father being killed only a month before that, and how he’d been very depressed ever since, and he’d had the Luger for years but I hadn’t known he’d brought it along on this trip with him. And we were just traveling around the state, basically to try to forget our recent losses. But Bill had just got steadily more and more depressed, and now he’d killed himself.

The local cop swallowed it whole, with tobacco juice. The DA’s man would have liked a hotter story, but he didn’t want the work of digging for it. And the CID man didn’t believe a word of it, but he didn’t care. He was just there to memorize my face.

So it was called suicide. To me, it looked like a lousy job of staging. Aside from the fact that Bill wouldn’t have killed himself for anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.

The local cop had called a local undertaker, who might have been his brother-in-law. He looked at me and rubbed his hands together. We both knew that he was going to cheat me down to the skin, and we both knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

Thursday night, I went out and got drunk. I barhopped out toward the air base. When I started a fight with a Staff Sergeant, the CID man came from out of the smoke and took me away. He drove a gray Ford, and he put me in it and took me back to the hotel. Before I got out, he said, “Don’t do what your brother did.”

I looked at him. “What did my brother do, smart man?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Whatever it was, you take warning.”

I said, “Go to hell.” I fumbled the door open and lurched into the hotel. I never saw him again. What -ever had bugged him, he’d either been satisfied or had given up.

In the room, I lay in bed, and for a long while I didn’t know what was wrong. Then I figured it out. I couldn’t hear the sound of Bill’s breathing in the next bed. I listened. He wasn’t breathing anywhere in the world. Poor sweet honest Bill.

I once read a book of stories by a man named Fredric Brown. In one of them he quotes the tale of the peasant walking through the haunted wood, saying to himself, I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn’t any justice, and a voice behind him says, There isn’t.

The author didn’t say so, but I know. The peasant’s name was Bill.

I wished I

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