The Bookwoman's Last Fling by John Dunning

Author:John Dunning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

14

Erin sat coldly through my account that night. The police had arrived at two o’clock with the coroner’s men on their heels; Baxter and I had been questioned in separate rooms; I explained why I was there and showed them my note from Sharon; I told them about my own adventure in the trunk of Cameron’s car and the gun, recently fired, that I had found there. I was released after two hours with the usual polite request to keep in touch. They were still questioning Baxter as I left. I knew they weren’t satisfied with his part of the story: If he had told them what I had seen or heard from him, I wouldn’t be satisfied either. They would ask, for example, how he had suggested a walk and then led me almost straight to his brother’s body. I hadn’t told Baxter about this likelihood: the last thing I wanted was to coach the suspect, if that’s what he turned out to be, but this was one of those times when I longed to be on the other side of the badge. I did take his gun away from him when he put it on the table: I picked it up carefully, put it on another table across the room, and left it to the cops to deal with when they arrived. Other than a few brief comments, we had nothing else to say until the police came.

“I didn’t kill him,” he did offer at one point. “How long’s he been dead do you think?”

I didn’t say but I thought it could be a week on the long end.

“I’ve been up at Golden Gate till early this morning.”

People could verify that, he said, he was well known up there. “Besides, why would I kill him?”

Now, hours later, Erin listened to my story without a word. We ate our dinners in that awful silence, and at last I said, “Okay, if you’re gonna chew me out, let’s have it.”

“Would that do any good?”

“In what context?”

“Don’t be dense, Janeway, it doesn’t become you. I’m just very calmly asking if you’d do it again under the same circumstances, which of course you would, like a bat out of hell. I thought we had all this out months ago. Years ago.”

“If it makes any difference, I did bring my sword to fall on.”

“Which means nothing when push comes to shove. I predict one of these days we will have us an ugly parting over something like this.”

A scary thought. I pondered it and said, “But what would we do without each other?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?”

That was indeed the question. I had once come so close to losing her that now I got edgy if she was running late in traffic, tense if she failed to call. I was nervous in all those harmless down times where before, in my old life, I had felt invincible.

“You worry way too much,” she said. “You’re becoming…”

She fished for a term and I gave it to her.

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