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I felt her studying my face. “I’ll lock you in,” I said. “Maybe this guy Smiley is back in town.”
“That’s not what’s on your mind. Labiche is the only guy who knows what happened the night T. J. Dartez died.”
“That sums it up.”
I
drove down East Main and turned onto the side street that led to Labiche’s house. Someone had turned on the lights inside. A cruiser was parked in front. There had been a six-car pileup on the four-lane, and the paramedics had not arrived. I went through the broken door and up the stairs. A red-haired, barrel-chested patrolman nicknamed Top met me at the entrance to the bedroom. “I left everything alone. The pillowcase was half off his face when I got here.”
There was blood splatter on the headboard, the wall, and the window glass. There were three bullet holes in the headboard and a tear in a sheet with powder burns around it and a long bloody swath down the side of the mattress and the bed frame that dead-ended at the body on the floor.
Through the French doors, I saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning off Main. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the edge of the pillowcase with my ballpoint. There was an entry wound high up on Labiche’s left cheek, a graze that had taken off most of one ear, and another entry wound on his neck. His left eye had turned to milk. Half of his body was painted with blood. I let the pillowcase drop and looked around the floor, then shook out the sheets and a bedcover on the foot of the bed.
“You see a gun?” I said.
“No,” Top said.
“Casings?”
“Nope. You think he shot himself four times?”
“I was hoping our shooter dropped his weapon.”
The truth was, I hadn’t precluded the possibility of suicide. I’ve seen victims who had to take a run at it several times before they pulled it off, particularly when they were filled with rage at others and couldn’t let go of this world.
I looked under the bed and the nightstand. The recoil in a suicide can put a firearm in strange places. But there was no gun. I opened the drawer on the nightstand. There was a five-shot holstered titanium .38 Special inside, the Velcro strap in place. Then I realized the enormity of the presumption I had been operating on. Labiche’s left hand twitched, as though a tiny electric current had touched it. I knelt again and peeled the pillowcase off his head. The clotted hair in one nostril moved almost imperceptibly.
“Get the medics up here, Top.”
* * *
I STAYED IN the emergency room with Labiche until sunrise, then walked along beside the gurney to the ICU. The neurologist said the bullet in the cheek had been fired at a downward angle and had tunneled through the temporal lobe and cerebellum, destroying Labiche’s hearing and sensory transmitters and muscular control. There was a chance that other areas of his brain were impaired as well. His face was sunken, his breathing little more than a rasp, the rectal catheter leaking. I rested my hand on the rail of the gurney and pushed a door open to help one of nurses. I felt Labiche touch my hand.
“Stop,” I said. “He’s trying to tell me something.”
The nurse smiled kindly and shook her head and made the word “no” with her lips.
“What is it, Spade?” I said.
One eye had eight-balled. It stared into my face. His other eye was caved, the lid black.
“Wait out here, Detective,” the nurse said.
“Sure,” I said.
I looked through the glass in the door as three nurses wheeled him into a room. I wondered what images lay in his head. Was the touch of his finger the result of a muscular spasm, a bump of the gurney, or a signal that the only man who knew the fate of T. J. Dartez was taking flight forever?
I drove back home and slept for three hours. When I woke, Sherry Picard’s cruiser was parked in my driveway.
* * *
I OPENED THE screen door and stepped into the yard. She got out of the cruiser and looked at me across the roof, her hair blowing, leaves drifting on her clothes. “Your daughter said you were asleep. I told her I’d wait.”
“Where’d she go?” I said, half asleep.
“To the movie set.”
“They’re union,” I said. “They’re not supposed to work Sundays.”
