Blowback(58)

But I wanted to hurt him anyway, with words if not with my hands. I said, “Only you got more than you bargained for. The two of you turned him into a psychotic, all right, but you did such a bang-up job of it that he started killing other people before you were ready for him to kill himself. Jerrold may have been the one who crushed Terzian's and Bascomb's skulls, but you're twice as guilty because you pulled the strings. You killed them all, Harry, goddamn you, you murdered three men instead of just one.”

He put up a hand like a man warding off blows. “Buddy…”

“Don't call me that,” I said, “I'm not your buddy any more. You used me just like you used all the rest of them, you son of a bitch, you used me to help you get away with murder. Whose idea was it to bring me in? Hers? Yeah, it would have been; you're not devious enough for that. Maybe the whole thing was her idea, maybe she planned it from the start and you just went along for the ride. You want to cop out that way, Harry? Put all the blame on her?”

“Shut up,” he said, but there was no malice in it. “Shut the fucking hell up, can't you?”

“No.” Relentless now, hating myself and hating him more. “So damned clever, the whole scheme. Work on his jealousy, make it look like she was playing around with every guy in sight, while you pretended to be his confidant and stiffed him up every chance you got with a load of crap about what you'd seen or heard or suspected. How long did it take the two of you to turn him into a lunatic? Weeks, months, a year or more?”

Headshake. His eyes held mine as though each pair was a magnet.

“Yeah, clever,” I said. “ Too clever-too elaborate. A simple hunting accident wasn't good enough, you had to get fancy; that's where people like you always screw up, so that people like me can eventually figure the truth. You get fancy and you make mistakes, you either leave little holes unplugged or you overdo things. Like the way you worked it after I got here: Jerrold's sudden convenient attack on Cody Sunday, when the kid and I happened to be together and I'd be sure to see right away what kind of shape he was in; you always keeping the pressure on-a little too worried, a little too uptight; the phony twosomes Angela Jerrold kept arranging between herself and Talesco and Bascomb and Cody so I couldn't help but stumble in on a few of them; the personal things she told me about Jerrold to cement the picture of him as an obsessive; her immediate agreement to get him to go home, the apparent concern for him, and then in spite of that, continuing to see Cody without trying to hide it.

“But the way Jerrold died was where you really blew it. He was an outdoors type and knew his way around guns; a man like that is too cautious to let the muzzle of a shotgun nose into mud or clay. And where would there be any mud or clay around here in the first place? The lake bottom is rocky in close to shore; there hasn't been any rain before today in quite a while and that damned red dust is everywhere.

“How did Jerrold know she and Cody were together at Cody's cabin? And why was he up in that glade? Why didn't he just confront the two of them and blast off at point-blank range? He had to have been programmed, that's the only answer-and you're the only one who could have done it. You said you didn't know where he was when I showed up, but you were coming back along the lakefront, and there's nothing else over past the beach except the path up to Cabin Six. You were there, all right, and you told him about her and Cody, and then you talked him into using the shotgun, gave him the idea of going up into the glade because you didn't want him anywhere near her when the blowback got him. It probably wasn't hard; he was ready for anything by then, he'd just come back from sealing me into the mine. What'd you say to him? ‘Oh, you don't want to kill them, Ray, just throw a little scare into them, just a warning shot or two.’ That about the way it went, Harry?”

He backed up another couple of steps and leaned heavily against the light pole. The bones in his face seemed to have collapsed; the skin looked shrunken, gouged with deep hollows. I stood staring at him, silent now. I had run out of words and run out of the desire to make him suffer-and run out of hate too. Emotion seemed to have deserted me entirely.

After a long time he said, “You don't know what it's like to fall in love with a woman like Angela. She gets inside you, you can't think and you can't sleep, she takes over your world. Nothing else matters. I didn't want to do any of it, you've got to understand that. I didn't want to drag you into it or to kill anybody.”

“So it was her then, right? Lay it on her.”

“No. She's not like that. We did it together, we did all of it together. It wasn't her and it wasn't me. We're one person.”