Deadfall(5)

“Are you a friend of Leonard’s?” he asked.

“No. I’m afraid not.”

“One of his clients?”

“No. Mind telling me your name?”

“Tom Washburn, if it’s any of your business. What are you doing in my house?”

“You live here too, then?”

He made an impatient gesture. “Certainly I live here. Now what’s going on? Where’s Leonard?”

I took a breath, let it out slowly. Telling somebody about the death of a friend, a loved one, is never easy. Doesn’t matter if you know the person or not—it’s never easy. I said, “There’s been some trouble here. I’m a detective and I happened in on it. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Trouble? What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

“Your housemate is dead, Mr. Washburn. He was shot a few minutes ago.”

Washburn stood there for a couple of seconds without moving; it took that long for the words to penetrate, to mean anything to him. Then they rocked him, as if some invisible force had struck him a sharp blow. He put a hand up to his mouth and said between the splayed fingers, “Dead? Leonard?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Somebody shot him?”

“I’ve already called the police. They’ll be here any minute—”

“Who? Who would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. I heard the shots and I saw the person run out of the house, but I didn’t get a good look at him.”

Washburn still had his hand over his mouth; he was swaying slightly now, with his eyes squeezed shut. I was afraid he might faint, but that didn’t happen. After a time he said in a low, tremulous voice, “Where is he? I want to see him.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I want to see him. I have a right to see him.”

“Mr. Washburn, for your own sake—”

His eyes popped open and he said with sudden savagery, “Goddamn you, I want to see him! You tell me where he is! Tell me or I’ll scratch your fucking eyes out!”

He meant it. Shock and grief and confusion make people irrational. I said, “In the dining room,” and he spun away and ran through a big beam-ceilinged living room, the rear part of which was raised by three steps. I went after him; I did not want him touching anything, by accident or for any other reason. But he didn’t go into the dining room. He stopped when he got to the archway and saw what lay beyond. Stopped, and then screamed —a shrill keening cry full of anguish and horror that put goosebumps on my arms and across my shoulders. He turned blindly, stumbling, his face all twisted up. I caught his arm to keep him from falling. And he made a little whimpering noise and came in against me, threw his arms around my neck and buried his face against my chest and began to weep hysterically.

I didn’t know what to do. For a couple of seconds I just stood awkwardly, letting him hold onto me; there was a lump of something dry and bitter in my throat. Then I put an arm around him, turned him a little so that I could walk with him. He came along without resistance. I could feel the tremors racking him, paroxysm after paroxysm, so that his sobbing breaths came out like hiccups. I got him to a blocky Spanish couch set at an angle away from the arch so that you couldn’t see into the dining room from there, and sat him down on that. There was a quilted afghan draped over the back; I shook the thing open and wrapped it around his shoulders, folded it over the front of him. It didn’t stop his shaking but it seemed to take the chill away, help him get his breathing under control.

I stood off at a distance, not looking at him because I didn’t want to face any more of his grief. Not looking at much of anything, just waiting.

There wasn’t much longer to wait. In less than a minute pulsing red light stained the curtains over the front window and I heard the cars—two of them—come to fast stops out front. The officers made some noise, more than they had to, getting out and coming to the house. Cops don’t show enough respect for death sometimes —the young ones, especially.

I went into the foyer to let them in.



The next couple of hours were bad, although not half as bad for me as they must have been for Tom Washburn. There was a vague sense of surrealism to the events, of déjà vu: I had gone through them all before, so many times that they blended together and became the same ordeal relived. Only the surroundings and the faces were different. The routine was the same. And so was the despair.

I didn’t know any of the uniformed cops, but one of them knew me by reputation, so there was no hassle. I answered their preliminary questions. I took them in and showed them what was left of Leonard Purcell. I answered more questions. Washburn had stopped crying at some point and had made an effort to get himself under control; but he stayed seated on the couch with the afghan wrapped tightly around him. I listened to him answer questions in a small, empty voice, but his responses were just words to me, without any real significance. I felt removed from everything, even more so than at other scenes like this because I didn’t know any of the principals, I wasn’t an integral part of it personally or professionally. Just a bystander, that was all—in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only things Washburn said that I could remember later were that he worked in a bank and that he’d gone to a movie tonight, gone alone because it was R-rated and Leonard didn’t approve of graphic violence in films.