Mr. Murder

He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his tongue.

“Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load them?”

Speaking around the ice cube, he said, “I saw how that jolted you. I did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge.”

“Why?”

As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he’d had that something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.

He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded unbalanced—if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and precautions.

“And something was coming,” she said. “This dead-ringer. You sensed him coming.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Somehow.”

“Psychic.”

He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. Not if you mean a psychic vision. There wasn’t any vision. I didn’t see what was coming, didn’t have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement park, when it swings you around real fast and you’re pinned to the seat, feel a weight on your chest. You know, you’ve been on rides like that, Charlotte always loves them.”

“Yeah. I understand . . . I guess.”

“This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving for the doctor’s office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch was here, but I didn’t feel anything when I walked into the house.”

They were silent for a moment.

Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.

Paige said, “How could he look exactly like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he say you stole his life?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

“I’m scared, Marty. I mean, it’s all so weird. What’re we going to do?”

“Past tonight, I don’t know. But tonight, at least, we’re not staying here. We’ll go to a hotel.”

“But if the police don’t find him dead somewhere, then there’s tomorrow . . . and the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m battered and tired and not thinking straight. For now I can only concentrate on tonight, Paige. I’ll just have to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here.”

Her lovely face was lined with anxiety. He had not seen her even half this distraught since Charlotte’s illness five years ago.

“I love you,” he said, laying his hand gently against the side of her head.

Putting her hand over his, she said, “Oh, God, I love you, too, Marty, you and the girls, more than anything, more than life itself. We can’t let anything happen to us, to what we all have together. We just can’t.”

“We won’t,” he said, but his words sounded as hollow and false as a young boy’s braggadocio.

He was aware that neither of them had expressed the slightest hope that the police would protect them. He could not repress his anger over the fact they were not accorded anything resembling the service, courtesy, and consideration that the characters in his novels always received from the authorities.

At the core, mystery novels were about good and evil, about the triumph of the former over the latter, and about the reliability of the justice system in a modern democracy. They were popular because they reassured the reader that the system worked far more often than not, even if the evidence of daily life sometimes pointed toward a more troubling conclusion. Marty had been able to work in the genre with conviction and tremendous pleasure because he liked to believe that law-enforcement agencies and the courts delivered justice most of the time and thwarted it only inadvertently. But now, the first time in his life that he’d turned to the system for help, it was in the process of failing him. Its failure not only jeopardized his life—as well as the lives of his wife and children—but seemed to call into doubt the value of everything that he had written and the worthiness of the purpose to which he had committed so many years of hard work and struggle.

Lieutenant Lowbock returned through the living room, looking and moving as if in the middle of an Esquire magazine fashion-photography session. He was carrying a clear plastic evidence bag, which contained a black zippered case about half the size of a shaving kit. He put the bag on the dining-room table as he sat down.

“Mr. Stillwater, was the house securely locked when you left it this morning?”

“Locked?” Marty asked, wondering where they were headed now, trying not to let his anger show. “Yes, locked up tight. I’m careful about that sort of thing.”

“Have you given any thought as to how this intruder might have gained entry?”

“Broke a window, I guess. Or forced a lock.”

“Do you know what’s in this?” he asked, tapping the black leather case through the plastic bag.

“I’m afraid I don’t have X-ray vision,” Marty said.

“I thought you might recognize it.”

“No.”

“We found it in your master bedroom.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“On the dresser.”

Paige said, “Get it over with, Lieutenant.”

Lowbock’s faint shadow of a smile passed across his face again, like a visiting spirit shimmering briefly in the air above a seance table. “It’s a complete set of lock picks.”

“That’s how he got in?” Marty asked.

Lowbock shrugged. “I suppose that’s what I’m expected to deduce from it.”

“This is tiresome, Lieutenant. We have children we’re worried about. I agree with my wife—just get it over with.”

Leaning over the table and regarding Marty once more with his patented intense gaze, the detective said, “I’ve been a cop for twenty-seven years, Mr. Stillwater, and this is the first time I’ve ever encountered a break-in at a private residence where the intruder used a set of professional lock picks.”

“So?”

“They break glass or force a lock, like you said. Sometimes they pry a sliding door or window out of its track. The average burglar has a hundred ways of getting in—all of which are a lot faster than picking a lock.”

“This wasn’t an average burglar.”

“Oh, I can see that,” Lowbock said. He leaned away from the table, settled back in his chair. “This guy is a lot more theatrical than the average perp. He contrives to look exactly like you, spouts a lot of strange stuff about wanting his life back, comes armed with an assassin’s gun threaded for a silencer, uses burglary tools like a Hollywoodized professional heist artist in a caper movie, takes two bullets in the chest but isn’t fazed, loses enough blood to kill an ordinary man but walks away. He’s downright flamboyant, this guy, but he’s also muy misterioso, the kind of character Andy Garcia could play in a movie or, a lot better yet, that Ray Liotta who was in Goodfellas.”

Marty suddenly saw where the detective was headed and understood why he was going there. The inevitable terminus of the interrogation should have been obvious sooner, but Marty simply hadn’t tumbled to it because it was too obvious. As a writer, he had been seeking some more exotic, complex reason for Lowbock’s barely concealed disbelief and hostility, when all the while Cyrus Lowbock had been going for the cliche.

Still, the detective had one more unpleasant surprise to reveal. He leaned forward again and made eye contact in what had ceased to be an effective confrontational manner and had become instead a personal tic as annoying and transparent as Peter Falk’s disarmingly humble posture and relentless self-deprecation when he