A Welcome Grave

I started to move toward Doran, who was still standing, and he made a wavering turn to point the gun at me. I stopped where I was and held my hands out. For a second he looked right into my eyes. There was an expression of great concern in his face. Blood welled out of his stomach and spread across his shirt. He dropped the gun and sat down on the floor and looked at the wound for the first time.

“I wanted to kill him with his checkbook out. I wanted to kill him while he wrote the check,” he said, and then he died.

44

Rain was falling again, drumming on the big window behind Brooks, keeping me company as I sat with two dead men. I stayed in that office watching Doran long after I knew he was dead. The only sound was the rain at first, and blood dripping off Brooks’s chair to the floor, but then I began to hear things from out in the main body of the house. It took me a minute to remember Gaglionci. Best not to leave him to his own devices.

I stood up and walked out of the office and down the dim hall, came around the corner, and found the front door open, Gaglionci gone, a trail of blood splatters leading out into the dark, rainy night.

Go after him, or stay here and call the police? It should have been an easy decision, but my brain was cloudy, unconcerned, as if none of this mattered anymore. Sit in a room with two corpses long enough, that’s the way it starts to feel.

I went through the door and stood on the porch, watching the rain splash into puddles in the driveway and pound off the roof of Doran’s rusted van, and then I heard footsteps from up by the road and a silhouette appeared, moving slowly. For a moment I thought of the guns back with Doran and Brooks and considered going for one of them. Then I saw it was Thor.

He had Gaglionci, now unconscious, draped over his arm, feet dragging along the wet pavement. Thor hauled him up onto the porch and dumped him at my feet.

“Thought you would want him back.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s good.”

Thor stood on the porch and peered in at the house, saw the blood on the polished floors and heard the silence.

“It is done,” he said. It was somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. He believed it to be true but was asking for verification.

“They’re dead,” I said.

He didn’t respond. I realized that it was exactly what he’d meant.

“I didn’t kill either one of them. They shot each other.”

Still silent. I supposed it really didn’t mean a damn thing to him one way or the other.

“Where are Amy and Joe?” I asked.

“Going for help. To the police. I thought it would be best if I went after you. It seems that was unnecessary. Your partner told me how to get here.”

“I’ll need to call the police now,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t be here when they come.”

“No.”

“I’ll try to keep you out of it, Thor. I’ll do my best.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You got her back,” I said. “It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been on my own. Thank you.”

He made a slight bow. It was the motion of a professional performer thanking the grateful audience that had appreciated his talents, and I thought it was damn appropriate.

“Do you need to go to a hospital?” I looked at his side, where the blood was still not dry.

“I know a man who can help with that.”

“I bet you do.”

“I will leave now,” he said. “You make your calls.”

“How are you getting back to the city?”

“That is not a problem,” he said, and then he turned and walked off the porch and into the woods.

______

I gave him five minutes before I called the police. By then, Gaglionci was conscious again. I passed on 911 and called Targent. He answered on the first ring, and he recognized the number.

“Perry, you are about twelve hours late with this call, you son of a bitch, and you’d better be ready to come in.”

“You want to close your investigation?”

“I doubt you say that because you’re offering to confess.”

“Good guess.”

“What do you have for me?”

“I’ve got two bodies in a house by Geneva,” I said. “I’ve got a woman who was abducted today and is now safe and ready to explain some things to you. I’ve got the man who killed Alex Jefferson and Donny Ward in handcuffs.”

“Tell me where you are,” was all he said.

45

They held me for three days. The warrant for Donny Ward’s murder was still plenty valid when police arrived at the winery, and nobody was so impressed with my explanation that they wanted to tear it up and cut me loose. Tommy Gaglionci wasn’t offering a confession, either. I’d been arrested on a Friday night, which gave the police—or maybe me—a break, because it postponed arraignment until Monday morning, giving them forty-eight hours to plunge into the stories Amy and Joe and I had to offer. On Monday morning my attorney learned there would be no arraignment.

By then, my claims had some evidence behind them. Along with Amy’s story of how Gaglionci had abducted her, breaking into her apartment and covering her mouth with a sweet-smelling rag, the evidence techs had matched prints left in Donny Ward’s yard with the boots on Gaglionci’s feet.

They finally kicked me loose slightly after noon on Monday. Targent came to take me out of the jail himself. Joe was waiting to drive me home, but Targent held the door of a small interview room open and asked me to give him a minute. I went in and sat behind the table, enjoying the absence of handcuffs.

“Listen,” Targent said, “maybe you’re wanting an apology from me.”

“I’m wanting to go home. That’s it.”

“Maybe you deserve one,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “I thought about that a lot last night. We still don’t have all the details of this thing worked out, but if it holds up the way it looks now . . . My point is, you think I tried to force this onto you. That’s not true. The things that happened to increase my suspicion, I didn’t imagine those, Perry. I wouldn’t have been doing a good job if I didn’t try to explain them, right? And that’s all I was doing. I was just trying to explain—”

“I’ve got it, Targent. I understand. No, you didn’t imagine those things. You didn’t need to believe them so completely, or at least disbelieve me so completely, but I know what your job was, and I do understand that you were trying to get it done.”

“A case like this,” he said, “somebody actively trying to frame a guy . . . You don’t see that much. It’s tough to believe even when it’s in your face.”

“Your approach, while unimpressive, was no worse than what I brought to the table.”

He tilted his head, looked at me curiously. “Yeah?”

The better part of three days spent in jail, I’d had a long time to consider it. Liked myself less as each day passed.

“You got a taste of some evidence against me and shut out the rest of the possibilities,” I said. “Because you wanted me to be guilty. You didn’t like me. You wanted to take me down. All of that? Same thing I did with Alex Jefferson. I railroaded a suspect, him and the son both. Decided they were guilty because I didn’t like them. I didn’t