Donleavy studied me. He looked older, grayer, maybe a little fatter, and his eyes seemed even more sleepy than I remembered them. The impression he gave was one of softness and mildness-but that was an illusion. He was shrewd and dedicated, and he could be pretty tough when he had to be.
“You know this Talbot, do you?” he asked.
“I know some things about him. I’m working for his sister.”
“Why would he confess to a murder he didn’t commit?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “You want it now or after you’ve seen the body and talked to Talbot?”
“Make it after.” He clapped me on the arm and waddled off toward the garage.
Another five minutes went away. Then Donleavy returned alone and entered the house. The coroner put in an appearance not long after that, to tell the ambulance attendants that they could have the body. Osterman was with them when they brought it out from the garage; he stood near me, not saying anything, while the attendants loaded the stretcher.
Just as the ambulance started down the drive, the house door opened and everybody inside came out. The local doctor and one of the uniformed cops had Talbot between them, hanging onto his arms; he still moved like a sleepwalker. They put him into the doctor’s Cadillac and wasted no time taking him away in the wake of the ambulance.
Donleavy was still up on the front porch; he gestured to me to join him. I did that, with Osterman behind me, and the three of us filed into the living room.
I asked Donleavy, “Did you talk to Talbot?”
“A little. Doctor wanted to get him to the hospital for observation; he’s in a pretty bad way.”
“He confess to you?”
“Yep, he did.”
“To me, too,” Osterman said. “It’s an open-and-shut case.”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t. He didn’t kill Carding.”
“What?”
Donleavy said, “Go ahead, you can lay it out now.”
“Let me give you the background first.” And I told them about the accident in which Carding’s wife had been killed. About Talbot’s obsessive guilt. About what Laura Nichols had hired me to do. About following Talbot here this afternoon.
“He doesn’t sound like a probable murderer, I’ll admit that,” Donleavy said when I was done. “But he claims he picked up the gun in self-defense, more or less, and it went off by accident. It could have happened that way.”
I shook my head. “There are at least three good reasons why it couldn’t.”
“Which are?”
“One is the time factor,” I said. “I was down at the foot of the drive when he disappeared toward the garage. It was thirty seconds before I started up after him, and another two minutes or so until I heard the shot. Say three minutes, maximum. Talbot would have had to walk to the garage, enter, confront Carding, listen to enough verbal abuse to make him pick up the gun, and then shoot Carding when he lunged forward-all in three minutes or less. If that isn’t impossible, it’s the next thing to it.”
“You sure about the amount of time?”
“Positive.”
“What’s the second reason?”
“Talbot claims Carding shouted at him, shouted accusations. But I didn’t hear any shouting; I didn’t hear anything at all from the garage until the gun went off. A yelling voice would have carried almost as far as the shot, quiet as it is around here. And I heard the shot loud and clear.”
Osterman was frowning. “Maybe Carding didn’t shout after all; maybe he spoke in a normal voice and Talbot, mixed up as he is, remembered him as yelling.”
“Then why would Talbot have picked up the gun in such a hurry? If somebody’s talking to you in a normal or slightly raised voice, even making accusations, you wouldn’t have much cause to fear for your safety. Or to grab a weapon just to shut him up.”
Donleavy said, “Let’s hear the third reason.”
“That’s the clincher. I took a close look at Carding’s body less than five minutes after the shot: the blood around the wound was coagulating. He’d been dead at least fifteen minutes by then, maybe longer.”
“You could be wrong about that,” Osterman said. “You’re not a forensic expert.”
“No, but I’ve seen a lot of blood in my life. Believe me, I can tell the difference between fresh and coagulating.”
Donleavy ruminated for a time. Then he said, “Your theory is that Carding killed himself, right?”
“Right. Probably because he was despondent over the death of his wife.”
“Gun suicides don’t usually shoot themselves in the chest, you know.”
“I know. But it happens once in a while-often enough to take it out of the implausible category.”
Osterman said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why the hell would Talbot shoot off the gun if Carding was already dead? Why would he want to make it look like he’d committed murder?”
“Because he believes he did commit murder,” I said. “And not just one murder-two. Carding’s wife in the accident and now Carding as a result of it.”
“Elaborate on that,” Donleavy said.
“Look at it this way. Talbot’s a man so full of guilt that he can’t live with himself; he wants to be punished for what he did-wants to die but doesn’t quite have the courage or the strength to take his own life. So he decides to confront Carding, either because he hopes to provoke himself into a suicidal state or because he hopes to provoke Carding into carrying out the threat against his life.
“But when he gets here he finds Carding dead in the garage of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For Talbot it’s a pretty terrible irony: He’s the one who wants to be dead, to kill himself, but it’s turned out the other way around. He’s got a double load of guilt to deal with now and he can’t handle it; he really starts to unravel.
“Then he hears the cab driver hassling me out on the drive and realizes somebody’s about to find him there with the body. In his mind he’s already killed Carding; why not just go ahead and make it look like murder? That way he can be arrested and prosecuted; he won’t be dead, but at least he’ll be punished.
“He picks up the gun, either from the floor or from Carding’s hand, and fires a shot into the roof or one of the walls. And when I come in he blurts out his confession. Simple as that in the factual sense; damned complex in the psychological sense. But I’ll bet that’s the way it happened.”
Osterman was unconvinced. “It still sounds screwy to me,” he said.
“Maybe not,” Donleavy said. He hooked his fingers around his coat lapels and rocked back and forth; when he did that he looked more than ever like Oliver Hardy. The resemblance was uncanny sometimes, even without the little toothbrush mustache, and it made me wonder if at least some of the mannerisms were calculated-an act to keep the people he dealt with off guard. “I’ve done some reading in criminal psychology; you should see a few of those case histories.”
“Well-if you say so.”
“Besides which, there’re two empty chambers in the gun and just a single wound in Carding’s body. And Talbot only fired one shot.”
“Carding could have kept one chamber empty,” Osterman said. “Or he could have fired a round days or weeks ago.”
“Yeah, I know. Still, you’d better have your men comb the garage for a bullet hole and a. 38 slug.”
“Whatever you say.”
Osterman gave me a curt nod, as if he were annoyed with me for making waves in what he still considered an open-and-shut case and went on out. When he was gone, Donleavy asked me, “What’s Laura Nichols’ address and telephone number?”
I told him and he wrote the information down in a spiral notebook. “I called her just after I reported the death,” I said. “She wasn’t home.”
“I’ll try her again pretty soon,” he said. “You got a card for yourself? Home and office numbers?”
“Sure.” I handed him one from my wallet.
He said, “I guess that’s it for now; you might as well go on home. I’ll call you later today or tomorrow.”
