Time froze, too, like a stop-frame sequence in a film. Eight or ten yards from me a bottle struck the brick wall of a building and smashed.
There was no explosion beyond the shattering of the glass. It was just an empty bottle.
And the car was just a car. I watched now as it went on careening south on Ninth Avenue, six kids in it, six drunken kids, and they might well kill somebody, they were drunk enough to do it, but when they did it would be an accident. They weren't professional killers, hitmen dispatched to murder me. They were just a bunch of kids who'd had more to drink than they could handle. Maybe they'd cripple someone, maybe they'd total their car, maybe they'd make it home without bending a fender.
I got up slowly, looked at the gun in my hand. Thank God I hadn't fired it. I could have shot them, I could have killed them.
God knows I'd wanted to. I'd tried to, thinking logically enough that they were trying to kill me.
But I'd been unable to do it. And if it had been pros, if the object I'd seen had been not a whiskey bottle but the gun or bomb I'd thought it was, I'd have been no more able to pull the trigger. They'd have killed me and I'd have died with an unfired revolver in my hands.
Jesus.
I dropped the useless gun in my pocket. I held out my hand, surprised that it wasn't shaking. I didn't even feel particularly shaky inside, and I was damned if I could figure out why not.
I went over to examine the broken bottle, if only to make sure it was just that and not a Molotov cocktail that had providentially failed to ignite. But there was no puddle, no reek of gasoline. There was a slight whiskey smell, unless I imagined it, and a label attached to one chunk of glass indicated that the bottle had contained J & B Scotch. Other fragments of green glass sparkled like jewels in the light of the streetlamp.
I bent over and picked up a little cube of glass. I placed it in the palm of my hand and stared at it like a gypsy at a crystal. I thought of Donna's poem and Sunny's note and my own slip of the tongue.
I started walking. It was all I could do to keep from running.
Chapter 27
'Jesus, I need a shave,' Durkin said. He'd just dropped what was left of his cigarette into what was left of his coffee, and he was running one hand over his cheek, feeling the stubble. 'I need a shave, I need a shower, I need a drink. Not necessarily in that order. I put out an APB
on your little Colombian friend.
Octavio Ignacio Calderon y La Barra. Name's longer'n he is. I checked the morgue. They haven't got him down there in a drawer. Not yet, anyway.'
He opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a metal shaving mirror and a cordless electric shaver. He
leaned the mirror against his empty coffee cup, positioned his face in front of it and began shaving. Over the whirr of the shaver he said, 'I don't see anything in her file about a ring.'
'Mind if I look?'
'Be my guest.'
I studied the inventory sheet, knowing the ring wouldn't be on it.
Then I went over the photographs of the death scene. I tried to look only at her hands. I looked at every picture, and in none of them could I spot anything that suggested she was wearing a ring.
I said as much to Durkin. He switched off the shaver, reached for the photographs, went through them carefully and deliberately. 'It's hard to see her hands in some of these,' he complained. 'All right, there's definitely no ring on that hand. What's that, the left hand? No ring on the left hand. Now in this shot, okay, definitely no ring on that hand. Wait a minute. Shit, that's the left hand again. It's not clear in this one. Okay, here we go. That's definitely her right hand and there's no ring on it.' He gathered the photos together like cards to be shuffled and dealt. 'No ring,' he said. 'What's that prove?'
'She had a ring when I saw her. Both times I saw her.'
'And?'
'And it disappeared. It's not at her apartment. There's a ring in her jewelry box, a high school class ring, but that's not what I remember seeing on her hand.'
'Maybe your memory's false.'
I shook my head. 'The class ring doesn't even have a stone. I went over there before I came here, just to check my memory. It's one of those klutzy school rings with too much lettering on it. It's not what she was wearing. She wouldn't have worn it, not with this mink and the wine-colored nails.'
I wasn't the only one who'd said so. After my little epiphany with the bit of broken glass, I'd gone straight to Kim's apartment, then used her phone to call Donna Campion. 'It's Matt Scudder,' I said. 'I know it's late, but I wanted to ask you about a line in your poem.'
She'd said, 'What line? What poem?'
'Your poem about Kim. You gave me a copy.'
'Oh, yes. Just give me a moment, will you? I'm not completely awake.'
'I'm sorry to call so late, but—'
'That's all right. What was the line?'
'Shatter / Wine bottles at her feet, let green glass / Sparkle upon her hand.'
