He smiled and reached into his shirt pocket. I cocked the gun but he only laughed in that faint, sad way. When he opened his fist, he had two tiny capsules in his hand.
“What’s that stuff?”
“Guess.”
We looked at each other: a long, searching moment. Barbara Crowell flitted through my mind, along with a hundred suicides and suicide attempts I had known over the years.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
But he popped them into his mouth and swallowed.
“I knew you’d get me,” he said. “Knew it that first day, when they put you on Bobby’s case. So I had these ready.
He doubled up and fell out of the chair.
“Neff,” I said weakly.
I looked for the phone, but you can’t do much with cyanide. It works in a minute.
He went into the shakes and groaned, a long cry of agony.
His pulse slowed, and I could almost see his heart giving up.
I got down beside him and opened his shirt.
Biggest mistake I ever made.
He moved like a snake. I didn’t know what had hit me. Suddenly I was down and he was up and through the haze I knew he had kicked me in the head. He had caught me in the temple with the point of his shoe: the hardest kick he could muster. I spun around and he was on my back. He had a rope: I don’t know where it came from, but he was a magician and there it was, twisted around my neck. He cut my windpipe, and the next twenty seconds were so desperate that I couldn’t think of anything but my heaving lungs. I know the gun fell: it skittered across the floor and slammed into the wall. I was up on one knee with this thing on my back, and I couldn’t shake it and if I didn’t shake it I was going to die.
I tried to buck him and couldn’t. We slammed into the wall. He held on, stuck to me like we’d been born that way, grotesque Siamese twins bent on killing each other. The world turned red. I was losing consciousness…
I heard a scream, then a shot, and the rope went slack.
God, I could breathe again!
But I still had to struggle for it, and for at least a minute 1 had the heaves.
When the world cleared, I saw Rita standing over Neff’s body. She was staring at the mess she’d made, clutching my gun with both hands.
I found the key to the storage locker in Neff’s hip pocket. It was the only lock-it-yourself place in Longmont.
We drove the four miles from Neff’s house in what seemed like total silence. Only when we reached the storage yard did I realize that the radio was still playing.
Benny Goodman. “It Had to Be You.”
I drove to unit 254, opened the door, and walked in. It was like walking into King Solomon’s Mines.
He had shelved the locker and some of the books were out on open display. Yes, they were wonderful things.
But I was tired of looking. If you get too much new blood, you begin to drown in it.
Rita had lingered but now she came in. She didn’t touch anything, just walked along and looked at the spines.
“Well, this is it,” I said wearily. “This is what people kill for.”
She was just standing, staring at nothing. She looked older in the dim light.
On a worktable in a corner, I found some papers. The name Rita McKinley caught my eye and I leafed through them.
“Looks like a copy of your appraisal,” I said. “You want to tell me about this?”
