I was breathing pure naphtha. It was cold and bracing and it had an immediate calming effect on my stomach.
If it didn’t kill me, I could function like a cop again.
I found him sprawled on the far side of the table. He had been there most of a week from the looks of him. His face was gone, but I could guess from the wispy white hair that he had probably been Otto Murdock.
I didn’t know what had killed him: there wasn’t enough left to decide. What there was was hidden under a carpet of flies.
Let the coroner figure it. Whatever they pay him, it’s not enough, but let him earn it…and in the end tell supercop what I already knew.
Murdock hadn’t keeled over and died of old age.
And Janeway hadn’t done it. This would break his super heart, but when the reaper came cal-ling, Janeway was still in Denver, doing what came naturally. Trying to fit John Gardner into his proper shade of orange, with murder the last thing on his mind.
I didn’t see any weapon. Nothing on the table looked promising as a motive or a clue.
There were no ashes.
No sign of a struggle. Even the chair he had been sitting in was upright, pushed back slightly as if he’d been getting up to greet a visitor.
I went to the far door and opened it.
His bathroom. Nothing out of place there.
I was feeling lightheaded by then: the naphtha was doing its dirty work. The skin under my eyes felt like blisters on the rise.
I ripped off the rag and got out of there.
Downstairs, I looked through his rolltop.
Some of the notes in the pigeonholes were three years old.
I looked through the drawers.
Bottle of cheap bourbon, with not much in the bottom.
Letters…bills…
The sad debris of a life that didn’t matter much to anybody, not even, finally, to the man who had lived it.
Pushed off to one side was the canvas bag. Eleanor had wanted to look inside, but I wouldn’t let her.
I opened it now and hit the jackpot.
A thick notebook, old and edgeworn…
I seemed to be holding Darryl Gray son’s original subscriber list. With it was a manuscript, a dozen pages of rough draft on yellow legal paper. I knew the handwriting, I had seen it on other papers in Amy’s attic. The top sheet was a title page, aping Vic-toriana.
I took it all and went back to Aandahl’s and read it. I read it many times. I was reading it again at midnight when Trish came home.
