“I talked to some people where you work-well, where you worked,” Flint said. He tossed his hat onto the couch so that he could reach into his jacket for his notebook. He turned over a couple of pages, squinted to get a better look at his own handwriting. “You know a woman named Frieda, I think it is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She runs the housing section at the paper?”
“Home,” I said, without the exclamation mark. Flint would have wondered what was wrong with me had I shouted it at him.
“You got moved there, according to Mr., hang on…Mr. Magnuson?”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah, I had a little chat with him. You got moved out of your feature-writing job because of this difficulty with Mr. Benson, the deceased, this business about trying to get him not to write about Ms. Snelling.”
“That was his interpretation. I never told him not to write about her.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to ask him about that at the moment.” I felt a droplet of sweat run down my neck and under my shirt collar. “So,” Flint continued, “you went to work for Frieda, and she said things didn’t work out very well there.”
“Not really. But I didn’t have much of a chance to settle in.”
“She told me you were upset about a lot of things, including your troubles with Mr. Benson. She said, and just hang on a second here, I wrote this down. Okay, here it is. She said you referred to him as a ‘dipshit’ reporter. Does that sound right?”
I swallowed. “It does sound like something I might have said.”
“And that you also said you’d be happy if he got caught in a, hang on, got caught in a ‘Wal-Mart cave-in.’ Does that sound like something you said?”
“I was,” I said carefully, “a bit upset.”
Flint nodded again. “I guess you were. I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? Benson, he complains to his boss, his boss is an old friend of your boss, they get talking, and you get demoted.”
“That’s pretty much what happened.” I happened to glance at the clock on the mantel. I had forty minutes to get to my meeting with Sandler. At least now I had transportation.
“I see you looking at the clock there,” Flint said. “Am I holding you up from something?”
“No, that’s fine.”
“So tell me again, where are you off to? It’s clearly not an assignment. I guess you sort of lied to me about that, what with you being suspended and all.”
“My wife and I,” I said, “we’re having a bit of a rough time. We need a bit of space.”
Flint frowned. “That’s too bad. My wife and I, we’ve had our ups and downs too, over the years. Kind of goes with the territory, this kind of job, you know? Long hours, working nights, that kind of thing. But we worked through it.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“So what would make you imagine a Wal-Mart cave-in?”
Flint was giving me a case of mental whiplash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just have that kind of mind, I guess.”
“Creative,” Flint said, helping.
“I suppose.”
“Because I remember, you write science fiction books, right?”
“I have. Not lately. My last one was a sequel to Missionary, but it didn’t get a whole lot of attention. That, and getting back into a mortgage, since we moved back downtown from Oakwood, meant getting a job at the Metropolitan.”
“That’s a shame, not being able to realize your goals and all.”
Don’t let him mess with your head, I told myself. Just let it go. “Sure,” I said.
“I mean, not that you aren’t doing okay. A good job with a big paper, until, well, yesterday, when you got suspended. They still paying you while you’re suspended?”
“Yes. At least, I think so.”
“You got a union?”
“Yes.”
“You should talk to them.”
“I probably should. There’s been so much going on, I haven’t really had a moment to think about it.”
“So you really don’t think your friend, Ms. Snelling, had anything to do with Mr. Benson’s death?”
It was like watching a one-man ping-pong game. Flint had the ball moving so fast I could barely keep track of it.
“I, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, even if Trixie had wanted to kill Benson, the time to do it would have been before his story and the picture of her ran in the paper.”
“What do you suppose he was doing there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for an even better story. An exclusive on Trixie’s basement.”
Flint gave a satisfied nod, like this was his line of thinking too. I tried not to be obvious as I took another look at the clock.
“You sure you don’t have to be someplace?” Flint asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.” God, I’d barely glanced at it.
“So, that’s quite the basement Ms. Snelling has,” Flint said.
“I suppose,” I said. “I think, if I had that kind of space in my basement, I’d build a model train layout.”
Flint actually chuckled. “Yeah, I love those. With the flashing signals, the crossings that come down. Did Ms. Snelling ever do anything to you in that basement of hers?”
“No. You asked me this before. We’re friends, that’s all.”
“Some friend. Leaving you handcuffed in the same room with a corpse and all. You got any extra friends like that I could have?”
“I guess she had her reasons.”
“You ever check out all the equipment she has in that basement? Straps and whips and all that stuff?”
“I certainly saw it hanging on the walls, but it’s not like I did an inventory.”
“Some men, they get off on being tortured, spanked, that sort of thing.”
I said nothing.
“But you wonder, how far would some guys like for Ms. Snelling to go?”
“I don’t think anyone would want to have his throat slit, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No,” Flint said, his voice drifting off. “What I was wondering was, would anyone ever want to be electrocuted?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, shocked. Have a few volts shot through their system.”
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine anyone getting their jollies that way.”
“Well, me neither. But I was wondering whether you ever noticed, did Ms. Snelling have a stun gun?”
“What?”
“A stun gun. You know, the kind some police forces have. You shoot a guy, you put fifty thousand volts into him, tends to slow him down a bit.”
“No,” I said. “I never saw anything like that. What makes you ask?”
“Well, you see,” Flint said, “we found something interesting on Mr. Benson’s body. Looked like a couple of bee stings at first. Right on his torso, just to the left of the navel, these two spots, a few inches apart.”
“Maybe he’d been stung.”
Flint shook his head. “No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets zapped with a stun gun.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. See, what I’m thinking is, maybe Ms. Snelling, or maybe somebody else if we accept your version, that she didn’t do this, zapped Mr. Benson with a stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden cross, and finally cut his throat open.”
I tried to make some sense of this. “Don’t you think, if Trixie had done this, she wouldn’t have had to use a
