Murder Most Merry

“You collect, Marley,” Sughrue sighed. “I’ll tag. Start in the toilet where it started, and work out to the desk.”

The toilet where it started? Well, that was one theory. Of course, it wouldn’t explain how so much of Smollett got splattered back against the wall behind his chair, or why there wasn’t more of him spilled over the desk he supposedly leaned across. It wouldn’t even account for why the blood drops on the carpet were in front of the desk, and trailed toward the toilet, not away from it. No, the only story that would explain all that was one where Smollett and whoever killed him got up in each other’s face over his desk and one of them pulled a gun but didn’t do it quick enough to keep the other one from shooting him. Or shooting him back.

But I had a feeling that wasn’t how Sughrue wanted things to look, and they damn well weren’t going to look like that when we left. Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick my foot in his story just now. I got down on my knees—not much fun for a guy of my build—and started scraping half-dried blood from the floor onto little sterile pieces of paper that went into little sterile envelopes for Sughrue to put labels on.

Sughrue didn’t get up. Just sat there with his pen out and wrote down what part of the room each envelope came from before putting it carefully in the kit.

That’s another thing shows how long ago this was: Nowadays you can get DNA identification from a blood smear and know whose it was and what he ate last Thursday. But back then, all you could get was blood type. So if Sughrue was fiddling with the envelopes like I thought he was. all the blood that got to the lab would be from behind the desk. The envelopes might say this sample or that sample was from the toilet or the front of the desk, but...

Then I thought of one other thing, and it almost got me killed right there. Which shows where thinking will get you. I was picking up blood from behind the desk, and when I got up I sort of routinely opened and closed the desk drawers. There was the usual clutter of coin wrappers, old receipts, and business cards, but “No gun,” I said, and then kicked myself for saying it, because Sughrue turned to me real fast—fast like when he’d knocked the mike out of my fingers—and I couldn’t see where his right hand was, which scared me so that I tried to cover.

“I mean” —I said it slow and dumb-like— “I was thinking there’d be one. Guess not, though; I never heard of him to pack.” Fact is. you could look in a million back-room offices in bars like this and find a gun in every one of them. It’s like bar owners think they’re supposed to have one. or maybe they come with the liquor license or something. And considering Smollett’s reputation, it was damn funny there wasn’t one here. Maybe it was with the records gone from the safe. But I could see I wasn’t going to get much older by saying that in front of Sughrue. so I just stood there looking stupid till he finally untensed and moved his hand out where I could see it empty.

“That’s enough,” he said. What with pictures and samples and the coroner’s boys, we’d been there maybe two hours. “Let’s get this to the station and ready for the lab.” He got to his feet, slow, wincing a little.

So here I was with a guy who I thought had done the murder we were investigating, a guy who was also maybe roping me in as his accomplice, and who might just put me out of my misery if he thought I’d figured that out. And all I could think was, I wonder how he plans to keep anyone else from looking over the scene and reading it right. And I never did find that out.

Funny how your mind works. I mean, I should’ve been thinking a lot of other stuff, about Smollett and Sughrue, and if my guesses were right—about both of them—and whether Sughrue thought I was going along with whatever his plans were, and what ideas he might have about my future. But what I remember most was worrying about how he was going to keep everyone else from seeing what I saw in the back room there at Smokey’s.

So this next part nobody believes. I must’ve told it a hundred times in the week after it happened and never got anything but funny looks, but it’s true just like I’m going to say: We were walking out the back of Smokey’s, to the car. And the snow hadn’t let up a bit, but it’d been packed down by the uniforms standing around holding the scene for us. So as I followed Sughrue out the back door, onto the little landing there, I stepped onto that smooth- packed snow and my foot slid out from under me, and I lurched up to keep from falling and bumped into Sughrue, and he went down. Hard. Into the snow.

And he yelped.

Like I say, most folks don’t think it happened that way. I could see on their faces when I got to that part, they all figured I pushed Sughrue on purpose. But it ain’t so; I was there, I seen it, and it was pure luck, good or bad.

Anyway, Sughrue hit the snow and he yelped and laid there. After a second, I reached down to help him up. but he kind of half swung at me so I pulled back.

He rolled over then and got to his feet, but it wasn’t like anything I ever saw before. You know how sometimes you get hurt and feel like you’re moving in slow motion? Well, now I saw just that. Sughrue moving in slow motion. It was almost like he floated onto his side, holding his coat shut real tight, then got to his knees, then his feet, and I swear I wouldn’t have been surprised if he drifted up into the falling snow and vanished in the gray clouds.

He might as well have.

We looked at each other again. We both knew now that he’d got shot last night, and I knew that the guy who’d done it just went to the morgue. And Sughrue knew I knew, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it but walk back to the car with me.

And I mean to tell you, that ride back was weird. We had this thing between us now, and we both knew what it was, and neither one of us said a word all the way back to the station. I wasn’t worried about Sughrue anymore, I wasn’t even thinking what I should do about this sorry mess. I just kept trying to remember a word I read in a book once about something the Greeks call it, when fear turns to pity.

I never did think of that word. I don’t think I had one other clear thought in my head all the time I fought the car through the snow-drifted streets. I parked and followed Sughrue across the parking lot to the station, seeing his steps get stiff and lurchy. And slow. I followed him up the stairs to the second floor even slower, hearing his breath get loud and raspy as he pulled himself up the steps one at a time, and I mean, One. At. A. Time.

I never saw his face again. Not while he was alive, anyway. I stood there at the top of the stairs and watched the back of him ooze down the hall to his office and get the door closed. Then I figured it was safe and I told Rosey to call the lieutenant.

Lieutenant Franklin retired a few years back, then died or something. So no one but me remembers pushing open the door to Sughrue’s office and seeing him sprawled back in his chair, white like Smollett was, white like the snow, with his coat hanging open and red blood spread all over his shirt and down on the floor. The same blood that was trailed from the front of Smollett’s desk into the bathroom where last night he’d gone to stop the bleeding and thought he had till he went down in the snow and opened up the wound again.

But all that was a long time ago. and nobody remembers Sughrue much anymore, and us who were there reported what we had to and covered up the rest and never talked about it after. In a few years it was like it never happened at all. Like I say. I’d even quit seeing Sughrue’s picture on the wall till the new kid made a point of it.

And even though I looked at it again on the way out that night, it didn’t mean much to me; just some guy I killed once, that’s all.

RUMPOLE AND THE CHAMBERS PARTY – John Mortimer

Christmas comes but once a year. Once a year I receive a gift of socks from She Who Must Be Obeyed; each year I add to her cellar of bottles of lavender water, which she now seems to use mainly for the purpose of “laying down” in the bedroom cupboard (I suspect she has only just started on the 1980 vintage).

Tinseled cards and sprigs of holly appear at the entrance to the cells under the Old Bailey and a constantly repeated tape of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” adds little zest to my two eggs, bacon, and sausage on a fried slice in the Taste-Ee-Bite, Fleet Street; and once a year the Great Debate takes place at our December meeting. Should we invite solicitors to our Chambers party?

“No doubt at the season of our Savior’s birth we should offer hospitality to all sorts and conditions of men,” “Soapy” Sam Ballard, q. c., our devout Head of Chambers, opened the proceedings in his usual manner, that of a somewhat backward bishop addressing Synod on the wisdom of offering the rites of baptism to non-practicing, gay Anglican converts of riper years.