Kill Your Darlings Read Online Free PDF Page B

accident. You’re giving me a real major pain in the ass, pal. What’s your part in this, anyway?”
    “I found the body.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Who are you? Just a friend of the family?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, go sit with the wife. Be supportive. Leave me do my job.”
    “Sir. I think you may be blowing this.” I couldn’t quite get indignant; I wasn’t sure I was right.
    “I know my job. Leave me do my job. What do you do for a living, pal, that makes you such an expert?”
    Great.
    “I’m a writer,” I said.
    “What, a reporter?”
    “Mystery writer,” I mumbled.
    “What?”
    “Mystery writer.”
    He gave me a big-city smile that said I was the most pathetic thing he’d seen all day, in a day full of seeing pathetic things and feeling superior to all of them.
    Part of me wanted to punch him, but part of me also thought maybe his attitude was right on target. My hero had drunk himself senseless and drowned in the tub. Maybe I ought to grow up and accept that sorry fact.
    I took one more try.
    “Listen,” I said. “I used to be a cop. Please don’t write me off as a kook. Hear me out.”
    “Why, you got something new to say?”
    “Come with me.”
    I walked him into the bathroom; Roscoe hadn’t moved.
    “That empty bottle of Scotch,” I said, pointing to it. “I was with Mr. Kane until maybe forty minutes before his wife and I found the body. And you’re saying during that time he supposedly drank this whole bottle of Scotch and passed out and drowned? I just don’t believe it. And where’s the glass? Roscoe Kane didn’t drink out of a bottle.”
    “You brought me in here for this twaddle? A drunk who doesn’t drink out of a bottle? You think forty minutes isn’t time enough to drink some Scotch and drown and die?”
    “A
whole bottle
?”
    “Who says it was a full bottle? He had it in his room and ’d been nursing it all day, probably; he just killed it here in the tub. And it killed him.”
    I didn’t have anything to counter that with. I found myself looking at Roscoe, nude, old, skinny, dead. I looked at him through a watery haze, not all of it in the tub.
    The man from the coroner’s office put a hand on my shoulder; it was a gesture that was meant to be conciliatory, but it was too firm a hand, the impatience in the man getting the best of him. I shook it off.
    He raised his two hands in a gesture that sought a truce, and then pointed toward Roscoe Kane. “Come look at something,” he said.
    I went closer to the tub; looked where the fat stubby finger was pointing.
    “Do you see any bruises?” he said. “Look at his shoulders, where he’d have likely been held down. Take a close look.”
    I did.
    “No bruises,” he said.
    “Suppose he
had
passed out or fell asleep in the tub or something, but with his head up out of the water—and somebody held him under; even if he woke up during that, it’d be over fairly quick.”
    “Sure, but he’d be bruised.”
    “Not necessarily. He’s skinny. Frail. It wouldn’t take much to hold him under and...”
    “Listen—what was your name? Mallory?—you could be right. One in a hundred is about your odds. But there’s just not enough to go on. He has a history of drinking; a past, recent accident where he drank himself to sleep and almost died because of it. The evidence here indicates no struggle; it, in point of fact, indicates he passed out and died. Now. Let it go.”
    Suddenly I felt he was right; I felt embarrassed. I nodded, said, “Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right. Sorry.”
    “It’s okay.”
    That was when the ambulance guys from the funeral home arrived with a stretcher and a body bag. I helped them dry Roscoe Kane off before they put him in and zipped him up and wheeled him out. I told them we’d call tomorrow and give them the particulars.
    So Roscoe Kane was gone, and soon so was the man from the coroner’s office. Mae was asleep. Fitfully so, but asleep.
    I thought about sleeping on the other bed, so she