The Two Timers Read Online Free PDF

A few seconds

later Convery returned.

"My partner reminds me I've jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton.

Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found

with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a

clear-cut case I don't like prolonging things. Just for the record, have

you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five,

tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we

found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have

been that of Mrs. Breton?"

"No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that." Breton

closed his eyes. I did it -- I killed my wife. "I let her go alone."

"We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of

the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue."

"It isn't necessary," Breton said. "I can do that much."

The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming

an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly

on Breton's mind. A good machine. He looked down at Kate's cold,

dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her

eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He

saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand

to stop. Thou hast not a stain on thee.

Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close

at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent

brilliance, "Is this your wife?"

"Who else?" Breton said numbly. "Who else?"

An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and

stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order

in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his

guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless

formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge

had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding

his disintegration into human shrapnel.

It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the

day after Kate's funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city's

north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was

cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near

an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it

up. It was striped pearly gray and white -- dropped by a bird in haste --

and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked

for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove,

and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton

let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete

and covered it with his foot.

His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later,

when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.

The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed

and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been

drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting

the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that

kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all

the simplicity of genius.

Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They

could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into

the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she expect?

Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the

dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much

with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without

sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent,

and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction

-- because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible

to steer -- but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player