Deep Without Pity | Page 3

that
was too uncomfortable to sit on, so I crouched for a while and watched
the sailboats. They were a symbol to me of the kind of people, like the
Kings, who had everything I never would have--money, prestige, a
sense of time. But the sense of time was a lie, and even people like
Jason King could die, suddenly, in a brief flash of mortality. I climbed
back up the path.

III
"It's open and shut," Winslow confided to me on the way back to town.
"Marion King has a motive, what with all this mistress business, and
she can't account for herself at the time of the murder."
"Why wasn't she staying at the house last night?" I asked. "She was at
her sister's. She says her sister was sick. I say like hell. Here's how it
was.
"Marion King quarrels with her husband over the mistress and moves
out. She thinks it over, decides she wants a divorce, say. Then she tells
her sister she's going to a movie. She doesn't want her sister to know
she's even seeing her husband again. She goes to the house, tells him
she's leaving him for good. He pulls a gun, threatens her. That's the last
straw, he says, I'd be ruined. They struggle over the gun, it goes off."
"King was shot through the back of the head," I said.
"Okay, she pulls the gun and threatens him. He tries to walk out on her,
and bang, it goes off. Maybe she didn't mean for it to."
The road heaved and dipped over countless hills between the lake and
the outskirts of the city. The swaying car and white heat were numbing
me. I considered asking Winslow what he made of the scrapbook and
lighter, but changed my mind. It wasn't my case, and there was no point
in stirring things up.
They dropped me at my house and I waved as they pulled away. Two
bills sat waiting for me in the mailbox and a jug of milk had gone sour
overnight. I cooked a couple of hamburgers and took a shower, then
went outside with a beer. I sat in the front lawn and drank the beer and
pulled Johnson grass. Johnson grass is a vicious, predatory plant that
can take over a lawn in a matter of weeks. All its leaves come out of a
central root system, and to pull it up you have to track down all the
runners and separate leaves and pull them back to the center. Pulling
Johnson grass is just the job for an out-of-work detective. I stayed at it
until it got too dark to see what I was doing.

IV
My employment status changed at ten o'clock the next morning. I heard
a tapping at the door and dropped my book into the center drawer of
my desk. Before I could say anything, a husky blond kid with short hair
and bangs came in. He introduced himself as Jeffrey King, the dead
man's son.
I offered him a chair, noticing a gold cross at his throat and a strong
smell of aftershave at the same moment. I guessed him to be about
eighteen.
"I assume you know what happened to my mother," he said. I nodded,
and he went on. "She didn't kill him, Mr. Sloane. If you knew her, you
would know she couldn't have done it." He had a clear, ringing voice,
with a taste of the deep south--Alabama or Georgia--in his accent. He
was calm, direct, almost painfully sincere.
"I know the man who's handling the investigation," I said. "He's a
friend, and he's an honest man. You can trust him to see that justice is
done."
"The Lord said, 'Woe to you lawyers also, for you load men with
burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with
one of your fingers.' It doesn't matter to Mr. Winslow whether my
mother did it or not. I'd prefer to have. someone working with her
interest in mind."
His mannerisms and voice were those of a mature public speaker. I had
to keep blinking my eyes to be sure he was the same person who'd
come in the door.
"Let's hear your side of it," I said.
He paused, collected himself, seemed to be waiting for the right beat to
come in on. "I can't claim my mother and father had a perfect marriage.

They've been rather...distant from each other for some time. It was
perfectly natural for her to leave the house in which my father had
committed adultery. 'Do not look back or stop...lest you be consumed.'
But that hardly means she would kill. The thought would not even
occur to her."
"Do you live with your parents?"
"No. I'm in a dormitory