Deep Without Pity | Page 3

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.
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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.
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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 at school, Texas Seminary."
I nodded, made a nonsense note on my blotter. I printed the letters slowly, paying no real attention to them. "Did you get along with your father?"
"I hardly see what that has to do it."
"Look, Mr. King--"
"Jeffrey."
"All right, Jeffrey, if we're going to work together you're