He turned to look at me. For the first time, he appeared truly frightened, because he understood how much I knew.
I had more to say, not to impress Mel as much as to finally speak aloud all the things I had been telling myself for the past twelve hours.
“Did you panic, Mel? Did you lose it and shoot Honeysett in some kind of … of unthinking knee-jerk reaction? Or did you wait until the bridge went up, so the noise would hide the sound of the gunshot? Which was it, Mel? Never mind, I don’t care. Afterwards you lifted his body and set his head, with the bullet from your gun in it, on the bridge support and held it there while the bridge came down on it. Jesus, Mel, don’t you have nightmares about that? What kind of sound does a man’s skull make when a bridge comes down on it and crushes it like an eggshell and squeezes the brains into jelly? Sure works to hide a bullet, though, doesn’t it? Sorry, a projectile. The pro-jec-tile becomes just another piece of junk off the bridge supports, like a flattened penny, and who the hell would look for that among crushed brains, right, Mel?”
He looked away and down, one hand squeezing the bridge of his nose.
“What’s that, Mel? I couldn’t hear you. Say it louder. I’m really interested in what you have to say.”
He raised his head to look through the windshield again. “I said you have no proof. And it was Gabe’s gun that shot Dalgetty and Gabe’s gun that he used to kill himself.” He turned to look at me. “Because he discovered you had been screwing his partner.”
Which might have been enough for me to shoot him there and then. But I didn’t. I was too damn proud of myself to miss the chance to show him how clever I was. And how stupid I had been.
“I don’t know if he knew that.” I wanted to close my eyes, to lower my arms, and to think about Gabe, but I couldn’t. Not yet. “But he knew you shot Dougal Dalgetty.”
There’s something else, Gabe had said when he called, wanting to make love on the blanket, and I said, I know, and Gabe asked me how I could know. He meant how could I know about Mel shaking down Dalgetty and Pilato and making up the story about Eugene Griswold, because that’s what he wanted to tell me, that he believed Mel had killed Dalgetty.
“And Mike Pilato figured it out as well. That you shot Dougal. When I told him the forensics matched. The bullet that killed Dalgetty and the one that killed Gabe. They matched. Pilato knew Gabe hadn’t shot Dalgetty, and now he knew you had. He suspected you all along, because you were the one shaking him and Dalgetty down. It fell into place with the forensics report, first with Pilato, then with me. So you take your choice, Mel. You get me sitting here, or you get Mike Pilato looking for your ass, ready to punish you for shooting his good buddy Dougal.”
Mel actually smiled. “Mike Pilato doesn’t scare me,” he said.
“He’d better. And what were you doing at our house that night, anyway, Mel? Did you learn that Gabe knew who killed Dalgetty, and why? Were you looking for me? Never mind. Gabe went into the bushes, wrapped in a blanket, you followed him, maybe you talked to him while he was there on the blanket, trying to get him to go along with you, and Gabe wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cover for you, and he wouldn’t have been on his knees when you shot him either. Not for you, not for anybody. I think he was getting up off the blanket, ready to kick your ass, and that’s when you lost it and shot him with your gun—”
“It was Gabe’s gun.” Mel sounded tired, resigned. “Forensics says so. Hayashida signed the form. The paraffin test was positive—”
“No, no, no, no, no, Mel. You were so ‘upset’ about Gabe’s death, so intent on ‘investigating what really happened,’ that you insisted on filling out the forensics forms yourself. You were the one who read the serial number of Gabe’s gun aloud to Hayashida, who entered it on the form before the gun was fired. Except it wasn’t Gabe’s gun you fired into the water tank to get …” I couldn’t resist saying it the same way again. “… the pro-jec-tile for the forensics lab. It was your gun. A Glock G22 identical to Gabe’s, identical to the one carried by everybody else in the department. Boy, I hope they got a volume discount for all those ass-ugly guns. And you sure as hell deserve a medal for thinking fast in a tight situation, like Gabe said you could. You shoot Gabe, drop the gun in the right place, get the hell out from inside those bushes before anybody on the beach can see you, and walk through the garden and into our house, where you get Gabe’s gun out of the kitchen. Then you put it together, slip it in your holster and leave by the front door, maybe already thinking about how you can convince Hayashida or whoever that your gun is really Gabe’s until you get a chance to switch them again. Brilliant.”
I waited for a reaction. There was none, except for a slight glistening on his brow. He was beginning to sweat. Good.
“Oh, and you shook his hand too, didn’t you, Mel?”
He looked at me. I had surprised him again.
“You grabbed his hand, his right hand, with your own. Just a quick grab and release. Shaking hands goodbye, Mel, while Gabe lay dying? No, transferring some of the gunshot residue from your hand to his. Just enough, Mel, for the paraffin test to find some. Just a trace, that’s all you needed. Where’d you pick that up, Mel? At the police academy? Or from that case in Baltimore, where a suspect and his lawyer proved the residue on the suspect’s palm came from shaking hands with the real killer? Nobody thought of doing a paraffin test on your hand, did they? Or even to check the gun for fingerprints. Why should they? Everybody believed Gabe had shot himself with his own weapon. Why waste time on fingerprint tests? Boy, you were good, Mel. Really good. You almost got away clean, except that Wayne Weaver Honeysett was in the garden shed, waiting for me to come home so he could watch me undress in our bedroom—maybe I’d be near the window, where he could see me. He heard the shot and watched you instead. Watched you go into the house and get Gabe’s gun. Poor Wayne. Jerking off among rusty rakes and a bag of topsoil.”
I leaned forward, trying to look Mel in the eye.
“You also grabbed our notepad from the kitchen counter as you were leaving. What was in the notebook, Mel? Was there something in there about you and Dalgetty, maybe? Is that why you took it with you, why I couldn’t find it? Or maybe he just wrote that he loved me. Is that what Gabe wrote on it?”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Mel sat up straight, his back against the seat. “Something like that.”
“What did it say, Mel?”
“Go to hell.”
“You know what I think? I think there was something about you in it that didn’t add up with Gabe. Something my friend Dewey saw him writing a day earlier. Is that what it was?”
“Fuck you.”
“Not anymore, Mel. Not you, not ever.”
He looked over and actually smiled. “None of this matters. Either you shoot me now, which you can’t, or you just get the hell out of here while you can.”
“Or Walter Freeman and some other cops show up and take over.” The flashing red and blue lights appeared on the bridge. Bubble gum lights, Gabe used to call them.
Mel twisted in his seat to look at the cruisers on the bridge, the officers spilling out and heading along the canal toward us. “They’ll shoot you when they see you with the gun,” he said.
“Or I’ll shoot you first,” I said, and I took aim and pulled the trigger.
28.
Walter Freeman wouldn’t look at me. He had avoided looking at me for the last hour while I sat in an interrogation room with him and Harold Hayashida and a female police officer who managed to look like a Playboy model with her blonde hair, blue uniform, black leather belt, gold badge, and silver bullets. What makes such a good-looking young woman become a cop, I wondered. Maybe good-looking young male cops.