LITMIR.BIZ

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discovery in my apartment. The gun that had killed him was here, as well.

      Earlier I had reported an unsettling encounter with the victim at St. Bartholomew’s. And the chief knew that I had illegally entered Robertson’s house on Tuesday afternoon and had thereby given the man reason to confront me.

      If this pistol was registered to Robertson, the most obvious assumption on the part of the police would be that he had come here to demand to know what I’d been doing in his house and perhaps to threaten me. They would assume that we had argued, that the argument had led to a struggle, and that I had shot him with his own gun in self-defense.

      They wouldn’t charge me with murder or with manslaughter. They probably wouldn’t even take me into custody for questioning.

      If the pistol wasn’t registered to Robertson, however, I’d be as stuck as a rat on a glue-board trap.

      Wyatt Porter knew me too well to believe that I could kill a man in cold blood, when my life was not at risk. As the chief, he set the policies for the department and made important procedural decisions, but he wasn’t the only cop on the force. Others would not be so quick to declare me innocent under questionable circumstances, and if for no reason but appearances, the chief might have to park me in a cell for a day, until he could find a way to resolve matters in my favor.

      In jail, I would be safe from whatever bloody catastrophe might be descending on Pico Mundo, but I would be in no position to use my gift to prevent the tragedy. I couldn’t escort Viola Peabody and her daughters from their house to the safer refuge of her sister’s home. I couldn’t find a way to induce the Takuda family to change their Wednesday plans.

      I had hoped to follow the bodachs to the site of the impending crime as Wednesday morning gave way to afternoon, when this event seemed destined to occur. Those malevolent spirits would gather in advance of the bloodshed, perhaps giving me enough time to change the fates of all those who were unwittingly approaching their deaths at that as yet unknown place.

      Odysseus in chains, however, cannot lead the way back to Ithaca.

      I include this literary allusion solely because I know Little Ozzie will be amused that I would have the audacity to compare myself to that great hero of the Trojan War.

      “Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think that you can bear to give it,” he instructed before I began to write, “because you won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.”

      My promise to obey this instruction has become more difficult to fulfill as my story progresses relentlessly toward the hour of the gun. The light recedes from me, and the darkness gathers. To please my massive, six-fingered muse, I must resort to tricks like the Odysseus bit.

      Having determined that I couldn’t turn to Chief Porter for help in these circumstances, I switched off all the lights except the one in the bathroom. I couldn’t bear to be entirely in the dark with the corpse, for I sensed that, even though dead, he still had surprises in store for me.

      In the gloom, I quickly found my way through the cluttered room with as much confidence as if I had been born sightless and raised here since birth. At one of the front windows, I twisted the control rod to open the Levolor.

      To the right, I could see the moonlit stairs framed in slices by the slats of the blind. No one was ascending toward my door.

      Directly ahead lay the street, but because of the intervening oaks, I didn’t have an unobstructed view. Nevertheless, between the branches I could see enough of Marigold Lane to be certain that no suspicious vehicles had parked at the curb since my arrival.

      Judging by the evidence, I wasn’t under observation, but I felt certain that whoever had whacked Bob Robertson would be back. When they knew that I had come home and discovered the cadaver, they would either pop me, too, and make the double murder look like murder-suicide, or more likely place an anonymous call to the police and land me in the cell that I was determined to avoid.

      I knew a set-up when I saw one.

       CHAPTER 33

      AFTER CLOSING THE LEVOLOR AT THE window, leaving the lights off, I went to the bureau, which was near the bed. In this one room, everything could be found near the bed, including the sofa and the microwave.

      In the bottom drawer of the bureau I kept my only spare set of bed linens. Under the pillowcases, I found the neatly pressed and folded top sheet.

      Although without a doubt the situation warranted the sacrifice of good bedclothes, I regretted having to give up that sheet. Well-made cotton bedding is not cheap, and I am mildly allergic to many of the synthetic fabrics commonly used for such items.

      In the bathroom, I opened the sheet on the floor.

      Being dead and therefore indifferent to my problems, Robertson could not be expected to make my job easier; however, I was surprised when he resisted being hauled out of the tub. This wasn’t the active counterforce of conscious opposition, but the passive resistance of rigor mortis.

      He proved to be as stiff and difficult to manage as a pile of boards nailed together at odd angles.

      Reluctantly, I put a hand to his face. He felt colder than I’d expected that he would.

      Perhaps adjustments needed to be made in my understanding of the events of the previous evening. Unthinkingly, I had made certain assumptions that Robertson’s condition didn’t support.

      To learn the truth, I had to examine him further. Because he had been lying facedown in the tub when I’d found him, before I’d turned him over, I now unbuttoned his shirt.

      This task filled me with loathing and repugnance, which I had anticipated, but I wasn’t prepared for the abhorrent sense of intimacy that spawned a slithering nausea.

      My fingers were damp with sweat. The pearlized buttons proved slippery.

      I glanced at Robertson’s face, certain that his gaze would have refocused from some otherworldly sight to my fumbling hands. Of course his expression of shock and terror had not changed, and he continued staring at something beyond the veil that separates this world and the next.

      His lips were slightly parted, as though with his last breath he had greeted Death or had spoken an unanswered plea.

      Looking at his face had only made my heebie-jeebies worse. When I lowered my head, I imagined that his eyes tracked the shifting of my attention to the stubborn buttons. If I had felt a fetid breath exhaled against my brow, I might have screamed, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

      No corpse had ever creeped me out as badly as this one. For the most part, the deceased with whom I interact are apparitions, and I am spared too much familiarity with the messy biological aspect of death.

      In this instance, I was troubled less by the scents and sights of early-stage corruption than by the physical peculiarities of the dead man, mostly that spongy fungoid quality that had marked him in life, but also by his extraordinary fascination—as revealed in his files—for torture, brutal murder, dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism.

      I undid the final button. I folded back his shirt.

      Because he wore no undershirt, I saw the advanced lividity at once. After death, blood settles through the tissues to the lowest points of the body, giving those areas a badly bruised appearance. Robertson’s flabby chest and sagging belly were mottled, dark, and repulsive.

      The coolness of his skin, the rigor mortis, and the advanced lividity suggested that he had not died within the past hour or two but much earlier. The warmth of my apartment would have accelerated the deterioration of the corpse, but not to this extent.

      Very likely, in St. Bart’s cemetery, when Robertson had given me the finger as I’d looked down on him from the bell tower, he had not been a living man but an apparition.

      I

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