Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,33

office when it was officially closed, Dr. LeMay would have shown him the door, or told him to make an appointment, or called the police, or referred him to the emergency room doctor who drove out from Pine Bluff every day. Dave LeMay would have dealt with the homeless man any number of ways.

But he wouldn't have stayed behind his desk.

The intruder would have had the pipe in his hands. He hadn't come upon a rusty pipe in the doctor's office. And if the intruder had entered with the pipe, he had intended to kill Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong.

I shook my head as I stared out the living room window. I was not a law enforcement officer or any kind of detective, but several things about the homeless-man-as-murderer scenario just didn't make sense. And the more I thought about it, the fishier it seemed: If the homeless man had killed Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong, why hadn't he robbed the place? Could the horror of what he'd done have driven him out before he accomplished his purpose?

If he was innocent, how had the murder weapon - what Chandler McAdoo seemed to think was the murder weapon - come to be in the alley? If this man was clever enough to hide Diane Dykeman's purse, which he almost certainly had stolen, why hadn't he been clever enough to get rid of the evidence of a much more serious crime?

I'll tell you what I'd do, I thought. If I wanted to commit a murder and pin it on a throwaway person, I'd put the murder weapon right by a homeless man, moreover a black homeless man ... someone with no local ties, no likely alibi, and already reported to be a purse snatcher.

That's what I'd do.

The back door to the doctor's office had been locked, I recalled. So the murderer had come in the front, as Varena and I had. He had walked past the doorway of the room in which Mrs. Armstrong was working, and she had not been alarmed. Binnie Armstrong had been lying in the doorway, so she had calmly continued whatever she had been doing in the little lab.

So. The murderer - carrying the pipe - walks into the office, which is officially closed. The murderer passes Binnie Armstrong, who stays right where she is. Then the murderer had gone into Dr. LeMay's office, looked at the old man on the other side of the piled desk, spoken to him. Though the killer had had a length of pipe in one hand, still the doctor hadn't been alarmed.

I felt goosebumps shiver down my arms.

Without warning - since Dr. LeMay was still in his chair, which was still pushed right up to the desk - the murderer had lifted the pipe and hit Dr. LeMay over the head, kept hitting him, until he was just tissue. Then the killer had stepped out into the hall, and while Binnie was hurrying from the lab to investigate the awful sounds she'd heard, he hit her, too... until she was on the verge of death.

Then he'd stepped out the front door and gotten into his vehicle ... but surely he must have been covered in blood?

I frowned. Here was a snag. Even the most angelic of white men could not step out in front of the doctor's office in the daytime with blood-soaked clothing, carrying a bloody pipe.

"Lily?" My mother's voice. "Lily?"

"Yes?"

"I thought we'd have an early lunch, since the shower is this afternoon."

"OK." I tried to control the lurch of my stomach at the thought of food.

"It's on the table. I've called you twice."

"Oh. Sorry." As I reluctantly dipped my spoon into my mother's homemade beef soup, I tried to get back on my train of thought, but it had rolled out of the station.

Here we all were, sitting around the kitchen table, just as we had for so many years.

Suddenly, this scene seemed overwhelmingly bleak. Here we still were, the four of us.

"Excuse me, I have to walk," I said, pushing away from the table. The three of them looked up at me, a familiar dismay dragging at their mouths. But the compulsion had gotten so strong that I could no longer play my part.

I threw on my coat, pulled on gloves as I left the house.

The first block was bliss. Even in the freezing cold, even in the face of the sharp wind, I was by myself. At least the sun was shining in its watery winter way,