stick his hand out. Then he sees how it’s part of the system and he gets hardnosed in various ways, and little by little he develops an appetite. But you, Loren, you were hungry right outta the box. You were hungry without ever gettin’ hip. You’re still mopin’ around with your moon in fuckin’ Capricorn or whatever it is and you’re the hungriest sonofabitch I ever saw.”
“Ray, you know I’d never kill anybody.”
“I’m not sure what I know.”
“Ray, with a nightstick? Come on.”
I was glad he’d brought that up. I swung Loren’s nightstick and slapped it ringingly against my palm. “Nice club,” I said. “Smooth and shiny. A person would swear you never hit anybody with it, Loren.”
“I never did.”
“No, you never did. Or bumped it into anything or dropped it on the pavement or scraped it against a brick wall. Or even wore it until a couple of days ago.” I pointed it at him in a shamelessly theatrical gesture. “It’s new, isn’t it, Loren? Brand new. Positively virginal. Because you had to replace your old one. It wasn’t brand new and it had been knocked around a lot because you liked to play with it and you tended to drop it a lot. The surface was chipped and there were a few cracks in it. And you knew Flaxford’s blood could have soaked into the cracks—blood or skin fragments or something—and you have to know what a crime lab can do with something like that and that all the scrubbing in the world isn’t always enough to get rid of the evidence. You got rid of the whole nightstick.”
Loren opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Ray took the stick out of my hand and examined it. “It does look pretty cherry,” he said.
“Ray, for God’s sake.”
“Very fuckin’ new, Loren. This ain’t the club you been carryin’ around. When’d you get this one?”
“Oh, maybe a week, two weeks ago.”
“Before the Flaxford murder, huh?”
“Of course before the burglary. Ray—”
“What was the matter with the old one?”
“I don’t know. I just liked the heft of this one better. Ray—”
“You throw the old one away, Loren?”
“I probably got it around somewheres.”
“You figure you could come up with it if you had to?”
“I guess so. Oh, come to think of it, I think I maybe left it out in the backyard. Of course one of the neighbors’ kids might have run off with it but there’s still a chance it’s there.”
The two of them looked at each other. I might as well not have been in the room. They held each other’s gaze for a long time before Loren averted his eyes and examined his shoes. They were black oxfords, incidentally, polished to a high sheen and far more suitable for a uniformed patrolman than scotch-grain loafers.
Ray said, “The toilet. He went to the bathroom and we heard him flush the toilet and then just a few seconds later he was back in the living room. How’d he have time to do everything you said?”
“He flushed the toilet on the way back, Ray. He walked right past the bathroom originally and he just stopped on the way back to flush the toilet.”
“As a cover?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I guess that would fit. What about the ashtray? Flaxford got killed with an ashtray.”
“From the living room.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You remember when I asked about the ashtray? There was one in the living room on the table next to where I was sitting. It wasn’t there tonight and I thought at first that it was the mate to the murder weapon, one of a pair, and the lab crew took both of them for some reason. But there was only the one ashtray. It was in the living room when I entered the apartment and by the time the lab crew got there it was in the bedroom.”
“How’d it get there? He took it?”
“Sure. He came back to the living room and did his fainting act. It seemed strange the way that happened. It was the damnedest delayed reaction ever, if you think about it. Of course if he never saw a corpse before—”
“He’s seen a few.”
“Well, maybe this was the first one he was ever responsible for. So he probably did feel a little weak in the knees, but he managed to get all the way back to where we were and then flop on the rug. It wasn’t a real faint. A minute later I was out the door, and then when you got