Hendricks walked slowly back to his car and radioed for an ambulance. While we waited for it he had a seat beside me in the mud and asked for the details. I handed him April’s ring and described everything I had seen in the cottage, with the exception of the brown leather briefcase. Hendricks listened closely. He never once looked at Crane or touched the corpse.
When the ambulance arrived I left the keys to my car with Hendricks and was gurneyed and rushed north to La Plata General. I spent the next three hours in the emergency room, mostly next to a moaning, liver-spotted old woman who had stumbled and broken both wrists on what was probably her last Christmas Eve. She complained about her daughters who lived in Pittsburgh and never called, even at Christmas, and I sat there and let her complain. I had eaten a couple of Tylenol 3s, and I wasn’t feeling all that bad. But a taste of whiskey would have made things a whole lot better.
The bearded doctor who finally saw me had the look of a lawn and gardIsnfonen department manager. He cleaned out the cut across the inside of my hand and wrapped my fingers together with tape over a gauze bandage. After that I was ushered off into a busy room and laid on a cold table, where an unsmiling brunet with shapely but occupationally cumbersome breasts took several X-rays of my bruised arms and shoulders. Everything turned up negative.
I asked for “something stronger,” but the good doctor ignored me as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up over the bridge of his nose and wrote out a prescription for more Tylenols. When I was released I walked out to the parking lot alone. Hendricks leaned on the trunk of my Dart. His white car sat idling next to mine.
I followed him to the station in La Plata and sat at a nondescript metal desk in a room that had a gated chain fence run along its interior. Hendricks asked me the same questions he had asked earlier, and I tried to duplicate my answers exactly. When it was over I asked if I was to be charged with anything, and I asked if my name would be released to any of the local media. He answered no to both questions, and I thanked him again and wished him a good Christmas. He did the same, and as he handed me the keys to my car I shook his hand and said good-bye.
Two miles up the road I pulled off onto the shoulder, got out of the car, and walked back and unlocked my trunk. Inside was my automatic, and next to that the leather briefcase. I closed the trunk and got back into my car and stopped at the next open bar and had a beer and two shots of Jim Beam, then drove back to my apartment in Shepherd Park.
My landlord was waiting for me at the door with my annual Christmas present, a fifth of green-seal Grand-Dad. I gave him a hug and a kiss on his dark brown cheek, and picked up my cat on the way in, rubbing the scar tissue in the socket of her right eye as I carried her. My landlord followed me. I poured two slugs of Grand-Dad into juice glasses and shook two Tylenol 3s into his palm, and two into mine, and we washed those down with the bourbon. Two hours later the bottle was nearly empty, and I had the English Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It on the stereo, full blown, and my landlord and I were dancing wildly around my living room while my cat watched calmly from her roost on top of the radiator. It was Christmas Eve, and I guess I had a right to celebrate, but I wasn’t thinking about the holiday. I was thinking that I had come close this time, that I had seen the empty black eye, and I had walked away. I was thinking how good it felt to be alive.
Hendricks phoned me from southern Maryland two days later. A dog search of Crane’s property had failed to turn up any sign of April Goodrich. The cottage had been combed as well, with no result. Only when Hendricks screened the tapes from the root cellar did he find the evidence.
The collection had consisted of the standard rough trade pornography, with a few snuff films in the bunch. On the tail end of one, some home video footage had been cut in.
“You sure it was her?” I said carefully to Hendricks.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “You don’t want to know the details, Stefanos. Let’s just say he did her like one of his pigs. Tied up, with one bullet to the head.”
I thought about it and closed my eyes. Hendricks cougHenlked awayhed once on the other end of the line. I said, “That kind of thing can be faked, Hendricks. Any reason to think…”
“No reason. Listen, Stefanos-I’ve seen the tape, you haven’t. What I saw can’t be done with trickery, or special effects. April Goodrich is dead. Now, I don’t know the motive, except that Crane surely was one sick son of a bitch. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“I guess not,” I said, thinking of the money.
“I called her husband,” Hendricks said.
“I know. I spoke to him myself.”
“How’s he doin’?”
“How would you be?” I said.
“Right,” Hendricks said.
“There’s a service for her tomorrow, outside of town.”
“I never get that close to D.C.”
“Bad things happen in the country too, Hendricks.”
“Bad things happen everywhere,” he said tiredly. “You take care.”
The memorial service for April Goodrich was held in a small Baptist church in Beltsville, just south of Laurel. April had no family, and none of her former friends were in attendance. The group consisted of Billy, his parents, me, and a pale, anemic minister. I kept three pews back from Billy and his family and watched Billy the entire time. He stood with his hands folded, expressionless throughout.
Outside the church I shook Billy’s hand and began to walk away. Billy told his parents to wait on the front steps and followed me across the gravel lot to my Dart. He caught me as I was putting the key to the driver’s side lock.
Billy thanked me for coming, and for seeing everything through to the end. Then he asked if I had “found anything” that day at Crane’s.
I shoved him back with both hands. Billy fell onto the gravel. He sat there looking up at me, and we stared at each other for what seemed to be a very long time. Finally I got into my Dart, started it, and pulled out of the lot.
In the rearview I saw him stand and brush the dirt from his billowing cashmere overcoat as he watched me drive away. Billy’s parents were behind him, staring at us both. They held each other on the steps of the church, wondering what kind of horrible thing had finally happened, just then, to end it between their son and his old friend.