“Take your hand off the door. Do it now, or I’ll have you arrested.”
“Marcy—”
“Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that, not after what you did. The only reason I’m not screaming my head off is because my daughters are upstairs, listening to their dead father’s records.”
“Please.” He thought to say, Don’t make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn’t enough. “I’m begging you. Please talk to me.”
She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. “I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here’s the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get . . . the fuck . . . off my doorstep.”
“What if he didn’t do it?”
Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment.
“What if he . . . ? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn’t do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?”
“If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there, and he’s responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours.”
She considered this for a moment, then said: “Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn’t you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy.”
She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away.
12
Marcy stood trembling on her side of the door. She felt her knees go loose, and managed to make it to the bench near the door where people sat when they took off boots or muddy shoes. Upstairs, the Beatle who had been murdered was singing about all the things he was going to do when he got home. Marcy looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if unsure how it had gotten there, then snapped it in two and slipped the pieces into the pocket of the robe she was wearing （it was indeed Terry’s）。 At least he saved me from starting up that shit again, she thought. Maybe I should write him a thank-you note.
The nerve of him coming to her door, after taking a wrecking bar to her family and flailing around with it until all was in ruins. The pure cruel in-your-face nerve of it. Only . . .
If he didn’t, whoever did is still out there.
And how was she supposed to handle that, when she couldn’t even find the strength to go on WebMD and find out how long the first stage of grief lasted? And why was she supposed to do anything? How was it her responsibility? The police had gotten the wrong man and stubbornly persisted even after checking Terry’s alibi and finding it as solid as Gibraltar. Let them find the right one, if they had the guts to do so. Her job was to get through today without going insane, and then—in some future that was hard to contemplate—figure out what came next in her life. Was she supposed to live here, when half the town believed the man who had assassinated her husband was doing God’s work? Was she supposed to condemn her daughters to those cannibal societies known as middle school and high school, where even wearing the wrong sneakers could get you ridiculed and ostracized?
Sending Anderson away was the right thing. I cannot have him in my house. Yes, I heard the honesty in his voice—at least I think I did—but how can I, after what he did?
If he didn’t, whoever did . . .
“Shut up,” she whispered to herself. “Just shut up, please shut up.”
. . . is still out there.
And what if he did it again?
13
Most of the folks in Flint City’s better class of citizenry thought Howard Gold had been born rich, or at least well-to-do. Although he wasn’t ashamed of his catch-as-catch-can upbringing, not a bit, he didn’t go out of his way to disabuse those folks. It so happened he was the son of an itinerant plowboy, sometime wrangler, and occasional rodeo rider who had traveled around the Southwest in an Airstream trailer with his wife and two sons, Howard and Edward. Howard had put himself through college, then helped to do the same for Eddie. He took care of his parents in their retirement （Andrew Gold had saved nary a nickel）， and had plenty left over.
He was a member of Rotary and the Rolling Hills Country Club. He took important clients to dinner at Flint City’s best restaurants （there were two）， and supported a dozen different charities, including the athletic fields at Estelle Barga Park. He could order fine wine with the best of them and sent his biggest clients elaborate Harry & David gift boxes each Christmas. Yet when he was in his office by himself, as he was this Friday noon, he preferred to eat as he had as a boy on the road between Hoot, Oklahoma, and Holler, Nevada, and then back again, listening to Clint Black on the radio and studying his lessons at his mother’s side when he wasn’t in school someplace. He supposed his gall bladder would put a stop to his solitary, grease-soaked meals eventually, but he had reached his early sixties without hearing a peep from it, so God bless heredity. When the phone rang, he was working his way through a fried egg sandwich, heavy on the mayo, and French fries done just the way he liked them, cooked to a blackened crisp and slathered with ketchup. Waiting at the edge of the desk was a slice of apple pie with ice cream melting on top.