We both opened the car doors simultaneously and we each cradled them back into place with barely a sound. Her shoes made a slight pattering as she walked across the sidewalk but that lasted only a second until we were walking across the front lawn. I pulled my gloves on as we went up toward the house. I followed her lead as we crossed over the driveway at the left side of the house. As we did so, a light mounted on the right side of the garage triggered by a motion detector threw the both of us into stark relief. As nonchalantly as I could, I followed her to the left side of the garage. She paused briefly at a side yard gate and pulled a wire that protruded through a hole that was drilled near the gate’s top to unlatch it. I pulled the gate back and we stepped into the side yard and beyond the cast of the light. I trod carefully, my eyes having to readjust to the darkness after their encounter with the security light. I would gauge the depth of the house on the left side as roughly 55 feet, which, including the attached garage, would be fairly typical of homes built during that era. The width of the side yard was about fifteen feet. As we came into the back yard I had to step around a rather large round ceramic planter that had some type of vegetation, flowers of some sort I could not clearly discern in that lighting. The grass beneath my feet felt firm and healthy and in the lighting appeared to be dark colored. There was a patio with a chaise lounge and a few scattered redwood chairs and a small redwood table. It occurred to me at that point that there was no dog, a factor that up until that point I had not even considered. That was good. A dog could have made this into a very complicated and even more dangerous undertaking. Emli’s shoes lightly tapped across the concrete of the patio. At the back of the house, about midway down its length, was a sliding glass door inside a sliding screen door. She slid the screen to the right with a sidelong arm motion. She gripped the glass door’s handle and did the same. It was not locked and immediately slid open along its track. I followed her in through a light but opaque curtain. I slid the door closed behind us.

My initial sensation coming into the place was the slight dustiness of the curtains, which momentarily tickled my nose but did not make me sneeze. I stood just inside the curtains, allowing my eyes to further adjust to the darkness inside. Even before Emli made her way over to the right wall to turn on a ceiling light, I could see we were in the dining room. The back of a single wooden chair, which was at one of the narrow sides of an oblong dining table, was about six or seven feet inside the sliding glass door. Emli hit the light switch and instantaneously illuminated the place. I immediately looked to see the body but from where I was standing, there was none in sight. I sized up everything I could in those fleeting seconds. I was still facing toward the front of the house with my back to the sliding glass door. There were four chairs around the dining table, made of the same wood, probably walnut, as the chairs. To the left was the kitchen, which was partially separated from the dining room by a bar about seven feet or so long. There were two bar stools in front of the bar on the dining room side. There was about five feet or so of space between the bar stools and the back of the nearest chair on the long side of the dining table. At the end of the bar was the unobstructed entrance into the kitchen. Through the entrance and above the bar I could see a double sink, a stove and oven, a counter, a microwave on the counter, cupboards and, along the wall opposite the far end of the bar, a refrigerator. The floor in the dining room was covered with a rug but I could see that at the entrance to the kitchen at the far end of the bar the rug ended and the kitchen had a tile floor. The dining room wall to my right was covered with wallpaper that featured a pattern of what looked like the dark brown or black outlines of wine glasses alternating with opened umbrellas against a tan background. From what I could see, Emli’s most recent ex-boyfriend was not quite as tidy of a housekeeper as I am, but still somewhat neater than your average bachelor, or so it appeared.

I sniffed the air. There was the slightly bitter tinge of cordite, but only very slight.

“Well, where is he?” I said.

“This way,” Emli said.

I followed her out of the dining room. To the right as we left it, that is as I faced the street, was a hallway which presumably led toward the house’s bedrooms. Just beyond the hall toward the front of the house were two rooms – a den to the right and the living room to the left, again as one faced the street. I watched my step in the unfamiliar surroundings and moved very slowly until Emli turned on a light from a switch plate next to the front door, which was recessed in a very small entranceway between the living room and den. As I came closer to the front of the house, the odor of cordite, still not overpowering, grew stronger. He was in the living room, sprawled out on his back next to a coffee table. His left arm was flat on the floor. His right arm from the shoulder to the elbow was on the floor, but the rest of it was bent upward at the elbow and the back of his hand was propped against a leg of the coffee table. I stepped closer and went down on one knee. His face was pulled into a gruesome, taut grimace. I removed my left glove and felt for a pulse at his left wrist. His skin was cold. There was no pulse that I could detect. I knew at that point that he was definitely dead, but I felt again at the side of his neck, where his skin was equally cold. There was no pulse there either.

All along, I had anticipated that the wound would be to the head. It was not. Rather, he had taken it in the chest at a point I estimated to be slightly to the left side of and at most no more than an inch lower than the breastbone. With my gloved hand I unbuttoned one of the buttons on his shirt and gingerly peeled it back. The entrance wound was not terribly large – about half the diameter of a dime – and there had been some bleeding but this did not appear to be too profuse. He was wearing a green and black woolen lumberjack’s long sleeve. The shirt appeared to have sopped up much of the blood that had likely hemorrhaged initially and there was a stain of now coagulating blood that had spread about the wound and down across his left side. Some of it had dripped on the oval throw rug that was placed beneath the coffee table and which covered the living room carpeting.

I gazed at his face. Both eyes were eerily open, the left more so as if the right eyelid was somehow heavier than the other. This gave the visual impression that he was gazing back at me in a skeptical fashion, as if I had just said something he could not quite believe. But for the grimace and the fact that his pallor had grown somewhat ashen he was, or had been, in all a fairly handsome chap in a rugged sort of way. He was not a pretty boy as much as he had that man’s man type of visage a la John Wayne or Kirk Douglas.

I gripped his arm again and pressed it hard between my fingers and then gently shook it. Rigor Mortis had yet to set in in any major way. That is, his arm was yet pliant and the hand pivoted at the wrist when I shook it.

I pulled the glove back on and stood up. I looked over at Emli. She was looking down at him, wide-eyed and incredulous. It appeared as if she was shaking. I took a deep breath. “Well, the scenario where we make it look like a suicide is out,” I said. “No one shoots himself in the chest.” I rubbed my forehead with a gloved hand. “Where’s the gun?”

“I put it over… there,” Emli said and pointed across to a desk in the den. I walked over to where it lay and picked it up. It was a .22 caliber semi-automatic feed. Not much stopping power, I adjudged. One bullet, as Emli said she had fired, would not be likely to instantly kill anyone, especially a bruiser like the nearly deceased, unless the shot was particularly well-placed. Police and popular lore are rife with stories of people who have sustained one or even more .22 caliber shots and continued on for several minutes as if having been shot was just something of an irritating or annoying nuisance. I pressed the safety and threw open the magazine contained in the handle. It was a nine-shot job. I counted seven in the magazine and looked in the chamber to see one more. Hollow points. That explained it.

Hollow points are a particularly insidious device of interpersonal mayhem. In flight from the barrel they travel pretty much like solid rounds but when they hit into something they behave quite differently. A solid round generally continues on in the trajectory it is on, plowing through whatever is in front of it until it either stops or passes all the way through. That can be bad, of course, depending on what it runs into on its way, but if there is nothing vital in the bullet’s path, assuming the victim can get treatment and does not bleed himself to death, such a wound is not necessarily fatal. Hollow points on the other hand, once they run into something of the consistency of flesh or muscle, begin to flatten and then tumble in an irregular rather than a straight course. That leads to a wider path of damage. And if a hollow point bullet chances to hit something more solid like bone, there is a likelihood that it will shatter. Those fragments do not merely come to rest either. They continue on in their separate tumbling courses, ricocheting around, multiplying by the number of fragments and different directions the likelihood that they will run into something vital.

Ultimately what had undone the ruggedly handsome but now no longer breathing heap of expired protoplasm on the floor in the adjoining room was the one hollow point that had entered his chest. I could not know precisely, but it had very probably hit a rib or the sternum and had fragmented. One or more of those fragments may have been deflected to another rib and in turn been fragmented. At any rate this collection of metal moving at an initial speed of somewhere around 2,100 feet per second would have continued in a variegated path inward through his body. Given the placement of the shot there were several critical organs or body parts that would have been likely to be nicked, scraped, lacerated, pierced, or outright pulverized, starting with his heart, and continuing on to his pulmonary artery, his aorta, his lungs or liver. That sort of trauma to his lungs or liver would not be likely to kill him, at least in the immediate term. But if his heart or aorta – the major arterial branch that takes the body’s supply of blood away from the heart – or the pulmonary artery – the vessel which conveys blood from the heart to the lungs – or, for that matter, the pulmonary vein – which returns the blood to the heart from the lungs – were to be sliced there would have been almost zero chance for him even if competent medical assistance had been immediately available. If any one or a combination of these crucial cogs in his circulatory system had been compromised, with every beat of his heart ounce after ounce and then pint after pint of his blood would have been dumped into his chest cavity and inside two minutes probably there would have been insufficient pressure for his vascular system to continue functioning. In all likelihood, the trauma he had sustained within the highly vulnerable thorax region would have sent him into immediate shock. He would have passed out at once.

Much less likely, but yet possible, was that one of the fragments could have ricocheted upward perhaps even as high as his neck to sever his spinal cord or into the base of his skull and to his medulla, the portion of his brain that controls muscular coordination and breathing. Or a fragment might have headed downward through his stomach and into his diaphragm, which served as the bellows that allowed him to inflate and deflate his lungs.

Any way you looked at it though, a single shot from the gun in my gloved hand had caused the fatality attested to by the corpse in the living room, no matter what the exact train of effect had been. I closed the magazine and set the gun back down on the desk.

“I take it the gun is registered to him?” I said.

Emli was positioned in the passage between the den and living room, looking down at the just departed. She half turned toward me. “I think so, but I can’t really say.” she said.

I walked around her and back into the living room. I again bent over the body. I carefully raised it with some effort up on its side using my left hand and, cautious not to smear my arm with any blood, reached down to the hip pocket and yanked out the wallet. As gently as I could I let the corpse settle back onto the oval rug. I stood up, opened the wallet and hampered somewhat by the gloves began thumbing through its contents. There were forty seven dollars in greenbacks in the billfold along with a California driver license, a health plan card, an Automobile Club card, a pipefitter’s union card and six credit cards all in the slightly variant names of Gregory Allen Williams, Gregory A. Williams, and Greg Williams. I studied the face on the driver license. In the photo he wore a beard and an almost devilish smile. Nevertheless I could recognize that he and the clean-shaven grimacing man lying at my feet were, or had been, one and the same. The address on the driver license corresponded with the street. And I noted that he was exactly one year and nine months younger than I was.

“Gregory Allen Williams,” I said.

I sized up Emli’s situation. She had shot the deceased, with his own gun, which may or may not have been registered to him. If she was going to approach the police, it would be foolish for her to do anything other than be entirely truthful. If she were to fabricate anything or be in any way economical with the facts she would most certainly eventually be tripped up by the investigators. Yet, telling all at this point would be tremendously problematic. At the very least she would be admitting to the negligent discharge of a firearm that resulted in Greg Williams’ death. Manslaughter. And even if she was entirely truthful in approaching the police, they might well conclude she was lying. How was she to justify not having called for paramedics immediately if it were truly an accident? Assuming we were to go to the police now, how would we explain away the four hours delay? Panic? My practice has been entirely in business and civil law and I have no experience whatsoever as a criminal lawyer, but I shuddered at what I knew an aggressive prosecutor could do with the facts of the case, arguing that she had come deliberately to Williams with the intention of seizing his gun to use against him. That sounded dangerously close to premeditation. Her citation of his threats and harassment would sound more like a motive to prosecutors than a plausible assertion of self-defense, given that Williams had been shot in his own living room by someone who by her own admission had traveled across town to confront him. And that was as good as it got. What if Williams had not registered the gun? Emli’s assertion that it was his gun might not be believed and a jury might be further convinced that she had actually brought the gun to the murder scene herself and that her account to the contrary was a ploy to downplay the seriousness of her action and muddle the premeditation issue.

“Where did you find the gun?” I asked, folding everything back up inside the wallet and setting it down on an end table.

“He always kept it in that drawer right there,” Emli said, pointing to the entertainment center, a large oaken hutch nearly five foot tall and about seven feet wide that housed a television, a cable box, a VCR, a CD player and speakers, set against the living room’s far wall. I went over to it and pulled open the drawer. I rummaged through its sparse contents with my gloved right hand – there were owner’s manuals for the VCR and the CD player, about three feet or so of bundled up coaxial cable, three VCR cassettes, a screwdriver, some assorted pieces of wrapped peppermint and butterscotch candies, a candle and some matches. There was no spare clip for the gun and no bullets, either loose or in a box. Nothing, in short, that would support the contention that the drawer was the place where Williams kept his gun. I shut the drawer and turned around.

I looked at Emli and she at me.

“This is perfectly awful,” she said.

“It’s pretty bad,” I replied.

She was looking back at me, with fright in her face. But there was something else in her look, something I had not seen for four years and which my soul had been longing for. Her senses were locked onto me in the way I had once been accustomed to. For the duration of our eyes being in contact I was at the center of her universe. She had everything in her life riding on me and I had that feeling that had coursed through me every day for sixteen months when I was four years younger and a hundred years more innocent that I was on some kind of sacred mission for her and that I could not let her down.

Through all of this, the direness of the situation never left me. Unless something – something very drastic – was done, some order of murder rap was going to be hung around her pretty little neck. I had done the best that I could to drive thoughts of her from my mind over the last few years with lesser and greater success but after all I had just seen I knew I could not bear knowing that she had been relegated to a prison cell somewhere, housed in an iron-barred and concrete cubicle among other women who were truly sociopaths and hardened by drug abuse, and lifetimes of prostitution and criminality. She would herself be hardened by being institutionalized and treated like chattle. Despite all she had done to me in abandoning and forsaking me, there had remained deep in me somewhere the concept of her as I had idealized her – the most perfect, the most splendid, the most refined, the most exquisite creature in the universe. I recognized at that second that maintaining that concept, even if it was to prove ultimately illusory for me, was inexpressibly precious. Whatever had to be done, I would do. The plan that had vaguely leapt into my mind when I was still in my bathrobe back in my living room less than an hour before and which I had instinctively begun to actuate when I collected the pick and shovel from my garage, was now beginning to crystallize in my mind. There were still a few rough details I needed to work out, but as a whole I knew what I was going to do.

I looked at the digital time display on the VCR. It was 2:17.

“Remember those kind of letters you used to write to me?” I asked.

Emli looked surprised. “Yes!” she said in her trademark breathless way.

“Did you write letters like that to Gr… this guy?” I had almost called him Greg

“Steve!”

“Just answer the question. Did you?”

“Well, not exactly like the ones I used to write you.”

“But you wrote him love letters?” I bent down and shoved the coffee table over toward the wall so that it was no longer on the braided rug.

“I wrote him some. Not many. He didn’t seem to appreciate them as much as you did.”

I craned myself down and pushed the coffee table to the side. I then took hold of both of his legs at the ankles and swung him around and pulled him so that he was aligned straight on one side of the oval rug. Some of his blood had trickled down onto the braided rug but it did not appear to be heavy enough to have seeped through. With care I reached into his right pants pocket and pulled out his ring of keys. I put them in my pocket.

“You said you were staying here for a while. Were you ever receiving mail here?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Your name isn’t on any of the utilities or anything like that?”

“No.”

Carefully, so as not to smear any of the blood on me or to allow it to run off of the rug onto the carpet, I slid my hands beneath the rug at spots slightly wider than shoulder width, gripped the rug firmly and rolled the body up into it like a hefty burrito.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to take care of Mr. Williams, here. While I’m out you need to go over this entire place very carefully. Don’t rifle anything but make as orderly of a search as you can and don’t leave it looking like anything has been disturbed. Find anything and everything you can that will link you to him – letters or photos or,” I paused, “any of the drawings or paintings you did of him. You probably have a pretty good idea of all the likely places to look. It goes without saying that you need to leave the gloves on.”

“There aren’t any paintings or drawings, Steve,” she said. “I gave all that up after you.”

I tried to not let that affect me.

“Where’s his linen closet?” I asked. “Where does he keep his sheets and towels?”

“Down here,” she said. She walked back toward the dining room and turned down the hallway and switched on a light. The first door on the right was open. I glanced in. It was a bathroom. Immediately after the bathroom on the same side were two sets of folding doors, one directly above the other. She opened the two top doors. There were two shelves inside in addition to the bottom partition above the lower cupboard that she had not opened. On the top of the partition were sheets and pillowcases. On the lower shelf were two stacks of folded bath towels and next to them hand towels and washcloths. I grabbed three of the bath towels and two of the washcloths and pawed with my glove into the sheets until I found what looked to be the largest one among them, a king-size top sheet. I stepped back from the closet, closed it up and went into the bathroom where I thoroughly wet the washcloths at the sink. I headed out back into the living room and to the entranceway, unlocked and opened the front door, stepping out onto the porch.

I started down the walkway but then remembered the motion sensor and stepped onto the grass four or five steps to the left and walked toward my car at that angle. By doing this, I passed out of the range of the motion detector and the light mounted on the corner of the roof atop the garage did not come on. At my car I opened my trunk and, aided by the light on the underside of the lid that automatically lit up when it was opened, saw what I had to rearrange, shoving the box of snow chains and emergency road kit into the far corners. I laid the shovel and pick down flat on the bottom and then spread the sheet out over the top of them, pushing it as far as it would go in all directions and into each of the four corners. I dropped the towels and the wet washcloths in the corners nearest the back of the car on either side. I then reached up and, fumbling through the thickness of the gloves, managed to unscrew the small light bulb that had allowed me to see what I was doing but which would also allow any passerby or nosy neighbor to see what I was going to next load into the trunk.

Leaving the trunk open, I turned around and as casually as I could, even though I could actually hear my heart pounding in my ears, looked across and then up and down the street to see if there was anybody about at that ungodly hour. The television still flickered behind the curtained window in the house on the other side of the street near the cul-de-sac. I could detect no other nocturnal activity. I turned around and, maintaining my casual air, strolled up the grass well to the right of the walkway and went back into the house.

Emli was in the den, looking through the top drawer of the desk. I walked over to the rolled up braided rug and its contents and inserted my right hand inside, gripping the bottom of one of the pants legs in my palm as tightly as I could. With the other hand I gripped the rug. Bending my legs at the knees and stooping low so as not to strain my back I tugged and pulled, lurching the load in several inch increments again and again repeatedly toward the front door. That effort did not really wind me, but it had not been easy.

I called to Emli and told her I needed her help. She dropped what she was doing and came out from the den. “I’m going to lift him up,” I said. “When I do, as soon as I do, you’re going to need to turn off the lights and open the door. Chop. Chop. Toot Suite.”

Now came the hard part. I bent down over the heap, which bundled as it was, presented a rather awkward package. I wrapped my arms around it and started to lift it, but I did not have the weight evenly balanced and I could feel the body slipping inside the rug. I dropped it. I straddled the roll and this time took it at where I better calculated was the fulcrum of the entire bulk. This was better but I still had to muscle it all up in a very unsteady, jerky motion that nearly wrenched my back and neck, not to mention the strain it put on me at the hips transferring the weight in front of me and then up over my shoulder into what to anyone looking on would have seemed a nearly comical rendition of a fireman’s carry.

Emli did as she was told, shutting down the lights and stepping across in front of me to open the door and then standing outside over to the side to let me pass. That was good because I did not want any blood to spill out onto the rug and the faster I made my exodus, the less chance there was of any spillage. I stepped out of the entranceway and over the threshold onto the porch and, staggering under the load, made my way onto the grass and headed toward the car. This was an exceedingly strenuous stretch. I’m just a tad under six feet and I weigh in at anywhere from 185 to 190 pounds depending on the calibration of the scale. Williams looked to be every bit as tall as I and he outweighed me by a good 20 pounds. The rug counted for another 25 pounds I would estimate. And Williams – at this point literally dead weight – was doing nothing to help me along. At one point my knees almost buckled but I managed somehow to keep from going down. As bad was the effect all of this was having on my neck, which was crimped and tweaked to accommodate the load resting in the nook it formed with my right shoulder. It seemed to take an eternity to cover the forty-five or so feet from the porch to where my car was parked. My steps were short, choppy ones that minimized the chance that I would stumble either on my own or over anything that happened to be in the way. I was breathing heavily by the time I arrived at the back of the Buick, where I shifted around and with a final heave, unburdened myself of the load right over the open trunk. The back of the car dipped on its shocks and the elongated bulk did not drop neatly into place. With a little bit of an effort I had to fold it sideways in one direction at the top and in the other direction at the opposite end to contort the form to fit underneath the lip of and crossways inside the trunk, which was something less than five feet wide. Eventually I nestled the whole package into place. I retrieved the flashlight and closed the lid down. Pointing the flashlight lens toward the ground, I turned the beam on, carefully examining the spot where I had walked across the sidewalk to see if there was any blood. There was none. I retraced in reverse the path I had just taken across the grass, seeing if I could see in the beam’s focus any blood that may have dripped. I failed to see any. Likewise, there was no splattering or drops on the porch. I switched off the flashlight and stepped inside at the door, closing it behind me. I found the switch plate and illuminated the entranceway. I scrutinized the carpet for any trace of blood. None that I could see. I went back into the living room and switched on a floor lamp in the corner. There was no blood beneath where the braided rug had lain or where I had dragged it. There was, however, the slightest indentation into the carpet of the form of the rug and each of its concentric oval layers.

I went over to the den, where Emli had resumed her exploration of the desk’s contents. “If he has a vacuum cleaner, go over the entire living room floor and see if you can remove the imprint of the rug left in the carpet,” I said. “Then put the table back into place. What’s the phone number here?”

Emli told me. “Write that down on a scrap of paper for me,” I said. She did so. I reached into my pocket for Williams’ keys. I handed them to her and took the scrap of paper in exchange. “If I’m not back here in two-and-a-half hours, use a rag to wipe every place you touched tonight the first time you were here. Do the same to the gun, with the safety on. Leave the gun in the drawer where you got it. Lock everything up and take his car back toward your apartment. Park it somewhere where it won’t get ticketed or towed and walk back to your place. Go to work just like usual. Leave here while it’s still dark. In the meantime, do everything I just told you. Turn on the air conditioning or the heater and open up the back door to air the place out. If he’s got some aerosol spray or air freshener, give the place a good dose of that but don’t overdo it and let it get aired out, too. Make sure you close everything down and turn everything off before you leave if I’m not back. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. If I call, I’ll stay on the line just long enough to give it two rings. Then I’ll hang up and call again immediately. That’s when you answer. I hope to be back before you leave, but if I’m not then get out of here before the sun comes up. I’ll get a hold of you later at work.”

I backed up, turned and started toward the door.

“Steve…” I heard her say.

I turned around as she was coming around from the side of the desk. She walked straight up to me so that the toes of her shoes were right up against mine. She lifted herself up on her tiptoes and at the same time reached with a gloved hand behind my head to pull me toward her. She kissed me warmly and fully on the lips. I stood there, frozen, not actively resistant but almost startled, with a flash of ecstasy that I did not give into running through me.

“Be careful,” she said in her breathless way.

“I will be,” I said and let myself out.