A Moment of Wrong Thinking (Matthew Scudder Mysteries Series Book 9)

by Lawrence Block

  She waited to hear what it was.

  “Your husband didn’t kill himself,” he announced.

  Her eyes widened, and she looked at Mahaffey as if he’d gone suddenly mad. “But I saw him do it,” she said.

  He frowned, nodded. “Forgive me,” he said. “I misspoke. What I meant to say was that the poor man did not commit suicide. He did kill himself, of course he killed himself—”

  “I saw him do it.”

  “—and of course you did, and what a terrible thing for you, what a cruel thing. But it was not his intention, ma’am. It was an accident!”

  “An accident.”

  “Yes.”

  “To put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. An accident?”

  Mahaffey had a handkerchief in his hand. He turned his hand palm-up to show what he was holding with it. It was the cartridge clip from the pistol.

  “An accident,” Mahaffey said. “You said he was joking, and that’s what it was, a joke that went bad. Do you know what this is?”

  “Something to do with the gun?”

  “It’s the clip, ma’am. Or the magazine, they call it that as well. It holds the cartridges.”

  “The bullets?”

  “The bullets, yes. And do you know where I found it?”

  “In the gun?”

  “That’s where I would have expected to find it,” he said, “and that’s where I looked for it, but it wasn’t there. And then I patted his pants pockets, and there it was.” And, still using the handkerchief to hold it, he tucked the cartridge clip into the man’s right-hand pocket.

  “You don’t understand,” he told the woman. “How about you, Matt? You see what happened?”

  “I think so.”

  “He was playing a joke on you, ma’am. He took the clip out of the gun and put it in his pocket. Then he was going to hold the unloaded gun to his head and give you a scare. He’d give the trigger a squeeze, and there’d be that instant before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, that instant where you’d think he’d really shot himself, and he’d get to see your reaction.”

  “But he did shoot himself,” she said.

  “Because the gun still had a round in the chamber. Once you’ve chambered a round, removing the clip won’t unload the gun. He forgot about the round in the chamber, he thought he had an unloaded weapon in his hand, and when he squeezed the trigger he didn’t even have time to be surprised.”

  “Christ have mercy,” she said.

  “Amen to that,” Mahaffey said. “It’s a horrible thing, ma’am, but it’s not suicide. Your husband never meant to kill himself. It’s a tragedy, a terrible tragedy, but it was an accident.” He drew a breath. “It might cost him a bit of time in purgatory, playing a joke like that, but he’s spared hellfire, and that’s something, isn’t it? And now I’ll want to use your phone, ma’am, and call this in.”

  —◊—

  “That’s why you wanted to know if it was a revolver or an automatic,” Elaine said. “One has a clip and one doesn’t.”

  “An automatic has a clip. A revolver has a cylinder.”

  “If he’d had a revolver he could have played Russian roulette. That’s when you spin the cylinder, isn’t it?”

  “So I understand.”

  “How does it work? All but one chamber is empty? Or all but one chamber has a bullet in it?”

  “I guess it depends what kind of odds you like.”

  She thought about it, shrugged. “These poor people in Brooklyn,” she said. “What made Mahaffey think of looking for the clip?”

  “Something felt off about the whole thing,” I said, “and he remembered a case of a man who’d shot a friend with what he was sure was an unloaded gun, because he’d removed the clip. That was the defense at trial, he told me, and it hadn’t gotten the guy anywhere, but it stayed in Mahaffey’s mind. And as soon as he took a close look at the gun he saw the clip was missing, so it was just a matter of finding it.”

  “In the dead man’s pocket.”

  “Right.”

  “Thus saving James Conway from an eternity in hell,” she said. “Except he’d be off the hook with or without Mahaffey, wouldn’t he? I mean, wouldn’t God know where to send him without having some cop hold up a cartridge clip?”

  “Don’t ask me, honey. I’m not even Catholic.”

  “Goyim is goyim,” she said. “You’re supposed to know these things. Never mind, I get the point. It may not make a difference to God or to Conway, but it makes a real difference to Mary Frances. She can bury her husband in holy ground and know he’ll be waiting for her when she gets to heaven her own self.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s a terrible story, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a good story as a story, but it’s terrible, the idea of a man killing himself that way. And his wife and kids witnessing it, and having to live with it.”

  “Terrible,” I agreed.

  “But there’s more to it. Isn’t there?”

  “More?”

  “Come on,” she said. “You left something out.”

  “You know me too well.”

  “Damn right I do.”

  “So what’s the part I didn’t get to?”

  She thought about it. “Drinking a glass of water,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He sent you both out of the room,” she said, “before he looked to see if the clip was there or not. So it was just Mahaffey, finding the clip all by himself.”

  “She was beside herself, and he figured it would do her good to splash a little water on her face. And we hadn’t heard a peep out of those kids, and it made sense to have her check on them.”

  “And she had to have you along so she didn’t get lost on the way to the bedroom.”

  I nodded. “It’s convenient,” I allowed, “making the discovery with no one around. He had plenty of time to pick up the gun, remove the clip, put the gun back in Conway’s hand, and slip the clip into the man’s pocket. That way he could do his good deed for the day, turning a suicide into an accidental death. It might not fool God, but it would be more than enough to fool the parish priest. Conway’s body could be buried in holy ground, regardless of his soul’s ultimate destination.”

  “And you think that’s what he did?”

  “It’s certainly possible. But suppose you’re Mahaffey, and you check the gun and the clip’s still in it, and you do what we just said. Would you stand there with the clip in your hand waiting to tell the widow and your partner what you learned?”

  “Why not?” she said, and then answered her own question. “No, of course not,” she said. “If I’m going to make a discovery like that I’m going to do so in the presence of witnesses. What I do, I get the clip, I take it out, I slip it in his pocket, I put the gun back in his hand, and then I wait for the two of you to come back. And then I get a bright idea, and we examine the gun and find the clip missing, and one of us finds it in his pocket, where I know it is because that’s where I stashed it a minute ago.”

  “A lot more convincing than his word on what he found when no one was around to see him find it.”

  “On the other hand,” she said, “wouldn’t he do that either way? Say I look at the gun and see the clip’s missing. Why don’t I wait until you come back before I even look for the clip?”

  “Your curiosity’s too great.”

  “So I can’t wait a minute? But even so, suppose I look and I find the clip in his pocket. Why take it out?”

  “To make sure it’s what you think it is.”

  “And why not put it back?”

  “Maybe it never occurs to you that anybody would doubt your word,” I suggested. “Or maybe, wherever Mahaffey found the clip, in the gun or in Conway’s pocket where he said he found it, maybe he would have put it back if he’d had enough time. But we came back in, and there he was with the clip in his hand.”

  “In his handkerchief, you said. On account of fingerprints?”

  “Sure. You don’t wa
nt to disturb existing prints or leave prints of your own. Not that the lab would have spent any time on this one. They might nowadays, but back in the early sixties? A man shoots himself in front of witnesses?”

  She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “So what happened?”

  “What happened?”

  “Yeah, your best guess. What really happened?”

  “No reason it couldn’t have been just the way he reconstructed it. Accidental death. A dumb accident, but an accident all the same.”

  “But?”

  “But Vince had a soft heart,” I said. “Houseful of holy pictures like that, he’s got to figure it’s important to the woman that her husband’s got a shot at heaven. If he could fix that up, he wouldn’t care a lot about the objective reality of it all.”

  “And he wouldn’t mind tampering with evidence?”

  “He wouldn’t lose sleep over it. God knows I never did.”

  “Anybody you ever framed,” she said, “was guilty.”

  “Of something,” I agreed. “You want my best guess, it’s that there’s no way of telling. As soon as the gimmick occurred to Vince, that the clip might be missing, the whole scenario was set. Either Conway had removed the clip and we were going to find it, or he hadn’t and we were going to remove it for him, and then find it.”

  “‘The Lady or the Tiger.’ Except not really, because either way it comes out the same. It goes in the books as an accident, whether that’s what it was or not.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “So it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other.”

  “I suppose not,” I said, “but I always hoped it was the way Mahaffey said it was.”

  “Because you wouldn’t want to think ill of him? No, that’s not it. You already said he was capable of tampering with evidence, and you wouldn’t think ill of him for it, anyway. I give up. Why? Because you don’t want Mr. Conway to be in hell?”

  “I never met the man,” I said, “and it would be presumptuous of me to care where he winds up. But I’d prefer it if the clip was in his pocket where Mahaffey said it was, because of what it would prove.”

  “That he hadn’t meant to kill himself? I thought we just said…”

  I shook my head. “That she didn’t do it.”

  “Who? The wife?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That she didn’t do what? Kill him? You think she killed him?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But he shot himself,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Or did I miss something?”

  “That’s almost certainly what happened,” I said, “but she was one of the witnesses, and the kids were the other witnesses, and who knows what they saw, or if they saw anything at all? Say he’s on the couch, and they’re all watching TV, and she takes his old war souvenir and puts one in his head, and she starts screaming. ‘Ohmigod, look what your father has done! Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph, Daddy has killed himself!’ They were looking at the set, they didn’t see dick, but they’ll think they did by the time she stops carrying on.”

  “And they never said what they did or didn’t see.”

  “They never said a word, because we didn’t ask them anything. Look, I don’t think she did it. The possibility didn’t even occur to me until sometime later, and by then we’d closed the case, so what was the point? I never even mentioned the idea to Vince.”

  “And if you had?”

  “He’d have said she wasn’t the type for it, and he’d have been right. But you never know. If she didn’t do it, he gave her peace of mind. If she did do it, she must have wondered how the cartridge clip migrated from the gun butt to her husband’s pocket.”

  “She’d have realized Mahaffey put it there.”

  “Uh-huh. And she’d have had twenty-five thousand reasons to thank him for it.”

  “Huh?”

  “The insurance,” I said.

  “But you said they’d have to pay anyway.”

  “Double indemnity,” I said. “They’d have had to pay the face amount of the policy, but if it’s an accident they’d have had to pay double. That’s if there was a double-indemnity clause in the policy, and I have no way of knowing whether or not there was. But most policies sold around then, especially relatively small policies, had the clause. The companies liked to write them that way, and the policy holders usually went for them. A fraction more in premiums and twice the payoff? Why not go for it?”

  We kicked it around a little. Then she asked about the current case, the one that had started the whole thing. I’d wondered about the gun, I explained, purely out of curiosity. If it was in fact an automatic, and if the clip was in fact in his pocket and not in the gun where you’d expect to find it, surely some cop would have determined as much by now, and it would all come out in the wash.

  “That’s some story,” she said. “And it happened when, thirty-five years ago? And you never mentioned it before?”

  “I never thought of it,” I said, “not as a story worth telling. Because it’s unresolved. There’s no way to know what really happened.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “It’s still a good story.”

  —◊—

  The guy in Inwood, it turned out, had used a .38-calibre revolver, and he’d cleaned it and loaded it earlier that same day. No chance it was an accident.

  And if I’d never told the story over the years, that’s not to say it hadn’t come occasionally to mind. Vince Mahaffey and I never really talked about the incident, and I’ve sometimes wished we had. It would have been nice to know what really happened.

  Assuming that’s possible, and I’m not sure it is. He had, after all, sent me out of the room before doing whatever it was he did. That suggested he hadn’t wanted me to know, so why should I think he’d be quick to tell me after the fact?

  No way of knowing. And, as the years pass, I find I like it better that way. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do.

  THE END

  About the Author

  LAWRENCE BLOCK began writing about Matthew Scudder almost forty years ago. The Sins of the Fathers was published in 1975, and sixteen more novels followed over the years; Mulholland Books brought out the most recent, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, in 2011.

  Over the years, Block has written a substantial body of short fiction featuring Scudder, of which “A Moment of Wrong Thinking” is an example. The story first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2002, and has since been collected in The Night and the Music, along with ten other Matthew Scudder stories and novelettes. Two of them, “Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” and the moving and elegiac “One Last Night at Grogan’s,” made their first appearance in The Night and the Music.

  Brian Koppelman, the noted screenwriter/‌director and a lifelong Scudder fan, has contributed an appreciation of the series, and Block’s afterword supplies the publication history of the stories and puts them into perspective.

  The Night and the Music is available as a Kindle eBook for $4.99. If you prefer a printed copy, Amazon offers the handsome trade paperback edition for $16.99.

  LB offers signed books for sale at his eBay store, posts frequently on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, and is an active blogger. He gets out an occasional newsletter, and will gladly add you to the distribution list if you’ll send a blank email headed “Kindle-Newsletter” to lawbloc@gmail.com. He enjoys reading your emails, and usually replies.

  Here’s his contact information:

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  Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

  Also available now: The complete collection of Martin H. Ehrengraf stories, Ehrengraf for the Defense, which includes the newest story, “The Ehrengraf Settlement.”

  You've never met a lawyer like Martin Ehrengraf. He never loses a case, and rarely sees the inside of a courtroom. Nor does he pass his hours poring over dusty legal volumes, or searching the Lexis database.
Ehrengraf is a criminal lawyer who takes cases on a contingency basis; he collects a fee only when his client goes free. And that somehow never fails to happen happens, because his clients always turn out to be innocent.

  Ehrengraf's debut came in 1978, in Ellery Queen. Ten stories appeared between then and 2003, and now, after almost a decade, the dapper little lawyer is back (only in eBook form, and only for Kindle) in “The Ehrengraf Settlement.” All eleven Ehrengraf stories, exclusively eVailable as Kindle Select titles, have now been gathered up into this full-length eBook.

  In 1994, when there were only eight stories about the fellow, a small press collected them in a limited edition of Ehrengraf for the Defense. (That little volume commands $250 to $1250 on the collector market—if you can find it.) Edward D. Hoch, acknowledged master of short mystery fiction, wrote an appreciative introduction, and Lawrence Block added an afterword. Hoch's introduction is reprinted in our new enlarged eDition of the stories, and Block has updated his afterword.

  Lawrence Block has peopled his fictional universe with a host of memorable characters. If you want a walk through the dark and gritty streets of Manhattan and the outer boroughs, Matt Scudder's your man. If you need a lighthearted and lightfingered companion to lift something from a safe in a triple-locked apartment, you want Bernie Rhodenbarr. If you have to get someone out of your hair once and for all, you'd better get Keller on the case.

  But if you're facing a murder charge, and if the evidence is overwhelming, you want the one man who's not only prepared to believe in your innocence, but able to demonstrate it to the world. You want Ehrengraf.

  Just make sure you pay his fee...

  Available on Amazon

  Ehrengraf For The Defense

  The Complete Short Story Collection