Killed with a Passion

by William L. DeAndrea

  “I sure do.” We made it for ten o’clock Monday morning. The chief made a note of it, then climbed back in his Land-Rover and drove off.

  So did we. Eve was smiling as she drove. I asked her what the hell she was so happy about.

  “Like old times, wasn’t it?”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Our talk with the chief. You spotted the key phrase—”

  “Right. Then you hammered him with the heavy artillery. Ouch.” I shifted on my seat. “How much pain do you have to be in before you can die?”

  “Don’t be a baby,” Eve said. I told her I was being brave, that if I gave in to my impulses, I’d be a whimpering blob of protoplasm.

  “Well, you’ll take your medicine, and that will help. We’ll stop at my place first.”

  “What do you mean, ‘first’?”

  She smiled again. “Resolved,” she said, “that Matt Cobb, having made of himself a helpless cripple, will need, at least tonight, a personal servant to feed him, walk his dog, change his bandages. You take the negative.”

  “No, thank you. About taking the negative, I mean. You’re an angel, Eve. I was wondering how I was going to open the can to feed Spot. But answer one question for me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Does this go on the bill?”

  “Oooh, Matt. I’ll get you for that.”

  “I surrender.”

  “Too late. That was a tasteless remark.”

  “That’s half my charm, my tastelessness. Wait till I’m better, at least, before you exact your revenge, okay?”

  She said we’d see about that. She parked outside her house, and left Spot and me in the car while she threw some things in an overnight bag.

  Eve started cooking while I went to take a shower. In its way, the shower was worse than the fall itself, because the shower was my own idea. The water burned like acid, and the soap was 99 44⁄100% pure torture. Still, it felt good to get rid of the sweat and grime that had accumulated during the day; the folks at the hospital had cleaned only the wounded areas.

  I got out of the shower, then dried off by patting myself with the towel, the way you dry a baby. Then I struggled into briefs and a pair of cutoffs.

  Eve saw me emerge, went in, and turned the water off, then sat me on a kitchen stool and repainted and rebandaged me.

  “You do nice work,” I told her. “You could have been a doctor instead of a lawyer.”

  “Simple first aid,” she said. “I picked this all up in the Camp Fire Girls.”

  “WoHeLo means Love,” I said, and she laughed.

  I got on an old, loose sweatshirt and sat down to supper. Eve had made chicken soup, a wise idea, since I could handle a tablespoon fairly well. It was good stuff, and I told her so.

  She blushed prettily and thanked me.

  I looked at her closely, trying to figure out what was going on here. After all, it hadn’t been too long ago that she’d told me she hated me, this tough, competent courtroom fighter who was defending a man she thought was guilty because that was what she did.

  Now here she was, all motherly and domestic. She even tucked me in when the pills took effect, and I went to bed.

  I got about six hours of deep, dreamless sleep, and I felt much closer to human when I woke up late Sunday evening. I joined Eve and Spot in the living room, where the radio was playing softly. It was the local soft rock station, the very one I used to listen to when I lived in Sewanka.

  “Hello, Matt,” Eve said. “I’ve been making friends with Spot. He’s a lovely dog. So intelligent.” She was also still being domestic. On her lap was a needlepoint pattern, a unicorn in a field of flowers.

  I yawned and sat carefully in Dan’s best chair. “Intelligent enough to be wonderful to people who feed him anyway.” She told me I was terrible, and I agreed. “Did you walk him?”

  “Yes, we had a nice walk.” She made a few stitches, humming along with the radio. After a while, she said, “Matt?”

  I’d closed my eyes. They popped open, though I didn’t feel startled. “What is it, Eve?”

  “What do you think is the reason you were attacked today?”

  “I wish I knew. They’ve got Dan stuffed and sewn and ready for the oven, as far as I can tell. Why take a chance that someone will believe me and start to doubt Dan’s guilt? Unless, of course, they’ve got Wernick pegged pretty accurately. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t seem too difficult.”

  “No, you’re right about that. Of course, another aspect of it could be that they didn’t expect you to survive the fall.”

  That made me sort of laugh. “Once I started falling I didn’t expect to survive either. If basketball hadn’t gotten me used to falling on hard surfaces, I’d probably be in a refrigerator right now.”

  Eve held her needle in midair, looked at her work, bit her lip. Then she put her hands together in her lap and looked at me sadly. “Matt,” she said, “I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t want you to get mad, and you don’t have to answer. Even if you do, I promise this will be the end of it, and I’ll never mention it again.”

  I smiled at her. “All right, Counselor. Go ahead.”

  She took a breath. “All right, then. Have you considered the possible effect on yourself if you find out Dan really is guilty?”

  I had promised not to get mad, so I didn’t. I just said, “Ah.”

  “You have an enormous emotional investment in his innocence,” she went on. “It’s almost as though you were out to prove your own innocence.”

  I closed my eyes again. My battered body seemed to throb the more I thought about an answer. Finally, I said, “You’re right, Eve. If it turns out Dan killed Debbie, I’m finished.”

  She shook her head angrily. “You can’t do that! That’s my whole point. You can’t let your own self-respect depend on the actions of someone else. I’d be a basket case if I let that happen!”

  “We’ve had this argument already,” I told her. “Look. The guy is the best friend I have ever had, and I’m not a lawyer. The only reason I’m here is that I believe in him. He has looked me in the eye and told me he never killed her. For me, that’s that. It has to be, don’t you see that? Or what kind of friend am I?

  “That’s the key thing. Not whether he killed Debbie. Hell, if Dan did it, that would be a classic crime of passion—anybody can lose his head and lash out.”

  “Not you,” she said. “You’re too strong.”

  Now I shook my head in sadness. “Don’t bet on it, Eve. I know what I’m capable of. Someday, somebody’s going to say the wrong thing at the right moment, and I’m going to kill him. I’ve been afraid of that happening since I was twelve.”

  She told me I didn’t mean that, and I let it go. I got back to the point. “Anyway, if Dan did do it, which I still don’t believe, that means he’s used our friendship to back up a lie. If I can’t trust him, I can’t trust anybody. I think that answers your question.”

  She smiled. “Not really. The question was, ‘What would you do if?’”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it.”

  Eve said nothing. She went back to her needlepoint. Spot was amusing himself by rolling around on Dan’s mat. I closed my eyes again and listened to the radio.

  The DJ played Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by request. I wondered idly what kind of masochist would request that number—it’s a work of genius, all right, but it’s one of the most surrealistically depressing works in history.

  I listened to it, losing myself in the song; when Dylan got to the last line, in which the singer decides to go back to New York City because he believes he’s “had enough,” I started to shake.

  Not tremble, shake. As if I were hooked up to one of those exercise machines. As though I were being electrocuted. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I started to panic, which made it all the worse.

  Spot saw what was going on and started to whimper. Eve looked up at the nois
e and saw me. She was alarmed.

  “Matt! What’s wrong?”

  “I—I—I—” I was trying to say, “I don’t know,” but I couldn’t do it. Eve said, “You’d better lie down,” and practically carried me back to the bedroom and put me on the bed.

  “Are you cold? Do you want a blanket?”

  I shook my head no, and she lay down beside me and held me tight and spoke softly to me. “It’s all right, Matt, don’t worry, I’m here, everything’s okay, it’s all right—”

  Eventually, it worked. I stopped shaking and lay on my back, breathing hard. “Jesus,” I said. “There goes my macho reputation.”

  Eve started to laugh. “You idiot.” She shook a finger at me. “You’ve been worried sick about your friend for days, you’ve quit your job, there’s been an attempt on your life, you’re a physical wreck, and you’ve taken powerful medicine. I think your macho reputation can survive a case of the shakes.”

  “You sure you’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

  “Positive. This is what I do to make you feel better.” She leaned over and kissed me.

  It was soft and warm and welcome, and when she stopped, I put my bandaged hand behind her head and pushed her back to me with my wrist.

  “Goodness,” she said at last. “This takes me back to the waterfall days.”

  “You remember.” I grinned.

  “Mmm-hmm. I’ve got it filed under unfinished business. You walked out on me before we could finish it.” Very gently, she touched my cheek. It was all I could do to keep from shaking again.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really makes me wish I weren’t a physical wreck.”

  She kissed me again. “Nonsense,” she said. “This is how I’ve always wanted you. Helpless.” She bit my nose.

  “But I’m all bandaged up—”

  “I’m into gauze.” Her hands were soothing and exciting at the same time, and her lips were magic.

  I still wasn’t totally convinced. “How the hell am I supposed to make love to you? I can’t use my hands. I can’t use my elbows.”

  She was naked now, pink skin and red hair making a beautiful pattern of flesh and flame. And the freckles. Millions of them. She was working on getting rid of my clothes, gently sliding them past the sore spots.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “Shut up and stop worrying,” she said. “Well think of something.”

  And, by God, we did. Lots of things. Much later, when it was over, we slept holding each other, and I felt warm and safe. And loved.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Snatch the pebble from my hand.”

  –Keye Luke, “Kung Fu” (ABC)

  EVE APPOINTED HERSELF MY official chauffeur beginning Monday morning and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “What about your other clients?” I asked.

  “Matt, I’m capable of worrying about my own business, really. Not everyone’s like you, you know, ready to immolate himself at the drop of a hat. Believe me, if I couldn’t afford to take the time to do this, I wouldn’t. Besides, somebody has to keep an eye on you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well since you put it that way, the first stop is police headquarters.”

  Chief Cooper was waiting for us with a three-foot-high stack of mug shots. Eve took one look at the pile and decided to go to her office after all. I would call her when I was ready to go somewhere.

  The chief watched her go. “Nice woman,” he said.

  “I like her.”

  “I could tell. How is this all going to affect your friend’s defense?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You got Eve Bowen convinced he’s innocent?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got me convinced he’s innocent. The only other people I really have to convince is a jury.”

  “Yeah, twelve people who’d rather be somewhere else.” He started to dig through the books. “Look, Cobb, I don’t know what it is about you, but you’ve got me thinking, too.” He pulled out one of the fat volumes and thumped it down on the table in front of me.

  “Here, look at this one first.”

  “Oh? You have a candidate?”

  He looked at me grimly. This whole episode was against his better judgment, or maybe just against his sense of the fitness of things. It wasn’t right for a cop (at least it wasn’t right for Merce Cooper) to be helping someone work against a good solid arrest.

  “Just look at the pictures,” he said. “Call me if the guy who pushed you down the stairs is in there.”

  I looked at the book. I had a certain amount of difficulty with it at first, because my hands still hurt too much for me to turn the pages. I was damned if I was going to ask for a policeman to come sit at my elbow and flip pages for me, so I struggled along until I hit on the wet-thumb method. If I wet the side of my thumb and pushed hard, I could slide the paper in toward the spine until there was a nice bend in the paper I could get my left hand under. After that, things went much more smoothly. We cripples develop ways of dealing with things.

  With the physical technique taken care of, I got involved in looking at the faces. Before long, I realized it was only the format of the photographs, the full-face and profile, with numbers underneath, that made these men seem like criminals. They were just faces, handsome, ugly, and in between, looking into the camera with varying degrees of interest. It could have been the portfolio of the Upstate New York Toyota Dealers’ Association, or a college alumni bulletin, or any other seemingly random collection of male human beings.

  I guess the moral of all that was that you can’t tell a criminal until he pushes you down a flight of stairs.

  As I sat there, awkwardly flipping the pages, I began to wonder what the hell I would do if this guy turned up again. If I punched him, I would score an instant knockout—of myself. I’d probably pass out from pain if I just made a fist. I could get a gun, but unless I could figure out a way to pull the trigger with my thumb, that wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good either.

  And what if some karate expert came after me? After all, I thought, that karate-type bruise didn’t just grow wild across Debbie’s throat. Somebody put it there, somebody, I told myself, whose existence I as yet had no way to prove. Just possibly there was a karate killer for hire at large somewhere. Possibly. Who might be after me next.

  That was a frightening thought. Even if I were in top condition, that would be enough to scare me considerably. As it was (“... how I’ve always wanted you,” Eve had said. “Helpless.”), I dealt with it the only way I could—I refused to let myself think about it.

  Patiently, methodically (well, not really, but that’s how it would have looked to an outsider), I made my way through that book of mug shots. Rarely have I done anything more boring. They were all beginning to look alike. It must have been something like this, I decided, that had led Professor Lombroso to his theory of “the criminal type.”

  Then I found him. Third from the right, second row from the bottom of a left-hand page. I blinked hard, then took another look. It was my pal, all right, no question about it.

  “Are you sure?” Chief Cooper demanded when I called him over.

  “Positive.”

  “Crap,” he said. I asked him to elaborate.

  “This is the guy I thought it might be,” he told me. “You’re absolutely sure? Okay. His name is Fred Stampe; he works out of Rochester. He’s about your age, maybe two or three years older.”

  I looked at the picture again. “Come on, he’s got to be fifty. Look at that face.”

  “I know, I know. When I was with the State Police, we had to go through stuff like that every time we busted him. He was this big student activist, you know? Tried every drug from alcohol to Xylocaine, and was working on y and z when he got into the strong-arm racket. Of course, the way he burned himself up free-basing four, five years ago, like that comedian, you know—”

  I told him I knew.

  “Like him. One of the first cases of that I ever came across. Th
at didn’t do his looks any good, either. Between dissipation and scars, he looks twenty years older than he really is.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “How’d you know it was him?”

  “I still don’t know it was anybody, Cobb. Not officially. The DA had better not hear about this until I’m ready for that to happen. Is that clear?”

  “Sure. But what made you think of him in the first place?”

  “It’s his style, pushing you down a flight of stairs like that. Along with the description you gave me, of course, but it’s more the MO. This guy is a total acorn shell.”

  “A what?”

  “A nut case.”

  “I thought you had no sense of humor.”

  He smiled at me. “This is a pose to make the witness feel comfortable, all right?”

  “Oh. Yes, it’s working very well. I’m quite comfortable. Do go on.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, after Stampe burned himself up, he sort of went off the rails completely. Stopped taking drugs and opened this storefront drug-free place. One of those do-it-yourself encounter things, you know? And he gets pretty good results, too.”

  I said that all sounded very commendable.

  “Oh, sure. Only trouble is, Cobb, this guy commits murders for hire to finance the goddam place! The only reason he’s loose is that we’ve never been able to pin anything on him.”

  “You said something before about his style.”

  “Yeah. Ever since he stopped pouring chemicals into his body, he’s become all-natural. Never uses knives, guns, ropes, poisons, anything like that. He kills on the spur of the moment, using whatever’s handy.”

  “Like a flight of stairs,” I suggested.

  “Exactly. You ran into him in the library. Another time, he did one of his numbers just outside a library in Utica. Beat this guy’s head in with a portfolio of bird paintings. The victim had just checked it out. Like I said, whatever’s available.”

  “Cute.”

  “I’ll tell the world it’s cute. It’s what helps keep him out of the clink, too. There’s never a weapon to trace to him, and when we do manage to get a witness, he makes a big noise about how we’re picking on him, because we always harass reformed drug users, especially the ones who are trying to help people. Another thing about him, he makes it a point to meet the people he’s supposed to kill, exchange a few words with them. He gets away with it, too.”