River’s End

I ...”
    He stopped, took a long drink, then set the glass aside. “There’s blood everywhere. I didn’t even recognize it for what it was at first. It’s too much to be real. There’s broken glass, smashed. The lamp we’d bought on our honeymoon is shattered on the floor. My head’s buzzed from coke and vodka, but I’m thinking Jesus, Jesus, there’s been a break-in. And I see her. Oh God, I see her on the floor.”
    His voice broke, wavered, quavered, just as perfectly delivered as the stream of violence in his first version. “I’m kneeling beside her, saying her name, trying to pick her up. Blood, there’s blood all over her. I know she’s dead, but I tell her to wake up, she has to wake up. I pulled the scissors out of her back. If I took them out, they couldn’t hurt her. And there was Livvy, staring at me.”
    He took a cigarette from the pack on the table and struck a match, and the flame shivered as if in a brisk wind. “The police didn’t buy that one.” He blew out smoke.
    “Neither did the jury. After a while, I stopped buying it, too.”
    “I’m not here to buy anything, Sam.”
    “No.” He nodded but it was a sly look, a con’s look. “But you’ll wonder, won’t you?”
    “According to Manning, he and Julie never had an affair. Not for lack of trying on his part, he was up-front about that.” Noah stood with his father outside the youth center while a group of kids fought through a pickup game on the newly blacktopped basketball court. “He was in love with her—or infatuated, spent a lot of time with her—but she considered him a friend.”
    “That’s the way he played it during the investigation.”
    “Did you believe him?”
    Frank sighed, shook his head as he watched one of his boys bobble a pass. “He was convincing. The housekeeper’s testimony backed him up. She swore no man had ever spent the night in that house but the man her mistress had been married to. She was fiercely loyal to Julie and could have been covering. But we never shook her on it. The only evidence to the contrary was Sam Tanner’s belief and the usual gossip. As far as the case went, it didn’t matter one way or the other. Tanner believed in the affair, so to him it was real and part of the motive.”
    “Don’t you find it odd that Manning and Lydia Loring ended up as lovers even for only a few months?”
    “That’s why they call it Holly-Weird, pal.”
    “Just hypothetically, if you hadn’t had Tanner cold, where else would you have looked?”
    “We had him cold, and we still looked. We interviewed Manning, Lydia, the housekeeper, the agent, the family. Particularly the Melbournes, as they both worked for Julie. Actually, we took a long look at Jamie Melbourne. She inherited a considerable sum upon her sister’s death. We went through Julie’s fan mail, culled out the loonies and took a look at them in case an obsessed fan had managed to get in through the security. The fact is, Tanner was there. His prints were all over the murder weapon. He had motive, means and opportunity. And his own daughter saw him.”
    Frank shifted. “I had some trouble with the case during the first few days. It didn’t hold as solid as I wanted it to.”
    “What do you mean, it didn’t hold?”
    “Just that the way Tanner behaved, the way he mixed up two different nights—two different altercations with Julie in his head—or pretended to ... It didn’t sit at first. Then he lawyered and went hard. I realized he’d been playing me. Don’t let him play you, Noah.”
    “I’m not.” But he jammed his hands into his pockets, paced away, paced back. “
    Just hear me out. A few days ago he told me two versions of that night. The first jibes with your findings, almost a perfect match. He’s into the part when he’s describing it. He could’ve been replaying a murder scene in a brutal movie. Then he tells me the other way, the way he got there and found her. His hands shake, and he goes pale. His voice races up and down like a roller coaster.”
    “Which did you believe?”
    “Both.”
    Frank nodded. “And he told you last the way that makes him innocent. Let that impression dig the deepest.”
    Noah hissed out a breath. “Yeah, I thought of that.”
    “Maybe he still wishes it was the second way. One thing I believed, Noah, is that after, he wished she hadn’t opened the door that night. And you can’t ever forget that one vital point,” Frank added. “He’s an actor and knows how to