Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

looked in the bedroom. I saw him stretched out on the bed. There was a blanket tucked up tight under his chin; he had his jeans on, and his boots were there on the floor beside the bed.”
    Jan Cummings suspected that George might have already been dead when Getchell peeked into the bedroom. “How did he look?” she asked. “Like a normal guy sleeping?”
    “Well, George’s face looked awfully bruised up, and it was kind of all red and swollen,” Getchell said. “But I figured it was just because of another fistfight. Him and Larry was always swinging at each other.”
    Suddenly Getchell realized what Jan Cummings had suggested. He looked at her and breathed, “You ain’t telling me George was dead when I was looking at him?”
    Jan Cummings nodded. “What did they tell you when George disappeared?”
    Pete Getchell’s face turned pale green. “They said he took off for Chicago—just like that,” he said. “And I believed them, didn’t even think otherwise. And I bought the horse when they also took off for Illinois. I don’t know what happened to that old gun. It was a real old one, like maybe fifty years old. Maybe it got burned up in the fire.”
    Cummings and Boedigheimer checked at the Lone Pine grocery store and learned that Larry and Doris Mae had been in to cash a check sometime in the first week of April 1971. The store owner said that he hadn’t had enough money in the cash register to cash a check so large. “It was one of those IBM checks like the welfare gives—almost $400 worth. They never did come back to pay us what they owed us—let’s see, here it is: $31.42.”
    That welfare check was probably why Doris Mae had stayed in the old house even after it was condemned. She and Larry needed that money to get out of Oregon.
    Halfway across the country in Sheriff Berg’s office in Lacon, Illinois, Jim Byrnes faced the man who had confessed on the phone to murder. Larry Light was still anxious to shed himself of the burden of guilt he’d carried for three and a half years. He said he was willing to pay whatever penalty he had coming for killing his brother.
    Byrnes realized that had Larry not confessed, George’s body might never have been discovered. Somewhat ironically, the crime had been effectively covered up by the Silverton Fire Department when they burned the farmhouse and outbuildings.
    Now, Larry spoke about his obsession with his brother’s wife, and his anger over the way George treated Doris Mae. And yes, he admitted that he had still harbored resentment over the way that George had snitched him off to the police on the murder charge in 1959. During the years he spent in prison, he had planned so many times how he would settle that score. Had he consciously followed George to Oregon so that he could wreak revenge? He honestly didn’t know. At first they had gotten along, during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1970. But when George was so cruel to Doris Mae, Larry said, it “kind of set me off.”
    “And I knew I was going to kill him after he hit me between the eyes with a beer bottle.”
    “When was that?” Byrnes asked quietly.
    “It was sometime in January or February back in 1971. I can’t say for sure when. I guess it was three or four days later that I shot him.
    “I recollect that it was on a Sunday when it happened. Doris Mae had shown me where the shells were kept for the old P.M. shotgun after our first bad fight. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking whiskey when another argument started. When George threw a lamp at me, I went for the gun. Doris saw what was going to happen and she rushed the children out back, except the baby might have been on his table in the kitchen.”
    Larry Light narrowed his eyes as he seemed to envision the scene in the old farmhouse. Byrnes realized it was no longer a hot day in August in Illinois—it was a winter night in Oregon some three years earlier.
    “He told me I’d better get started killing him because he was going to beat me up. I got up and walked into the front room and I was right by the stairs leading upstairs. He threw a lamp at me and I just reached in and grabbed the shotgun and shot him.”
    “Had you been thinking about what you were going to do?”
    “Yeah. I knowed I was going to kill him if he started it again.”
    Larry remembered that he had fired from the hip as George threw up his arms in a futile gesture of self-defense.
    “I dragged George onto the bed and tucked the blanket