Swan Dive

convenient deflector for somebody.”
    She shook her head. ”John, it doesn’t make sense. The real killer should have been planning this kind of thing for months to pull it off right. You say you only met Marsh on Friday, three days before the murders.”
    ”That’s right.”
    ”So how could anybody work that fast, take care of you so perfectly, then bungle the killings themselves, shooting only the woman and not both of them?”
    ” Nancy , I swear to you, I don’t know.”
    ”You don’t even have a plausible theory. I can see why Holt and the boys wouldn’t buy your story.”
    ”That doesn’t bother me. What would bother me is your not buying it.”
    She looked at me for a minute. ”What does Murphy think?”
    ”He won’t talk to me. I saw him after Holt questioned me, but there really isn’t anything he can do. To use his words, how can he tell Holt I didn’t stage things to kill Marsh when Murphy’s way of knowing that is how much better I handled an earlier killing.”
    ”Maybe I ought to call Murphy and commiserate with him.”
    ”Is that a lawyer’s way of admitting she believes me too?”
    She set down her now empty glass. ”You know something, John? I spend all day anticipating answers and revising questions to keep witnesses enough off balance that maybe they tell something close to the truth and not their convenient version of what happened. But I guess that has to be the difference here, doesn’t it? I can’t assume you’re lying, because that would mean you set me up to alibi you and that would mean that everything I want to believe about you and me has gone up in smoke. On the other hand, your story makes so little sense that somebody as smart as you are would have done it better if he was trying to deceive anybody.”
    ”So now the lawyer believes me?”
    ”No.”
    ”No?”
    ”No. The lawyer believed you about halfway through. When you kept telling me what you thought happened without stopping to find out what I already told the police.”
    ”For the lawyer that makes sense. But I have to know that Nancy believed me from the beginning, from when I just said I didn’t do it.”
    She kneeled down next to me on the cushion. She hugged me and I hugged back.
    Kissing me on the ear, she said, ”You are the most aggravating man I have ever met,” but I think she was smiling when she said it.

    I left Nancy ’s a few minutes later. I was nearly to my parking space behind the condo when I realized I hadn’t even thought of stopping to see Beth. At Nancy ’s, I was only a few blocks away, and it never occurred to me. No big thing, but...
    I was still thinking about it when I got out of the car. There was a real stink coming from over by our trash cans. It was nearly dark, and I’d had about enough of garbage for a while. Then I heard the groaning. Hurrying toward the cans, I started to gag from the smell when I saw the feet, with shoes and socks still on, wiggle a bit. I bent down, covering my mouth and nose with my hand. A barrel-chested black man was lying on his back, eyes closed in a face like a clay mask formed by a clumsy child. Then he opened his eyes and smiled with both his remaining teeth. He brought a .45 from down the side of his leg up into my chest. Another black, tall and spiffily dressed, came out from the shadows leveling a chromed Colt Python with a six-inch barrel.
    The second man spoke, his Caribbean accent thick and lilting. ”Terdell, they tell us the mon was a true child of God.”
    Terdell said, ”They right, J.J.”

The Mercedes sedan rode smoothly over the potholes as Terdell guided us out of the city. I was sitting in the backseat with J.J., his Colt cocked and just out of lunging range.
    Braxley wore a continental-cut, double-breasted suit, with a linen shirt, silk tie, and matching pocket hankie. His short hair converged to form the most pronounced widow’s peak I’d ever seen, a Madison Avenue Dracula. A nasty scar began at the middle of his left cheek and arched elliptically back toward his left ear before trailing off at his jawline.
    Unfortunately, I realized that the stench that made me gag at the trash cans came from Terdell. Even in the roomy car, his body odor was overwhelming.
    I said, ”Hey, Terdell, they ever make you file an environmental impact statement?”
    J.J. laughed. Terdell swung his head around, his features bloating into a smile, then turned back to watch the road.
    J.J. said, ”Mon, you think it bad now, you best