“Yes,” I said.
“Well now, I didn’t kill nobody, I didn’t sic Peter on you for that purpose, Sheriff, oh, no, I didn’t,” said Jamie MacHugh, sweat gobbering out his head like water from them fancy park sprinkling systems in the concrete skulls of them pretty naked women statues.
The Sheriff said, “Let Peter search you.”
Jamie said no, as I grabbed his wrists with one big hand and held them while I put my other hand in his rear pants pocket and pulled out the dead man’s wallet.
“No,” whispered Jamie like a ghost.
I let him go. He swung around next thing, gibbering, and slammed out the door, crying, before anybody could stop him.
“Go get him, Peter!” everybody yelled.
“You really want me to?” I asked. “You’re not kidding like with the skyhook and shore line?”
“No, no,” they cried. “Get him!”
I thundered out the door and ran after Jamie in the hot sun over a green hill, through a little woods. What if Jamie gets away, I thought. No, he can’t do that. I’ll run fast.
Just near the edge of town I caught up with Jamie.
He never should have tried to fight me.
Crunch.
* * *
So now people sit around the Sheriff’s office on summer evenings dangling their shoes in a little laced pattern and speaking with smoke blowing from their easy mouths about how the Sheriff let me solve the case. And the Sheriff says he don’t care, he’s just as pleased that I caught the criminal as if he’d done it himself; but the Sheriff winces when he says this.
Kids on the street don’t kick my shins no more or throw rocks at me. They come ask to hold my hands as we walk downtown. They ask me to tell how I did it. Even ladies in pretty blue or green dresses look over back fences and ask. And I shine up the battered silver star the Sheriff had left over from twenty years ago, catch it on my chest where it sparkles, and I tell everybody again how I solved the Simmons case and caught the murderer Jamie MacHugh, who broke his neck trying to get out of my hands.
Nobody ever tells me to run get a skyhook or shore line or a left-handed screwdriver no more. They think my silences are thinking ones. Men nod at me from cars and say hello Peter and they don’t laugh so much, they sort of admire me, and just this morning asked if I intended solving any more cases.
I’m very happy. Happier than in all my days. I’m certainly glad now that Mr. Simmons died and I had a chance to catch Jamie MacHugh that way. No telling how much longer these people might have pestered me.
And if you’ll promise, cross your heart, hope to die, spit over your left shoulder, not to tell nobody, I’ll let you in on a little secret.
I killed Mr. Simmons myself.
You understand why, don’t you?
As I said at the beginning—I’m not so dumb.
Killer, Come Back to Me!
CHAPTER ONE
Ricky Wolfe’s Woman
If you’ve never watched an autopsy, then this is what they do. They cut the body down the middle. Not all the way, but far enough for you to see everything from collarbones to kidneys. When the peels of flesh are tethered back with bright surgical clamps, the various organs thus exposed are examined closely before being sliced out with an expert move of the scalpel. They are then set aside for chemical analysis. The brain is removed from its case by the simple expedient of lifting the skull off in a circle from the ears up.
If you’re a criminal, you get special attention. You’re not much different inside than anybody else, but the doctors keep looking, as if some day they’d actually find a criminal’s body that didn’t have a heart.
An interesting case turned up at our laboratory this morning. They brought in the cadaver of one John Broghman. He had little blue tattoos dinting his chest and pelvic regions. On second look, you saw they weren’t tattoos, but bullet holes.
I’d like to tell John Broghman’s story as it came to me, flat and cold and naked on an autopsy table. It’s not sugar. It’s carbolic and cyanide. It’s a heart beating like a tommy-gun, faster, faster and faster until—well.…
He had big lungs and good muscles. He had sponge sacs in his rib casings that maybe one day sucked in the air of the world and liked it. From the build of him you could see he was from a small town where those lungs could grow and get started. Then, you can see where his father and mother died; you can see where he had a younger brother who wasn’t much help; you can see where they moved in with an aunt and uncle who didn’t love them, and you can see where the uncle made Johnny Broghman work—too young and too hard—in a coal shaft. Those spots on Johnny’s lungs—that’s what tells you all about those years.