One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts. I told them all about Bill’s having lost his wife two months ago in an automobile accident, and his father being killed only a month before that, and how he’d been very depressed ever since, and he’d had the Luger for years but I hadn’t known he’d brought it along on this trip with him. And we were just traveling around the state, basically to try to forget our recent losses. But Bill had just got steadily more and more depressed, and now he’d killed himself. The local cop swallowed it whole, with tobacco juice. The DA’s man would have liked a hotter story, but he didn’t want the work of digging for it. And the CID man didn’t believe a word of it, but he didn’t care. He was just there to memorize my face. So it was called suicide. To me, it looked like a lousy job of staging.
