"So maybe it started out to be just another drive-by to keep Nettle's water hot. Then Wilma saw the door standing open and the drive-by turned into something else. Maybe it wasn't quite that way, but it feels right to me."
The words weren't even out of his mouth before he recognized them as a lie. It didn't feel right, that was the trouble. It should have felt right, he wanted it to feel right, and it didn't. What was driving him crazy was that there was no reason for that sense of wrongness, at least none he could put his finger on. The closest he could come was to wonder if Nettle would have been careless not only about locking her door but about shutting it tightly if she was as paranoid about Wilma jerzyck as she had seemed... and that wasn't enough to hang a suspicion on. It wasn't enough because not all of Nettle's gear was stowed tightly, and you couldn't make any assumptions about what such a person would and wouldn't do. Still...
"What did Wilma do?" Norris asked. "Trash the place?"
"Killed Nettle's dog."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Jesus! What a bitch!"
"Well, but we knew that about her, didn't we?"
"Yeah, but still-"
There it was again. Even from Norris Ridgewick, who could be depended on, even after all these years, to fill out at least twenty per cent of his paperwork bass-ackwards: Yeah, but still.
"She did it with a Swiss Army knife. Used the corkscrew attachment and stuck a note on it, saying it was payback for Nettle slinging mud at her sheets. So Nettle went over to Wilma's with a bunch of rocks. She wrapped notes of her own around them with rubber bands. The notes said the rocks were Wilma's last warning.
She threw them through all of the jerzycks' downstairs windows."
"Mother-a-God," Norris said, not without some admiration.
"The jerzycks left for eleven o'clock Mass at ten-thirty or so.
After Mass they had lunch with the Pulaskis. Pete jerzyck stayed to watch the Patriots with jake Pulaski, so there was no way he could even try to cool Wilma out this time."
"Did they meet on that corner by accident?" Norris asked.
"I doubt it. I think Wilma got home, saw the damage, and called Nettle out."
"You mean like in a duel?"
"That's what I mean."
Norris whistled, then stood quietly for a few moments, hands clasped behind his back, looking out into the darkness. "Alan, why are we supposed to attend these goddam autopsies, anyway?" he asked at last.
"Protocol, I guess," Alan said, but it was more than that... at least for him. If you were troubled about the look of a case, or the feel of it (as he was troubled by the look and feel of this one), you might see something that would knock your brain out of neutral and into one of the forward gears. You might see a hook to hang your hat on.
"Well, then, I think it's time the county hired a protocol officer," Norris grumbled, and Alan laughed.
He wasn't laughing inside, though, and not just because this was going to hit Polly so hard over the next few days. Something about the case wasn't right. Everything looked all right on top, but down in the place where instinct lived (and sometimes hid), the Martian warlords still seemed to make more sense. At least to Alan.
Hey, come on! Didn't you just lay it out for Norris, A to Z, in the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette?
Yes, he had. That was part of the trouble. Did two women, even when one was half-nuts and the other was poison-mean, meet on a street-corner and cut each other to ribbons like a couple of hopped-up crack addicts for such simple reasons?
Alan didn't know. And because he didn't know, he flipped the cigarette away and began to go over the whole thing again.
2
For Alan, it began with a call from Andy Clutterbuck. Alan had just turned off the Patriots-jets game (the Patriots were already down by a touchdown and a field goal, and the second quarter was less than three minutes old) and was putting on his coat when the phone rang.
Alan had been intending to go down to Needful Things and see if Mr.
Gaunt was there. It was even possible, Alan supposed, that he might meet Polly there, after all. The call from Clut had changed all that.
Eddie Warburton, Clut said, had been hanging up the phone just as he, Clut, came back from lunch. There was some sort of ruckus going on over in the "tree-street" section of town. Women fighting or something. It might be a good idea, Eddie said, if Clut were to call the Sheriff and tell him about the trouble.
"What in the blue hell is Eddie Warburton doing answering the Sheriff's Office telephone?" Alan asked irritably.
"Well, I guess with the dispatch office empty, he thought-"
"He knows the procedure as well as anyone-when dispatch is empty, let The Bastard route the incoming calls."
"I don't know why he answered the phone," Clut said with barely concealed impatience, "but I don't think that's the important thing.
Second call on the incident came in four minutes ago, while I was talking with Eddie. An old lady. I didn't get a name-either she was too upset to give me one or she just didn't want to. Anyhow, she says there's been some sort of serious fight on the corner of Ford and Willow. Two women involved. Caller says they were using knives. She says they're still there."