Everything pointed in one direction, and the Examiner’s headline had it right. Suicide. But there’d been two shots, and he still didn’t know what to make of the note Castelli left in Melissa Montgomery’s inbox: Get Cain. He needs to know. Why would he leave a note like that if he’d planned to shoot himself? If he knew he’d die that night, and he wanted Cain to see the second set of photographs, he could have just left them on his desk.
Cain pulled out the photo of the mayor’s medicine cabinet. Half the Ambien and tramadol were missing, but the Viagra was unopened. In the next photo, of Castelli’s desk, there was the bourbon, nine-tenths empty. Castelli might have been able to drink most men into their graves, but he’d gone through nearly an entire bottle between ten thirty and midnight. He would have been reeling. Blackout drunk. With that much bourbon, he might not have known what he was doing. Instead of a suicide, they could be looking at an accident. Mona said he wasn’t a gun person, but that didn’t make it true. Castelli might have pursued any number of fascinations behind his locked door.
Picturing it was easy enough.
He comes home, finds his wife gone. He’s alone, finally. All day, he’s been holding everything back. His rage at the blackmailer, at Cain. He’s thinking about the photographs, he’s remembering the way Cain dumped his drink and pushed him into his chair. He goes into his study and locks the door. He gets a bottle of bourbon and his gun.
He drinks. One glass, two glasses. He pours more.
He wipes his mouth on his shirtsleeve and coughs into his elbow. He sits in the chair and he holds the gun, and sometimes he points it at his black reflection in the window and imagines the blackmailer standing there. He spins around in his chair and somehow the gun goes off. It blows out the M section of his dictionary, but he hardly notices.
He pours one more glass.
The bottle tips over when he sets it down, but he’s drunk so much of it now that the bourbon can’t spill from the raised neck. He drinks. He sets the glass down and uses both hands to hold the gun. As it comes up toward his face he sees three barrels, six barrels. Then just black. He closes his eyes. He’s so drunk now his thoughts aren’t conscious. They’re more like the shadows that sometimes float behind his closed eyelids after too many flashbulbs go off at once. Unbidden, unconscious.
He’s passing out in his chair, but he could be anywhere. He’s an undergraduate, walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Nothing in front of him but the future. He sees a sweep of blond hair from the corner of his eye.
There’s an easier way out, the blackmailer had said. An unmoored thought, something drifting in a current. It goes by and he hardly notices it, but his fingers must have heard.
Bang.
Cain put the photographs back into the folder and looked at his watch. Five a.m. and still dark outside. He took out his cell phone and dialed. It was early, but that was okay. He wanted to keep Melissa Montgomery on her toes.
“Good morning, Miss Montgomery,” he said. “Did I wake you?”
“What do you want?”
“How often did Castelli drink?”
“Every day.”
“That’s not what I mean—how often did he drink himself stupid? A bottle, two bottles in a sitting.”
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“You never saw it?”
“I saw it, but I don’t know how often he did it.”
“When’s the last time you know about?”
“Over a year ago. We were in Beijing—the China-Pacific trade conference. I’d just broken it off with him, and then in the hotel he rang down and had bottles delivered to his room. I had to sign the bill.”
“You broke it off with him?”
“I told you already.”
“You told me you’d stopped. That it was only sometimes, but you’d stopped more than a year ago.”
“We stopped because I stopped it.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Right now, everything matters.”
“All right.” From her end of the line, a door opened and shut. Now he could hear wind. She must have stepped outside to have a more private conversation. He’d forgotten she lived with a roommate. “I broke it off because I’m not stupid. Because a married politician who fucks his chief of staff isn’t going anywhere, and if he didn’t go anywhere then neither would I.”
“That’s what you told him?”
“Yes.”
“And then he went up to his room and drank himself blind?”
“That was the last day of the conference for us. He didn’t leave his room again until it was time to go home.”
“Okay,” Cain said. “What about Mona?”
“What about her?”
“Could she match Castelli, drink for drink?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Melissa said. “I tried not to spend time around her. You can imagine why.”