Spider’s Cage by Jim Nisbet Page B

yourself because you’re rich is one thing, but getting crazy and stupid behind a lot of nose candy…” Bdenoiwitz wagged a forefinger at Windrow, as if he were lecturing a child. “A theorist down at headquarters, a specialist in reconstructing homicides,” hetilted his head toward Gleason, who shifted uneasily, “came up with a really plausible explanation for this poor woman’s untimely demise.” Bdeniowitz sighed again, heavily.
    â€œIt seems,” he began, “it seems… Oh Christ.” He scrubbed his forehead, shielding his eyes from Windrow. “You tell him, Gleason.”
    Gleason cleared his throat again and used his hands while he talked. “Well, she’s rich, sure. So she don’t have to work and she’s sitting around this big joint all day, snorting the blow, free-basing too. That’s hard on a person. Doing nothing but dope gets your brain working on itself. You get nervous, paranoid. You think the world’s out to get you. Everybody wants your ass, if it’s nice, or your coke. Like that.” Gleason looked from Windrow to Bdeniowitz and back again. Bdeniowitz kept his face hidden from Gleason, scratched an eyebrow. “So she’s there in the house, all by herself. She’s holding nearly an ounce of cocaine, and she knows that’s big trouble, even in San Francisco. Maybe the ounce has just been delivered, by a certain out-of-work detective and ex-cop, a known pot offender, who came on to her, shook her up, made her more nervous than usual. There’s the sex angle: she’d just had some of that…” Gleason avoided Windrow’s slitted eyes. Windrow’s disdain hurt his own face. “Anyhow, there’s this huge commotion down the street. Sirens, firetrucks, cops; a traffic jam, ambulance, a crowd and a TV news truck. She thinks the sirens are for her, the dragnet is on and the bust is coming down. She’s wrong of course; they’re down there untangling a private dick and his car from all that nice furniture. But she doesn’t know that. She runs around the house with the ounce of coke. What to do, what to do. It’s too big to flush down the john whole, and there won’t be time to empty it slowly. Increasingly hysterical, she zigzags all over the house andthen: Aha! The cliff. She’ll just throw it at the ocean. She runs outside, leans over the low balcony railing, heaves the bag, slips…” Gleason inverted the palms of both hands. “Good night Miss Anne.” He stood, waiting for a reaction.
    He got silence.
    Gleason squinted. “Irene, I mean,” he said, almost as if to himself. “Good night, Irene.”
    Bdeniowitz sighed and talked to the floor. “A kid on the beach calls it in. They get the corpse downtown and find all these wood fragments, splinters, embedded in the body, especially about the head and shoulders. The homicide theorist opines as how there are a lot of junipers and scrub cypress on the way down to the beach. The full report, with theory, is released to the newspapers, who just happened already to be right down the street photographing what’s left of the Maclellan place, and insist they know what happened for the morning edition
before
the autopsy.” He looked up at Windrow. Windrow returned the gaze.
    â€œWell, we found the ounce,” Gleason protested meekly. Bdeniowitz ignored him.
    â€œThe theorist—unrelenting, brilliant, self-taught—got one thing right: You.” Bdeniowitz pointed at Windrow’s nose, “You had something to do with it.” His voice was suddenly forthright and loud. “I don’t buy no funny coincidences. We got you, we got mayhem, and only a block separates the two. No coincidences, not even a little one, even if it is in the Herb Caen. As for the rest,” he threw up his hands. “Shit,” he said, “The boss catches a fish this big.” He let about six