The King of Lies by John Hart Page B

in order. I looked back up the narrow stairwell and started to climb. I moved slowly, one hand on the rail. Five steps up, I stopped, thinking that I saw movement. I took one more hesitant step, heard something, and stopped. Then something huge, dark, and very fast descended upon me. It crashed into my chest and I was falling. I felt a moment of blinding pain; then all was blackness.

CHAPTER 6
    I  saw light. It flickered and died, then flickered again. It hurt. I didn’t want it.
   “He’s coming around,” a voice said.
    “Well, that’s something at least.” I recognized the voice. Detective Mills.
    I opened my eyes to bright, fuzzy light. I blinked, but the pain in my head didn’t go away.
    “Where am I?”
    “Hospital,” Mills said, and leaned over me. She didn’t smile, but I smelled her perfume; it was ripe, like a peach too long in the bag.
    “What happened?”
    Mills leaned closer. “You tell me,” she said.
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Your secretary found you this morning at the foot of the stairs. You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.”
    I sat up against the pillows and looked around. Green curtains surrounded my bed. A large nurse stood at my feet, a bucolic smile on her face. I heard hospital voices and smelled hospital smells. I looked for Barbara. She wasn’t there.
    “Somebody threw a chair at me,” I said.
    “I beg your pardon,” Mills said.
    “Ezra’s chair, I think. I was walking up the stairs and somebody pushed the chair down on top of me.”
    Mills said nothing for a long moment. She tapped a pen against her teeth and looked at me.
    “I talked to your wife,” she said. “According to her, you were drunk last night.”
    “So?”
    “Very drunk.”
    I stared in dumb amazement at the detective. “Are you suggesting that I fell down the stairs?” Mills said nothing and I felt the first stir of anger. “My wife wouldn’t know very drunk if it bit her on the ass.”
    “I corroborated her story with several people who were at your house last night,” Mills said.
    “Who?”
    “That’s hardly relevant.”
    “Relevant! Christ. You sound like a lawyer.” Now I was mad. Mainly because I was being treated as if I were stupid. “Have you been to my office, Detective Mills?”
    “No,” she replied.
    “Then go,” I said. “See if the chair is there or not.”
    She studied me, and I could all but see the debate. Was this guy for real or just being an ass? If she’d ever considered me a friend, I saw right then that she did no longer. Her eyes were intolerant, and I guessed that the pressure was getting to her. There had been many stories in the paper—retrospectives on Ezra’s life, thinly worded speculation about the manner of his death, vague details about the investigation—and Mills had been mentioned many times. I understood that this case would make or break her, but for some reason I’d imagined that our personal relationship would remain apart.
    “What’s your secretary’s name?” she asked. I told her and she turned to the nurse, who looked uncomfortable. “Where’s your phone?” The nurse told her to use the one in the triage nurse’s office. Down the hall. Second door. Mills looked back to me. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, and I almost smiled before I realized she wasn’t making a funny.
    She flapped her way through the curtains and disappeared. I heard her heels on the tile and then I was alone with the nurse. She fluffed my pillow.
    “Is this the emergency room?” I asked.
    “Yes, but Saturday morning is slow. Shootin’ and stabbin’ is done until tonight.” She smiled and suddenly became a real person.
    “What’s wrong with me?”
    “Oh, nothing but some bruises and such. Your headache might last longer than it would have otherwise.” Another smile and I knew I wasn’t the first Saturday-morning hangover she’d seen. “You’ll be discharged shortly.”
    I laid my fingers on the warm dough of her forearm. “Has my