In the last episode of Special Delivery, the landslide that struck the Weller mansion had finished, but not before it took the life of Jesse Weller. Rocky managed to save the life of Frank Weller's mistress and they were on their way out of the house, to freedom. The following takes place later that day:
The door thundered open. It had been hours since I had been trapped inside the Weller mansion but it was still enough of a recent memory to make me start a little. My hands, which had been resting on a heavy table in the center of the room, jerked away toward the inside of my jacket, where my gun would have been, if I still had it. Lieutenant Phil Hardacre exploded through the opening under a full head of steam, his eyes burning into me with red-hot fury. If he meant to scare me, he was way off. I knew the job he had to do and I would have looked like that if I had to do it.
The architect of the police station had positioned the interrogation room directly over the boiler room, a not very subtle tactic to make the man on the wrong side of the table that much more uncomfortable. I had been in the room forever, or so it seemed, and the sauna baths at the health club couldn't have made me any slicker with sweat than I was at that moment.
Hardacre stood above me as I sat in the sturdy, uncomfortable chair they had thrown me into the moment I stepped inside. “Explain yourself,” he growled.
“That'll take more time than you've got, Phil.”
If he had anything on me he would have busted my jaw right then and there, but since he didn't all he could do was grit his teeth and move on. He found another chair like mine and threw himself into it. Fifteen seconds in the room and already beads of sweat were appearing on his forehead. “You reported a rich guy and his wife dead in their house. You want to tell me what happened?”
I gave him the run-down, just like I had given Officer Kirk the moment I came to the police station with Rollo Betancourt and Frank's mistress in tow. I came in, steaming mad. Frank and his dame in their bathrobes, Jesse showing up with her gun, the landslide. Rescuing the girl. Finding Jesse in the mud. Then Frank: he was halfway up the stairs by the time he collapsed. The look on his face was one of pain, serious pain, the kind of face that sticks in your memory years later when you think about the awful ways a man can die. The girl buried her head in my chest as I pulled her up and out the door.
Hardacre listened to it somewhat. Kirk had probably prepared a report already and Hardacre was just checking for holes in my story. He leaned back in his chair and nodded whenever I came to a part that was familiar to him.
After I was through, he made an approximation of a smile and said: “Guess that leaves me out.”
That was meant to get my goat and it had gotten my goat, but good. Hardacre was a natural-born goat-getter. “The boys took my statement already. You put me in this steam-box for the better part of an hour and that's all you can say? Why waste my time? You think I managed to bury Jessica Weller in four feet of mud and kill her husband with radiation poisoning?”
“So your story goes,” said Hardacre as he put all four legs of the chair on the floor again.
“It's the truth. What did that dame of Frank's tell you?”
Hardacre shrugged and called in to the next room for her statement. A red-headed officer with freckles that belonged on a boy of twelve handed him a clipboard with a couple neatly-typed pages. He studied them, swiped away a pint of sweat from his forehead, and absently read aloud the words written on the page: “Eloise Grant, 31...secretary of Frank Weller...”
“There's a shock,” I muttered.
“Stuck in a room...found Jessica Weller, then Frank. Curled up on the floor...broken statue...” He lifted his eyes off the page. “She didn't see what happened to either one of them.”
“That's because she wasn't there. Look, that's my story. Have you get a better one?”
He laughed at me. “No, I suppose I don't. Frankly, I don't believe you, but you're free to go. Maybe the house got hit by a landslide, but it's too much of a coincidence: you show up, mad as a hornet, and two people end up dead.”
Yeah, it did. If I could believe that my anger alone could cause the wind and the elements to conspire against a man, I'd say that I did away with both of them perfectly, just the way I would have wanted to see them go, destroyed by the prized possessions they held most dear. But it was never in my power and it was never my right to get as angry as I was for something that was never a crime against me.
I stood up and made my way for the exit. “Chalk it up to an act of God,” I said.
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