And Leave Her Lay Dying by John Lawrence Reynolds Page A

Hadn’t touched a drop in ten years. Dried himself out. Then, after the bitch was killed, he started drinking again. He’d come home, he could hardly stand up, and I’d say ‘You’ll kill yourself, you keep this up.’ He’d laugh and tell me I didn’t know nothing. He said ‘I got everything figured out about that Cornell woman and her brother.’ I asked him what, and he just laughed at me. Then I found out he wasn’t drinking alone. He was running around with somebody.”
    â€œWho?”
    She paused, swallowed once, and blinked at the sky. “I don’t know. He said it was Andy.”
    â€œJennifer’s brother?”
    She nodded.
    â€œHe disappeared when Jennifer Cornell died.”
    â€œI guess so,” she said. “I never saw him again anyway.”
    â€œAnd your husband would go drinking with him.”
    â€œBullshit.” She blinked again, several times, and McGuire realized she was crying. “He was drinking with some woman. I figured it out. I could smell her on him. What the hell do you do with a man, after forty-three years, he sneaks away and goes drinking with some woman? I tell you what you do. You say ‘Piss on him!’ So one night I’m in bed alone and he’s late, he’s out with her I know, and I hear a crash, hell of a noise. I get up and get dressed and there he is at the bottom of the cellar steps. Broke his fool neck trying to carry a case of whisky down the stairs.”
    McGuire stood up. “A whole case?”
    â€œTwelve bottles of rye. All of them broken and him lying there with his neck . . .” She lowered her head and hid her face in her hands.
    McGuire waited, listening to traffic noises from the street and muffled footsteps from the apartment above them. “Do you remember what happened the morning Miss Cornell was found dead?” he asked gently. “I mean, before the police arrived?”
    Lifting her head, she frowned at her fingernails. “Nothing.”
    â€œWhere was your husband that night?”
    â€œHe was here. In bed with me. Then he got up, maybe about four o’clock. I asked him what the hell’s wrong and he said he heard somebody on the fire escape. Thought maybe there were kids back there or them drug addicts from the Fens, they like to sit out there on the fire escape steps. They’re crazies. Should lock them all up. So he got up and looked and came back in about ten minutes. I asked him what it was and he said nothing. Told me to go back to sleep. So I did, and then I got up in the morning and told him to move his ass out of bed, he had chores to do.”
    â€œWhat time would that be?”
    â€œI get up six-thirty every morning. Always have. Him, he’d have his fat ass in bed until seven. Sleep all day if I’d let him.”
    â€œDid he ever explain who was on the fire escape?”
    â€œNot to me he didn’t. Told the cops he thought it was her brother, sneaking out the back way.”
    â€œWhere did your husband get the money for the whisky?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. Never had enough money to buy me anything. I never saw none of it. Whatever he had, he spent on the woman.”
    â€œWho was the woman?”
    She exploded in fury, turning on him. “How the hell should I know? I never cared. He could do whatever the hell he wanted, far as I was concerned. He could have ten women, the dummy, I wouldn’t care.”
    McGuire waited until she had calmed down. “And you never saw Andrew Cornell or the man in the BMW again?”
    She had returned her gaze to the window, her chin on her hand, fingertips in her mouth. She shook her head.
    McGuire pulled a card from his wallet and left it on a side table. “Please call me at one of the numbers on my card if you think of anything else,” he said. Then he added, “I’m sorry about your husband.”
    â€œWhy the hell should you feel sorry