Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) by Ed Gorman Page A

proceeds. He kept shouting that he didn’t have a magic act or a woman to sell.”
    “I’ll be damned,” I said.
    “At this rate, McCain,” he said, pointing a final time to the bottle for permission, “we’ll all be damned.”

TEN
    I WASN’T READY FOR SLEEP. They were half an hour gone and I sat in the easy chair with the warm remains of a beer and my little ten cent Woolworth notebook that fits just about any pocket you care to name.
    I was making one of my famous lists, the way this cop had taught us in night school. He said there were two kinds of forms you should fill out for every incident. The official one, for which the state provided the form. And your own, which you provided for yourself. He urged us to make up our own form. He said, for instance, to use emotional words when you were conducting an investigation. I kept the example he gave us tucked into every one of my notebooks.
AL DUFFY
    Arrogant
    Evasive
    Wife afraid of him
    Say this was a fire investigation and you’re the detective assigned to liaison with the fire department folks. The first thing they’ll want to eliminate is arson, which is generally motivated by money or revenge. When you look at Al Duffy’s attributes (as you perceive them), you’ll look doubly close at the possibility of arson just because of his attitude. The way he bullies his wife with angry glances and interruptions may be significant here. Maybe she’s on the verge of confessing to what they’ve done.
    I made my own list.
ROSS MURDOCH
    Distracted
    Depressed
    Afraid
    MIKE HARDIN
    Angry
    Frantic
    Then I stopped myself. These little profiles were going to be essentially the same for all of them. Who wouldn’t be distracted, depressed, afraid? Who wouldn’t be angry and frantic?
    I should be writing down motives instead of moods.
    But why would any of them kill their hired woman and her brother? Their deaths guaranteed that the whole setup would become public and destroy them.
    It was more likely that somebody who hated one or all of them had found out about their concubine and decided to inflict the worst kind of revenge—public humiliation and the destruction of their reputations. Plus there was a good chance that one or two of them might even be tried for murder.
    Men like these would have made innumerable enemies. Some deserved, some not. Successful people are targets.
    But if it was revenge, then it was done by somebody who’d really thought everything through. He would have had to murder the woman, hide her body in a container and then get inside the house.
    Daunting as this seemed, it certainly wasn’t impossible with all those workmen going in and out. The men would be working for several different companies, so what was one more man from one more company? He’d have to go in at the very end of the day, of course. If Murdoch was telling me the truth and really hadn’t gone down to the shelter between approximately five p.m. and the next morning (a fact I’d noted in my notebook), then all the killer had to do was sit back and wait. Think of Murdoch’s face when he saw the dead woman. Think of Murdoch’s panic. His shame.
    I went to bed around three o’clock. I read fifty pages of the new Charles Williams Gold Medal novel which was, as always, well-crafted and fetchingly written. There was a darkness in Williams’s books that you couldn’t find even in Jim Thompson. Thompson’s darkness was the darkness of the insane. Williams’s darkness was the darkness of the sane. A subtler and ultimately more terrifying doom.
    I lay in the luxury of Pamela’s various scents—sleep, body heat, perfume. I got a useless erection and then fell asleep, my second-to-last thought being that in the morning I needed to get a list of all the companies that had worked on the bomb shelter. My very last thought was to wonder if Mike Hardin’s financial loss in any way played into the murders. But I was too tired to puzzle it through.
    I HAD BREAKFAST in the café down the