A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan

of coffee and went back to the living room. I went to the window. Opened the curtains. It was early evening. The end of a clear blue day. The people on the sidewalk were hurrying home in their winter overcoats and woolen caps. Their breath was visible in the darkening air.
    I sipped my coffee and watched the scene like it was Christmas morning. I felt good, really good. The Emory case was over and the poison was out of me and now there was Samantha.
    Samantha.
    I went downstairs to Ed Morris’s place. Ed was one of those old guys you see sometimes who seem to be deflating in slow motion. Getting smaller, softer, more slouched and shapeless, bit by bit, day by day. He was a black guy with iron hair and rheumy eyes. Grumpy was his good mood. When he was in a bad mood, he got silent or whiskied up.
    “Don’t tell me I gotta clean your shit up there.” That’s what he said when he opened his door and saw me on the front step. That was his version of hello. “I don’t wanna hear it.”
    “Be thankful you don’t have to dispose of my body, you nasty old son of a bitch.”
    “Sounded like I was gonna. Way you was carrying on. Smell the upchuck all the way down here.” By then he had turned his back on me and gone shambling back into his apartment. “Only reason I didn’t call the cops on you is you are the cops, I know they would’ve sided with you, rousted my ass.” I followed him in. Followed his hunched figure down an unlit corridor toward the bright kitchen.
    “They would’ve, too,” I told the back of his flannel shirt. “They’d’ve dug up every evil deed you ever did.”
    “Oh, I know it. Don’t think I don’t.”
    “So quit bitching. You got off easy. Plus I’ve lived to overpay you for another month. What else do you want?”
    “Overpay me!” He was in the kitchen now. He opened the refrigerator. I leaned against the doorway. “I see on TV your boys been doing good work, though,” he said. “Sending that evil motherfucker to hell. That’s a good day’s work right there. You tell them I said good job.”
    “I’ll pass it on.”
    “Whoever done it. TV say he’s undercover. You tell ’em: He’s a good man. Good job.”
    He handed me a bottle of beer. I tipped it to him. “Will do.”
    “Hope he did it slow too. Put one in his goulies. Man doesn’t know how to use ’em shouldn’t be allowed to keep ’em.”
    “True that. There oughta be a law.”
    By now, I was already thinking this was strange. Samantha said Ed had told her I was the detective who killed Emory, but now he didn’t seem to know. The department had shielded my identity, kept my cover. That was standard procedure. So how would he know? Maybe he had guessed. Maybe he was just being discreet or . . . or something. It was strange.
    Ed made it across the room and settled into a wooden chair at the kitchen table—really, just like he was deflating. He already had a beer bottle open there and a plate of some mess he’d been eating. Had a small television set up right in front of him, playing the local news at low volume. He started eating again. Watching the TV as if I weren’t there.
    “Didn’t mean to disturb your dinner,” I told him.
    “What’d you think you’d do coming down here around this time of night?”
    “That crap you’re eating—I did you a favor.”
    “Well, you got that right, at least.”
    “Anyway, I’m not looking for you. Who would be? I wanted to talk with Samantha.”
    Ed went on eating his crap and drinking his beer and watching his TV. He didn’t even seem to hear me. Then he said, “Who that?”
    “What do you mean, who that? Samantha. The girl. The redhead. Said she was staying down here with you.”
    He glanced at me. “You see any redhead girl down here? There’s no redhead girl down here. There was a redhead girl down here, I wouldn’t be talking to you, I’d be doing her.”
    I started to laugh as if he were kidding, but I could see he wasn’t kidding so I didn’t laugh.