It’s always tough work waking up a dead guy. And it doesn’t help when someone’s bird-dogging you the whole time.

    "You murdered him, you big, dumb ape!"

    That was Nancy. Nancy who was going to get a lead cork shoved in her mouth if she didn’t shut up.

    I had arrived about two minutes ago. Through the front door. Shoulder first. It helps when you’re six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds. It helps when your guts are so twisted up with hate that you do things you’d never do in a more rationale mood. But when you’re trying to bust a dirty cop, it helps to come in hard and fast; so fast and so hard that the cop has no time do any thinking, if he’s prone to that sort of exercise.

    "What’s the big idea, stupid?" Bill barked at me when I splintered the entrance to his two bedroom, split-level slice of suburban paradise. He had been reading the comics.

    I go by a lot of names - ape, stupid, dummy. Bill went by another name lately - hero. It just didn’t suit him.

    I brushed the splinters off my jacket. "I want to know why you killed your wife, Bill, and I want to know now."

    As he did his deaf-mute imitation, I walked over to the phone in the corner of the room and dialed a number. Then I put the receiver down on the table. I walked over to Bill and picked him up out of his recliner with a pair of mitts that could have got me a job catching for the Dodgers. I shook him hard. After his brains stopped rattling around in his head, he slammed a fist into my liver. I dropped him and smiled. He scrambled out of his chair and made a break for the kitchen. I tripped him up, picked him up, and then threw him into the glass-fronted hutch full of bone china. The noise was deafening. The noise flushed out the other pheasant I was hunting for - Nancy.

    Nancy stood in the hallway looking into the living room. As I glanced at her, Bill bounced up off the floor and drew a gun from his fat hip. It was a .38 police special and it looked angry.

    I pulled a cannon out of my shoulder holster and leveled it at Bill’s gut. It was a big target. Bill weighed about three hundred pounds and didn’t have the height to support it. He was an amiable loser most of the time, and standing there in his undershirt, his bald head beaded with sweat, a half-smile on his kisser, you would have thought he had just bowled a strike at the Tuesday night league game. Bill could have gone on enjoying life until he was felled by a heart attack, but he overstepped his limitations. And it cost him.

    "Put the gun down, Bill," I warned him. "No way I can miss."    

    He looked at Nancy for direction, and that was his undoing. Nancy slammed a baseball bat down on my right forearm, shattering the bone. The gun stayed level. Bill and Nancy looked at each other quickly, and their faces spoke of fear. Nancy nodded and Bill brought his gun up. I blasted off two rounds. Bill’s gut grew a couple of .44 caliber red holes and blood poured out. His life was over before he hit the floor face-first, like Graziano against Zale, third fight. A shard of china dug into his right eye. He didn’t even blink.

    That was two minutes ago. I had hoped to beat a confession out of Bill or, if my hunch had been sour, get out of town. But now Bill was getting fitted for horns and a pitchfork and I only had Nancy.

    "So he killed his wife to be with you," I led off. "How romantic." My forearm ached like an abscessed tooth and my hand shook like a jackhammer. "How pathetic. I wouldn’t kill a cigarette to be with you."

    "Dead men don't speak. I can hardly hear you, bum" she spat back.

    She was a good-looking woman - tall, dark-haired, fair complexion, but her eyes were full of hatred, and you could tell she was rotten at the core. It was a hatred that came from being treated like dirt even though you think you deserve better. Only you are dirt, and there’s no way you’re ever going to really change that. Bill should have looked a little deeper into those eyes.

    "A serial killer is on the loose - three married women are killed within three weeks. All of them are strangled while their husbands are away at work. So you convince Billy-boy that now’s the perfect time to drop his anchor. Bill hires Lucas Molle to come up from Chicago and kill his wife, using the serial killer’s m.o.. Then he hires Lucas to attempt another killing - a complete stranger to you and Bill - and Bill catches him in the act and guns him down. One mass murderer and mob hit-man dead, one two-bit traffic cop hero. Bill and Nancy are together to share in the wife’s estate. How does that play?"

    "Like a broken record. Any last words?" Nancy smiled a twisted smile.

    "Yeah, just to point out that you made one very big mistake."

    "What was that cop-killer?"

    "You’re looking at him. You see, honey - isn’t honey what the boys on Fourth and Lexington used to call you?"

    Her blood-red nails dug into the sides of the chair and she struggled to get up. I turned the cannon her way, using my left hand. She blinked, it didn’t. She sat back down.

    I continued. "Bill’s wife was my cousin. So I got interested in the case. And I started thinking. I started thinking about why Lucas Molle, low-level Mob hit-man, would start whacking people off six hundred miles from where he lived? He makes a living killing people doesn’t he? Surely, he can find something different for a hobby. So I start digging around and up out of the filth pops little old you. Bill didn’t have the brains God gave the dodo - I know, I worked with him - but you do, Nancy. You were always figuring out easy ways to the good life when you were walking the streets."

    "Shouldn’t you be ordering a last meal?" she asked. She looked like a greeter at the gates of hell.

    "I’ll take my chances, and yours. Because you’re going to die right now, Nancy." I brought the gun level with her head and drew back the hammer. Her face became a pale cloud of fear and desperation.

    "We can be together, darling. Bill has lots of money, or, at least his wife did. You know that. We can blow town and start somewhere new." She pushed the strap of her dress off her right shoulder with shaking fingers and showed me a pale, white breast. It looked as cold as a tombstone, and it had Bill’s name on it.

    "First, tell me what happened."

    "You got most of it right. About Lucas, I mean. Only, I killed the three other women. The killings stopped after Bill shot Lucas, because I stopped. Bill didn’t know I killed the other women. It was all part of my plan."

    I was speechless. But my gun wasn’t. It spoke about death, as it usually does, and a bullet hit Nancy between the eyes, tearing her ugly face apart. I don't think I did it purposely - it was just a reaction. Nancy fell back in the chair, and a small gun slipped out of her right claw and clattered to the hardwood floor. It had been sleeping in a holster around her thigh, before she roused it.

    I pushed myself off the couch and staggered to the phone.

    "You get all that, Charlie?" I groaned.

    The reply was faint, and long in coming. "Yeah. A patrol car and ambulance are on the way."

    The floor met me in a hard embrace.