Anatomy of a Murder

Anatomy of a Murder

The mine whistles were tooting midnight as I drove down Main Street hill. It was a warm moonlit Sunday night in mid-August and I was arriving home from a long weekend of trout fishing in the Oxbow Lake district with my old hermit friend Danny McGinnis, who lives there all year round. I swung over on Hematite Street to look at my mother’s house- the same guant white frame house on the corner where I was born. As my car turned the corner the headlights swept the rows of tall drooping elms planted by my father when he was a young man-much younger than i-and gleamed bluely on the darkened windows. My mother Belle was still away visiting my married sister and she had enjoined me to keep an eye on the place. Well, I had looked and lo! Like the flag, the old house was still there.
 I swung around downtown and slowed down to miss a solitary drunk emerging blindly from the Tripoli Bar and out upon the street, in a sort of gangling somnambulistic trot, pursued on his way by the hollow roar of a juke box from the garishly lit and empty bar. “Sunstroke,” I murmured absently. “Simply a crazed victim of the midnight sun.” as I parked my mud-spattered coupe alongside the Miners’ State bank, across from my office over the dime store, I reflected that there were few more forlorn and lonely sounds in the world than the midnight wait of a juke box in a deserted small town, those raucous proclamations of joy and fun where, instead, there dwelt only fatigue and hangover and boredom. To me the wavering hoot of an owl sounds utterly gay by comparison.
 I unlocked the car trunk and took out my packsack and two aluminum-cased fly rods and a handbag and rested them on the curb. I shouldered the packsack and grabbed up the other stuff and started across the echoing empty street.
 “How was fishing, Polly?” someone said, emerging from the darkened alley alongside the dime store. It was old Jack Tregembo, tall and lean and weather-beaten as a beardless Uncle Sam. Jack had been a night cop on the Chippewa police force as long as I could remember.
 “Fine, fine, Jack,” I said, rubbing my unshaven neck. “I ate so many trout the past few days I suspect I’m developing gill slits.”
 “S’pose you heard about the big murder?” Jack said, moving closer, plainly hoping that I hadn’t. “We even made the city papers.”
 “No, Jack,” I said, pricking up my ears. “Just got in- as you see. No newspapers, radios or phones, thank God, up in the big Oxbow bush. Talkative Old Danny could never stand the competition. Trust you caught the villain and got him all hogtied, purged, and confessed for Mitch.”

ANATOMY OF A MURDER. Copyright 1958 by Robert Traver