Free The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour Page B

juncture with the main road. Justin and Duane had gone inside; the house was wildly lit up now, the light spilling out the windows onto the grass. It was very quiet out there, but you could hear the hum of electricity pouring through the thick wires overhead. For a moment or two I wondered if I should go back to the farmhouse. I had a feeling that if I didn’t, the damage between us would harden like cement. But I also knew not to. I knew I was safer driving drugged and jumpy all the way back to the city, in the dark, on a motorcycle, than I would have been if I’d stayed in that house, that night, with my old friend.
    Peculiar as it sounds, I can’t recall how I heard what I heard next. Was there a phone call? I simply don’t know. But this is what I read in the newspaper a few days later. Shortly after my departure, Justin fired a short blast from a machine gun into Duane’s mouth. Brain tissue splattered against the library books. Several hours later (that’s hours ), local police were called. On arriving, they observed that the body had been “interfered with.” Which meant moved from the living room to the kitchen to the porch. The study was in disarray: smashed furniture, lamps overturned, a valuable Spanish acoustic guitar snapped off at the neck. One detail in particular snagged their attention: given where Justin claimed he was standing when the gun was discharged (self-defence, carving knife on the Persian carpet), the brain tissue appeared to be on the wrong part of the wall.
    A blond woman with the eyes of a drowsy garter snake was also in the house. Justin’s mother. It turned out she lived just down the road. A lawyer was also present.
    By midnight the following day, Justin was a patient at the Bosley Centre for Criminal Psychiatry in Toronto, which, in a touch almost too literary to mention, faced the kitchen of my apartment several blocks away. In fact, I believe that first night, the day after the killing, I saw him standing at the window of his “room.” With his hands in his pockets. I don’t think he knew I lived nearby.
    I never talked to the police. I’ve always had the suspicion that it was Justin’s mother’s idea to keep them from me, that she thought, as only the evil think, that I might do to her and her son what she, without question, would have done to me if our positions had been reversed. And more than once I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart thwacking at the notion that she might somehow— any way she could —implicate me in the murder. I say “murder” because I know that’s what it was. I knew it then, I know it now. And they both know I know.
    In the days that followed, the Bosley Centre looming across the streetcar tracks, I read more about the case, how Duane, at the time of his death, had been out on bail for the kidnapping and torture of a prostitute as well as the attempted murder of his own mother with a ball-peen hammer. Which accounted, I’m sure, for the hair rising on the back of my neck when I met him. Our instincts aren’t there for nothing; they keep us alive. In a word, Justin Strawbridge had gone to town and brought the devil back. I have often wondered if he did it on purpose, if he set out that day to destroy his life.
    The police, so said the newspaper, discovered a cache of weapons inside the farmhouse: two .38 revolvers, a metal-link whip, a second machine gun, nunchuks, a Taiwanese Death Star, and “a weapon of decapitation.” How banal, a rich boy doing designer drugs and collecting weapons, all paid for on his mother’s dime.
    “Just what a boy needs for a life in the country,” said M., my first ex-wife. “How’d he like War and Peace , by the way?”
    “We didn’t get around to it.”
    “He’ll have time now, I imagine.” (She’d had a fling with him in university.)
    I saw Justin only one more time after that glimpse in the window of the nuthouse. It was at his murder trial a year later. I ran into him in the