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Jack is a former small-town newspaper writer, and a retired Navy/USMC corpsman, electronics instructor, and technical writer. He lives in the mountains of West Virginia amid priceless treasures--his terrific wife of 31 years, his wonderful 15-year-old daughter, and a loveable though mentally challenged 4-year-old Lab.

Handful Of Stars by Jack Hardway

"Look, the stars are so big, it looks like you could reach out and take a handful," the man on the roof said to Chris. "That's what I told her. Then she came over to the bridge railing and leaned out to take in the view and I pushed her over and she fell 800 feet into the New River Gorge."

Chris came to the roof each morning after leaving Samantha and before catching the bus to work so he could tend to the tomatoes he was growing in a 6-by-6 box filled with potting soil, next to Samantha's geranium box. There were about a dozen such plots that different tenants looked after, as well as a couple clotheslines for those who preferred sun-drying to the basement laundromat. Tenants came and went on the roof here and there throughout the day, but Chris had thought he was alone this morning. He hadn't even noticed the middle-aged man sitting on the short ledge that looked over the service alley that ran along the rear wall of the ten-story apartment complex. Not until he spoke. When he did, it seemed to Chris like an odd conversation starter.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I'll get to that in a minute. Are you curious enough to hear the rest of my pitch?"

"Your pitch?"

"My presentation, if you will. I figured I might have to say all this more than once, so if some of it seems rote it's because I've practiced it. Intriguing opening, don't you think? Does it make you want to hear more? The name is Deglin, by the way."

Chris took that in, thought about it, and upended his watering can and sat on it a few feet from the man. "Chris. You don't live in the building, do you?"

"No. It just seemed like a nice, tall one to start with."

"You thinking about jumping off the roof?"

"Well, that's close."

"Because of your wife?"

"It's a little late for remorse to overtake me for that," Deglin said. "I'm not going to go into why I killed her. It was a lot of things over a long time. It just came to that. I couldn't divorce her. I was unwilling to hand over half of everything I'd worked for all my life to that adulterous, man-eating—" He bit his words off and shrugged. "Ready for the pitch?"

Chris took out a piece of gum, a little surprised by the ease with which he'd settled into the odd dialogue. "Shoot."

"I was a police officer for twenty-two years, Chris. Eight of them as a detective. I had a dispatch once to an apartment in the Bronx where a husband in a bathtub had reached over to change the station on a radio he had placed on one of those tall stools, tubside. He'd somehow run afoul of the stool itself and tipped it, and the radio had fallen into the tub and electrocuted him. When he hadn't come downstairs after a long time, his wife went up to check and found him. That was what it looked like.

"My partner and I listened to her, thanked her, had him taken away, and left. Outside, my partner looked at me and said, "She killed him." I said, "Sure." And we went back to the station and wrote up our reports that documented it as a household mishap. We knew she'd done it, but there was no way on earth to prove it.

"After a while, you know. No one thing. The eyes and the way they look at you or don't look at you, the particular way arms are crossed, a dozen things you see after enough cop years that tell you somebody's probably lying to you. She'd given us coffee, and just before we left I followed her into the kitchen when she took the cups away to the sink. I said, "I don't suppose you'd want to confess, ma'am." She put the cups down and turned to face me with a blank expression except for one thing. Have you ever seen smiling eyes, Chris?

"Now, here's the point. It's a duck if you can't prove it's not a duck. With no witness or physical evidence to contradict what appears to have happened, that's what happened even if you know in your gut that that's not what happened.

"That wasn't the only time I came across one who got away with it, of course, but it was the one that gave me the push I needed to rid myself of her. I knew that the simplest murders were the most successful, and I knew that, regardless of what anyone might think happened, you can walk away if there's no physical evidence, no evidence of any prior intent, and no witness.

"And so I pushed Helen off the bridge while we were on vacation in West Virginia. It was night, no one around, no evidence of anything but an accident. Even if anyone had suspected me, there was no way to prove it, and a prosecutor wouldn't have touched it. It was a duck because nobody could prove it wasn't a duck."

"You talk about it like it was a long time ago," Chris said.

"Twelve years. It's been a pretty good twelve years, actually, but nothing lasts forever. Last month, I learned that I have pancreatic cancer. Inoperable and terminal. I decided to go on my own terms, and have tried to do that about a dozen times since. What I've learned is that I can't. Whether it's survival instinct or perhaps nothing more than cowardice, I don't know, but I'm not able to do it. That's why I'm sitting here on a roof ledge and why we're having what you must think is an unlikely conversation between strangers. I've already shown you that no one will know and, since we're strangers, no one will even suspect. All you have to do is what I can't do myself. Just stand behind me and give me a slight nudge."

"You're going to recite this to everyone who comes out here who you think might be willing to push you off the roof? That's murder, Mr. Deglin. Nobody will do that."

"Not murder, Chris. You'd be doing it with my full cooperation, fulfilling my last wish. There's no victim here. No, hardly murder."

"What if someone calls the police and tells them there's a guy on the roof trying to get people to push him off?"

"That's possible."

"Or more than likely."

"If they come before I make a deal, no harm done. I'll still have my money, I'll get some counseling, and live to die another day. If they get here afterward, they'll find this." He pointed to the stationery page showing from under the edge of a paper sack that sat on the asphalt beside him. "The usual despondency thing. Anything I've told anybody about money will be written off as lunatic ravings. Seem like a duck to you, Chris?"

Chris glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes until his bus. "Could be a duck. What money?"

"Oh, I didn't mention that, did I? The fifty-seven thousand dollars from my deposit box that I took out yesterday. I didn't keep it in an account because most of it has come from, well, other than official sources over the last two decades. Accommodations that come a vice officer's way if he's open to accommodation. We'll leave the ethics of that lie. Anyway, I don't need it now, so it's what you might call discretionary income. It's in a grocery bag inside that paint locker. Even the people who turn me down, if any, might keep quiet for at least a little while just from thinking about the money and whether it is murder and whether they could get away with it, which, of course, they would. Have a look." He gestured toward the stainless steel door of the locker about ten feet from them.

Chris started to rise, then checked the motion. "I'll take your word for it."

"You don't want to make sure it's there? That doesn't bode well for me."

"No," Chris said and got up. "I'm afraid I can't do much for you, Mr. Deglin. Human nature being what it is, though, you still might be able to cut a deal today."

"I might. Can you at least keep this conversation to yourself? It would be helpful."

Chris thought about that and said, "That I can do."

"Good enough. Someone will turn up. I mean, how many more folks of your inviolable ethics and high moral tone can there possibly be in one little piece of New York City?"

Chris smiled humorlessly and started to speak, but he couldn't bring himself to wish him luck. On his way down from the roof to the ninth floor and the elevator, he had to edge by a big man with a jagged scar over one eye who labored under the burden of a thick slab of steel for some unknown purpose. The man looked to be bad business, and Chris put off his natural inclination to exchange hellos, and just nodded as he passed him. Maybe this is your lucky day after all, Deglin.

Chris was exhausted by the time he reached home at eight. The workday had been long, and the morning conversation, the queer conspiracy of sorts he'd entered into with the man on the roof, and the guilt that was plaguing him over it had replayed in his head relentlessly throughout the day. The familiarity of the apartment and the smell of fresh flowers and the music of Samantha playing her recorder flute put some reason back into the world. He went to the balcony and sat, looking out at the night sky. As it turned out, Deglin was the talk of the building.

"Suicide," Samantha said as she brought the drinks over to where Chris sat and settled in beside him. "We've never had a suicide in this building. Have we?"

"I don't know," Chris said, taking her hand. "Who found him?"

"Maintenance guy, out back checking the air conditioning plant. There's no fence around the roof. I'm amazed nobody's gone over before this."

"Anybody see it happen?"

"No. You know how it is up there. Most times, you're alone. He left a note. He was dying or something. What a world."

Chris felt his stomach roll. I should have said something, he thought. But what good would it have done? Save his life and send him to a mental ward and then to a cancer ward for what, a few months, to die like that? "You ever see a fellow with a scar over his eye in the building?"

"What?"

"Nothing. Never mind." He wondered if Deglin had found the courage he lacked, or if he had made his deal after all. And then there was the paint locker, that might or might not have just paint in it.

She got up and walked over to the railing. "Look..." She went on for a while, but when she turned back toward him he was picking his jacket off the coat rack by the front door.

She came in to the center of the living room and placed her hands on her hips. "What in the world?" she demanded. "Where are you going?"

"Something I have to check on, Sam. I won't be long."

"I swear, Chris, you have the attention span of a ferret. You haven't heard a word I've said."

Chris stepped out onto the roof and walked over to the paint locker. He started to reach for the latch, but let go of the idea. The money, he knew, wouldn't be there. He went to where Deglin had been, and eased himself onto the same spot and sat with his lower legs dangling, immobile, for what seemed like a long time but was not, then took out his cell and keyed through its phone book until he found what he was looking for. He called his friend Kevin, who lived two blocks over, and as he punched the second call, for the taxi, he thought of holding hands and of drinking scotch, and of newly cut geraniums and of looking out on the night sky from their eighth-floor balcony. Was it possible that…no. Not put that way. That exact way. He felt wetness on his cheek and looked up––there was no rain, no cloud, nothing at all to intrude upon the clear night sky, dazzling in its scope and purity. Look, she had said as she stood by the railing. The stars are so big, it looks like you could reach out and take a handful.

THE END