Eric was sure he had gotten away with things when on the third night after the one in which he had killed his best friend the police announced the capture of a likely suspect. He couldn't fault the man for sleeping with Billy's wife: glass houses and stones. But he had not bought for himself an ex post alibi once the murder had become news. That was in Eric's eyes a worse crime than his rather justified murder of an ineffectually jealous husband who also happened to be a problematically honest business partner.
The first and only visit from the detective during his lunch did nothing to rattle him. Eric's secretary had been vague about his name, affiliation, and appearance. There were hints of a wet raincoat in her prissiness about the office carpet and notes of slightly rumpled handsomeness in the deliberateness of her frown, nothing more. Another three days passed without the detective or anybody from the police contacting him in any way. The same could not be said of the grieving widow, much to Eric's unsurprised pleasure.
The night of the phone call it was raining. A careful driver, Eric pulled his car aside before taking it; it would have been at least untidy to be pulled over by a cop coming back home from meeting a certain woman in a certain hotel.
"Yeah?" said Eric. He wouldn't be able to explain himself later why he had answered a call from a private number.
The man on the other side of the call answered with a concise and, as far as Eric could remember, entirely accurate description of every step he had taken to kill Billy, from the way he had hidden the gun in Billy's car a week before to the trick with trash bags he was still quietly proud of. The man ended the call before Eric could find his voice.
It was the detective. Of that he was sure. The rain became a storm. Eric drove to his house faster than usual.
After a week without a blackmail demand an increasingly frayed Eric almost crashed against a waiter when he thought he saw outside the restaurant window the silhouette of a raincoat. He rushed outside ignoring the surprised expression of his date, a shapely brunette who as far as he knew had never met Billy in her life, and managed to catch sight of a fragment of a raincoat calmly turning around a corner half a block away. He continued his pursuit; he didn't know if he was glad or not of not carrying a gun just then.
He found the raincoat standing in front of a shop window. It wasn't the color of dirty concrete as he had been expecting. It was a comely deep black and it was being worn by somebody who whatever sins had committed in her life, being a detective with an unoriginal side business as a blackmailer had not been one of them.
Eric cursed under his ragged breath and walked back to the restaurant. As he entered it he saw on the corner of his eye a man tipping an old fedora from the shadows of an alley across the street. Or he thought he saw him. He wasn't there when he turned around to see, and he was too nervous to go and check.
The night before that one would be the last night Eric did not see the detective. Never for more than a second and never during the day — but Eric found he couldn't sleep at night, so the sun did not provide much protection. In quick succession he alienated both brunette and Billy's wife, annoyed his secretary, irritated his lawyer, and gave a profitable few weeks to a PI agency without gaining any respite from the pointless, silent pursuit of a blackmailer that refused to contact him.
Eric took to spending time in the dark corners of bars and coffee shops, or standing under unlit overhangs on cold rainy nights. The detective ignored those invitations as if aware of the gun he always kept in his pocket. Instead, he saluted him from passing cars as he entered his house, or nudged his way advertisements of a very specific brand of trash bag.
He stopped driving. He preferred crowded subways, and he kept a tense hand over the gun in his pocket during the three-block walk between the station and his house. Despite his planning, patience, and terrified hate he did not even think of turning around and shooting the detective that last night when he heard his steps at his back splashing quietly through the sidewalk puddles.
Eric ran through the rain without looking back. Two times he almost slipped and fell. He opened his front door after a fumbling infinity of seconds, closed the three newly installed bolts, and ran once again to his bedroom. Eric locked himself in it, took out his gun, and waited.
They found his body three days later. You could see the front of the gun barrel through what was left of the back of his skull. One of the cops commented on the three bullets the victim had shot at the mirror. The forensic technician said they were an increasingly common feature in this sort of suicide. The cop nodded. He went to the window and pretended to watch the rain while he wondered if it would help to add that detail to the tableau he would have to stage before his bookie ran out of patience.