GUY FORREST was sitting on the cement steps outside the house when I arrived. His head was hidden in his hands. Rain fell in streams from his shoulders, his knees, tumbled off the roof of his brow. He was slumped naked in the rain, and beside his feet lay the gun.

From his nakedness and the diagonal despair of his posture, I suspected the worst.

“What did you do?” I shouted at him over the thrumming rain.

He didn’t answer, he didn’t move.

I prodded him with my foot. He collapsed onto his side.

“Guy, you bastard. What the hell did you do?”

His voice rose from the tangled limbs like the whimperings of a beaten dog. “I loved her. I loved her. I loved her.”

Then I no longer suspected, then I knew.

I leaned over and lifted the gun by the trigger guard. No telling what more damage he could do with it. Careful to leave no prints, I placed it in my outside raincoat pocket. The door to the house was thrown open. I slipped around his heaving body and stepped inside.

Later on, in the press, the house would be described as a Main Line love nest, but that raises images of a Stanford White-inspired palace of debauchery – red silk sheets and velvet wallpaper, a satin swing hanging from the rafters – but nothing could be further from the truth. It was a modest old stone house in a crowded Philadelphia suburb, just over City Line Avenue. The walls were bare, the furnishings sparse. A cheap table stood in the dining room to the left of the entrance, a television lay quiet before a threadbare couch in the living room to the right. There was a Jacuzzi in the bathroom, true, but in the furnishings there was a sense of biding time, of making do until real life with real furniture began. In the bedroom, up the stairs, I knew there to be a single bureau bought at some discount build-it-yourself place, a desk with stacks of bills, a fold-up chair, a mattress on the floor.