CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: You’d Better Clean Things Up
The whole house seemed to be rocking from the sound of people fighting. Thomas grunted ferociously, as if experiencing a great deal of pain. Things were falling or being thrown, and things were breaking. The legs of the bed on the floor above jostled around, scraping against the hardwood floor. Blair heard feet scrambling for the stairs but not making it.
Just as Blair started to pass out, the sound of Ingrid’s wails jarred him awake again. What was happening to her? What was happening to Thomas? They seemed to be struggling to survive a battle plagued by inequity. Blair wanted to run, to get the hell out of there, but he felt paralyzed.
“My God!” Ingrid shouted. “Nooooo!”
As Ingrid stumbled down the stairs, Blair crammed his body under the sofa, using the underside springs to get a good grip. It was a tight squeeze, but he hoped that staying alive would be well worth the discomfort. Blair slid completely under, lifting the sofa’s back legs off the floor by almost two inches. Peeking out from the front, he saw a man catch Ingrid and shove her to the floor. For the first time, Blair got a clear view of the intruder: it was Detective Mikel Smith, the officer in charge of the Maxwell and Massey murder investigations.
“Where’s that sorry son of a bitch?” Detective Smitty said, his jowls dancing. Perspiration dotted his forehead and ran down his face in steady streams.
“He isn’t here!” Ingrid told him.
“Where are the crystals?”
“They’re on the desk!” she said, sitting up on the hardwood floor and exposing skinned knees and elbows. She pointed to the desk as if her life depended on it.
Smitty looked, but he wasn’t amused. “There’s nothing on that desk but a bunch of junk!” One sweep of his massive arm sent bottles of barium mercuric iodide and thallium formate flying. Thomas’s prized gemoscope hit the Oriental carpet beneath his desk with a thud. As Smith walked over to Ingrid, his foot crushed a compass clinometer as if it were a pile of Play Doh. He yanked her to her feet and stuck his big face right in hers. “I want those rubies and I want them now!” he said.
“Blair must have taken them when he left! You said so yourself that the bed in the guest room hasn’t been slept in!”
Silence ensued, except for the sound of Ingrid’s sobbing and pleading. A gloved man with blood all over his arms and white dress shirt came down the stairs. It was Quentin Latrice, and he walked over to Ingrid and then calmly put his bloody hands on the hips of his gray slacks. He stared at her through those small, oval glasses with the intensity of a magnifying glass refracting the sun. “Where’s the corundum?” he said, not allowing dramatics to get in the way of the information he was seeking.
“I don’t know!” she said. “I have money in my purse! Credit cards. Take them! There’s two hundred dollars in the desk drawer. You can have all of it! Just please, please don’t hurt me!”
Quentin stepped between Ingrid and Smitty. After pulling her head back by the hair and holding it steady with his right hand, Latrice took a carving knife from his belt with his left. He slit her throat so fast, there was no way Blair could’ve stopped him. Ingrid’s blood spurted out like a fountain, its redness glistening like a rainbow against the light from the kitchen. She struggled a bit, grabbing Latrice’s arms and digging in deep with her fingernails, but he held on, undaunted. Only when her body went limp did he ease his grasp around her. Stepping to one side, he thrust the knife into her back until it went through her so far, that it was visible from the front. Leaving the knife there, he finally allowed her body to fall to the floor.
“Was that necessary?” Detective Smitty said, standing away from the body so that he wouldn’t get any blood on his trousers. His black eyes looked down that teeny, tiny nose of his as if truly offended by Latrice’s actions.
“Her man is dead upstairs, so that makes her a loose end.” Latrice took off the gloves he was wearing and let them drop. “I tie up loose ends.”
“But a knife in the back? And of a woman yet? Come on!”
“You’re a big talker when you’ve got other people doing all the work for you. Just shut the hell up and let me think. Somebody’s got to do the thinking around here.”
“You call that thinking? Look at this mess!” Smith said, stretching his arms out to emphasize the point. “You’ve got blood all over you!”
“Well, mister detective, you’d better clean things up for me.” Latrice smiled. “I’m depending on you to get me off the hook again. Besides eating at every opportunity, allowing people to get away with murder is your specialty, isn’t it?”
Smith didn’t answer, but his frown spoke volumes.
“Where’s that lush bastard Vaughn? He’s supposed to be here.”
“If he is here, I’ll find him,” Detective Smitty said.
“You’d better, you fat shit, or yours will be the next throat I’ll be slicing tonight.”