Leather Maiden

I thought what he really meant was he needed another.

  “No note?” I asked.

  “Note?”

  “From the kidnappers.”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. If there was a note, I’d know for a fact she got ’napped, now wouldn’t I? I got that much savvy. I know how to pull my socks on one at a time, shit in the pot and not on the floor. I’m not totally useless. So, there was a note, I’d know if she was kidnapped, now wouldn’t I, Jason?”

  “Cason.”

  “You’re not saying Jason?”

  “No. Cason. With a C.”

  “I’ll be damned. Could have sworn you were saying Jason.”

  “Nope.”

  “Huh.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re right. You would.”

  “Would what?”

  “Know if she had been kidnapped…if there was a note.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Of course. They leave a note, you got their word, and who wouldn’t believe the word of a murderer? I see you got a camera there. Nice little camera, small, easy to handle. Maybe you should have been sneakier.”

  “Why would I be sneaky?”

  “There’s nothing you’re going to be photographing inside.”

  “I was gonna take some outside photos. You know, the POLICE, DO NOT CROSS strips. Maybe a shot of you looking very investigative.”

  “Again, you’re not going inside. You did, you’d wish you hadn’t. I did. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “That bad?” I said.

  “I’m always surprised at how much blood is in the human body. It’s spread from one end of that shithole to the other. And it’s pretty fresh, he’s been dead, oh, I don’t know, maybe today early, before light. Maybe yesterday late. Guy was naked and in bed. Well, a lot of him was. There was some more of him elsewhere, and, I’m sure you know this, being a crack reporter and all, but he shit all over the place too.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “Machete or axe would be my guess. Sword if one was available. Might have been more than one person did it. It was one killer, it was a goddamn tiger. It was like someone held him down and ran a lawn mower over him. Meth heads is a good guess. They seem to always be hacking people or chopping heads off.”

  I tried to keep my face neutral, but what I was thinking was Jimmy and I had been in that house, our fingerprints might be in there. Then I remembered we had been wearing gloves and felt a shade better.

  “So a tiger did it with a machete, or possibly a lawn mower?” I said.

  “Find your own comparison. I’m not that poetic. Do I look like fuckin’ Dylan Thomas?”

  “No. But a lot of people will be surprised you know who he is, and a lot of them will wonder who it is you know about.”

  “I’m surprised you know who he is,” the chief said.

  “Touché.”

  “Literature major. That was me. Should have stuck with it. I’d be in a university somewhere, teaching kids that would hang on my every word. I could be looking up coeds’ dresses watching beaver move inside underpants, and I could be talking. I like to talk. I’m good at it. Everything else for me sucks the big old donkey dong. I’m not cop material, you know? But don’t tell the town council. I need the job. My wife and kids like to eat.”

  “So you don’t know anything about the girl?”

  “Officially, we haven’t got a clue. Me, I’m thinking she might have done it, woke up in the night, worked the dirty deed.”

  He pushed away from the car to stand for a moment, took a deep breath. I decided he wasn’t drunk after all. He hung his head and patted at his pocket like he might be looking for cigarettes, but nothing was there. I tagged him for an ex-smoker.

  “Why would she do it?” I asked.

  “He left the toilet lid up. I don’t know. It could be anything. That’s another thing to be answered, and guess who doesn’t have the answers yet? Your one and only swinging dick of a chief of police, that’s who, and that would be me, pardner. Shit, Jason—”

  “Cason.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry. We just went through that. But I was going to say, I seen some car wrecks, shit like that, even a murder, a suicide, a guy jumped from an overpass and did a one-point on his noggin. He was all over the highway, like a dropped watermelon. Saw some things like that even before I was a cop. Had a job once where I cleaned apartments. Back in college. And this guy, he blew his brains out with a shotgun, and it was all over the place. And the company I worked with, we got hired to clean it up, and I thought that was bad, but now I got this, and let me tell you, this is bad, boy, bad. It looks like there was a tomato fight in the bedroom. Except it don’t smell like tomatoes. It smells like what’s in there, and there’s some kind of cat piss smell too, only there isn’t a cat. Let me just boil it down, and say it is some ugly goddamn business.”

  “I’m starting to get the picture,” I said.

  I remembered that cat piss smell from when Jimmy and I were in the house. It could have been from former renters; cat piss stays with a place better than fresh paint.

  “Shit, boy. They chopped off his dick. Looked like a little sausage lying there on the floor. One of them, what do you call them, Vienna sausages, isn’t that it? Isn’t that the little ones?”

  He was chattering on like a squirrel. He didn’t wait for me to respond.

  “I don’t like this at all,” he continued. “Not even one little bit. Today I have looked at the abyss, and let me tell you, it has looked back with both eyeballs and it is one hideous motherfucker.”

  “You should have finished college,” I said. “Quoting philosophers and the like.”

  “I got too deep in debt. I only lack a year. Don’t think I don’t think about going back. As of today, I’m thinking about it a lot more. I got the job here because I thought it was even sleepier than the town I came from. Truth is, though, there’s always something, and there isn’t any such thing as a quiet town, unless maybe there are only two people in it and one of them is dead.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re thinking the girl gets up in the middle of the night and does a Lizzie Borden. That’s not much of a theory.”

  “It isn’t much of a theory,” the chief said, “but I’m not much of a police chief either.”

  “Nothing else you can share?”

  “Someone cut off the air conditioner,” he said, “and I don’t think it was to save on electricity. They did it so the body would get hot and stink. It worked. And there is a little thing we’re holding back, so I won’t tell you that. You can just say we’re holding back some things that only the killer/kidnapper could know. That’s good enough right now.”

  “Will you tell me in confidence what you’re holding back?”

  “No.”

  “Is it a good lead?”

  “No. We’re just a Podunk police department, did I tell you that?”

  “You did.”

  A cop came out of the front door of the house then, and though we were a good distance away, out by the curb, an odor came out with him. The cop leaned over and threw up in the shrubbery.

  “Close that goddamn door,” the chief yelled. Another uniformed cop leaped out of the yard, padded up there in his paper pullover footsies, his gloves, grabbed the doorknob and closed it.

  “Everybody here, get some goddamn masks on,” the chief said. “Not just some of you, all of you. You’re wearing one around your neck, get near that house, pull it up.”

  The cops scuttled about when he was finished yelling.

  “I doubt murder is contagious,” I said.

  “These days, so much murder going around, you got to wonder. It’s like some kind of disease. And you got the smell. A mask helps that…I know I don’t sound like much of a cop, but I don’t give a shit. I’m not much of a cop.”

  “You said that already.”

  “I’m just making sure the word gets out.”

  “At least you showed up. I heard the old chief didn’t get out of the office much.”


  “He was smarter than me.”

  “What’s okay for me to print? What facts are there?”

  “Well, the guy is dead. That one is a fact. The girl is gone, and that’s fact two. It’s also bloody in there and the deed was done with something big and sharp. That’s about it.”

  “Sign of forced entry?” I asked.

  “Nope. Front door was unlocked. One of the neighbors remembers seeing a dark-colored van parked in the drive. It could have been black, green, blue, just about any color but white. Saw it late, before he went to bed. Didn’t notice the time. Said he thought he had seen it before, sometime back. Few months back. But couldn’t be sure. Looked out the window for no other reason than he wanted to look. Saw the van and didn’t think anything of it. No reason he should. People have visitors all the time. He didn’t hear any yelling, but says his air conditioner runs loud and he had the TV on. None of the other neighbors saw or heard anything. Look, I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and worry about it later.”

  “I’d like to take those photos of the outside of the house, a shot or two of you.”

  “You do that, but you do it from the road. I don’t want you on the lawn. A valuable clue that we probably won’t find anyway might be there. As for me, I’m not up for pictures, and believe me, I like my picture taken, like it so much you bought some National Geographic footage you’d probably find me on it or in it. I’ll jump in front of a camera, I get the chance. But not today. No fucking way. We catch whoever did this, it’ll be an accident. Someone saw something and tells us, we might catch a break. Someone comes forward and admits it. Someone knows who did it because they bragged. My God, that bedroom was coated in blood. All over the bed, the walls. And there were bloody tracks, and there was that boy’s shit smell. Jesus. A mess. A sickening mess.”

  “It’s as bloody as you said, you ought to have some shoe prints.”

  “Oh, yeah. No one was trying to be careful, either because they were in a frenzy, didn’t care or didn’t expect to be caught. We got footprints, but it’ll be a Cinderella job, going to everyone with that size shoe, matching it to their foot. I might as well just put an ad in the paper begging the killer to turn himself in.”

  “Cheaper than DNA.”

  “I told you about our budget. What DNA? Guy doing the fingerprints, sucker took a two-day fingerprint course. He might as well have got his training off the back of a gum wrapper.”

  “Was the place ransacked?”

  “Torn apart, looked like the Tasmanian Devil had been in there. But that could have been a plan on the woman’s part. Make it look like murder and robbery, and her taken by the killer. She could plan on showing up later, having escaped from her killers, so to speak. That would be clever.”

  He chattered on some more, finally got in his car and drove away. I walked around the outside of the house and took the photos, then I went back to the office and typed up a generic kind of report. When I finished typing it up, I filed it with Timpson, went to lunch, pulled up at the curb in front of the café. Before I went inside for a sandwich, I got out my cell phone and called Jimmy.

  His cell went to voice mail, and I left a message: “Call me.”

  27

  Went all day and didn’t hear from Jimmy. I thought about going over to the university, but didn’t. I didn’t go to his house, because I didn’t want to give Trixie anything to think about. She was a smart woman. I wasn’t sure how well I could hide what was on my mind, pretend that nothing was wrong.

  Belinda and I had dinner together at my parents’ place. They loved her, and Mother fussed over her and made sure she had plenty to eat and asked her all manner of questions.

  Belinda was a real hit.

  When we went out, I saw Jazzy in her tree. She hadn’t been there when we drove up, but now that it was growing dark, when she should have been inside, she was in the tree.

  I looked up and said, “Hi, Jazzy.”

  She raised her hand and waved like she didn’t really mean it.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Jazzy said.

  “This is my friend, Belinda.”

  “Hello, Jazzy,” Belinda said.

  “Are you still my friend?” Jazzy asked.

  “Sure, honey,” I said. “We’re always friends.”

  “Okay,” she said, but she didn’t act like she meant it. She turned her back to us and sat on the other side of the little platform and looked toward her own house.

  “Bye, Jazzy,” I said.

  “Glad to meet you, Jazzy,” Belinda said.

  Without turning, Jazzy lifted her hand in a goodbye wave.

  We went out to the car. When we were inside, Belinda said, “That little girl has a crush on you.”

  “That’s obscene.”

  “Nothing like that. She doesn’t like seeing you with me. She thinks that’s the end for her. In psych class I learned about that. She’s not used to having friends, or they leave her. Trust issues.”

  “You can’t know all that meeting her once,” I said, starting the engine.

  “No. But you’ve told me about her, and now I’ve met her. Didn’t you say her mother is…well, a tramp?”

  I eased the car out into the street. “That seems to be the case.”

  “We have to help her, Cason.”

  “I know. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. Though that’s not a good excuse. I get my head straight here in a few days, I’m going to push Child Protective Services hard. I may write a piece about their incompetence. They should have already done something. They’ve let Jazzy fall through the cracks.”

  “You’re an all-right guy,” Belinda said.

  “And you’re not so bad yourself,” I said.

  We didn’t go to Belinda’s place or mine. I told her I had some research to do, a column I was thinking about writing. She took it well enough, but I figured she was already thinking I was looking for a way to dump her; thinking maybe she had made a mistake with Jazzy, saying “we” had to do something, therefore making us a couple.

  I couldn’t let that worry me right then. I went home and sat in a chair and read a bit of a book, and then I paced awhile. I set the alarm and tried to take a two-hour nap, but I just lay there the whole time looking up, trying to make animals and insect shapes out of the water spots on the ceiling, then the alarm went off and I got up and walked around some more.

  At about one a.m. I got a screwdriver out of my toolbox under the kitchen sink, got a container of Vicks VapoRub, put it in my coat pocket along with a neckerchief and the screwdriver. I added gloves and a flashlight to the pocket, pulled on the coat, which was a little too warm for the weather, wore my old tennis shoes, picked up an extra pair of shoes, walked out to my car and drove over to the murder site.

  I drove past the place and glanced at it. I could see the yellow tape was still there. I wondered if the chief had stationed someone to wait and see if Tabitha came back, but truth was, I doubted he had thought of it. He was quite the mess, and the way he was handling things, it might end up with him hosing oil off a filling station driveway, maybe greeting people at the Wal-Mart.

  I circled anyway, just to be sure. Second time I went by, I decided there was no one outside watching, not unless they were in a tree. To be safe, I checked those as much as the dark would allow.

  There was one advantage: the house wasn’t well lit from the streetlights. In fact, all the streetlights along that way had been knocked out; probably kids with BB guns or pellet rifles. Still, I didn’t pull up in the driveway or park out front at the curb. I went around the block and found a place to stop under a tree in a little park. The park consisted of about a half acre, a dozen big trees and a picnic table. I locked the car and walked back to the house. As I went dogs barked, and one light went on in a house nearby, but no one came to the window and no one opened the door.

  I walked faster, and pretty soon I was down at the corner of the block. The coat made me warm, but I liked
the pockets. They held my tools.

  I stood there for just a moment, then went back a few steps, slipped over a wooden fence without snagging my balls and went through a backyard that was dark. I went over the other side of the fence without getting attacked by a dog that turned out to be a stone yard ornament, and landed in the backyard of the house I wanted.

  I got the gloves out of my coat and pulled them on. I took hold of the screwdriver. I went to the back window and tested it with my hands. I didn’t need the screwdriver. It went right up. Maybe whoever had come in had come in this way. Or maybe the cops had unlocked it from the inside and left it that way. I could see it like that, in there with the stench and the body, and someone had to throw open the window, get some air.

  When the window was up, a foul odor like the graveyard of all things long dead gusted out at me. I turned without considering and threw up in the unkempt shrubbery there. I got the Vicks jar out of my pocket, opened it up and dunked my finger in and rubbed it under my nose, and pushed some of it up each nostril. I pulled the neckerchief out and tied it around my face.

  I stepped through the window and pulled myself inside, turned on the flashlight. The air conditioner was humming. One of the cops had turned it back on, to preserve the crime scene maybe. More likely because he couldn’t take the heat and the stench. It didn’t help much in the latter department, even with it on and my nose full of Vicks.

  I took off the coat and draped it over the windowsill and took a look around.

  First thing I saw was the bed. It was deeply stained with blood and feces; it drooped in the middle. There were hacks in the old-style mattress and the stuffing was poking out in spots, and the part of it that was not stained stood out prominently, white as ready-to-pick cotton.

  The chief was right. It was hard to imagine there was that much blood in the human body. Because of the air conditioner, the blood was still drying and it had all gone dark as motor oil. The walls were splattered with it. The killer had moved around, striking from all angles; I knew that much from investigating crime scenes in Houston.

  I took a deep breath of Vicks, flashed the light at my feet, and then spread the pool of yellow forward until it fell on the bloody shoe tracks the chief told me about. They were all around the bed. It looked as if someone had danced there. I eased over without stepping in the mess, and saw amongst the shoe prints bloody little bare footprints. I knew that would be Tabitha. The chief had either been playing coy with me or he was as stupid as he thought he was, because it was obvious she had been nabbed. And then I thought, maybe they fought alongside the bed, her with the machete, or the axe, and finally she had pushed him back on the bed and finished him off; that would explain some things.