Charity Kills (A David Storm Mystery) (2 page)

The house where he now lived in lonely silence had been a celebratory purchase after Angie had gotten her promotion. Angela Storm had been the love of his life, his wife and his best friend. She had been named the vice president of sales for a large oil field supply company. Although her income dwarfed Storm’s, she never gloated or was the least bit flagrant with her earning power; they were partners so the total always outweighed their individuality. With their combination of incomes and Angie’s desire to own a home, they could now afford to buy a house in the neighborhood she wanted, and that was the old historic Houston Heights. Always the eternal optimist, Angie convinced him that the close-in neighborhood would rebound and their investment would grow. Storm thought of her as a Mary Poppins, who always saw the future ahead as brighter than he did and in spite of his hesitation, he agreed and went along for the ride.

The Heights is an old community adjacent to downtown Houston, with classical wood Victorian houses built in the 1920s and ‘30s. Constructed before Houston’s meteoric expansion, the Heights had been the part of town where the working class had lived. They rode trolley cars and horse drawn carriages downtown to work and in the evening families sat on the porches hoping to catch any cooling breeze that might blow down the tree-lined streets. They waved and greeted their neighbors. Children played in the front yards, as was the custom in early Houston, before retiring to bedrooms with screened windows and oscillating ceiling fans.

The neighborhood had been idyllic in the ’20s and ‘30s, but as the city began its development to the suburbs west, east, south and north, it had lost its appeal to most Houston natives. Houston became a boomtown attracting people from around the world seeking their fortunes, but in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Houstonians seemed to all want new homes with big yards and with nice new schools built nearby. Even the oil companies were moving out of downtown to the upscale Galleria area and modern developments further north and west. With the addition of the new interstates and four lane highways the commute downtown became easily accessible for the newly rich and growing middle class. Many of these Houstonians worked in the growing oil patch or the growing medical field and wanted to stake their claim to a piece of the American dream.

Following these Houstonians’ exodus to the suburbs, the Heights became a low cost housing area, which meant it was an area where oppressed immigrants coming across the border to seek a better way of life could find cheap places to live. Four or five families would move in together and they could save their money to send home to the families they had left behind.

In the 1980s the yuppie movement started in Houston, and the Heights began to make a resurgence. Oil companies, engineering firms, and banking institutions built giant skyscrapers as paeans to their success and more people were again working downtown. The super highways of the 1950s were becoming congested and could not keep up with the growing traffic. Some of the advantages the suburbs had offered in the early days were now gone, replaced with hour-long commutes or trips on the express buses, which meant leaving the Houstonian’s ever valued personal car at home. In Houston the idea of leaving your car at home was akin to not being able to drink a cold “tall boy” on the drive home—it was just not done in Texas. Eager young couples began to buy up the dilapidated Heights properties and remodel them or replace them with updated three-thousand-square-feet contemporary two and three story homes; most were replicas of the original homes with the advantages of modern innovations.

Angie had always been the one who had the solid judgment for investments—even her ventures into the stock market had paid dividends. She had seen this trend coming and had pushed Storm to buy a stately two-story three-bedroom, pier and beam house, built circa 1930s with shuttered windows and porches that ran the length of the house.

Although he put up a good fight, Storm’s plea to buy a new house in the west part of town had fallen on deaf ears. Shortly after college when he was still single, he had lived in the Galleria area of town and loved it. It was a great place to see and be seen, with country dance clubs, upscale restaurants, and other frequented haunts, life was good. But Angie stuck to her guns about the Heights, as she always did, and like she always did, she got Storm to accept her plan. It was always a war he couldn’t win and mostly didn’t care to. She would giggle and smile at him and he knew his goose was cooked. When it came to Angie, he had always been out of his league; that was another thought that always made him smile. Storm had been a college football player when they met. He had never had a problem meeting cute girls, but not the type of girl you would marry or take home to Mom. When he met Angie he knew that intrigue was over. She was not only beautiful, but she was smart. She used to tell him she was smart enough to marry him.

They had fixed up the house, turning it into a three-bedroom home with two-and-one-half baths and a large family/party room, which opened onto the kitchen. Over the years the house had been a great place for their friends to gather and have fall-down, party-your-butt-off barbecues.

Angie, though, had always wanted children. She was of Italian descent, tall and slender with those magazine model good looks. Blended with Storm’s rugged athletic features, a bright gorgeous child would have been a natural outcome. Storm continually wanted to give Angie everything she required. Unfortunately, the extra bedroom went unfinished along with their hopes of picking the paint colors for a son or a daughter. Children seemed not be something he could give her, and as yet, adoption had not been a consideration.

* * * *

Sunday was usually Storm’s day to rest; it was also the day that left him with unfilled time to dwell on memories. While flooded with thoughts of the past, he also knew he had things to do and a place to be. Storm dragged himself to the shower and began his routine. He was out of the house in less than twenty minutes, not that the body was going anywhere, but time is always critical when you investigate a murder.

The trip from Storm’s house to the Dome took no time at all. He used service roads and the back streets, arriving only forty minutes after he had received the phone call from the dispatcher. The Dome complex had changed immensely in the past two years with the addition of a new stadium and the demolition of the old convention hall. There were even rumors that the Dome itself would be torn down, but Storm had never heard anything confirming that those innuendos were anything more than gossip. He felt they came from people with too much time on their hands who tried to guess the future, however he also knew you could never totally discount rumors, as many times, fiction did become fact.

The main entrance to the Dome complex hadn’t changed, at least not yet, and he turned in between the banners advertising the Lone Star Livestock Show and Rodeo. Why didn’t I remember it’s that time of year? He asked himself.

Lone Star time was when Houstonians dusted off their hats and shined their boots in hopes of recapturing the days of cowboys and the cattle herds that had once thrived on the land that surrounded the city of Houston. That storied past, with its free grazing land where cowboys slept under the stars was long gone, replaced with oil company offices and new housing developments. But once a year the city donned its Western garb and cowboy attitudes of the old days in the guise of raising scholarship money. Houston was proud of its Lone Star Livestock Show and Rodeo and the contributions it had made to youth of the city and surrounding rural South Texas, but Storm was also always amused at the trappings of the event. Women wore leather outfits adorned with feathers and fur and the men wore their cowboy hats and expensive exotic skinned boots, talking of horses and cattle, when again, Storm was sure the closest most of them had been to a horse was the local racetrack on the north side of Houston.

Storm was waved through the north Kirby gate by one of parking lot attendants working the early shift. He noted how the new stadium’s sign, its big bright red letters announcing its new name and sponsor, reflected the change from the old Dome days. The stadium, only a year old, sat directly on Kirby Street; the rest of the complex‘s sixty-five acres was bounded by Fannin, Old Spanish Trail, and Interstate 610. The new stadium was grand—actually, so big it almost blocked out the view of the old Dome from the street. Like many native Houstonians, Storm was resistant to change. The thought that the “Eighth Wonder of World”, as it was once called, had been diminished to a supporting player gnawed at him like the loss of an old friend.

The huge new convention center surrounded the Dome on its north side, and the sheer size and scope of the place was overwhelming, so Storm had not yet been able to locate the flashing lights or police presence of the murder scene.

“Where they at?” he asked the guard, showing him his badge.

“The cops? Boss, you will need to go ahead on and turn around and pull in at the south Kirby gate,” the guard directed him. “That’s where I seen the other police cars go in.” Storm backtracked and turned left so that he could enter at the south side of the stadium.

So far, this morning had not been one of Storm’s best: he had lost sleep, wrestled with memories of Angie, been faced with changes he wanted to ignore to a place he had known and enjoyed most of his life, and as yet, had not even had his first cup of coffee. What else did this morning have in store for him? Only the murder scene would to tell him that.

After entering the southern gate he saw the cars and crime scene tape around the site of the discovery of the body. He parked, got out, and immediately saw Sergeant Ralph Hebert holding court as the officer in charge of the scene. Sergeant Hebert saw him too and motioned him over to where he was regaling his troops with stories of the old days...

“Well, Detective, nice to see you could join us this morning.” His snide tone registered his disapproval.

Sergeant Hebert was a thirty-year veteran cop and had been around the department most of his adult life. He made it clear to anyone who would listen that anyone but a street cop was an overpaid, pampered pencil pusher. Born and raised in southeast Texas, Hebert was more Cajun than Texan and was obviously proud of it. He was known to be hard headed and contrary, but in all their dealings Storm had always felt that, although cantankerous, he was always fair.

“Nice to see you too, ‘Hee-bert.’” Storm knew that to pronounce Hebert’s name with an “e” sound rather the “a” sound (most Cajuns used the “a” sound) would piss him off. One good verbal jab deserved another. “What have we got?”

Hebert, glowering at him, spat out, “Dead girl found at around 5:00 AM this morning, nude. She fell out of a trash dumpster over there.” He pointed to a row of dumpsters placed in the parking lot for use during the three-day Livestock Show Barbecue Cook-off, which was a precursor to the three-week long show that would begin tomorrow.

“Who found her?” Asked Storm.

Hebert just pointed to a man wearing what looked like a cleaning crew uniform standing with a group of other police officers and dismissed Storm by saying, “You’re the big detective, you figure it out.”

The medical examiner had not yet arrived so the body was still lying where it had been discovered. Storm could tell even from a distance that the girl was young, brunette, and had ash-colored skin due to blood loss. As he got closer he saw that her features looked almost serene. She had been a pretty girl and way too young to have come to this awful end in this cold place. She was naked and no one had covered her up, probably waiting for the M.E. and the crime scene people to arrive to officially pronounce her dead. Although the M. E. would establish an official cause of death later, Storm could see her throat had been cut, slit from ear to ear, he also noticed there didn’t seem to be much blood around. If this young girl had died here and bled out, there would have much more blood, but there was no sign of any. The poor girl was lying there exposed to the prurient interest of the onlookers.

The policemen standing around the girl’s body were talking to the man in the cleaning crew uniform when Storm walked over.

“I’m Detective Storm of HPD. Your name, sir?”

“Ernie—Earnest—Underwood.”

Storm noted the name on his notepad. “Occupation?”

“I works for Manpower doin’ cleanup for the livestock show.”

Storm knew Manpower provided temporary help to the Livestock Show. They contracted for cleanup of the facility in the early hours of the morning before the crowds arrived. Manpower’s employees were mostly men on hard times who needed work and would do so for minimum wage. The livestock show had always been about helping the community in one way or another since its inception in the late 1930s and hiring these men qualified as one way to help.

“OK, Ernie, how did you find her? What made you look in here?” Asked Storm.

Ernie said eagerly, “Well, Boss, I comes out here to throw out the garbage bags from the stadium. We carry them bags down to the loading docks of the stadium and when the dumpsters there are full we start to bringing dem out here. This is loose,” Ernie motioned to the hinges that held the doors to the dumpster open, “and when I pulled on it, the door fell open like it is now. Kinda like it’s broke or something, so I hadta be careful not to tump everything inside out, ya know? Well, I was making sure it didn’t tump all over on ground when this arm fell out. Boss, it scaid the hell outta me, so I jumped back and that’s when that white girl came a-tumblin’ outta that thing. I ran back inside and got the boss and he was the one who called the police. I been out chere ever since talking to all the policemen.”

Ernie hesitated a little looking at Storm with frightened eyes. “Boss, that girl is a white girl.”

“Yes, I see that,” Storm replied dryly.

“Well, Boss, I just found her, nothing else. I been workin’ inside ‘til I found her. You can ask everyone they will tell ya, I was inside till I found her.”

Ernie sounded scared. Storm didn’t blame him. Like a lot of big cities, the HPD’s record with minorities wasn’t sterling. In the midst of jotting his notes, Storm stopped and looked at Ernie. “Don’t worry; I am sure you did the right thing. We will just double-check with your boss before we leave. Now what time was it when you found her?”