Maddie Cochere - Two Sisters and a Journalist 01 - Murder Under Construction (2 page)

Sergeant Rorski spun around to face us, and for a moment, I thought he overheard us talking about the fireworks.

“Jo,” he roared. “Downtown. I need your statement.”

“Sarge, I need a shower,” I protested. “I’ve got dirt in my underwear. Can I do it tomorrow?”

He faced the officer who was still grinning. “Take her to the station and get her statement. Don’t let her leave until she signs everything. I don’t want to see her again.”

I knew arguing with him was useless, and I dutifully walked behind the officer. I took a quick glance back at Jackie. She put her hand up in a telephone gesture and mouthed, “I’ll call you.”

~ ~ ~

Two hours. It took a freaking two hours for the officer to have me write my statement. The actual statement writing only took five minutes, but the twit put me in a room with no paper or writing utensils. Every time I stuck my head out the door to ask about the needed supplies, the officer on duty yelled at me to “get back in there.” Officer Twit finally came back with a pen and paper, but he disappeared again for another forty-five minutes before bringing official papers for me to sign. His official papers turned out to be one slip of paper proclaiming that I promised to cross my heart and hoped to die in a cellar full of rats if the statement I wrote wasn’t true. We then had a disagreement over how I would get home.

“It’s not up to me to take you,” Officer Twit said.

“But you brought me here, and I can’t walk home. Why should I bother family at dinnertime
? Give me a ride. It’ll take you five minutes.”

He smiled the entire time he argued with me. What was up with all the grinning? But I wouldn’t let up until he gave in and led me to his cruiser.

It was ten minutes later when we pulled into a cul-de-sac on the south side of town. There were four, well-manicured, two-story homes on the circular knob at the end of Clark Street. Officer Twit pulled into the first driveway on the right.

I jumped out and ran to the house. He may or may not have heard the thank you I threw over my shoulder as I ran, but now that the house was in sight, I was desperate to get my clothes off and jump into the shower.

The front door was unlocked, but that didn’t surprise me. I had left it unlocked earlier in the day when I walked across the cul-de-sac after lunch to chat with Pepper about the upcoming holiday and cookout. She was rolling out cookie dough, and the flour was flying. She had it on both arms, her shirt, and in her hair. I sat on a stool at the counter and watched her make moon-shaped cookies filled with a walnut and sugar mixture. She dusted them with confectioner’s sugar while still warm, and they were melt-in-your-mouth delicious. Between the two of us, we ate nearly as many as she set aside for the holiday.

My sister Pepper was thirty-five and older than I was by three years, but I was taller by three inches. We were both born with dark brown hair and green eyes, but two years ago, she made the decision to become a blonde. Her desire for her hair to look rock ‘n’ roll spiked had fallen flat and most days her hair stuck out in all directions. The blonde color had eventually evolved to a canary-yellow hue. As odd as the overall style and color was, it was peculiarly adorable on her.

Pepper had been overweight all her life, while I had always been thin. It wasn’t until I suspected my husband Alan of cheating on me that I began gaining weight. He complained about my weight gain after five pounds, and by the time I had achieved a twenty-pound gain, we were in divorce court. Two weeks after the divorce was final, he moved in with his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, a coffeehouse barista.

Anger set in, followed by depression, and I spent far too much time eating at Pepper’s house. That was two years ago, and after watching Alan remarry, receive a promotion, and move into a gorgeous new home in a beautiful subdivision, I continued to comfort myself with food. Pepper recently crossed the two-hundred pound mark, and I was right behind her at one-ninety. I was flabbergasted I had gained sixty pounds in two years. More and more I realized my weight directly affected my self-esteem, but no matter how hard I tried, I felt helpless to get my eating under control.

Now, hours later, I was mildly annoyed with myself for eating so many cookies, but I smiled remembering how good they were as I dashed through my doorway and slammed the front door behind me. In a flash, I had my shorts and underwear off and whipped my shirt over my head. I reached around to unhook my bra, but a strange feeling I wasn’t alone swept over me.

I glanced over to the dining room doorway and saw a tall man peering around the corner. He was watching me through thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

My scream was bloodcurdling. I wanted to stop screaming, but the ear-splitting noise continued. I finally thought to grab a pillow from the sofa and hold it in front of my crotch. Mercifully, the screaming subsided. Strange, feeble, unhappy sounds replaced it.

I finally found my voice. “Stewie! What the blazing devils are you doing in my house?”

Before he could answer, Pepper’s husband, Buck, burst through the front door and was greeted with a perfect view of my big, naked butt.

Buck is super cute, and although I’ve known him since we were all kids, it killed me to have him see my behind. He had seen me naked once before when I was nineteen, but he always said it was purely accidental when he walked in on me while I was changing into my swimsuit. His eyes twinkled and crinkled on that day, but they weren’t twinkling now.

I grabbed another pillow to hold against my backside.

“What the bloody hobbit is going on in here?” he yelled. “We thought you were being murdered. Even the hair on the cat stood up.”

I was completely mortified, and I hated them both at the moment.

“I thought we had a date,” Stewie said nonchalantly. “The door was open. I figured you were upstairs, and you’d be down in a minute.”

A date! I had forgotten, but it wasn’t a date. It was maybe going out for ice cream.

“Everything’s ok, Buck,” I said. “I didn’t know Stewie was here, and he scared the sh-.” I caught myself and said instead, “He scared the beejees out of me.”

The twinkle was back in his eye. “Well, I’d say you look like you’re ready to get this date started, so I’ll just head on back over to my place and let you two get to it.”

I glared at him as he went out the door, but I held my tongue. I was done. I was hot, dirty, and I was pretty sure my deodorant gave out with the scream. If Stewie hadn’t still been standing there staring at me, I would have lifted my arm to do a smell check.

“Stewie, I -”

He interrupted before I could finish my thought. “Jo, please. Don’t call me Stewie. Only my mother has ever called me Stewie, and it embarrasses me. Call me Stewart.”

“Stewart. Stewart.” I tried the name out a couple of times. It didn’t work. I yelled at him, “Why didn’t you tell me that forever ago, before I started calling you Stewie?” I didn’t even know if I liked him well enough to date him, and he was exasperating me now. “Stewart, there’s no way I’m in the mood for ice cream tonight. I’ll see you at work next Wednesday, Stewart.”

“Pepper invited me to her Fourth of July party on Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

I sighed.

“Ok. Just make sure you bring plenty of potato chips and beer.”

The hot shower felt wonderful. It took some extra scrubbing to get the dried blood off my knee, but other than a superficial scrape, it was fine. Dirt had rubbed for so long in my underwear, I had chafing where I’d never chafed before. A handful of medicated powder felt soothing, and as long as I didn’t get overworked and start sweating again, there was no danger of making paste. My long, silky hair was my best feature these days, and I was allowing it to air dry, which would create soft waves near the evenly trimmed bottom.

I reached for another barbecued rib from the plain white box in front of me on the coffee table. It had been delivered from Smitty’s a few minutes ago.

Smitty’s was a dirty, hole-in-the wall bar, frequented by only the most serious of drinkers. A little-known fact was that they had the best beef ribs in the state. After plying Smitty with pies, Jackie and I managed to obtain delivery privileges, but the driver’s tip was always a non-negotiable twenty-dollar bill. After everything I had been through today, the tip was money well spent.

It was eight o’clock, and I hadn’t had anything to eat since noon. I inhaled the half dozen beefy ribs and washed them down with a cold bottle of beer. With no one in the house, I indulged in a few loud belches to alleviate the stuffed feeling.

I was permitting myself to pig out until after the Fourth. Pepper and I were going to get serious about losing weight, but until then, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about eating anything.

I leaned back on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. I started laughing. What in the world went through Stewie’s mind when he saw me tearing off my clothes? What did Buck think when he saw my backside?

My laughter ratcheted up to slightly hysterical. Stewie probably wouldn’t tell anyone about it, but Buck was going to be spreading this all over the country. He was a long haul driver and only home every other weekend. He’d be back out on the road again on Wednesday with more tales to tell. His sister-in-law stories were legend, and now he was going to have a new murder tale, and a nearly naked tale, to add to his repertoire. I was going to be famous one day because of Buck.

Just as my laughter was subsiding, and I was debating about crying over the fiasco, the red phone rang.

The red phone is my prized thrift shop find. I didn’t know anyone who still had a home phone plugged into a wall jack, but I had one. And it had a secret telephone number known only to Pepper and Jackie. We usually chatted on our cell phones, but when there was something big afoot, the girls called me on the red phone. It was all very clandestine.

The phone sat on an antique wooden telephone stand next to my second favorite find – a large, overstuffed chair with a small refrigerator unit in the side.

I jumped into the chair cross-legged, reached for another bottle of beer, and answered the telephone, “Hello?”

“What are you doing?” Jackie asked.

“I just finished shoveling ribs into my piehole, and now I’m drinking a beer. What have you got?”

“Howard was happy with the peach pie, and he gave me some information, but I have to take two more pies to him later this week if I want to hear about anything else he finds. He’s a greedy mother f-”

I cut her off. “Jackie, help me out here. I told you I promised Pepper I’d quit swearing, and if you keep dropping f-bombs, I’ll never be able to stop. Kelly’s twelve now, and Keith’s ten, and she says it’s our fault her kids are swearing. I know full well they hear it every day when they’re with their friends, but I still promised her I’d knock it off.”

I heard a muffled laugh before she asked, “Is that why you keep coming up with absurd expletives? When you dropped that bottle on your foot last week and yelled hockeysnots, I thought you’d lost your mind.”

“I know,” I said. “If I could come up with one word that has some real punch, it would be easier, but I’ve got nothin’, so I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Buck’s choices are just as bad, and I think all we’re doing is entertaining the kids while they swear up a storm with their friends behind our backs.”

I heard her laugh. “Well then, Howard is a son-of-a-mooch, because I don’t know when I’m going to have time to bake more pies.”

“Buy ‘em at the bakery,” I suggested.

“Jo Ravens, you’re talking sacrilege! There isn’t any comparison between that dumpy bakery and my pies. Besides, Howard would know in a heartbeat, and I can’t risk losing him as a source.”

“I’ll help you make the pies,” I said. I knew she would never take me up on the offer. “What did you find out from him?”

“It’s kind of complicated. They were able to get a name based on her prints, but it’s not her real name.”

I didn’t know if she paused for effect or not. “What? What name did he tell you?” I prodded.

“Ruby.”

“Ruby?”

“Yep. Ruby Rosewell. She was a stripper in Pittsburgh. They picked her up a few times for prostitution, and every time they booked her, she gave the same name and swore she was born with it.”

“If she’s from Pittsburgh, how did she end up in Buxley, Ohio?” I asked.

“No one knows, but our little town is gaining a reputation for murder, so it probably seemed like a good dumping ground to someone. The police are positive she was murdered somewhere else and taken to the construction site. My money is on her pimp. If they find him, I think this could be solved pretty darn quick.”

“Do you have a time of death yet?”

“Howard said she’d been dead about eleven hours when he first checked her over, so that puts the murder around five a.m.”

“Did you get anything else?”

“Nope. Not yet. Do you want copies of the pictures?”

“I sure do,” I said enthusiastically. “Just don’t let Sergeant Rorski know I have them. I don’t want him to know I’m interested in this one, or he’ll stroke out for sure.”

I heard her laugh again. “I’ll send them to your email. If you and Pepper decide to go snooping around, let me know.”

~ ~ ~

My dreams are usually the stuff movies are made of. I dream in color, the characters are always fun and interesting, and if I can hold onto a dream long enough in the morning to remember it, I’m always entertained by what my mind came up with yet again.

Still in that place between sleep and coming fully awake, I realized the dead girl from yesterday had made her way into my dream. I was in a strip club looking for a pimp. I scanned the crowd before zeroing in on the stage. The scene quickly mesmerized me. Five wholly naked girls were either writhing in front of leering men or making obscene movements on poles. I hadn’t seen this much female nudity since the locker room after gym class in junior high school, and nobody had big boobs like these back then.

Curtains at the back of the stage parted, and the dead girl strutted out. She was fully clothed in black leather and carried a long black whip. The other girls appeared fearful and scattered into the audience. She struck several of the men with her whip as she pranced the outer edges of the stage. It became eerily quiet in the room. She stopped in front of me. The black of her eyes matched her hair, and her stare bored into me. I couldn’t turn away. I knew she wanted me to come onstage. The next thing I knew, I was naked and twirling around the stripper pole. I was horrified my fat was hanging out for everyone to see. The patrons began booing. I tried to dip and writhe, but lost my hold on the pole and fell to the floor with a splat sound. The boos became a roar. The dead girl cracked her whip. The room became silent again. She leaned down and whispered to me, “Paula. My name is Paula.”

My eyes flew open. I wasn’t naked, and I wasn’t in a strip club, but I was sweating profusely. I threw the bedding back and sat on the edge of the bed. That was
not
a good dream. That was a porno flick, and it was unsettling. And why was I so hot?

I slipped my feet into fuzzy orange slippers and grabbed my robe. I went downstairs to the kitchen and checked the thermostat. Eighty degrees. The air conditioning wasn’t working.

The clock on the stove blinked twelve o’clock. The power had gone out during the night. I had no idea what time it was, but it didn’t matter. It was Sunday, and I hadn’t made any plans.

I slipped the robe on over the long t-shirt I wore to bed before walking out the front door into even more heat with an abundance of humidity. It was going to be another scorcher today. I didn’t mind the heat, but I did mind the humidity, and it seemed much worse with the extra weight I was carrying.

My newspaper wasn’t on the porch. I spotted it near the end of the driveway and shuffled my way down to it.

“Did you have a good time last night?”

I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and squinted across to Pepper’s house. Buck was working outside piling fresh mulch into flower beds. He was standing in one of the beds with his hands on his hips and a grin plastered across his face.

I continued shuffling and made my way across the cul-de-sac.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I had a wonderful time last night. I spent it with a box of ribs and a couple of beers.”

“What happened to your date?”

“He wasn’t my date. He wants to go out, but I keep saying no. He’s a co-worker. He’s nice enough, but he’s kind of odd.”

“I liked the last guy. Edward. What was wrong with him?”

Just thinking about Edward made me cringe. “For starters, he was too loud no matter where we went, and the constant phone calls from his ex-wife made me want to kill him and her both.”

Keith came out the front door with a gym bag in hand. Kelly followed with a small suitcase, and Pepper brought up the rear.

“Where are you guys going?” I asked.

Keith screwed his face into a pout and said, “Mom’s making us spend two whole days with Grandmama so she can get ready for the cookout.”

“I don’t want to go,” Kelly grumbled. “Why can’t I stay here and help you?”

“Because I don’t want your brother to have to deal with your grandmama by himself. You go and help him.”

“But she smells,” Keith said mimicking Kelly’s tone.

“She smells because she chain smokes,” Pepper said. “Play outside as much as possible and be nice to her.”

“Let your grandmama be a lesson to you,” I said. “If you don’t want to grow up to smell like she does, don’t smoke.”

“She’s a toothless wonder,” Keith said.

“All right. That’s enough,” Buck admonished. “Your grandmama loves you, and you kids will have a good time if you let yourselves. Go on. Get in the car.”

Buck looked over and winked at me. He was first to use the phrase about Mama, and it was his fault the kids used it now. She rarely wore her false teeth, and when she did, she thought it was funny to stick them out at the kids. Doing so had only served to scare Kelly half to death when she was little, and for weeks after, we couldn’t stop her from looking in the mirror to see if her teeth were falling out.

“Why in the world aren’t you dressed yet?” Pepper asked. “It’s almost noon.”

“I don’t know. Yesterday wore me out, and I slept in.” I turned to Buck. “My power was out during the night, and now my air doesn’t work now. Will you take a quick look?”

“Let me wash up, and I’ll be right over.”

Pepper opened the car door. “I’ll be back in about an hour or so. Come over this afternoon and help me get things ready?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on what Jackie found out about the murder.”

I shuffled back across the cul-de-sac with my newspaper. I needed some coffee.

An hour later, I was happily settled in my murder room.

Buck had fixed the air within minutes by simply flipping a switch in the breaker box. It never occurred to me to try that first. I assumed I would be looking at a huge repair bill, but my savings account was safe for another day.

After Buck left, I showered, pulled on a pair of jeans with an elastic waist, and yanked a navy blue t-shirt over my head. The style had become a uniform for me. Nothing else was comfortable. If I was feeling festive, I might wear an orange or yellow tee, but chances were good you would find me in navy blue or black. I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone, but I felt better trying to hide my weight gain behind the dark clothing.

My murder room was a cozy upstairs office. It was over the garage on the east end of the house. Alan had used it for a television room late at night, but I repainted the dark room with a pretty coral color and installed new beige carpeting. I never took the time to furnish the room until after I found the third murder victim last year.

The first two bodies were crimes of passion. A husband murdered his wife and stuffed her in a garbage bag before tossing her into the dumpster next to the mortgage office where I worked. The large sign on the front of the dumpster clearly read:
Property of Faye’s Dry Cleaning. No public disposal.
That didn’t stop me from going to work early the next morning to toss in my two garbage bags, because I had missed my trash collector. It wouldn’t have been a problem if my watchband hadn’t hit the edge and broken. Instead of falling onto the ground, it fell into the dumpster. I ran into the mortgage office and grabbed a chair to stand on to look inside. The dumpster was only about a third full, and most of the trash was clean paper and plastic. I could see my watch in an empty box. I figured the best spot to land when I jumped in would be on the largest bag. I met Sergeant Rorski that day.