Primed for Murder (2 page)

Finally he saw two people, just shadowy shapes, wrestling around in there: a domestic dispute? Toby gazed at the spot and thought he heard another cry come from the blue house, more muffled than before.

One figure dropped to the floor and struggled to get up. The other wouldn’t allow it, and kept striking at the fallen form again and again with something. Toby couldn’t hear the blows but he cringed with each just the same. After a while, the one standing up stopped hitting the one lying down and moved back, as though admiring his handiwork. The flattened person didn’t stir.

Toby stood, teetering, open-mouthed, and waited for something else to happen.

After a minute, the shape that moved bent over the one that didn’t, then stood and walked out of sight. The room across the street suddenly darkened as the light was extinguished. Slanting shafts of sunlight still illuminated pieces of the person on the floor.

Toby saw a speck of shoe, part of a pant leg, a bit of sleeve and a hand. The bars of light—and Toby’s fractured view of the still figure—went away when the blind’s slats suddenly flipped shut. A moment later, fingers wedged a space between slats so somebody inside could peer out. Toby made himself a statue on the ladder, tried to become part of the house, willed his body invisible. A person who’d beat someone else so viciously could be capable of anything.

The ploy must have worked. Maybe Toby’s light-colored, paint-dappled coveralls faded into the pale backdrop of Mrs. Cratty’s house. Maybe the distinctive vertical and horizontal planes of the ladder blended into the lines of the clapboards and the shadows thrown by trees in leaf. Or maybe the watcher was only looking out at eye level, not upwards. In any case, the eyehole disappeared.

Long, sweaty moments later, Toby glimpsed a man with dark hair and broad shoulders running from the rear of the blue house. He carried a paper bag and had a white cloth wrapped around one hand. The man went out of sight behind some bushes, then reappeared at the dirt-floored alley bordering the back yards of all homes on that side of the street. Sunlight reflected off the man’s slick, sleek head as he unlocked a car half-hidden by a weather-beaten, dog-eared cedar fence. The man glanced both ways down the alley and climbed behind the wheel.

Toby tried to read the license plate, but it was the wrong angle and too far away. Looked like New York’s colors, though.

The car started up and drove off, flinging loose pebbles behind. A cloud of dust billowed in its wake. Toby watched without moving anything but his head. He followed the progress of the vehicle by the hazy dust plume that rose after it. The car—a late-model dark-gray sedan—turned from the alley at the end of the block and sped out of sight down a cross street, heading south, towards the city.

Toby inhaled a deep shuddering gulp of warm air: he’d held his breath for ages. He was still gripping his paintbrush, too. Heart beating like a hummingbird’s, Toby took can and brush, and climbed skittishly down the ladder. Safely on the ground again, he stood weak-kneed, staring at the blue house across the street.

Chapter 2

Thoughts crowded into Toby’s head, all jostling for attention. Stay where you are, the most prominent shouted. It’s none of your business. Keep painting. Play deaf, dumb and blind, like Tommy in the rock opera. Better still: go home. Say the paint fumes got to you. Pretend you weren’t here when it happened.

When what happened?

Check it out, another part of his brain echoed. See if somebody really is down on the floor of that blue house, somebody unconscious or dying, who might need help.

A different country heard from. It said: the guy’s already dead. You know that. And you know what you’ve got to do: get the cops and let them handle it.

Stay out of it. Go over there. Call the law. What to do?

Toby looked up and down the street. The neighborhood was as quiet, as empty of traffic as the moon. His ladder was still tipped against the front of Mrs. Cratty’s house. The triangle of fresh paint drying under the roof peak looked small and lonely against the remaining clapboards still to be done. If I go back to work, Toby thought, and really bust my hump, I can finish touch-up tomorrow. Then I can collect the rest of my pay when the old lady returns next week.

But no, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the job.

Stay here? Or check out the house across the street? Toby flipped a mental coin.

It came up tails. Okay, he’d make sure what he’d seen wasn’t merely hallucinations brought on by breathing petroleum vapors eight, ten hours a day. If what he’d witnessed happened to be real, he’d call the cops.

Toby used a fist to hammer down the lid on the paint can, dropped the brush in a bucket of thinner. He strolled across the street, trying to look like he belonged in the neighborhood in case somebody came by. He attempted whistling but couldn’t work up any spit. His feet were numb and his hands were cold. His stomach churned.

From the sidewalk, it was five paces to the front of the house along a root-buckled concrete walk bordered by low hedges. A short wooden staircase led up to a small, square front porch. Treads and risers, slathered with paint, had probably been done by whoever daubed the house, Toby figured, by the uneven texture and petrified drops lumping the surface. The latest coat was the color of the house, halfway between sky and navy. The treads had worn to a rainbow of different shades, all revealed where feet had worn or chipped away crudely applied layers.

Toby clung to wrought iron handrails, pulled his lanky body up the stairs. The crummy paint job looked even worse close-up. Real slap-dash weekend work, as though somebody had sloshed a few gallons at the top, then halfheartedly spread the paint as it trickled down. The house looked different at ground level: so ordinary, like there couldn’t possibly be violence behind its run-of-the-mill walls.

Toby murmured, “I know what I saw. I think.”

He tapped lightly beside the door, beneath numbers tacked to the wood: 1413. Even the brass numerals were splashed with blue.

There was no answer. Toby bounced knuckles off the wood, hard: still nothing. Just what he expected. He tugged open the screened door and tried the knob. Locked tight. He bent to peer in windows bracketing the front door but both were heavily draped.

Toby cut across a scorched lawn to the window he’d seen down into from the ladder. It was open a few inches, but the sill was too high to reach from the ground.

He soft-pedaled along a sunburned grass strip dividing crumbling concrete tracks. The driveway led back to a detached two-car garage. The doors were locked. Putting an eye to a dusty side window, Toby saw the garage was unoccupied.

The alley was empty, too. Tire-spun dust still blemished the air. Toby knelt to examine the ground. The gray sedan hadn’t left more than a scuff and it was tough to distinguish one track from another on the dry, packed earth. Maybe the cops could find something. He turned back towards the house.

Basement windows were too narrow to crawl through. Between head-high rhododendron bushes was a screened-in porch. The door hung open, so Toby pulled it wide and cat-footed between stacked lawn chairs and plastic bags of crushed aluminum cans to a half-glassed back entrance, closed shut. Shading eyes, he saw through frilly curtains into a kitchen floored with blue vinyl, complete with modern appliances.

The door was locked. He thought about smashing the glass with a mallet from the croquet set racked in a porch corner and reaching in to unlatch it, but vetoed the noisy, potentially painful idea. A guy could get in trouble for that. Besides, there was a neater, quicker route inside.

The cracked-open window called as Toby returned the way he’d come. He made straight for his battered pickup parked in shade at the rear of Mrs. Cratty’s driveway, near her freshly painted garage. Toby untied a six-foot wooden stepladder from the homemade rack and carried it back on his shoulder. He set it up beneath the open window of the blue house.

He oozed sweat. His stomach writhed like he’d downed a bowl of week-old chili. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. This is dangerous, he thought. With my luck, somebody will come along and spot me. I’ll be busted for burglary.

But he had to see, to be sure. He owed it to his conscience.

Without further thought Toby scrambled up the ladder. He hooked fingertips in the gap between window and frame and heaved. The wood was dry, squawking like a gut-shot goose, but the sash went up. He shouldered metal blinds aside with a clatter, threw a leg over the sill and ducked inside.

The contrast between bright sunshine outside and dimness inside the room momentarily blinded him. Something crackled underfoot: paper. He didn’t move.

When his eyes had adjusted, he quickly scanned the room. Light flowed weakly around edges of the blinds, enough to tell he was in a den wallpapered with alternating tan-and-white vertical stripes.

The place would be cozy, usually. Right now, it was a mess. Books from built-in shelves lining one whole wall lay heaped in mounds. Drawers of a large wooden desk in one corner were pulled open. The padded brown leather seat of a well-used swivel chair and the cushions of a lived-in, earth-tone easy chair were slashed to rags. Objects—pictures, pottery, a small shelf and bric-a-brac it had once held—now lay crushed and broken. Framed photographs marching along a fireplace mantel had been toppled. One had fallen face-up onto the marble hearth and spidery cracks in the glass over the photo scarred the face beneath. Sheaves of paper were strewn everywhere.

In the middle of the floor, half-covered in stray 8½″ x 11″ sheets, lay a body.

The guy was dressed in a lightweight tawny suit that went with the room’s color scheme. The creamy satin-lined tail of the coat was flipped up over the man’s butt. His pant legs were bunched above his ankles, showing off canary-yellow socks and the shiny pigeon-toed soles of almost-new sand-colored shoes. The man lay on his face with arms outstretched, as if performing a dive with a low difficulty factor. The back of his skull above a salt-and-pepper ponytail was a pulpy mess. A dark pool seeping into a thick beige area rug surrounded his head like a wreath. A fly was caught in tacky dampness inches from the man’s ear and buzzed feebly, trying to pull loose.

The thing that had done the damage, a wrought-iron fireplace poker with a solid brass handle shaped into a duck’s head, lay on the rug a foot away from the body. The mallard—its bill gooey with blood—looked like a vampire.

Toby walked on a path of paper, knelt to see the guy’s face. The man kissed the rug, nose squashed flat against the nap. The open eyes stared at carpet fibers without seeing them. Toby didn’t like touching the corpse, realized he shouldn’t. But he wanted to know if he’d recognize the man as someone he’d seen while working on Charbold Street. It seemed important at the moment. He brushed loose papers aside, hooked fingers through the dead man’s belt loops, and rolled the body onto its side. The man was limp and heavier than he looked. The shirt matched the socks, discounting spatters of blood.

The collar was held together by a bolo tie cinched with a silver ornament shaped like the head of a grinning jungle cat. The man’s hair and clothes smelled of cigar smoke.

Toby gazed a long time at the features, trying to imagine how the dead man would look when alive. Take away a ragged gash across the broad, brown forehead. Remove a welt disfiguring the high cheekbone. Forget about the red syrup covering his lower face that made him look like a cherry pie-eating contestant. What have you got?

You’ve got somebody who looked like he was from somewhere else than Syracuse. Not part of the local Italian-Afro-Polish-Irish-Jewish melting pot. He was sixty or so, Toby guessed, by the gray hair. The face was lean with skin the color of tanned cowhide, tight to the skull. A thin, sharp nose featured high, narrow nostrils. The eyes were deep and dark. Prominent lips slack in a wide mouth.

Toby didn’t recognize him, didn’t know if he should. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t recall seeing anyone come or go at the blue house during the whole time he’d been at Mrs. Cratty’s. He hadn’t paid much attention though. This house was directly across from hers, so it would have been out of sight much of the time he’d painted the sides and back. Armies of people could have bivouacked there and Toby would never have known.

So who was this guy? How’d he get to be lying here dead? Who was the man who’d killed him, and why?

Toby cringed as he rifled the corpse’s clothing. The dead man didn’t have a wallet in hip or breast pocket. He carried no keys, matches or loose change. The coat label said the suit was one of millions sold in chain stores. Side pockets held nothing but lint and dark flakes of tobacco. Toby let the stiff go and the body slumped back the way it had come to rest, facedown in the red puddle. The fly in the pooled blood stopped struggling and gave up the ghost.

He stood to browse, walking a path of blank sheets of paper. Conscious of his paint-smeared hands, his telltale fingerprints, he just looked, touching nothing.

A few popular novels slummed among the scattered books, but most hardbound volumes seemed to be texts on Mexican history. There were dozens dealing with the Mayas, Aztecs, Olmecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs and other -ecs. Since Toby favored watching TV over reading, the books didn’t interest him much. But they made him imagine the guy who owned this house was either a history nut or a teacher.

Toby found a pencil and used it to flip open the cover of a hardback on the floor:
Pre-Columbian Mexico
. Inside the cover was a fancy bookplate reading “Ex Libris” and “Puterbaugh.” He idly turned pages with the pencil’s eraser and came across a picture. The caption said: “Detail depicting Lord Shield-Pacal from Stela B, Palenque.” Except for an elaborate headdress the figure in the photo wore, and earplugs the size of coffee cups, the Indian chief could have been the brother of the dead man—identical profiles. Toby pencil-closed the book, and pencil-opened another: same sticker, same name, and same pictures of the dead man’s ancient kin.