Primed for Murder (6 page)

“You still singing that same tired song?”

“There’s no pile of books, like you told us,” Dixon said reasonably. “No slashed furniture. No bloody rug or spatters. Everything’s normal.”

“Most of all, no body, like you claimed.” French’s voice had a nasty tone.

“They put the room back in order,” Toby said. “But they were careless. Did you look at the books? Some were shelved upside down. Pictures on the walls didn’t match spots on the wallpaper where other things once hung, and—”

French stopped and Toby almost ran into him. “Know what I think?”

“Who cares what you think? I know what I saw.” Toby’s face, inches from the detective’s, felt hot. French’s breath stank as though he’d had pizza heaped with pepperoni and garlic for lunch. The odor clashed with his pungent shaving lotion.

French went on as though Toby hadn’t spoken. “You’re in trouble. It’s illegal to file a false crime report.” He huffed through his nose like an accelerating locomotive.

“To
knowingly
file a false report.” Dixon stepped between them. “Mr. Rew is only guilty of having a few too many, of impaired judgment.”

Toby rounded on the older detective. “You think I dreamed it all up, too?” Dixon shrugged. “I didn’t have a drink until later.”

“Then you made up for lost time,” French cracked.

Toby ignored him. “I was sober when I witnessed the crime and found the body.” The beer buzz had worn off and now he just felt tired. “Look, I’m a law-abiding citizen. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

French waved it away. “You’re so full of crap, it’s coming out your mouth.”

“Try to see it from our point of view, Mr. Rew. We deal in evidence. Facts.” Dixon slung an arm in friendly fashion around Toby’s shoulders. “Here are the facts, as we see them.” He made a fist of his free hand, except for a slender forefinger. “One: no evidence of a crime, much less murder, at the Puterbaugh’s—”

“How many times do I have to tell you? They cleaned it up!” Toby ducked from under the detective’s arm and faced the two men. “They had a couple hours between when I found the dead man and when we got back here. Plenty of time to get rid of a body and do a little housekeeping.”

“And whose fault is it they had so much time?” French asked.

“I explained all that.” Behind Dixon and French, Toby saw slight movement at the open blinds in Puterbaugh’s den window as someone flashed into and out of sight. “Maybe the body is hidden in the cellar. Maybe it’s in the attic.”

“Maybe it’s all in your mind,” French said. “Give you credit: you got a vivid imagination.”

“Everything I said is true! I gave lots of details—”

“They didn’t pan out. Sure, it’s apparent you’ve been in that room before. But we’re missing the main attraction: a corpse. Or evidence there ever was a corpse.”

“What’s the problem? Take apart the house, you’ll find it. Or spray some stuff that glows where blood’s been. What’s it called?” What was wrong with the cops? Why didn’t these lummoxes want to do their job?

“Luminol,” French said.

“Problem is, Mr. Rew, to search the place thoroughly, we’d need a warrant,” Dixon said. “And to get a warrant, we need probable cause.”

“We haven’t got probable squat. Everything’s kosher.” French’s eyes, the green of a cat’s, glinted with anger. “We haven’t got anything but a colossal waste of time. And you, the guy who’s wasted it.”

“That’s the second important fact, Mr. Rew.” Dixon made a two-fingered V. “The fact you’ve been drinking. And the two facts sort of cancel each other out.” The fingers were snapped up by Dixon’s sharp-knuckled fist.

“We should run you in for public intoxication.” French fingered handcuffs looped at his belt. “Making us come out on a wild-goose chase.”

“But we won’t,” Dixon said. “I’m sure it was all an honest mistake.”

Toby fumed, biting his tongue. How could these blockheads, investigation specialists, supposedly professional observers, be so blind?

Dixon patted his shoulder like a father chastising a son. “You sober enough to drive?” Toby nodded, unable to speak. “Hope so. I’d hate to see you arrested for DUI. Go straight home, sleep it off and we’ll forget about this little incident, okay?”

“And don’t let it happen again.” French shook a finger in his face. “I’ll keep an eye peeled for you, Rew.” He sniffed once more, with feeling, climbed behind the wheel, fired a parting shot: “Get some help for that drinking problem.” Dixon smiled at Toby sympathetically and slid in on the passenger side. The car pulled smoothly away.

Toby stared after them a moment, then crossed to his truck. He mused briefly about getting out paint and brush again, and having at Mrs. Cratty’s house. But the sun was lower in the sky. It had been a long, trying day. He’d never be able to focus on the job, knowing the Puterbaughs were watching him.

He unlocked the truck door. The cab was stifling. The seat covers seared his legs through the coveralls and the plastic steering wheel burned his fingers. Toby rolled down both windows to let in air and slumped back to think. At the angle he was sitting, the blue house across the street filled the outside mirrors of the truck. Questions crowded Toby’s head—questions the police couldn’t be bothered to ask.

Like, who was the dead man? No idea, but he was related to those people in Mr. Puterbaugh’s history books. Ancient Mexico was written all over his face.

Who’d killed him? Toby had only seen the dark-haired man from the back.

Why had he been killed? No answer.

What were killer and victim doing at the Puterbaugh’s? One or both had been searching for something. Who knew what? Maybe it had to do with Mr. Puterbaugh’s profession. Or maybe it was connected to the family’s recent trip to Mexico.

How’d the trespassers enter? Front or back door, window—what did it matter?

Where was the body now? There were dozens of possibilities.

Were the Puterbaughs involved in the murder? Toby didn’t think so, not directly, anyway—they hadn’t been home, according to their statements. He hadn’t heard a sound the whole time he’d been inside the house. It was possible they could have kept still as the man was being brutally murdered in their den, but it didn’t seem likely. Besides, why would they say they’d been shopping when the crime occurred, since it was easy for the police to check out their story’s veracity?

So when they returned home and found the body, why didn’t they call the police? Give them the benefit of the doubt. Say they didn’t find it. Say somebody else had disposed of it already. Okay, then why didn’t they mention the furniture being changed? Because they’re guilty of something, guilty enough, perhaps, to hide a body, definitely guilty of helping conceal evidence of a crime, and lying to the law.

Or, Toby thought, they’re totally innocent and I’m completely loony. He sighed, started the engine and backed down the driveway. The blue house grew in the driver’s-side mirror. As he swung onto Charbold, Toby glanced at the blinds of the Puterbaugh’s den. They were shut now, except where a pair of fingers spread them apart to make a peephole. By the height, it would be Mrs. Puterbaugh.

Toby wove through late afternoon traffic towards his apartment. A minivan idled ahead of him at a stoplight. Half a dozen kids packed into the back, all in baseball uniforms, made faces at him. They stopped clowning when they saw he didn’t react.

At his address, Toby pulled into his assigned slot in the continuous row of single-car garages behind the house, and switched off the ignition. Climbing out, he remembered the wad of papers he’d taken from the blue house and reached under the seat. The bloody pages were dry now, stiff and crinkly. He shoved the bundle down his coveralls, locked the cab, and padlocked the double doors of the garage.

Toby crossed the asphalt driveway. He wearily began to ascend the metal stairs newly attached to the backside of the building: Just thirty-two steps up to his home.

Chapter 6

The house on James Street where Toby lived, like its neighbors for several blocks in any direction, had once been part of a ritzy section of Syracuse. In the 1920s and 1930s, the huge Tudor, stone, and frame homes owned by the city’s wealthy had hosted many an elegant soirée. In the post-war boom, the suburbs had beckoned. One by one the stately houses had passed from owners’ to landlords’ hands. Some had become offices for lawyers, CPAs, photographers, upscale ad agencies, trend-setting graphic design firms. Others, like Toby’s address, had been subdivided into apartments.

On the first floor, the house was now halved, producing a matching pair of mirror-image two-bedroom flats. The left-hand flat, as you faced the wide, stone-and-wood structure, was shared by two young women—Sylvia Morris and Jean Dodge—who worked as secretaries half-days while attending LeMoyne College part-time in the evenings. They had invited Toby down for a keg party when they’d first moved in and he saw them weekly in passing. Both were reasonably attractive, friendly. They wore their brunette hair the same way. Wore similar clothing. Giggled at the same things. Liked the same music. Completed each other’s sentences. Toby couldn’t tell them apart and often called them by the wrong names when he met them coming or going.

On the right lived Barton Hughes and his girlfriend
du jour
, Barbara, a nondescript ash blond. Bart, a burly, hairy guy about thirty, with ornate crosses tattooed around his forearms, worked odd shifts at Carrier Air Conditioning. He went through women like a cold sufferer ran through tissues.

The second floor was parceled into three dissimilar single-tenant units. A pudgy middle-aged man with neat salt-and-pepper beard had just moved into the large L-shaped apartment and was still unpacking—Toby hadn’t introduced himself yet. A studious nineteen-year-old at Onondaga Community College, Todd Sylvan, had a medium-sized one-bedroom unit. Joe Ianotti, a wiry, dark-haired fellow of twenty-seven, occupied a tiny studio apartment. Joe was assistant manager at a fast-foot joint, but had aspirations of making it as a jazz guitarist. Every couple weeks Toby got out the tenor sax to jam with him on variations of Brubeck, Hagen and Davis standards. Joe strummed the right chords and plucked the correct notes, but he had a lousy sense of rhythm.

Toby had the attic apartment to himself. After climbing the metal steps outside, Toby keyed the lock in the fire door. A second key opened the only door off a small paneled vestibule. Eight steps up an eighteen-inch-wide wooden staircase and he was home: Land of a thousand angles, where roof slope dictated room contour. Home, where you had to watch yourself when moving about, to avoid bumping head or elbow on hard, slanted surfaces that were both ceiling and wall.

At the top of the stairs was the kitchen. An ancient two-burner stove and a modern dwarf refrigerator were tucked opposite one another either side of a hallway so narrow that both appliance doors couldn’t be opened at once.

Toby bent to the fridge for a chilled aluminum can. It had BEER printed on its side in black, UPC stripes, a small-town Ohio address in two-point type, and nothing more. Popping the top, Toby slumped onto a seat of the booth-like nook set into the hallway. The faux marble-topped pedestal table and red vinyl-covered benches looked like they’d been lifted from a second-class diner and set down here. He took a healthy slug of watery-tasting beer, dragged the lump of papers from his overalls and plopped it onto the table. What’s the best way, he wondered, to get rid of typing paper stained with paint, his fingerprints and footprints, and another man’s blood?

Couldn’t just throw it out with the trash. Plastic bags acted like magnets to the city’s poor and homeless—or as it was politically correct to call them nowadays, the economically disadvantaged and involuntarily domiciled—who made Garbage Day live up to its name in their implacable quest for usable junk. What would they do upon finding a ream of bloody paper? Who knew? He couldn’t take the chance.

He could feed wadded pages to the toilet—no more than one or two a day, however, without plugging the house’s seventy-five-year-old plumbing. That would take too long and be too risky.

Burning would work best. But Toby couldn’t do the job here: there was no fireplace. If he tried to torch papers in a wastebasket, smoke would fill the apartment and attract the fire department.

He finished the beer, started a second. So how could he have an open fire in the summertime without causing suspicion? A barbecue! Sure. He could buy franks and buns, and have a solitary late-night picnic at a brick fire pit along the Liverpool side of Lake Onondaga. While nobody was looking, he’d eliminate potentially incriminating evidence. That’s what he’d do! Toby slapped a hand on the solid oblong of paper, pleased with his brainstorm. Of course, to be sure the pages were all destroyed he’d have to feed them one by one to the fire and stir the ashes well. If he just dumped the bundle onto the flames, bloody or paint-smeared sheets might not be entirely consumed.

Funny, the blank paper didn’t feel entirely smooth. Toby gently rubbed fingertips across the top sheet’s surface. Something was definitely there: a series of slight indentations. Like words typed without a ribbon in the machine.

He clicked on a shaded bulb hanging above the table and picked up the top page, angling it in the light. Lines of words were there, all right, as regular as rows of corn. Individual letters weren’t crisp and sharp, as they’d be if typewriter keys had struck paper directly without benefit of a ribbon. The marks were too faint to be readable, impossible to see without closer examination. Were they all like this? Toby picked ten pages at random to examine. Every page contained slight marks.

Second sheets, Toby’s dad would have called them. Memories of his father came sputtering back. Randy Rew had died, aged forty-eight, when Toby was twelve. But for twenty-five years before coughing out his lungs, he had made a living, of sorts writing mail order pamphlets that sold for $3.95 to $5.95 apiece, plus postage. These dealt with every subject imaginable, incorporating information Randy gleaned from books, magazines and encyclopedias, in taverns and on the street—all presented in a new and easily digestible form for the masses.