The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (14 page)

“I can tell you one more thing,” Sue added. “That old man loved Folami like she was his own granddaughter. He’s heartbroken. He just sat there, nearly catatonic, mumbling, ‘I’ve lost them both.’” Sue pulled a tissue and turned away from the others to wipe her dark eyes.

Brackett mimicked her actions.

Maddie had found the story about Folami and old man Elders poignant. The sniggers from Brackett and Amun, and even Jed, simply verified her suspicions that sensitivity in a man was indeed rare. Still, she remained hopeful that one day she would find such a man.

***

At a little after eleven, Maddie pulled into her garage. She had missed dinner with Brad, but she had made the time to call and tell him goodnight on the phone. Somehow she had to reduce her number of late nights. She also knew she shared this particular concern with many working mothers.

The slightly sweet aroma of turkey filled her as she entered the house. Her mother was on another of her big dinner kicks. Roast beef last night, turkey tonight, and the leftovers would be enough to take care of dinners for the rest of the week.

The browned, glistening bird sat in a roasting pan on top the stove burners, next to a note from her mother: Madeline Jane, there’s a covered plate with garlic mashed potatoes and green beans in the ice box. Pop it in the micro; then add the cranberry sauce. Please put the turkey in the ice box before you go to bed; I made room on the bottom shelf. Love, Mom.

Maddie smiled and shook her head. The stubborn old woman grew up with an ice box, and had never accepted the word refrigerator.

After eating and cleaning up, Maddie stood in the kitchen looking out the window over the sink into the blackness of the night. Thinking, almost in a trance, until a sudden shard of lightening over the White Tank Mountains snapped her out of it. She went to bed.

Chapter 20

Maddie had driven most of the way to the station the next morning before the head of Phoenix’s crime scene technicians called. “The brush he used to paint his blood message,” Bill Molitor said into Maddie’s ear, “wasn’t anything special. Just a woman’s basic brush, sold in hundreds of stores all over town. … Sorry.”

“You mean a makeup brush?”

“I think so. The kind with a big flared end that gives all you foxes that extra luster.”

“I guess I better get me one,” Maddie said before asking, “Could the brushes have belonged to the victims?”

“I’d of guessed you already had one,” Bill said. “You always look very nice. As for the brushes, the vics’ brushes were in their bathrooms. Your perp brings a new one to each scene.”

“I’d hoped for some rare fiber that held a cryptic meaning for this sick bastard. I’ll have someone check stores in the area of the victims but this guy is too smart to buy the brush down the street from each victim. We should also check chain and online stores for a buy of several such brushes at one time.”

“Sorry about no cryptic meaning, love. Maybe you’re hunting some ugly broad who’s jealous of beautiful women? How’s that for a theory?”

“Your guess is as good as any other. But the odds don’t support this butcher being a woman. Was there anything helpful off the prints at either scene?”

“They all matched up with folks who had reason to be there.”

“Any prints at both?” she asked, a sneak of hope in her voice.

“Sorry. Maybe at the next scene.”

“Hey, now there’s a nice thought,” Maddie said before adding, “thanks for the compliment and the call.”

As soon as she hung up, Maddie joined Jed and Folami Stowe’s boyfriend, Ronald Walker, the employed trucker and unemployed chorus dancer. Her partner had put him in interrogation room six, another part of the station painted bargain-buy gray with bare walls except for a one-way glass through which she figured Lieutenant Harrison would be watching.

Walker had the lean build one would expect of a dancer, and he was very upset.

“Mr. Walker. I’m Sergeant Richards. You’re not here as a suspect at the moment, but that doesn’t guarantee you might not graduate into one. If you’re okay with that, I’d like you to tell me about finding Ms. Stowe’s body.”

“Sure. I just went in and found Folami on the bed. Oh, man. How can anybody do that stuff?”

“How did you come to have a key to Folami’s apartment?”

“Folami and I, we was engaged. She got a key to my place, too. Well, she did until a week or so before … you know.”

“If she returned your key, why hadn’t you returned her key?” Jed asked.

Walker studied the ceiling for a moment, either organizing the truth or constructing a lie he thought might work.

“We weren’t broke up,” he said, “not really. We was just fighting some. She got pissed and returned my key.” He pressed his fingers into his eye sockets and sat in the hard gray chair as still as a photograph, clearly embarrassed by his escaping tears.

“What’d you two fight about?” Maddie asked.

“I tol’ her to quit tricking. I got hot and said we was through if she didn’t stop selling it. She said she couldn’t stop, not yet. Not until she had enough money for that damn school in California. That’s when she mailed back my key. Two nights later I called her, early, ‘fore I split on a ten-day-coast-to-coast run. I tol’ her if she’d quit now, we could live together and save one seta expenses. She said, she’d think on it. I went by late, after spending a few hours with a couple of friends, went by to talk about it some before I hit the long road. That’s when I found her.”

Jed scooted a box of tissue across the table. Walker stopped it with his hand and pulled two. While Walker was distracted with the tissues, Jed went at him. “You lost it and killed her. Is that how it went down?”

“Hey, man. The sergeant here said I ain’t no suspect. No. That’s not how it went down. Damn it. I tol’ you what happened. ‘Sides, I couldn’t a done it.”

“Why not?” Maddie asked.

“A friend called me on my cell. He said the news reported that some rich, white woman was killed just like Folami. That day I was trucking across Texas. Both them women was killed by the same dude, right?”

“Could be?” Maddie said. “At this point, everything we think is fluid.”

“I never been in no big trouble with the law,” Walker said, his voice breaking. “Check me out. My friend Skeeter says you been talking with the guys I was hanging with earlier the night Folami was killed. Tell me I ain’t no suspect.” He rubbed his palms on his pant legs. “I wouldn’t hurt Folami. No way. I loved that girl, Sergeant Richards. Please tell me I ain’t no suspect.”

Maddie knew this wasn’t going anywhere. It was just another of those blind alleys that cops spent so much time walking, but she knew of no better way than to search all the alleys until she found the one that held the killer.

“You can go, Mr. Walker. Thanks for coming in. If you remember anything, anything at all you call Detective Smith. Okay?”

“I will … I will.”

“Detective Smith will walk you out. Give him the details on your next run and your cell phone so we can reach you while you’re on the road.”

“I’ll do it. Thank you, Sergeant Richards. Please let me know if anything happens.”

Maddie watched Walker get up, and found she admired the grace with which he moved. Before she realized it, she had said, “Good luck with your dancing. I hope you hit it.” The door shut on his smile.

Everything they’d learned indicated that Folami had decided to quit the grungy flesh business. Popcorn could’ve destroyed Folami as a message to the rest of the girls in his stable, but Popcorn had no known connection to Abigail Knight and no reason to kill her, at least no reason they had found. Popcorn had been pimping for thirty years with no record of heavy violence. For him, being hassled by the cops was a routine part of doing business. If he’d been involved in the murder of Folami Stowe, his street instincts would’ve told him not to make the crack about Folami being his private snack on Monday nights. Still, Maddie decided Popcorn should be pushed about what he knew of Folami’s plans to quit and his whereabouts the nights of the two murders. She’d send Brackett. From his time in vice he’d know best how to push the pimp’s buttons.

Maddie stopped by her lieutenant’s office and got him to agree to assign someone to check on the makeup brush lead; it was thin, but at this point they were already grasping at straws. Then she called Rex Bronson and got a recorded message to the effect that he’d be out until 1:30 and then in his gym the rest of the afternoon. She pulled Bronson’s rap sheet.

“It’s time we confront Abigail Knight’s personal trainer,” she said when Jed returned. “He’ll be back in his gym at 1:30.”

“Let’s grab some chow on the way,” Jed said. “I feel like some baby-back ribs with sauce so hot it’ll melt the fillings in my teeth.”

“Oh, great,” Maddie replied, “something for both my heart and my hips.”

“But great for your soul.” He grinned. “Let’s get out of here.”

Toward the end of Maddie’s father’s career, Jed had been his cruiser partner and a family friend—one she had come to count on. When Maddie made sergeant six years ago, Jed, who claimed he never wanted to advance beyond a detective grade, had said, “It’s wives that give men ambition; I’ve tried to avoid both. But it’s right for you and I’m proud of you. Your dad would be, too.”

***

The aroma of deep frying hung thick in the air. The joint was crowded and a bevy of waitresses in white sleeveless blouses scurried among the tables like aquarium fish darting around sunken plastic galleons. A young man brought water and, for no apparent reason except that his jeans fit him like a second skin, Maddie thought of Packard.

“Jed,” she said, “I’m not coming onto you, but I got a question only a man can answer and, well, I don’t know any other man the way I’d need to, to ask.”

“I’m flattered. Shoot.”

“If we were sitting on your couch watching TV and I was looking like, well, like you’ve seen me look when I’m not on the job, would you wanna, you know, fool around?”

“Assuming we weren’t partners, you mean?”

“This isn’t an invitation. I told you this was hypothetical.”

“It’d depend.”

“Depend!” Then Maddie lowered her voice. “Depend on what?”

“Well, I subscribe to the Major League baseball package on TV, so it’d depend on whether there was a D’Backs game on.”

“So, you’d rather watch a baseball game than roll around on the floor with me?”

“It’s not a matter of which I’d rather do. I’m a practical man. With a little patience, there’d be time for both.”

“So, I should take a number and wait like I’m in line for sausage at the butcher shop?”

“Maddie, my love, to give it to you straight, if we weren’t partners I’d love to fool around with you. You’re a real looker and a nice person. Now, that’s as mushy as I’m going to get. Let’s have lunch.”

A waitress came to their booth; she had straight hair that framed a thin face. She pulled an order pad from her apron pocket, curled her hand around a pencil, and rested the fist on her bony hip. She called Jed, “Honey,” before explaining that the special was chili and that it came with garlic toast.

Chili might be good in January, Maddie thought, but not in August.

Jed asked for ribs and being told they were out, ordered a plate of spaghetti with meatballs.

After sighing with envy, Maddie ordered a small salad with no dressing and a lemon wedge. For the past few weeks she had been squeezing fresh lemon juice on her salads to avoid high calorie dressings. The lemon perked up the flavor of a salad, making each bite’s first chew seem kind of squeaky.

“So how’s things with Theresa the waitress?”

“That’s over,” Jed said. “She had big plans for us, but for me it was only lust. We’re still friends.”

The time-honored epitaph, Maddie repeated to herself: we’re still friends.

Right then, an attractive woman in a short skirt walked past their table. Jed watched her pass, and then turned his head to look at her butt. The girl glanced back and smiled.

“Perhaps she should put in an application to refill Theresa’s position?”

“Maddie, the woman obviously dresses to attract the attention of men. I’m just letting her know her efforts were not in vain.”

“Women are not sex objects,” Maddie scolded.

“That’s a lie spread by women who don’t like sex,” Jed explained patiently, “also women without the merchandise to compete. Sex appeal is as old as time. It’s not subject to cancellation, political correctness and trumps. True equality is not a woman resenting being a sex object, but a woman demanding the right to also treat a man as her sex object.”

“Thank you, Professor Jed Smith.” Maddie let it drop, unwilling to admit she was unsure whether she agreed or disagreed.

They discussed Bronson’s rap sheet until their meal came. A restraining order had been issued keeping him away from his ex-wife who claimed he had been stalking her. There was no record of his threatening her with violence, but he had been charged with assault for a bar fight two nights after their final divorce decree. And, last but far from least, his DNA had confirmed it was his hair and semen Rip had found in Abigail Knight’s bed.

When Jed’s plate of spaghetti came, he picked up his knife and a fork and cut the strands north to south, then east to west.

“There can be no Italian blood in your ancestry.”

“What?” He asked, looking across the table at Maddie. “It’s efficient to eat spaghetti this way. No twirling. No slurping. And as for Bronson and the Knight case, all we’ve got so far is a married woman having consensual sex outside wedlock. And like you said, if we started arresting folks for that we’d have to build more jails.”

Maybe that’s what I need, Maddie thought, my very own personal trainer.

Chapter 21

The trainer was a powerfully built man whose muscle shirt displayed his ripples in much the same way the blouse worn by the waitress Theresa had displayed her nipples.

Bronson’s storefront gym was small, but given what the Marta the maid had said, Bronson did his best work in his clients’ bedrooms.