The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (4 page)

A moment later she came fully awake, the sounds of the early wind dragging the thorny spines of an ocotillo plant across the outside stucco wall of her bedroom. She squinted to read the bright red lines on her digital clock: 4:05 A.M.

She threw back the sheet and light blanket, and rolled out of bed eager to get to her first stop: the Folami Stowe murder scene. Last night, after leaving the Knight crime scene, she had stopped at the station to copy Brackett’s report on the Stowe homicide and pick up the key to Stowe’s apartment. She wanted to see the scene with her own eyes. Engage her senses. She also wanted to be more knowledgeable than Brackett about both the murder scenes. She wanted the assignments over both cases.

She gathered up one of her regular cop outfits. At least she did until she found her underwear drawer empty other than a white thong bright against the blue drawer liner. Tonight’s chores would need to include washing some panties. She had never worn a thong to work. That would change today.

In the bathroom she took out her curling iron, looked at it, put it back, ran a comb through her hair, sprayed, brought the medicine cabinet mirror forward to check the back, and decided she’d go with the way it looked.

At four-forty-five, she backed out of the garage. The stars, which not long ago had been scattered like diamonds on a black velvet cloth, were being faded out by faint peach and purple streaks dashing from the horizon to tinge the clouds.

Gary Packard’s house was still, but the neighborhood was beginning to toss and turn. A woman was shuffling down her driveway. Her housecoat clamped shut with one hand; she leaned down with the other to pick up last night’s throwaway newspaper. She didn’t look toward the street as Maddie drove by. The plumber who lived two more houses down had his head inside the back of his truck. He waved over his shoulder without bothering to see whose car was going by. The whole scene explained why the police rarely found people near a crime scene who had actually seen anything.

Maddie turned into a crosswind that began quarreling with her partly opened rear window. She hit the button to close it, then turned into a corner convenience market to gas up and get some of the fresh coffee they made each morning before the go-to-work rush hit.

Five minutes later, she had a full tank and a big foam coffee cup with a sip lid in the bottle holder built into her dash. The only thing left to do before hitting the road was to push the button to start her Hoagy Carmichael CD. She had first heard Hoagy sing while watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie with her mother, who later bought the CD. Maddie had played it the first few times out of respect for her mom, but came to like the singer’s friendly voice, unusual melodies and catchy lyrics.

Phoenix’s few downtown high-rises grew smaller in the rearview mirror as Maddie neared the outskirts of Folami Stowe’s neighborhood. There were no tattooed home boys out this early, only a few men with gaunt faces holding handmade signs, their stick arms shrink wrapped in skin: WILL WORK FOR FOOD. People long ago labeled homeless, but that only referred to their lack of a residence. Their faces spoke silently of despair and hopelessness, and that referred to a loss of dignity, the wasting of a soul.

Chapter 5

Folami Stowe’s last residence, if you didn’t count the slab in Dr. Ripley’s medical examiner’s office, was a tired white stucco multi story studded with air-conditioning units poking out of windows, their whirling fans a tin orchestra in search of a tune.

She parked across the street in the lot of a restaurant with boarded up windows, except for one which featured a tube light shaped to spell out Eat-at-Joe’s. The walls heavily disfigured with gangland graffiti claiming turf no one should really want.

The number nine on Folami Stowe’s apartment had lost its top nail and swung into a six. But Maddie had found it easily, the strands of yellow crime scene tape across the front door as obvious as a red nose on a clown.

The unlocked door screeched as if to warn the neighborhood that a badge carrying invader had breached their outer defenses. After giving her heart a moment to calm, Maddie ducked under the upper strand of tape, stepped over the lower one and entered the last known address of Folami Stowe. She eased the door shut. The room had the warmth, stuffiness and silence of a tomb.

Folami’s apartment, the size of a couple of walk-in closets stapled together, had one of those sprayed ceilings that looked like dried cottage cheese, and was furnished as poorly as an honest politician’s future. Maddie’s nostrils filled with the smell of cat pee brought to full blossom by the heat the apartment had swallowed since the prior day. The room held nothing obviously personal. No family pictures, nothing that said, “This was the world Folami Stowe held close.”

Time and pollution had left the walls in the manner that a thousand steps saddened light carpeting. A crossword puzzle sat open on an unfinished oak coffee table. The words filled in were all foods and spices. Maddie closed the cover,
Culinary Crosswords.
She shook the puzzle book, nothing fell out.

A thick, green glass ashtray wedged open the bedroom door. The center of the mattress looked black, although the dried blood would be revealed as deep burgundy with the advancing sun. A small-screen TV with a rabbit-ears antenna sat on a flimsy TV tray that wobbled when touched. Nothing indicated Folami had a roommate other than Stinky—the missing cat.

The temperature-set dial on the window air conditioner pointed at normal. This was different than the cold temp setting on Abigail Knight’s thermostat. The push-in power button read off.

The department’s file showed that Folami’s boyfriend, Ronald Walker, had found her body. Walker had claimed he stopped by after spending the evening at a sports bar with four other men. Doyle Brackett’s file notes said Walker worked as a long-haul trucker while chasing his dream of becoming a chorus-line dancer. Because murderers rarely reported their mayhem, and because a quick check of Walker’s alibi seemed solid, Brackett had told the boyfriend he could leave on his next run, but to check in with the department upon his return.

The end wall of the bathroom held a turquoise porcelain tub, circa 1950s, its sides ringed with scum. Maddie lifted the cover off the toilet tank, this toilet made more than one hundred without a finding.

The shelves in the medicine chest supported a bottle of aspirin, a jar of petroleum jelly, tweezers, a few lipsticks, and an eyelash curler. The first drawer next to the sink contained a hard brush and one of those long-toothed, plastic combs—bright purple. The second drawer had been reserved for a hair dryer. And the bottom drawer was crammed full of enough condoms to verify that Folami Stowe’s one arrest for prostitution had understated her career.

Jed’s sick humor would say that large a number of condoms meant that Folami had led the hooker league in at bats.

The media had written up the probability—the media’s, not the police’s—that Folami Stowe had been killed by a crazed trick. That conclusion instantly doomed the story of her death to one short column on page twelve. The death of Abigail Knight, however, was another matter. The public’s appetite for the gory details became voracious whenever the violent among us took one of our rich or famous. The department called it juice, and cases with juice got a disproportionate ration of police resources.

Maddie took a double take when she entered the kitchen. Had she somehow drifted into
The Twilight Zone
? The kitchen was as neat and clean as the rest of the place was messy and dirty.

Maddie was startled when the nagging warble of an alarm clock came through the paper-thin walls from the adjoining apartment. The alarm stopped and music came on. The neighbor’s female but not feminine singing voice joining in.

Brackett’s case file identified the tenant in number eight as Natalie Comstock, a middle-aged nurse’s aide at Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Ms. Comstock had not been home the afternoon Folami’s body was found and for the standard reasons, mostly excuses, Brackett had not come back. The department, the media, and society had already boiled Folami down to the nub: a dead hooker, maybe a dead black hooker. The end.

Maddie stepped out of number nine, crossed the small landing and knocked.

Ms. Comstock, a bony woman with a burger-sized mouth came to the door in a pink bathrobe and white bunny slippers with matching pink ears. She stopped just inside her door, her hips shifting to one side.

“I hardly knew Folami,” Comstock said, sliding a barefoot out of one bunny and stacking it on top the ears of the other bunny. “The girl was quiet and polite. That may not seem like much to you uptown folks, but for this neighborhood that’s a home run. Now, I gots to get ready for work, so if you real cops is like them ones on TV, this is where you give me your card and tell me to call you if I thinks of something else.”

Maddie smiled and gave her the card, then went back inside Folami’s apartment. She examined the black vinyl recliner and its lacerated shoulders. The depth of the violent claw marks attested that Stinky would be safe regardless of where the cat had taken up residence. Hearing a noise behind her, she turned to see a man straddling the crime-scene tape, his hand clutching the knob on the door. Her eyes were drawn to the spider-web veins in his broad nose.

“Dan Combs,” he said. “I’m the building manager.” He came toward her wearing a sleeveless white undershirt with a scoop neck, the sides yellowed from old sweat. “What can I do fer ya, ma’am? You with the poleece?” Despite the early hour, his breath was laced with stale cigarettes and malt beer.

She flashed her shield and learned nothing other than he liked to dig in his ears with his forefinger and wipe his discoveries on his yellowed shirt.

“How soon can I get this here apartment back?” he asked. “I need it cleaned and painted up, so’s it can be rented.”

“Mr. Combs, when did you move the temperature setting on the air conditioner?”

“How’d you know I did that?”

“When?”

“The night Folami’s boyfriend come pounding on my door. While he used my phone to call the cops, I came up here. Check it out, you know. Scope out how much cleanup I was facin’. The tenants are always setting them window units too low. This place was freezing. I backed it off some.”

“Did you tell the detectives you adjusted the air?”

“No bother. The place had got normal before the cops showed up.”

“What else did you touch?”

“Nothing. The door when I was coming in. After I saw what had happened, well, she sure weren’t pretty no more. I didn’t touch nuttin. Now, what about my apartment here? I need to get paintin’.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I can,” Maddie said before taking down his number. He went out the door hacking up a wad of phlegm that he spit over the rail before trudging down the cement stairs.

After he left, Maddie looked more closely at a two-shelf bookcase made from stained wooden planks held apart by masonry blocks. The books were all cookbooks. On the top shelf she saw a large brown mailing envelope with the victim’s name and address typed on a white label. Inside were a letter-sized envelope and a copy of a completed application for a Miss Folami Beatrice Stowe to attend chefs’ school starting in the spring. The letter from the school, dated two weeks ago, said her application had been accepted. Drops, which appeared to be tears, had crinkled the paper.

When Maddie went over to put the envelope back from where she had gotten it, she saw a diary that had been under the package from the school. The journal spoke of her discussions of marriage with Ronald Walker, and her decision to wait until after completing chefs’ school. Most weeks preceding her death, she had written of meetings on Thursdays with a man she referred to as grandpa. The bookcase held a stack of yearly diaries. About halfway through the oldest book, there was a notation of having a
date
with an old man named Elders. She had described him as having thick glasses and tobacco-stained teeth, and that his granddaughter had been killed in a drive-by shooting. The next Thursday’s entry spoke of Folami feeling odd about calling him Grandpa, but that it seemed harmless. She didn’t keep the diary religiously, but the entries, over time, showed a developing love for the old man, and of her apprehension about telling him she was leaving for chefs’ school. The last entry, the night before her death, mentioned a date tomorrow with a man. She had written: “My last. Too big a fee to say no, ‘sides no split with BB.” Then the notation, “This one will end that part of my life. Forever.”

“A more permanent end than you had imagined,” Maddie said out loud.

The department file on Stowe had included an old-fashioned style passbook issued by a small, independent local storefront savings and loan. Maddie remembered thumbing through it to see a great number of small-to-modest deposits posted over the past five years. Each deposit, entered beside the initials of a teller, had helped the balance grow from a few dollars to more than thirty-nine thousand.

Much of the rest of the story of Folami Stowe seemed obvious. She had lived all of her young life in the ghetto and wanted out, apparently through becoming a chef. Prostitution wouldn’t be the choice any of us would want for our children but, given Folami’s limited education and traffic-stopping beauty, it had been her plan. Had that been a more honorable way to fund her dream than selling drugs? Maddie would leave that for God to judge. The city just paid her to catch the sick bastard who had smashed Folami’s dream of becoming a chef.

Chapter 6

The man pulled the door to his bedroom closet inward until it latched with him inside.

He licked his fingers still moist with butter from the last bite of his grilled cheese sandwich. In the dark he put his nose into the corner of two walls and jammed his fingers into his ears.

It had been more than thirty years since his mother had last locked him in her closet. Still, in his mind, right now became back then. He had recreated this scene a thousand times: Always vibrant. Resonate. Glorious. Shameful.