The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (5 page)

His closet memories always started with the same conversation, the one in which he’d told his mother he’d been accepted by an art school, and she had replied, “Don’t be stupid. Places like that accept anyone. If you send money, they’ll see talent.”

“But Momma,” he had cried. “I want to draw. I’m good. You never look. I’m good, Momma. Look at these, Momma. Please.”

She had finally agreed that if her looking would shut him up, she would look. He could still hear her words.

“You’ve captured no emotion. I see no passion. No pain. No love. No fear. No feelings of any kind, I’m sorry. I know you’d like to be an artist, but these drawings are nothing special.”

He had tried to tell her he’d get better. That art school would make him better. At that she had gotten angry and screamed that she never wanted to hear any of this art shit again.

“You’ll need a real job when you get older,” she had said. “A man’s job that pays good money, not a loser’s job like the ones your father worked until I threw out his sorry ass. Now go finish your grilled cheese sandwich and leave me alone. A friend is coming over and I need to get ready.”

That day, when his mother’s friend pulled his car to the curb, his mother did what she always did. She locked him in her closet.

Balled up in his own closet now, the man was again the boy. After a while the man took his fingers out of his ears and listened. He turned his head from the corner and looked through the keyhole to see and hear what the boy had seen and heard so many times from inside his mother’s closet. He then did what he had always done. He watched his mother standing beside her bed peeling off her nylons, and the man using her stockings to tie her down.

Only now, the bed was in the man’s home. An older home he had chosen because he could put his bed directly across from the keyhole in the old-fashioned closet door, the same position his mother’s bed had occupied in her bedroom.

The man could see her as clearly as had the boy, on top of one of her men, looking toward the closet door and smiling, smiling at him. Smiling because she knew he was watching, positioning herself so that he would always have a good view. He was her audience. She was performing for him. And he watched. Aroused and ashamed, but he watched. He couldn’t stop watching. He didn’t want to stop watching.

The man satisfied himself then in the only place he ever had, a closet. Toward the end of his imagined reenactment, the boy remembered what his mother had said one morning after her performance.

“When you get a little older, Son, you’ll stop resisting. You’ll want to watch. Your father liked to watch.”

The man turned his face toward the wall and spoke as the boy. “I already like to watch, Mommy.”

“Sure you do. You’re going to be a real stud man.” She had then reached over and stroked his crotch until he had grown hard, then she laughed and took her hand away. “Yes, sir, a real stud man.”

She had never again touched him. He longed for her to touch him again. But she only touched other men, many different men, sometimes more than one at a time. Some he knew. Most were strangers. He hated her. He loved her. He hated being in her closet. He loved being in her closet.

The boy never gave up his desire to draw. At first he drew and redrew that little deer from the art school advertisements, but never again attempted to show his mother. Next, he drew some canaries in an aviary in the backyard of an old man who lived at the end of their street. The old man kept his promise and never told the boy’s mother. When the boy tired of the birds, he drew cartoon characters until he could draw them all from memory. He particularly liked drawing the short, stocky Mighty Mouse. Eventually, the boy began to draw his own face onto Mighty Mouse soaring above everyone. Looking down, watching the city look up at him as he soared over them.

As he grew deeper into the teen years, he drew girls’ faces with his mother’s body; the body he knew, the body he could draw from memory. The body he had seen two or three times a week since he was old enough to develop an interest in women’s bodies.

In college he had audited art classes, but never enrolled. His mother would have gone ballistic had she learned he took classes she considered frivolous. At graduation, the only woman he had ever loved, ever hated, had not attended. The week before she had run off to God knows where, to do God knows what. Well, he knew what. He just didn’t know with whom.

He knew he was not what the girls called a hunk. He wasn’t tall, or dark, or handsome. But he wasn’t ugly, wasn’t ugly enough to be rejected, certainly not by his own mother. His cheeks and neck had a few deep pockmarks, but his forehead was clear. He didn’t smile much. He hated smiles, like his, which revealed the gums above the teeth. He didn’t know exactly what color his eyes were. He wasn’t color blind, but had trouble discerning shades of brown, so he always just put down brown. Eyes were said to be the windows to the soul, but he didn’t really think people had souls.

The thing he hated most was that his mother had been right. His art had lacked emotion, but now he was changing that.

Chapter 7

Maddie arrived at the station early and held the door open for two uniforms who were bringing in a handcuffed black female. Maddie recognized the woman, a drug addict and drunk, a station-house regular. The woman was about thirty, but her daily diet of crack and alcohol had added twenty more years. She was Junkie-thin with penciled eyebrows, uneven enough to have been applied by a child who colored outside the lines.

When the woman stopped cursing long enough to take a breath, one of the officers said, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Why don’t you let me the fuck alone?” she said, her speech slurred. “I’m just trying to live, man. I needs to scrape up the rent.”

The stoned hooker’s words drifted out of range as Maddie moved into the conference room used for the weekly detectives meeting headed up by Lieutenant Adam Harrison. Maddie liked her lieutenant. He was a solid cop, and an all-around good guy with a kind face, despite lines deep enough to make her think of chainsaw art.

She took a seat between her partner, Jed, and Brackett’s partner, Amun Grant, the black half of the detective team some of the older cops called Salt and Pepper. Brackett stood to the side of the room, his backside holding up the wall. The man had one of those faces you associated with the karate men who broke cement blocks with their heads, only Brackett’s face kept losing.

After Lieutenant Harrison’s openers, Chief of Police Grant Layton walked into a chorus of throat clearings and coughs. The room fell silent. The chief had a bald head as knobby as a fist, and wore glasses with Clark Kent frames.

Maddie chewed her lip, striking back at the ambition and fear which were gnawing on her insides. Would Chief Layton pass her over and give the lead to Brackett? Would Curtis succeed in his effort to take away her son?

Then the waiting ended, at least the part about the lead on the case. In what seemed less than a minute, Chief Layton authorized a special homicide squad to officially join the Knight and Stowe killings into one investigation.

“The squad will include Sergeant Richards, Sergeant Brackett, and detectives Jed Smith and Amun Grant. Also Nigh,” the chief said, adding Archibald Nigh as if it were an afterthought. “Sergeant Richards will be in charge, answering to Lieutenant Harrison.”

The chief had dealt with the whole thing with less emotion than ordering a pizza. What the hell did the chief expected her to do with Archie Nigh?

While the chief had made the announcement, Brackett had remained stone still, except for his eyes which flitted about with the alacrity of an escaped con. As for Maddie, she held her outward calm while inside the bees were storming out of the hive. She wondered if her being put in charge would end up being good news or bad.

After the meeting, Maddie’s new squad crowded near the door to her cubicle where she divvied up the start work, then she dismissed the others and asked Brackett, who had remained in the doorway with his arms folded, to stay.

Once the room cleared of everyone else, she asked, “We got any issues, Brackett?”

“If you’re thinking I’m pissed Maddie, forget it.” He raised his lower jaw lifting his teeth over his upper lip and then dragged his teeth down through his mustache. “The bodies I get in vice are a lot more attractive than the ones you get.”

“Speaking of bodies, stop calling Officer Sue Martin your African Queen.”

“How the hell is that your business?”

That was a typical Brackett response. He had no respect for women, which in part explained his recent divorce from wife number three.

“You’re assigned to my squad, Brackett, and I don’t want to hear that kind of talk while I’m in charge.”

He shrugged his lumpy shoulders. “I need to go to the can so if there’s nothing else, Sergeant Madeline Richards, Ma’am?”

“Brackett,” Maddie said. “I respect your skills as a detective, but your attitude sucks. You’ve got a lot of homicide experience. There’ll be times I’ll want to come to you for advice. So tell me now if you’ve got an issue working with me on this?”

“Your partner Jed’s the old man of the streets. You won’t need me for advice.”

“Anything else you want to say, Brackett?”

“I just hope you won’t keep talking my ass off. I get enough of that from my ex wives.”

He’s pissed, Maddie thought, but he’s dealing with it.

“Okay, Brackett. Get out of here.”

“What’re you gonna do with Archie Nigh?”

“That’s my worry.”

“I got one more thing.”

“Let’s have it.”

“Are you wearing a thong?”

“The keen eye of a vice detective,” Maddie said dryly. “Now get out of here, Hardass, and not another word about my thong.”

Maddie followed Brackett as far as the hall to the vending machine where she got a diet Coke. As she passed the door to the coffee room, she nearly ran into the arms of Chief Layton’s brother-in-law and administrative assistant, Arthur Dinkins. The Dink was a giant dumpling with an uncanny knack for positioning himself where he could watch her butt. A woman knows when a guy’s ogling her fanny, and sexual fantasies left slimy trails through Dink’s mind the way slugs did crossing a sidewalk.

She smiled politely but said nothing. Maddie no longer thought of herself as a hottie, but at forty-two, she was hanging onto the thought of being foxy—whatever that meant exactly. At least she hoped her neighbor Gary Packard held that opinion. Dink was another thing all together; if she were forced to choose he would run a distant second to a dildo.

On the way back to her office, Jed acknowledged her come-with-me wave and got up to follow.

Her gray cubicle, a perk that came with the rank of Sergeant, fit the way her new platform red heels fit, just big enough to squeeze in what was necessary. Her tilt-back wooden chair had dug a latrine in the back wall. The desk along with two four-drawer file cabinets left just enough room for Maddie to get around her desk or to open a file drawer, if she stood to the side as the drawer pulled out. She had also been able to nudge a two-shelf bookcase, with pictures of her son at various ages, into the space between the side of the file cabinet and the back corner.

Jed was lounging in the visitor’s chair just inside the entry door. “I saw Dinkins giving you the eye,” he said. “Don’t let that man get to you. If you turned around and came onto him, he’d run.”

“No way,” she said. “I’ve already seen more of Dink’s body hair than I care to.”

Jed laughed. “Hell, Maddie, some cops, some men, live to tease women about sex. Just keep being the swan and glide through the cesspool with your head up, the way you always do.”

“Yeah, sure, say hello to Miss Elegant from Swan Lake. And to keep the record straight, I don’t mind mixing it up with the boys. That’s fun. It’s just that Dink is so … slimy. I can tolerate his crude double entendres, but I resent his smarmy attitude when he talks about me to the other men. I think he does it hoping the guys will think I’m doing him to get things like the lead on this case. And God only knows what the hell he tells his brother-in-law, the chief?”

“I’m telling you, don’t sweat Dinkins. Everyone knows the score. And, as for your elegance, now that it’s under discussion, you’re the most honest, classiest woman I’ve ever known. And, as long as we’re telling it like it is, you underestimate us men folk. There are a lot more good guys out there than you think.”

“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown, and obviously a great judge of women.”

“It’s a gift.” Jed grinned and stuck out his fist. “And congrats, heading up this squad puts you in the post position to become our top murder dick, when they get around to breaking out homicide.”

The size of her work area made it easy to reach out and bump fists with Jed. “Thanks. I think. I admit I wanted it. The downside is that if the hours get too crazy it may play into Curtis’s hands.”

“Don’t sweat that. Your ex has no chance.”

“That’s sweet of you, but I’m not so sure. His new wife’s got plenty of dough and that means high-powered attorneys.” Maddie pushed back her hair. “We’d better get to work.”

She wanted to hear about Jed’s neighborhood canvas and his midnight meeting with Dr. Knight, but they had long ago established their pattern: first Maddie, then Jed. He called it respect for rank. She gave him the rundown on her visit to Folami Stowe’s apartment. Then he told her about his canvas of the Knight’s neighborhood.

“There’s only four other houses on that street,” he began. “The three across from Knight’s were attending a barbeque at the middle house. There’s no neighbor on the uphill side. That was the boy’s perch while they watched Abigail Knight. The house on the downhill side is owned and occupied by Mr. Brent Sternberg and his wife, Ashton. He’s some kinda investments consultant and was out of town when Mrs. Knight was killed. He’ll be back in two or three days. Mrs. Sternberg was also at the barbeque party.”

“So nobody saw anything.”

“Afraid so, Sarge. And none of them ever heard of Folami Stowe.”

“What about Abigail’s husband?”