The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (6 page)

“Dr. Knight has moved into his sister’s house in Tempe. He says he won’t ever again sleep in his home. He plans to sell the place as soon as we release it as a crime scene. Figures he’ll take a bath selling it, but says he doesn’t care.”

“Must be nice not having to care about such things,” Maddie said.

Jed flipped to the prior page of his spiral notepad. “Dr. Knight claimed he loved his wife and could not think of anyone—yada, yada, yada. The Knights had been married a little more than six years. The husband described his wife as the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He said he wanted her to come with him to San Diego. That he begged her to go.” Jed turned another page. “Here are his exact words, ‘She’d still be alive if she had gone or if I had stayed home. My life ended the night Abby was murdered.’”

Maddie swallowed the last of her Diet Coke. “How’d he strike you?”

“He looked like he belonged on one of Rip’s slabs after driving half the night thinking about his dead wife. But he seemed sincere; then again he’s a shrink so he could probably turn my mind inside out without me feeling a thing.”

“Why,” Maddie asked, “would a beautiful woman with a rich husband stay in Phoenix in the heat of July in a garter belt and stockings rather than go with her husband to La Jolla, California, with its cool ocean breezes, great restaurants, and fancy boutiques?”

Chapter 8

The digital clock on Maddie’s dashboard read six as she pulled into her garage. When she walked out to the mailbox, Gary Packard came out his front door.

Maddie’s mother’s film collection from what she called the Golden Age of Hollywood included all of the movies with her favorite hunk, Kirk Douglas. Sometimes when Maddie couldn’t sleep, she would go into her mother’s room and the two of them would lie on the bed, eat mixed nuts, watch Kirk Douglas and feign swoons like two giddy bobbysoxers from the 1940s. Maddie had long ago decided that if Kirk were in his prime today he could put his boots under her bed anytime. And her mother was right; with his tight Levis and the dimple in his chin Gary Packard did have that Kirk Douglas look.

While Maddie walked toward Gary, she briefly fantasized putting him in a police-approved restraining hold, dragging him into his house, and—the polite phrase was—seducing him. The hell with the probing questions, and the coy half-truths that were the grist of the modern dating game, Maddie was ready to enjoy the last chapter first.

“Hello, Mr. Packard. I’m Maddie Richards.” The words were poor substitutes for what she was thinking, a weakness she blamed on her Catholic upbringing.

Gary’s grin widened his dimple. “Hello, Maddie, it’s nice to finally meet you.”

She picked up a sweet smell she thought was baking cinnamon. Wow, she said to herself. He wears tight Levis and bakes. You just don’t meet a man like that every day.

“I saw you and your son out washing your car last Sunday,” he said.

Bradley had playfully sprayed her with the hose, drenching the T-shirt she had worn without a bra. Her mind conjured a brief image of Gary washing his pickup in Spandex shorts, but he wasn’t the type. If he were, half the gals from her mother’s coffee klatch would be out front sitting on the edge of their lawn chairs.

He motioned toward his house. “How ‘bout an after-work drink?”

Maddie heard the screen door on her house slam and turned to see Bradley jump down from the porch before running toward her, hollering, “Mom. Grandma says dinner will be ready in five minutes.”

“Stop! A car’s coming.” Maddie screamed before realizing it was Jed in his car.

“I know, Mom. Come on. Dinner’s ready.”

Jed pulled to the curb. “Get in, Maddie. We’re meeting the Knight’s maid. She’s waiting at one of the other houses she cleans.”

“But Grandma says dinner’s ready.”

“Grandma will understand,” Maddie said with her hand on her son’s shoulder. “I’ll come in to see you when I come home. Okay?”

“Even if I’m asleep?”

“Even if you’re asleep. Please take the mail in the house for me.” As she handed the envelopes to her son, she noticed that one was from her attorney. Bradley ran for the house jumping up over the step onto the porch. She recalled her son going up those stairs one at a time on his hands and knees.

She shrugged and waved at Gary as she got into the car, wondering as she did so, when they would ever get past the waving stage.

***

“Ms. Gonzales,” Maddie said, “we’re talking murder here, so don’t hold anything back. You understand?”

Marta Gonzales, a pudgy middle-aged woman with puffy eyes and well-established laugh lines, glanced at Maddie’s left hand, then said, “Si, Señorita.” After twisting a dust rag as if the wringing might squeeze out her troubles, she added, “I tell you the truth.”

Maddie started with some easy questions to help the woman relax. “Tell us about your schedule at the Knights’ home.”

Marta continued wrestling with the rag. “I clean all day Fridays. On Mondays and Wednesdays I work from twelve to four to pick up after Señora Knight. I want mornings, but the señora don’t get out of bed. I not want to be disrespectful, but you want the truth. Señora Knight was not a nice woman, but the señor is a fine man. I would quit if not for him.”

“You were there this past Wednesday, the day before she died?” Marta’s brown eyes wincing when Maddie said
died.

“Si.”

“Go on,” Jed urged. “Did you see her?” He then extended his question after she nodded. “What was she doing?”

“She went out by the pool in one of her tiny suits,” Marta said. “She always there until I go. I do the laundry and pick up after her, even the clothes she takes off to put on her bikini. I take the clothes she throws on the shelf in the laundry room to the dry cleaners and leave the bills in the kitchen.”

“Last Wednesday, did you bring back a bill from the dry cleaners?”

“Si. I put in the kitchen like always.”

“What fragrance air freshener do you use in the Knights house?” Maddie asked. Jed turned to stare at her.

“None. Never. The
lady
of the house does—did not like them.” Marta could not resist sneering when referring to Abigail Knight, even after her death.

“Do you ever clean the thermostat on the bedroom wall? Not just dusting, washing.”

“Si. I wash them every other month. Dust every week. The señora hollers whenever she find dust. Last Wednesday I wash.”

“Do you have any reason to believe Abigail Knight played around on Doctor Knight?” Jed asked in his jump-in-the-deep-end style.

“Marta,” Maddie raised her hand in front of the maid. “You did not like Mrs. Knight. That is fine. But we need you to be honest with us. Tell us what you know. Okay?”

“Si.” She tossed her dust rag on the table and cleared her throat. “Rex Bronson, the señora’s trainer, a black man, exercise her hard so the wine don’t make her fat. They have sex too.”

“How do you know this?” Jed asked, his eyes narrowing as he turned the page in his memo pad.

“I see them one time. Hear them sex talk on the phone many times. The señora don’t think I speak English. She call me ‘the fat no-speak-um.’ I don’t want to talk to her so I never tell her. Doctor Knight, he knows I speak English. It is our little secret.”

“Tell us what you saw.”

“One week my Thursday customer have a party. That lady say, ‘Come Friday.’ Doctor Knight, he refer me to her, so he say I can do his home that week on Thursday. I guess he no tell
her
. When I walk in, the señora and Rex make so much noise they not hear me. From the hall I see into the exercise room. Señor Bronson ees lying on the exercise bench. Señora Knight sit him like a vaquero, her feet hooked behind the bench legs. I see her boobies flopping and hear her yelling, ‘gitty up.’”

Marta blushed, then continued. “I tiptoe out and come back in an hour. When I come back Señora Knight angry I come Thursday. I play no-speak-um and do my work. She never know I see her riding Rex.” Marta blushed again, and then giggled. “I tell no one, till you. Every Thursday, the trainer’s van ees in the Knight’s driveway when I go to my regular Thursday house around the corner.”

Abigail Knight’s weekly affair with her trainer could explain why she opted not to go to La Jolla with her husband. Did Abigail Knight have more, “other men” in her life?

“The señora drops clothes all over,” Marta said, bringing Maddie back from her thoughts. “Leaves dirty dishes and glasses everywhere. When she ees mad, she swear, how you say … I hear once in a movie … like a sailor. No, like a drunk sailor. I do all the washing and almost no panties. In my country, we call her a puta. Señor Knight, he crazy for her, but she twist him around her finger. He a fool. A good fool. I would like my daughter, Rosa, to meet such a man. She would know how to treat him.”

“Did Señora Knight wear nightgowns?” Jed asked.

“Si. I wash six or seven each week.”

Maddie described the red babydoll she had seen folded on the vanity at the crime scene.

“Si, I wash it many times.”

“Did you often find their thermostat set at a really low temperature?” Maddie asked.

“No. Always at seventy.”

“Always?”

“Si.”

The low temperature that night must have been set by her killer. It was also low at the Stowe scene; at least it was until the building super changed the setting.

Maddie tried a presumptive question. “What did the Knights fight about?”

“The señor ees never home when I clean, but I hear her once on the phone telling somebody the señor very mad because the señora she get fixed to not have child. I hear her laugh. She say she not going to ruin her body just to be saddled with a brat. That is what she call a baby. A brat.”

Marta shook her head in disgust before adding a few words in Spanish; Maddie didn’t need a literal translation.

Jed asked, “Marta, have you ever heard the name Folami Stowe?”

Maddie didn’t expect she had, but as the fictional, inscrutable Charlie Chan might say: “Unexpected question sometimes get unexpected answer.”

“I see this name in the newspaper, I think,” Marta said, “or maybe on the TV.”

***

Late that night, Maddie crawled into bed and turned on her little bedside television. The picture quickly lost her attention as her mind went back over the interview of Marta the maid, and the images of a butchered Abigail Knight. Maddie had been given the point on a major case. Just what she needed while her ex-husband was trying to destroy her life.

On both fronts, the worst was yet to come.

Chapter 9

The odor of sun-ripened vomit rose from the weedy patch along the side street when Maddie and Jed got out of the car to visit Folami Stowe’s director of marketing, Clarence Clark Johnson. According to the vice department, the pimp ran his take from his girls through BB’s Tavern on Broadway which occupied the center spot in a commercial triplex, sandwiched between a 24/7 coin-operated laundry and a tattoo parlor. Clarence Johnson’s girls and customers called him BB; the city’s head vice detective, Brackett, called him Popcorn.

“Surrender to Jesus and be saved,” an old man in rags screeched, holding a Bible above his head while pacing the sidewalk on Broadway. From the look of the neighborhood, not many had taken his message to heart.

After the sunlight, the inside of the tavern seemed dark as a cave, with a mixture of odors that provoked an urge to chew.

When Maddie’s eyes adjusted, she saw Clarence Clark Johnson standing near the far end of the bar. He looked just as Brackett had described him, a high shiny forehead surrounded by thinning, burr hair. Johnson moved his tongue across his lips, tossed popcorn into his mouth, and allowed a slight upturn to the ends of his lips. It wasn’t a smile, just his way of letting Maddie and Jed know he had made them as cops.

The six-foot pimp had a sallow complexion and a beer gut that oozed over the bar suggesting he drank up a significant chunk of the profits.

There were two other people in the tavern. A white man around twenty-five wearing a sleeveless shirt with gang tattoos cresting over his shoulders, sat slouched near a pool table. He looked at Maddie and suggestively slid his hand up and down the cue stick propped between his thighs. A black woman sat at the far end of the bar, holding a cell phone, wearing a red dress cut low enough to suggest being suspended on velcroed nipples.

The woman shot a glance toward BB. He shook his head once. She put down the cell phone and pulled the short chain dangling below a rectangular green plastic shade. The light that had spilled across the bar in front of her disappeared.

“We’re homicide, BB, not vice,” Maddie said. “We aren’t interested in your side business. Our job is to find the person who killed Folami Stowe. We’re assuming you want that, too. Don’t change our minds.”

“Whatchu want from me?” he asked, waving an empty popcorn basket in their direction on his way over to the popper in the corner that had just dumped a fresh batch of puffy whites. Maddie shook her head.

“We’ll need a list of Folami’s customers for the past two months,” she told him. “Include the days and times of her appointments and how we can contact them. I’m sure your secretary over there can give us the list, and include anybody who hung around here who had the hots for Folami.”

“Angel didn’t hang here.” BB ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “I never dug that African name Folami shit, but you saw that face. I never permitted no rough stuff with Angel.”

“We’ve seen pictures,” Maddie said, without getting into the current condition of Folami’s face. The media had not yet learned of the mutilation of the victims.

“She had her reg’lars,” BB admitted, “but they was all meek. Anybody roughed Angel know’d they’d get double. No hard ass took a turn on Angel. I got my ethics you know.”

“Sure you do, and you keep them in that jar on the back bar down among the pickled eggs,” Maddie wisecracked.

“Whachu talking about, woman?”

“Forget it.”

Jed tossed a pad and pencil on the bar. “Names. Dates. Times. Addresses. Phone numbers.”