The Coffee Shoppe Killer

by Rod Kackley

  David’s skull exploded onto the computer. A warm backwash of brains, blood, and bits of skull landed on Mary Eileen. That was a shock. It woke her up to the reality of what she had just done.

  The mess was something she had not counted on. Now she was afraid. Her fear would only get worse.

  Suddenly she realized it was 3 p.m. Children were outside playing. People were walking to and from the shops on the street; one of those quaint, old-style European streets built before automobiles. Although many of the buildings were constructed with thick brick walls, there could still be very few secrets, especially the secrets of three shots fired into the back of a man’s head.

  And here was Mary Eileen with David’s dead body on her dining room table.

  What should she do now? No matter how much housework a person might be accustomed to it can’t compare to cleaning up the mess left by a dead body, especially a corpse with its brains splattered across a dining room table.

  Mary Eileen washed David’s blood, flesh, brains, and tiny bits of skull off her hands and her forearms. There were splashes of blood and whatever else flew backward on her face and neck as well.

  Mary Eileen decided washing up after a homicide is something that is never described accurately enough on TV crime shows.

  Just as she got herself clean, Mary Eileen’s smartphone rang.

  Good God, she thought, is it a neighbor who heard the gunshots?

  If so, how would she explain the noise? And what if someone knocked at the door to make sure she and David are okay. Certainly, she was not going to be able to move his corpse, and whoever was standing in the door of the apartment would be able to look over her head and see David’s body.

  It was a corpse, by the way, that was already starting to smell.

  The phone rang again.

  Fuck. Maybe it was Cheryl next door. Did she hear the gunshots?

  Mary Eileen ran over to the TV, desperately searching for a cowboy or police show that could be used to explain the sounds of gunfire.

  She found one turned up the volume and only then picked up her smartphone, held her breath, and answered.

  It was Sue Ann, one of the college kids Mary Eileen hired to get through spring break and the tourist season.

  Guess what? A busload of tourists had just unloaded in front of the Coffee Shoppe.

  “Can you come back, please? It’s a bunch of old people on their way down to the Tulip Time thing in Holland. Some of them are even asking for something called, ‘Sanka.’ Everybody wants decaf,” Sue Ann said.

  Thank God, Mary Eileen thought.

  She had never been so relieved to be needed at the Coffee Shoppe. This was one time she would not complain about someone on the staff asking for assistance.

  The sound of the bus and its air brakes, along with those old people all yelling at each other to be heard probably covered the sounds of the gunshots.

  So that was all good.

  But Mary Eileen looked back at David’s body on the table. That was bad.

  What was she going to do about him? Getting David to move out of the apartment was tough enough before Mary Eileen squeezed the trigger. Now her dilemma had increased exponentially. What was she to do?

  The decision would have to wait.

  She turned to look at him one last time and left David where he lay, on her dining room table.

  Six

  When Mary Eileen returned from the Coffee Shoppe, she cleaned. Mary Eileen spent the first hours of the night washing and disinfecting the dining room. Then she moved through the rest of the apartment, just in case she had tracked traces of blood or brain into the other rooms. All the while, she was looking at David’s body, wondering how she was going to get rid of it.

  Well, it didn’t take a master criminal to realize she had to get the body out of the apartment. Mary Eileen needed a plan.

  She was not a large woman. And David was not a small man. Mary Eileen would learn the truth of the expression “dead weight” this night.

  She pushed and pulled his corpse off the dining room table. It hit the floor was a wet thud as more brain and blood came out of his head. There was a rather small entrance wound at the back of his skull. But at least a third of his face seemed to have been blown off by the exit wound.

  More mess to clean, Mary Eileen realized.

  That would have to wait.

  She put her arms under David’s armpits and started dragging him backward. Again, more mess as his body left a skid mark of death on the floor that she had already cleaned and disinfected.

  Mary Eileen was able to get the body out of the apartment through the back door. After catching her breath and wiping the sweat from her face, she started dragging David down the stairs.

  It was a peaceful night in the neighborhood. A cat could be heard meowing and a small dog was barking, but those sounds were nothing out of the ordinary.

  The only sound that was truly extraordinary, Mary Eileen realized, was the noise of her ex-husband’s dead body bumping and thumping its way down the wood steps of the staircase that went from her apartment to the ground.

  Mary Eileen cringed with every thud and waited for a neighbor to poke his or her head out of a bedroom window to find out what was making the sound of a wet sack of cement bouncing off wood.

  Finally she hit the bottom step and was able to pull David’s corpse to her car.

  Oh, Lord! If dragging her dead ex-husband off the dining room table, through the apartment and then down the stairs had required extraordinary strength from this average-sized woman, superhuman muscles would be needed to lift the body into the trunk of her car.

  Taking David for his final drive into the country to dump his body had been Plan ‘A” for Mary Eileen. She thought of it while working on her books at the Coffee Shoppe. But she never expected it would be next to impossible for her to lift the body up off the ground and into the trunk.

  Plan ‘A’ wasn’t going to work. She had no time for a ‘Plan B.’ Mary Eileen had made enough noise to wake the living about the reality of a dead man in the neighborhood. Besides, she had to get cleaned up and go to work.

  There was nothing else to do but to push and drag David into a storage shed. She closed the shed door as quietly as she could and then went back up to her apartment.

  Mary Eileen showered after doing her best to quickly erase the skid marks of death from her floor and tried to get some sleep.

  Every muscle in her body, including those she didn’t know existed, ached so loudly that Mary Eileen was nearly screaming in agony. However, the last thing she wanted to do was to call any attention to herself. So she would put in a full day at the Coffee Shoppe.

  But only half her mind would be on her customers and employees.

  The other half would be occupied with trying to come up with ‘Plan B.’ What was she going to do with David’s body? But that was only half of the problem facing her that day, and Mary Eileen knew it.

  But first things, first, she had to dispose of the body. However, there was something even more important to do, and that was to get some sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY, MARY Eileen decided to burn David’s corpse. It was not an easy decision. She spent the day serving ice cream, paying bills, dealing with Christina and the other employees, and dreading the first time someone asked, “Hey, how is David doing?” or even worse; they might ask, “Is David upstairs?”

  Those were two questions Mary Eileen did not want to face. So as soon as it got dark, she went back to work on disposing of this ex-husband of hers. Ironically, Mary Eileen was having as much trouble getting rid of his corpse as she had to get her ex out of the apartment.

  When it was dark, she dragged the body out of the storage shed and into a yard behind her building. Moving David wasn’t as hard as it had been. She developed a system and a rhythm to get up under his body and use her body as kind of a sled to pull it across the broken concrete of the alley and into the yard.

  Now it was time to light David’s funeral pyr
e. She covered the corpse with branches and leaves, found some old newspapers crumpled the pages and tossed them on the pile. Anything to serve as kindling she figured had to help. Mary Eileen poured gasoline over it all and lit a match.

  Good, God! The pile exploded. It was all she could do to jump out of the way. Thank heavens she had been standing back when she tossed the match. As soon as it hit the fumes of the gasoline — maybe she had gone overboard on the gas — the flames erupted.

  She was breathing heavy. This felt good. Mary Eileen probably should have worried about the smell of burning flesh. How would she explain that to the neighbors?

  But on this city block, what with the homeless wandering like zombies all night long talking to the traffic lights, there was always an odd assortment of odors.

  At least she hoped that would be an explanation that would be accepted if a neighbor couldn’t help but stick his or her nose where it did not belong.

  Mary Eileen went back to her apartment. If someone did come along to investigate the fire, she didn’t want to be at the scene of the crime.

  So, she went back upstairs and waited.

  Mary Eileen thought about showering to wash away the stench of David’s corpse —burning it didn’t come a moment too soon — but decided she might as well wait.

  When she went outside with a shovel and a dust pan, Mary Eileen figured cleaning up the ashes would be the easiest part of this disposal job, she nearly cried.

  David’s corpse had not been reduced to ashes. It had not even been burnt beyond recognition. The body had only been singed.

  Now Mary Eileen needed a ‘Plan C.’ She was too tired to even think about that as she dragged the body, which smelled even worse now, back to the storage shed.

  Seven

  St. Isidore tended to be a cloudy, rainy city. It wasn’t too unlike the British Isles in that regard, Mary Eileen thought. So when she awoke the next morning at 6 am to sunshine coming through her bedroom window, that was a bonus.

  However, the moment of euphoria disappeared when she took her first deep breath. The odor of disinfectant and bleach hung in the apartment.

  “Good God, it’s worse than a swimming pool that’s overdosing on chlorine,” Mary Eileen said aloud. Then she glanced quickly to the left and the right to make sure the ghost of David had not heard her.

  He had not been such a bad guy, that David. Maybe he just couldn't help himself. Mary Eileen knew she had killer’s remorse. But at the same time, she had to admit that maybe the murder of David had been a mistake. After all, there had been a time when she loved him. Or at least Mary Eileen thought she had loved him.

  Yes, I did love him, she thought. I did love him. But he let me down. He didn’t make me happy. And face it, there was no way that St. Isidore boy was going to move out of this city. None of them every does.

  Oh yes, Mary Eileen knew this city.

  Mary Eileen had not met more than one or two people in St. Isidore who could honestly be described as “friendly.” There was always kind of a film over them, an air of self-righteous arrogance that passed for being nice.

  The city had been overwhelmingly Dutch from the late 1700s through the mid-to-late twentieth century; Mary Eileen had heard the town’s favorite expression then had always been, “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” It didn’t ring as true anymore. But it could have been replaced with “If you weren’t born here, you’ll never be much.”

  St. Isidore natives could be friendly, but they could never be your friend if you weren’t born and raised here. Mary Eileen had learned that early on. And David was a native. So maybe he couldn’t help himself, she thought, pulling the covers up around her neck.

  When her fingers got near her nose, Mary Eileen could still smell David. Or better put, she could smell the stench of his rotting corpse.

  “Oh my God!” Mary Eileen screamed as she jumped out of bed, getting her legs and feet tangled in the comforter, ruining her exit.

  Mary Eileen screamed and cried, literally bawled like a baby, as she fought to get out of the tangled web she had woven in her bed. It all came out. All the tension. All the guilt. Oh sweet Jesus, what have I done?

  Mary Eileen fell out of the bed, landing flat on her stomach. She slowly pulled herself up to her knees and prayed at the side of the bed like she had not done since childhood.

  She wept the tears of a woman who had killed for the first time. Mary Eileen had quite often considered murder as an option. And there were very few mornings that she hadn't thought about suicide as a viable option. And she knew the latter was just as sinful as the former.

  But now, Mary Eileen had done it. There was no turning back. Was she doomed to Hell?

  Wouldn’t you know it? Church bells began to ring out. Oh, my God, Mary Eileen thought, her breath catching in her throat. Her racing heart came to a sudden stop.

  Just as quickly Mary Eileen began to laugh. It is Sunday, she thought, of course, church bells are ringing. There are hundreds of churches in this city and scores of them are downtown. Why wouldn’t I hear church bells?

  Mary Eileen laughed so hard, with such violent relief, that she began to cry again. But it was the tears of a happy woman running down her cheeks.

  She sat down on the floor and thought this through.

  “David deserved to die,” Mary Eileen said aloud so that she would hear it and believe it.

  “He was the one who promised we would move out of this little city. He was the one who promised to at least visit Ireland with me. He was the one who pledged to make me happy,” she said. “He was the one who failed.”

  Mary Eileen padded barefoot across the wood floor of her bedroom into the kitchen and poured some coffee beans into the grinder.

  “I promised to love him until death did us part,” she said with a smile and pushed the button to grind the beans.

  “Guess what motherfucker,” Mary Eileen said, underlining every syllable of the sentence with her thickest Irish brogue, “we are apart.”

  Relaxing with her first cup of coffee, realizing it was Sunday and she had the whole day ahead of her, Mary Eileen sat in her breakfast nook, looked out the window and said to herself, “I got you out of my apartment finally. Now I just need to get you out of that goddamn storage shed.”

  Mary Eileen realized she was only kidding herself. Getting the body out of the shed was the easiest of the chores that lay ahead of her.

  Once it was out, what was she going to do with the corpse?

  While she thought and worked on her second cup of the day, one of Mary Eileen’s neighbors supplied the answer as he used a chain saw to cut through some branches that had fallen in last week’s windstorm.

  She eased out of her wooden breakfast nook chair and walked to the window, peeking out through the curtains like she was afraid of being spotted.

  “That’s it!” Mary Eileen whispered. “How hard can that be?”

  DRIVING BACK HOME WITH the chainsaw in the trunk of her Volvo, Mary Eileen felt like a genuinely empowered woman. She pushed the car through its five-speeds, smoothly sliding the stick to her right from one gear to the next, effortless controlling the engine with perfect hand-eye-left-foot-right-foot-coordination.

  For the first time in a long time, Mary Eileen felt like she was actually in control of her life. There would be no more kowtowing to David, worrying about sounding “too Irish” for his St. Isidorian friends.

  God, what a basketful of morons these idiots are, Mary Eileen thought, not worrying for a moment about how she would explain David’s absence.

  “Should be easy,” Mary Eileen said aloud as she downshifted to third gear to take a hairpin curve on the exit ramp from U-S. 131 to I-196 before sliding the stick down to fourth to accelerate as she came out of the curve.

  “I’ll just tell them that David left,” Mary Eileen said, hoping she could produce a tear or two to dribble down her cheeks, “and I have absolutely no idea where he could be.”

  They’ll believe it all, Mary Eil
een thought as she came off the expressway and prepared to take a right turn on red without touching her brake. Sure handed, with total confidence, she downshifted to second, the engine powered down and then she accelerated as she popped it into third, flew over a mini-mogul in the crappy pavement on College Avenue and screamed into a hard left-hand turn onto Michigan Street.

  A five-speed saved my life, Mary Eileen thought before getting back to the matter at hand.

  “They’ll believe it all,” she said aloud, laying out the next step in her plan to be free forever.

  “They’ll believe it all because they want to believe it,” Mary Eileen said with a smile for the rear-view mirror, winking a green eye at the dimple on the left side of her mouth.

  “Whenever you want a lie to be believed, just tell them what they really want to hear, and they’ll buy it every time,” she said with a laugh as she idled into the garage that doubled as a storage shed for the Coffee Shoppe.

  Eight

  David’s body was way too heavy for a woman the size of Mary Eileen to move on her own. She certainly could not ask anyone for help. But as soon as she heard her neighbor's chainsaw the answer blazed in her mind like the neon sign that told her customers the Coffee Shoppe was open for business.

  She had the body. Now she had the chainsaw.

  All Mary Eileen had to do was cut off David’s head, arms, and legs and then stuff the body parts into the cellar. Nobody ever went down into the basement except she and the maintenance workers who had to fix the decades-old plumbing system. The pipes were always leaking and sometimes breaking. So there was a chance of discovery. But Mary Eileen couldn’t let that get in the way of her plan. After all, what other choice was there?

  Chopping up a human body with a chain saw was not as easy as she thought, or hoped it would be. Just pulling the cord to start the machine was a challenge. When the chain started ripping into David’s body, blood flew everywhere. Even four days after his death, fluids were in his corpse, and they all came out.