Dead Beat (Flynt and Steele Mystery Book 1)

by Micheal Maxwell

  Comrade’s mother was a radical in the Weather Underground mold. She believed that in order to change the system, it must be destroyed. Much of her adult life was spent in protest marches, LSD trips, and copious amounts of marijuana, combined with lots of free love. She’d always carried a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book with her, even though she never read it. Then, to her dismay, she found she was pregnant. Since the father could have been any one of a dozen or so fellow hippies, there was no support system. With no money to raise a child, her only option was to give the child up.

  Two days after his mother delivered him in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, to the sound of Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised blaring from a VW Bus, she left him. She gave up her son, Comrade Truelove, on the front steps of Our Mother of The Angels church.

  Wrapped in a red, white and blue flag with a large peace sign instead of stars, he was placed in a white plastic laundry basket. She took the time to write a note though, scrawled on a rough, brown, service station paper towel. Flynt knew it word for word, often reciting it to himself.

  I do not believe in your fairy tale god. The thing that matters is that you do. I entrust you with my child. His name is Comrade Truelove. Add to it any last name you wish. I will continue my fight for peace, and equality for all. I may return for him when we win the War for Justice. I will not sign this so you can’t send the Pigs to find me.

  Peace,

  A Warrior for Change!

  Not the best start for a foundling. The nuns saw to it that this child of an atheist was raised up in the way of the church. Penitence for his infractions and sins were fourfold what the others suffered. The Mother Superior framed the letter from his mother as a reminder of his sin from birth. It was read to him in the same way others received bedtime stories. Along with the note, the Mother Superior pinned a clipping from the San Francisco Examiner of an Anti-War protest. It was a three by five photograph with a caption detailing the event. On the picture was drawn a circle of red around the slightly blurred face of a young woman, her mouth open in an angry yell. Next to the face was written, Mommy.

  This was all Flynt knew of his mother. The nuns told him some of it and he discovered the remainder by good old fashioned detective work. The framed picture from the news article was packed away with his worn and patched clothes when the redheaded little boy was sent to live with the Flynt family.

  The Flynt home was a place of verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse. There were times Comrade Flynt wished he would die in his sleep. He wished that his parents would just beat him to death. It never happened, though. He lived. He lived and they continued to whip him, slap him, and throw him around. The damage inflicted, the bruises and welts, never emotionally healed.

  It wasn’t always that way, though. For a time, four years to be exact, the Flynt family were a fun-loving, happy, singing, playful family. Comrade and his younger sister put on skits, acted out Disney movies, sang songs from their favorite TV shows, and played for hours in the backyard on the playground set their father built them. The playground rivaled the best playground in any nearby park. It was built with love and excitement as a Christmas present. Little did the kids know on that bright Christmas morning that in only a matter of months, the beautiful playground would be doused with gasoline and set alight.

  He couldn’t remember every single detail of how it all happened, but his scattered memories presented it as best they could at least three times a week.

  Comrade was consumed with building a castle out of Legos. His mother, however, asked that he take his six-year-old sister for a walk. Comrade objected but eventually gave in, wanting to please his mother.

  “Just around the block,” his mother said. “You’ll be right back. She needs the exercise. And she loves to spend time with you.”

  The Lego castle would never be finished. The world would never be the same, and his parents would never look at the adopted boy without showing their hatred of him.

  Comrade and his sister were turning the third corner on their trip around the block when his sister insisted on going farther. Comrade wasn’t having it. He took her hand and pulled her toward home. It was a decision that proved fatal. She broke away and ran into the street in front of an oncoming car. The car struck her, sending her forward, and wasn’t able to come to a stop before it ran over her tiny body—groin to head with both front and back wheels. There were no brakes, no time to stop. After the crunching thud of the car going over the child, the driver, Nancy MacArthur from just up the street, slammed her brakes, bringing the Chevy station wagon to a halt a few car lengths away.

  The woman screamed and cried as she collapsed next to the mutilated body in the street. Comrade stood on the sidewalk unable to move. A neighbor heard the wailing and called the police. The sound of the sirens in the distance sent the dogs in the back of Comrade’s house into fits of howling, barking, and scraping at the fence boards.

  The sight of the police car arriving on the scene sent Comrade running for home fearing he would be arrested.

  Breathless and crying he told his mother that his sister got hurt. She ran from the house in time to see the ambulance crossing the intersection at the end of the block. After that Comrade’s memories grew hazy. He can recall a lot of people coming to their house, dressed in black and a little white box being carried into the front of the church.

  Beyond that, his next memories are of angry, screaming parents, coupled with times they wouldn’t answer his questions or talk to him from the time he got home from school until he went to bed. His parents spoke little to each other, too.

  They no longer said grace before meals or had a story and prayers at bedtime. He was told when to go to bed, and was awakened in the morning with rough orders from his father to, “Get up!”

  Three days after his fifteenth birthday, Comrade’s father died of a heart attack. Comrade didn’t cry. His feeling was one of relief as he watched the coffin lowered into the ground. A fat man in a tan leisure suit stood next to his mother at the funeral. At one point he reached over and held her hand. No one paid much attention to Comrade. From that time on, the fat man came to their house often. The man was all his mother cared about, and they were usually holed up in the bedroom. The man usually left just as Comrade got up to go to school.

  At eighteen, Comrade Flynt left home. He called once, but the woman on the other end of the line may as well have been the recipient of a call from a telephone solicitor. She mumbled something about him not being related and her having done what was required by law before hanging up.

  Shortly after leaving home, he joined the Navy. When his enlistment was over, he attended a community college and joined the police force. He’d done these things because it felt right to do so, not particularly because he had a strong interest in any of it.

  He met his wife, a nearsighted girl with bad teeth four years his junior, at the Dairy Queen where she worked. She gave him free Dilly Bars and he took her to the movies. Her home life was just as miserable as his. Just before she left him all those years later, she told him that this dark similarity of their childhood was the only reason she married him.

  As he thought of her, Comrade remembered how she would sometimes kiss the side of his face as if out of duty. There was no love in those kisses, no passion. But he would have done anything to have one at that moment, as he drifted to sleep in the recliner.

  He awoke at three in the morning, shuffled drowsily to the bathroom, and then back to the comfort of his recliner. He dreamed of ghoulish nuns chasing him, asking where Bill was.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Steele sat for a long moment in the parking lot before starting his car to leave. The first day was now over. He’d made it. He was partnered with the bastard child of Barney Fife and a Nick Nolte mug shot. Worst of all, he arrived at the precinct after Flynt totally screwed up the first few hours of the case he was assigned.

  As Steele started his car, he spotted Flynt coming out the door. His shu
ffle and slothful gait made Steele chuckle. He wanted to give his new partner every chance but…well, the man was terribly pathetic. It seems cruel to be mean to him, but he was so annoying, with his unicorn notebook and absolute disregard for social norms.

  Steele drove home, trying to push Flynt from his mind. He arrived home just after six, to the sound of Mozart coming from the family room.

  “I’m home,” Steele called out.

  “In here,” came the garbled reply.

  Jacki’s wheelchair sat facing the sliding glass doors out to the back yard. He was used to the sight by now but there was still something heartbreaking about it.

  He entered the family room, greeted by yet another voice. “Oh, Hi, Noah!” exclaimed Eva, Jacki’s home care nurse. “She’s had a great day.”

  “That’s terrific,” Steele said with as much emotion as he could. “Thanks, Eva, I’ve got it from here. So, this will probably be my new time getting home with the new job. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

  “Not so long as you can pay for it!” Eva said exaggerating her Ukrainian accent. She moved from the kitchen to where Jacki sat, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “See you tomorrow. Have a good night.”

  Eva high-fived Noah as she made her way to the door. It was his routine to wait until the nurse left to go to his wife with a warm embrace. Tonight was no different.

  “Hey, Tiger, am I glad to see you!” Noah said kneeling and wrapping his arms around Jacki’s frail shoulders. “Eva said you had a good day.”

  “That right,” Eva said haltingly. Her eyes fell on him. He always saw something in there, a reminder of the woman she once was. The woman she still was, in fact. Sort of.

  “The Mozart is nice,” Steele said.

  “You hu-hu-hate it.” Jacki smiled at her husband, knowing how much he hated classical music.

  “Maybe, but at least I know who it is. You’ve taught me well.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Did you eat?”

  Jacki rocked her head slightly back and forth, indicating the affirmative. “Eva fed.”

  “Well, I’m starving,” Noah said. “Let me see what there is and I’ll be right back.”

  Jacki turned her wheelchair using the wand control under her wrist brace. She faced the kitchen and watched as Noah put a sandwich together on the counter.

  “ ’At looks good.”

  “Want some?” Steele turned and smiled.

  She shook her head. “It’s for you.”

  She was so thin and frail. Her beautiful smile now looked distorted and her thin cracked lips barely covered her yellowed teeth. The combination of months of hospitalization and multiple drugs left her snowy white smile almost unrecognizable. He hated to think of his wife as some zombie, but it was the first descriptor that popped into his head far too often.

  How long has it been? he wondered. Time plays tricks on the memory. When it all started, he routinely counted the days as if they could only reach a certain number until she would be alright again. It didn’t happen, and the days turned to months, and the months, years.

  What he did recall was the hot summer night when Jacki ran to the store for a surprise treat of ice cream, chips and his favorite chocolate brownies from the bakery counter in the Ralph’s Supermarket. It was less than a mile down the road and she sprinted out to surprise him with it while he’d been showering after a particularly vigorous bout of lovemaking.

  Steele could remember the phone ringing and ringing while he was in the shower, wondering why his wife wasn’t answering it. Finally, wrapped in a towel and dripping his way across the bedroom, he answered the phone.

  “Noah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Martone. There’s been an accident.”

  “So?” Steele said, more than a little irritated at this off duty interruption.

  “It’s Jacki.”

  “No it’s – No she’s…” But he then realized the apartment was silent. “Jacki?” he called. But there was no answer.

  Exactly two minutes later, he was standing amid a flurry of red and blue emergency lights, looking at Jacki’s little yellow Mini Cooper. It was pretty much destroyed, crushed by a red Camaro that laid on its roof, leaking gas and coolant onto the road in front of Ralph’s Supermarket.

  He vaguely recalled the paramedics, and the blonde teenage girl with a ponytail, tank top, and pink shorts sitting on the curb holding a blue ice pack to her forehead. The paramedics were there for Jacki, attending to her. One of them continually repeated: “Stay with us, sweetheart.”

  It was that one line and the distant ringing of the phone from his shower that he remembered most. He supposed that was a mercy. He’d caught a glimpse of what Jacki looked like, having been ejected through the windshield and tossed ten feet, sliding another five across the pavement.

  For eighteen months Jacki lay in a hospital bed. First, she fought for her life. Then, when she barely won that battle, she fought depression, bedsores, and mood swings. She survived the crash with a broken neck, a crushed pelvis, and multiple fractures of her arms and legs. She was paralyzed from her chest down, left with only the slightest movement of her right hand.

  After Jacki’s release from the hospital, her parents refused to speak to Noah. His decision upon her release to bring her home was the focus of their anger. They insisted their daughter be brought to their house to be nursed by her mother, not a paid medical professional. In their anger and unwillingness to see that Jacki’s care is better served by the decisions of her spouse, they also threatened to write Jacki out of their will. They have even gone so far as to threaten a wrongful death suit against Noah if she died.

  Noah remained steadfast, wanting her in their home. He went to great lengths to see to it that she was given quality care during the day. If he was honest though, there were times when he wished he’d let her parents transfer her to a long term care facility. She’d likely be more comfortable there. But Jacki told him she preferred it this way, with him, living their marriage out.

  He smiled at her as he bit from his ham and cheese sandwich. He still loved her dearly but the beautiful woman, so full of life and passion, was no longer there. She was much more than a shell—he would never see her in such a negative light—but he would be both stupid and naïve to think the same woman he married currently sat in the wheelchair across the room, looking like a frail broken bird. She weighed less than ninety pounds. At times the look in her eyes was so distant, Noah wondered if she really knew who he was.

  Holding the plate up Noah teased, “There’s plenty.”

  “I can’t eat that C.R.A.P.” Jacki’s eyes twinkled at her joke.

  The nutritionist at the hospital told them not to eat C.R.A.P. when she got home. C was for Chemicals, R: Refined sugar and flour, A: Artificial sweeteners, and P: Preservatives. The silly acronym stuck in their minds and it quickly became Jacki’s way of teasing Noah about his eating habits.

  “How was,” Jacki struggled to get her words out. She frowned and then finally got it out. “First day?”

  Steele’s mouth was full of his first bite of sandwich and he raised his index finger as he took a seat at the snack bar. “Well, my dear, it will be an interesting few weeks. I have been assigned a partner, that when I tell you, you will think I’m making it up.” He took another small bite of sandwich. Then gave her a complete description, complete with his best impersonation of his new partner’s speech pattern. He did his best to not use the word leprechaun, though it was a pretty fitting description, he had to admit.

  “Liar. Nobody that bad.” Jacki giggled.

  “I swear I’m not making it up. The problem is that the captain expects me to provide the evidence he needs to fire the poor guy. While solving the case.”

  Jacki frowned and moved her head side to side as best she could to indicate her displeasure. “Not fair.”

  “I agree. It’s not fair to me or him,” Noah agreed. “The thing I can’t figure out is how someone like him ever got to be a detective, or
even a cop for that matter, in the first place. I do know the guy I’m replacing spoiled him…covered a lot for him.” He took a sip of his milk.

  “Where old partner?”

  “There’s a sad deal. That detective, Lieutenant Barrow, had a heart attack and stroke last night. He died on the way to the hospital. This poor guy Flynt, he’s still trying to wrap his head around his partner being gone. So, I guess I’m not seeing him in his best light.”

  “Like you,” Jacki said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You lost your partner, too.”

  Steele stood from the breakfast bar where he sat and moved to kneel at Jacki’s chair. He reached up and laid his hand on her cheek.

  “I have lost nothing.”

  “Los’ me. You los’ sex, you los’ jogging partner. You los’…” She shook her head to show his touch annoyed her. “When was last time you ran?”

  Steele could see Jacki’s anger rising. Inside the motionless, useless body still dwelt a mind. A mind that processed, that remembered and hated the state she was in. Noah knew with a soul-crushing certainty that if she could, Jacki would end her life.

  “You’re still my girl,” Steele said softly. “And I never really liked jogging, anyway.”

  “You know ’at girl’s dead! I wish this one was too!”

  His little jab at jogging did not deter the mood swing. Jacki used what strength she had to shove against the toggle and spun her chair around. She raced it to the far side of the apartment facing the bookcase.

  Steele stayed on his knees and watched the desperate act of the woman who was lost in her thoughts and body.

  A fleeting memory came to his mind and slipped away. It was the memory of the first time he’d seen her, a dark-haired beauty that fought like a tiger on the volleyball court. The irony was that he attended the game with his college girlfriend, who went to the game to cheer for her roommate.