by Blake Banner
LITTLE DEAD RIDING HOOD
Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
EPILOGUE
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
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ONE
“Family.” He said it as though it was the answer to a particularly complicated equation. Then he smiled, like he expected me to be amazed at that answer, and turned his smile on Dehan, pulling up his bedclothes as he did so. Rain rattled on the windowpane. A dull, wet glow highlighted his left profile, leaving the right side of his face in semi-darkness. He didn’t want the lights on. His eyes were too sensitive. There was a smell of encroaching death in the room. I had the feeling it was lying patiently in the corners and in the shadows, waiting to creep forward when nobody was looking. It was the reek of flavorless food, musty clothes and too much disinfectant. I had a strong urge to get up and leave. My attention strayed through the rain-spattered glass to the sodden lawn. A drip from the eaves sounded like an accelerated clock.
Sean Reynolds was talking again. “Everybody thinks family is an Italian thing.” He pronounced it ‘eye-talian’. “Like the Italians invented family. ‘Family.’” He wheezed a laugh. “You gotta say it like you’re Robert de Niro. But I’m Irish. I’m not Italian. We came over two centuries ago. And let me tell you, family is just as important to an Irishman as it is to any Italian.”
Dehan was sitting in a sage green armchair that looked almost black in the failing light. She said, “Mr. Reynolds, we were told that your son, Samuel, had some new evidence for us…”
“Oh, he has, he won’t be long. He’s only gone down in the truck to the store. There are things I need, you know. He’s a good lad. He brought my bed down to the living room, so’s I wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. I’m practically bedridden. Family, see? He never married, stayed here with me and Hen.”
“Hen?”
“Helen. We call her Hen. Always have. She’s not…” He screwed up his face, made a gesture with his finger going around in circles at his temple, and mouthed, “not all there… We’ve had some family tragedies. If I told you, believe me.”
Dehan nodded. “That’s the girl who let us in?”
“Hen, yeah.”
“And where is she now? Does she know anything about this new evidence…?”
“Up in her room. She stays in her room. She’s on medication. She didn’t used to take it, but now Samuel makes sure she takes it. He’s a good lad. I don’t know…” He said this last as though answering an inaudible query, then shook his head slowly on the pillow and repeated, “I don’t know…” Then, after a long pause gazing at the rain outside, he added, “What we’d do without him.”
I looked at my watch and drew breath to say that maybe we could come back some other time, but his eyes were glazed and his mind was somewhere else. “Since Eileen died,” he said, in that way he had of making statements as though they were related to something nobody had said.
Dehan spoke from the shadows of her chair. “Eileen was your wife.”
It wasn’t a question and he didn’t answer, he just kept staring at the window, with his mouth slightly open and the covers pulled up almost to his chin.
“Giving birth to Celeste,” he said.
“So Celeste never knew her mother?”
He gave his head the most imperceptible shake. “The good Lord gave us Celeste and took away her mother, all on the same night, twenty years ago, on November ninth. Samuel was only six years old. Helen was eight, and poor Celeste came into the world without ever knowing her mom. That was a cruel night.” His gaze drifted from the window to rest on Dehan’s face. His smile made him look somehow older than he was. He couldn’t have been more than sixty-five, but lying there, he might have been a hundred. “We pulled together, as family. I think Samuel realized that night that it was up to him and me to pull through. To pull the family through.”
A flurry of wind dragged wet leaves across the patch of lawn visible through the glass. The air seemed to groan through the house and I heard the front door open and close. Big feet tramped past. We sat in silence and listened to a fridge open and close three times, cupboard doors bang, then big feet tramped back and the door to the room opened.
Samuel occupied the whole doorway. The hall behind him was as dark and gloomy as the room in front of him. He narrowed his eyes to observe Dehan, and then me, where I sat at the foot of the old man’s bed. He had an angry face, like it had been cast that way, and he’d look mad whatever mood he was in. His narrowed eyes now made him look angrier. His voice was surprisingly quiet.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I had to get some things.”
I stood and showed him my badge. “Mr. Reynolds, I am Detective John Stone. “This is Detective Carmen Dehan.” She stood also and showed him her badge. “We run the cold cases unit at the 43rd. We got a message that you have some new evidence relating to a cold case.”
He didn’t look at our badges. He listened to me, and when I had finished, he went over to his father. “How are you doing, Daddy?” he said. “Will I make you your cocoa?”
My voice was a little louder than I had intended. I sighed and said, “Mr. Reynolds, we are very busy and we can’t afford to spend the afternoon sitting around waiting for you. If you have something to tell us, then we would appreciate you doing it now.”
He stood erect and scowled at me. “He always has his cocoa at this time.”
I pulled a card from my wallet and handed it to him. “When you’re ready, call me and come down to the station house.”
The old man was flapping his hands. “Sit down, sit down. Samuel, you can’t keep the police waiting on you, I’ll have my cocoa later. Sit down.”
Samuel hesitated a moment, then pulled over a straight-backed chair and sat by the window with the cold, silver light on his face. We sat too and Dehan pulled a notebook from her pocke
t.
I said, “Samuel, we got your message and came straight over. We haven’t looked at the file yet. So if you could fill us in a little, that would help.”
He didn’t answer straight away. When he did, he said, “I asked for Lenny. Lenny had the case.”
“Lenny Davis?”
He nodded.
“Detective Davis doesn’t work cold cases. Like I said, we run the cold cases unit. This case is two years old now.”
Dehan was making notes. “Don’t worry, we’ll be sure and talk to him to get us up to speed.”
His back was very straight and he had his big hands on his knees. His trousers were a rusty corduroy. His sweater was a darker rust color, like his tightly curled hair. He wet his lips with his tongue. “I went to see Chad.”
Dehan sighed. “Who’s Chad?”
“Chad Norris was Celeste’s boyfriend, kind of. She was seeing him, used to stay over with him. I always thought he was the one who killed her. I didn’t like her seeing him. That’s where she was going the night she was killed. To see him.”
“Celeste,” I said, “was your younger sister. She was eighteen at the time, and you didn’t approve of her boyfriend, Chad.”
He gave a single nod.
“What was it about him, Samuel, that you didn’t like?”
“He was one of those, you know, like he thought he was superior. His dad’s got lots of money, and he has his own house his dad bought for him, and he’s studying law, going to be a big shot lawyer, you know. Like he was too good for us.”
Dehan scratched her head and leaned back in her chair, crossing one long leg over the other. “If he was going out with your sister, how could he think he was too good for you?”
There was a resentful glaze to his eyes now, and a slight curl of the lip. “Well, she was getting ideas herself. Maybe she thought she was too good for us, too.”
“Samuel!” Sean, the old man, had gotten up on one elbow. The aged weakness had evaporated from his face. In its place, there was a scowl that instantly cowed his son. “Family! That’s your sister!”
I studied the old man’s face as he sank back into the pillows, and the appearance of sickness seeped back into the folds and creases. I glanced at Samuel. He was rubbing his palm with his thumb. “So what made you think Chad killed your sister?”
He shrugged. “She was going to his house that night. Probably going to stay the night. She did often enough.”
I waited, but there was nothing more. “Forgive me for insisting, Samuel, but going to visit somebody isn’t normally a motive for murder. There has to be something more.”
“Well, it’s him. He’s a violent sort, aggressive. He used to attack her…”
Dehan looked up from her pad. “Physically?”
“No… well… She said he used to push her if he got mad. He had a temper. He’d pinch her sometimes, too. But mostly it was verbal. He used to humiliate her, shout at her. She told me about it and it made her cry. It made me mad. I told her I’d go talk to him, but she said not to. Like she didn’t want him to meet us. Like she was ashamed of us.”
“So you never met him?”
“Never till now.”
“He lives near here?”
It was his father who answered. “Croes Avenue, not more than five or ten minutes walk down Gleason,” and he told us the number.
I said: “So, what happened that night?”
Samuel said to his hand, “I would have thought you’d know that. Lenny would have known. That’s why I thought they’d send him.”
I smiled as amiably as I could, though he wasn’t looking at me and in that gloom he probably wouldn’t have seen me anyway.
“As I said, Samuel, we were only just handed the case and we haven’t had a chance yet to study the file. What happened that night?”
Again it was his father who answered for Samuel. He was smiling and seemed to be talking to Dehan. “She’d never known her mother. She never had a mother figure, to show her the way. She was my good girl though, hey, Samuel? Lovely, sweet natured child, couldn’t do enough to help around the house. Always obedient and polite.”
Samuel was nodding, still rubbing the palm of his hand, like he had a stain there he was trying to remove.
The old man frowned. “But as she got older, the lack of maternal guidance began to tell a little. Samuel and I…” He looked over at me as though I would be better equipped to understand the next bit. “We weren’t best suited, being men, you know? When she became a woman, we didn’t really know… how to guide her and that.”
Samuel finally looked up from his hand at his father. “We did the best we could, Daddy. But…” He looked frankly at Dehan. “No offense, but women can be real hard to understand sometimes. Especially at the time of the month. It’s like two out of every five weeks, some women go crazy.”
Dehan gave a bark of laughter. “You’re not kidding. But don’t let the thought police hear you say that.”
He gave a small frown like he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Anyway, by the time Celeste was sixteen, it seemed she was going to be one of those. She started going out a lot with boys, staying out late, drinking. You know the sort of thing.”
His dad was scowling at the floor. “She wasn’t a whore!” he said suddenly. “She was a good girl. But when she hit her teens, she went a bit wild. Maybe it was her Irish blood. God knows I was no saint at sixteen—nor at twenty-six! It took your blessed mother to make me settle down. Lord! I miss that woman every day of my life! She would have known how to calm Celeste. She would have known how to talk to her, how to make her see sense. God must know in his wisdom why he had to take her from us, but it nearly killed me when he did. And I believe it killed Celeste.”
Dehan frowned. “How’s that, Mr. Reynolds?”
“If she had still been with us, Celeste would not have been so wild, I’m sure of it. She would not have been out that night, and if she had, she would have been with a nicer type of man.”
“So you also believe Chad might have been responsible for her death?”
“If not him, one like him. They’re all the same, boozing, taking drugs, having their damned parties.”
Dehan spoke suddenly, “OK, so, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Sunday, 6th November, she goes out, at night, to walk to Chad’s house, five or ten minutes down the road?”
Samuel nodded.
“OK, so where had she been that weekend?”
“She had spent most of Friday and all of Saturday with him, stayed the night and came back lunch time on Sunday.” He said all this flatly, without looking at us, in a voice made mechanical by shame.
I asked: “How was she when she got in? Was she her normal self? Did she seem preoccupied?”
Neither of them answered.
I said, “Well?”
The old man said, “You have to remember, Detective, that without a mother to intercede, communication wasn’t always easy. Me and Samuel, we can talk to each other, we understand each other, but with Celeste, at that time, she could be sullen.”
Samuel said, “And I was angry with her for staying out, so we had words in the kitchen. Daddy come in to sort it out, and the two of us wound up shouting at Celeste, and her shouting back…”
“Samuel!”
“Well, they have to know, Daddy! That’s how it was. It’s nobody’s fault! But she wound up storming up the stairs to her room, slamming the door and not coming out.”
Dehan said, “Until?”
The old man answered. “I’ll never forget it so long as I live. Eight thirty PM, she come down those stairs, in her torn jeans, big, black boots like a soldier’s boots, her hair—she had lovely, wild red hair—her hair all scrunched under a woolen cap, and a dirty, big, red, woolen jacket with a hood. You know, I often think what a tragedy, such a beautiful girl—and she was lovely looking, wasn’t she, Samuel?—to die looking so bloody awful. I know that sounds like a shallow thing to say, but it’s true all the same.” His gaz
e wandered again, out the window. “Such a lovely girl, to die looking like a tramp. When she had her home and her family to care for her.”
“So when she came down the stairs, did she say anything?”
Samuel said, “I asked her where she was going, she gave me a mouthful of abuse and said she was going to see Chad. She said at least she felt welcome there.”
“And she left?”
“Maybe more things were said. I went to the kitchen. Daddy was begging her to see sense. She walked out and slammed the door behind her.”
His daddy had started to sob. He had a big, boney hand over his face and he was making ugly, visceral noises.
Samuel said, “He has angina and high blood pressure. This isn’t good for him.”
The old man uncovered his face and reached out to us with his other hand. His face was wet and twisted with grief. “I don’t want you to go! I want to help! I want to hear what you talk about. It’s been two years waiting and I swear it’s killing me. I need to hear what you say and what you think… Don’t go.”
I studied him a moment. “We won’t keep you much longer, Mr. Reynolds. Just a couple more questions. After Celeste left that night, none of you heard from her again?”
He started sobbing again and Samuel said, “No. Not till the police—well, Lenny—told us she’d been found, down by the river.”
I looked at Samuel. “You said you had new evidence, Samuel.”
His expression didn’t change, but he drew himself up, and there was a challenge in his eyes. “I got tired of waiting for nothing to happen, and I went and talked to Chad.”
“When was this?”
“This morning. I told him I thought he’d killed Celeste. He said I was crazy and I ought to be careful making that kind of accusation. Threatened me with all his lawyer talk. I told him I wasn’t scared and maybe we should have the whole thing aired in court. He said I was probably stupid enough to do that, and I said that maybe I was. That was when he told me.”
“Told you what, Samuel?”
“That she was seeing other men. He said they were both getting tired of each other. He was finding her boring, he said. That they were never serious about having a future together, and that she was seeing at least one other man.”