Silent Pretty Things

by O. J. Lovaz

  Ideas started to stream into Anna’s mind as if an emergency floodgate of cunning had been opened just in time to avert a disaster. She began thinking aloud as she organized her thoughts, “If all of us had left around eight thirty, and Mom, being very, very tired, had gone upstairs to lie down before nine…and maybe…sleeping pills…yes, sleeping pills…Mom, remember that—you took sleeping pills. I know you have them. When you go upstairs, take two pills out of the package, flush them down the toilet, and leave the package lying on top of your nightstand.

  “So, okay, are you following this? With Mom on the top floor, in a state of deep sleep, presumptively, someone could have murdered Dad in the basement without her waking up. Maybe Dad forgot to lock the front door—be sure to leave it unlocked—and a burglar came to rob the house; perhaps a lowlife who knew Dad kept lots of cash in here. The criminal found him in the basement and struck him before running away with the rent money, which is down here somewhere, right, Mom?”

  “It’s in that cabinet under the TV,” said Lydia, pointing to the spot where she would find the money.

  “All right, Mom. Here’s the rest of your story. Just after midnight, you will wake up and come down to the kitchen for a glass of water. You will hear the TV on in the basement and go downstairs to check if Dad fell asleep watching sports or whatever. And that’s when you find him, dead on the floor. Horrified and inconsolable, you’ll call 911 and report that your husband has been murdered. Only describe what you’re seeing. Remember, you know nothing. You were out cold from around nine until midnight.”

  “The baseball bat has to disappear,” said Frank.

  “Yes, there can be no murder weapon here,” said Anna. “It has to disappear for good. We cannot risk it being found, ever.”

  “It’s made of wood,” said Lydia. “We could burn it, right?”

  Her mother was right. “Yes, yes, we’ll burn it. Not here, though—out in the woods, somewhere far away from the house. Aunt Marlene, you need to leave now. Go home. Listen, this will all come as tragic news to you tomorrow. Right now, you know nothing about it, because you left here around eight thirty, after the other guests had left—remember that! If you can manage to drive away from here without waking up Grandma, that would be best. Frank, you should also leave. Your story is that you left around eight, right after Mark left with his family. Aunt Marlene and Grandma were the only guests still here. You went straight to your apartment and stayed there.”

  “Don’t you need my help here?” Frank asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I have it all planned out. Mom, I’m going to need a large plastic bag. And the cash, the rent money.” Anna went and checked inside the center drawer of the wide cabinet below the wall-mounted TV. She pulled out a bulging yellow envelope, inside of which were twelve stacks of twenty-dollar bills. “Listen up,” she said as she walked back to them, avoiding stepping anywhere near her father’s corpse. “This money was stolen.”

  Anna took out one of the stacks and threw it at the bottom of the stairs. “The man dropped one stack of bills as he ran out. Don’t touch that stack. It will be evidence. Mom, it’s very important that you tell the police about the yellow envelope full of cash that was inside that cabinet drawer, which you found as it is now, open, and empty. The TV needs to stay on, as you found it when you came down here. You would have run back upstairs, horrified, and not come back down again. Okay now, go upstairs, and don’t touch anything. I’ll be there in a moment. Mom, I’ll need that bag I asked for.”

  They did as Anna asked. No questions. No arguments. Her mother brought her a large black garbage bag, gave her a hug, and went back upstairs, leaving her alone with her father’s lifeless body.

  Even now he looked intimidating, as if in another instant he might wake up and exact his vengeance upon them all. She imagined his spirit, floating above his body—above her—sullenly asking himself how the hell he ended up dead. “Who fucking killed me?” he would ask. “Really, Lydia? Well, I’ll be damned.” Such crazy thoughts. Post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps.

  If Frank and Michael were right, her father was just gone, lights out; no more awareness, thoughts, desires; no more anger, disappointment, hatred, fear. Just an easy way out. She found herself wishing that for him. No hellfire, no torments, no judgment. Just lights out. The anger and longing for retribution that had possessed her before was gone. It had been extinguished somehow. She almost felt sorry for him, wondering what might have driven him to become such a contemptible human being.

  She knelt down and examined the baseball bat. It was chipped at the top of the barrel, right where a smudge of blood baptized the bat as a murder weapon. She put it inside the bag and brought her gaze down, scanning the floor for the missing piece. Found it! She grabbed the blood-splattered little witness. It would have been an absolute disaster if she had left it there for the police to find. She took one last look at her father. “Well, this is goodbye, Dad. Guess I’ll see you at the funeral if I’m not in jail.”

  When Anna reached the top of the stairs, Marlene and Frank had already left. “I asked them to leave already,” said her mother in a numb, distant voice. That’s a good thing, she thought, and would have uttered the words had she not seen, at that very instant, Michael coming toward them.

  “Anna, what’s going on? I ran into Frank outside, and he asked to me take off, but I won’t. Whatever happened, I’m here for you; I want to help you, and I won’t take no for an answer. Just tell me what you need.”

  Anna grabbed his hands, pulled him closer, looked into his eyes. “Well, Michael, if you must help me, and won’t take no for an answer, then go grab a shovel, lighter fluid, and matches. We’ll drive two or three miles out of here, find a desolate place deep in the woods, and burn to ashes the baseball bat that killed Victor Goddard.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  The call came in at 12:55 a.m. He had slept less than two hours. Still in a daze, he heard every other word from the patrol officer who had secured the scene of the crime. “Murder…Blake County…just off Twin Oaks Road…victim has been…as Victor Goddard.”

  Goddard? Detective Andrew Wozniak thought he might know the man. He had known a Goddard once. Was his name Victor? He couldn’t remember. That had been many years ago.

  He splashed cool water on his face, put on his one good suit; grabbed his keys, badge, and his Glock. In another minute he was inside his unmarked black Dodge Charger. He tossed a handful of mixed nuts in his mouth and drove away. He’d have to make a quick stop at McDonald’s for a black coffee, no sugar. Jesus! What a splitting headache he had!

  It was just past 1:30 a.m. when he arrived. The first odd thing that he noticed was the picnic table out on the front lawn, which looked as if the guests had left in a hell of a hurry. There were plates full of food and bottles of beer from which no more than a sip had been taken. Moreover, it was evident that no one had attempted to clean up or save any of the leftover food, and there was a whole lot of it. Pity that he couldn’t nibble on the evidence. That lasagna looked amazing—sure, it would be cold now, but he’d done much worse, especially during long stakeouts. Of course, eating lasagna right before inspecting a corpse wouldn’t be smart.

  Officer Gutierrez greeted him at the front door. As he signed the crime-scene logbook, he sensed a faint smell of smoke. Curious. “Do you smell that?” he asked Gutierrez.

  “Smell what?” His voice reeked of mediocrity.

  “Smoke. Do you smell it?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Hmm, have the rookie do a perimeter search around the house,” said Wozniak, looking back and sideways at a young officer standing idly at the bottom of the stairs. “Have him report to me anything that seems out of place, especially any evidence of a burn site.” He then saw two ladies, one much younger than the other, sitting together in a corner of the porch, to his right. “Who are the two ladies?” he asked.

  “They are the wife and the daughter of the victim. The wife was alone when we got
here. Her daughter arrived twenty minutes ago.”

  “Who called the daughter?”

  “Her mother did.”

  “Has she called anyone else?” asked Wozniak.

  “Yes, her son. He should be on his way here as well.”

  “Nobody enters the house without my express authorization.”

  “Understood, Sir.”

  Wozniak took another glance at the ladies. “And their names?”

  “The wife is Lydia Goddard, and her daughter, Anna Goddard. The son’s name is”—he pulled out a little spiral-bound notebook with a few scribbles on it—“Frank, Frank Goddard.”

  “I’ll want to speak to them after we complete the crime-scene investigation. Officer Mitchell is inside, I presume?”

  “Yes, he’s down there in the basement,” said Gutierrez. “The crime-scene technician and the medical examiner are also there.”

  “Yes, I saw their names on the logbook just now. Very well, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Wozniak hoped no one other than his old pal, Gary Mitchell, the medical examiner, and the technician had been allowed to enter the scene of the crime. The latter two he could trust by virtue of their specialized training. But Mitchell he trusted implicitly. He was an old-school, straight-arrow professional like himself, and smart too. He had met him over two decades ago at the police academy. One of the best cops he’d ever had the pleasure to work with; and yet, somewhere along the way he had managed to piss somebody off, someone high up the chain of command—fucking politics. If he was ever put in a position where he could help Gary make detective, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second. As he came out into the basement, careful not to step on any evidence, including a conspicuous stack of twenties at the base of the stairs, he was glad to see only the three people he had hoped to see there.

  Then he saw the body. It was him! That was the man he once knew when they were both much younger. He’d been more of an acquaintance than a friend, but they did play basketball together at the YMCA many times. They talked about stuff between games. He couldn’t recall much of it, but it stuck with him that the man was in the real estate business, quite successful too, and seemed like a real upstanding citizen. And, boy, the guy could play too. He was a beast. Look at him now. Jesus! What the hell happened here?

  No matter how many corpses he’d seen before, being in the presence of death was something he would never fully get used to. Death made the air feel thicker, and silences more unbearable; its unnatural stillness seemed to slow down time. Already he sensed here the scent of death—not putrefaction; that would come hours later. Something else, as if death itself, the moment in which a human being became a big hunk of raw, dead meat, gave off a subtle stench, like walking into a kitchen where a whole raw chicken has been sitting on the countertop. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t cooked anything other than breakfast since his wife left him five years ago. Thank God for frozen microwave meals, sandwiches, and takeout.

  “Hey, Wozniak,” said Mitchell, “you all right, man?”

  “I’m fine. Good to see you, Mitchell.” He acknowledged the other two men with a nod. “Gentlemen.” Had he been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it toward them as a gesture. “So, would you like to fill me in?”

  The technician spoke first. “The body’s core temperature, taken today at 0116 hours, was 92.8 Fahrenheit. Livor mortis has set in. Estimated time of death is between 2130 and 2200 hours. It does not appear the body has been moved since the time of death.”

  “So, he was killed about four hours ago. Mitchell, who called it in and when?”

  “His wife, Lydia Goddard, called it in after midnight, at 0015 hours. I was the first responder at the scene of the crime. When I arrived at 0033 hours, Ms. Goddard was alone, waiting on the front porch. She seemed quite agitated, as one would naturally expect.”

  Wozniak scanned the floor around the body, then the corpse itself. No gunshot or stab wounds. A damn awful bruise on the head, though. Who could have taken down this Goliath? “What did Ms. Goddard say to the operator, and to you upon arrival?”

  “She stated to the operator the same she said to me; that she had taken sleeping pills after their guests left, approximately at 2030 hours. Near midnight, she woke up thirsty and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water; she heard the TV on in the basement, came down, and found her husband dead on the floor.”

  “How about that stack of twenty-dollar bills over there by the stairs?”

  “Yes, there’s that,” said Mitchell. “Ms. Goddard indicated that there were twelve stacks of a thousand dollars each in a yellow envelope inside that open drawer in the cabinet under the TV, and it’s gone now, except for that one stack. On the surface, it would appear that the motive for the murder may have been robbery, and that the attacker dropped one stack as he ran back upstairs to flee the crime scene.”

  “He?” asked Wozniak.

  “Well, in most likelihood…”

  “We don’t know that. Assume nothing. Assumptions make one eliminate viable explanations. You must avoid them like the plague.”

  The medical examiner spoke next, his voice imbued with expert certainty, almost boredom. “The body presents a head injury consistent with blunt-force trauma. It appears the victim received a single blow to the temple, with enough strength to cause a severe traumatic brain injury.”

  “Murder weapon?” asked Wozniak.

  “None have been found,” said Mitchell.

  Wozniak looked about him. One big fat clue stared back at him. “I think we are looking for a baseball bat, gentlemen, a baseball bat that, perhaps, the assailant picked up right off this wall mount. Well, look at that, a baseball signed by Barry Bonds. Oh yes, I bet the murder weapon was sitting right here five hours ago.”

  “A baseball bat would certainly be capable of producing an injury such as this,” said the medical examiner.

  “Any signs of forced entry?” asked Wozniak.

  “No evidence of forced entry,” said Mitchell. “Ms. Goddard said that she found the front door unlocked when she stepped out after midnight.”

  Already, some things didn’t seem to be adding up. Wozniak approached Mitchell. “So, you mean to say that upon discovering her husband brutally murdered by who knows who, this woman’s instinct is to go and wait outside alone?”

  Mitchell’s face lit up, eyebrows shooting up. “Sharp as always, Wozniak.”

  “You know, nine out of ten times, in a murder case that looks the way this one is starting to look, the murderer ends up being the spouse.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t be surprised if the little lady did it. And the competing theory here would be that a burglar came in without a weapon of his own—or her own—resorting to use the victim’s own baseball bat as the murder weapon. Seems farfetched.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? God damn it, Mitchell, you’d make a fine detective. I want your help cracking this one. I bet we can make an arrest within forty-eight hours.”

  “I bet we could. It would sure help if we found the murder weapon.”

  “Yes, that would be splendid.” Wozniak turned around and addressed the technician, “Um, Scott, right?”

  “Yes, sir, at your service,” he said, as though he were a concierge at a luxury hotel, instead of someone who specializes in dissecting murder scenes.

  “Please be sure to dust for fingerprints all over this basement, those stairs and the front door. And I’d be very interested to learn if you find any traces of foreign material within the injury site itself, perhaps wood particles from a baseball bat.” He turned back to Mitchell. “I assure you, this is, at best, the work of an amateur; but most likely, a crime of passion. Either way, mistakes will have been made, and we just need to find them.”

  “There’s no substitute for experience, right?”

  “True enough, though I’ve met plenty of people whose minds appear to reject the benefit of experience. Say, Mitchell, did you smell smoke outside of the house?”

  “Smoke?
I can’t say I did, no.”

  “I did smell it, sir,” Scott, the technician, interjected. “Right outside of the house, as I was coming in. It was a faint smell, probably carried by the wind from a distance; something like burnt charcoal. I figured someone might be having a bonfire nearby.”

  “And when did you get here?”

  “Not more than fifteen minutes before you did, sir.”

  “Thank you, Scott. Good insights. Here’s what I’m thinking, Mitchell.” Wozniak tapped him on the shoulder. “Sure enough, the smell may have come from some neighbors’ bonfire, but we aren’t going to assume that. Another plausible explanation for the smell is that someone burned a wood baseball bat, our missing murder weapon. That’s why I have an officer searching the premises right now. Should we find a charred baseball bat anywhere around the house, even if we couldn’t lift fingerprints from it, that would be a major piece of evidence.”

  “It sure would be. The random burglar theory would go out the window and the wife would become our prime suspect,” Mitchell observed.

  “Without a doubt. A burglar-turned-murderer would have not lingered around here, but rather taken the weapon and disposed of it far away from this place. Let’s go talk to the family.”

  As they reached the stairs, Wozniak turned around. “Gentlemen, I trust that you will do a thorough examination of the body and sweep this place for evidence. We’ll leave you to it. Officer Mitchell and I will be right outside. Please keep me appraised of anything noteworthy.”

  Coming out into the porch, Wozniak noticed someone new sitting with Lydia Goddard and her daughter. It was a young man about the same age as the daughter; Anna was her name, he recalled. “That must be Frank Goddard, the son,” he whispered to Mitchell. “Let’s go. Try to get a good read of their body language and micro expressions.”

  Wozniak approached the table where Lydia Goddard was sitting, flanked by her daughter and son. Her big dreamy eyes had been following him all along.