This time I didn’t have time to get out of the way. I leaped upward, trying to get above the bumper and the front grill. I twisted in the air, drawing my feet up after me, and hit the windshield lengthwise. As I rolled up on top of the cab, a woman screamed—me maybe. Someone was coming across the street. The pickup was still gathering speed, and, as it went over the curb into the road, I bounced off the top of the cab into the bed of the truck, landing in a heap. The truck lurched to a stop, throwing me against the cab, then it took off again, just as I was sitting up, holding to one side of the pickup with my left hand and forearm. Brooke Marshall and Dr. McDermott, the retired physician who lived across the street from me, were standing in the road. I only caught a glimpse of them before the pickup, jerking from one curb to the other as it accelerated, threw me against the far wall of the pickup bed amid a jumble of crumpled beer cans and other detritus.
The back window of the cab was tinted and in the dark completely opaque to me. Though the street curved sharply as it went downhill, the pickup maintained its speed, its suspension squealing. I managed to work my way into a crouch, holding on to the tailgate with one hand and the side of the pickup with the other, but I almost went down when the street came to a T and the pickup went through the stop sign without slowing down, its tires skidding as the rear of the truck slewed sideways.
Nothing, it seemed, was going to slow it down. As the pickup accelerated through another stop sign, I felt the first surge of panic breaking out of whatever closet my brain had consigned it to. There was a traffic light ahead, its light green, as if that mattered, and the pickup swung into the middle of the road as we rocketed toward it. The driver turned hard to the right, starting the turn early, and the truck screeched as if it were coming apart, the tires sliding on the pavement, then losing their grip entirely as the truck went into a spin. It bumped over a curb onto somebody’s lawn, bouncing me into the air. I came down on my kiester, bounced, then scrambled over the side, sliding down the rear panel and landing heavily on my back in the grass as the driver regained control of the pickup and bounced over the curb back into the road.
Chapter 18
For a moment I lay stunned, unable to draw a breath, then my diaphragm came unstuck, and my chest rose as my lungs inflated. Lifting my head, I saw that the pickup had stopped a house or two down from me. I lurched to my feet and limped onto the front stoop of a small brick house. I rang the bell, my head turned so as not to lose sight of the pickup. The taillights dimmed as the truck began to roll forward, picking up speed, then the truck from hell was gone.
The porch light came on above my head, and I turned toward the door to give the peephole a shrug and a sick smile. The door swung open. The man inside was significantly taller than I was, wearing a thin cotton bathrobe that didn’t quite reach his knees. I looked up into a wide, toothy grin.
“Hello,” he said, blinking at me over the unnatural smile.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said, and stopped, unnerved by the quaver in my voice.
“It’s quite all right.” He spoke in a flat, West Texas sort of drawl: Quat all rat. At first glance, I had taken him for my own age, about thirty, but the web of seams about his eyes and mouth suggested that I had misjudged him by maybe twenty years.
“Thank you,” I said. “I…” I had thought to give some explanation for my appearance on his doorstep, but suddenly it all seemed too complex and unbelievable. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked down and realized that half my dress had been torn away and my bra was showing. I pulled at the edges of what remained of the silk in an effort to cover myself, but the material didn’t seem to be there, and the left cone of my bra continued to shine at the man like a headlight.
It was all too much, and I began to cry. I was ashamed of myself for doing it. It was more of an imposition than coming up to the man’s house and shining my breast at him, but I didn’t seem to be able to help myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just been so…” You shouldn’t try to cry and talk at the same time. My chest hitched, and a line of snot squirted out of my right nostril onto my upper lip. It checked my crying in mid-sob; then, mortified, I began to cry harder.
My host had taken a step backwards, his smile dimming, but his lips never closing completely over his slightly protruding teeth. His hands rose in front of his chest, his palms turned out defensively as he cringed away from me. I felt bad for him, and, reaching out, I laid a hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said, sniffing, trying to get myself under control. “I know it’s just awful.”
He nodded, reaching behind himself with one hand and groping on the spindle-legged secretary in his little entranceway. He found what he was looking for, a box of facial tissues, and he thrust it at me protectively. “Kleenex?” he said.
“Thank you.” I took several, held them to my face, and snorted.
He waited, still leaning slightly away from me, as if to see if the Kleenex would appease me.
I wiped my nose, folded over the tissues and dabbed at my eyes. I smiled at him, and he seemed to relax a little. “I’m not normally like this,” I said, as if he were contemplating a relationship with me and he cared what I was normally like.
“No, I’m sure you’re not.” He tried out his smile on me again, and this time the smile seemed not unnatural, but only defensive.
I looked around for some place to put my spent tissues, but I didn’t see a trashcan. He held out his hand. I hesitated, looking up into his face.
“I’ll take them.” Al take them.
I gave him a half-shrug and a lopsided smile, then folded the tissues over again and handed them to him. His hand closed on them, but he remained where he was, his eyes on my face.
“I guess I need to use your phone,” I said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Someone broke into my house, I think. They…” I stopped. They tried to kill me sounded too dramatic.
He was nodding as if he understood. “Where do you live?” he asked.
I opened my mouth and found that for a moment I couldn’t remember my own address. “Beechnut Street,” I said finally.
He nodded, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck. “My name’s Ralph Mitchell,” he said.
“I’m sorry. Robin Starling.” I held out my hand. He shifted the wad of tissues to his left, and we shook.
“The phone’s by the bed. Back there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the hall. At the end of it, a fan of light spilled from one of the rooms.
I nodded, hesitated, then moved past him.
The bed was covered by a white chintz spread, thrown back, and a table lamp was on. A library copy of Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens’ fourth or fifth novel—I know because I was an English major—lay open, face down, on the spread.
The telephone was on the nightstand by the table lamp and another box of Kleenex. It was a heavy, black phone with a rotary dial. I had last seen one at my grandma’s house when I was a very little girl. I put it on my lap and dialed my home number.
Click-click-click-click-click-click. Click-click. Click-click-click-click. Eventually, I had it dialed.
Brooke answered. “Hello?”
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Thank heavens you’re okay.”
“Relatively speaking,” I said. “Is everything all right there?”
“Someone broke into our house,” she said. “Are you really okay?”
“Yeah. A little scratched and bruised.” Looking down at myself, I could have added half-undressed, but I didn’t. “Do you know what they were after?”
“I think they were after me,” Brooke said.
“You? Why would they be after you?”
“I don’t know. They kept talking about a redhead.”
“You heard this from across the street?”
“No. I heard that from under my bed while two sets of feet stomped around my room.”
I didn’t have anything to say to
that.
“Dr. McDermott is here with me. Where are you?”
I looked up. Ralph Mitchell was looming in the doorway, angular and awkward-seeming, even in his own house. “I don’t know. At a house a mile or so away, I think.”
“It’s 922 Hilliard Street,” Ralph said.
“922 Hilliard,” I repeated.
“Do you need us to come get you?”
“That would be nice. I’ve lost my shoes, and I’m not really in any condition to walk it.”
“I’ll drive you,” Ralph said from the doorway, “if you need a ride.”
“We’ll see you soon,” Brooke said.
“Thanks.” When I hung up, I looked up at Ralph. “They’re coming to get me. I’ve already ruined your evening.” I pointed at his book. “I’m sorry.”
“Can I lend you a T-shirt?”
I looked down at myself, then up again. I smiled at him crookedly. “You’re a champ,” I said.
We waited in the living room, Ralph seated on the sofa and me in a wingchair set at right angles to it. Glancing at him, I wondered what he did for a living—or whether he stayed in his house, reading library books and living off a small inheritance his mother had left him. The newest thing I’d seen in his house was the T-shirt I was wearing, a crisply folded, unfaded shirt bearing the Washington Nationals logo.
My grandma had been like that: she would never wear anything new until she was sure she had gotten all the use there was to get out of the old one. The slippers she wore got so ratty, every Christmas people gave her two or three new pairs. She’d put the new slippers in her closet against the day when her old ones wore out, and she’d died still wearing the old ones, with six new pairs of slippers lined up neatly in her closet. Of course, Grandma had grown up during the Great Depression. I didn’t know what Ralph’s excuse was.
In front of the house a car door slammed, and Ralph said, “Here they are.” He was still grinning, but the smile looked forced, ill at ease.
I reached toward him and patted his hand, which rested on his knee. “Thanks, Ralph. You’ve been great.”
He nodded.
“I’ll get this laundered and get it back to you as soon as I can.”
He shook his head. “I have plenty of T-shirts.”
I was willing to bet this was his only new one. He stood up, and, impulsively, I put my arms around him and gave him a hug.
“Thanks again,” I said.
He nodded, looking a little flushed and still grinning helplessly at me.
I went to the door. When I looked back from the end of the sidewalk, he was standing in the doorway. I felt a pang as I raised a hand to wave at him.
He held up his own hand in response, but he didn’t wave it. He just stood there on his porch, looking forlorn despite his grin, like an abandoned child.
As we pulled away, Brooke said, “Who was that?”
“Ralph Mitchell.” I was sitting in the back seat, and she was sitting in the front, turned sideways with her arm hooked over the back of the seat.
Dr. McDermott, behind the wheel of the big Town Car, said, “Where do you know him from?”
“I don’t. The pickup just happened to be driving by his house when I jumped out of it.”
Dr. McDermott nodded as he drove, bent over the steering wheel.
“Tell me what happened,” I said to Brooke.
“You first.”
“There’s not much to tell. You didn’t show up at work to pick me up…”
“I was waiting for you to call.”
“Ah. By the time I thought of that, it was late, and you weren’t answering.”
“I was probably under the bed by that time.”
“That’s what I want to hear about.”
“I want to hear why you’re wearing a Washington Nationals T-shirt.”
I lifted the shirt so she could see the condition of my dress underneath.
“Oh,” she said. Dr. McDermott’s eyes were watching me in the rearview mirror. I lowered the shirt, and the car jolted to a stop as his eyes returned to the road and he saw the stop sign.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m seventy-five years old. It’s not every day a pretty girl shows me her underwear.”
“I forgot my keys,” I said. “I waded into the bushes to look through the front window, then, when I heard one of the French doors slam, went around to the back of the house. I came back through and a pickup tried to run me over in the street.”
“We saw that,” Brooke said.
“Why did you jump on top of the pickup?” Dr. McDermott asked.
“I didn’t have time to get out of the way.”
“It was a terrific display of gymnastic ability.”
“I muffed the landing. It hurt like hell.”
Dr. McDermott gave a dry, wheezy laugh. I made a face at him in the rearview mirror, but he was making a turn and didn’t see it.
“So what happened to you?” I asked Brooke. “How did they get in?”
“Someone rang the bell. I went and looked, and nobody was there.”
“So you opened the door,” I said.
“No, I didn’t open the door. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Actually, I was thinking it was what I might have done.
“Nobody was there, and nobody answered when I called out, so I turned the thumblatch to lock the deadbolt and went back to my room. On the way back, I snatched up the telephone.”
“So what happened?”
“They came in the French doors.”
“Broke in?”
“Walked in. It was a nice afternoon, and I’d been on the patio getting a little sun on my legs. I guess I forgot to lock the doors when I came in.”
She was a redhead and shouldn’t be getting any sun on her legs, but we’d had that conversation before.
“I heard them coming in and scooted under my bed before they got to my bedroom.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know. Two people wearing flared jeans and sneakers. Little Feet was wearing Reeboks. Big Feet’s had a logo I didn’t recognize. He had a pronounced southern drawl, but he spoke softly and most of the time I couldn’t even make out what he was saying. Little Feet had a big, foghorn sort of voice.”
“What was Little Feet saying?”
“They wanted us for something. They didn’t say what.”
“Both of us?”
“They didn’t call either of us by name. It was Red, or the redhead, and that lawyer bitch.”
“That would be me,” I said.
McDermott turned onto Beechnut and slowed as we saw two patrol cars parked in front of my house.
“Great,” I said drily.
“No, this is good,” Dr. McDermott said. “You’ve got to report this.”
I sighed.
“Anyway,” Brooke said, “the doorbell rang again while I was under the bed. I thought it might be you. When they went into the living room, I slid out from under. I was afraid you’d come right through the door and walk into them.”
“I would have, if I hadn’t forgotten my keys.”
“I picked a candle up off the nightstand, the one in the heavy round base, and heaved it down the hall into your bedroom. I think I broke a lamp.”
“I heard that.”
“It spooked the intruders, evidently. They ran back to your bedroom, then they ran out again. When I heard them go out the back door, I went out the front.”
McDermott said, “She ran across to my house and got me.” He parked in front of his house, across from the patrol cars, and opened the door to get out.
Brooke said, “We didn’t even notice the pickup until it charged up onto the lawn to get you.”
“Well, I don’t guess there’s any way to find it now,” I said. “I couldn’t even tell you whether it was a Ford or a Dodge.”
“I saw the license plate,” McDermott said.
We both looked at him. “Do you remember the number?” I asked.
“I’m old,�
�� he said. “I’m not senile.”
Chapter 19
The next day, Saturday, a Sergeant Stebbins called me to say they had run the license plate.
“Who does it belong to?” I asked.
“Mark Walker. Name mean anything to you?”
“It could.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a common name. A Mark Walker used to work for Derek Nolan, who was murdered last week.”
“What do you know about that?”
“I’m the lawyer representing the accused. What does this Mark Walker have to say for himself?”
“He reported his truck stolen at eleven-thirty last night.”
“He reported it at eleven-thirty, or it was stolen at eleven-thirty?”
“Reported it. He didn’t know when it was stolen, said he last saw it around four yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s convenient. Have you recovered it, or is it still missing?”
“We’ve got it. We found it in the parking lot of a grocery store a couple of miles from his house.”
I thought about that. “Where is that? Where does he live?”
“Duplex on China Street in Oregon Hill. What I need to know is whether there’s any point in bringing him in for a line-up. Would you recognize the driver if you saw him again?”
“I never saw him the first time. Let me check with my roommate.” I put my hand over the receiver. “Brooke. They found the owner of the truck, but he reported it stolen last night. Could you pick the burglar out of a lineup?”
She looked up from painting her toenails. “I could pick out his shoes.”
“Great.” Into the phone I said, “She only saw his feet. There were two of them.”
“Two feet?” Stebbins said. “Now that’s going to narrow it down.”
“Two sets of feet. A pair of little feet wearing Reeboks, and a pair of big feet wearing shoes with a logo she didn’t recognize.”
Stebbins was silent.
Juggling Evidence (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 11