Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1)

by Gail Lukasik

  I pulled into the parking slot in front of Joyce Oleander’s town house, and switched off the truck's engine. The sun was starting to set. It would be dark soon. I retrieved the small flashlight I kept in the glove compartment and shoved it into my jacket pocket before exiting the truck. With the setting sun, the wind was picking up. I pulled my jacket hood over my head.

  As I walked toward Joyce’s building, I wondered what had possessed her to buy this place. Although all three buildings were situated on a high bluff above Green Bay, only Joyce’s building was minus a view. It was obscured by a line of dense, towering evergreens. The brown cedar siding was faded, and from the barrenness of the parking lot, it looked like most of the units were occupied only on weekends, if that. Which didn’t bode well for my idea of interviewing a neighbor. The place looked about as populated as a mall on Super Bowl Sunday.

  I walked up the concrete steps to the unit adjacent to Joyce’s, and rang the bell. The whole building felt abandoned. A kid’s plastic flip-flop lay in the brown grass, the front door screen had a hole the size of my fist and scraps of paper and debris littered the shrubbery. I rang the bell again. The wind was rushing through the tops of the trees, making me wish I was home soaking in a bubble bath.

  Okay, now what? I crossed the slight rise of grass that separated Joyce’s front door from her neighbor’s. I looked from side to side, then tried the front door knob. It didn’t budge. There was still enough light coming from the west to illuminate the interior of Joyce’s town house. I cupped my eyes against the front door glass and looked in. I could make out a short narrow hall leading into a sunken living room with a sliding glass door at the back. I looked around again. No one in sight. It was worth a try.

  Although I was sure her building was deserted, I slunk around to the back, careful to stay in the shadows, just in case someone from one of the other buildings saw me. Extending off the back of each unit was a concrete patio and a six-foot wooden divider. All the patios were bare except Joyce’s. In defiance of the weather, she had left out a small hibachi, two lawn chairs, and a small table—forest green and made of that cheap resin guaranteed to outlive the Sun. Joyce had positioned the chairs so that she could sit with her feet up and look out toward the non-existent bay view.

  I went to the sliding glass door. Again I looked around. Then I tried the door. It moved easily. I slid it open, stepped inside and slid it shut.

  I was now standing in the living room, the very room where Joyce Oleander died less than 24 hours ago. I took a deep breath, inhaling a pleasant odor of old pine fires interlaced with traces of patchouli. The scent seemed a strange choice for a woman who had supposedly given up on sex. The rich earthy scents contrasted with the sparse room. Joyce had favored browns and greens and dark woods. In the musky light, I saw a mahogany rocker, and an early American couch with thick wooden arms that was covered in a brown, green, and yellow print featuring windmills or miniature Revolutionary soldiers. The matching side tables and coffee table were cumbersome, functional rather than stylish. The furniture was old and sad and probably had been part of her legacy from her dead parents. I noticed immediately that there was no TV set. But the built-in bookcases surrounding the ceramic-tiled fireplace were crammed with books. From where I was standing, I couldn’t read specific titles, but most were hard cover.

  I walked over to the couch and stopped suddenly, as if an electrical current had shot through my body. There on the carpet was a dark splotch. What shocked me was the realization that it was human blood. I’d thought the blood had only been matted in Joyce’s hair, not here as such an irrevocable sign of her death just a few hours before. Why hadn’t Ida mentioned this?

  I stood transfixed in the failing light, watching the stain seem to absorb the falling darkness. Though the sight of it was making me light-headed, I had a strange desire to touch it, as if I half expected it to still be warm and wet.

  Instead, I pulled my gaze away and knelt down in the space between the couch and the coffee table, studying the coffee table for signs of blood and tissue. In the fading light, I couldn’t see much. I dug out the small flashlight from my jacket pocket and clicked it on, shining it over the table. On the corner nearest the couch and farthest from the patio door was a dark smudge that looked like blood. The table edge wasn’t sharp. Age had rounded it. But it was solid. If you got up from the couch, lost your balance and fell forward with all your weight and hit it, it would cause some damage—depending on where your head connected with the edge.

  I sat back on my heels, trying to envision how it had happened. Ida Reeves had insisted that she hadn’t touched the body except to check for a pulse. And she had said that she found the body face up, and that Joyce had a deep gash on her left temple. Now as I surveyed the room, that information didn’t jibe with either the location of the bloodstain or the position of the table and the couch. Either Ida was lying, or confused.

  Since the couch was set against a low wall that ran the length of that side of the room and couldn’t have moved, and since there was just enough space between the couch and the coffee table for a body to rest, then whatever way the body fell, it would stay that way.

  And even if Joyce had somehow landed on her back, because she was bleeding from her left temple, the blood would have been closer to the couch rather than the coffee table. So I came to the conclusion that someone, probably Ida, had turned Joyce over. Then why not admit it? In Ida's case, that would mean admitting that the careful, controlled head librarian had made a mistake. Had been too human.

  That knot at the base of my skull spawned by Sarah Peck was now returning, and with it, a headache that squeezed like a band around my skull. My empty stomach felt like it was grinding meat. I stood up, and a wave of dizziness ran through me. I held still until my equilibrium returned. For a change, I thought, my body was speaking loud and clear. Still, I ignored it and moved through the living room and up the carpeted stairs. I wasn’t done yet.

  When I reached the top of the stairs, I paused to let the pulse that was beating in my head slow down. In the gloomy light, I saw two doorways. I turned right into the larger of the two rooms. This appeared to be Joyce’s bedroom, but also a room decorated like a page from House & Garden—the perfect décor for the all-American, little girl princess. A queen-sized, four-poster canopied bed dominated the room, the kind you might find in a quaint bread-and-breakfast inn where they charge you an exorbitant fee to stay in their extra bedroom. Arranged against the headboard were different sized pillows trimmed in ribbons and white eyelet, in contrast with a variety of worn teddy bears. The bed was covered with a blue and white diamond pattern quilt that looked handmade.

  There was a floor length mirror in a far corner. One wall had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, again bursting with books. The other walls sported fussy wallpaper with pink tea roses running up and down a green trellis. A white wicker rocker straddled the space between the two windows. There were frilly curtains on the windows that reminded me of a Swiss chalet. I felt like I had wandered into Sleeping Beauty’s bedroom before the prince got there and kissed her into womanhood.

  I looked out one of the windows. Through a gap in the trees, a sliver of water shimmered in the distance. I turned away from the window and sat in the wicker rocker. I hadn’t expected Joyce’s bedroom to be so pathologically feminine, so fit for a child. It was as if Joyce could turn back the clock in this room, could be a little girl again, free from the burdens of womanhood. I knew that there were women like that, women who didn’t want to leave their girlhoods. They collected Disney movies and elaborate dolls, even made yearly pilgrimages to Disneyland to ride "It's a Small, Small World," and "Pirates of the Caribbean." Getting married and having kids just meant that the dolls they played with were bigger.

  As I sat rubbing my temples and trying to ease my headache, something caught my eye on the table beside Joyce’s bed. I went over and picked up the slim book: Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Great, wasn’t that the poet who committed suicide by sticking her
head in the oven? Well, if you weren’t thinking about suicide, you would be after reading this. I let the book fall open to the book mark. “Lady Lazarus,” I vaguely remembered the poem. I’d have to reread it. Maybe it contained a clue to Joyce’s suicide.

  The other room would have to wait. I could no longer ignore my pounding head and roiling stomach. The sun was completely down, and I was afraid to switch on a light, so I made my way by flashlight down the stairs and into the living room. One more time, I crouched down by the coffee table and thought through the logistics of Joyce’s fall and the final position of her body.

  Satisfied with my conclusions, I was about to stand up when a flashlight beam bounced around the room. I flicked off my flashlight and ducked down beside the couch, careful to avoid the blood stain. Someone was outside the patio door. Before I could react, the door slid open.

  “Don’t move there,” a deep male voice said. “Or I’ll have to shoot. Ya dirt bag, wise guy.”

  I froze.

  “Okay then, get up real slow. Hands where I can see ’em. And no funny business or I’ll have to cuff ya. Pretty sneaky comin’ in that there truck.” The man let out a series of choking sounds. It took me a few seconds to realize that he wasn’t choking but laughing.

  I stood up slowly with my hands above my head, wondering who this weirdo was and what was so funny. As he panned the room with the flashlight, his silhouetted shadow lengthened, making him appear to be the size of the Incredible Hulk. Finally the light found me. I put my hand up to shield my eyes. He moved the light steadily from my face down to my feet and back to my face again.

  “What the blue blazes. You’re not Ferry!" He sounded surprised and bewildered.

  “Either shoot me or get that light out of my eyes,” I bluffed, hoping to take advantage of his momentary surprise.

  He switched the flashlight off. For a moment, we stood in total darkness while he stumbled around trying to locate a light switch. I considered making a run for the patio door, but thought better of it. All the Hulk had to do was make it to the door before me, and there’d be no way around him.

  “Okay, then. Should be a switch here somewheres." I heard him pat the wall and scrape something, then a hanging lamp circa 1970s complete with rattan dome cast a diffused glow over the room.

  “Who's Ferry, Officer?” I asked the cop standing in front of me. He was big and blonde and solid, like a Viking warrior fully ready to enter Valhalla.

  He started to answer, then stopped. “What're you doin’ here then, Miss?”

  “My name’s Leigh Girard. New reporter with the Gazette. I’m doing the obit feature on Joyce Oleander.” I would have offered my hand, but I wasn’t sure I’d get it back in the same condition.

  “Jake send ya, then?”

  I had two choices, tell the truth or go for the information. “Yeah, he did. And the door was unlocked.” I hoped that let me off the hook for breaking and entering. And besides, if the door was unlocked, it was the cops’ fault for not securing their crime scene.

  “Huh,” was all he said, narrowing his eyes. “Ferry’s a cop friend of mine. We were meetin’ here on official business.”

  “Do you often threaten to shoot your fellow policemen?”

  He pushed his hat back off his forehead and scratched his head. Then he grinned sheepishly. “Kind of a joke with us.”

  “Aha.” I nodded. “Got to keep it interesting, huh?”

  “Ya got that right, there,” he said, smiling.

  “What do you make of this?” I pointed to the blood spot on the carpet.

  The smile left as quickly as it came. “Look, Miss Girard. I can’t be talkin’ about this here. It's an official case. So ya better skedaddle. No offense.”

  “Leigh, call me Leigh. I didn’t catch your name, Officer?”

  “Jorgensen, Deputy Chet Jorgensen. Now let’s go, then.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door.

  “Deputy Jorgensen. I already talked to Ida Reeves. I know all about this situation. How Ida found Joyce Oleander lying here dead, on her back with blood in her hair. Considering the bloodstain and the position of the couch and coffee table, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that someone turned the body over. Do you have any suspicion of foul play? I didn't see a crime scene tape, so is that why you’re here?”

  He scratched his head again. “Now don’t ya be jumpin’ to no conclusions or puttin’ words in my mouth.”

  He seemed unnerved enough for me to keep at it. “So there was foul play! Could Joyce have been murdered?” I didn’t really think that Joyce had been murdered, but I wanted to push the Deputy’s buttons and see what came out.

  “There ya go. Joyce Oleander died from an overdose of a drug called Vicodin, which ya already know. She washed them pills down with bourbon. And that’s what’s goin’ in the police report. Ain’t no murder involved, less someone shoved those pills down her throat along with the booze. And there was no bruising on her throat.”

  I was doing everything my chief editor had told me not to do, but it was working. “Then why are you here? What’s the official business?”

  “Just goin’ over things one more time. Gotta be careful in cases like this here. You guys handling it like usual?”

  I hadn’t a clue what “like usual” meant. But I wasn’t going to let him know that. “Yeah sure.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. “Cause we don’t want no copycats.”

  “Right,” I said. “We don’t want that.” He was holding something back, I could sense it. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Come on, Deputy Jorgensen, off the record. I won’t print it, much less tell anyone, even Stevens, Scout's honor.” I held up three fingers and hoped they were the right ones.

  “What’s so important about this to ya? Did ya know Joyce?”

  In a way, I felt I did. Except for the fairy tale bedroom, I felt a kinship with this woman, as if I was looking at my own future. But I wasn’t about to tell Officer Jorgensen that. “I promised a friend of hers that I’d look into it.”

  “Who might that be?” he asked.

  “Joe Stillwater,” I answered.

  He sat down in the rocker, and rocked back and forth. He was debating what and how much to tell me. I stood quietly listening to the methodical creaking of the rocker, which probably was in tune with the labored thoughts creaking around that mammoth head of his.

  Finally he stopped rocking and leaned forward, putting his palms on his thighs.

  “Okay, then. Seein’ as you figured it out most ways, so no harm there. But this stays here with us. You can’t tell Joe. And I ‘spect somethin’ in return.”

  “What?” I wasn’t about to complain, but I was a little surprised that this cop was going to share information with me. Stevens was right, I had a lot to learn about the Door ways.

  “You find out somethin’ about this, you come to me first. Okay, then?”

  “Sure. It’s a deal.”

  “Ya ever hear of lividity?”

  “No, not really. What is it?”

  “Lividity is where the blood settles in the body after a person’s dead. Has to do with gravity. And in this case here then, we found lividity on the chest and stomach and along the back.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, it supports what you were sayin’ there about someone turning the body over. Ya see, it takes about six hours for lividity to get a hold completely, which means it’s permanent. But it takes only one to two hours for it to start appearing. And since according to the doc on the scene, lividity hadn’t set in yet. Then the body must have been face down at first for there to be lividity on the chest and stomach. Then someone turned the body over, which caused lividity along the back.”

  “You mean Ida Reeves? But she said she didn’t move the body.”

  “People say a lot of things, especially when they think they done somethin’ they shouldn’t.”

  “So how long did the doctor figure she’d been dea
d?” I asked.

  “Three hours. Close as he can figure.”

  “How certain is the doctor about time of death?” I was getting an uneasy feeling.

  “As certain as he can be,” he said. “What you gettin at?”

  “What I’m getting at is this: If the doctor figured she’d been dead about three hours, and there was lividity on both the chest and stomach and along the back, and it takes one to two hours for lividity to appear, then there was at least an hour between Ida’s turning the body over and her calling this in. Unless it took you guys an hour to get here. Because how else could there had been lividity on both the front and back of the body? Unless . . ." I thought of another alternative. “Unless someone else was here before Ida. And that person turned the body over but never reported finding Joyce dead.”

  “It didn’t take us no hour to get here.” He sounded defensive. “And I’m telling you, Ida turned that body. She just don’t want to admit it. As for that hour you’re talkin’ about, sometimes people go into shock when they find a dead body. They get paralyzed like. That’s probably what happened here.”

  I wasn’t convinced. Ida didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would get paralyzed by shock. “You check with the neighbors to see if anyone else was here last night?”

  He stood up. “Nobody saw nothin.’ Just remember our bargain.”

  Novice journalist that I was, I knew about writing too many details regarding a suicide, for fear of giving disturbed and impressionable people something to copy. My part of this bargain was to keep the details off the record.

  * * * * *

  Salinger was howling and scratching at the door as I jiggled the key in the back door lock. “Take it easy, girl, I'm hurrying.” I inched the door open. She jumped up at me for our obligatory greeting, then tore past me through the field toward the water. I didn’t have the energy to even call after her. My headache was still present, albeit faint and persistent, and likely to edge into a full-blown migraine.