Pillow Stalk

by Diane Vallere

  “Hello?”

  “Night? What are you trying to do?” It was Tex.

  “I can’t talk right now, I’m waiting for an important call.”

  “From Hudson? I warned you to stay out of this.” Despite his accuracy, I bristled at his tone.

  “Why do you think I’m waiting for a call from Hudson?” I asked.

  “Because his cell phone is sitting on my desk and you just blew it up with a bunch of calls. You want to tell me what’s so important?”

  “Why do you have his cell phone?”

  “It turned up at the theater after Carrie Coburn’s murder.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I don’t have to tell you that,” he said. “It’s part of the investigation.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Remember that text message you got telling you to go to the theater? The one you didn’t get because you were busy being mad at me?” he asked.

  I didn’t like where he was going. “Yes?”

  “You didn’t think we forgot about that, did you?”

  I didn’t answer, but my hand started to shake because where he was going had just gotten worse.

  “We got the phone company to pull the records. That text message came from his phone.”

  My cell phone fell to the floor mat of the explorer. I bent down and fished around for it and put it on speaker.

  “Night? Are you there? Night? Night!”

  “I’m here.”

  “Let me ask you a question. Did Hudson have access to the trunk of your car?”

  I closed my eyes and took the first of several deep breaths. I was hyperventilating. I needed Tex to spell it out.

  “He did, didn’t he? C’mon, Night, I know you’re not stupid. Why is it so hard for you to see that Hudson James is trying to kill you?”

  After I hung up on Tex, I pulled into the driveway and swung around the parking lot. I backed into my space, no longer worried about avoiding damages to the rental car. The building was dark. I wanted to go inside, to shower for an hour and crawl under pink four-hundred thread count sheets trimmed with daisies and eyelet, to fall asleep to the innocent nuance of a Doris Day movie, but life wasn’t that simple anymore. Until five minutes ago I had been sure—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that Hudson was innocent. Yet what Tex had just said scared me. The idea that I’d spent last night with Hudson in a vacant apartment, feeling safe just because he was with me, shook me up. I wasn’t that naive, I wasn’t that trusting. Not anymore.

  I was cautious as I entered the building, tension mounting from deep within me, like bubbles of boiling tomato sauce that creep up from the bottom of a vat of marinara. I hesitated outside my apartment. It was silent. I inserted the key in the lock, telling myself I’d come home alone a thousand times and aside from once, no one had ever been waiting for me on the other side. Had it been better to be in the dark about how easy it would be to get to me?

  I turned the key and pushed the door open. There was a crash from the bedroom. I didn’t hesitate. I pulled the door shut behind me and ran as fast as my knee would allow down the back staircase, over worn blue carpeting, to the parking lot. I would have welcomed the sight of the tailgaters in the lot next to mine, but I was alone.

  I pulled out of the lot with a screech of wheels and the near-miss of an oncoming sedan. The driver laid on his horn. I spun the SUV in a dangerously tight left turn onto Gaston and hit the gas, eager to put distance between me and the only place that felt like home. Within seconds, red and blue lights pierced my rearview mirror.

  I continued driving until I got to the parking lot that led into Lakewood Plaza, where other cars and other people created the illusion of safety in numbers. The cop pulled into the space next to me. I didn’t recognize him.

  “License and registration, ma’am,” he said.

  I was unaccustomed to being pulled over for minor traffic violations, but that wasn’t the least of what was bothering me.

  “Officer, I live back there. I’m sorry for speeding but I wanted to get away.”

  “Don’t we all? License and registration.”

  My hands clamped down on my wallet and I nervously pulled out my library card and Visa before landing on my license. I held them out the window to the young man. He took it without a word.

  “Officer, you don’t understand,” I started.

  “Registration?” he prompted.

  I stared at the glove box for a couple of seconds, wondering if I needed a key or not to open it. I yanked on the handle, but it didn’t move. I turned off the ignition and tried the key. The glove box popped open and a flood of AAA maps fell to the floor.

  “I’m sorry, it’s a rental and I don’t know how it works.”

  “You should always be familiar with your vehicle, ma’am,” he instructed, still holding a penlight over my license, staring at the information on the small plastic card.

  “Is this really you?” he asked.

  “Of course it’s me. Why would I have a fake license?”

  “Wait here.”

  Before I could dig out the registration, he walked away. I put the key into the ignition, rolled the window up, and cranked the air conditioning. I turned to watch the officer. He opened the door to access his radio and held the small mouthpiece in front of his face. A curly cord connected the small black box to his car. I couldn’t hear what he said. He stared down the street in the direction from where I’d driven. He never once turned back to face me.

  After several minutes he sat in his car and pulled the door shut. His head was bent down. I imagined him writing me up for some traffic violation I’d committed while getting away. It occurred to me if I backed the car up and fled while he was giving me a ticket, he’d be forced to follow me, and maybe even take me into the station. Surely that would provide some kind of escape from the situation I found myself in now, wouldn’t it? But if I was taken away, then there would be no one to check on Rocky.

  Rocky. In my apartment. With Mortiboy.

  Crap. Double crap.

  I knew who had caused that crash. I had to get home.

  I used the driver’s remote to roll down the passenger side window. “Officer, are you almost done? I have to get home.”

  “I thought you were trying to get away?” he asked without looking up. They must teach a class on sarcasm at the academy.

  “I think I made a mistake.”

  “We’re not going to take any chances. I’ll follow you back to the apartment and go inside with you. If there’s a threat, I’ll take care of it.”

  And if Hudson’s there, he won’t have a chance, I thought, realizing why the young officer had stared so intently at my license. He’d called Tex. He’d been given instructions to see me home. For all I knew, the cops were already at my building.

  The young cop returned to my window and handed my identification back. “Let’s go.”

  I drove home at a steady thirty-five miles an hour, adhering to every traffic law I remembered. The cop followed too closely for me to back into the space and I ended up parking slightly crooked. My neighbor would have a hard time getting her car into her space if I didn’t fix that when we finished.

  We walked to the back door and up the stairs. I turned the key in the lock, not sure what I’d find. The officer was on my heels, close enough that he’d see everything I saw the second the door was open. I leaned in and took a half-step, blocking his path, feeling around for the atomic lamp. The lamp wasn’t there. I took a few more steps in, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. The cop clicked his penlight and flashed it around the room.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Ma’am, I think you’ve been robbed.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I took a few steps into the room and tripped over something. Something that hadn’t been there when I left. My hands flailed through the air to break my fall. They landed on the arm of the sofa. My balance lost, I fell forward, head first into a cushion.
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br />   “Nice view. I’ve never been a fan of polyester knit until now,” said Tex from behind me.

  I used my hands to turn myself over and push myself back up until I was standing again.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he answered. “Are you going to turn on the lights?”

  “The light isn’t where it used to be. Flip the switch in the kitchen.” My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw my pink atomic floor lamp lying on the floor. I kicked it under the sofa, out of the way.

  The younger cop rounded the corner. “What the—shit.”

  Tex ran to the kitchen and hit the light switch. The young officer leaned against the counter, balanced on one foot. There was a smushed pile of dog poo on the floor. I handed the officer a roll of paper towels.

  “Night, where’s your dog?” Tex asked.

  “Rocky?” I called out. “Rocky?”

  “Wait here,” commanded Tex. He moved into the hallway and flipped on the light. I followed him despite his instructions. The bedroom was torn apart, the closet open, clothes in a pile on the floor. “Is this normal?”

  “No, it’s not normal. I don’t keep my house like this.”

  “So what do you think happened here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked around the bedroom. The lamp on the nightstand was on the floor, the bulb shattered. The comforter was pulled off the bed. A piece of caramel colored fur peeked out from under the bed.

  It twitched.

  I stooped down and lifted the comforter. Rocky sat curled in a ball, staring at me with big, sorrowful eyes. There was no graceful way for me to get him out, but I didn’t care. I leaned forward, with my butt in the air, and reached for his front paw. He resisted my efforts at first, but I won, pulling him forward until I could reach around his body and hold him close to me. There was a scratch on his face by his nose and I suspected I knew the bully who had swiped at him, even though there was no sign of the black cat.

  Rocky cowered in my arms. He was as scared now as when I took him to the groomers.

  Tex hadn’t said a word while I was down on all fours. He stood in front of me stroking Rocky’s head. “Scared little fella, isn’t he?”

  “Rocky: four, lamps: zero.”

  The young officer walked out of the kitchen, his shoe in a clear plastic bag in his hand. He fiddled around with the locks on my door. “Lieutenant? There’s no sign of a forced entry on this door.”

  Tex joined him by the door and conducted the same fiddling. I held Rocky close, his racing heartbeat pounding against my own.

  “Lieutenant, I don’t think this was a break-in,” I said.

  “You’re not going to tell me he did this, are you?” Tex asked, petting Rocky.

  Despite my urgent need to believe in Hudson’s innocence, it was getting harder to refute the facts.

  “I’m not going to tell you he did this,” I confirmed. “Let’s move into the living room. We need to talk.”

  I tidied up a bit while Tex spoke to the young officer. Rocky sat in his crate. Not because I was punishing him, but because I didn’t want him to be underfoot while I righted lamps, folded blankets, and rehung most of my wardrobe. There was a chance that indeed he’d had a hand in the mess, or rather a paw, but I couldn’t see him accomplishing this kind of an interior redesign on his own. And still, I wanted to find Mortiboy. His absence troubled me more than I wanted to admit.

  Tex saw the other officer to the door and closed it behind him. When he returned to the living room I gestured toward the sofa. “I can offer you a glass of white wine or tap water. It’s grocery time. You want anything?”

  “I want to know what you want to tell me. You’re stalling.”

  “Fine. Have a seat.”

  He sat down on the end of the sofa. I could have sat next to him, but instead I took the green chair that faced him, with the low boomerang coffee table between us. I balanced on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward, not allowing myself to get comfortable. That had been my mistake too many times before.

  “Remember when you told me to stay out of this and let you do your job?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t completely follow your instructions.”

  I waited for him to either reprimand me or explode. He did neither. He leaned against the back of the sofa and rested his left arm on the silver metal frame. His light brown hair was slicked back today, away from his face. He was generally rumpled, his white button down collar shirt creased from the time he’d spent sitting in his Jeep, I guessed, his faded jeans marked with dirt along the hems. Light gleamed off of the face of his Swiss army watch, flashing in my eyes, causing me to squint.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “And I have new evidence.”

  “So do I.”

  “What’s yours?” I asked.

  He was silent.

  “Oh, right, ladies first and all that.”

  More silence. His light eyes bore into me like frozen blue Otter Pops and gave me the chills.

  “You’re not going to lecture me?”

  “I want to know what you know.”

  “Hudson was here. A couple of nights ago. He was waiting for me inside the apartment after you dropped me off. He didn’t attack me, if that’s what you’re thinking, but he needed a place to stay.”

  The look on Tex’s face told me he wasn’t just listening as a cop.

  “I have a vacancy in the building and I let him stay in the empty apartment.” I didn’t tell him how I’d spent the night in the apartment with him or the nature of our conversation. It felt too personal, but it also felt like a stupid thing to have done.

  “He didn’t return the keys, did he?” Tex asked.

  “No, he didn’t.” Silence draped over us like a throw blanket on a dying fire.

  “Night, are you okay?”

  I snapped my head up. “I’m fine.”

  “Your leg is bouncing like it’s been hooked up to a generator.”

  I looked at my leg, hammering a rhythm against the floor. I couldn’t stop it if I tried. “There’s more.”

  He leaned forward.

  “Richard Goode. You have to talk to him.”

  Tex sat very still, watching me, nodding his head. He was taking me seriously.

  Surprised, I kept talking. “He’s involved, but I don’t know how much or why. He’s anti-Doris Day, and even you can’t deny how frequently Doris Day keeps popping up in the middle of your investigation.”

  He didn’t react.

  “Anyway, Richard wrote a threatening letter to a film rental company several years ago, an aggressive letter telling them to destroy their Doris Day movies. At first AFFER thought it was a joke, until someone broke into their warehouse, assaulted a security guard, and stole a bunch of movies. There was sabotage, I don’t know the details, but a lot of their inventory was ruined.”

  “AFFER?” he asked.

  “American Film Rentals. Listen, are you hearing me? This is a pretty strong connection. Don’t you want to write some of this down?”

  “I have a pretty powerful memory,” he said. “Keep going.”

  The more I spoke, the sillier I felt, and if it wasn’t for the pieces of the puzzle I’d put together that afternoon, or for the pillows I’d seen in Richard’s makeshift sleeping quarters, I would have stopped talking altogether.

  “Night, where did the pillows in your trunk come from?”

  “An estate sale.”

  “When?”

  “About a month ago.”

  Tex’s face was unreadable, but I could tell he was paying close attention. I didn’t know what it all meant myself, but with what he knew that he wasn’t telling me, maybe pieced together with what I had found out for myself, the key to unlocking this thing might appear and the idea of ending the nightmare might exist.

  “Tex, the thing is, Richard acted scared. I think he’s involved more, but I don’t know how.”

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nbsp; Tex leaned back against the sofa cushions. “We talked to Richard. He’s cooperating with us. But what I don’t get is where Hudson comes into this? What’s their connection?” Tex asked.

  “What connection?”

  “Between Richard and Hudson. That’s what you’re giving me, isn’t it? The goods on Hudson James.”

  “You’re not listening to me! I’m telling you about Richard! I went upstairs to the balcony of the Mummy after he left and I found a couple of those velvet pillows you saw from my trunk. And he told me, the day after Carrie Coburn was murdered, that he had been in my trunk without me knowing. Those same pillows are your murder weapon in four different homicides. Aren’t you going to check it out?”

  “I checked out Richard Goode myself. Aside from the facts that he doesn’t like your favorite actress and he’s a recreational pot smoker, he’s clean.” He leaned forward and rubbed his palms over the front of his faded blue jeans.

  “No, you aren’t getting it. Richard has a zillion scripts, he’s acting! He even told me once he acted in college, and that’s when the letter was sent, and even if he says he didn’t send it, there was the deciding committee who had access to it and one of them might have been working with him. This has to do with cinematic connections, not Hudson!”

  “Night, forget it. Richard Goode came to us and gave us those names. We already checked them out. There’s no motive. The sci-fi expert lives in Hollywood. The documentarian was a—”

  “Documentary filmmaker,” I corrected.

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘Documentary filmmaker’, not ‘documentarian’.”

  “Whatever. He was a freakin’ astronaut. And the pop culture expert wrote her dissertation on Doris Day. Besides, Richard Goode was the one who found Hudson’s phone outside of the theater. I thought you were going to give me evidence that they were working together but you just proved to me that Goode’s on our side.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.