Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan)

by P. M. Carlson

  “Thanks, Jerry.” A small smile. They resembled each other: hair, eyes, rangy build. Family, Holly decided. The whole pack of them had probably spent the sixties jamming helpless daffodils into National Guard rifles. Well, doesn’t matter now, Schreiner. Your job is to find out why Dale Colby got wasted this afternoon. So get on with it.

  “Your name is Maggie?” Holly asked as the woman joined her.

  “Yeah, not Maggot. That’s just big-brother talk. Hasn’t called me anything else since he first heard the word in second grade,” she explained. She moved smoothly, athletically, in contrast to her angular, lanky appearance. With a curious glance at Holly, she asked, “Do you like being a detective?”

  “I’ve had worse jobs.”

  “I’d like the puzzle side of it. And the sense of helping people, putting things right. But there sure are a lot of forms to fill out. A lot of rules. Don’t you get tired of those?”

  Wonderful. A witness who was trying to interrogate her. But it was interesting that she had apparently encountered police red tape sometime or other. Well, plenty of demonstrators had rap sheets. Holly made a mental note to check. For now, she said neutrally, “A necessary evil. Would—”

  “Right. Chain of evidence, they tell me. When did you decide to join the police?”

  Holly felt her jaw tightening. Steady, Schreiner, she warned herself. So okay, your chief witness turns out to be a pushy, inquisitive, demonstrator type, and irritates the hell out of you for various reasons. But your job is to find a murderer. Holly pulled her eyes from the red T-shirt with the peace sign, reassembled her professional shell of neutrality, and waved at the sofa politely. “Please sit down.”

  “Okay.” Those blue eyes, disconcertingly alert, were appraising her. “Unless you want me to show you first how the body was lying when we arrived.”

  Holly halted beside the sofa. “What do you mean?”

  “As soon as I broke in I rolled him over. I thought you knew if a body was moved.”

  “We knew,” said Holly shortly. So this was the culprit, not the paramedics. Idiot civilian. Well, find out what happened. Keeping her voice flat, she repeated, “You’re saying you broke into the room, and you moved him?”

  Maggie nodded. “Yeah. To see if I could help him. Want me to show you?”

  Holly snapped open her notebook to underline who was in charge. “First let me get your full name.”

  “Oh, right.” She combed back her feathery black curls with bony fingers. “Margaret Mary Ryan, R-Y-A-N.”

  “Address?”

  “Two-sixty-eight Garfield Place, Brooklyn. I’m here visiting my brother.”

  “His name?”

  “Jerry Ryan. Four-oh-seven-three Markleman Road.”

  A posh area compared to this one, a pocket of big prewar houses, young professionals. Holly asked, “Is he a lawyer? Doctor?”

  “Doctor.” The glint in Maggie’s eyes revealed appreciation of this deduction. “Have you lived here long?”

  “Nine years. Mrs. Ryan, shall we—”

  “Yeah, I thought you didn’t sound like Virginia. Started out in Ohio, myself. Where were you before?”

  “Let’s go talk to the ME.” Brusquely, Holly marched past her to lead the way to the back hall and den. She stopped at the door. Several men were working in the room, and plump Doc Craine, the medical examiner, was squatting next to the body. The position was already chalked onto the carpet. “Dr. Craine,” said Holly, “we’ve got a witness here says she saw the original position of the body.”

  He looked up at them, little shrewd eyes with puffy lids. “Hello, Schreiner. Yeah, let’s hear it.” Maggie Ryan started to step in past Holly, but Holly grabbed her arm and Doc said, “Hey, no, don’t come in. Just tell us about it.”

  “Okay. He was on his stomach.” She stood in the door squinting at the scene, cool, detached, but Holly could see that her hands were clenched together behind her. Not so unruffled, after all. Holly remembered, eons ago, her own first encounters with death, her younger self struggling to stay calm, objective. It was the only way to get the job done. She repressed an unwelcome stirring of empathy with the witness and readied her notebook as Maggie continued, “The jaw and neck were already stiff so their position hasn’t changed any. The blood was pretty well dried on his face, the head lying on that stain on the carpet. Left arm bent, upper arm maybe forty-five degrees from the body, elbow bent at seventy degrees.” Other Crime Unit men were peering at the carpet too, trying to visualize what she was describing. “Right arm extended beyond his head, fingers near the lamp base. Legs—I’m not real clear on the legs. My impression is that they weren’t totally straight, but they weren’t curled up either.”

  Doc Craine peered at the body closely again, probably checking lividity stains, and nodded curt approval. Holly fished out her graph paper and sketched in a second little stick man next to the first on her floor plan. “Is there anything else different about the scene now from what you saw?”

  Maggie surveyed the room. “No, except the drawers were all closed. God, are those guns? Wonder why he didn’t try to grab one? Defend himself?”

  “And what about the door?” Holly insisted, keeping her on track.

  “Closed, bolted.”

  “You said you were the one who broke in.”

  “Yes. Donna and Olivia knocked at the door and yelled and couldn’t rouse him. So I went out to peek in the window, saw he was in trouble. I ran back in. Had to pass through the garage and there was a crowbar on the wall so I grabbed it. Pried the door open.” She glanced at the splintered wood beside her. “Looks like I really messed up the jamb.”

  “Yeah, it’s a strong bolt,” agreed Holly. “Where’s the crowbar?”

  “Crowbar. Oh, yes, I took it to the kitchen with me when Officer Higgins sent me out of this room.”

  “Anything else you remember that’s different now?”

  “No.” A slow shake of the black curls. A vision nudged at Holly: dark curls bunched above a tight bandage, reddened with seeping blood. She turned away. God, she was tired tonight.

  “Let’s go back and sit down,” she said.

  Maggie lingered a moment, frowning at the room. “Sure don’t see how anyone got in. Or out again.” Then she fell into step beside Holly, glancing sideways at her. “Have you worked in Homicide long?”

  “Two years,” said Holly wearily. “And yes, I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies, and no, I don’t like to see them. Let’s get on with this, okay?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I don’t like to see them either. I’m just nosy by nature.” Maggie touched Holly’s forearm apologetically but Holly jerked away and walked to the other end of the sofa. Maggie shrugged and perched on the edge of the near sofa cushion, long legs stretched out past the coffee table, eyes brightly studying Holly again. “And I’m interested when I meet women with unusual jobs. I’m a statistician, myself. Homicide work must be pretty exhausting. Psychologically too, right?”

  Holly, tight-lipped, smoothed the flowered cushion unnecessarily and sat down. Psychologically exhausting, yeah, you could say that. But why did this damn curly-haired peacenik care? Why did she keep worming past Holly’s defenses? Maggot, her brother called her. Pesky. But what the hell, in the last few years Holly had dealt calmly with witnesses of all types—surly, drunk, antagonistic, hysterical, violent, even amorous. Nothing so difficult about this one, right? So quit acting like an asshole, Schreiner, and get on with the job. Ignoring those inquiring eyes, Holly took a deep breath, balanced her notebook on her knee again, wrote “statistician,” and said in a colorless voice, “Mrs. Ryan, you mentioned that the jaw and neck were stiffening, and the blood already dried when you first reached the body. So why did you roll it over?”

  “He was lying there, obviously hurt. So I turned him over to start CPR.” Maggie’s hands were clenched together again, the knuckles white. “As soon as I tried to move his jaw to open his airway I noticed the rigor.”

  A disgustingly admirable c
ourse of action for a mere civilian.

  Holly asked, too sharply, “You couldn’t tell he was dead?” Steady, Schreiner.

  But Maggie had picked up on Holly’s skeptical tone. Her blue gaze was chilly as an ice storm. “No, I couldn’t tell! Not that first minute. I touched his back, okay? It didn’t register that he was cold, only that he wasn’t breathing. Sorry I disturbed the scene of the crime, but my first impulse was to try to save his life!”

  “Yes, of course, you did right,” Holly admitted. For a moment the blue eyes held hers, angry but puzzled too, Holly thought. Then the bony shoulders in the red shirt shrugged and Maggie seemed to accept the truce. Holly asked, “Now, did you notice anything else that might help us?”

  “Stuff I’m sure you noticed too. Cracked windowpane. Gouges in the edge of the desk. Story about the crash of Representative Knox’s plane last January. Lunch eaten. Lamp bashed and bloody. Some notes by the phone, and a tape recorder on the desk. And a bunch of tapes missing by the stereo there.”

  Holly looked at the gap on the shelves indicated by the pointing finger. “You say missing. You saw tapes there earlier?”

  “Yes. I sat on the arm of the sofa here while we got organized to go to the beach, talking to one of Colby’s daughters about a book. I remember noticing how neat Donna kept everything, books, magazines, tapes. Even newspapers. At home we drown in newspapers.”

  “I see.” Holly made a note about the missing tapes. “What were the tapes?”

  “I couldn’t read the labels from here.”

  “We’ll ask. Did you notice anything else?”

  “Not that I can remember now.” She leaned forward eagerly. “But the big problem is how it was done. I mean, that door was really bolted. From the inside.”

  “We’ll get to that. Right now let’s go over what you did from the time you arrived.” Sometimes that jogged memories, and Holly had to admit that this annoying witness seemed to be more observant and a hell of a lot less dazed than poor Donna Colby had been.

  Maggie leaned back and flopped a rangy arm along the back of the sofa. “Okay. We arrived sometime around nine. The kids had been cooped up during the drive, and it was cool. So they all wanted to play, and ran around. We encouraged them, I’m afraid. You’ll find lots of little footprints all over the yard. And Nick and Jerry ran around too. But I don’t remember them going in the backyard.”

  “The children were in the backyard?”

  “From time to time.”

  “By the den windows?”

  “I wasn’t there. I know they ran all the way around the house sometimes, but I didn’t see the exact route.”

  “And the rest of you?”

  “Let’s see. Donna went in as far as the dining-room door for a second, called to Dale that we were back. Then she came back out and helped us unload the van. She left the kitchen door open and we just stuck things inside the door. It took a while because we hadn’t really packed carefully to leave the beach. The storm was coming and we just tossed things in the van, so we needed a lot of trips unloading. Oh, and Donna dropped the picnic basket on the driveway and we had to clean up all that too.”

  “About how long did this take?”

  “Twenty minutes, maybe. We also had to discuss getting pizza and who was going to go get it. You know.”

  “No one wondered why Mr. Colby didn’t come out?”

  “Yeah, sure, it crossed my mind, but not enough to worry about at first. No one said anything about it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay.” Holly wrote that down. “Then what?”

  “Nick and Jerry and Tina were elected pizza committee, and they took the van to Cedar Lane Center for it. The rest of us went into the kitchen. Donna called Dale again and started fixing iced tea. I was looking for my daughter’s clothes in the heap. She was still in her swimsuit. Olivia finally went down to knock on the den door.”

  “Right.”

  “And the rest I’ve told you. Donna got worried and went to help Olivia, and I popped outside to look in the window.” She straightened her leg and waggled a sandal toward Holly. “You’ll find my footprints out back too. I stood right outside the window.”

  “I see.” Holly noted it down.

  “Do you have any idea whether he was killed before or after the rainstorm?”

  “The ME will tell us. Any special reason you ask?”

  “Just curious. If it was before the storm, any traces of a person out there might have been wiped out by the rain, right? Not by us?”

  “Maybe,” said Holly noncommittally. “Now, you all used the kitchen door when you came in?”

  “Kitchen door. Every one of us.”

  “Every time? There was a lot of running in and out, wasn’t there?”

  “Not as much as you’d think. We came through the garage as far as the kitchen door and tossed things in from out there. But when we did finally go in, there were a lot of us.”

  “No one used the front door, then?”

  “We didn’t.” A ghost of a smile.

  Holly took the point and nodded resignedly. She and all the other cops had trooped in that way. Colby might as well have got himself killed in the middle of a busy intersection. However the perp had entered, the traces were mostly covered over. Well, let the Crime Scene boys sweat that problem. Holly said, “Okay, let’s go back to the discovery of the body. You turned him over to try to help, and found out he was dead. What happened next?”

  “Well, while I was turning him over I was yelling for Olivia to call an ambulance and the police. After I’d figured out I couldn’t help him I looked back at the door. Little Josie was there, and Donna, gaping. Donna was trembling. I was afraid she’d get hysterical or faint or something. So I told her to get Josie the hell out of there, to take her to the kitchen. And I asked her to check on my daughter because I’d just dumped her in the kitchen on my way in with the crowbar. That sort of brought Donna to her senses. She rallied around pretty well. I stayed in the room with the body. By the door.”

  “Did you move anything?” Holly demanded. She caught the glimmer of incipient anger and added hastily, “I have to ask. There are a lot of questions I have to ask.”

  “Yeah, okay, I know.” Maggie sprawled back into the corner of the sofa and pushed her fingers through her curls. “I keep thinking we’re on the same team, but you can’t assume that yet, can you?”

  “I try not to assume much.” Holly made herself meet Maggie’s eyes. Appraising eyes, skeptical yet friendly.

  Still sprawled, Maggie dropped her hands to rest on her round belly and shifted her gaze to the big blank TV. “Okay, I’ll play your rules. The answer is no. I didn’t move anything or touch anything except poor Dale. I didn’t step anywhere except on the carpet between Dale and the door. The only reason I stayed in that room at all was to keep other people from running in and touching things. Kids especially.”

  “So you were the only person in the room after the door was pried open?”

  “Well, no. Jerry came in.”

  “Your brother.” Wonderful. Whole platoons of Ryans tramping across the crime scene.

  “Right. He and Nick and Tina arrived with the pizzas. I hollered down the hall for him to come.”

  “Why did—” Steady, Schreiner. No need to squawk at her.

  But Maggie was already defending herself, straightening up, gesturing with those lean, graceful hands. “Look, I wanted to be absolutely sure! He’s a doctor, damn it! We stupid laymen aren’t all that confident about our medical judgments. A guy is lying there, bloody, he’s been attacked—but we don’t want to believe he’s dead. We cling to hope too long. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes, of course, Mrs. Ryan. I just—”

  The front door opened. Holly turned to look at it, almost grateful for the interruption.

  It was Higgins’ partner that she’d seen outside. Patterson, said the nameplate under his shield. He was escorting a blonde woman, trim, a carefully made up forty. Red flare-leg sla
cks, a sleeveless white blouse, wavy hair sprayed stiff. She was gesturing indignantly at the policeman.

  “Look, what is this? What’s going on?” she demanded. She spotted Maggie and Holly, and appealed to them. “Can you tell me what’s happening? I just want to talk to Dale. Is this some new trick of his?”

  “You want to talk to Dale?” Holly asked, standing up. “About what?”

  “He knows about what! I’ve been phoning him about it for days!” She paused to eye Holly’s unpowdered face and plain twill skirt belligerently. “Listen, who are you? Why should I talk to you?”

  Holly held up her ID. “Detective Schreiner,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Jesus, what next?” The blonde rolled her eyes at the ceiling in exasperation. “I come to talk to Dale and he sics the cops on me! He’s the one you should be after! Don’t you know that? Look, I’ve got papers!” She fumbled in her big white handbag, pulled out a red chiffon scarf, a Holiday Inn motel key, a romance paperback, finally an official-looking document that she waved under Patterson’s nose. “See? Right there! Judge says he’s supposed to pay Mark’s tuition! Well, he hasn’t! Won’t answer my letters, won’t even pick up the phone any more! And then I come and the cops won’t even let me see him!”

  “You’re Felicia Colby, then,” said Holly.

  “Damn right! That’s my name right on the paper here!” She jabbed at the document with a shiny red nail.

  “Okay, we’d better discuss it.” She was surprised at the depth of her own relief. Tomorrow, she told herself, she wouldn’t feel so raw, she could cope with Maggie Ryan better. Maybe she’d be tired enough to sleep tonight. Glancing down at her notes, she was astonished to see that pages of information had resulted from this tense, half-bungled interview. Meanwhile Felicia Colby’s story might be very interesting. Without looking up she said, “Patterson, take Mrs. Ryan here next door, all right? We’ll get an official statement tomorrow.”

  Maggie had been observing the angry Felicia Colby with frank curiosity. Now she looked sharply at Holly. “God, you’re exhausted!” she said sympathetically. “Bummer of a job some days, isn’t it?”