The Trouble With Murder

by Catherine Nelson

  Ellmann was catching on.

  “If we leave now,” he said quickly, “we’ll come back with a court order, and you won’t be able to keep us out. That looks much worse.”

  She swung back around to me.

  “What are they looking for?” she snapped. “What have you gotten mixed up in now? You know, you’re such a troublemaker. The police are always looking at you for something. When are you going to straighten out your life? Your brother, now he’s making something of himself.”

  The same record, spinning ’round and ’round. Always the same few lines.

  “They don’t actually think I did anything wrong.” And this whole little act of hers wasn’t entirely about me.

  “This is my house!” she said again. “Get out! All of you, get out! Including you, you little brat.” She stomped over to me and slapped me, her open palm smacking hard and sharp against my cheek. The stinging sensation lingered.

  Before I could respond, Ellmann clicked handcuffs on her wrists, against her wild and ugly protests. She flung and jerked and kicked, but Ellmann easily guided her to the door and out of the house. I could still hear her screaming after the front door closed behind them. She was screaming about calling her lawyer. I really hoped she didn’t do that. She had reason to worry about the police searching the house, though. Who knew what they would find in her room?

  I looked at Troy, who still stood against the kitchen counter wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  “Are you almost finished?”

  Maybe I should have been more worried about her, about what she kept in the house, about what kind of trouble I might get into for it, but I found I was beyond all that.

  “We, uh, we still need to finish most of this level, and the garage. But . . . with the lady of the house revoking consent, we won’t be able to move forward until we have a court order. Despite how sure Ellmann made getting one sound, it’s highly unlikely we will, given the circumstances.”

  The front door opened and closed.

  “Go ahead and finish. I gave consent, and I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “But it isn’t legal if the house doesn’t belong to you,” Ellmann said from behind me.

  “Then it’s legal,” I said. “I own the house.”

  I left the kitchen and returned to the basement to resumed packing. The clock had started ticking, and it was counting down fast. And I still had quite a bit of work to do.

  “So, you own the house, huh?”

  I looked up and saw Ellmann leaning against the doorjamb of my bedroom, his hair brushing the top.

  “Yes.”

  I was standing in front of the closet, stacking more clothing into a plastic bin.

  “If you own the house,” he tried again softly, “why are you the one moving out?”

  “It’s complicated. Let’s just say it’s easier.”

  Once the bin was full, I crammed the lid on and lifted it. Ellmann came over and took it from me, carrying it out of the room and setting it near the door. He used tape to reinforce the lid.

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling the next bin over and reaching into the closet again.

  “What did she mean when she said you’re a troublemaker? That the police are always looking into you?”

  He took up his place in the doorway again.

  “She resents me almost as much as I resent her. She hasn’t been able to see things fairly where I’m concerned for the past thirteen years. Maybe longer.”

  I hauled hanging items out of the closet by the armful, dropping them unceremoniously into the bin.

  “Is that when she started comparing you to your brother?”

  “No, she’s been doing that since the day he was born. The resentment started when I was twelve.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I stuffed one more armload into the bin, squashed the lid on, and held it closed while Ellmann taped it. I let him carry it out and set it on top of the other. Then I retrieved another bin and resumed my task.

  “I know if I don’t tell you, you’ll just look it up, but that’s fine with me. It’s not something I talk about.”

  “All right, change of subject. Why are you in such a rush to pack?”

  “Because anything I want to keep I need to have out of here by the time she gets back. She doesn’t respond well to being slighted, especially in her current condition, and especially by me. She’ll retaliate. Maybe she’ll have a big bonfire in the backyard, maybe she’ll drench everything in gasoline or bleach.” I shrugged. “Hard to say. She’s done that and a lot more.”

  “No pressure, then, right?”

  “You don’t have to help me. I’ve gotten pretty good at packing over the years.”

  He shrugged. “I’m here, and I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “By the way, what did you do with my mother?”

  “Put her in the car. But don’t worry,” he said. “I cracked the window.”

  9

  “This is a great place. How’d you find it?”

  Joe Pezzani and I stood in the kitchen of my new place off Drake, east of College, sipping bottled waters, the only edible thing in the house.

  I had nearly finished packing everything when Ellmann had called to say my mother had just spoken to her attorney. Knowing her release was imminent, I’d asked Pezzani for help with the move. There had been more to do than I could do alone, and I’d wanted to avoid another run-in.

  Amy would have come to help me had I asked, but I knew this thing with Brandon’s family was pretty important. My friend Mercedes Salois is a nurse and works nights at the hospital. She’d worked the night before and was sleeping. I couldn’t call my brother, whose truck I was already borrowing. And Donald isn’t big on physical labor. So, to both his surprise and mine, I’d called Pezzani.

  “I went to another management company in town and asked what they had available. Finding this place was just luck.”

  “Didn’t want to take something your company manages?”

  I shrugged. “It was an option. But sometimes that’s complicated. This way is usually simpler.”

  Working with Margaret Fischer was certainly simple. She was predictably by-the-book. But it wasn’t pleasant. For either of us. I wasn’t fond of her and, sadly, I didn’t think she liked me.

  That morning, after the search team had left, I’d had to call Fischer because I was running late for our rescheduled appointment. I’d thought she would be in good shape if that was the worst thing that happened to her today. Still, she’d done a lot of glaring and sighing until I’d given her a check and she’d given me the keys.

  “And you like simplicity?”

  “Generally speaking, yes.”

  We made dinner plans for the following evening, my treat as a thank-you for the moving help, then Pezzani left. I grabbed a fast shower, threw on jeans and a top, and hit the road. The one thing I hadn’t been able to spend a lot of time packing was food, and that was something I was going to need. I began compiling a grocery list in my head, the total adding up quickly by my mental math. I wasn’t getting paid for my vacation. For the next two weeks, I would be living off my savings. Not the most ideal situation considering I’d just taken on the expense of an additional household. Maybe I needed to go back to work and accept White’s promotion.

  No, I thought. What I need is money.

  Immediately, my thoughts drifted to Tyler Jay and the fifteen-thousand-dollar reward. I would soon be burning through my savings; another fifteen large would go a long way in reducing my stress level until I got things figured out. Grocery store forgotten, I pulled the pages of notes out of my bag, glancing over them as I drove. I had a few possibilities, but the best bet seemed like his mom’s house. If Tyler Jay was still in town, I thought the chances were good his mother would know where he was. It seemed pretty likely she would know where he was even if he wasn’t in town. What I didn’t know was if she would tell me.

  I knew nothing about Tyler Jakowski, aside from the fac
t that he was dating Stacy Karnes and was Larimer County’s Number One Most Wanted Fugitive for a whole slew of violent crimes. Tina Shuemaker had said he had a scar and a lot of cheap-looking tattoos. I wondered now if he’d gotten any of those in prison. At a stoplight, I quickly went over the information I’d pulled off the Internet about the names Tyler Jakowski and Tyler Jay. There wasn’t much aside from a few newspaper articles, primarily from the Fort Collins Coloradoan, regarding Tyler Jakowski and his suspected involvement in various crimes. I hadn’t made note of any reported gang affiliation, but I suddenly wondered if that was because I’d overlooked it or simply hadn’t dug deep enough.

  I found the house I believed belonged to Tyler’s mother and parked a couple doors down. I sat for a moment taking in the neighborhood. Located in the center of town, just off Prospect, this subdivision is middle-class. The driveways have minivans and SUVs parked in them, and the yards are full of bikes and toys.

  The lots in this neighborhood are slightly larger, the houses having been built in the ’70s, before cookie-cutter designs. The house was a tri-level, painted a cheery yellow that had faded over the years. The windows and gutters appeared clean, and the yard was maintained. There was a late-’90s Honda Civic CRX parked in the driveway with aftermarket exhaust, rims, and spoiler, the windows tinted beyond legal limits, and twin white racing stripes splitting the shiny black paint from bumper to bumper. I didn’t think Tyler’s mom, whatever kind of woman she was, would drive a souped-up Honda with such horribly atrocious rims. At least, I hoped she wouldn’t.

  Taking a deep breath, I exited the truck, walked up to the front door, knocked, and waited.

  I saw movement behind the curtains in the windows on all three levels of the house. It confirmed I was on the right track. A woman a few years older than my mother, dressed in worn and comfy-looking jeans, opened the door and stared through the screen at me, taking in even the most minute details. Her entire demeanor was guarded, cautious.

  This was definitely the right place.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I really hope so. I’m a friend of Stacy’s, and I’m trying to find Tyler. Is he home?”

  I watched her face closely, seeing her eyes flick involuntarily to the left, at something inside the house.

  “Tyler who?” she asked. Mom wasn’t a very good liar.

  “Tyler Jay. Stacy told me to find Tyler if anything ever happened to her.” I was pulling this out of my ear on the fly, hoping anything I learned would be more than I’d had before, even if I didn’t hit pay-dirt straight away. “She’s in the hospital. It’s serious.”

  Something in her shifted, softened. I wondered if she’d met Stacy. Either way, she seemed saddened by thoughts of Stacy’s injuries.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t know any Tyler.”

  Her eyes flicked to the side again, and this time they lingered for a second or two. Then I heard movement. A large man came into view, blocking the woman from sight. He pushed the screen door open and stepped out onto the small porch, forcing me back down the steps and onto the sidewalk.

  He was about my age, well over six feet tall, built like a refrigerator, and dressed in baggy, black shorts and a black tank top. His chest, arms, and neck were tattooed with symbols and designs largely meaningless to me, though I got a distinctly “gang” vibe from them. He was of Hispanic descent, though not wholly. His skin was more tanned than brown, his hair and eyes brown but not dark. His hair was short and slicked back from his forehead. It looked like he was trying and failing to grow a moustache. I stared up at him, struggling to keep all signs of intimidation hidden, wondering who he was and what he planned to do to me, because he wasn’t Tyler Jay, and I suspected he knew where Tyler was.

  “Who are you?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly soprano for his size.

  “My name is Jennifer. I go to school with Stacy. Are you Tyler?”

  My go-to fake name is Jennifer. It had been ever since I’d started sneaking into clubs during my unruly teenage years. In my high school class, practically one out of every three girls was named Jennifer, half of them brunette.

  “Derrick,” he answered. “You go to CSU? Aren’t you a little old to be in college?”

  Old? Old?!

  I’d been getting this old bit a lot recently. Starting immediately, I’d need to be more aggressive about getting my stress level under control. Because obviously it was the stress that had aged me.

  “I got a late start,” I said lightly, shrugging. “Took some time off after high school. Do you know where Tyler is?”

  “Look, little girl, you better run along, now.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you; I’m just trying to help out a friend. She’s not doing well. The doctors don’t know if she’ll make it. I really need to find Tyler. Can you help me?”

  I’m not sure why asking, “Can you help me?” tends to soften people, but it does. It doesn’t always mean they’ll do what you want, but it almost always means they’ll feel so bad about not doing what you want that they try to make up for it by doing something else. Whatever the reason for the response, I take advantage of this phenomenon regularly. Even now I saw this big man’s face relax and his eyes soften. His stance was less confrontational, and he was obviously trying to decide how to respond.

  “Look, girl, Tyler knows about Stacy already, okay? You can’t tell him anything he don’t already know. So, don’t worry about it no more. That’s the best thing for you. Just walk away.”

  “He already got the message?” I asked, hopeful. “Maybe she asked more than one person to give it to him. She said it was important, I think about money, but I’m not really sure. I’m just glad he knows. I know it was important, and I’d feel really bad if I didn’t do this for her, especially if she dies. Gosh,” I said suddenly, as if realizing this was a possibility for the first time. “I really hope she doesn’t die.”

  I shifted my weight between feet, sniffed, and quickly blinked my eyes a few times. I wanted to give the impression that I was emotionally distraught at the thought of Stacy Karnes passing away. I might have just looked like a girl too old to be in college who had to pee and was fighting an attack of allergies.

  The man sighed and stepped off the porch to stand in front of me, lessening the difference in our heights almost imperceptibly. He was suddenly very uncomfortable, no doubt worried I would burst into tears. He obviously wanted to avoid that outcome.

  “Hey, it’s too soon to know anything for sure,” he said. “Stacy’s strong; she could pull through.”

  I nodded and sniffed again.

  “Now, since it was so important to her, why don’t you tell me the message, and I’ll get it to Tyler?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but she was very clear: speak to Tyler directly. She said there would be others who would want the information. She said to ask for him here because his mom would always know where to find him.”

  It was a huge gamble. Everything could blow up in my face if the woman who lived in this house was not actually Tyler’s mother. All I really had to bolster my guess was the fact that Tyler was about my age and the woman who had answered the door was about my mother’s age. It was thin, so very thin. I held my breath while the man took in my words.

  Through the open screen door, I saw another man step into view. He glanced at me then took in the street with the eye of an experienced fugitive. This man, tall and lanky, with cheap-looking tattoos and a scar over his eye, was the same man from the photo on the wanted poster. This was Tyler Jay.

  “I’m Tyler,” he said in a deep voice, husky from cigarettes. “What’s the message?”

  “If you’re really Tyler,” I said, “tell me what Stacy’s tattoo looks like.”

  “She doesn’t have any tattoos.”

  From the way he said it, I was fairly sure he was telling the truth. Of course, I was all too aware this was also a gamble, since I didn’t actually know the answer.

  “All right, then,” I said,
satisfied. “She said if anything ever happened to her, I was supposed to find you. She wanted me to tell you she tucked something away for safekeeping in your spot. That’s it, nothing else. I sorta guessed it was money, since I know she works so much, but she never did say.”

  Something I’d said hit home with him; I could tell by the small change in his eyes. Wasn’t that a stroke of luck.

  “How do I know this is a real message?” he asked. I resisted the urge to panic. “Why would you deliver a message for her anyway? She never mentioned you, so I doubt you two are very close.”

  I cleared my throat and shuffled my feet nervously. “Uh, well, she sort of walked in on me with a certain professor once. We were . . . well, you know. Anyway, she said she would spread it all over campus if I didn’t do her a favor. Hey, look, if that sort of thing got around, I’d be kicked out! The professor would be fired, and she’d probably never find another job. I figured doing this one little favor was a small price to pay.”

  I have no idea where I come up with this stuff.

  “Wait,” Derrick said. “She? The professor was a woman?”

  I looked at him innocently. “Yeah. Why?”

  A stupid grin spread over his face and he shook his head. “No reason.”

  I turned back to Tyler, who was also grinning slightly. Boys are so dumb. “So, listen, I’m sorry to come over like this, but I just wanted to deliver on my end of the bargain. I’m really sorry about Stacy. I actually like her. You know, she’s okay when she’s not blackmailing you.”

  Tyler chuckled softly. “She must have picked up a few things after all, little Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Thanks for the message. I’ll make sure she knows you came through if she . . .”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say what I struggled to think about myself, and I didn’t even know the girl. Tyler might have been a bad and dangerous guy, accused of all sorts of horrible crimes, but he was just a man underneath all that, and he seemed to really love Stacy. I kind of felt bad for him; it hurts to lose someone you love, or to worry about losing them.

  I just nodded. “Thanks.”