Primed for Murder

by Jack Ewing

  Toby clung to wrought iron handrails, pulled his lanky body up the stairs. The crummy paint job looked even worse close-up. Real slap-dash weekend work, as though somebody had sloshed a few gallons at the top, then halfheartedly spread the paint as it trickled down. The house looked different at ground level: so ordinary, like there couldn’t possibly be violence behind its run-of-the-mill walls.

  Toby murmured, “I know what I saw. I think.”

  He tapped lightly beside the door, beneath numbers tacked to the wood: 1413. Even the brass numerals were splashed with blue.

  There was no answer. Toby bounced knuckles off the wood, hard: still nothing. Just what he expected. He tugged open the screened door and tried the knob. Locked tight. He bent to peer in windows bracketing the front door but both were heavily draped.

  Toby cut across a scorched lawn to the window he’d seen down into from the ladder. It was open a few inches, but the sill was too high to reach from the ground.

  He soft-pedaled along a sunburned grass strip dividing crumbling concrete tracks. The driveway led back to a detached two-car garage. The doors were locked. Putting an eye to a dusty side window, Toby saw the garage was unoccupied.

  The alley was empty, too. Tire-spun dust still blemished the air. Toby knelt to examine the ground. The gray sedan hadn’t left more than a scuff and it was tough to distinguish one track from another on the dry, packed earth. Maybe the cops could find something. He turned back towards the house.

  Basement windows were too narrow to crawl through. Between head-high rhododendron bushes was a screened-in porch. The door hung open, so Toby pulled it wide and cat-footed between stacked lawn chairs and plastic bags of crushed aluminum cans to a half-glassed back entrance, closed shut. Shading eyes, he saw through frilly curtains into a kitchen floored with blue vinyl, complete with modern appliances.

  The door was locked. He thought about smashing the glass with a mallet from the croquet set racked in a porch corner and reaching in to unlatch it, but vetoed the noisy, potentially painful idea. A guy could get in trouble for that. Besides, there was a neater, quicker route inside.

  The cracked-open window called as Toby returned the way he’d come. He made straight for his battered pickup parked in shade at the rear of Mrs. Cratty’s driveway, near her freshly painted garage. Toby untied a six-foot wooden stepladder from the homemade rack and carried it back on his shoulder. He set it up beneath the open window of the blue house.

  He oozed sweat. His stomach writhed like he’d downed a bowl of week-old chili. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. This is dangerous, he thought. With my luck, somebody will come along and spot me. I’ll be busted for burglary.

  But he had to see, to be sure. He owed it to his conscience.

  Without further thought Toby scrambled up the ladder. He hooked fingertips in the gap between window and frame and heaved. The wood was dry, squawking like a gut-shot goose, but the sash went up. He shouldered metal blinds aside with a clatter, threw a leg over the sill and ducked inside.

  The contrast between bright sunshine outside and dimness inside the room momentarily blinded him. Something crackled underfoot: paper. He didn’t move.

  When his eyes had adjusted, he quickly scanned the room. Light flowed weakly around edges of the blinds, enough to tell he was in a den wallpapered with alternating tan-and-white vertical stripes.

  The place would be cozy, usually. Right now, it was a mess. Books from built-in shelves lining one whole wall lay heaped in mounds. Drawers of a large wooden desk in one corner were pulled open. The padded brown leather seat of a well-used swivel chair and the cushions of a lived-in, earth-tone easy chair were slashed to rags. Objects—pictures, pottery, a small shelf and bric-a-brac it had once held—now lay crushed and broken. Framed photographs marching along a fireplace mantel had been toppled. One had fallen face-up onto the marble hearth and spidery cracks in the glass over the photo scarred the face beneath. Sheaves of paper were strewn everywhere.

  In the middle of the floor, half-covered in stray 8½″ x 11″ sheets, lay a body.

  The guy was dressed in a lightweight tawny suit that went with the room’s color scheme. The creamy satin-lined tail of the coat was flipped up over the man’s butt. His pant legs were bunched above his ankles, showing off canary-yellow socks and the shiny pigeon-toed soles of almost-new sand-colored shoes. The man lay on his face with arms outstretched, as if performing a dive with a low difficulty factor. The back of his skull above a salt-and-pepper ponytail was a pulpy mess. A dark pool seeping into a thick beige area rug surrounded his head like a wreath. A fly was caught in tacky dampness inches from the man’s ear and buzzed feebly, trying to pull loose.

  The thing that had done the damage, a wrought-iron fireplace poker with a solid brass handle shaped into a duck’s head, lay on the rug a foot away from the body. The mallard—its bill gooey with blood—looked like a vampire.

  Toby walked on a path of paper, knelt to see the guy’s face. The man kissed the rug, nose squashed flat against the nap. The open eyes stared at carpet fibers without seeing them. Toby didn’t like touching the corpse, realized he shouldn’t. But he wanted to know if he’d recognize the man as someone he’d seen while working on Charbold Street. It seemed important at the moment. He brushed loose papers aside, hooked fingers through the dead man’s belt loops, and rolled the body onto its side. The man was limp and heavier than he looked. The shirt matched the socks, discounting spatters of blood.

  The collar was held together by a bolo tie cinched with a silver ornament shaped like the head of a grinning jungle cat. The man’s hair and clothes smelled of cigar smoke.

  Toby gazed a long time at the features, trying to imagine how the dead man would look when alive. Take away a ragged gash across the broad, brown forehead. Remove a welt disfiguring the high cheekbone. Forget about the red syrup covering his lower face that made him look like a cherry pie-eating contestant. What have you got?

  You’ve got somebody who looked like he was from somewhere else than Syracuse. Not part of the local Italian-Afro-Polish-Irish-Jewish melting pot. He was sixty or so, Toby guessed, by the gray hair. The face was lean with skin the color of tanned cowhide, tight to the skull. A thin, sharp nose featured high, narrow nostrils. The eyes were deep and dark. Prominent lips slack in a wide mouth.

  Toby didn’t recognize him, didn’t know if he should. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t recall seeing anyone come or go at the blue house during the whole time he’d been at Mrs. Cratty’s. He hadn’t paid much attention though. This house was directly across from hers, so it would have been out of sight much of the time he’d painted the sides and back. Armies of people could have bivouacked there and Toby would never have known.

  So who was this guy? How’d he get to be lying here dead? Who was the man who’d killed him, and why?

  Toby cringed as he rifled the corpse’s clothing. The dead man didn’t have a wallet in hip or breast pocket. He carried no keys, matches or loose change. The coat label said the suit was one of millions sold in chain stores. Side pockets held nothing but lint and dark flakes of tobacco. Toby let the stiff go and the body slumped back the way it had come to rest, facedown in the red puddle. The fly in the pooled blood stopped struggling and gave up the ghost.

  He stood to browse, walking a path of blank sheets of paper. Conscious of his paint-smeared hands, his telltale fingerprints, he just looked, touching nothing.

  A few popular novels slummed among the scattered books, but most hardbound volumes seemed to be texts on Mexican history. There were dozens dealing with the Mayas, Aztecs, Olmecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs and other -ecs. Since Toby favored watching TV over reading, the books didn’t interest him much. But they made him imagine the guy who owned this house was either a history nut or a teacher.

  Toby found a pencil and used it to flip open the cover of a hardback on the floor: Pre-Columbian Mexico. Inside the cover was a fancy bookplate reading “Ex Libris” and “Puterbaugh.” He idly turned page
s with the pencil’s eraser and came across a picture. The caption said: “Detail depicting Lord Shield-Pacal from Stela B, Palenque.” Except for an elaborate headdress the figure in the photo wore, and earplugs the size of coffee cups, the Indian chief could have been the brother of the dead man—identical profiles. Toby pencil-closed the book, and pencil-opened another: same sticker, same name, and same pictures of the dead man’s ancient kin.

  He moved to the fireplace, examined framed photos on mantel and floor. These people weren’t related to the victim. Family portrait: a thin, tweedy-looking guy, late thirties, dressed in a poor-fitting suit and wearing thick glasses, stood beside an attractive, chubby mid-thirties woman in a print dress. In front of them, a blond boy with a burr cut showed all his teeth. Next to him and a half-head taller was a pretty, dark-haired preteen girl. Her mouth was slightly open revealing the glint of braces, and she had a hairdo that made her head look deformed.

  Were these the Puterbaughs? Where did the dead man fit into the picture?

  Other snapshots showed the same people at different stages of their lives. Here, the guy with the glasses had more hair and was wearing a graduation gown. There, the wife was younger, slimmer and prettier. In this one, the boy was costumed like a pirate for Halloween. In that one, the pigtailed girl had lost baby teeth. The dead man wasn’t in any of the photos.

  Toby peeled back a sleeve to glance at his cheap, paint-spotted watch, feeling sure he’d been in the house for hours. Only five minutes since he’d crawled in the window. It was just a matter of time before a neighbor got back from an area mall or returned home instead of going back to work after a dental appointment. Chances were, somebody seeing the ladder would either come snooping or call the police. Neither option would do him any good. But Toby had his own curiosity to satisfy. “Five more minutes, max.”

  He walked to the oak desk, paper crinkling beneath his boots. Next to the desk stood a brass wastebasket, empty, and a smashed terra-cotta figure. A beat-up brown vinyl-covered metal case on the floor contained an old portable manual typewriter.

  Nothing much on the desktop: brass lamp next to an ink-stained blotter, pen and pencil set upright in a marble base, brass ashtray. Scratch pad. An old-fashioned beige push-button telephone sat on a directory beside an address book. Toby flipped through addresses. Most of several dozen names and numbers written in a crabbed hand were local. Many listings were for the same number with various extensions.

  Nothing lay under the blotter. But between the absorbent green sheet and its brown leather-like holder was a folded piece of paper with a name and address printed boldly: McFarland, 412 South Street, Morrisville. Underneath was written and underlined “Codex?” He copied the information on scratch paper, wondering what a brand of sanitary napkins had to do with anything, and returned the scrap to its hiding place. He tucked the note away in one of his many coverall pockets.

  Toby considered checking out the rest of the house, curious if the killer had searched throughout. What was he looking for? Had he found it? Were other bodies lying around to be stumbled over?

  But the feeling kept building in him: get out, now. He became aware of the tick of his watch. With every second that passed, he grew more nervous about being discovered where he didn’t belong. He practically vibrated with tension a full minute before the end of his self-imposed time limit. “The hell with this.” Toby strode to the window, pulled back the blinds and lifted a leg to straddle the sill. Something made him take a last look at the still figure on the floor. His eyes went wide.

  In a shaft of sunlight, wet marks glinted dully, dotting papers scattered around the body. Toby squatted, tested a spot with a finger and sniffed it. Paint. On another page, a fragment of shoeprint was stamped in red: His or the killer’s? From a lowered angle he could see lacy streamers of blood on walls and ceiling, cast off on the backswing. Toby felt his coveralls: dozens of tiny, wet droplets of paint clung to the fabric, waiting to be transferred elsewhere. He checked his boot soles. Tacky white liquid, dotted with red, hugged the lugs. He must have trod in the small spill on Mrs. Cratty’s front lawn where he’d poured paint from a larger bucket to a smaller, and picked up the second color in this room. He’d left paint-stained, bloody imprints everywhere he’d walked.

  “Talk about a dead giveaway! It’s like signing my name.” He’d seen the shows on TV. He knew the miracles cops could perform in a lab.

  Toby hastily gathered loose sheets, using papers as stepping-stones and moved backwards in a ragged circle that began and would end at the window. He had to get them all, every page. He didn’t know which ones he’d touched or stepped on. He grimaced as he rolled the reluctant weight of the dead man first one way then the other to get at sheets trapped beneath the body. Several pages were heavily stained with blood. He gingerly tucked them in the middle of the sheaf. He aligned the papers into a sloppy, three-inch-thick bundle and wadded the whole mess down the front of his coveralls, turning his flat stomach into a square-cornered potbelly.

  Toby threw himself out the window and onto the ladder. He bent to retrieve the last papers he’d stood on, and rammed them into a pocket.

  A few steps down and he stood on the ground. He glanced around: still nobody in sight. What luck! Toby folded the ladder shut and charged across to Mrs. Cratty’s. He hung the stepladder back in its rack and opened the truck cab long enough to stash the bundle of papers under the seat. He withdrew crumpled pages from his pockets, smoothed them out and added them to the stack. He quickly stowed the rest of his gear, collapsing the extension ladder and securing it, piling empty five-gallon paint drums into the truck bed, slinging in brushes, drop cloths. He efficiently tied down a spattered tarp over everything. He’d finish the job the next day, or the next after that, well before Mrs. Cratty got back.

  Toby locked the cab and set out on foot. There was no rush, and besides, why waste precious, expensive gas driving his fifteen-year-old guzzler? The walk would help clear his head, too.

  He’d aim for a public phone. Sure, it was an inconvenience, but with his irregular income he couldn’t afford the luxury of mobile service, or replacement costs for the fancy, all-the-bells-and-whistles cell phone he’d accidentally dropped from a thirty-foot height onto concrete. There had to be a booth somewhere on Salina, a main north-south drag through downtown Syracuse.

  Time to call the cops.

  Chapter 3

  Fourteen blocks later, as he approached an old-style glassed-in phone booth on the edge of a parking lot on the corner of Charbold and Salina, Toby slowed to practice his speech. “I’ll just call 911, tell them what I saw, give ’em the address and hang up. Won’t mention my name.” He nodded, satisfied. That would do the trick. He fumbled for a coin, flung himself into the coffin-sized glass cubicle and sealed it. It felt like an oven in there. Toby’s hand darted towards the coin slot but paused mid-air: the cord had been cut and the handset was missing. He came out of the booth with beads of perspiration standing like blisters on his face. “I should’ve called from the blue house,” he grumped aloud.

  “Be glad you didn’t,” a voice in his head contradicted. “Fingerprints, remember? What if you were caught in there? What if they traced the call? Who needs more grief?”

  “Should’ve taken the truck.” Toby looked south down Salina. “Too late now.” He’d come this far—no way was he trudging back in the rising afternoon heat to start over.

  There was a neon sign perpendicular to the sidewalk a few blocks away in the direction of town. He plodded towards it, drenched in sweat.

  Antonio’s was a dingy, narrow bar with a lit-up Schaefer’s Beer sign in the window: “The one to have when you’re having more than one.” Good idea. Toby went in, figuring they’d have a phone. He invested in a sixteen-ounce draft to fortify himself for his conversation with the police. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and the beer practically evaporated. As he ordered a second glass, Toby learned from the proprietor—a rail-thin man with cheeks pitted by purplish acne scars
and a jet-black pompadour like patent leather—that there was no public phone in the place.

  “No,” the man responded to Toby’s question about a big, black dial phone visible behind the bar, “you can’t use that.” He draped skeletal fingers protectively on the receiver. “I’m expecting an important call.”

  Cursing under his breath, Toby swallowed the last inch of foam in his glass and left. Six blocks closer to town, past cheap, boxy, two-story houses flung up in the ’40s, he entered Julio’s Pub. Over a bottle of Miller’s he inquired about a phone. “Had it yanked.” The fat young bartender sucked at a ragged moustache whose ends didn’t match in length. He combed thin strands of hair across a muskmelon-shaped head and waved pudgy fingers at surly-looking men hunched over drinks at a scarred twenty-foot bar. “Too many broads calling to check on their guys. Don’t you have a cell?”

  Inhaling beer an inch at a time, Toby pondered what to do next. He could call from his apartment. But that was stupid because the cops probably had caller ID and would be onto him in a flash. Besides, he lived way on the other side of town. He’d still have to walk back more than twenty long blocks—must be a mile, at least—and fetch the truck anyway. It was hot outside. The bar was cool. Beer really hit the spot.

  He could forget about calling altogether. But over the past two weeks too many people had seen him in the neighborhood of the crime. He might even get blamed for the murder if he didn’t come forward first.

  Toby pictured again the bloody face, the still body. Shudders tiptoed up and down his spine, made a neck muscle spasm involuntarily. His nerves were a mess.