Primed for Murder

by Jack Ewing

  “How many times do I have to tell you? They cleaned it up!” Toby ducked from under the detective’s arm and faced the two men. “They had a couple hours between when I found the dead man and when we got back here. Plenty of time to get rid of a body and do a little housekeeping.”

  “And whose fault is it they had so much time?” French asked.

  “I explained all that.” Behind Dixon and French, Toby saw slight movement at the open blinds in Puterbaugh’s den window as someone flashed into and out of sight. “Maybe the body is hidden in the cellar. Maybe it’s in the attic.”

  “Maybe it’s all in your mind,” French said. “Give you credit: you got a vivid imagination.”

  “Everything I said is true! I gave lots of details—”

  “They didn’t pan out. Sure, it’s apparent you’ve been in that room before. But we’re missing the main attraction: a corpse. Or evidence there ever was a corpse.”

  “What’s the problem? Take apart the house, you’ll find it. Or spray some stuff that glows where blood’s been. What’s it called?” What was wrong with the cops? Why didn’t these lummoxes want to do their job?

  “Luminol,” French said.

  “Problem is, Mr. Rew, to search the place thoroughly, we’d need a warrant,” Dixon said. “And to get a warrant, we need probable cause.”

  “We haven’t got probable squat. Everything’s kosher.” French’s eyes, the green of a cat’s, glinted with anger. “We haven’t got anything but a colossal waste of time. And you, the guy who’s wasted it.”

  “That’s the second important fact, Mr. Rew.” Dixon made a two-fingered V. “The fact you’ve been drinking. And the two facts sort of cancel each other out.” The fingers were snapped up by Dixon’s sharp-knuckled fist.

  “We should run you in for public intoxication.” French fingered handcuffs looped at his belt. “Making us come out on a wild-goose chase.”

  “But we won’t,” Dixon said. “I’m sure it was all an honest mistake.”

  Toby fumed, biting his tongue. How could these blockheads, investigation specialists, supposedly professional observers, be so blind?

  Dixon patted his shoulder like a father chastising a son. “You sober enough to drive?” Toby nodded, unable to speak. “Hope so. I’d hate to see you arrested for DUI. Go straight home, sleep it off and we’ll forget about this little incident, okay?”

  “And don’t let it happen again.” French shook a finger in his face. “I’ll keep an eye peeled for you, Rew.” He sniffed once more, with feeling, climbed behind the wheel, fired a parting shot: “Get some help for that drinking problem.” Dixon smiled at Toby sympathetically and slid in on the passenger side. The car pulled smoothly away.

  Toby stared after them a moment, then crossed to his truck. He mused briefly about getting out paint and brush again, and having at Mrs. Cratty’s house. But the sun was lower in the sky. It had been a long, trying day. He’d never be able to focus on the job, knowing the Puterbaughs were watching him.

  He unlocked the truck door. The cab was stifling. The seat covers seared his legs through the coveralls and the plastic steering wheel burned his fingers. Toby rolled down both windows to let in air and slumped back to think. At the angle he was sitting, the blue house across the street filled the outside mirrors of the truck. Questions crowded Toby’s head—questions the police couldn’t be bothered to ask.

  Like, who was the dead man? No idea, but he was related to those people in Mr. Puterbaugh’s history books. Ancient Mexico was written all over his face.

  Who’d killed him? Toby had only seen the dark-haired man from the back.

  Why had he been killed? No answer.

  What were killer and victim doing at the Puterbaugh’s? One or both had been searching for something. Who knew what? Maybe it had to do with Mr. Puterbaugh’s profession. Or maybe it was connected to the family’s recent trip to Mexico.

  How’d the trespassers enter? Front or back door, window—what did it matter?

  Where was the body now? There were dozens of possibilities.

  Were the Puterbaughs involved in the murder? Toby didn’t think so, not directly, anyway—they hadn’t been home, according to their statements. He hadn’t heard a sound the whole time he’d been inside the house. It was possible they could have kept still as the man was being brutally murdered in their den, but it didn’t seem likely. Besides, why would they say they’d been shopping when the crime occurred, since it was easy for the police to check out their story’s veracity?

  So when they returned home and found the body, why didn’t they call the police? Give them the benefit of the doubt. Say they didn’t find it. Say somebody else had disposed of it already. Okay, then why didn’t they mention the furniture being changed? Because they’re guilty of something, guilty enough, perhaps, to hide a body, definitely guilty of helping conceal evidence of a crime, and lying to the law.

  Or, Toby thought, they’re totally innocent and I’m completely loony. He sighed, started the engine and backed down the driveway. The blue house grew in the driver’s-side mirror. As he swung onto Charbold, Toby glanced at the blinds of the Puterbaugh’s den. They were shut now, except where a pair of fingers spread them apart to make a peephole. By the height, it would be Mrs. Puterbaugh.

  Toby wove through late afternoon traffic towards his apartment. A minivan idled ahead of him at a stoplight. Half a dozen kids packed into the back, all in baseball uniforms, made faces at him. They stopped clowning when they saw he didn’t react.

  At his address, Toby pulled into his assigned slot in the continuous row of single-car garages behind the house, and switched off the ignition. Climbing out, he remembered the wad of papers he’d taken from the blue house and reached under the seat. The bloody pages were dry now, stiff and crinkly. He shoved the bundle down his coveralls, locked the cab, and padlocked the double doors of the garage.

  Toby crossed the asphalt driveway. He wearily began to ascend the metal stairs newly attached to the backside of the building: Just thirty-two steps up to his home.

  Chapter 6

  The house on James Street where Toby lived, like its neighbors for several blocks in any direction, had once been part of a ritzy section of Syracuse. In the 1920s and 1930s, the huge Tudor, stone, and frame homes owned by the city’s wealthy had hosted many an elegant soirée. In the post-war boom, the suburbs had beckoned. One by one the stately houses had passed from owners’ to landlords’ hands. Some had become offices for lawyers, CPAs, photographers, upscale ad agencies, trend-setting graphic design firms. Others, like Toby’s address, had been subdivided into apartments.

  On the first floor, the house was now halved, producing a matching pair of mirror-image two-bedroom flats. The left-hand flat, as you faced the wide, stone-and-wood structure, was shared by two young women—Sylvia Morris and Jean Dodge—who worked as secretaries half-days while attending LeMoyne College part-time in the evenings. They had invited Toby down for a keg party when they’d first moved in and he saw them weekly in passing. Both were reasonably attractive, friendly. They wore their brunette hair the same way. Wore similar clothing. Giggled at the same things. Liked the same music. Completed each other’s sentences. Toby couldn’t tell them apart and often called them by the wrong names when he met them coming or going.

  On the right lived Barton Hughes and his girlfriend du jour, Barbara, a nondescript ash blond. Bart, a burly, hairy guy about thirty, with ornate crosses tattooed around his forearms, worked odd shifts at Carrier Air Conditioning. He went through women like a cold sufferer ran through tissues.

  The second floor was parceled into three dissimilar single-tenant units. A pudgy middle-aged man with neat salt-and-pepper beard had just moved into the large L-shaped apartment and was still unpacking—Toby hadn’t introduced himself yet. A studious nineteen-year-old at Onondaga Community College, Todd Sylvan, had a medium-sized one-bedroom unit. Joe Ianotti, a wiry, dark-haired fellow of twenty-seven, occupied a tiny studio apartment. Joe was assis
tant manager at a fast-foot joint, but had aspirations of making it as a jazz guitarist. Every couple weeks Toby got out the tenor sax to jam with him on variations of Brubeck, Hagen and Davis standards. Joe strummed the right chords and plucked the correct notes, but he had a lousy sense of rhythm.

  Toby had the attic apartment to himself. After climbing the metal steps outside, Toby keyed the lock in the fire door. A second key opened the only door off a small paneled vestibule. Eight steps up an eighteen-inch-wide wooden staircase and he was home: Land of a thousand angles, where roof slope dictated room contour. Home, where you had to watch yourself when moving about, to avoid bumping head or elbow on hard, slanted surfaces that were both ceiling and wall.

  At the top of the stairs was the kitchen. An ancient two-burner stove and a modern dwarf refrigerator were tucked opposite one another either side of a hallway so narrow that both appliance doors couldn’t be opened at once.

  Toby bent to the fridge for a chilled aluminum can. It had BEER printed on its side in black, UPC stripes, a small-town Ohio address in two-point type, and nothing more. Popping the top, Toby slumped onto a seat of the booth-like nook set into the hallway. The faux marble-topped pedestal table and red vinyl-covered benches looked like they’d been lifted from a second-class diner and set down here. He took a healthy slug of watery-tasting beer, dragged the lump of papers from his overalls and plopped it onto the table. What’s the best way, he wondered, to get rid of typing paper stained with paint, his fingerprints and footprints, and another man’s blood?

  Couldn’t just throw it out with the trash. Plastic bags acted like magnets to the city’s poor and homeless—or as it was politically correct to call them nowadays, the economically disadvantaged and involuntarily domiciled—who made Garbage Day live up to its name in their implacable quest for usable junk. What would they do upon finding a ream of bloody paper? Who knew? He couldn’t take the chance.

  He could feed wadded pages to the toilet—no more than one or two a day, however, without plugging the house’s seventy-five-year-old plumbing. That would take too long and be too risky.

  Burning would work best. But Toby couldn’t do the job here: there was no fireplace. If he tried to torch papers in a wastebasket, smoke would fill the apartment and attract the fire department.

  He finished the beer, started a second. So how could he have an open fire in the summertime without causing suspicion? A barbecue! Sure. He could buy franks and buns, and have a solitary late-night picnic at a brick fire pit along the Liverpool side of Lake Onondaga. While nobody was looking, he’d eliminate potentially incriminating evidence. That’s what he’d do! Toby slapped a hand on the solid oblong of paper, pleased with his brainstorm. Of course, to be sure the pages were all destroyed he’d have to feed them one by one to the fire and stir the ashes well. If he just dumped the bundle onto the flames, bloody or paint-smeared sheets might not be entirely consumed.

  Funny, the blank paper didn’t feel entirely smooth. Toby gently rubbed fingertips across the top sheet’s surface. Something was definitely there: a series of slight indentations. Like words typed without a ribbon in the machine.

  He clicked on a shaded bulb hanging above the table and picked up the top page, angling it in the light. Lines of words were there, all right, as regular as rows of corn. Individual letters weren’t crisp and sharp, as they’d be if typewriter keys had struck paper directly without benefit of a ribbon. The marks were too faint to be readable, impossible to see without closer examination. Were they all like this? Toby picked ten pages at random to examine. Every page contained slight marks.

  Second sheets, Toby’s dad would have called them. Memories of his father came sputtering back. Randy Rew had died, aged forty-eight, when Toby was twelve. But for twenty-five years before coughing out his lungs, he had made a living, of sorts writing mail order pamphlets that sold for $3.95 to $5.95 apiece, plus postage. These dealt with every subject imaginable, incorporating information Randy gleaned from books, magazines and encyclopedias, in taverns and on the street—all presented in a new and easily digestible form for the masses.

  Remove Any Stain!

  A Short Biography of Chief Black Hawk

  Why Communism Will Fail

  Get Rid of Acne

  Improve Your Love Life!

  Mushroom Hunting for Fun and Profit

  Fix Your Car!

  Mama Mia! Favorite Italian Recipes

  A Stamp Collecting Primer

  My Daily Devotional

  Bake Your Own Bread

  Successful Chinchilla Breeding

  No Pests in My House!

  Real Estate Secrets

  Techniques of Weaving

  Land the Big Ones—Tie Your Own Flies

  A Whole Vegetable Garden in Just 36 Square Feet!

  How to Make Money Writing Mail Order Pamphlets

  Toby’s dad, unfiltered cigarette constantly plugged between his lips, banged at an old Royal manual, turning out twenty-four to thirty-six-page booklets every working day.

  These were promoted, alongside pitches for hemorrhoid creams or trusses, in boxed ads inserted into the low-cost classifieds of specialty magazines and obscure newspapers. Within days of the ad’s appearance, envelopes containing checks, money orders or wrinkled currency would begin trickling in. When enough money was collected to cover production costs of a particular work, Randy contracted to have it printed up and mailed out. Some pamphlets—one concerning chemical experiments that could be performed with common household products, for example—sold only a few dozen copies. Others, such as a new theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination, sold thousands and went into several printings.

  Randy worked like a machine. Behind each sheet he rolled around the typewriter carriage invariably lurked a carbon and second sheet. He kept copies of everything he wrote in battered filing cabinets in case he needed to borrow from an earlier work for his latest masterpiece, a common practice. Even in his final weeks, when he knew he was dying, Randy continued to pour out words and suck in smoke. He sat hunched over the typewriter, bones showing through a sweat-soaked undershirt, working for thirty, forty hours straight to get down words before they were forever lost. “It’s my legacy, Toby,” Randy rasped when his only child begged him to stop, to save strength. He paused to draw breath and his exhale resulted in dry hacking with a gurgle at the end. “A last chance to leave my small, unique mark on the world.” He stifled a cough, patted the boy’s cheek with skeletal, nicotine-stained fingers and turned back to the keyboard.

  When he got too weak to sit up, Toby’s mom rigged a table across the bed and his father continued to pound away. As weeks dragged by, the clack of keys became more hesitant. Pauses between bursts of inspiration grew longer. Randy skipped carbon paper then, as though it no longer mattered if what he wrote was preserved in duplicate. But out of long habit he used new backup sheets for each page he typed, to help cushion the blows of sharp keys against the beloved old Royal’s tender carriage.

  Toby remembered his mother throwing out stacks of those almost-blank pages, marred only by blurry indentations, after Randy died. “But Mom,” he had complained, holding out for her inspection a sheet, pristine except for nearly invisible ghost marks, “they’re practically brand-new, perfect for drawing.”

  His mom had yanked the paper away, stuffed it into one of many boxes bulging with blank reams stacked at the curb. “I don’t care. I want it all out of the house.”

  Toby snapped out of his reverie and stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. Those pages of Dad’s, those second sheets looked just like these.

  He began a third beer. He’d never read much of what his father had written—he’d never been inclined to read much of anything, outside the newspaper Sports section or the comics. But now he wondered what these pages contained and was eager to find out. His dad had probably written a pamphlet about how to raise the words. It was too bad Mom had sold Randy’s filing cabinets and chucked their contents when she moved to Missouri a cou
ple years ago to be near her ailing sister.

  Maybe you dipped sheets in vinegar. Or held them over a flame. Or painted them with carbon tet. What, Toby wondered, could he use? From cupboards over the sink he selected and rejected several household products before arriving at a possible solution: a canister of powdered graphite used to lubricate skids of stubborn windows and cranky doorknobs. If properly applied, it could be a variation on the old rub-a-pencil-over-the-message-pad-to-see-where-the-killer-went gimmick from a 1930s detective movie.

  Toby sifted a quarter-teaspoonful of graphite onto a page. With a clean, dry half-inch paintbrush he moved the fine black powder around, filling tiny crevices. It worked. Words and numbers, fuzzy as if slightly out of focus, began to stand out.

  Page 33: “…Human figures and symbols on the forty-four bark panels are still as brilliant as the day they were painted, eleven hundred years ago…”

  Page 61: “…Colors, extracted from various native plants and earths, including such esoteric sources as…”

  If it was all this dull, he had a long, tiring job ahead. Best thing was to organize pages, then see what he had. He looked for a dimple at the edge of each sheet, dabbed graphite, and when a number showed, filed the page in correct sequence. In the middle of the job, the phone rang. Toby padded into the living room, to answer it. “Toby Rew?” It was a woman’s voice, in the flat, nasal tones of a native upstate New Yorker.

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Desdemona Colangelo. You’re the painter?” She sounded young.

  “That’s right. Where’d you hear about me?” Toby always conducted an informal survey to determine the efficacy of his minimal advertising campaign. So far, word-of-mouth from satisfied customers had a big edge, although he had gained a few decent paying jobs off business cards tacked, stapled or taped in bars, restaurants, grocery stores and other establishments where there was a bulletin board, heavy foot traffic, and passersby had idle time on their hands.