Primed for Murder

by Jack Ewing

“When did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. We returned home late, night before last. The kids rushed off to see their friends. Jim and I were exhausted. We went straight to bed.”

  “Where was the manuscript?”

  “The original and carbon were in a desk drawer in the den. Jim discovered the manuscript missing yesterday afternoon after we returned from the supermarket.”

  “Was that before or after you dumped the body?” Sandy pinched her lips together angrily. “When did he see the papers last?” Toby asked.

  “Jim was working on them that morning.”

  “So somebody broke in your house while you were away shopping.”

  “Apparently.” Sandy chose words with caution. “But a thief, not a murderer.” She turned a lazy gaze his way. “It could have been you who took the manuscript.”

  “Why would anyone—why would I—steal your husband’s book?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not valuable to anyone but us.”

  “What’s the dissertation about?”

  “It’s a detailed study of a Mayan manuscript. It’s a very high-tech work, not for public consumption, aimed at others in the field.”

  “Sounds like a big yawner.” It was, by the excerpts he’d already read.

  “I’m sure it is, to a layman. But that’s not who it’s intended for. It’s Jim’s ticket to a higher degree, a better position.” Unspoken were other elements that came with promotion: increased salary, better house in a swankier neighborhood, enhanced prestige. “That’s why we have to have it back,” she said.

  “Can’t he just write it over again?”

  “Impossible! It’s hundreds of pages, thousands of words, tons of original research, loads of footnotes. Too many details to re-create, too many quoted references. You’d understand if you were a writer.”

  “I can barely manage to write postcards to my widowed Mom. How do you plan to get it back?”

  “I don’t know.” She rubbed her chin. “The police won’t be any help, since the papers aren’t worth anything, monetarily speaking.” Her eyes met Toby’s. She leaned closer. “What if we offered a reward for the return of Jim’s dissertation?”

  “How much?”

  She tapped her pouted lower lip. “A thousand? Two thousand?”

  Toby whistled. “You’d pay that much for a bunch of papers?”

  “More.” Sandy looked askance at Toby.

  “What’s it really all about?”

  Her fingers followed the tapered column of her neck onto the plateau of her full breasts, ostensibly wiping away perspiration. “If money alone is not enough incentive, other arrangements could be made.” Her voice was soft and husky.

  Toby cleared his throat. “I’m sure you’ll make a fair offer. Wish I could help. But you’re talking to the wrong guy. I don’t have the book.” Strictly speaking, he’d told the truth. He had just the second sheets. It wasn’t the same thing.

  Sandy’s eyes narrowed. Vertical lines appeared in the space between the parabolas of her eyebrows. “What are you saying?”

  “What part of ‘No’ don’t you get? I don’t have the papers.” Now he was lying, and he wasn’t good at it. “I saw them scattered around your den, at the same time as I saw the dead man cluttering up the floor. I left everything alone to go call the police.”

  Her frown deepened. “But if you don’t have them, that means—”

  The murderer must have taken originals and carbons, Toby thought. He said aloud: “Somebody else must have come along after I split and snatched them.” It sounded like a Three Stooges farce with people coming and going willy-nilly, and a guy in a moth-eaten gorilla suit popping up now and again for comic relief. But with a real, really dead man it was no laughing matter.

  “Don’t know why anybody would want the papers I saw,” Toby added. “Because the pages all looked blank.”

  “Blank?” Sandy looked stunned.

  “As in empty, not written on.” This conversation was about to get more complicated, more congested with lies, so Toby brought it back on track. “Now let’s talk about the dead man, Sandy.”

  She answered offhandedly. “As we told the police—”

  “Knock it off. I know better. I saw the corpse in your den.”

  “Maybe you should get your eyes checked.” She glanced at Toby and away. “Or have your head examined.”

  “Maybe you should tell the truth before you’re found out.” Toby fired rapid questions like bullets. “Who was the dead guy? Did you know him? What was he doing in your house? What did you do with him?”

  Sandy didn’t flinch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. When did you allegedly see this body?”

  “One o’clock or thereabouts. Same time as I saw papers all over the place. And you got back about three, you said?” She nodded, her eyes darting as though looking for answers on the wind. “That’s enough time for a little light housekeeping. When I came back with the detectives a couple hours later, surprise! No body, no blood, no papers or books on the floor. Furniture’s all different.”

  Sandy forced a yawn. “This is all very interesting—”

  Toby flung the remains of his drink into the grass, put the glass on the step and stood. “You can fool the cops, but you can’t fool me. For some reason, you and hubby scrambled to clean the clutter instead of leaving it for the police. I wonder why.”

  “We did no such thing!” The denial was mechanical and not very convincing. It didn’t sound as if she believed her own words.

  “I’m willing to take a lie detector test,” Toby said. “Are you?” She didn’t answer. “Had to be you. I don’t feature you farming out that sort of cleanup job.”

  “What kind of people do you think we are?”

  “We’re working on the answer. You lied to the police. You lied to me. You have something to hide, something that might come out if there was an investigation.”

  “What a vivid imagination you have,” she murmured.

  “So I’ve been told.” Toby strolled towards the truck, calling back over a shoulder. “I wish I could imagine what happened to the corpse. If I could find that, I’ll bet the cops would listen to what I told them. They’d probably even believe me.”

  Sandy rose, brushing off her shorts. “You have no proof of anything.”

  Toby went around back of the pickup where the tarp was loosely spread over the truck bed. He grasped a corner of the rubbery material. “You sure of that?” Mrs. Puterbaugh stood rooted where she was, watching him, her whole body stiff and tense. She looked to be holding her breath. Her deep tan seemed faded. Toby flung back the tarp, picked up a brush, tested the bristles on a thumb. They both looked at the spot where the body had lain. Toby couldn’t resist a grin. She knew that the man had been there. Maybe she’d even helped put him in the truck bed.

  Sandy came forward stiff-legged. “Think you’re smart, don’t you?” She strained the words through her teeth. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know this.” Toby looked into her narrowed eyes. “Whoever got the papers also got the dead man.” That was no lie. “They’ll probably both turn up, sooner or later.”

  He turned his back on her, feeling her sharp gaze burrow like a dagger between his shoulder blades. He moved off down the driveway, re-climbed the ladder and began applying paint to Mrs. Cratty’s house again. A minute later, Mrs. Puterbaugh appeared, carrying two empty glasses. She stalked straight across the street to her home without once glancing at Toby. He grinned at her rigid back. Wouldn’t it be fun to be a fly on the wall of that blue house today?

  Chapter 8

  Trim work was Toby’s favorite part of painting. It meant more to him than just the end of a job. There was something satisfying about cutting in crisp, straight edges where dissimilar colors met, using tape or a square of thin cardboard for a faster job, then running a two-inch brush smoothly down the centers of door and window frames. Finally, touching up so there were perfect rectangular shapes to set off the work, a
nd say to the world at large: “This was done by a professional.”

  Toby finished at seven-thirty that evening. Bone-weary, he stood in the street to admire the finished product. The old house positively gleamed. Dark trim stood out sharp against clean, almost-white clapboards, emphasizing subtle architectural geometry. Late afternoon shadows showed the intricacy of open woodwork at the eaves. Mrs. Cratty should be well pleased when she returned. Pleased or not, she’d damn well better fork over the money she owed. They had a deal.

  He glanced over at the Puterbaugh house. No signs of life there since Sandy stomped off. Toby had kept an eye out for movement but nothing happened. What were they up to?

  Taking his time, Toby packed away all equipment. Normally, he’d have felt content at this point: Another job well done, a bundle of hard-earned cash heading his way. Time off to take it easy. But he couldn’t afford to relax. Not with a body moldering in his garage and those papers stashed in his oven. Once they were disposed of, he could kick back and enjoy summer, even with more work looming.

  On his way home, Toby ordered a burger, fries and shake at a fast food restaurant. He ate slowly at a simulated wood-grain table, considering options. By the time he’d finished, he knew what he would do. He picked up a couple brand-name six-packs and drove through light traffic as the long summer dusk began to settle in.

  When Toby swung open the garage doors he knew the corpse was right where he’d left it. The smell coming off it had worsened. A gag-inducing stench was strong enough to overcome paint and exhaust fumes that usually dominated the space. The man would have to keep for a while, though: it was too light out to do anything.

  Toby backed the truck into the garage, unloaded ladders and other gear, locked up. Still in coveralls, he trudged up the steps to his apartment. After changing into jeans and dark T-shirt, Toby popped open a beer, removed the stack of papers from his oven and sat down at the table to read. It wasn’t easy. He was out of practice. Words were faint. Sheets were peppered with long words of many syllables, unfamiliar to Toby. The dusted graphite smeared at a touch. Pages daubed with dried paint or blood could only be partially deciphered. Nevertheless, he began to understand what the fuss was all about.

  In a fifty-page introduction, Puterbaugh described a brand-new Mayan manuscript that had been discovered—an event tantamount, it seemed, to the Second Coming in the world of archaeology. The prose rhapsodized about the discovery’s potential importance to further understanding of the beliefs of the ancient, vanished culture. The Xaxpak Codex, Puterbaugh had named it, to designate the manuscript’s supposed place of origin and to set it apart from the few other codices in existence. In case the reader, like Toby, was ignorant about these old works, they were summarized in page after page of interminable paragraphs. The Dresden Codex, sent back to Europe by Cortés in 1519. The Madrid Codex and the Paris Codex, both discovered in the Nineteenth Century. The Grolier Codex, unearthed in Mexico in the 1960s, about which there was still some dispute as to its authenticity.

  “Codex. That’s the word I found under the blotter in the den.”

  In the paint-daubed coveralls atop dirty laundry in his bedroom, he located the scrap on which he’d written down the name and address. He dialed Information. “What city?” a Brooklyn-voiced woman asked.

  “Morrisville, New York.”

  “Name of the party?”

  “McFarland.” He spelled it. “At 412 South Street.”

  “I have no listing under that name in that town.”

  “There’s nobody in town by that name or the phone’s not listed?”

  “I am not permitted to give out that information,” she said with all the warmth of an electronically generated greeting, and disconnected without another word. Toby shrugged and hung up the dead phone. Opening a fresh brew, he continued scanning the dusty-looking pages.

  The author was coy about how he’d come across the Xaxpak Codex. The way Toby read it: a Syracuse University colleague of Puterbaugh’s had a Mexican academic contact with a friend who knew a man who had a cousin who had an acquaintance whose uncle’s friend permitted Puterbaugh to examine and photograph his find. It wasn’t revealed how the cousin’s acquaintance’s uncle’s friend had gained possession of the manuscript. But it was hinted it might have come from a looted Mayan ruin called Xaxpak near a resort of the same name down the coast from Tulum in the state of Quintana Roo.

  There was a lengthy physical description of the manuscript: a wood-backed deerskin cover containing forty-four pages, each about 6″ x 9″. Pages were painted in vivid shades of red, blue, green, yellow, black, brown, purple and gray on both sides of bark paper coated with gesso. The thing unfolded accordion-fashion into a strip more than twenty feet long. Following were endless and complicated analyses of materials—bark, leather and paints—used in construction of the manuscript. Fragments of bark had been subjected to radiocarbon testing and were dated to A.D. 810, plus or minus 80 years, which apparently confirmed the Codex’s authenticity.

  The second section of the manuscript, 200 pages, contained scene-by-scene breakdowns of what was depicted in the Codex. By descriptions, the old book held signs like fanciful, antique computer icons. These “glyphs” surrounded colorful pictures of almond-eyed people with big pierced noses, dressed in outlandish costumes and wild headgear, holding weapons and strange objects. The people were sometimes depicted enacting ordinary events, like celebrating the birth of a new heir to the kingdom or playing a sort of ball game. Other times, they were shown doing awful things, like cutting off somebody’s head or ripping out somebody’s heart in sacrifice. Prominently featured throughout were animals both real and imaginary: birds, snakes, tigers, monkeys, frogs, rabbits, dragons and creatures with combined bestial attributes.

  Pages of the Codex were sprinkled liberally with symbols like dots (representing one year) and bars (five years) and shells (twenty years). These referred to specific dates on the Mayan calendar, which could be mathematically calibrated to correspond with the modern calendar. Puterbaugh identified some signs. His text was crowded with native words for particular days and months—Pop, Zip, Zotz—that looked like they’d been taken from a Batman comic.

  Toby skipped over the densely packed pages. It was as tiring as reading columns of “begats” in the Bible that he’d committed to memory to earn a gold star in Sunday school class many years ago.

  The third section of the manuscript was a short recap of everything learned so far from a painstaking examination of the Xaxpak Codex—nothing that sounded earth shattering to Toby. The section ended with a suggestion that further comparative analysis should be undertaken by other experts in the field to uncover hidden meanings in the ancient writings. The final few pages promised an item-by-item interpretation of pictures and a prose translation of the Codex, followed by a lengthy conclusion about the important new find. But there was nothing more. What had happened to the last part of Puterbaugh’s opus? Had somebody else stolen that? Or hadn’t it been completed yet? And what about those photographs taken of the Codex? Where were they?

  Who knew? Who cared?

  Toby washed graphite-smeared fingers and rubbed tired eyes, thinking wistfully of bed. He wasn’t sorry the book’s final portion was missing. He’d done his quota of reading for this decade. And only two cans of beer were left in the fridge. He returned the manuscript to the oven—there’d be time to get rid of it later, if necessary. Meanwhile, more important business was at hand: dumping that body.

  It was after one a.m. when Toby, a little tipsy, crept down the steps from his apartment. The remaining two cans of beer in their plastic collars dangled from one hand. All other apartments except that of Bart the night owl were dark.

  Toby winced at the click, loud as thunder to his ears, that the garage padlock made. He gritted his teeth at the piercing squeak of the hinges, like the cry of something dying, as he swung the doors wide. The awful odor was strong and cloying, thick enough to make him dry-heave and swallow hastily to work up saliv
a. Working with feverish haste, he dragged the smelly bundle from its hiding place. He lifted the uncooperative body awkwardly over the tailgate and dropped it with a stomach-wrenching thud in back. Toby chucked in a pair of paint-spattered coveralls, just in case it got messy. He drew the tarp over the truck bed and began to tie it down.

  A light suddenly blinded him. Toby, heart hammering, put up a hand to block the glare. “Freeze!” a voice commanded: A familiar voice.

  “Bart?” Toby’s voice quavered.

  “That you, Toby?”

  The beam of light dipped but its afterimage lingered as incandescent yellow spheres imprinted on Toby’s retinas. “You scared the bejesus out of me, Bart. What are you doing out here?” He tried to stop hyperventilating. How much had Bart seen?

  “Sorry. Thought I heard someone prowling. Didn’t know it was you.”

  Toby continued to make knots by feel, securing the tarp. His fingers shook. “Well, thanks for watching out for my stuff. But you almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “Good thing I didn’t use this, huh?” Bart thrust something shiny into the light. “These .357 Magnums make a hell of a noise.”

  “And a hell of a mess, I hear.”

  “Yeah.” Bart sounded wistful at the missed opportunity to demonstrate the damage he could cause.

  The twin suns faded from Toby’s vision. He finished tying down, yanked the last rope in place and turned to face Bart. The lens of the flashlight in the other man’s hand was a foot across, the type that produced a half-million candlepower, perfect for hunting at night or bouncing an SOS off the moon. “Why are you carrying a gun? And what are you doing in your underwear?” In the backwash of brilliant light, Bart was even less attractive, if possible, in bikini briefs that hid nothing. His pudgy face with its corona of kinky matted hair floated above his chubby body. He had crosses tattooed up and down his surprisingly scrawny legs, too.

  “Told you: I heard a noise and come running. I brought this in case of trouble. You just never know what could happen.” He waved the weapon. It was huge and lethal: you could fit the tip of a pool cue down its bore. Bart stuck his forefinger through the trigger guard and twirled the gun smack into his palm, like he’d practiced the move in front of a mirror. “If you’d been a sneak thief, I’d’ve blown you away.” He aimed the muzzle at Toby, made the sound of a shot with his mouth and yanked the barrel back as if in recoil.