A Bad Day for Mercy

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Oh, we did not kill this man!” Natalya said, her eyes widening in surprise and indignation. “We are come home from movies and here he is, on porch. We are dragging him inside before anyone can see.”

  “Wait,” Stella said. “Who—look here, can you start from the top for me? Because I’m kind of confused.”

  “Well, is Chip night off, but he is always working overnight shift so we are all the time staying up very late. So we go to movie at theater and is after midnight when we come home, because we are getting drink at Best Western bar, is open late and having good price, so he is show here after, hmmm, maybe is after nine o’clock and before one o’clock.”

  “Uh, thanks, but what I meant is, just who is this guy?”

  Chip, who had jogged to the front door and tested the knob, sidled back into the room and surveyed his handiwork, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Aunt Stella, what you’re looking at there is a bad man.”

  “Well, part of him, anyway,” Stella observed.

  “Oh no, we got the whole shebang.” Chip pointed to a corner of the kitchen. On a plastic sheet lay a neat pile of jumbo-sized Ziplocs, most fogged with moisture that obscured their contents; the top one, however, contained what certainly resembled a chunk of human flesh, possibly a forearm. “We’re just, you know, making him easier to dispose of.”

  “Where you fixing to do that?” Stella demanded. “And if you didn’t kill him, how do you figure it’s your job, anyway?”

  “Oh, I know,” Chip said, nodding in fervent agreement. “It totally sucks that we got to do this, but who else are we gonna get?”

  “Um…” Stella hesitated for a moment, wondering if her stepnephew-in-law had gone seriously around the bend. “If what you’re telling me is that you came home and found this person laid out dead on your porch all unexpected-like, you mighta called up the cops, for a start. I could be wrong, but I’d figure they might be interested enough to take a break from their traffic stops and whatnot to come take a look, even up here in Wisconsin.”

  “Oh no, that is terrible mistake,” Natalya said. “Man who is killing him, he is desperate. He is maybe killing us, too.”

  “Who wants to kill you? And what is the warning about? Look, Chip, I don’t mean to be rude, but is this connected to your gambling issues?” Only then did a thought strike her. “Wait a minute—what the hell! You’ve got both your ears! I can’t believe I didn’t—”

  She shook her head in disgust. Talk about a lapse in deductive detecting skills. Chip’s ears were definitely both still attached to his head, though they were missing the multiple studs and little hoops that he was wearing the last time Stella saw him.

  “Oh, that,” Chip said, coloring. He touched his ear self-consciously, as though he’d been caught out in the process of naughtily regenerating it. His face colored the deep red of shame and embarrassment. “I guess Gracellen told you, huh.”

  “Well yes, Chip, your stepmom called me just about out of her mind when she got a fucking ear in a fucking box,” Stella said.

  “Oh no,” Natalya exclaimed, her face turning a similar deep red shade.

  “Uh, Stella,” Chip said sheepishly. “Could you … uh … Natalya don’t like that kind of language. Our home is a profanity-free zone.”

  Stella stared at him in disbelief. “You want me to fu— to, uh, watch my language when you two are in the middle of reenacting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre here?”

  Natalya squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hands to her ears and began humming, a soulful, wistful sound that immediately made Stella feel like she’d stepped on a baby bunny.

  “Aw, hell,” she muttered, before tapping Natalya gently on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, Natalya. Sometimes I speak before I think. I’ll try to be more careful.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said. A second later she nearly knocked Stella over with a hug whose strength belied the woman’s dainty build. She smelled of a generous dousing of perfume overlaid with notes of bleach and Windex, and she sniffed delicately into Stella’s shoulder. “Oh, is so good to meet family of Chip.”

  Stella hugged back, feeling an oddly maternal inclination. Stella was five-six but could tuck Natalya comfortably under her chin. “China doll” popped into her mind. She remembered the one time Chip had brought a girl to Thanksgiving dinner; she had been a vacant-eyed, gum-chewing girl with more eyeliner than conversational skill. Natalya was an improvement, at least in the grooming and enthusiasm departments. Stella gently disentangled herself from the hug and scowled at Chip. “So what gives with the ear thing?”

  “Oh. Well, it wasn’t mine.”

  “Yeah, I think we established that.”

  “I, uh, got it at work. I was just trying—I mean, I get that I overstepped, it was wrong, blah blah blah. But Jesus, Stella, my folks are loaded, I mean Gramps practically shits cash, it’s not like they’ll even miss it—”

  “Chip!” Natalya gasped.

  “Sorry, sorry, sweetie—”

  “What did you need thirty thousand bucks for anyway?” Stella demanded, deciding to leave aside her newfound knowledge of the Papadakis family’s precarious financial situation for the moment.

  “Thirty thousand!” Natalya squawked. “Chip! You said—”

  Chip took on a pained expression and held up a palm. “Stella, if you could just—ah, hell, Natalya, I’m sorry, I might have given you ummm, a slightly—”

  “But you said—”

  “I just didn’t want you to worry, honey,” Chip said miserably. He jammed his hands in his pockets and assumed a hangdog expression. “If I’d told you the truth, I mean you were saying it was hopeless already and all…”

  “But you say Benton wants five thousand dollars only!”

  “Natalya, believe me, if it was only five thousand dollars, it would have been done by now,” Chip said passionately, cupping her face in his hands. Stella had to suppress an “ewww” moment, considering where his hands had recently been, but Natalya gazed upon him with a fiery combination of anguish and adoration. “I’d’ve sold my car, my—my plasma, my sperm, whatever it took!”

  “Wait just a second here,” Stella demanded, resisting the urge to pry the pair apart to get their attention. “What exactly was the thirty thousand bucks for?”

  “It’s this ass— uh, this guy,” Chip said, pointing a finger at the mess on the table. “It’s all his fault.”

  “He is husband,” Natalya sniffed, nodding.

  “He’s your husband?”

  “Natalya came here as a, she came here from Russia to be a bride. Benton—this here’s Benton Parch—they met online and he brought her over and married her. But then she met me, and, well—”

  “He is bad man,” Natalya interjected hastily. “Bad husband. I am here almost two years. I work hard, I keep house. At first I try to make Benton happy, but he…” Her eyes filled with shining tears, but she wiped them impatiently away. “Is never good enough.”

  “He did that to her,” Chip said darkly, pointing at her lips.

  “Wow,” Stella said. Never, in the years she’d seen a variety of bruises and lacerations and swelling and all manner of injury delivered at the hands of a man, had she seen anything quite like the swelling and malformation that marred Natalya’s otherwise appealing face. Her professional curiosity was piqued, and she leaned in for a better look. “How, though, is what I got to ask? I mean did he…”

  “Wait, I don’t mean he did that himself,” Chip clarified. “He paid a guy to do it.”

  Even up close, Stella couldn’t see signs of laceration or bruising, just the swelling and a shiny patchiness to the lips, kind of like the fake leather on her knockoff Dooney & Bourke handbag. “Guy musta used something with a rounded edge…”

  “He use Botox,” Natalya said. “Only not very good at it.”

  “Now honey,” Chip murmured soothingly. “It’s hardly noticeable.”

  Natalya beamed. “You see why I am fall in love with Chip—”

  Their eyes
met and their mad romantic attraction threatened to propel themselves into each other’s arms again, so Stella held up a hand to keep their attention. “Your husband paid a guy to inject you? Not a doctor, I take it.”

  “He see picture in magazine, talk friend at work who his wife have Botox super cheap. Get phone number for practice doctor, we meet him when school is closed. Benton tell him what to do, he likes the big lips, big big, like model from Brazil.”

  “Do you know how many muscles and nerves there are around the mouth?” Chip demanded in a tone of outrage.

  “This doctor, he only has done the eyebrow before, the wrinkle, but Benton tell him go ahead. When this happen Benton find him after school one night, tell him he turn him in and he will never be doctor.”

  “Oh, he was a medical student,” Stella clarified. “So your husband threatened to tell the AMA or whatever.”

  “Which is how this happened,” Chip sighed, ignoring Stella’s comment and gesturing at the partial corpse with the meat fork.

  “You mean, Benton threatened to report this guy so he … what, whacked him? And left him for you here to take care of?”

  “He want to make it look like I am killer. Shut up two birds with one rock. Benton is dead and now he think I am too scare to talk.”

  “How exactly did he kill him, anyway?”

  Natalya shrugged. “I don’t know. He is just dead.”

  “What, you mean there weren’t any marks on him? No injuries or wounds?”

  “Nothing,” Chip agreed, “and since we stripped him down I had a chance to check him out, you know, all over.”

  “Well, couldn’t he have died of, I don’t know, a heart attack or stroke or something? I mean, if he came to your door, it might have been just really bad timing. Say he wanted to talk to you, but you guys are out, he’s ringing the bell, he’s frustrated, getting madder and madder, blood pressure going through the roof—”

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” Chip said. “He didn’t just fall in a heap or whatever. He was sort of folded up with a couple of Hefty bags laid on top to cover him up.”

  “Hefty bags … huh.”

  “Sloppy, right? He could’ve at least used a sheet or something. These medical students—I can’t stand ’em,” Chip interjected. “Most of them, they just go through life expecting other people to clean up their messes.”

  Stella’s confusion was deepening. “Uh, you know a lot of medical students?”

  “I work with them, Stella,” Chip said in an aggrieved tone. “I guess I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Chip works in Boberg Clinic, at St. Olaf’s Hospital. Is how we met.” The look of consuming devotion was back on Natalya’s face.

  “Wait, you were there when Benton brought her in?” Stella asked. “For the, uh … unofficially sanctioned procedure?”

  “No,” Chip said with contempt. “He did that at his place. Stole the supplies he needed or bought ’em black market or something.”

  “We go to his house late at night,” Natalya added. “Very late, no one there but us.”

  “Then how did you…”

  “After Benton threaten him, I am still like this?” She touched her fingertip to her swollen mouth. “It was even worse then, and I think, I will go by myself, I will ask what can be done. I think maybe can be fixed, I can be nice instead of mean, convince better. So I go very early in morning, one day when Benton is on business trip. I take his car and park outside clinic. I think I will see each person go inside until I see right one.”

  “I was getting off my shift, and I see this beautiful lady all alone in her car in the parking lot. It wasn’t even light out yet. So I went to see if everything was all right.”

  “We have love at first sight,” Natalya added helpfully.

  “She was crying, so I took her to Dunkin Donuts.”

  “He buy me coffee and fat-free blueberry muffin, he ask me where am I from, he is so easy talking!”

  “Okay, okay, I get the picture,” Stella cut her off. She’d been subjected to these sorts of stories before—only she had a more cynical view than most, having seen how badly some relationships ended up after equally promising beginnings. “So you meet, you start dating—”

  “No, no date, we have to sneak. Benton is very, ermmm … he is having terrible jealousy.”

  “But we found ways, like when he had to travel for work. After a month or so we knew we had to be together. So I went to Benton’s office and told him I was going to marry her no matter what, but he—” Chip glared at the leaking mess as though the man wanted to start up the argument again. “That’s when he threatened me. Said if he couldn’t have her, no American man would, and he’d send her ass right back to Russia.”

  “Could he do that?” Stella asked dubiously.

  Chip’s face darkened with fury. “Stella, if you knew the half of it—why, the way the immigration law’s written they might as well just stand at the border waitin’ for Cupid to fly overhead and shoot him right down like a, like a damn duck. The American government—it’s coldhearted as hell.”

  “Residency permit says I must reside in country for two years after marriage,” Natalya said dolefully. “Two years anniversary is July 4, that is only six weeks away, but—”

  “Bastard said unless I covered all his costs since the first day he went scrolling through the LovelyBrides site on the Internet and came across Natalya, he was going to report her before the anniversary. They can deport her then.”

  “That’s where he got that number?” Stella asked. “The thirty thousand?”

  “That’s what he said. What with the lawyer he got to help them get the K-1 visa, and all the flights back and forth, and the wedding itself and all the—”

  “No, no, I understand, it adds up.” Stella’s clients’ tales of woe occasionally included visits to attorneys they didn’t stand a chance of affording, attorneys whose hourly rate could feed their kids for a week or buy a set of tires. “What I don’t understand is, why couldn’t you just marry her right quick? She leaves him, gets a divorce, bam, next day she marries you. With no downtime, she wouldn’t really have a chance to get illegal again, at least not for very long, would she?”

  Chip’s murderous scowl deepened. “Well, you’d think that, wouldn’t you. Problem is, Benton had such a bug up his ass he wasn’t gonna let that happen. He was going to see this one old golf pal of his, a judge down at the county seat, and withdraw his residency petition and have them come after Natalya before we could do a damn thing about it.”

  “I have friend, Yuliya, from home,” Natalya said wistfully. “This happen to her. She and I join LovelyBrides at same time, she is meeting man from Oklahoma. In six month time passing, husband divorce her. Lawyer tell her, she can file petition to stay here while pursue permanent status, but—” Natalya made a slicing motion across her neck—presumably to indicate deportation and not something worse.

  “So your girlfriend’s ex wanted cash?” Stella turned to Chip. “I assume from what you’re saying that your, uh, financial position hasn’t improved any?”

  “I’m not gambling, if that’s what you mean,” Chip said, rooting in his pocket and producing a key chain. He flipped it over to expose a circular bronze medallion stamped with a telltale triangle design, which he proudly showed Stella. “Six months in recovery, I go to meetings.”

  “Well, that’s, uh, marvelous,” Stella said. “Seriously, Chip, big props to you on that. Still, I’m guessing it’s been a little difficult to build up the old bank account with the, ah, entry-level employment…”

  Chip nodded. “I had to work my way up. Got on at St. Olaf’s doing janitorial, but I been there almost a year now and I got promoted twice, and now I work in the Boberg Clinic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, like an extension program they run up here at the hospital. They got a bunch of specialty residencies they do up here. Like, if you’re a med student who wants to go int
o plastic surgery, once you’re done with your regular surgical residency, you can come up here and put in a couple of years at the Plastic and Reconstructive Clinic.”

  “That’s where you work?”

  “Yup. What my job is, is I clean and stock all the surgical labs, and one of them is where they do the cadaver practice. Which is how I got the ear and—” Chip stopped midsentence, holding up a hand for silence. “Did you hear that?”

  Natalya sniffed the air like a bloodhound, her brow knit anxiously.

  “I didn’t hear nothing,” Stella said. “What-all are you worried about?”

  “I don’t know, just jumpy, I guess,” Chip said. “Thought I heard something out front, probably just a car going by. I wish I could just keep chattin’ and all, Stella, but I really think I ought to wrap this up.”

  But Stella was already headed for the front door, gun in hand. Todd was out there. She’d locked the truck, sure, but the idea of a killer roaming around outside—even if it was only a pansy-assed medical student, as Chip said—didn’t sit well with her.

  She burst out of the house and the profanity died on her lips as she saw that the truck’s passenger window had been shattered, the door standing open on a pile of glass that sparkled in the first golden rays of dawn.

  Chapter Eight

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Stella cradled her head in her arms on the kitchen table, beyond caring that only moments earlier Natalya had been giving it a final going-over with the Windex, removing any traces of the carving and packaging operation.

  Chip had left a little while earlier with the neatly wrapped pieces of Benton Parch loaded in the trunk of his car, a beat-up Hyundai Sonata with rust pocking its lower panels. Chip’s plan was to dispose of the dead man in a variety of Dumpsters all over town, and Stella had to admit she couldn’t come up with any better ideas. Sure, she could have advised Chip to weight the packages down and toss them in silty farm ponds, or cut holes in drywall or pour concrete in basement floors, but the truth was that all that extra trouble, in Stella’s experience, rarely bought you any more peace of mind than just using the Dumpster for its intended use—disposal of rubbish. The odds of the cops finding something you no longer wanted—say, a gun wiped of prints but a little too familiar to the fellow you’d been waving it at earlier in the day—once you’d wiped it clean and wrapped it in aluminum foil and bubble wrap and newspaper and packing tape and stuck it inside a Green Foods bag—were approximately zero. It just went to the dump, like every other crazy thing folks threw out every day.