Pillow Stalk (A Mad for Mod Mystery)

by Vallere, Diane

  It twitched.

  I stooped down and lifted the comforter. Rocky sat curled in a ball, staring at me with big, sorrowful eyes. There was no graceful way for me to get him out, but I didn’t care. I leaned forward, with my butt in the air, and reached for his front paw. He resisted my efforts at first, but I won, pulling him forward until I could reach around his body and hold him close to me. There was a scratch on his face by his nose and I suspected I knew the bully who had swiped at him, even though there was no sign of the black cat.

  Rocky cowered in my arms. He was as scared now as when I took him to the groomers.

  Tex hadn’t said a word while I was down on all fours. He stood in front of me stroking Rocky’s head. “Scared little fella, isn’t he?”

  “Rocky: four, lamps: zero.”

  The young officer walked out of the kitchen, his shoe in a clear plastic bag in his hand. He fiddled around with the locks on my door. “Lieutenant? There’s no sign of a forced entry on this door.”

  Tex joined him by the door and conducted the same fiddling. I held Rocky close, his racing heartbeat pounding against my own.

  “Lieutenant, I don’t think this was a break-in,” I said.

  “You’re not going to tell me he did this, are you?” Tex asked, petting Rocky.

  Despite my urgent need to believe in Hudson’s innocence, it was getting harder to refute the facts.

  “I’m not going to tell you he did this,” I confirmed. “Let’s move into the living room. We need to talk.”

  I tidied up a bit while Tex spoke to the young officer. Rocky sat in his crate. Not because I was punishing him, but because I didn’t want him to be underfoot while I righted lamps, folded blankets, and rehung most of my wardrobe. There was a chance that indeed he’d had a hand in the mess, or rather a paw, but I couldn’t see him accomplishing this kind of an interior redesign on his own. And still, I wanted to find Mortiboy. His absence troubled me more than I wanted to admit.

  Tex saw the other officer to the door and closed it behind him. When he returned to the living room I gestured toward the sofa. “I can offer you a glass of white wine or tap water. It’s grocery time. You want anything?”

  “I want to know what you want to tell me. You’re stalling.”

  “Fine. Have a seat.”

  He sat down on the end of the sofa. I could have sat next to him, but instead I took the green chair that faced him, with the low boomerang coffee table between us. I balanced on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward, not allowing myself to get comfortable. That had been my mistake too many times before.

  “Remember when you told me to stay out of this and let you do your job?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t completely follow your instructions.”

  I waited for him to either reprimand me or explode. He did neither. He leaned against the back of the sofa and rested his left arm on the silver metal frame. His light brown hair was slicked back today, away from his face. He was generally rumpled, his white button down collar shirt creased from the time he’d spent sitting in his Jeep, I guessed, his faded jeans marked with dirt along the hems. Light gleamed off of the face of his Swiss army watch, flashing in my eyes, causing me to squint.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “And I have new evidence.”

  “So do I.”

  “What’s yours?” I asked.

  He was silent.

  “Oh, right, ladies first and all that.”

  More silence. His light eyes bore into me like frozen blue Otter Pops and gave me the chills.

  “You’re not going to lecture me?”

  “I want to know what you know.”

  “Hudson was here. A couple of nights ago. He was waiting for me inside the apartment after you dropped me off. He didn’t attack me, if that’s what you’re thinking, but he needed a place to stay.”

  The look on Tex’s face told me he wasn’t just listening as a cop.

  “I have a vacancy in the building and I let him stay in the empty apartment.” I didn’t tell him how I’d spent the night in the apartment with him or the nature of our conversation. It felt too personal, but it also felt like a stupid thing to have done.

  “He didn’t return the keys, did he?” Tex asked.

  “No, he didn’t.” Silence draped over us like a throw blanket on a dying fire.

  “Night, are you okay?”

  I snapped my head up. “I’m fine.”

  “Your leg is bouncing like it’s been hooked up to a generator.”

  I looked at my leg, hammering a rhythm against the floor. I couldn’t stop it if I tried. “There’s more.”

  He leaned forward.

  “Richard Goode. You have to talk to him.”

  Tex sat very still, watching me, nodding his head. He was taking me seriously.

  Surprised, I kept talking. “He’s involved, but I don’t know how much or why. He’s anti-Doris Day, and even you can’t deny how frequently Doris Day keeps popping up in the middle of your investigation.”

  He didn’t react.

  “Anyway, Richard wrote a threatening letter to a film rental company several years ago, an aggressive letter telling them to destroy their Doris Day movies. At first AFFER thought it was a joke, until someone broke into their warehouse, assaulted a security guard, and stole a bunch of movies. There was sabotage, I don’t know the details, but a lot of their inventory was ruined.”

  “AFFER?” he asked.

  “American Film Rentals. Listen, are you hearing me? This is a pretty strong connection. Don’t you want to write some of this down?”

  “I have a pretty powerful memory,” he said. “Keep going.”

  The more I spoke, the sillier I felt, and if it wasn’t for the pieces of the puzzle I’d put together that afternoon, or for the pillows I’d seen in Richard’s makeshift sleeping quarters, I would have stopped talking altogether.

  “Night, where did the pillows in your trunk come from?”

  “An estate sale.”

  “When?”

  “About a month ago.”

  Tex’s face was unreadable, but I could tell he was paying close attention. I didn’t know what it all meant myself, but with what he knew that he wasn’t telling me, maybe pieced together with what I had found out for myself, the key to unlocking this thing might appear and the idea of ending the nightmare might exist.

  “Tex, the thing is, Richard acted scared. I think he’s involved more, but I don’t know how.”

  Tex leaned back against the sofa cushions. “We talked to Richard. He’s cooperating with us. But what I don’t get is where Hudson comes into this? What’s their connection?” Tex asked.

  “What connection?”

  “Between Richard and Hudson. That’s what you’re giving me, isn’t it? The goods on Hudson James.”

  “You’re not listening to me! I’m telling you about Richard! I went upstairs to the balcony of the Mummy after he left and I found a couple of those velvet pillows you saw from my trunk. And he told me, the day after Carrie Coburn was murdered, that he had been in my trunk without me knowing. Those same pillows are your murder weapon in four different homicides. Aren’t you going to check it out?”

  “I checked out Richard Goode myself. Aside from the facts that he doesn’t like your favorite actress and he’s a recreational pot smoker, he’s clean.” He leaned forward and rubbed his palms over the front of his faded blue jeans.

  “No, you aren’t getting it. Richard has a zillion scripts, he’s acting! He even told me once he acted in college, and that’s when the letter was sent, and even if he says he didn’t send it, there was the deciding committee who had access to it and one of them might have been working with him. This has to do with cinematic connections, not Hudso
n!”

  “Night, forget it. Richard Goode came to us and gave us those names. We already checked them out. There’s no motive. The sci-fi expert lives in Hollywood. The documentarian was a—”

  “Documentary filmmaker,” I corrected.

  “What?”

  “It’s ‘Documentary filmmaker’, not ‘documentarian’.”

  “Whatever. He was a freakin’ astronaut. And the pop culture expert wrote her dissertation on Doris Day. Besides, Richard Goode was the one who found Hudson’s phone outside of the theater. I thought you were going to give me evidence that they were working together but you just proved to me that Goode’s on our side.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.

  “How can you not be?” he asked. “Hudson James skipped town. He’s been around every time a dead body that matches this profile has turned up—from twenty years ago until today. Richard Goode was eight years old when the first murder happened. Hudson’s got no alibi, and we have hard evidence connecting him to every victim. Including you. Though somehow, despite my caution, you continue to put yourself directly in his path.”

  “You’re missing something, Tex. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.”

  “Listen, Night, I didn’t want to tell you this but you’re going to see it in the newspaper tomorrow morning. We got a warrant and searched Hudson’s house. Those round velvet pillows you’re so fond of? We found a couple of them on his sofa.”

  “His sofa is orange tweed—” I started but Tex put his hand out to silence me.

  “We opened them up. They’ve been re-upholstered.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The article came out at the worst possible time. Arrest Warrant Issued for the Pillow Stalker read the title. Numbness shot through my arms and my legs, and my silk pajamas were suddenly not enough to keep the chill at bay. I sat in my kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, flipping through the morning newspaper. I wanted to shut it, to crumple it up, or use it to line Rocky’s cage, but I had to face the reality of what Tex had been telling me all along. I had to force myself to read the article, to see in print what concrete evidence had led to this moment in time.

  The journalist had done his research, digging up much of what had been written about Sheila Murphy’s murder two decades earlier. To be fair, he printed Hudson’s story of picking up the young woman, offering his shirt and a ride to her apartment. He also printed the statements of the neighbors who identified Hudson’s truck, the dry cleaning label that identified his shirt, and all of the other details that Hudson had explained to me personally. None of that was a surprise. But when I continued to read, it became clear that the journalist had camped out in front of Hudson’s house in order to get this story. Was he the one who had attacked me? It seemed unlikely.

  He had watched the handyman’s comings and goings, watched him throw a packed bag into the back of his truck and set a cat carrier on the passenger seat. He knew Hudson was planning to leave town. He went through his trash, looked into his windows, and cooperated with the cops when it came time to tell what he’d seen.

  It sickened me, this invasion of Hudson’s privacy, yet if he was a killer who had been living with his freedom for the past twenty years, then that privacy was undeserved. I thought about the people I watched on crime TV, people who have been living in the open for decades before DNA evidence caught up to them. People who thought they got away with murder. Is that what Hudson had done? It certainly was what the article implied, and it would be a hard detail for people to ignore a second time around.

  Richard’s name had been kept out of the article, but I recognized his actions as that of the confidential source. He’d discovered a cell phone on the edge of the Mummy property and thought nothing of it at first. It sat in the lost and found until the battery wore low, beeping a caution, and alerting him to its presence. It was then he realized it might be a clue and turned it over to the cops.

  I shut the paper. It would still be here when I returned from swimming. At last, they’d reopened Crestwood, letting me get in my much needed morning workout. I could clear my head in the water. I could let the rest of the world seep away, if only for an hour, and be at peace. It was the only place for me to take the edge off.

  I stuffed my towel, cap, and goggles into a nylon shoulder bag, pulled on a bathing suit and zipped into a terrycloth dress. Rocky had been nervous all last night and this morning and I wasn’t about to leave him alone again. I held him close to me and walked into the kitchen to find a Milk Bone biscuit. I opened and shut three drawers before I found them. When I shut the last one, I heard a yelp.

  I looked at Rocky. He looked at me. The sound I’d heard wasn’t a sound he normally made.

  I opened the last drawer again and shut it. Another yelp.

  I set Rocky on the floor and armed myself with a wooden mallet, the kind you use to pound chicken. I stood as far away as possible and maneuvered a black plastic two-pronged spaghetti fork around the pink ceramic knob of the cabinet, easing it open. I looked inside. An angry black cat sat at the very back corner of the cabinet, wedged between my silver colander and a large white serving dish that only came out for Thanksgiving.

  “Mortiboy!” I said, dropping my utensil weapons. I reached for him. He swiped at me and left four small punctures on my left hand. I put on oven mitts and tried again, this time pulling him out by the scruff of his neck. As soon as he saw sunlight he wriggled free, dropped to the floor, and shot like a cannon into the bedroom. Rocky took off after him, as though they were playing.

  I followed them. Rocky stood outside of my closet. Mortiboy clung by his nails to a turquoise and white tennis outfit that I’d rescued from Thelma Johnson’s closet the day I went by myself to her house. There were a series of holes in the polyester, indicating that this wasn’t the first time the outfit had been climbed.

  I pulled Mortiboy off the now ruined outfit. He wriggled around but this time I was prepared. I carried him into the bathroom, dropped him on the carpet and shut the door behind me. Yowls of protest followed me into the hallway.

  I went back into the bedroom and looked around. How had I missed that? The fact that the clothes in piles on the floor were all by the closet. That they had small puncture marks through them, the size of cat’s claws. That the top shelf of my closet, normally filled with tidy stacks of round hat boxes, was in disarray, with my belongings pushed aside at odd angles, revealing the faded pink and white floral wallpaper I’d never replaced when I first moved in? I’d been right the first time. Mortiboy was the guilty party who had trashed my apartment, not Hudson, as Tex had implied. That’s what I got for leaving the two animals unattended.

  I’d ignored the details, the rational explanation. I violated Hudson’s confidence. I gave Tex fuel for his fire of tracking down Hudson and left him with no doubt that my former contractor was a killer. I didn’t know which was worse—that I’d allowed myself to think Hudson was a killer or that after all of my declarations of his innocence, I’d helped the cops go after him.

  It was too wild of a theory not to test. I opened the bathroom door and let Mortiboy out. He ventured into the hallway, hissed and swatted at Rocky who had trotted his direction, and took off into the bedroom. Up the polyester tennis outfit, onto the ledge where my hatboxes sat, squeezed behind a Styrofoam head that held an old Halloween wig. The top box tipped precariously, then spilled. A red felt beanie fell to the floor, landing on top of the pile of clothes that had been torn from the hangers. It looked like a cherry planted on top of an ice cream sundae. All this mess at the paws of an angry cat.

  I slid the closet door shut. If Mortiboy was capable of this much damage, he needed to be contained. Besides, he’d already shown a preference for dark spaces.

  “Come on, Rocky, leave the cat alone. Let’s go to the pool.”

  Rocky led the way to the white Explorer and hopped up the st
ep on the outside, onto the floorboards and then into the driver’s seat. He stepped over the center console to the passenger side and stood on his hind legs, front paws on the window. My neighbors stacked paint cans into the back of a pickup truck. They smiled at Rocky’s interest.

  I drove to Crestwood, wondering if there would be signs of the yellow crime scene tape lingering by the parking lot. My car should be cleared any day now, and life could start getting back to normal, if there was such a thing. Only, it couldn’t. Because despite what Tex had told me, and what I’d told him, and what it seemed was the reality of the situation, my life would never be normal again.

  Somewhere along the way my hard shell had broken, and I had become involved with two very different men. Hudson’s story, his alienation from many of the people who lived in Dallas and always thought of him as guilty, had followed him around for the past twenty years, and I saw what that had done to him. But Tex—Tex had a hard exterior like mine, and I felt his cracking, too. His flirtatious nature, his sarcasm, his jokes to the other officers showcased a one-dimensional man. But after spending time with him, I knew that was far from accurate.

  Tex believed Hudson was guilty. But that was based on so many things that could have been misinterpreted. Twenty years ago Hudson avoided being convicted for the murder of Sheila Murphy. This time he might not be so lucky. And it was entirely possible, though I wasn’t willing to admit it to myself, that he was involved.

  It was all too much. Too much danger, terror, and murder for me to deal with. I needed a release. Even the idea of work held no interest for me. It was as if my life was stuck on a moment in time, like I was a glob of fruit suspended in the middle of Jell-O.

  I turned the white Explorer onto the winding gravel driveway that led to the pool. Trees, plus the occasional large rock, lined each side of the road, keeping it mostly secluded from the street. The yellow tape was gone. So was my car. But a few familiar vehicles were parked in their usual spots. I wasn’t the only slave to routine around here. It would be nice to see the whole gang again. Even old Mr. Popov.