by Nancy Grace
He actually thought of taking out one of his guns and shooting straight through the front door. Just blow ’em to hell and back. He could always argue self-defense. He was in his own house, and an intruder was antagonizing him on his own front porch. If he hadn’t duct-taped over the front door peephole, he could get a better look at whoever was standing there, but after reading about reverse peepholes used as spy techniques by the U.S. government, specifically the IRS and the CIA, he beat the Feds at their own game and duct-taped his peephole.
Tiptoeing across the den floor, he avoided every spot he knew made a creaking sound.
Ha! He made it to the front window without a noise. He picked his favorite pinhole, in an article about cancerous food additives in fast-food french fries. The Times was always exposing something. They should expose themselves. What a crock of simmering liberal holier-than-thou twits.
Staring hard, he spotted a goldish-brown sedan parked in his front drive.
Cocking his head and looking as far left as he could without shifting locations, he could make out the very bottom of a white short-sleeved shirt. Was it the Amway people?
He took another look, with only one eye at the pinhole, twisting his neck at such an angle it was unnatural. He didn’t want to actually touch the newspaper, so as not to tear it. He could feel his breath hot against the yellowed article on french fries.
Holy crap. It was them again.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Either them or the fricking Amway people. He didn’t want any of their stupid detergent. Plus, last time he’d waved his shotgun at the Amways, so he doubted they’d be back any time soon. More likely the Jehovahs. They didn’t scare easy.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were a different animal altogether . . . God only knows what it would take to make them go away. He’d either have to sandblast them off the front porch or else answer the door and accept their pamphlets.
Several months ago, two of them caught him coming in with both arms full of groceries and trapped him on the front porch. They kept inching toward the front door, but he held his back to it. They actually made themselves at home on his porch furniture and started pushing their Awake! magazine on him.
The very first thing they told him was Michael Jackson had been a member of their congregation. Well, that didn’t go far at all with Francis. True, Jackson was one of the greatest music icons that ever lived, but wasn’t he a junkie? That’s not a very good advertisement for the Jehovahs, but apparently they didn’t agree.
Aside from their refusing to acknowledge birthdays, July Fourth, Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving, the only thing he knew about them was they were against blood transfusions, vaccinations, and all festivities in general.
And of course there was the mandatory door-to-door proselytizing. A mandate of which he was now a victim. How many others had suffered like himself?
Oh yeah, and they were run by an outfit in Brooklyn, New York. That didn’t set well down here on the Bayou. Anything run out of Brooklyn, New York, could kiss his butt.
That very night he’d removed all the patio furniture off the front porch. It was 2 a.m. when he did it, pulling out the hardware where he’d bolted the wicker chairs to the porch’s wooden floor. Without porch furniture to plop down on, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would never get another piece of him.
He didn’t want anybody to see his activities, especially his crab of a neighbor. Gladys Kravitz he called her. From Bewitched. Always looking through the fence at him and everything he did since his mother passed away and left him the house. He got sick of her watching him, too. He was convinced she was in league with the Feds, so he welded sheet metal over all the windows on the side of the house that bordered Gladys Kravitz’s yard. Nosey crone.
He looked longingly back at the poster of Leather Stockton at the far end of the long hall running the length of the house. She was posted there at the end of the hall, at eye level so he could talk to her one-on-one whenever he felt like it. He’d just lit a vanilla-scented candle and placed it at her feet. She loved the vanilla-scented candles he bought at Yankee Candle Company. It made the others jealous, so sometimes he’d pick one up for a few of them, specifically his other girlfriend, the wholesome singing star Cassie Lake. Everybody knew Cassie had a jealous streak. He got lilac scent for her and lit it on Fridays. Like date night.
That was Friday. On Tuesdays, he communed with Prentiss Love. He had lots of posters of Love, but his favorite, and the one he had taped to the wall in his bedroom, was her as a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. So alluring, but at the same time so wholesome in that little navy blue and silver skirt. Yes, she shot to stardom, but she still looked best in the little cheerleading outfit. His all-American girl.
Wednesdays were reserved for Fallon Malone. Of course, just like everybody else in the country, he’d seen her in her famous screen role where she washed a red Corvette sans underwear. But there was so much more to Fallon . . . a heart and soul that only somebody like him could understand. She hurt a lot, he could tell. Extremely sensitive, that one. All of her sexual flamboyance was to cover up her pain and self-doubt. If only he had the chance, he could turn her life completely around.
Then there were all the others, but this was Monday and right now, the Jehovahs were keeping him from Leather. She was getting pissed, he could tell. He looked at the poster, glowing goldish in the candlelight. She had that look in her eyes. She was angry he was keeping her waiting.
He hated it when Leather got this way.
Beside the candle, he’d very soon lay the pair of Leather’s underwear he swiped from the Shutters on the Beach Hotel out in Santa Monica. He read how she’d go there, and so he went there and hung out at the hotel pool for four weekends in a row, living out of his car the whole time. Well, technically, it was his mother’s car, but she was dead, anyway.
Finally, on his last day there, Leather came walking out of a cabana and strolled beside the pool heading for the main lobby. He wound his way through all the lounge chairs and drinks sitting there chilling on classy little tables beside the chairs and chaise lounges. He wanted to talk to her, maybe just touch her arm to see what Leather Stockton’s skin felt like.
Was that so wrong?
When he finally got close enough to talk to her, he called out her name.
“Leather . . . Hi! It’s me!”
The guy with her, whose hair, by the way, was obviously styled with hairspray or some related hair product, pushed him back hard in his chest.
He didn’t want to appear uncivilized to Leather, so he didn’t kick the guy in the crotch like he wanted to.
“Hey! Leather! It’s me! I sent you the roses for your birthday last month! The white roses . . . Your favorite! Right?”
She only slightly glanced backwards. The guy just grabbed her elbow from behind and pushed her forward a little forcefully, saying something into the back of her hair.
Francis tried to keep up, but in the process, knocked over one of the little white plastic poolside tables with four frosty little drinks sitting on it. The glasses slid to the cement, splintering into pieces as they made impact.
Idiots! You should never serve drinks in glass glasses poolside! Plastic, people! Plastic! Ever heard of plastic?
Now, two hotel staffers headed straight for him. One was short and chunky. The other one was tall and lean, his collar loose around his throat. Their black jackets matched each other.
He couldn’t give up this easily . . . He was finally in her presence. Screw the black jackets.
He called after her. “Leather . . . It’s me! You sent me the photo of you in the swimsuit . . . Remember? I love it! It’s up on my wall right beside the greatest poster of you I got at Spencer’s.”
“Sir! Sir! Can we be of some assistance?”
Closing in on him from behind, the Shutters security guards stepped up, one on each side of him, firmly placing their hands around each of his biceps.
He’d better cool it. He couldn’t afford another
arrest. That last stunt back home with the makings for a pipe bomb in the garage nearly landed him in the Federal pen. It was all BS of course, he hadn’t even assembled it. What happened to freedom of speech? That’s what his public defender said.
But now, his mother wasn’t around anymore to bail him out. There could be no more arrests. That was one of the last little nuggets of wisdom she shot at him from her deathbed in the hospital.
Old bag.
Assistance? He managed to keep it together and answer almost normally. “Oh no, assistance will absolutely not be necessary. I’m fine. Just thought I recognized her.”
He saw them exchange glances. Two little snots. They apparently didn’t seem to think he was “fine.”
The short, stocky one piped up. “Sir, in which room are you registered?”
“Actually, I just got here, I hadn’t even stopped in the lobby to register yet.”
Who was he kidding? He’d been here poolside for days, trying to scope out Stockton.
“Sir, do you have any identification on you?”
“Well, not exactly on me, but I do have it in the car. I’ll just go out to the parking lot and get it.”
“Did you valet? We can get that for you . . .”
Hell no, he did not valet.
He wasn’t about to part with $25 to have some moron dent his car. His mother kept it in pristine condition for ten full years and he meant to keep it that way, although it was currently covered with a thick coat of dust. That was only because of the long drive out here. He planned to take it to the Minute Car Wash way before Leather got into the front seat with him.
“We’ll just escort you to your car, sir.”
“No need! I can find it.” They could drop the “sir” bull. He knew they were going to have his butt arrested.
“No problem at all.”
S.O.B.s. They literally walked him off the property and then tagged along the full seven blocks to where he parked the Saturn on the side of a street with no parking meter to worry about.
The “guards” stood by the side of the car as he got in and pretended to shuffle through some papers. Within sixty seconds, he switched on the ignition, floored it and scratched off.
The two must have seen it coming, because they jumped back pretty fast when he gunned the gas. Good thing, or else he might have taken one of their feet with him. Too bad.
Fine. They wouldn’t let him talk to Leather?
He got them good.
That night, after he’d sneaked back onto the property, he watched the cabana he’d seen her come out of earlier . . . It was damn miserable squatted down in a thatch of palmetto bushes. The plant was like a bushel of swords. And the automatic sprinklers had come on, too.
S.O.B.s.
Around 9:30 p.m., he heard the cabana door open and music come floating out from inside. She’d been all alone in there. If he had known for sure she was alone, he’d have gone right in. He saw her step out onto the lighted walkway and leave.
She was a vision, dressed in a beaded, white halter top that looked great against her tan skin and blonde hair, and tight, white pants. He didn’t dare move an inch, crouched there on the wet dirt beneath him, watching her walk away from the cabana. The man from earlier at the pool appeared out of nowhere and walked along beside her. So he wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a bodyguard or else he’d have been inside with her. She was single. In his heart, he’d already known it.
But what about security? They could kiss his ass. Even with the best hotel security, Francis found a way. He waited till the coast was clear and jimmied the lock on a secluded window behind a group of three thick palm trees.
Once inside, he looked around. Leather’s clothes were tossed casually across the bed and one of the chairs, and a hair dryer was lying on a counter next to a tall, silver can of hairspray. A bottle of vodka was beside the bed, with a glass of melting rocks. So she was a drinker after all. Probably out of sheer loneliness.
There were the jeans she’d had on earlier at the pool. They were on the floor, as if she’d just stepped out of them. Shoes were everywhere. Who cared if she wasn’t a neatnik? She could learn to be a good wife. He would be patient.
He couldn’t help but stop to just breathe it in. Her perfume was delicious. He couldn’t stop himself. He had to pick up the jeans and rub his face in them. The heady sensation sent tingles up and down his whole body. The touch of her jeans against his face . . . It was so much more than he could ever have imagined. He was overcome with love.
He stopped the sniffing and rubbing when, from beneath lowered lids, he spotted her bed pillow. This was the pillow where Leather Stockton had laid her beautiful face and luxurious hair. There was no other word to describe Leather’s hair than simply luxurious.
The sight of her pillow caused him to take several deep gulps of air. He stared down at it intently and walked toward it carefully, as if it might jump off the bed and run away frightened. Kneeling down on one knee at the top corner of the bed, he leaned in closer to the mattress, looking intently for a strand or two of Leather’s silky hair, but didn’t see any.
He scanned the bedside area. There was a stack of papers by the telephone; he’d love to look through them or better yet, take them in order to track her a little better, but he didn’t have time and they were the kind of thing she’d likely miss.
Just like James Bond, with time running down to the last second, he scored. A red pair of silk thong underwear was lying on the bathroom floor beside the shower. The tiny shred of material was practically still warm.
That had been three years ago.
Ever since then, he’d kept them preserved in a plastic Zip Lock sandwich bag, only taking them out for their date every Friday night.
Standing there, trying to peer onto his front porch through the newspaper punch hole, the thought occurred to him . . . Could Leather have possibly wanted him to leave? She could have said something, anything to call her bodyguard off. Did she really have feelings for him, as she’d told him through the TV set?
Every time she was on, he set his TiVo to automatically record it just in case somehow he missed it live. She always sent him special, sexy little messages, all in code of course, like touching her necklace or earring or brushing her hair away for her face. It was so the Feds wouldn’t pick up on it. But they were such dumbasses they never would.
Leather was very private that way.
But thinking back on it, he wondered: Had she purposefully allowed him to be brushed off? Humiliated there at the Shutters pool?
Was it part of some game she was playing with his head? He stared hard at the poster of her, smiling in a swimsuit.
Was Leather Stockton . . . . a bitch?
Chapter 4
WHEN QUINTON HOWARD ROUNDED THE CORNER OF THE POOL house, the stench hit him like a ton of bricks. He headed for the four giant plastic trash bins he’d emptied for the last eight months. Normally, the city provided curbside pick-up. All the rich people made their maids roll it down just before trash time, but the Saxtons paid a hundred bucks extra a week to the lucky sanitation worker assigned to their street so nobody would have to worry about wheeling it down the driveway.
Incredible.
The bins were just in sight. Quinton turned left, each step digging into crunchy gravel beneath his work boots. They were hidden from the casual eye by a decorative “modern-contemporary” façade to match the stark (bleak) lines of the mansion. They’d probably paid some uptight German architect God only knows what to design their huge monstrosity, all white and plain, with a cute little trash-bin hider to match.
Frank Lloyd Wright would vomit.
All the recycle bins were stacked neatly beside the garbage, something to make the rich people feel good about themselves. Quinton always got a laugh off the $15 bottles of sparkling water from Italy these idiots sprung for, tucked neatly into their recycle bins.
Oh, the dichotomy of the über-wealthy. Quinton graduated with a master’s in philosophy from the U
niversity of Pennsylvania. He could tell you anything about the great philosophical thinkers, Thales, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza . . . he could go on.
His all-time favorite was Aquinas, of course, who shifted the focus from Plato to Aristotle in his attempt to fuse Christianity with Aristotelianism. Quinton’s impressive, and unfinished, doctoral thesis had been on Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. He was still deeply pissed he couldn’t find a job expounding his deep thoughts on countless crops of philosophy majors at some, any, college or university. Hell, in the end he’d even have taken a community college offer . . .
But screw Plato, what the hell was that stench?
It seemed to emanate from the pool house. Quinton knew better than to look into rich people’s windows, but it looked like they were either gone or sleeping off another late night of partying, although the hot tub wasn’t still on and bubbling, surrounded by steam and booze bottles like it normally was every Tuesday and Thursday he was here.
Cocking his head to the left, he peered into the pool house with his right eye and there it was.
A woman. A dead woman. She was wearing a tight, pale pink miniskirt and heels, sitting in a straight-back chair that matched an uncomfortable-looking, modernistic table nearby.
In fact, she looked pretty hot with those legs, except for the fact half her head was blown off. Her hands seemed to be tied or taped to the chair, and her legs were sprawled at a weird angle out in front of her.
And she stunk. To high Heaven. No telling how long she’d been there.
Quinton pulled out his iPhone to call 911. But just before he hit “send,” he had a thought. Instead of putting the call through to Emergency Dispatch, he scrolled down to “contacts.”