The Hot Pink Farmhouse

by Unknown

  “You’ve seen her,” Des mentioned to him.

  “I have?” Soave looked at her blankly. “When?”

  “Tonight. She was the model at the art academy.”

  Soave’s eyes widened in surprise. “Time-out here . . . Are you telling me that a woman who poses buck-naked in front of total strangers is suing the school district because this guy left some dirty words on his computer screen?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re telling you,” Greta said.

  “Yo, this is totally wiggy,” said Soave, scratching his head. “What the hell kind of a place is this anyway?”

  “A quaint little village that positively oozes with historic New Englandy charm,” Greta responded dryly. “Me, I call it home.”

  Melanie Zide lived on Griswold Avenue, a dimly lit deadend street of bungalows near Uncas Lake. Des had walked by it several times on her way up to her new place from the inn. Some of the little bungalows were well-tended and freshly painted, their lawns mowed and raked. Others showed signs of serious, long-term neglect—knee-high weeds out front, broken windowpanes, peeling paint. Melanie’s place was one of these.

  Her lights were on inside the house, though no car was parked in her short gravel driveway. There was no garage. Des pulled her cruiser into the driveway and they got out, Soave waiting by the car. She climbed the two steps to the broad, sagging front porch, where an old sprung sofa sat on concrete blocks, and tapped on the door. There was no sound of footsteps inside. No response at all. Just a dog barking down the street somewhere.

  Soave automatically went around to the back, just like when they’d worked together. He returned in a moment, shaking his head. “Don’t see anybody in there.”

  Across the street, a man came out onto his own sagging porch to watch them. Des noticed him standing there under his porch light, arms folded before his chest. He was still standing there as she and Soave started back toward her ride.

  “Be right back, Rico.” She moseyed on over there and tipped her hat at him. “Good evening, sir. I’m Resident Trooper Mitry.”

  He was a big, suety man in his forties with thinning black hair, a slovenly beard and the sly, crafty eyes of a man who thought he was smart even if no one else did. He wore a blaze orange hunter’s vest over a frayed white T-shirt, jeans and work boots. What she noticed most about him was the message he had tattooed on his knuckles, one letter to a knuckle. On his right hand the tattoos spelled out J-E-S-U-S, on his left hand S-A-V-E-S. Behind him, through his open front door, she could see a living room cluttered with dirty dishes, pizza boxes and beer cans. On a card table in the middle of the room sat a personal computer, its screen illuminated. There was a stack of printouts next to it.

  “We just wanted to ask your neighbor some questions,” Des explained. “Your name is . . . ?”

  “Gilliam,” he answered, sullen and suspicious. Des wondered if it was her uniform or her pigment. Both, possibly. “Chuckie Gilliam.”

  “Hey, you wouldn’t be Sandy’s Chuckie, would you?” Des asked brightly.

  “Yeah, I am. And, lady, I don’t want no cat.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve got Polaroids. Want to see Polaroids?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, we’ll come back to that . . . Chuckie, have you seen Melanie this evening?”

  “I saw her go out maybe six o’clock,” he said. “Come home about nine.”

  Des nodded. This would square with Melanie’s modeling gig. “Did she stay home long?”

  “Left again right away, then came back again a while later.”

  “How much later?”

  “Lady, I dunno,” he said, his voice a low growl.

  “Could you take a guess, please? It’s important.”

  “Half hour. Maybe an hour. She popped her trunk, loaded some stuff into her car. She was in a real hurry.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Suitcases. She made a couple of trips in and out, then she split.”

  “What does she drive?”

  “A Dodge Neon, blue. Is Melanie in some kind of trouble?”

  “She have any men in her life?” Des asked, wondering if Chuckie was one of them. Or perhaps wanted to be. He kept mighty close tabs on her.

  “I haven’t noticed nobody. It’s been pretty quiet over there lately. Her brother used to be around, but he split.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year. Her mother used to live there, too. Old lady was gonzo in the head. Alzheimer’s. Every once in a while she’d fall. I’d help Melanie hoist her back into bed. But Mrs. Zide’s not around no more. Melanie put her in a nursing home.”

  “Any idea where that would be?”

  “Norwich, maybe.”

  Des glanced inside again at the computer on the card table. “What do you do for a living, Chuckie?”

  “Why do you need to know?” he demanded.

  “It’s just for my paperwork. I have to fill in those dumb blanks.”

  “I’m a carpenter here in town.”

  “Is that right? Who are you working for?”

  “I’m between jobs right now.”

  That was saying something, the way new houses were going up around Dorset. The contractors were so starved for manpower, they’d take anyone who knew which end of a nail gun to use. This had to be one real-live nowhere man, Des reflected. Poor Sandy would be so much better off with a nice pair of cats. “You and Sandy don’t live together, am I right?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m just wondering if you live here by yourself,” said Des, who was also wondering if Chuckie Gilliam had a sheet. He smelled like he did.

  “I’m here by myself,” he said grudgingly. “Anything wrong with that?”

  “No, not at all. Some of the smartest people I know live alone, myself included.” She thanked him for his help and crossed the street to fill in Soave.

  “It’s unlocked,” he mentioned idly, as the two of them stood leaning against her cruiser. “Her back door. If we want to go in and take a look.”

  “Do we?”

  Soave shifted his bulky shoulders. “What do you say?”

  “I say that it’s your case, wow man.”

  “Let’s go for it,” he declared, heading around back once again.

  He let Des in through the front door. Melanie’s living room was small and it was dingy. There was a moth-eaten purple love seat and a harvest-gold Naugahyde lounge chair that had been patched together with silver duct tape. Both pieces looked as if they had come from the dump.

  The wall phone in the kitchen was off the hook, the receiver dangling in mid-air. Des immediately felt a small uptick in her pulse.

  There were two bedrooms. In the smaller one there was an old iron bed, stripped down to its stained mattress. There was no dresser in there. No other furniture, period. The narrow closet was empty except for a few wire hangers.

  There was a double bed in the other room. Its covers were rumpled, the linen gray and sour-smelling. Everything in this closet was gone, too, including the hangers. All that remained was an unsigned nude drawing of Melanie thumb-tacked to the inside of the closet door. The proportions were way off, Des observed critically. Melanie’s torso was too long, her calves too short. Clearly the work of an unaccomplished art student.

  Soave knelt and looked under the bed. Nothing. He pulled open the dresser drawers. Empty. So were the drawers of the cheap pine student’s desk set before the bedroom window.

  Same story in the bathroom—the medicine chest had been cleaned out.

  All Melanie had left behind were a few clean dishes in the kitchen cupboards. And some food in the refrigerator. Not much—a half-eaten take-out pizza, a plastic liter bottle of Diet Coke, a quart of low-fat milk. There was a pull-down hatchway ladder in the kitchen ceiling that led up to the attic. Soave gave it a pull. Des handed him her flashlight. He went up and poked his head around. Nothing.

  There was nothing in the shallow crawl space under th
e house either.

  Des stood there looking around at the vacated house and remembering the anxiousness in Melanie’s voice when they’d talked that evening in the studio. Melanie had seemed frightened. Of whom? Of what? Was it about Babette Leanse’s case against Colin? Had Melanie been coerced into fingering her boss? Had she been bought? Or did she know something about Moose’s murder? Did the two cases connect up with each other? If so, how? Why had Melanie been in such a huge hurry to clear out of town? What was she so afraid of? What did she know?

  Des didn’t know. Didn’t know a damned thing.

  Except that Melanie Zide, the one person who might be able to help them make some sense of this whole mess, was way gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  “So we’re here to catch strays?” Mitch asked her, yawning, as he sat there slumped behind the wheel of his Studebaker pickup.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Des responded from next to him in the darkness.

  “How come we didn’t bring your have-a-heart traps and those yummy little jars of strained turkey?”

  “Different kind of strays.”

  “Gotcha,” Mitch said, nodding. “Okay, I’m thinking any minute now you’re going to tell me what the hell we’re doing here.”

  “Here” was the parking lot of Dorset’s A & P, which was mostly deserted since it was presently two o’clock in the morning and they closed at eleven. The market’s interior night-lights were on, casting a faint, ghostly glow out into the lot. But it was still quite dark. And they were quite alone. The delivery van from the florist next door was parked there for the night. A couple of rusted-out beaters with FOR SALE signs in their windshields were on display—the A & P’s parking lot doubled as an unofficial low-end used-car emporium. And there were Des and Mitch, a thermos of coffee and a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies for Mitch on the seat between them.

  “We’re hanging,” she said curtly, her hands folded in her lap.

  She had shown up at his cottage around midnight, taut as a tuning fork. He was asleep in bed when she got there, exhausted by his day of fact-finding but very happy to see her. And ready and willing to show her just how happy. But instead of stripping off her uniform and sliding her sleek frame under the nice warm covers with him, she’d barked, “Get dressed. And bring a warm jacket.” Sounding much more like a drill instructor than the new, babe-a-licious love of his life. “I need your truck.”

  “Take the keys,” he’d offered, groaning.

  “I need you. I’m about ready to chew my own hands off. And if I don’t talk to somebody, namely you, I will.”

  So he got dressed while she made the coffee and they piloted his Studey over the causeway to the market and parked it there. And now they sat, growing chillier by the minute, which Mitch didn’t mind. He was amply dressed, not to mention padded. What he minded was that she wasn’t talking.

  “Are we on a stakeout?” he pressed her.

  “We’re doing some surveillance, cool?”

  “Cool. Does this make us a crime-fighting team?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “What, like Starsky and Hatch?”

  “It’s Hutch. Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Salt and Pepper, a vastly underrated—”

  “Man, don’t even go there,” Des growled.

  “Okay, what’s upsetting you?” he asked, munching on a cookie. “Is it Soave?” Her ex-partner was not someone Mitch had been impressed with. In truth, he thought the guy was a pinhead. And not exactly Mr. Sensitivity. Mitch had seen him smiling for the cameras on the six-o’clock news. When someone asked him why anyone would want to shoot Mary Susan Frye he’d replied, “People may have thought they knew the victim, but maybe they didn’t.” A smarmy bit of innuendo that made it sound as if Moose had been asking for what she got. Des would never have left something that tactless hanging in the wind. She would have shown more consideration.

  But Des was not running the case.

  “I think he’s got blinders on,” she said tightly. “He’s so in love with Jim Bolan that he’s not seeing Colin. No matter which path you take, you end up right back at that man. And now Melanie has cleared out and I’m with you—it all fits together. I just can’t figure out how.” She paused, glancing at him uncertainly. “You didn’t know he and Moose were a couple, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. And I’m positive Hangtown didn’t. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise to us.” Mitch reached for her hand and gripped it. “In case you haven’t noticed, lonely people have a way of finding each other.”

  “Is that what we are?” she asked, caressing the back of his hand with her thumb. “Two lonely people?”

  “Not anymore.” He leaned over and kissed her softly on the mouth. “What else can you tell me?”

  “Wait, is this for your article?” she asked, her eyes narrowing at him.

  “I’ll take whatever you can give me. But if this is awkward, just say no.”

  “The medical examiner just confirmed that Moose had sex shortly before she was murdered. And she was not pregnant.”

  “Did you think she was?”

  “Not really, but she was involved with a married man. It’s something you have to consider.”

  “But that would mean you think she was the intended victim, not Takai.”

  “I don’t know what to think. The more I find out, the less I know.”

  “How about the gun dealers—have you gotten anything from them?”

  “Not yet. Not a single reported Barrett sale ties in to anyone involved in this case.” Nor had a trace on Melanie Zide’s credit cards yielded anything yet. “She hasn’t used a single card. Hasn’t stopped at an ATM. She didn’t even wait around after class to pick up her modeling fee. She just . . .” Des stiffened, peering through the windshield at something across the deserted parking lot.

  Mitch followed her gaze. He saw nothing out there but the darkness. “She just what?”

  “Skipped town. That girl was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “When we figure that out we’ll know who our shooter is.”

  Mitch glanced at her curiously. “Sure you’re not upset about something else?”

  “What else would there be?”

  He didn’t bother to answer. He knew what else. They both knew.

  She turned her steady gaze on Mitch. “What about you—pick up any news I can use?”

  “Well, Takai carries a loaded gun in her purse. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t. But that’s not so unusual anymore, I’m sorry to say. Anything else?”

  He filled her in on The Aerie, Bruce Leanse’s hugely ambitious dream project for Dorset. And about the man’s overheated romantic entanglement with Takai, which could torpedo both the project and his marriage. “He has every motive in the world for wanting Takai gone. And so does Babette,” Mitch said. “Although, personally, if I were in Babette’s shoes, he’s the one I’d be going after.”

  “I’m down to that,” Des agreed. “And I’d aim low.” Now she leaned toward the windshield, drawing her breath in. “Lookie-lookie, I thought I saw them . . .”

  There were five of them in all. Teenaged boys, as far as Mitch could tell. They were doing their best to avoid the floodlights as they crept their way out of the shadows from the loading zone behind the market. All of them wore dark clothing. All of them carried knapsacks. Briefly they paused, each reaching into another’s sack to remove spray can after spray can of paint. Graffiti artists—that’s what they were. Now they started their way toward the market’s enticingly huge, pristine picture windows, brandishing their weapons.

  “Start your engine, Mitch,” Des said in a low voice. “Hit your lights.”

  “Don’t you want to catch them in the act?”

  “No, just go ahead and do it.”

  “But they’ll run away.”

  “I want them to. Start it now.”

  He did, and at the sound of his engine kicking over they disappeared instantly ba
ck into the darkness—not scattering wildly like the cockroaches in Mitch’s New York City kitchen but in a planned fashion, each in a different direction from the others. The choreography was straight out of West Side Story.

  Mitch grinned at her admiringly. “That was them, wasn’t it? That was the Mod Squad.”

  “The skinny one’s named Ronnie Welmers. His kid brother called me just before I came over to your place. Told me they’d be hitting the market tonight.”

  “Why would he tip you off?”

  “He’s afraid. Ronnie told him they were about to pull something major.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like something he could go to jail for.”

  “Where?”

  “That part I don’t know yet,” she answered. “We’re done here if you want to head home.”

  Mitch put the truck into gear and started back toward Peck Point in the darkness of the small-town night.

  “Talk to me about an actress named Claire Danes,” Des spoke up.

  “She got hot a few years back in My So-Called Life, a teen-angst TV series. Played a sensitive, misunderstood high school girl.”

  “Has she got game?”

  “She was very effective in that. Then she went on to the big screen, and the results have been decidedly mixed—Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio, followed by what is possibly the single worst film ever made, The Mod Squad—” He broke off, glancing at her in surprise. “Okay, I’ll bite—how does she connect up?”

  “Ronnie’s madly in love with her. Beyond that, I have no idea. Never saw the movie.”

  “It was based on the TV show from the sixties,” he said, hitting the brakes as a deer darted across the Old Shore Road ten yards in front of them. That happened a lot late at night. “She played one of three bad kids who’ve gone good as undercover cops. The series was a big success at the time. Very ‘heavy.’ And they should have left it alone, same as they should have left The Avengers alone. It stank out loud. Gone and forgotten in a week.”

  “Not by everyone, apparently,” she pointed out. “Ronnie’s a serious movie buff. Knows your work well.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s a fan.”