A Novel Way to Die

by Ali Brandon

  “Nothing here,” Barry said a moment later when they’d taken a look at the other two rooms on the first floor. His voice louder than necessary, he added in the direction of the stairway, “Hey, Darla, why don’t I show you what’s on the second floor.”

  Which meant, Last chance, suckers. Get out now while the getting’s good.

  When no stampede of fleeing footsteps sounded overhead, Barry shrugged and gestured for her to follow him toward the stairs. Darla complied. By the time she’d taken four or five steps up, however, she was rethinking that whole victim-in-the-safe-spot theory and wondering with a fleeting sense of panic if it wasn’t too late to stay downstairs, after all. She wasn’t particularly concerned now about their stumbling across any intruders up there. It was the stairway itself that was doing her in.

  Not that the steps were all that narrow or rickety—in fact, the staircase seemed the sturdiest structure in the place—but the balustrade had been removed, and only a ribbon of yellow caution tape now drooped from newel to newel in place of the handrail. She didn’t have much of a head for heights, and that open side did bad things to her sense of balance.

  Climbing the open staircase was a test of nerves for her in the low light. To make matters worse, the dim lighting combined with Barry’s moving flashlight beam added a distinct fun-house effect to the whole stairwell. By the time they reached the landing, Darla was sweating despite the house’s chill, while bits of plaster were lodged beneath her fingernails from where she’d been gripping the wall for moral support.

  At least the balustrade at the top was intact, she saw in relief. She reached out to take hold while she regained her bearings . . . only to feel herself grabbed by her free arm and pulled back to the middle of the landing.

  “Sorry, I should have warned you, it’s a bit wobbly,” Barry said with an apologetic smile. He demonstrated by giving the handrail a gentle shake that caused it to sway, and Darla’s stomach to pitch. “That’s actually on today’s list to repair.”

  “Great,” Darla replied. “Any other death traps I should know about?”

  “Just the holes in the floor.” He aimed the flashlight toward a pair of sawhorses near the end of the short hallway. They were set across one of the cutouts in the subfloor that she’d seen earlier from her vantage point on the lower level. “Don’t worry, the rest of the floor is sound. Stay clear of the spots we’ve blocked off and you’re perfectly fine.”

  “Uh, maybe I’ll wait here while you finish checking out these rooms,” she suggested, earning a sympathetic nod in return.

  “Probably a good idea. It won’t take me more than a minute.”

  While Barry made his way down the short hall, Darla gave a cautious poke at the wall behind her. When it neither crumbled nor swayed, she figured it was safe to lean against it. She’d end up with plaster dust on the back of her sweater, but that was a small price to pay for regaining her equilibrium.

  She shoved her hands into her sweater pockets and felt the slim weight of her cell phone beneath her fingers. It occurred to her then that they were doing this all wrong. Why not simply try to get hold of Curt first and see if he’d been by the brownstone? If, as Barry had suggested, he was simply down the street grabbing a late breakfast, that would eliminate the other more unsettling possible scenarios regarding the unlocked door.

  She pulled out her cell and swiftly scrolled through her contacts. She often used her personal phone for business when James was tying up the landline with his negotiations. Sure enough, Curt Benedetto was there under the “B’s.” She pressed the dial key and listened while the phone rang on his end.

  But while she waited for him to pick up, she abruptly heard a faint but unmistakable cha-cha rhythm coming from somewhere below her. It took her a moment to realize what that meant. By then, Barry had finished his exploration of the surrounding rooms, and the last tinny notes of Santana’s “Smooth” had already faded. The sound of Curt’s recorded voice—“Yeah, too bad, I’m not here, leave a message”—was now playing in Darla’s ear.

  “What?” Barry asked as she pushed the “End” button and stared at him in dismay. “Who are you calling?”

  “Curt,” she choked out. “I forgot until a moment ago that I had his number programmed in my cell phone. I called it to see if I could find out where he was, and I heard his phone ringing.”

  “Well, did he answer?” he replied with a frown, apparently not understanding her meaning.

  She swallowed hard and clarified, “I meant I heard his phone ringing here . . . somewhere downstairs.”

  A look of seeming shock passed over Barry’s face, and he swiveled to look over the railing. Then, turning back to her, he snapped, “Quick, call the number again.”

  Fingers trembling, Darla hit the redial button and then strained her ears. Sure enough, she could hear Rob Thomas singing his heart out and Carlos Santana strumming away somewhere in the distance.

  “Dial it again,” Barry demanded and rushed toward the stairs, flashlight bobbing as he started down. “Keep calling it until we find out where the sound is coming from.”

  Darla hit redial once more and then hurried after him, taking the stairs as swiftly as she dared and pausing midway down to dial yet again. The familiar tune was far louder now, and Barry, who had already reached the ground floor, was looking about wildly. Darla joined him a moment later and redialed Curt’s number yet again. The rhythm started up once more, and Barry pointed his flashlight at a closed door she hadn’t noticed earlier.

  “The basement,” he declared. “He must be down there. But why isn’t he answering?”

  Maybe because he can’t, Darla thought as her stomach did a small flip-flop. From the grim expression on Barry’s face as made his way in that direction, he obviously was thinking the same thing as she.

  He yanked open the door, revealing a large area of gloom lit only by what daylight was let in by the narrow exterior windows. A workmanlike set of open wooden stairs with railings on either side led down into the darkness, where she could make out the vague shapes of stacked boxes. Shining his flashlight into the shadows, Barry headed down a couple of steps and called, “Curt? Buddy? You down there?”

  When he got no reply, he turned back to Darla. “Call him one more time, would you?”

  She nodded wordlessly and edged her way to the door while pressing the redial. This time, it sounded like a concert was happening almost at their feet. Barry swung his light down the stairs, searching . . . and then burst into laughter as his beam caught and held on a slim metallic shape lying several steps down from them. Glancing back up at Darla, Barry gave his head a rueful shake.

  “The idiot, he must have come down here for some reason and then dropped his phone,” he declared, his expression relieved. He turned again and started down the steps, adding over his shoulder, “He’s probably wandering all over the neighborhood right now trying to figure out where he lost it.”

  “Hey, it happens to the best of us,” Darla observed a bit breathlessly as she heaved her own sigh of relief. She’d truly feared something bad had happened to Curt. Now that she knew it was nothing worse than a dropped phone, she and Barry could have their lunch as planned. As for Curt, he likely could survive awhile without his smartphone.

  While Barry bent to retrieve the errant device, Darla squinted into the dimness to look around the basement. The requisite old-fashioned coal boiler was to one side, along with storage boxes and a couple of old chairs. The floor appeared to be its original brick, although sections of plywood had been laid near the stairs to give a more stable storage surface. She hadn’t noticed any unusual exterior access other than the windows. Her practical side kicked in. If Barry could convert the space into a garden apartment like Jake’s, that would add even greater value—

  She paused in midthought as the wavering flashlight beam momentarily revealed a flash of blue as Barry pocketed the phone and started back up the steps toward Darla. A chill swept her, and she gripped the doorjamb.

&nb
sp; “Wait,” she choked out. “Shine your light all the way down the steps, and to the right. I thought I saw . . .”

  She trailed off, and Barry stared at her in seeming confusion for a moment. Gathering her wits, she leaned past the doorway and pointed downward into the shadows. “It’s probably nothing, just a blue rag, but you’d better take a look.”

  Obediently he swung around and began moving the flashlight beam back and forth in wide arcs toward the area she’d indicated. “Tell me when you—”

  “There!”

  Shaking now, so that she didn’t dare let go of the doorjamb, Darla stared down at the spot where Barry’s flashlight beam had paused. It could be a blue tarp, she tried to tell herself. But as Barry slowly moved down the stairs, the pool of light around the fabric widened. No, not a tarp. It was a blue Windbreaker . . . the same jacket that Curt had been wearing last time he had stopped by the bookstore.

  And as the flashlight beam zeroed in on it even more closely, she now could see what appeared to be a human hand protruding from the jacket’s sleeve.

  SEVEN

  “CURT!” BARRY YELLED AND WENT STUMBLING DOWN THE steps toward the still figure lying on the basement floor.

  Darla rushed after him as fast as she could, given the spotty light. Surely Curt was simply unconscious, she frantically told herself. No doubt he had tripped on the steps and hit his head when he landed. A tumble could explain why his phone had been lying on the stairway rather than in his pocket. Frankly, she was surprised that neither of the men had injured themselves before today. The brownstone was nothing short of a disaster site.

  By now, Barry was already kneeling beside his friend. Darla could see by the flashlight’s yellow beam that Curt was lying on his belly a few feet away and to one side of the bottom step. What looked like a crowbar lay across his back, reminding Darla of Curt’s previous threats to lay in wait for the salvage thieves in case they made a return visit.

  A chilling thought came to her: had Curt tried to wield the bar against an intruder only to come out on the losing side of the encounter?

  She barely had time to consider that possibility before Barry grabbed the crowbar and tossed it aside, and then leaned over his friend’s prone form.

  “Curt, can you hear me?” he demanded as Darla breathlessly knelt beside him on the dusty concrete floor.

  For the space of a heartbeat, she held out hope that Curt would groan and then begin to move. That optimism lasted only until the flashlight beam illuminated both the bloody gash across the back of his skull and his wide-open, sightless eyes. Darla bit back another gasp. Curt couldn’t hear them . . . wasn’t ever going to hear anything ever again.

  “Son of a bitch,” Barry choked out, and made as if to turn his friend over. Hastily, Darla grabbed his arm.

  “Leave him alone, Barry . . . there’s nothing we can do. Besides, the police won’t want us touching anything.”

  “The police?” He rose and rubbed a frantic hand over his thinning hair. “Yeah, you’re right. Call 9-1-1, while I get some more light in here.”

  It took her two tries to punch in the right sequence of numbers, for her hands were shaking. Barry, meanwhile, had rushed back up the steps and plugged in a pair of the clamp lights so that they shone like faint headlights down the wooden stairway. The additional illumination made Darla blink and gave Curt’s unnaturally still form an even more unreal appearance. She promptly scooted several feet away from the corpse, preferring the relative darkness of the rest of the basement to being right next to the dead man as she made her call.

  Why couldn’t this have happened upstairs? She already had something of an aversion to dark basements. She suspected she would end up with a full-blown basement phobia now that she’d managed to find a dead body lying in one.

  After what seemed an interminable wait, though surely it had been but a matter of seconds, the emergency operator came on the line. In a strained voice she barely recognized as her own, Darla gave her name and explained the situation.

  “It could have been an accident, but we don’t really know. An ambulance?” she answered the dispatcher’s question. “You can send one, but I’m pretty sure he’s been dead awhile. Address? Barry,” she called to the man, who now sat silently beside his friend, “what’s the street number of the building?”

  Barry stirred from his reverie long enough to give her the address, which she hurriedly repeated into the phone, along with a few more details about the body’s location in the building. The dispatcher instructed her to remain on scene and not touch anything in the vicinity of the dead man . . . too late, as Darla recalled how Barry had moved the crowbar off Curt’s body.

  “They’re sending the police and an ambulance right out,” Darla told him once she’d hung up. Then, carefully avoiding looking at Curt again, she suggested, “Maybe we should wait upstairs until they get here.”

  “But I don’t want to just leave him here like this,” Barry countered with a miserable shake of his head. “I should find a blanket or something to put over him.”

  “The dispatcher said not to touch anything,” she reminded him. “We don’t know what actually happened to him, so we don’t want to accidentally destroy any evidence.” Like picking up the pry bar, she told herself, though she probably would have reflexively done the same thing had she been first to reach Curt.

  Barry gave a grim nod and gestured her toward the stairs. “I guess I should take a look around while we’re waiting on the cops to see if any wire or tools are missing. Curt’s been worried about those bastards who stole our copper last week paying another visit.”

  Darla had come to much the same conclusion. Bad enough that since Curt’s warning the week before, she’d worried over the possible loss of her street numbers to the scrap thieves. Now she had to fear the possibility of falling victim to criminals who were bold enough to commit murder if they were crossed?

  They retreated upstairs to the main floor again, leaving the body alone in the basement. The body. Darla felt uncomfortable referring to someone whom she’d personally known in such a manner, but she found it hard to reconcile the ghastly corpse sprawled beneath the stairs with her boisterous if obnoxious customer Curt. To be sure, she had tolerated the man rather than liked him, but never would she have wished such a fate on him. And of course, the situation was far different for Barry, who had been both a friend and a business partner to Curt for more than half their lives.

  She glanced Barry’s way. Once he had determined that nothing seemed to be missing from the work area, he had joined her in the parlor. Now, he sat slumped against the wall, hands limply propped on his knees as he stared at a gaping hole in the plaster opposite him. She couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude for this particular situation, and so she simply sat with him in what she hoped he’d view as sympathetic silence, though the truth was that she was guiltily wishing she’d turned down his lunch invitation and thus avoided the whole unpleasantness.

  She remembered abruptly that Robert was alone at the bookstore. She’d better let him know she was going to be delayed.

  Robert answered on the second ring, his “Pettistone’s Fine Books, this is Robert, and how may I assist you today?” greeting enunciated in respectable imitation of James’s precise tones.

  Feeling rather like she was breaching some major etiquette rule by making her call, she murmured, “Robert, this is Darla. Yes, your boss,” she clarified before he could ask for further identification. “There’s been a bit of trouble here at Barry’s place. I-I might be later than I thought. Will you be all right until James gets in?”

  “Under control,” he replied. “It’s a bit slow, so I’m working on a window display for those new political autobiographies from last week. You know, the ones that turned out to be, like, real dogs.”

  Momentarily returning to retailer mode, Darla winced, knowing to which ones he referred. Nothing worse than moving only a half dozen copies in a week of what was supposedly a blazing New York Times best seller
. “A window display, huh? Do you know how to do that?”

  “Sure,” was his enthusiastic answer. “There was this one the time Bill meant to order two copies of an old Naughty Teacher Nancy DVD but got two cases instead. You should have seen the cool display I made with a chalkboard and some notebooks. We sold, like, twenty DVDs in one day.”

  Great. Marketing tips courtesy of the adult bookstore industry. Darla rolled her eyes. But hey, if it had worked for Naughty Teacher Nancy, maybe it would work for the flavor-of-the-month politicians, too.

  “Go ahead, then,” she agreed, “but only use whatever you find lying around the shop for props. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  As she hung up the call, Robert’s mention of window displays made her think of Hilda Aguilar, whose talent at window dressing had always made her envious. What would happen to Jake’s investigation, given that the subject of said investigation was now dead? And more important, what would Tera Aguilar’s reaction be to her boyfriend’s untimely end? Even if Tera had felt as casual about the relationship as Curt apparently had, this would still have to come as a huge shock.

  A heavy pounding on the open front door was accompanied by a barked demand: “Police. Anyone home?”

  “In here,” Barry called, promptly rising and offering Darla a hand up.

  Her relief at seeing a uniformed officer arriving on the scene was tempered by the fact that she recognized the broad-faced, mustachioed cop. Officer Hallonquist had once caught her parked in Great-Aunt Dee’s old Mercedes in a no-parking zone. Despite Darla’s honeyed attempt at explanation, Hallonquist had gleefully written her a traffic citation, disproving her previous theory that all middle-aged New York men were suckers for women with southern accents. The fact that Jake’s former partner Detective Reese had later managed to get the ticket dismissed hadn’t tempered Darla’s displeasure over the situation. Would the officer remember her now, with equal annoyance?