The Cluttered Corpse

by Mary Jane Maffini

  “Okay, let’s see what devilment you got up to today,” I said.

  They had no problem with that. Once again, the apartment seemed to be in pretty good shape. No big misadventures. I could see two dents on the bedspread where they’d spent the day sleeping in the sunny spots, moving to warmer places only when the stripes of spring sunlight moved. I wrestled the bag of stuffed animals toward the closet. Truffle and Sweet Marie followed me to the cupboard. They looked up as I stuck the toys up with the wedding mice on the top shelf and closed the door.

  The dogs cocked their heads.

  Their legs are only four inches long, so maybe they were puzzling over where to get a ladder. Two pairs of black inquisitive eyes watched speculatively. I could almost read their tiny minds: hey, those fuzzy toys would be great in a tug-of-war.

  I said, “You won’t be getting near these toys. They’ll be on the top shelf of this cupboard until Emmy Lou gets home.”

  I wondered when she would get home, or if. And if she did, would she ever want to see those toys again? You think you’re equipped with life skills, but then when murder strikes, you realize all the stuff you don’t know. It doesn’t matter how organized you are, murder’s going to throw you off your game.

  “Okay, slow down,” Margaret said when I called her from the safety of my sofa.

  I took a breath.

  She said, “And then this toy-collecting client killed her next-door neighbor’s friend. Do I have that right?”

  “She says she did, but I don’t believe her.”

  “I see. She says she did, but you think she might be making up a murder confession.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I don’t know her that well. But she’s a very nice woman and she certainly doesn’t seem like the type to kill someone, even a horrible ugly man whom she disliked and who harassed her. I told you about that before all this happened.”

  “Boy, I can’t wait to mount a defense for this one.”

  “Maybe you could go and talk to her.”

  “I’m not allowed to muscle my way in to see a suspect and ask that suspect if I can represent her. I’m sure you know that.”

  “I do, I guess. I’m a bit scattered about all this.”

  “Murder’s like that. Messy, unsettling, makes you reevaluate people you thought were nice and harmless.”

  “I don’t have to reevaluate Emmy Lou.”

  “Doesn’t matter, because I can’t represent her.”

  “Can her husband ask you to represent her? I told him about you. I gave him your card. I’m surprised he didn’t call you already.”

  “It can take hours to find out anything when you’re dealing with the police. Give the poor guy time. He can ask her if she wants me to represent her. He might not want to. Or she might not want to. If she’s able to make that kind of decision. Do you think she’s of sound mind?”

  I hesitated. “I would have said absolutely before, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “Until they can demonstrate otherwise, she gets to make her own decisions, one of which might have been to kill her neighbor.”

  Lilith and Sally left messages while I was taking the dogs out for their last walk of the day. I picked up Lilith’s first. “Sorry, Charlotte. I had to dump those toys in your Miata. Did you know you left your keys in the ignition? Anyway, I didn’t want to leave the toys by the side of the road. I figured they’d get ruined or stolen. And the cops wouldn’t let me put them in the house, because it was a crime scene. I tried to tell them the stuffed animals belonged to Emmy Lou, but your friend Pepper threatened to charge me. Anyway, Patti and I didn’t want to find ourselves looking like felons on TV so we took off after we gave our statements. I hope you were able to outwait the vultures from WINY. Anyway, I’m going to work now. I’m on the night shift. I hope your client’s okay.”

  Sally’s exhaustion seeped into her message. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing on television! It must be a big deal if poor Todd gets dragged out on the weekend. If I wasn’t stuck here with this houseful of vomiting children, I’d get over there to give you a big hug. Sorry I can’t be much of a friend to you today, but I’m letting Benjamin take over for a while and I’m going to try to get some sleep tonight.”

  Oh man. Speaking of not being much of a friend, I’d let Tony’s death and Emmy Lou’s trouble with the police drive Sally’s situation out of my mind. I hadn’t even checked to see how, or if, she was surviving and whether the kids were getting better. Now it was too late to call her and show a bit of sympathy. In spite of all she’d been through, she’d managed to call me. I felt like a jerk. Of course, Sally never misses a broadcast with Todd Tyrell because she harbors secret, inappropriate fantasies about him and has since we were giggling ninth-graders and he was a superheated senior. Never mind. I believe it’s her only flaw.

  I put Sally on my to-do list for the next day and went back to worrying about how to help Emmy Lou.

  The hardest part of being involved with a death is not being able to do anything. The police had access to information. I didn’t. I was just plain stuck. I hate that.

  I spent a frustrating evening trying to get my head around what had happened. It would have been better for sure if I hadn’t turned on the television set at eleven.

  Todd Tyrell’s teeth blared at me. Behind him the camera zoomed in on the Rheinbeck house.

  Woodbridge Police continue to be tight-lipped about a suspicious death today on Bell Street. A twenty-seven-year-old man was found dead at this home. Police have not revealed the identity of the deceased pending notification of next of kin. However, sources reveal that the homeowner, forty-one-year-old Emily Louise Rheinbeck, is being interviewed at police headquarters. So far no charges have been filed.

  A stock shot of the Woodbridge Police Station replaced the image of Emmy Lou’s house. At least the cameras hadn’t been there to capture her hysterical confession or the humiliation of the handcuffs. So it could have been much worse. That didn’t take long: my own picture flashed on screen. It was one of the ones from last fall where I was being marched into the cop shop wearing my pink fluffy slippers and an air of utter culpability. Plus Patti Magliaro was right. I did look mean.

  WINY has learned that the body was found by thirty-year-old Charlotte Adams. Adams was at the center of the bizarre Henley affair last fall that shook Woodbridge to its very core. Stay tuned as WINY promises to bring you up-to-date images of this shocking crime.

  I unplugged my phone and went to bed.

  Sometimes it’s good to set your sleeping mind to work while you get your rest. Efficient and inexpensive and no harm done if it doesn’t work. Of course, if it does work, you’ll probably find yourself wide awake dealing with whatever info gets dredged up. I certainly did.

  My clock said three fifteen. But there was no way I could go anywhere and for a long time that included back to sleep.

  My subconscious had sensibly asked me who might have pulled the prank about the fire and why. A man had called me. That meant the man had known who I was and how to reach my cell phone. That narrowed it down to any of the thousands of people who might have read my Organized for Success brochures. I’d blanketed Woodbridge with them and used my cell number. But my brain wanted to know why that prankster had picked that exact time to play his miserable gag. For one thing, if I hadn’t responded to the call and raced home in a panic, then I might have been at the Rheinbecks at the time that Tony was killed. Perhaps I might even have prevented it. Or I might have witnessed it. So the question became, who had wanted to keep me away?

  Perhaps the person who’d killed Tony.

  The voice had been deep, possibly disguised. Was there something familiar about it? Or was my mind playing tricks on me?

  I drifted back to sleep after an hour or so of replaying the prank call over and over in my memory. I slept until my subconscious sent me another urgent memo: Why would Emmy Lou pretend to have killed Tony if she hadn’t?<
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  Once again, my eyes popped open.

  I had asked myself the same question more than once when I was wide awake, but my sleeping brain had a few suggested answers. I had nothing better to do than to lie there and try to reconstruct what must have happened. This might have been more effective if I’d been at the scene, but I worked with the material I had. I closed my eyes and imagined the inside of the Rheinbeck residence. The straight staircase, dark hardwood, solid, new sleek wood banister. In order to fall down, Tony must have been upstairs, or at least at the top. Why would he be upstairs in Emmy Lou’s house? For no good reason that I could imagine. Kevin had gone out with his mother. Tony had been seen in the car with them. Had he come back early? Why? Dwayne was at the restaurant. Emmy Lou was expecting me at two thirty. Would she have invited Tony into the house? Not impossible, I decided, but highly unlikely. But even if she had, she never would have encouraged him to go upstairs. I couldn’t buy that for a minute. Therefore, if he had been upstairs, and he must have been, it had been without her knowledge or without her permission. I decided to work through both of those scenarios: What if he’d decided to play one of his little tricks? What if he’d thought this time it would be amusing to hide and give her another scare? With or without a camera.

  This time I got out of bed. The dogs opened their eyes as if to say, “Have you lost your tiny human mind?” They immediately went back to sleep. I made my way to the entrance to my apartment. I opened the door and stared down the long, straight staircase. Not so different from Emmy Lou’s. Maybe I couldn’t be in her home, but I could approximate what might have happened.

  Emmy Lou’s bedroom was roughly in the same position relative to her staircase as my kitchen was to my own stairs. It was also across a small section of hallway roughly the same size. I scooted back to my bedroom and picked up my pillow. I moved back to my tiny kitchen and stood there. Suppose I was Emmy Lou and coming out of the bedroom, getting ready to come downstairs. And suppose I came face-to-face with Tony, hulking, greasy, and unpredictable. What would I do? Suppose he lumbered toward me? Instinctively my hands shot out. Emmy Lou was a substantial woman. She was also in a state of nerves already because of Kevin and Tony. Could she have pushed him away in a panic? She’d be strong enough. I tried my reenactment with my pillow. It bounced off the walls and tumbled toward the first floor, hitting the newel post and flopping on the floor. Damaging if it had been a person. I hurried down the stairs, grabbed the pillow, and raced back up. I worked out several possible reconstructions: perhaps she’d been in the bedroom and he’d come up behind her. She’d scream and try to fight. He might have panicked too and tried to get her to stop screaming. She’d struggle to get away, give him a shove…

  I closed my eyes and tried again to imagine the whole space. Of course, unlike my staircase, hers was littered with stuffed animals. Some had even been scattered under Tony’s body when I found him. Their pastel fur had been spattered with blood, an image I was hoping to forget soon. Perhaps she’d screamed and he’d run away, but tripped on a stuffed duck or a kitty cat and tumbled to his death.

  One final theory: What if Emmy Lou had been heading upstairs and spotted Tony at the top? The same thing could have happened for sure. Maybe she hadn’t done anything. Tony was clumsy and shambling. He could have been hurrying down the stairs or up the stairs, and merely tripped on those animals. I knew how easily that could happen.

  So if any of these propositions held water, it was definitely not murder. An accident. Or worst case, self-defense. Emmy Lou must have been overcome with guilt and remorse over Tony’s death. And she’d been emotionally on edge for days because of Tony and Kevin. She’d probably felt like killing him. That would explain her bizarre confession.

  I felt better.

  Emmy Lou hadn’t murdered Tony. And she hadn’t lost her mind. Of course, once the police interrogated her, they’d figure that out themselves. They’d probably already released her. She was most likely sleeping soundly beside Dwayne and a giant stuffed zebra at that very moment.

  No problem. I walked down to the foot of the stairs and picked up my pillow for the third time. Jack, wearing pajama bottoms, opened the door to his apartment and stood blinking nearsightedly without his glasses. His sandy hair stood on end. He looked like the world’s tallest seven-year-old.

  “Why do you keep thumping up and down the stairs? Is there something I should be aware of?” he said, stifling a yawn. “Do you need any help with that pillow? I’m good at pillows. Pillows fear me.”

  “Long story. Probably has a happy ending. Don’t worry about it, Jack. I’m heading for bed.”

  I also planned to call Pepper with my theories as soon as she got to work in the morning. I climbed back into bed with a big relieved smile on my face and flaked out almost immediately. I slept until five thirteen, when my subconscious sent a supplementary message: don’t forget that prank call.

  Charge your cell phone next to your bed at night.

  It will be where you need it in case of emergency.

  10

  Monday makes the week. So I wanted to get off to a good start, after the third worst weekend of my life. As awful as events had been, I didn’t want to get dragged down by them. I had people, and dogs, depending on me.

  The pooches found themselves having a brisk early morning walk. The timing didn’t suit them, but I reminded them that I was in charge, no matter what they may have been led to believe. They were too sleepy to argue. As we hiked up and down the residential streets in our neighborhood, Truffle and Sweet Marie kept an eye out for squirrels. I enjoyed watching bright tulips opening in the spring air. Nothing beats spring for improving the spirit. The walk cleared my sleepy mind.

  At home, I fed the dogs, made a coffee, and somewhat reluctantly flicked on the TV. WINY has only one star: Todd Tyrell. If Todd isn’t on duty, some unsung hero does the voice-over while Todd’s teeth grin at the world. Todd has three expressions: serious, happy, and stunned. I’m pretty sure stunned isn’t one of the official ones. Todd was wearing his serious face as he stood outside the Rheinbeck residence. From the gathering of people and police cars, I could tell that this was recycled footage of yesterday’s news flash. The voice-over informed viewers that as of this morning, Mrs. Emily Louise Rheinbeck of 10 Bell Street in Woodbridge had been remanded to county jail. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for Thursday. Pepper’s picture flashed on screen as WINY congratulated the police on fast action in this case. As you might expect, she looked good in her dress uniform. Todd Tyrell’s lips kept moving for a few seconds after the voice stopped.

  Once again WINY producers had fished out the guilty-as-sin-uncombed-hair-and-bunny-slipper shot of me from the previous fall and flashed it across the screen. The casual viewer could be forgiven for thinking I’d been arrested for killing Tony and who knew how many other innocent bystanders. I lifted the remote and snapped off the news, before the voice-over guy spelled out my name.

  Okay, I told myself. Never mind. Get moving.

  My first call was to Pepper. I figured she should have been in by that time, but I got her voice mail. This time, I left a message. Next up was Dwayne Rheinbeck. I figured he wouldn’t have slept much either and that he’d have plenty to do if Emmy Lou hadn’t been released. Better to call early.

  Unlike Pepper, Dwayne did answer. He blurted out, “Emmy Lou doesn’t want to see that lawyer you recommended. She has waived her right to legal counsel. They assigned her a public defender. She wouldn’t even talk to him. And she stared through me in court. Like a stranger. It was horrible.”

  “That’s bad,” I said. Bad? It was beyond bad. It was totally craptacular. I knew how awful it could be dealing with the police even if one of them had once been your best friend and even if you did have Margaret Tang by your side. What was Emmy Lou thinking?

  I heard his voice catch. “Unbelievable. A nightmare.”

  “There must be something we can do. Can you talk to her again? Can you see her in the county jail?�
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  “I don’t know what good that would do. Emmy Lou can be…”

  “Stubborn?”

  “I was going to say resolute. Stubborn sounds wrong, and Emmy’s not usually wrong. In fact, she takes pride in being right. So maybe she should waive counsel.”

  Oh man. “I doubt that. This is murder. Emmy Lou may be first-rate at her job and is obviously a wonderful wife, but she’d be way out of her depth dealing with police and jail. Especially if she leads off by insisting she did it. You can see that as a strategy that would have pitfalls.”

  “Agreed. And I’m way out of my depth myself.”

  “And I came in to help her organize these toys so that you would be more comfortable about the collection from hell.”

  “More comfortable about the collection from hell?”

  “Yes. I can see how they would bother you, but we were planning to fix it.”

  “Didn’t bother me. I never noticed them much. It’s my fault in a way. I bought her a few when we were dating and that started an avalanche, I guess. I was living in a bachelor pad with two other guys. My home is a thousand times better than that, even with plushies everywhere upstairs. They sure beat empty beer cans and pizza boxes lying around. Anyway, they made her happy. So no biggie. Why would I ask her to get rid of them?”

  “Sorry, she didn’t say that you’d ask her to get rid of them. I thought that…well, sometimes I jump to conclusions.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m glad you want to help her. After yesterday. I saw you on television, and, well, all I can say is that I’m sorry you got dragged into all this. And I apologize for yelling at you.”

  “Not your fault. You’d had a shock. But I believe if she’s behind bars for a while, there’s a good chance she’ll change her mind about the lawyer. The confession too. You could keep working on that.”

  “Emmy’s not one to change her mind. But I’ll keep trying.”