Murder Scene

by Richard Montanari

  ‘Heart of Fire’ by Black Veil Brides.

  Detta wandered in the music as the last person left the room. On the way out, they each said something to her. To each of them she mumbled, ‘I’m okay.’

  Can I get you anything?

  I’m okay.

  Do you need to talk?

  I’m okay.

  Your dad brought a monster into your life and that monster killed your mother. How does that make you feel?

  I’m okay.

  Something caught the edge of Detta’s attention, a silhouette in the doorway. She looked over.

  It was her father.

  He seemed to absorb the totality of the moment all at once, his family suddenly and everlastingly diminished by one third; his beautiful wife, the mother of his only child, the love of his life, now a jagged outline beneath a powder blue sheet.

  Detta glanced at her father’s hands. They hung limply at his sides. He had nowhere to put them.

  When she looked back at his face, she saw that Will Hardy was screaming.

  Bernadette Hardy could not hear him.

  13

  The Corley & Sons Stone Company had been a fixture in Trumbull County, Ohio since 1921. The company supplied shot rock used in the construction of driveways, parking lots, landfills, and logging roads, as well as Indiana limestone, Rustic Buff, and Gray Gorge.

  For Lonnie Combs it was so much dust and bullshit. He’d been a driver for old man Corley for the past six years. Today the load was five finished pieces of granite.

  Lonnie picked up the stone and got on the road a few minutes ahead of schedule. On the way he stopped at the Gas ’N Go and picked up some chips and some chewing tobacco. They called it smokeless tobacco these days, but Lonnie never would. To him it would always be chaw, just as it was for his daddy. Beech Nut was his brand. He even kept it in his daddy’s old Flying Dutchman tin.

  Twenty minutes later Lonnie delivered the granite to the Celestial Meadow Cemetery outside Abbeville. Lonnie did some part-time grave digging for the old man, and he had some back-filling jobs today.

  When he got the keys to the equipment shed he crossed the gravel lot. A few years earlier, at Lonnie’s suggestion, old man Corley had sprung for a used Semco Rotary II. It wasn’t the newest or the best, but it got the job done.

  On this day there were three separate funeral services underway. Before long a big white SUV pulled up, and a middle-aged woman exited the driver’s side. The back doors opened and a boy and a girl emerged. The boy was all but invisible, but the girl was not. She was about twelve.

  Lonnie tried not to look at her. She was way too young, he knew that, just as he had always known, but that didn’t stop him from looking. Looking didn’t cost anything, did it?

  He just didn’t want to be caught looking.

  Every time something happened with a kid, anywhere in the county, every time some teenaged girl scraped a knee or woke up with the willies after watching some shitty horror movie on Netflix, they came and talked to him. Fucking cops.

  He’d done his time, four years total, and there was no way he was going back.

  The sound jerked him out of a dream. A good dream, too.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Lonnie sat up in his desk chair, sleep-addled, suddenly freezing cold. The only light in his shabby front room was coming from his computer screen.

  ‘I ain’t fucking with you,’ he said. ‘I got a Louisville Slugger in my hand.’

  Silence.

  Lonnie raked the sleep from his eyes, stood up, his heart hammering in his chest. The truth was he didn’t have a bat. He stumbled across the small living room to the kitchen, felt his way along the counter, knocking more than a few dishes into the sink.

  He closed his hand around the handle of a crusty steak knife. Emboldened by his weapon, he called out one more time.

  ‘Last chance, asshole.’

  No response.

  He glanced around the corner, down the short hallway that led to the back door. He now knew why he was so cold. The damned door was wide open.

  When Lonnie looked back into the kitchen he saw a long shadow creep across the floor. Someone was behind him. Whoever it was had been in the bathroom.

  The next thing Lonnie knew he was face down on the dusty runner carpet, bright orange fireworks behind his eyes. His head pounded.

  As the world began to spin out of orbit Lonnie felt moist breath at his right ear, smelled a distinct odor; sour and sweet at the same time.

  Then came the voice.

  ‘You bury the dead,’ the voice whispered. ‘Take heed you are not soon among them, Mr Combs.’

  Lonnie Combs lay on the carpet for a long time, eyes tightly closed, waiting for the death blow; the rack of the shotgun, the trill of the knife removed from a sheath.

  It did not come.

  Take heed you are not soon among them, Mr Combs.

  At dawn, as Lonnie picked himself up, swearing off the mash forever, he felt a dampness in his crotch. He’d goddamned wet himself.

  Like he always did when he needed to calm down he reached for his tin of chewing tobacco. It wasn’t in his pocket or on the table with the computer.

  He grabbed the bottle of mash from the table, emptied it down his throat.

  As he staggered to the bathroom he realized what the other smell was, the one on the warm breath of the stranger – thick and sugary and pungent.

  It was apples.

  14

  In the months since Amanda’s death – Will had yet to call her passing what it was, murder, knowing full well he could not begin to heal until he did so – he had measured out the lives of himself and his daughter in confections.

  Each time he walked by the chocolatier on Bond Street, a place he had frequented as many times in trouble as in celebration to buy the glacé lemon peels, Amanda’s favorite, he marked the passing of each uncelebrated day by the theme of the elaborate window displays.

  Will had drifted through the wake and the funeral and the burial like a man untethered, rallied around by friends and acquaintances from the university, as well as Amanda’s co-workers.

  A week after the fire one of Will’s colleagues found them a sublet, a one bedroom on East Seventeenth. It was small, but it was safe and held nothing of their former lives.

  During the ceremonies Trevor Butler had stood no more than ten paces from both Will and Detta Hardy. He appeared fallen, as if what happened on that night in some way occurred on his watch.

  They’d spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day in the parking lot of a restaurant in Yonkers. The restaurant had advertised an ‘old-fashioned family Thanksgiving dinner, complete with homemade cranberry chutney and mincemeat pie’ and Will naively thought he could engage his daughter in the holiday and the meal if they took the trip.

  He was wrong.

  In their rented Ford Focus they pulled into the parking lot at just after one o’clock and sat, wordlessly, as snow swirled around the car, heater on full, Christmas standards playing softly on the radio. At two-thirty, without having eaten or said a word, they headed back to the city.

  They passed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in separate rooms in the apartment, each to their own books. New Year’s Eve found Will in bed at ten o’clock. At dawn he entered the living room, found Detta sleeping on the sofa, wrapped in an afghan, a repeat of the previous night’s Times Square event on the TV. On the coffee table next to her were her prescriptions for Lexapro and Lunesta. Will sneaked the vials into the kitchen, counted the remaining pills, checked and rechecked the fill dates. As he suspected, she was overmedicating, splitting pills, but not yet at a rate that would concern him.

  Will used all his sick days and vacation days for the year by the end of January, and met twice with the board about a leave of absence. While he found abundant sympathy and understanding in the board members, he knew that their patience would only stretch so far.

  In the time since the fire Will and Detta had seen a therapist, a midtown psychi
atrist named Catherine Levinsohn. Her practice specialized in grief counseling, as well as adolescent issues. She had started Detta on 5 mg of Lexapro, then increased the dosage to 10 mg after six weeks of no improvement. The side effects could be debilitating, and Will had tried to monitor his daughter’s reaction carefully. Not easy when she could barely stand to be in the same room with him for long.

  How many people had he counseled, people enduring the pain and sorrow of grief? How many times had he moved a box of tissues across an inexpensive laminate table?

  He now knew that his words were all empty.

  Every one.

  He’d found her there a dozen times, sitting at the bus stop on Prince Street, through the rainiest fall days, the most frigid early winter afternoons, watching as the trucks arrived, watching as the scaffolding went up, watching as the tradesman came and left.

  By mid-November they had sandblasted the exterior. By the first day of the new year it looked as if nothing had ever happened there, as if a woman’s life had not been taken in a tempest of fire and glass and stone.

  Each time, without approaching his daughter, Will turned on his heels, and went home.

  He began riding at just after 2 a.m. He’d begun the habit in February when his medications would not grant him sleep. He’d gotten on his Cervélo and begun to ride without caution, without any sense of safety or concern or direction. It was not a state of physical fitness he was seeking, as he had his whole life, but rather an atonement for his health and well-being.

  On this night he headed west, toward the river. When he reached the Greenway he knew he would head south. He had the note in his pocket, the letter that explained what happened when he was thirteen, as he remembered it, the day flames split the sky and sirens filled his world, as well as the letter that apologized to Detta, the only person on earth who mattered.

  The revised last will and testament, written in his hand, was under the pillow on his bed.

  As he rode his bike toward the park he wondered what the person would look like, the cop or the FDNY responder. He wondered if this person would be young or old, male or female. You don’t get to just die in this world, Will knew all too well. Someone has to find you dead, and then you become part of their story.

  Once in the park, Will dismounted, leaned the bike against the iron fence, sat on the cold ground, catching his wind.

  It didn’t take long. Within twenty minutes Will glanced up to see two boys crossing the park, coming toward him. They were both mid-teens, hanging tough and hard. One big, one smaller. They wore dark hoodies, newer Jordans.

  When they neared Will, the big one nudged the smaller one. They stood and considered him for a long moment.

  ‘Nice bike, yo,’ the smaller one finally said. He was clearly the alpha. He made an elaborate show of lifting the hem of his hoodie to show the grip of a black handgun.

  Will said nothing.

  ‘You fuckin’ deaf?’ the smaller one asked.

  Will made eye contact. ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Then why’n you say nothing?’

  ‘You’re going to have to take it,’ Will said. ‘The bike is worth four thousand dollars. If you’re really going to use that gun, you have to pull it out now, put the barrel to my forehead, then pull the trigger.’

  ‘You think I won’t do it, motherfucker?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

  The kid once again looked at his partner, back at Will. ‘Fuck’s a matter with you, man?’

  To Will, in this darkened end of the park, the boy was Anthony Torres. He was all the troubled kids that Will had thought he was helping, kids he thought he could fix. It had all been for nothing, and now it would end.

  Will slowly stood up. ‘Do it.’

  The kid looked away for a second. It was a tell. He had lifted the hem of his hoodie with his left hand, and Will knew that he was going to throw his right. When he did, Will was ready. He leaned away, transferred the weight to his back foot, and struck a clean, hard blow to the kid’s solar plexus. The sound echoed in the night.

  The kid staggered back, his hands at his throat, gasping for air. Will stepped forward, took the gun from the boy’s waistband, a cheap Hi-Point C9. As the kid sagged to the ground, Will leveled the weapon at the other boy.

  ‘You had your chance,’ Will said. ‘Now go home.’

  No one moved. Will’s hand was steady.

  The tall kid helped his friend to his feet. Without taking their eyes from Will, they slowly backed across the park.

  Will stood in the darkness, in the cold rain, his heart pounding.

  He lost track of time.

  Heading back home he blew right through intersections, faster and faster, not looking for cross traffic, not slowing for stop signs or red lights, just as he had done that day riding home from Gould Park. The night dissolved into long streaks of muddy neon, the staccato brass of car horns and distant sirens.

  Street by street, corner by corner, Will implored the city to finish what was started in Canal Park.

  The city did not oblige.

  When Will returned to the apartment, and walked down the hallway to his room, he saw Detta’s door closing. She knew he’d left the apartment in the middle of the night.

  Will tried to calm himself, to reconcile what he had done with what he had almost done. He peeled off his sweat-soaked clothes, sat on the edge of his bed, motionless, lost in thought, for almost an hour.

  At dawn he stepped out on the balcony, burned the note, along with the hastily drawn will, along with his mea culpa to Trevor. In it he’d asked Trevor to watch over Detta.

  The ashes scattered on a breeze.

  Will walked back into the apartment, into the bathroom. He closed the door, and vomited in the sink.

  15

  New Dawn Villa was a twenty-bed, long-term care facility in Windsor, a small township in Ashtabula County. It was a state-run center for indigent patients.

  Jakob had stolen into the woman’s room long after the evening’s dinner had been served, after the tray tables were rolled away, the medications administered, after the meager night shift had taken up their books and sodas.

  Once inside he’d stood by the window and looked at the woman for more than a few minutes. Before long the woman sensed a presence, opened her eyes.

  ‘You look beautiful, Camilla,’ he said.

  The woman tried to focus on him, his face illuminated only by a pair of dim nightlights. ‘I do not look beautiful.’

  Camilla Strathaven was in her eighties. She had once been a stout and vigorous farm girl, pretty enough with her hazel eyes, straw-colored hair and sifting of freckles. Camilla had been a patient at New Dawn Villa for nearly six months.

  Jakob brought a chair silently to the edge of the bed, and sat down. ‘I remember when I was just a boy, not even old enough to shave, I would cut the grass behind Godwin Hall. You would bring me cold apple cider on hot summer days, cider from my family’s orchards. I had, of course, grown up with the nectar, but it somehow seemed sweeter and colder in your glass.’

  Camilla blushed. There was still some of the village girl left in her.

  ‘Do you recall what we talked about on my last visit?’ Jakob asked.

  Camilla just stared at him, as if there were a wall of glass between them. Earlier in the month he had looked at the woman’s chart. Camilla Strathaven had an aggressive and inoperable brain tumor. She had three months at the outside, one turn of season. What he needed from her was now a matter of great urgency.

  ‘On my last visit, we discussed something,’ he said. ‘You made a phone call. I dialed the number for you, but you talked on the telephone. Do you remember that?’

  ‘I talked to my brother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was not her brother, who had passed away more than forty years ago. It was an attorney. ‘I have the papers with me,’ Jakob said. He reached into his pocket, removed the envelope.

  ‘Pape
rs?’

  ‘I don’t want to burden you with the details until you are recovered and back home again,’ he said. ‘Your brother looked them over and he said everything is in order.’

  It took nearly a full minute, but in the end the woman managed to scrawl her signature.

  ‘I’ll be getting the newspaper now,’ Camilla said. ‘Delivered.’

  ‘Right to your door.’

  ‘How much will it cost?’

  ‘It won’t cost you anything. It will be my treat.’

  Another smile. ‘My precious Theodore.’

  Theodore Edmunds had once run the town’s bakery. The story, as everybody of an age in the village knew it, was that Camilla, widowed at twenty-two, had fallen hard for the man – a married man with three daughters – and had never given up hope that he would leave his wife and children for her.

  He never did.

  Theodore Edmunds, too, had been in the ground for decades.

  ‘Yes, my love,’ Jakob said. ‘Theodore is here.’

  16

  The small house sat a hundred feet from the main house, just at the edge of the tree line that bordered Zeven Farms. Originally the dwelling had been built to house summer and harvest workers for the orchards. In the 1940s, the van Laars built a barracks-style compound closer to their barns.

  Ivy Holgrave knew that the current resident of the cottage, the sole resident, was heavily armed. Of the firearms Ivy knew about, the Charter Arms Bulldog and the Desert Eagle were the deadliest of the arsenal. She also knew of a Mauser .380 and a Remington 770.

  And yet Ivy never went in armed.

  At just after 7 a.m. Ivy slipped her key in the lock, turned it, slowly opened the door.

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  Ivy knew that her presence had been announced, more than once, by the dated but still quite capable security system, tracking her from the driveway, across the expanse of the yard, onto the porch, even in the small foyer.

  Ivy peered around the corner into the parlor.

  The woman napping in the La-Z-Boy recliner across from the large Vizio flat screen, was in her seventies, thin and surly from a lifetime of spent anger. On the TV tray was the remote, along with that Bulldog.