Your Chariot Awaits

by Lorena McCourtney

  Too late. The ambulance skidded to a stop behind the deputy’s car. The paramedics rushed to Tom, who, with rub-bery folds of flesh above his thick neck, gray stubble on his jaws, and the expression of a man who’s just eaten a raw squid, apparently looked as if he needed medical attention more than I did. He was also dressed in pajamas, a wild plaid like the pants he usually wore, but he did have a blue terry-cloth robe on over them.

  “Hey, get away from me!” Tom backed away and waved his hands as the paramedics approached him. By now Moose was in a full frenzy of barking in the Sheersons’ backyard, and I remembered he’d been barking in the night too.

  I stepped forward. “I guess it’s me you came for,” I said reluctantly. “But I’m fine, just fine.” I smiled brightly and bounced on my bare feet to reinforce that claim.

  “And you are?” the shorter officer inquired.

  “Andi McConnell. I live here.” I pointed to the house. “And that’s my limousine—”

  “Your limousine?”

  “I inherited it a few days ago. Long story,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  After some discussion with the officers, with me trying my best to look both physically and mentally robust, the ambulance finally departed. By this time Joella had come out, and other neighbors had clustered and were milling around on the sidewalk.

  “What’s going on?” Jo was in a robe too, with a wispy nightgown trailing around her bare feet. She reached up to touch my sticky hair. “Andi, you’re hurt!”

  I repeated my mantra. “I’m fine, just fine. This is all just a misunderstanding.”

  Short Deputy was examining the door of the limousine, Tall Deputy circling the vehicle, both of them being very careful not to touch anything.

  “We don’t find anything that suggests you had contact with either the door or doorframe,” Short Deputy commented. “No hair or blood.”

  I fingered my head. I didn’t feel any stream of blood, but my hair was sticky and matted over Texas. “What do you mean?”

  Tall Deputy: “It doesn’t appear you hit your head on the door. Or anywhere else on the vehicle.”

  “Then I must have just fallen and hit my head on the gravel.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t struck?”

  “Struck by what?”

  “You didn’t see anyone?”

  “No. Just Tom here, when I came to.”

  “She was out cold when I found her.”

  He sounded defensive, and I was startled to realize that under the circumstances the deputies might think he was involved in my injury. Okay, Tom and I have our differences. Most people in the neighborhood have differences with Tom. He’s pointed those binoculars in my direction more than once, and he called in a complaint when Rachel was playing “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” too loudly to suit him one Christmas. But I’d never suspect him of clunking me on the head.

  Short Officer pulled out a notebook and looked at Tom. “Your name is?”

  “Tom Bolton, 413 Secret View Lane.” He pointed across the street. “Lived right there for the past twenty-four years. I’m up by five or five thirty every morning. I like to get an early start on the day.”

  An early start on spying on the neighbors, is what I thought, but what I said was, “Tom is my good neighbor. He didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “About what time did you look out and discover the door of the limousine open?” the officer asked Tom.

  “Five fifteen, five thirty, somewhere around there. I hadn’t had breakfast yet. Still haven’t had it.”

  His sour glance in my direction suggested this was definitely my fault.

  “Did you see anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Strange persons, vehicles, anything?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Short Officer turned back to me as he put the notebook away. “Have you checked the interior of the vehicle?”

  I’d looked over the interior of the limo when I moved it from the street into the driveway, but I hadn’t checked inside it since I’d found myself stretched out beside it in my pajamas. “No, I didn’t even think about it.”

  “Mind if we have a look inside?” Tall Officer asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  The officers briefly inspected the interior of the limo, front and back; then Tall Officer motioned me over.

  “Everything look okay to you? Don’t touch anything,” he warned, as I leaned inside to look.

  I peered around. Nothing looked wrong or different, and yet, oddly, something didn’t feel quite right. The door of the little fridge hung open. Had I left it that way? Had the tarp mural always sagged like that? Had the curtains all been pulled shut?

  “I guess it’s all the same,” I said finally.

  “You still think you fell, you weren’t struck with something?” Tall Officer asked.

  I hesitated, a smidgen of doubt surfacing. Could someone have clobbered me? I couldn’t actually remember stumbling. “Why would anyone hit me?”

  “We’ll check the house. Someone could have gone inside while you were unconscious.”

  It was an alarming thought. Had I been knocked out by someone for the specific purpose of burglarizing the house?

  “I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”

  “We’ll take a look around, then you can come inside and see if anything’s missing.” Short Officer turned to the crowd. “Okay, folks, fun’s over. Nothing’s happening here.” He waved an arm, gesturing them to disperse.

  The small crowd, with some reluctance, I thought, headed back toward their homes. Except for Tom, who apparently felt he had a proprietary interest because he’d found me. Joella wanted to stay too, but I squeezed her hand and told her to go back inside. Standing out here in the wet grass in her bare feet, looking worried and scared, didn’t strike me as the best situation for a pregnant young woman.

  The officers went inside, moving cautiously as they shoved the door open, guns drawn. By now I was more jittery than when I’d first found myself stretched out on the driveway.

  Now that I thought about it, my head felt as if it could have been struck, walloped by anything from a baseball bat to that shovel I’d been waving at Jerry. The officers were inside for several minutes before Tall Officer stepped up to the open door and motioned me inside.

  “All this look normal?”

  Inside, looking at the rooms through the officers’ eyes, I could see that it might appear someone had pawed through the place. Mail and magazines scattered around the swivel rocker where I usually watched TV or read. A couple of kitchen drawers open. Cornflakes box fallen over on the counter. My purse on the coffee table, contents scattered because I’d been looking for spare change in the bottom. Clothes piled around the bedroom because I’d started a get-rid-of-old-stuff project a few days ago. Medicine chest in the bathroom open, contents strewn across the counter.

  I almost wished I could claim an intruder had ransacked the house, to explain the disarray, but the truth was, this was just my level of live-alone housekeeping. I kept my desk at F&N scrupulously neat and organized, but at home my inner slob seemed to take over. I peered in my jewelry box, where I kept the only good jewelry I owned, a pair of diamond-stud earrings. They glittered up at me, and my mother’s old Hamilton watch was there too.

  “I don’t see anything missing.”

  “Good.” Short Officer pulled out a notebook. He asked a few questions, the exact spelling of my name, my marital status, did I own the house or rent, how long I’d lived here, where I was employed.

  He nodded sympathetically when I told him I’d just been laid off at F&N. “My sister-in-law just lost her job there too.”

  He scribbled my answers in the notebook, then snapped it shut. “We’ll be on our way, then. Take a flashlight if you go chasing around out there in the dark again. Avoid any bumps or falls.”

  “Right. Thanks for coming. I appreciate your quick response.”

  Outside, the offi
cers paused to admire the limousine gleaming in the rising sun. “Quite an inheritance. What are you planning to do with it?” Short Officer asked.

  “I haven’t decided yet.” I thought about my Tuesday deal picking up the charter sailboat clients. “People are telling me I should start a limousine service.”

  “Good idea. Vigland could use something like that. I might even impress my wife on our anniversary and take her out in it.”

  I gave my best chauffeur’s bow and click of heels. Neither of which were particularly impressive since I was still in pajamas and bare feet. “Your chariot awaits, sir.”

  The officers headed for their patrol car; then one of them stopped. A ray of rising sun glinted on something in the gravel at the rear of the limousine.

  “It’s just shards of glass,” I called. “I dropped a photo there yesterday, and the glass in the frame broke.”

  The two officers glanced at each other. “Maybe we should have a look in the trunk,” Tall Officer said.

  “There’s nothing in there. I cleaned it out just yesterday.”

  “We’ll take a look anyway, if you don’t mind.”

  The driver’s door was still open. I went to it, intending to pop the trunk button, but Short Officer smoothly intercepted me.

  “We’ll use the keys. They’re in the trunk lock.”

  I followed him around to the trunk, and I saw the keys now too, dangling from the lock. I couldn’t remember using the keys to open the trunk to get the uniforms, but I must have. The officer didn’t instantly open the trunk, however. Pulling latex gloves from a pocket, he donned them and carefully touched only the metal part of the key ring.

  For the first time I realized that even though the officers were being polite and considerate and helpful, they hadn’t dismissed the possibility that I wasn’t being on the up-and-up with them. But what could they think was going on here? Drugs in the trunk? And my clunk on the head was part of some drug-deal skirmish? Was that what all these don’t-touch-anything precautions were about—fingerprints?

  “Really, the trunk’s emp—”

  I’m not sure just how it happened, but both officers, Tom, and I were all congregated around the trunk when Tall Officer lifted the lid with a gloved hand.

  We gave a collective gasp as we all saw what lay inside.

  8

  That’s the guy you were chasing around with the shovel!” Tom yelped.

  I couldn’t speak. I just stared, shocked, astonished, horrified, sickened. My head and stomach reeled. Jerry lay on his side with his knees bent, his neck twisted so his face was look-ing upward. One arm was under him, the other draped across his body.

  I grabbed for something, anything, to steady myself. That happened to be Tom. He gave me a dirty look and shoved my arm away. The taller officer reached inside the trunk and felt for a pulse at Jerry’s throat. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. I think all of us already knew. Jerry’s eyes were partly open, glazed with that awful unfocus of death.

  After one petrified moment, the shorter officer ran for the patrol car, and in another moment I heard the squawk of the police radio. It came like something from another planet, loud and yet incomprehensible. Or maybe the incomprehensible part was because everything in my brain seemed stalled. Tall Officer looked at me.

  “You know this person?”

  I touched my throat. “No . . .” I whispered.

  But I didn’t mean no, I didn’t know him. I meant No, no, no! This can’t be! I’d been furious with Jerry. I’d wanted to dump lemonade over his head. I’d wanted to wham him with what I thought was a broom. But I hadn’t wished death on him. How could he be dead? How could he be here, dead?

  “Do you know him?” the officer repeated.

  “It . . . it’s Jerry Norton.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “She was chasing him all over the yard a couple of days ago! Yelling like a wild woman! She banged a shovel right into his car door trying to get to him!”

  Tall Officer’s eyebrows lifted questioningly at me.

  “We, uh, had a disagreement,” I admitted. “I was . . . encouraging him to leave. But the shovel was a mistake. I thought it was a broom—” I broke off. Even I could hear how lame that sounded. Surely a person could distinguish between a broom and a shovel. “I sent him an e-mail offering to pay for damage to the car door.”

  “There’s the shovel!” Tom sounded gleeful. He made a dramatic fling of outstretched arm toward the rusty old shovel, now lying in the gravel on the far side of the limo, where I hadn’t seen it until now.

  He started toward the shovel, but the officer commanded sharply, “Don’t touch it!”

  Tom looked startled, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his robe with a pretended nonchalance, as if he’d never intended picking it up.

  “I use it to flatten those mounds of dirt that keep showing up on the grass. Moles or gophers or something. Like those.” I pointed to a couple of new mounds over on Joella’s side of the lawn. “I didn’t hit Jerry with it!”

  I broke off again. No one had accused me of hitting Jerry.

  Why was I so frantically denying it? “I mean, someone hit me. Maybe they used the shovel!”

  “A few minutes ago you said you’d stumbled and fallen.”

  “I . . . I thought I must have, but maybe . . . I don’t know!”

  I’ve never fainted in my life, but I felt on the edge of it right then. Jerry dead . . . dead. In the trunk of my limousine. The officer looking at me with an oddly speculative expression. My head doing a loop-the-loop carnival spin.

  “He was murdered, wasn’t he?” Tom said. “Clobbered with that shovel and then dumped in the trunk! I knew it. I knew some-thing like this was gonna happen soon as I saw that limousine!”

  “I don’t understand . . .” I shook my head, too bewildered to be more than distantly aware of pain caused by the movement. “How did he die? How did he get in there?”

  “He didn’t crawl in by himself,” Tom said. “That’s for sure. Looks to me like—”

  “Cause of death will have to be determined by the medical examiner,” the officer cut in. “Deputy Cardoff is calling the station now.”

  “I don’t understand!” I repeated. “Everything was okay when I came out to lock the limo—”

  “What time was that?”

  I thought back, and my mind tossed up those red letters on my clock radio. “It was 4:03 AM. I looked at the clock,” I explained quickly, because I thought the officer might think it odd I knew the exact time. “I heard Moose—that’s the Sheersons’ dalmatian—barking. And I realized the limo wasn’t locked, so I came out to do it. It was all foggy then.”

  “Did you look in the trunk at that time?”

  “No, I just opened the door on the driver’s side, and the light went on and . . . something happened. I don’t remember anything after that until Tom found me lying on the ground.”

  “Had Mr. Norton been a visitor in the house earlier last night?”

  “No. We’d . . . broken up,” I said reluctantly. “I hadn’t seen him since Wednesday.”

  “You’d had a personal relationship?”

  “For the last four months or so. He also worked at F&N.”

  “But you don’t know why he was here on your property, or how he got here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But it’s no wonder she didn’t want you guys looking in the trunk of the limousine,” helpful Tom put in.

  The officer joined his buddy over at the patrol car. I couldn’t hear their discussion, but I doubted they were talking about what an exemplary citizen I was.

  I couldn’t look at Jerry. And yet I couldn’t not look at him. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt. Dark socks. His loafers were around behind his body, as if they’d been tossed in after him. I couldn’t see any wound, but there was a dark blotch of something around his head and shoulders.

  Oh, Jerry, Jerry, I’m so sorry! Who did this? Be
cause some-body had. Tom might be acting like a pea brain, but he was right about one thing: Jerry hadn’t crawled into the trunk by himself. He was put there by someone. But by whom? Why? And how come here?

  Murder.

  Both officers returned to where I was still standing by the trunk. I sensed a change in atmosphere now. Before, the offi-cers had been interested and sympathetic, concerned that I may have been hit by some unknown assailant and not realized it. Now there was a ground shift, invisible vibes changing channels, and I felt myself helplessly slipping from victim to suspect.

  Neither officer said anything to me, but I found myself almost frantic to convince them of what really was true. “I . . . I don’t know anything about any of this!”

  Together the two men went over and bent to examine the shovel without touching it. One of them pointed to the blade. The other one nodded. I could see something red on it. Bits of paint from the Trans Am? Or blood?

  Tall Officer returned. “When did you last use the shovel?”

  “I . . . I guess when I was chasing Jerry with it.”

  The notebook came out again. “And this was?”

  “Wednesday evening. We had a disagreement, and I wanted him to leave. But, like I told you, I didn’t realize I was chasing him with the shovel—honestly I didn’t! I thought I’d grabbed the broom. That one over there by the garage.” I pointed to the broom.

  “Did you leave the shovel where it is now?”

  “I think I put it back there by the broom.” But I wasn’t certain. At this point I wasn’t certain of anything.

  And this could look bad for me, very bad, I realized with an apprehension that made my palms go icy-sweaty. I’d chased Jerry with that shovel. With Tom and half of Secret View Lane as witnesses. To add to it, Jerry’s body now lay in my vehicle. And I’d been out here in the middle of the night under what even I could see looked like odd and suspicious circumstances.

  “But someone hit me. That’s why I was unconscious. It must have been the same person who killed Jerry.” I touched the back of my head again, wishing now I’d let the paramedics at least look at the bump.