Crazy, VA

by Hill, Shannon

  I pitched a fit. I hate the phrase, and I hate the action, but I pitched me a royal first-class grade-A fit. I broke the front door off its hinges slamming it, I kicked a metal trashcan into a dented hunk of uselessness, I screamed profanities at the top of my lungs. Boris, safely in his condo, watched with something like awe. Kim, cowering behind the door to the restroom, just watched, ready to dodge any accidental missiles sent her way. When I’d hurled the county phone book across the office, knocked the pale blue curtains off the rod and the rod clean off its brackets, I finally took a breath. My chest heaved a few times, sweat stung my eyes, but I felt better. Not much, but enough to survive.

  “That motherfucking son-of-a-bitchin’ piece of shit,” I concluded, dropping into my chair. “Shit.”

  Kim edged into the office carefully, ready to dive for cover. Boris leapt onto my lap, tail waving, and lapped at the trickle of sweat on my cheek. “Um,” said Kim. “Mrrp,” said Boris.

  “Raymond no more killed her than I did,” I fumed, and sank my fingers into Boris’s coat. Thickening against winter. Soft and lush. The mere feel of it lowered my blood pressure. “God damn Jack Littlepage to hell.”

  “Um,” said Kim in a tiny voice. “Do you want me to…”

  I took a look at the carnage, waved a hand. “Go home. I’ll clean up.”

  “But the door,” said Kim, her forehead a mass of wrinkles. “It’s…”

  I swiveled to look at the door. It hung from one hinge. A second look showed me the hinges had twisted. “Crap,” I said mildly, and for some reason Kim giggled. “I’ll call someone.”

  Kim snatched up her purse and her cardigan, a long bulky thing that doubled her size and was no color known to Nature. Sort of neon pink with traces of screaming purple. “You sure…?”

  Nodding, I shooed her out the door with a look, and kicked back to tell Boris how wonderful he was. He didn’t mind a bit, curling up with his paws tucked under and his eyes squeezed shut like a particularly happy Buddha. While he purred, I stared at my white board. There had to be a way. Something to do. And maybe, it occurred to me, it’d be for the best that people knew Raymond Gomez had been arrested. Someone might get sloppy. Might‌…‌relax.

  Boris’s ears twitched a moment before I heard the knock on the door. Glancing over, I saw Donny Tucker’s head poking into the office. He was examining the door.

  “Your aunt,” he said calmly, “sent me over. She figured there’d be‌…‌debris.”

  Aunt Marge would know. I’d last pitched a fit at fifteen, over a grave injustice, and put a crack right down the middle of a solid walnut door. The grave injustice in question being that Aunt Marge grounded me for a month after she found me sneaking romance novels into the house. Aunt Marge loathes romance novels, even the potato-chip-and-fluff kind where there’s nothing more explicit than a kiss and a declaration of love following some terrible misunderstanding. The steamy stuff Bobbi lent me put Aunt Marge into a world-class snit. I still remember what she told me as she confiscated every last book: This trash rots the female mind! Only a man could possibly write a book where a woman falls in love with her rapist! Then she’d shaken her finger in my face, wielding a book as if it were raw sewage. These books are fantasy! Fantasies written by men to make women think they’re supposed to swoon at the mere sight of a penis!

  She has never, to my knowledge, uttered the word penis at any other time in her life.

  I never did touch a romance novel again. Like potato chips, marshmallows, and snack cakes with a decades-long shelf life, romances were scratched from my diet.

  “How bad is it?” I asked Donny, while that entertaining little memory trotted through my brain. “Can we have it fixed or…”

  “Just cheap hinges,” he assured me with one of those brief, lazy smiles. “New hinges and she’ll be fine. I’ve got old brass ones I salvaged. They’ll work.”

  He set down his tool boxes. One was a fishing tackle box with trays upon folding-out trays of fasteners neatly organized. The other had trays of equally well-organized tools. Not a power tool in sight. Interesting.

  He took the door off its remaining hinge, removed the old hinges, and attached new brass ones. “The screws,” he remarked professionally, “held better than the metal.”

  Boris jumped down to get a closer look. Donny put out a hand, and Boris approached, tail low, body tense. He sniffed, sneezed delicately, and turned his back. For Boris, that’s almost a compliment. I grinned as Donny raised a surprised eyebrow. “Not very friendly.”

  Boris had moved on to a thorough sniffing of the tool boxes. “He’s a cop cat.”

  Donny nodded gravely, and wrestled the door into place. I got up and popped in the hinge pins under his direction, while Boris supervised.

  “Good,” said Donny at last. “Anything else?”

  The curtain rod only had to be put back in its brackets, and the trashcan was a loss. I shrugged. “Nothing else. How much will I owe you?”

  He blushed a little, kept his eyes down as he closed the toolboxes. “Call it a freebie. I had the hinges anyway.”

  Automatic protest rose to my lips and faded as suspicion entered my head. I blushed. Shook it off. “Oh. Well, thanks. I’m grateful.”

  As he left, he asked, “What makes you think that man didn’t do it?”

  Not a challenge. Curiosity. I sighed. “Instinct. Hunch.”

  “I heard,” he said delicately, hand on the knob, “that Chief Rucker claims he dumped her body on the way back to Charlottesville.”

  I’d heard that too. Yet one thing bothered me. If he’d indeed stabbed her‌—‌why no blood at the guesthouse? The county boys had searched it top to bottom. And why dump her at Spottswood Park? Why not leave her body where it was? And if time of death was inaccurate by nearly two damn hours‌—‌it was set at 2 a.m. with an hour’s leeway in either direction‌—‌we still had a witness who saw the truck leaving between midnight and half-past. According to Tom, the truck hadn’t yet yielded much other than Lisa’s fingerprints and a few hairs. If those remained after a month, chances were blood trace would’ve been found too.

  Beyond all that, my gut told me Raymond was the kind of man who, having killed a lover in a fit of rage or passion, would confess to it.

  “Chief Rucker,” I said with rare diplomacy, “has a unique take on the case.”

  Donny Tucker looked me in the eye. Seemed to be pondering something. Said with great deliberation, “I don’t get involved in other people’s business.”

  I waited for the disclaimer’s inevitable but.

  “But,” he went on, “maybe this’ll help you a bit.” He hesitated, torn, I think. “I heard Mrs. Littlepage‌—‌the senior Mrs. Littlepage,” he specified, “is seeing a shrink.”

  Why would that help? She lost her daughter.

  Then I recalled that odd lack of flinch in her. Asked sharply, “What’s your source?”

  He had the grace to look abashed. “It’s private.”

  I let it slide. I could get it out of him if I needed to, but I had my own sources. I thanked him, shut the door, and told Boris, “We’re going for a manicure, kiddo.”

  ***^***

  The manicure didn’t do much for me but buff up my fingernails. It also exfoliated the skin on my hands and led to a detailed discussion on proper nail maintenance. Zero information on the murder, but all things considered, not a waste of time or money. There’s something about having someone else fuss over you‌—‌even if they’re paid to do it‌—‌that improves the mood.

  I went home humming, while a very disgruntled Boris sulked in his car seat. The chemical odors at Bobbi’s had bothered him, and then to his dismay, he’d been forcibly cuddled. He didn’t claw the woman, perhaps sensing her age and frailty, but he’d ruffed his fur and given me an angry slit-eyed glare of resignation.

  I ran everything past Aunt Marge, who rocked and nodded thoughtfully as I spoke. When I’d finished, she said, “Dear, why is it important that Mary Littlepage is seein
g a psychiatrist? She did lose her daughter, after all, in a terrible way.”

  “I don’t know!” I cried, brushing Boris vigorously. He loved to lean into the brush, and would sometimes push so hard he’d fall over. “But if it’s not important, why would he mention it?”

  “I will admit,” said Aunt Marge austerely, hands cupped around a mug of what smelled like rosehips and chamomile tea, “I have never liked Mary Littlepage. She is a Palmer, you know, of the Palmers.”

  Ah. FFV. First Families of Virginia. And heady company even for the Littlepages.

  “She is a bit of a snob. By which I mean to say,” continued Aunt Marge placidly, “she decides your value by how long your family has been in the country. We were at school together for one year, and only one year, thank heavens. She is clever, not intelligent, and she hasn’t a single natural taste or talent I could detect. It is all… learned.”

  I got her point. I continued to brush Boris until his excitement got the best of him, and he wrestled the brush into submission, sinking in his teeth and kicking his hind legs against it while he hugged it to his belly. I laughed a little, sobered fast.

  “So it might be… pro forma,” I replied after a long pause, broken by the thud of Aunt Marge’s mug on the end table. “Like her reaction when I gave her the news. Knock knock, no one home.”

  Aunt Marge yawned behind her hand. “Sad to say, yes.”

  My tired brain wanted to accept that. My gut refused. It said something lived behind Mary Littlepage’s eyes, and it wasn’t pleasant. Then again, that wasn’t grounds for suspecting the woman of killing her daughter.

  “My poor Lil,” said Aunt Marge, resting a hand on my head as she walked toward the stairs.

  She’d done that when I told her I was going to get a master’s in criminal justice and apply to the FBI. And done it again when I got into the FBI Academy, and again when I became an agent. And yet again when I had returned home after my brief, inglorious career with the Bureau. I knew what her words meant. They were her way of saying, without speech, My poor dear deluded Lil, who will chase bad guys like Ahab chased Moby Dick, and with as much reward.

  I lay on the floor. Boris trod on my bladder a few times for fun, and settled in for a long session of sucking his toes clean. I envied him. It would be a great life if my biggest worry was slurping the dirt out from between my toes.

  ***^***

  The next morning, I was in one of those easygoing moods that don’t come to me too often, when I’m more or less at peace with my world. The air had a crisp edge to it, the mountaintops were red and orange, but our little valley was still green and soft, with mist-wraiths swirling above Elk Creek. Indescribably perfect. I greeted Kim, picked up a new citation pad, and sauntered off to Turner’s Gap Road to set up my speed trap. Boris settled in to watch the traffic, and I kept only half an eye on the radar. I issued two speeding tickets, then lazed back to the office to hand them to Kim to process.

  I should’ve paid attention to Boris. His ears swiveled oddly as we approached the door, and when I opened it, I heard Brian Craig snarling, “Now!”

  He had drawn his sidearm. He had it pointed at Marti Green of Green’s Pharmacy. She was white-faced, her purse clutched to her chest, eyes like an animal in headlights. That she’d been brought in for what was her fifth or sixth ticket of the year‌—‌and thus a fourteen-day license suspension in our little town‌—‌was probable. That she deserved the treatment she was getting‌—‌wasn’t.

  I looked past her to Kim, who nodded slightly to show she was okay. I wondered if she’d had a chance to press our panic button. It seems odd to have one in a police station, but I’d bullied Maury into having it installed. If something went bad‌—‌like this, say‌—‌I took comfort from knowing the county boys might show up in time to identify our corpses.

  “Brian,” I said softly, as Boris huffed and began a rising growl, “you want to holster that, please.”

  He was trembling. Rigid. Flushed, yet pale around the eyes and mouth. Bad combination.

  “She won’t hand over her bag!”

  I wanted to close my eyes, wake up, start the day over. There are some secrets you can’t keep, and in a town this size, Marti’s was one of them. Her husband is, unfortunately for Marti, quite impotent‌—‌his medication takes it out of him, if you’ll pardon the expression‌—‌and she has certain hobbies. Perfectly legal. Performed in the privacy of an old workshed behind her house. If a healthy woman in her forties wants to entertain herself, I’m not about to ask how. Or with whom, if it comes to that. She can call that workshed a reading room or a pottery or whatever she wants, as long as she doesn’t give me any reason to knock on the door.

  I’d have bet about twenty dollars she received something interesting and new in a brown wrapper at the pharmacy that morning when she opened the previous day’s delivery. And she’d gone speeding home to try it out, pleading to her hopefully oblivious husband that she had one of her “migraines” coming on.

  Polite fictions, as Aunt Marge has often said, are the basis of civilized society.

  “Brian,” I said, “she doesn’t need to give up her purse.”

  Gratitude and shame warred in Marti’s eyes.

  “She might have…”

  “Deputy Craig,” I interrupted very gently, watching Boris slink behind the man with his ears slicked back, “please holster your weapon.”

  I’d started to ease my own gun out, figuring I could shoot him dead if necessary, when he hesitated, tiny beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. “Ma’am. Sheriff. She refused to surrender her bag.”

  Forget walking on eggshells. I was dancing barefoot on shards of broken glass. “And I’ll talk to her about that. Put the weapon down.”

  “I thought I saw…” He was really sweating now, his gun hand picking up the tremble that ran through the rest of him. “Ma’am, when she opened the bag to retrieve her license, I thought I saw batteries. Wires.”

  I blushed hot red. So did Kim. So did Marti, who looked nonetheless ready to die by gunshot rather than suffer death by embarrassment.

  “It’s not an IED,” I said, searching for a delicate enough phrase, and improvised wildly, “It’s a…. PFD.”

  At that, his gaze flicked toward me, away from Marti. I willed Boris not to jump, realized a split second later that Boris would jump if Brian turned the weapon on me.

  “A PFD is a, um, private female device,” I said, with a straight face. Believe me, you can laugh all you like, but when there’s a loaded gun pointed at someone, you do not get the giggles.

  More sweat. Another flicker, his gun hand lowering slightly. “Private,” he repeated. “Female. Device.”

  “Yes.” I hoped he wasn’t suffering enough post-traumatic stress that I had to give him a whole new case by describing the thing to him. “It’s a very complicated woman thing. No concern to you.”

  “But, she…”

  Boris had crept closer to Brian, tail lashing. I can’t believe the man didn’t sense the cat’s menace. “And I’ll have a chat with her about not explaining to you, but women don’t discuss certain things with men. Okay?”

  Brian didn’t budge. I looked at Marti, getting my own weapon free at last‌—‌it’s hard to draw by millimeters‌—‌and said, “Marti, put the bag down. Okay? On the floor between your feet. Then step back from it. Just one step.”

  She dropped the bag. Straight out of her hands to the floor. It hit with an oddly loud thunk, and everything happened at once, yet in slow motion.

  Boris levitated in pure startlement.

  Brian swung his weapon and fired.

  Kim screamed.

  I fired my weapon and dove behind my desk.

  Marti hit the floor with a louder smack than her purse had made.

  Brian hit the floor with a very loud thud.

  Boris landed, every hair on end, teeth bared in a snarl, and turned into a terrified blur.

  Then time and space re-aligned. I panted, “Kim?�
�

  “Okay,” came the weak response. “Lil?”

  I peeked over my desk, saw Brian and Marti flat on the floor. I kept my gun pointed at Brian, crept to Marti and checked her pulse. Fluttery but fine. It took me another second to understand she’d passed out. There wasn’t a mark on her. By the smell, she’d wet herself. Well, no wonder. I’d figured she was a goner, too.

  Kim had the county boys on the radio, demanding the ambulance. I told her to get the smelling salts for Marti, and prodded Brian with my foot. He was down, unconscious, alive. He’d been using a one-handed stance, and was right-handed, so I’d hit his left arm. Blood everywhere. I told Kim to get one of my towels from the shower, and used it to apply direct pressure. I had a nasty guess I’d shattered a bone. Things were‌…‌moving… under my hands. Which, I’ll be honest, were shaking so bad I couldn’t have hit the broadside of a barn from ten feet away.

  I heard a frightened “Mew?”

  Boris stuck his head back into the office, all fluffed and arched. I sighed, relieved to see he was all right, and he toe-tipped inside, skittering sideways now and then. His eyes devoured his face. He sniffed me anxiously, then fled to his condo when Kim dropped the first-aid kit. I jumped, too, and so did Kim. We traded skewed smiles. Right about then, Tom Hutchins came in the door with a shotgun. Kim shrieked. I yelled. Tom nearly dropped the gun, eyed Brian warily. “What hit him? Her?” He jerked a thumb at Marti.

  “Me,” I said, and placed my Sig Sauer on my desk. “Where’s the rest of the cavalry?”

  Tom lowered the shotgun, reddening. “Ah, well, um, I’m it.” At sight of my face, he hastily added, “But the ambulance is on the way.”

  “Oh,” I drawled. “Well, goodie.” I stood, thrust the bloody towel at him. “Make sure he doesn’t bleed to death, will you? I need to use the restroom.”

  ***^***