Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘There are lots of ways that much money can be used, to take back,’ she said.

  ‘One can only hope.’

  ‘OK, OK – I’m going to give up asking about the prepaid rent we’re going to be enjoying for years to come.’ She picked up the little purple box. ‘This wrapping paper is lovely. Little flowers, entwined.’ She pushed the box across the table. ‘Going to open it now?’ Her eyes sparkled, teasing.

  ‘I’m never going to open it,’ I said.

  ‘But … but why?’ asked the beautiful woman, pretending to be confused.

  ‘I can tell by its weight that it’s empty. It’s the outside that matters.’

  ‘Little purple violets.’ She smiled, charmed like me.

  ‘The woman who died on a jogging path would never give away a ring her beloved sister made when they were kids. And she wants it to be known that there’s nothing to be found beneath the little flower, and would like very much to be forgotten—’

  She froze, and held a forefinger to her lips for silence. ‘Do you hear?’ she mouthed, gesturing toward the open window.

  It was a hissing, the sound of a tagger’s aerosol can. I’d heard it at the Central Works, on a frightening night. Now, with luck, it might be the sound of closure.

  She stood up, about to head again to the window. I got up, quickly grabbed her hand and led her across the would-be hall to the dark part of the second floor. A window there looked out toward the short street that led to Thompson Avenue.

  ‘Don’t you want to stop someone defacing your turret?’ she whispered, though the window where we stood was closed.

  ‘No,’ I whispered back.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she whispered.

  I nodded, agreeing.

  His shadow appeared down below, running hunched toward the short street, bulged at the back by a backpack full of paints.

  ‘He’s getting away,’ she said, speaking normally.

  ‘Again, thank goodness,’ I said.

  A john car turned off Thompson Avenue and pulled to a stop on the short street. But in the briefest of instants before its headlamps were switched off, it had lit the short figure running up onto the grass and into the darkness. And that brief instant of brightness had been enough to show a flash of red – a red I’d first seen on a kid’s shoes, a red I’d mistakenly thought to have been dusted on with other designer colors at some shoe factory, but which I now knew was overspray from a tagger’s palette of aerosol paints.

  I’d been so blind.

  ‘Let’s look,’ I said.

  I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen and we went out into the night.

  It was tiny, done with precision to cover only a single limestone block on the river side of the turret.

  ‘A little yellow smiley face,’ she said, grinning as she turned to me. ‘A perfect miniature of the huge one tagged on the drug lab after it was torched by persons unknown.’

  ‘Mister Shade is pleased,’ I said.

  She reached for my hand, to lead us back inside.

  ‘As I will be, too,’ she said.