Left Field

by Elizabeth Sims

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said. “How did you boil the coffee water? Propane burner?”

  “Yes,” said Donna with resignation and tight lips.

  “I’m confused,” said Flora.

  “They’re squatters,” I told her.

  A gust of relief blew from the diaphragms of our hosts. No more pretending.

  Flora understood. “Oh! Then this whole thing is performance art!”

  What a terrific response.

  I said, “Indeed, what is life but one long performance?”

  “Right,” Blair said, and Donna actually smiled. It was a true smile, involving her eyes and smooth young brow and everything.

  We arranged ourselves on stools or perched on the tables. The air was bright with the smell of paints and spilled turpentine.

  “Right,” I said. “What did the police say when they came in?”

  Donna responded, “After we told them what we knew, which was nothing, they asked to look around, and we were like, whatever. Unless the property owner puts in a complaint, there’s nothing they can do.”

  “And they really don’t give a shit,” said Blair. “The police, I mean.”

  I said, “And the neighbors—”

  “That’s why we keep the yard up,” said Blair.

  “Who’s gonna complain?” asked Donna.

  “Certainly not I,” said Flora.

  “Where are the owners?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Donna. “We did our research. They’re Canadians. They own a chain of record stores, and their business is naturally enough going down the tubes. We’re betting they’re gonna default on this place, if they haven’t already.”

  “So you’ve got quite a bit of time,” I said.

  “Years, maybe,” Blair agreed.

  Flora asked if they’d tried getting the utilities turned on, and Donna explained that you have to pay the bill up to the date service was cut off. “And it was almost five thousand dollars. So, no, we can’t afford it right now.”

  They could tell Flora and I were genuinely interested in them, so their relaxation increased, and Donna dropped a bit more of her suffering-artiste stance, and all of a sudden, we were friends.

  They showed us all around. I was especially interested in the water situation, and they took us down the basement and showed us how they’d set up barrels to catch rainwater and snowmelt from the roof and ran a flexible line from a main downspout.

  When the barrels ran dry they crept out at night and ran an extended hose from the Pomeroys’ garden spigot into the basement.

  “We’re sorry,” said Blair. Donna did not look sorry; she only shrugged.

  “It’s perfectly all right,” said Flora. “Help yourself any time.” I saw her gears turning, and I smiled to myself.

  The whole setup fascinated me. A mansion with free rent! Apart from the studied scruffiness, our hosts seemed clean. They had a car in back, a little Toyota that looked to be in decent shape.

  “What do you guys live on?” I asked.

  “Well, our art,” said Donna, though her eyes slid away from mine.

  “To be honest, we mostly find odd jobs on Craigslist and stuff,” said Blair, sitting cross-legged on a table. “We earn food and gas money, anyway, plus we barter. I can fix stuff, and we can both cook and do yard work.”

  “Do you dumpster-dive?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. Then, quickly, he added, “But not the cookies! We bought those at the store.”

  Somehow, seeing these two people making their way like this gave me a sense of possibilities. There’s always a way.

  Our little party returned to the living room, where Flora once again pointed out her favorite picture. “All right,” she said. “How much for that one?”

  Donna was ready. “I’ll let that one go for nine hundred.” She smoothed her ratty skirt with her hands.

  Nine hundred dollars, I thought. Hell, what nerve!

  “Let’s make it an even five thousand.” Flora drew her checkbook from her purse. “I need something to write on.”

  Blair and Donna chuffed in disbelief (as did I) but quickly collected themselves. They looked at me as if to say, “Is she all right?” I just smiled. That was Flora Pomeroy.

  She needed a last name for the check; Donna gave it as Weatherfield. At least she had a current ID, and I guessed they both had driver’s licenses, so it wasn’t as if they were totally shadow people.

  We went to the kitchen, where Blair passed around the cookie package as Flora leaned a forearm on the counter and wrote her check.

  “Very generous of you,” said Donna. “I accept.”

  “Most of this is pretty cool,” I said, taking another cookie now that they could afford a few more packages, “but I can’t say it’s cool that you guys broke down those walls upstairs. I mean, given that you’re basically stealing rent and—”

  “It’s an improvement,” interrupted Donna. She blinked at me defensively through her glasses.

  “We’re not trashing this house,” put in Blair.

  “OK, OK.” I was just trying to run a thorough justification check in my head.

  Blair added, “If you think this is trashed, you should have seen some of our other squats.”

  “You guys are experienced?”

  “Oh, yes!” They told us this was their fourth and by far best squat. They’d squatted in abandoned commercial buildings all over town, and they’d even camped on Belle Isle, “which was really stupid,” said Blair, and I saw his eyes remembering. “There were crazy assholes that roamed every square inch of that place at night. It’s better now since the state took it over.” Belle Isle was now run by the DNR, with regular staff and a curfew.

  Donna opened the kitchen door and moved outside so languidly that we were all drawn along, drinking in the fresh summer air.

  “We’re putting in a vegetable garden,” said Blair.

  I hadn’t set foot on that lawn since the day I’d discovered Abigail Rawson’s corpse. I skirted the spot and noticed we all did. The grass around it was recovering from the trampling it had suffered that day.

  Blair led us to a line of shrubs that separated the back half of their yard from the Pomeroys’. He showed us a twelve-foot square of spaded dirt. “We missed spring planting, but I swear I’m gonna get on this tomorrow.”

  “Attaboy,” said Flora. “Well, I have to be off. Will you bring over the painting when you can?”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Pomeroy,” said Blair, and Donna nodded.

  “Please call me Flora.” She made her way back to her house.

  “I have to go too, pretty soon,” I said, but I was staring at the spaded dirt. Freshly dug ground. I watched it as if it were about to do something. A body would fit there, all right. Maybe my intuition was wrong about these kids after all? Of course I can be as paranoid as the next person.

  I pushed through some yews to a raspberry bush. “Look at these berries, you guys!”

  “Oh, pick us some!” said Donna, in an uncharacteristically cheerful tone. A check for five grand can improve just about anybody’s mood.

  I gathered a handful of the sweet red fruit from the thorny canes. My leg came in contact with something hard, and I thought it was an old fence post, but it moved. I looked down and saw shiny metal.

  “The hell’s this?” I picked it up then stepped backward out of the shrubbery and handed the berries to Donna.

  It was an aluminum bat. The kind you take to the softball diamond and try to smack a home run with.

  “How did that get there?” said Blair.

  A cold feeling took over my midsection. I turned the bat in my hands. There was a reddish smear on the fat end. I looked closely and made out tiny spatters at its edges.

  I turned to my companions. “Call the police.”

  13

  Abigail Rawson’s cousin must have hated her, I thought, as I pulled into the parking lot of the cut-rate funeral home she’d selected. Either that or she really couldn’t give t
wo shits. Mercedes had said something about a dispute with the cousins. The service was scheduled for ten on Saturday morning; I got there at nine-thirty so I could stake out a spot in back, where I could see everybody come in.

  The place, down on Woodward, featured signs warning against gang insignia, scotch-taped to horrible cheap paneling that reminded me of the motels around the horse track in Hazel Park. There were fluorescent lights like you’d put in an interrogation cell. An incredibly heavy air freshener thickened the atmosphere with a cloying, thousand-flower smell; it was so bad I almost would have preferred to inhale the low-level putridity I suspected it of covering.

  I met the cousin, a brassy, bossy type who looked put out by the whole business. Her name was Suzanne something. I fixed her with a penetrating look but caught no criminal vibes. Just maybe a little meanness. As well, I met Abby’s brother, Captain Novak Rawson, broad shouldered in Navy dress blues, with sad pouches under his eyes.

  “My sympathies to you both,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Novak. “Where…uh…where did you know Abby from?”

  “We played on the same ball team.”

  The casket was fortunately closed. It’s grim enough to know what’s inside.

  The cousin and brother stood side by side, anxious. I decided to just go ahead. “I know you’ve both talked to the police, but I…I wonder…do you have any idea who would have wanted to hurt Abby?” You never know what crumb might drop.

  They shook their heads, and Novak said, “I’ve seen her only once since I was deployed two and a half years ago. I came back for a week when our dad died ten months ago. She was just…living her life. Never thought I’d have to come here again so soon. This is so—wrong.” He cleared his throat, lifted his head, and got ahold of himself.

  I started to ask him about his father, but the funeral director—too-tight suit, shiny face—walked up and needed their attention.

  No sooner had I taken a seat in the back when Lieutenant Sorrel came in, spoke to the family, then headed in my direction. I thought he might show. If I were the detective on the case, I would have come, because they say often the killer attends the funeral, especially if it was a thrill killing. Which who knew in this case?

  “Looks like we have the same idea,” he said, taking a seat next to me.

  I was surprised. “Why do you say that?”

  “What do you think I am—dumb?” He stretched his legs and tipped his chair back. It creaked alarmingly, and he returned it upright.

  “So…you know I’m a reporter? Who did you talk to?”

  “Tom Ciesla and I are friends.”

  “Oh, my gosh!”

  “We were motorcycle cops in the Army together. Fort Bragg, you know, some few years ago.”

  “No kidding!”

  Tom was a detective in the Eagle PD I’d gotten to know while working for the shitty weekly there. I got fired for attempting to carve the ass off the boss’s son with an X-Acto knife after he pawed me one too many times.

  “Well, I love Tom,” I said. “He told you I’m OK?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, then he probably told you I’m a royal pain, but I keep my mouth shut, and sometimes I come up with stuff?”

  “Basically.”

  I started to laugh but caught myself. “You know what I’m wondering.”

  Lieutenant Sorrel paused for a long time. I thought it was to let me know he was doing me a favor. But he said, “I owe Tom a few favors. He asked me to be generous with you.”

  “He did?”

  “I think he’s trying to look out for you a little bit.”

  Now this was a piece of luck. Although I’d caused Tom Ciesla no end of headache, I’d also helped him, and Sorrel knew it. Moreover, Tom was always encouraging me to do more with my freelance career—which included investigative journalism. I waited quietly, because Sorrel’s vibe was still a bit uncertain. Finally he said, “The bat was the murder weapon.”

  “Oh, God.”

  He was grudgingly grateful that I’d found it. “Look, I can’t pretend we have this city under control. I hate reporters, and I hate reporters who think they can work with the police. But to tell you the truth, if somebody comes up with a key piece of evidence, I’m not going to be stupid enough to turn my back.”

  There’s a certain aura cops have—a hard look about the eyes; well, they’ve spent their careers trying to perfect the I’m-un-fuck-withable look. They’ve seen so much, been fooled and betrayed too much, that skepticism and mistrust are never far below the surface.

  If they get to know you, they can relax. But take it from me, you get one chance with a cop. If you fuck it up, that’s it; they’ll never trust you again.

  With Sorrel, like my friend Tom Ciesla, I saw a little something beneath the hard-ass shell. Yes, there it was in his eyes—I realized it was a sense of humor. A sharp one.

  Thank God, you know?

  “So that was Abigail Rawson’s blood on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Besides yours,” he said, “there were two other sets, one overlapping the other. But no match, nothing in any of the databases.”

  “Hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  Members of the ball team arrived in clumps as we talked. The air freshener was making the bridge of my nose ache.

  “So,” I said, “do you figure whoever bashed her just flung the bat away, and it landed in that bush?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Her purse or wallet hasn’t turned up?”

  “No.”

  “You gonna fingerprint the ball team?”

  “We’ve asked if they’ll voluntarily come in and be printed, yeah.”

  “And if somebody refuses?”

  “We’ll take a closer look at them.”

  “Speaking of fingers, what about Abigail’s? I noticed some of them were scraped, like, it seemed, with a little blood on the finger pads.”

  He gave me a look that was half surprised respect, half pissed off. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s possible there was a struggle.”

  “Like she scratched somebody?”

  “Hard to say—or the attacker was wearing some kind of garment with a rough surface. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Mercedes sailed in, gussied up in a cream-colored pencil skirt and low-cut jacket with flared lapels that made her look like a wise calla lily. The team clustered around her like chicks. Jackie was there and looked relieved to see me. Everybody said hello. Carmen gave me a quick, cold glance.

  Another woman, as strikingly dressed but with more jewelry than Mercedes, came in and paid her respects. She carried an aura of importance and terrific confidence, starting with massive tall hair, the kind of hard tall hive style that had never been a dominant fashion among black women but was striking for its bulletproof, satiny perfection. I couldn’t imagine the underlying engineering. She held her head high.

  Her outfit was black and purple silk—a barely butt-covering skirt and death-defying heels—with enough costume jewelry to have bent the spine of a lesser woman. She was as broad in the beam as those wonderful Greek statues. Unbelievable legs, jacked-up tits. I figured she was in her late thirties, not much more.

  A spectacular individual.

  As she moved, you could almost see the eddies swirling around her. After talking to the family for a solemn minute, she stood back and looked around, totally ignoring the ball team—especially Mercedes, who was her closest competition, looks-wise. Her gaze skimmed over the butchy, clumsily dressed athletes as if they were stumps.

  Her vibe was unmistakable to me; she had to show that a) she knew she was surrounded by a bunch of lezzies; and b) she disdained them. She was too classy to literally turn up her nose, but her stiff dismissal spoke it.

  Then she spotted Lieutenant Sorrel, and her face lit up. She practically galloped over.

  “Leon! Leon! What are you doing here?”

  What are y
ou doing here? I wondered.

  He rose and took the hand she extended. He smiled politely as she, remembering herself, hushed her voice and said, “Very sad, isn’t it? I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”

  “How’ve you been, Shirlene?” he said.

  “Oh—fine. You know.” She looked full into his eyes. “It’s hard. You know. Such a wonderful person.” She spoke with the deliberate resonance of someone accustomed to being listened to, a person who likes to give orders.

  “Yes,” said Sorrel, looking full into her eyes right back. His thin hands hung relaxed at his sides. His suit in summer-weight midnight-blue serge gave him a quietly dashing air.

  “Quite the bunch here, hm?” she said with a subtle smirk. “Guess I’d better watch my back.”

  Sorrel didn’t get what she meant, but I did.

  This Shirlene person looked at me with meaning, clearly wanting me to move over so she could sit next to Sorrel, who was on the aisle. I didn’t move, though, but extended my hand. “I’m Lillian Byrd.”

  She gave me a look of benevolent disgust and touched my fingers. “Shirlene Cord.” With the meaning of Now you know who I am.

  But I’d already realized who she was: Abby’s boss at DeMedHo. So this was Shirlene Cord. Holy crap.

  I’d learned a little bit about her. Seemed she almost single-handedly had founded that organization, which rapidly had become a sizeable department in the city government.

  I was expecting a shifty-eyed, gray bureaucrat as Abby’s boss—that or a warm, caring, obese social-worker-turned-administrator.

  However you looked at her, Shirlene Cord was an emphatic presence. Evidently her homophobia hadn’t been a hindrance to her and Abby’s relationship.

  “It’s hot in here. Don’t you think it’s hot in here?” she said to Sorrel, her teeth flashing from a gigantic swath of glossy crimson lipstick.

  In fact it was quite cool in this mortuary—even budget funeral homes spend what they have to on air conditioning, I guess.

  Sorrel just smiled at her, frankly drinking her in.

  “Well, you’re a cool customer,” she said, eating him up, and I got what was going on. She wasn’t my type, but if those headlights were ever turned on me, I’d have probably rolled over in a second to let my belly be scratched.