Darkness Once More (Archie Lemons #1)

by Grant Fieldgrove

  "They're not magic shoes, Elise. As far as I know, the only person with magical shoes was HammerMan! I'm afraid I am going to have to rethink that whole family thing now. This is just too much."

  "This coming from the guy with a pee stain on his shorts and a Humpty Hump t-shirt."

  "You leave Humpty alone. Even he wouldn't wear those shoes. Come on, seriously, why?"

  "Like I said, they're comfortable and they help tone your lower body."

  "Come on, you look like a retarded Frankenstein in those things." She picked up a pillow and smacked me with it. Oh, the humanity. I let out a horrible cry. "Oh my god, Archie! I totally forgot! I'm so sorry!"

  I took a few seconds to try to hold on to some dignity before I finally told her I was okay. I wasn't really, but ya know. I then took the conversation to a completely different topic and told her thank you for always believing that I didn't kill Marianne.

  "Why would I ever believe that? Nobody believed that."

  "I'm not so sure about that. I saw the way some people looked at me at the funeral. You never know. The detective that was here is probably still convinced I did it and I've seen enough movies to know that whenever a wife is killed the husband is always suspect numero uno."

  "Yeah, well people can believe whatever they want. If that thought even crossed their minds, then screw 'em. You don't need those people. Those people didn't know you and my sister the way I did, anyway. You loved her. I saw the way you looked at her when you thought no one was watching you."

  "Thank you, Elise. It means a lot knowing I have someone on my side."

  "Will you quit thanking me already? Jesus." We both laughed a nervous little chuckle and I apologized. I filled her in on all the details of the case I was working and what happened that caused me to chase after that asshole in the parking lot. She seemed shocked and pretty worried. I assured her I wouldn't give up on the case just because I was injured. I would still solve it. I had to solve it, but just now I have time to focus on the case that will actually pay my bills. She told me she was going to go eat with the kids now and if I needed anything just to yell for her. I started to say thanks but caught myself, instead I just smiled.

  "Now get to work, that missing girl isn't going to find herself."

  With my Macbook all booted up and sitting on my lap ready to go, I did a quick Google Search of David Fick. Even though his background check didn't come up with anything, I still decided it was worth a shot to check here. I did, in fact, have all the time in the world to weed through every hit. A White Pages site informed me that there were 62 people in the United States with the name David Fick. That seemed like good news to me, it could have been hundreds, I guess. I started going through the pages one by one and not finding anything. I found a Facebook page, and an official website for a composer named David Fick, but I highly doubted either of those were him. I also found an obituary but that didn't seem very likely, given the obvious reasoning. An hour later and I was right back where I started. With nothing. Okay, this is going to be harder than I thought.

  I went to the local Yellow Pages website, looked up Casinos, and got the number for the two that were nearby. I called the first one and asked to speak to a manager. Was that even what they were called? I had no idea. Stupid! The girl who answered had the good sense to ignore my lack of casino knowledge and just put me on hold.

  A man came on the line, "This is Michael Worthcott, how may I help you?"

  "Mr. Worthcott, my name is Archie Lemons and I am a private investigator hired by, I believe, one of your patron’s wives" I heard a sigh when I mentioned my profession. I was used to this, though. I usually lie about who I am but for some reason felt the need to be honest with this guy. "Now don't get any wrong ideas. The guy I'm looking for isn't in trouble or accused of anything. If he was, I certainly wouldn't have told you my profession." I laughed nervously then lamely cleared my throat. Still silence on the other end. "Anyway, sir, my client is very upset about her husband. It seems she hasn't been able to locate him and is very worried about him."

  "Okay, and why is this my problem? I don't understand."

  "Well, you see, my client informed me that he had quite the gambling problem and when he couldn't make it over to Vegas, he usually frequented the local casinos and the OTB. Seeing as you're the nearest casino I thought maybe you would recognize the name if he were a regular."

  "I see."

  "So would you maybe be willing to help me? Again, this is not some trap or anything like that. I am simply trying to locate a man who is missing and who the police have taken very little interest in finding."

  After a long silence, Mr. Worthcott responded, "Sure yeah, okay, what this guy’s name?"

  "David Fick."

  "Never heard of him. Sorry buddy. Good luck," and he disconnected the line. That was that.

  I called the other local casino and had about the same luck. This was close to impossible without a picture. Who tells people their name in a casino, anyway? And who's to say he used his real name? Or maybe people just knew his first name. How many goddamn David’s were there out in the world? This was bullshit. I needed to talk to Monica Fick and I needed to get a picture of her husband. I dialed the number I had for her in the call log on my phone and got no response. Of course. I tapped the pockets of my shorts thinking that maybe her business card would magically appear, but of course, it didn’t. Typical. Thanks for nothin', magic!

  I had no idea where I had put Mrs. Fick’s business card, actually. I'm pretty sure I didn't put it in my wallet, but I decided to check anyway. Actually, wait. Where the hell is my wallet, anyway?

  This was not going very well.

  I called Monica Fick back again and decided to leave a message this time. The automated voice told me to start talking after the beep. Beep.

  "Hello, Mrs. Fick, this is Archie Lemons calling again. I was wondering if you could call me back at your earliest convenience. It's regarding your case, obviously. I need some more information about David so I can proceed further. Hope to hear from you soon... Okay, thanks. Bye." Ugh, I can't even tough-guy hang-up on a recording!

  It was now early afternoon and I had been spinning my wheels for hours. I was finally getting hungry, so I called out for Elise. She and the kids had popped in from time to time during my work to check on me and say hi. It felt nice having people around me. Well, people I liked at least.

  She entered the room holding the biggest can of Sugar-Free Rockstar you could buy, triple-size, and a grilled cheese sandwich. I had no idea how she could have known the exact moment when I would be hungry and just how desperately I needed a Rockstar. "Oh my god," I said, "I take back that retarded Frankenstein comment. You can wear whatever Corky-style shoes you want from now on."

  "Gee thanks, Butthole. And how could you use the word retarded like that? Didn't you go all through grade school in the special ed. classes?"

  "Yeah, hey, thanks for making me feel worse.''

  She smiled and handed me the plate and the delicious Sugar-Free Rockstar and I couldn't help from smiling and saying thank you yet again. In fact, I wouldn't be able to thank her enough for everything she and the kids had done for me. This is the first day in a while that I hadn't woken up completely depressed. It was a good feeling. "Call if you need anything else," as she smiled and walked out the door.

  I wasn't even able to crack open my delicious, caffeinated beverage before my phone rang. I checked the call ID. It was Anderson. "Hello, Detective."

  "Hey Lemons, how’s the head?"

  "Never had any complaints.''

  ''Gross.''

  ''Sorry," I couldn’t help laughing at little. "Hey, I'll live, though. Thanks for dropping off my dog and computer last night. That was downright sweet of you."

  "Yeah, uh hey, don't mention it. Anyway, the reason I'm calling is because after we left the hospital last night we went back to Ms. Colley's house and had another look around. We couldn't really find much
though. They had dusted for prints, but that will most likely be a dead end. They pulled several sets from all over the house. Nothing else seemed really out of place and we couldn't find a sign of forced entry."

  "Yeah, the door was unlocked when I got there. I just let myself in to check around, ya know."

  "Right, so this gets me thinking that maybe the killer just knocked and she let him in. Then I start to thinkin' about how he managed to inject something in between her toes without her being a little suspicious about it, ya know, right. She had no other visible marks on her body, so it’s not like the killer was let inside then knocked her unconscious or anything." I nodded pointlessly. "So then I go back and have a talk with the coroner again and ask him the time of death. He says to me, he says, that by judging by the rigor that had set in and the way the skin was separated from the vic's hands and feet, he would put the death at around twelve to thirteen hours prior. So now I'm thinking, Ok, Archie says he gets there around 12:30 and we're there easily by 1:00. The coroner takes a little while to get there, right, so with this information I'm putting the death in the middle of the night, right? So what woman living alone is going to answer the door in the middle of the night? She has a peephole and could have checked if it was her daughter returning home, right, and anyone else, unless she recognized him, there is no way she would have opened that door, and even still, it goes right back to how she was able to get herself injected between the toes. So here's what I'm thinking. Someone breaks into the house, maybe through an unlatched window or something, while she is sleeping and sticks her, right? Then takes his time filling up the bathroom and getting her undressed and everything and drops her in the tub and voila, the perfect murder and he's out the door, nobody the wiser. Or so he thought."

  "Right. He wasn't counting on my amazing sleuthing skills."

  "Ha, yeah, something like that. But yeah, without the notice of the marking between her toes, everything else could have been ruled out and it’s back to being stamped as natural causes. No one will question why a woman would get up in the middle of the night for a bath. It could be any number or reasons and without any other sign of disturbance, no one would have thought twice about it."

  "So, I'm a hero and a detecting god, is what you're saying?"

  "Funny man, funny man. No, but it was good work. Maybe I did have you figured wrong."

  "Let me ask you something, Detective. Why are you so convinced I killed my wife?"

  "I don't know. I'm not too convinced anymore."

  "Well, thanks."

  "It’s just that, ya know, I'm a detective and I have seen the absolute worst humanity has to offer. You wouldn't believe how brutal men can be towards women. Your wife’s crime scene was bad, she was shot in the face and all, but some of the scenes I've shown up to were just horrific. You wouldn't even be able to believe some of them. Unbearable.

  “One time we pulled up to a crime scene that, get this, a punk breaking in to the house reported. He tried to remain anonymous but he called us from his cell phone for Christ sake. Anyway, we get to this crime scene and in this room there is a woman's body completely hacked to pieces. Someone really took his rage out on her. Grabbed a machete from the garage, we're guessing, because that’s where we found the sleeve for it, and hacked away at her until she was in pieces. The smell could have awoken the dead it was so bad and her body pieces had been laying there so long there were maggots crawling around in them.

  "We ask around and find out that the woman was planning on divorcing her husband. Well guess who we can't find now. Her husband. He's just gone. We've never found him; he's probably hiding out in some secluded area way off in some other country. We tracked his credit card usage to LAX where he bought a ticket to New York, but once he arrived there he took out a cash advance on the card, pulled out his max from an ATM and we never heard from him again. And it’s like that all the time. I mean, ninety-nine times out of a hundred when a woman turns up murdered, it’s the husband. Sometimes we catch the bastard and other times we don't. That time we didn't. With your wife, I suppose I just wanted you to have done it. Shit like that just gets to you. I want justice for the assholes that do this shit. Your case turned ice cold, especially when the lab cleared your gun. I just wanted there to be something we missed that I could nail you with. Ya know?"

  "I guess I understand." We both stayed on the line silent for a while until I spoke up again. "I know your job is rough, you see some shit you wish you'd never see."

  "Yeah, and the irony of it, I guess it's irony, I don't know, is that I became so depressed over all these cases and everything that I ended up losing my own wife. I guess she couldn't deal living with me anymore and packed her stuff and never looked back. I still wear my wedding ring, thinking, hoping she'll come back."

  "Me too."

  We remained on the line silent once more for a while until this time he broke it, "So anyway, enough of that I guess. Sorry I took so long to call ya. We finished with all that stuff pretty early in the morning. I still haven't even slept yet. I'm just now getting home.

  "Right after I got done with the coroner, Enzite and me, we get this call for a John Doe dropped off in a field a couple miles away from where all the action went down the night before. Get this, fucker is burnt to a crisp and has a bullet in his skull. Looks like he was shot in the back of the head at point blank range, execution style, then torched. They need his teeth to ID the poor bastard and forensics dug the bullet out. It was still in his head. Lab guy said the bullet ricocheted off his skull and banged around inside his noggin. Seemed to be a young guy, too. The only thing they found besides the bullet was a tin full of Oxycontin or Oxycodone, or something like that."

  "Yikes."

  "Yeah, so we've been working that all morning. Young couple riding their bikes called it in, I guess. The saw the smoldering and decided to go take a look. Oops. Oh well. Nothing more we can do about it now until we get an ID on the kid. They'll run his dental records today and forensics will run the bullet, but for right now, we have nothing to go on and I need sleep."

  "Yeah, man, you've been up way too long. Get some rest. I've hit a dead end with my other case, too, so I'm totally stalled out at the moment. Get some sleep. I'll be in touch."

  "Thanks."

  I hung up the phone and looked at my cold grilled-cheese sandwich and my warm Sugar-Free Rockstar. What the hell. Still looked delicious. I dug in.

  I found myself plopped there on the bed like a wet towel, staring off at nothingness. I was bored. Plain and simple. My body was tired but my brain was too busy darting off in a hundred different directions to allow me to sleep some more. Random thoughts entered my mind and just as quickly exited.

  Do you know how the term Private Eye came about? I mean, obviously, P.I. stands for private investigator, but the letter I changing into an actual eye dates back to 1850 when Allan Pinkerton formed the very first private detective agency in America. He had foiled a plot to assassinate the president-elect Abraham Lincoln and then became famous and opened up his own business. His firm was quite good at what they did. They were hired to track down Jesse James, even. And, if you've ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you'll recognize the name as the men who were hot on their tail, too. Anyway, point of my story is, Allan Pinkerton's agency's logo was an eye with the words "WE NEVER SLEEP" written around it. Hence the term, Private Eye.

  Not sure where the term Private Dick came from?

  Cinemax maybe?

  I don't know.

  Yeah. I'm bored.

  After a while, Elise came back in to remind me that I have successfully been in bed the entire day, and that dinner was almost ready.

  "Yeah, I haven't even peed today. How is that even possible?" I asked her.

  "I'm surprised that Rockstar didn't cut through you like a shark's fin through water."

  "Right? I need to get up anyway before they amputate my legs like in that terrible Clint Eastwood movie."

 
; "Really. How did that beat The Aviator and Sideways at the Oscars that year?"

  "The world may never know."

  "Well come on, Roger Ebert, dinner will be ready in five."

  15.

  Anderson had called me again while we were eating but I didn't answer it. I wanted to enjoy the meal with my family with no interruptions about work. Elise had made spaghetti with vodka sauce and garlic bread. I had never even heard of vodka sauce before tonight; I even asked if the kids should be eating it. Sometimes I'm pretty clueless. I thought my lack of knowledge was limited to what the kids were listening to these days, but apparently it extends all the way to grocery products. Anyway, this vodka sauce stuff is amazing! I highly recommend it.

  After we ate and polished off the rest of the cookies, I promised the kids I would watch TV with them for a while, but I had to make a quick call first. Elise said she would get them ready for bed while I made my call and we could meet in the family room afterwards.

  I returned to my room and called Anderson back, which is just what his message told me to do and nothing more. He answered with a Hello.

  "Hey Detective, it’s me. Sorry about earlier, I was eating dinner, didn't have my phone on me." A lie.