A Novel Way to Die

SEVEN





“CURT!” BARRY YELLED AND WENT STUMBLING DOWN THE steps toward the still figure lying on the basement floor.

Darla rushed after him as fast as she could, given the spotty light. Surely Curt was simply unconscious, she frantically told herself. No doubt he had tripped on the steps and hit his head when he landed. A tumble could explain why his phone had been lying on the stairway rather than in his pocket. Frankly, she was surprised that neither of the men had injured themselves before today. The brownstone was nothing short of a disaster site.

By now, Barry was already kneeling beside his friend. Darla could see by the flashlight’s yellow beam that Curt was lying on his belly a few feet away and to one side of the bottom step. What looked like a crowbar lay across his back, reminding Darla of Curt’s previous threats to lay in wait for the salvage thieves in case they made a return visit.

A chilling thought came to her: had Curt tried to wield the bar against an intruder only to come out on the losing side of the encounter?

She barely had time to consider that possibility before Barry grabbed the crowbar and tossed it aside, and then leaned over his friend’s prone form.

“Curt, can you hear me?” he demanded as Darla breathlessly knelt beside him on the dusty concrete floor.

For the space of a heartbeat, she held out hope that Curt would groan and then begin to move. That optimism lasted only until the flashlight beam illuminated both the bloody gash across the back of his skull and his wide-open, sightless eyes. Darla bit back another gasp. Curt couldn’t hear them . . . wasn’t ever going to hear anything ever again.

“Son of a bitch,” Barry choked out, and made as if to turn his friend over. Hastily, Darla grabbed his arm.

“Leave him alone, Barry . . . there’s nothing we can do. Besides, the police won’t want us touching anything.”

“The police?” He rose and rubbed a frantic hand over his thinning hair. “Yeah, you’re right. Call 9-1-1, while I get some more light in here.”

It took her two tries to punch in the right sequence of numbers, for her hands were shaking. Barry, meanwhile, had rushed back up the steps and plugged in a pair of the clamp lights so that they shone like faint headlights down the wooden stairway. The additional illumination made Darla blink and gave Curt’s unnaturally still form an even more unreal appearance. She promptly scooted several feet away from the corpse, preferring the relative darkness of the rest of the basement to being right next to the dead man as she made her call.

Why couldn’t this have happened upstairs? She already had something of an aversion to dark basements. She suspected she would end up with a full-blown basement phobia now that she’d managed to find a dead body lying in one.

After what seemed an interminable wait, though surely it had been but a matter of seconds, the emergency operator came on the line. In a strained voice she barely recognized as her own, Darla gave her name and explained the situation.

“It could have been an accident, but we don’t really know. An ambulance?” she answered the dispatcher’s question. “You can send one, but I’m pretty sure he’s been dead awhile. Address? Barry,” she called to the man, who now sat silently beside his friend, “what’s the street number of the building?”

Barry stirred from his reverie long enough to give her the address, which she hurriedly repeated into the phone, along with a few more details about the body’s location in the building. The dispatcher instructed her to remain on scene and not touch anything in the vicinity of the dead man . . . too late, as Darla recalled how Barry had moved the crowbar off Curt’s body.

“They’re sending the police and an ambulance right out,” Darla told him once she’d hung up. Then, carefully avoiding looking at Curt again, she suggested, “Maybe we should wait upstairs until they get here.”

“But I don’t want to just leave him here like this,” Barry countered with a miserable shake of his head. “I should find a blanket or something to put over him.”

“The dispatcher said not to touch anything,” she reminded him. “We don’t know what actually happened to him, so we don’t want to accidentally destroy any evidence.” Like picking up the pry bar, she told herself, though she probably would have reflexively done the same thing had she been first to reach Curt.

Barry gave a grim nod and gestured her toward the stairs. “I guess I should take a look around while we’re waiting on the cops to see if any wire or tools are missing. Curt’s been worried about those bastards who stole our copper last week paying another visit.”

Darla had come to much the same conclusion. Bad enough that since Curt’s warning the week before, she’d worried over the possible loss of her street numbers to the scrap thieves. Now she had to fear the possibility of falling victim to criminals who were bold enough to commit murder if they were crossed?

They retreated upstairs to the main floor again, leaving the body alone in the basement. The body. Darla felt uncomfortable referring to someone whom she’d personally known in such a manner, but she found it hard to reconcile the ghastly corpse sprawled beneath the stairs with her boisterous if obnoxious customer Curt. To be sure, she had tolerated the man rather than liked him, but never would she have wished such a fate on him. And of course, the situation was far different for Barry, who had been both a friend and a business partner to Curt for more than half their lives.

She glanced Barry’s way. Once he had determined that nothing seemed to be missing from the work area, he had joined her in the parlor. Now, he sat slumped against the wall, hands limply propped on his knees as he stared at a gaping hole in the plaster opposite him. She couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude for this particular situation, and so she simply sat with him in what she hoped he’d view as sympathetic silence, though the truth was that she was guiltily wishing she’d turned down his lunch invitation and thus avoided the whole unpleasantness.

She remembered abruptly that Robert was alone at the bookstore. She’d better let him know she was going to be delayed.

Robert answered on the second ring, his “Pettistone’s Fine Books, this is Robert, and how may I assist you today?” greeting enunciated in respectable imitation of James’s precise tones.

Feeling rather like she was breaching some major etiquette rule by making her call, she murmured, “Robert, this is Darla. Yes, your boss,” she clarified before he could ask for further identification. “There’s been a bit of trouble here at Barry’s place. I-I might be later than I thought. Will you be all right until James gets in?”

“Under control,” he replied. “It’s a bit slow, so I’m working on a window display for those new political autobiographies from last week. You know, the ones that turned out to be, like, real dogs.”

Momentarily returning to retailer mode, Darla winced, knowing to which ones he referred. Nothing worse than moving only a half dozen copies in a week of what was supposedly a blazing New York Times best seller. “A window display, huh? Do you know how to do that?”

“Sure,” was his enthusiastic answer. “There was this one the time Bill meant to order two copies of an old Naughty Teacher Nancy DVD but got two cases instead. You should have seen the cool display I made with a chalkboard and some notebooks. We sold, like, twenty DVDs in one day.”

Great. Marketing tips courtesy of the adult bookstore industry. Darla rolled her eyes. But hey, if it had worked for Naughty Teacher Nancy, maybe it would work for the flavor-of-the-month politicians, too.

“Go ahead, then,” she agreed, “but only use whatever you find lying around the shop for props. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

As she hung up the call, Robert’s mention of window displays made her think of Hilda Aguilar, whose talent at window dressing had always made her envious. What would happen to Jake’s investigation, given that the subject of said investigation was now dead? And more important, what would Tera Aguilar’s reaction be to her boyfriend’s untimely end? Even if Tera had felt as casual about the relationship as Curt apparently had, this would still have to come as a huge shock.

A heavy pounding on the open front door was accompanied by a barked demand: “Police. Anyone home?”

“In here,” Barry called, promptly rising and offering Darla a hand up.

Her relief at seeing a uniformed officer arriving on the scene was tempered by the fact that she recognized the broad-faced, mustachioed cop. Officer Hallonquist had once caught her parked in Great-Aunt Dee’s old Mercedes in a no-parking zone. Despite Darla’s honeyed attempt at explanation, Hallonquist had gleefully written her a traffic citation, disproving her previous theory that all middle-aged New York men were suckers for women with southern accents. The fact that Jake’s former partner Detective Reese had later managed to get the ticket dismissed hadn’t tempered Darla’s displeasure over the situation. Would the officer remember her now, with equal annoyance?

He did.

“You again,” Hallonquist said with a shake of his head as he trudged through the open door to join them. Giving Barry a curt nod, he turned back to her and went on, “Dispatch says you got something worse than an illegally parked Mercedes this time.”

“Hello, Officer Hallonquist. Nice to see you again, too,” she said with deliberate politeness, stretching her Texas accent into an even more exaggerated twang for his benefit. “And, unfortunately, yes. There’s been a bad . . . accident.”

“I’ll show you,” Barry interrupted and pointed toward the open basement door.

He led the way down the steps, Hallonquist behind him and Darla bringing up the rear. Not that she cared to see Curt’s body a second time, but she wanted to be there when Hallonquist took his first look at the scene. With luck, the officer would immediately tag the incident as a likely accident, so that she could stop worrying about scrap thieves and random, bloody violence. But then she remembered something Reese had told her once: that unless a doctor was holding the corpse’s hand, any unexpected death was treated as a homicide until proved otherwise. “Stop right here, sir,” Hallonquist told Barry when they were a few steps from the bottom. “Homicide will be here in a minute to secure the area, but in the meantime we don’t want you wandering around the scene any more than you already have.”

He’d drawn his oversized police flashlight, and now he clicked it on, the burst of LED illumination far brighter than the clamp-on lights that Barry had set up earlier. He swept his beam in the direction that Barry indicated, the white light washing over Curt’s stiff form. Hallonquist reached for his radio, and Darla heard him speak briefly into it, though she couldn’t make out his words or the answering squawk he got in return from his dispatcher. But from the stern expression on his face, she suspected that he had decided there was nothing natural about Curt’s death.

“All right, folks,” Hallonquist announced as he turned his radio down again, “time to go back upstairs so we can get some statements.”

He swung his flashlight beam over the scene again, and that was when Darla noticed something she had not spied earlier. At the sight, her stomach gave a small lurch.

Half a dozen rust-colored paw prints, each successively fainter than the previous, led away from Curt’s body.