A Novel Way to Die

EIGHT





��HELL, DARLA, IF YOU’D WANTED TO SEE ME AGAIN THAT BAD, you could’ve just dialed my cell.”

Detective Fiorello Reese—known simply as Reese by those who wished to avoid extreme bodily injury—had walked through the open front door just as she, Barry, and Officer Hallonquist exited the basement. She’d almost not recognized him, however, given that he’d exchanged his usual personal uniform of jeans and black leather jacket for navy slacks, striped tie, and brown tweed sport coat.

Tall and blond, with the physique of someone who hung out in the gym a lot, Reese was a year or two younger than Darla and possessed of what she called midwestern corn-fed good looks—this despite the fact he was Italian on his mother’s side—though he was saved from being a pretty boy by a strong nose that had been broken and never reset. And he had the reputation to go along with the nose. In fact, Reese had been the one to pull an injured Jake to safety during the gun battle with a homicide suspect that had left her permanently disabled.

Darla’s relief that Reese was the homicide detective apparently assigned to the case had been tempered by a flash of annoyance at this bit of levity on his part. Reese didn’t seem to notice her consternation. After delivering that offhanded greeting, he switched into detective mode and hustled them all outside again.

“Sir,” he addressed Barry, “I need you and the lady to wait out here until I can take your statements. Please don’t leave the scene yet.”

Not waiting for Barry’s assent, Reese turned to confer with Hallonquist for a few moments. Then he headed back inside the brownstone and presumably down into the basement for a look while a dour Hallonquist remained behind to stand guard over her and Barry. As he was jotting down their names and other pertinent information, Darla saw the crime scene van pull up. Two technicians—both blond, female, middle-aged, and wearing dark blue medical scrubs—fastened official yellow “Do Not Cross” tape along the perimeter of the narrow property. Then, reaching into the back of their van to don gloves and what resembled shower caps, each picked up what appeared to be a metal tackle box and marched over to where Officer Hallonquist stood.

“Body?” the shorter of the pair barked, not bothering with a greeting.

Hallonquist thrust a thumb in the direction of the front door, from which Reese was now emerging. “Basement,” was his equally succinct reply.

She nodded. “Gimme the Cliff Notes,” she commanded in a strong Brooklyn accent overlaid with the characteristic rasp of a two-pack-a-day smoker.

Hallonquist gave the woman a terse recitation of what was obvious from the scene: middle-aged male, dead several hours, apparent cause a blow to the head, possibly from a fall down the steps, but a crowbar had been found near the body.

“Anyone touch anything?” Shorty asked when he’d finished, her pointed look encompassing Darla and Barry. The latter nodded.

“I, er, moved the crowbar off him,” he admitted, earning a snort of disgust from the tech.

“Civilians! They’ll screw up a scene every time. We’ll need his prints, and hers, too,” she added with a meaningful glare at Darla before she headed up the steps.

Her partner, meanwhile, shot the rest of them a baleful look. “No one comes back inside until we give the okay.”

“All right, folks, statement time,” Reese said, all business now as he gestured Barry to join him. “Darla, why don’t you hang with Officer Hallonquist for a minute while I talk to your friend?”

The officer appeared just about as thrilled as Darla felt at the prospect. To her relief, however, Hallonquist’s definition of “hang” turned out to be “stand around silently and shoot dirty looks at the passersby who were gaping at the police vehicles and yellow tape.” Since the strip of trampled grass in front of the brownstone hardly qualified as a lawn, that meant Darla was close enough to Reese and Barry to catch bits of their conversation. She noted that when the latter got to the part about how they had located Curt by means of the dead man’s ringing cell phone, Reese quickly confiscated the phone in question still in Barry’s pocket. No doubt some official police hacker would be able to get all of Curt’s saved messages even without the benefit of the man’s password. Knowing Curt, she hoped for his sake that he had deleted any suggestive voice mails from Tera or any of his other conquests.

When it was Darla’s turn to talk, Reese went through the timetable of the morning’s events with her, up to and including their discovery of Curt. She included how they’d followed the ring of the cell phone, earning an approving nod from the cop at the unconventional tactic. When she mentioned how Curt had warned her about the scrap thieves last time he stopped in at the bookstore, Reese prodded her for everything she could recall about that conversation.

“Curt seemed pretty upset about having that copper tubing stolen,” she explained. “I’m sure he thought they were some street punks who’d run off at the first sign of trouble, but he warned me that they were hitting occupied buildings, too, and that I’d better keep a close eye on my place.”

“No mention of anyone else he was having trouble with? Creditors, ex-wives?”

“Actually, there is someone,” Darla replied, abruptly recalling the recent confrontation in her store. “You heard about my new employee, Robert? Last week, his old boss stopped by the store basically to harass him. Curt happened to come in at the same time, and it turned out the two of them knew each other. They got into a pretty nasty argument before I kicked Bill out, and he said something about unfinished business between them.”

“I don’t suppose you know Bill’s last name, do you?” Reese asked, looking up from his notes to give her a keen look.

Darla shook her head. “I can find out from Robert if you need me to. All I know is that he owns an adult bookstore a few blocks away called Bill’s Books and Stuff.”

“Short, ugly guy, looks like he escaped from the monkey house?”

At Darla’s nod, Reese gave a cold, satisfied smile, though his look for her was one of approval. “That would be Bill Ferguson. Let’s just say he’s not a stranger to the department. I’ll stop by that cesspool he calls a store and have a little chat with him. Anyone else?”

“You might want to ask Jake that,” Darla replied. “She’s poking around into Curt’s background for a new client. She might have something for you.”

The suggestion earned her another approving nod, and Darla tried not to feel guilty. It was probably more than she should have said without Jake’s permission, but maybe it would offset the one thing she did not intend to mention: the set of bloody paw prints she’d noticed near Curt’s body. No way was she going to implicate Hamlet—and, by default, herself—by telling Reese she suspected her store mascot might know something about what happened to Curt. The crime scene tech looked like a pro. She would surely spot the paw prints and draw her own conclusions as to what they meant.

Not that the prints were necessarily Hamlet’s, or even feline in origin, Darla reassured herself. For all she knew, they might belong to one of those giant rats she was always hearing about that lived in the New York City sewers. But she couldn’t help recalling Curt’s assumption that it had been Hamlet he’d seen the previous week slinking out of the brownstone.

What if Hamlet had found his way outside again last night and paid a return visit to Curt and Barry’s brownstone in the wee hours of the morning? While Curt was headed up the basement steps with his crowbar, Hamlet might have been lurking down there looking for some entertainment. What if he had decided to play his favorite cat game of rushing up the stairs while dodging a human’s legs? If he’d startled Curt and the man had actually tripped over him, could Hamlet be guilty of manslaughter?

Darla had no idea what the ramifications might be, but she suspected it would not bode well for either Hamlet or Pettistone’s Fine Books. Animal control for Hamlet, perhaps, definitely a lawsuit for her! She suppressed a shudder.

“Getting chilly?” Reese asked sympathetically as he shut his notebook.

She nodded. “A little.”

“I think we’re done here. You can go, and we’ll see about getting your prints later, if we end up needing them. Mr. Eisen,” he called to Barry, “I’m finished with the witness statements. You can wait here until our techs are finished and the body is removed to lock up the place, or you can go and we’ll lock up for you. But I can’t let you back inside again until probably tomorrow, when we’ll release the scene.”

Barry left his post by the construction Dumpster and joined them. “Yeah, I’ll stick around. It doesn’t seem right to leave Curt there with strangers.”

“Do you want me to wait with you?” Darla asked, a lump in her throat. Though her emotion was not so much for Curt as it was for Barry. If something like this had happened to one of her friends, she couldn’t imagine wanting to stay and watch the blanketed body being carried out on a gurney . . . and yet she knew she’d feel compelled to do so, all the same. Having been friends with Curt since high school, Barry must surely feel as if he’d lost a brother.

He gave her a faint smile and shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but you need to get back to the store. You don’t want to leave that kid running the place by himself all afternoon. I’ll be fine here. I’ll give you a call or something later, okay?”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she replied and managed a smile in return.

While Barry took a seat on the partially demolished stoop, Reese walked with her the short distance to the sidewalk. Holding up the crime scene tape so that she could walk under it, he asked, “So, you dating that guy?”

Darla stared at him in surprise. The detective’s words had been casual, but something in his deliberately bland expression told her that his interest in the answer was not. Surely Reese wasn’t jealous . . . was he?

“We’re just friends. At least, at this point,” she replied, surprised to find herself complimented by Reese’s apparent interest in her love life. Maybe he was regretting not putting forth a little effort back when they’d first met. Maybe now he was gauging the situation to see if he should try moving in on what he considered Barry’s territory. The question was, should she give him any encouragement?

What the heck, she decided. Why not? True, she couldn’t see things between her and Reese going anywhere—for one thing, he had a distinct aversion to the printed word—but the notion that he was interested in her added a cheery note to what had been a distinctly unpleasant day. And so, with a deliberately casual air of her own, she clarified, “We’re not exactly dating, but Jake has been encouraging me to go out with him. She thinks he’d be good for me.”

“Hey, that’s great.” Reese gave her a brotherly slap on the back. “I sure hope it works out for you. A broad your age, you can’t afford to wait around too much longer for the right guy to show up. Tick, tock, and all that.”

Tick, tock?

Darla’s previous warm, fuzzy feeling took an abrupt header into cold and prickly territory. Seriously, Reese’s whole “hates books” attitude should have been fair warning. Good a friend as he might be to Jake, the man was definitely a Cro-Magnon when it came to more personal relationships.

“If that was a crude reference to my biological clock, then I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you,” she replied in as frosty a tone as she could muster. “In case you didn’t get the memo, a woman doesn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life. And she sure doesn’t need one to have a baby . . . at least, not after that first ten minutes.”

“Hey, that first ten minutes is the best part,” Reese countered with a wink that made her blush despite her outrage. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Red. I was just kidding with you.”

“And I’ve told you before, don’t call me Red,” Darla gritted out. Her ex had called her that—usually followed by some obnoxious statement that he’d thought was unduly clever—and she had come to loathe the nickname.

He pantomimed an erasing motion with one hand. “Sorry, I forgot about that whole Red thing. Don’t send your boyfriend over to kick my ass about it, okay?”

“I can handle my own ass-kicking, thank you very much.” She was about to add a few more choice remarks, when she glanced past Reese to see Barry staring curiously at the pair of them. No point in creating a scene, particularly under the circumstances.

Favoring Barry with a sympathetic wave—and Reese with a parting glare—Darla started back in the direction of the bookstore. The weather seemed colder now than when she and Barry had so companionably made their way to the brownstone a couple of hours earlier. Also, reaction to Curt’s death had begun to set in, and she felt suddenly drained of energy.

Still, visions of crowbar-wielding thieves kept her moving at a brisk pace down the street, though force of habit made her slow as she passed by Great Scentsations. The Halloween graveyard scene had been modified by the addition of a stuffed figure of a sexy, miniskirted witch chasing a fuzzy black cat through the soap tombstones.

Cute, Darla thought with a flash of a smile, feeling more than a little sympathetic toward Ms. Witch. Her amusement faded just as swiftly, however, as she debated whether or not she should stop in to tell Hilda about what had happened to Curt.

She and Hilda were friendly enough, but their acquaintance was strictly a business one. Breaking this sort of news seemed to require a more personal relationship than they had. And she hadn’t thought to ask Barry if he planned to break the news to Tera about her boyfriend. But since Barry was still at the brownstone for the foreseeable future, who knew when he’d have the chance? If she gave Hilda a heads-up now, the woman could tell her daughter right away, rather than having Tera learn about it in some impersonal way. On the other hand, maybe it should be Jake who talked to Hilda. After all, she was the one who’d been hired to—

“Hello, Darla, how are you?” Hilda’s cultured voice broke in on her musings, the unexpected greeting making Darla jump.

Guiltily, she tore her gaze from the window display to see Hilda’s neatly coiffed head poking out from around the shop doorway. The woman smiled apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, but you’ve been standing outside my window for several minutes now looking dazed. Is something wrong?”

There’s an opening if ever I saw one. Darla took a deep breath. “Actually, there is,” she said aloud. “Why don’t I come inside and tell you.”

Hilda gave a gracious nod and held open the door. She was wearing a turquoise Chanel skirted suit and matching pumps, and Darla couldn’t help but feel dowdy by comparison. Once over the threshold, however, the faint sound track of New Age music that Hilda always played—heavy on flute and chimes—made her feel as if she’d stepped into a yoga studio. Some of her earlier tension dissipated. Unlike those expensive perfumes that lined the department store counters and assaulted the senses, the fragrances that filled Hilda’s small shop were subtle and inviting. Each day of the week, Hilda lit a different handmade soy candle, which either soothed or invigorated, depending on its scent. So far, Darla had stopped in on gardenia, sandalwood, rose, and honeysuckle days. This was the first time she’d been there for lavender, and she made a mental note to come back later to purchase one of those candles to burn in her own shop.

“So tell me, what’s wrong, Darla?” the woman urged in her polite but no-nonsense manner. “You have lines under your eyes . . . very bad. Here, you should try these all-natural compresses.”

She lifted a small jar from a nearby shelf, explaining, “They are made with cucumber, twenty to a jar. Gently squeeze out the liquid and put one compress over each eye for fifteen minutes. They work wonders, I promise you.”

“Maybe next time,” Darla said, hedging as she glanced about the small shop. A smartly dressed young Asian woman with a pigtailed toddler in tow was slathering on hand lotion from one of the sample bottles on the next aisle over, but otherwise the store was empty of customers. “Is Tera here today?”

“Not yet. She has classes in the mornings, so she never comes into the shop until after lunch.”

Then Hilda checked at the small gold wristwatch she wore and frowned.

“She should be here by now. That girl, I don’t know what to do with her,” the woman went on, a hint of Cuban lilt softening those words of maternal rebuke. “She stays out all night long with that so-called boyfriend of hers when she should be at home studying. And then, she’s too tired to get up in the morning and skips class. That, or else she goes home again as soon as class is over and sleeps all afternoon instead of helping me here in the store.”

Hilda glanced over at her customer, who had dragged her protesting little girl to the children’s section to look at organic baby shampoo, and then lowered her voice.

“That Curt Benedetto, he’s a bad influence,” she confided with a refined sniff. “Tera was making straight A’s in her all classes until she took up with him. What she sees in a man old enough to be her father, I’ll never understand. And that shifty look in his eyes . . .”

She paused and clicked her tongue. “I just know he’s hiding something. Probably a wife and five children. I hired your friend Jake to check up on him. If Tera won’t listen to her own mother, then maybe she’ll believe the evidence in black and white.”

“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” Darla broke in when the woman finally paused for breath. “I have some bad news about Curt.”

“Humph. The only news I want to hear about him is that he left town.”

“Well, it’s close to that.” Darla hesitated, and then forged on. “I went with Barry this morning to see the brownstone that he and Curt are remodeling. We found Curt dead in the basement.”

“Dead?” He artfully made-up eyes widening, Hilda took a step back and traced a quick sign of the cross. “Dios mío, who killed him?”

The woman’s porcelain skin had turned appreciably paler, while her gasped exclamation was loud enough to draw her customer’s attention. The young mother shot them both a look of alarm and promptly dragged her child toward the door, ignoring the little girl’s outstretched hands and plaintive cry of, “Mama, want!”

Hilda didn’t seem to notice that she’d lost a customer. As for Darla, she hesitated. Why had Hilda immediately assumed that Curt had been murdered? The more obvious possibility was that he’d succumbed to a fatal heart attack or else had an accident. It sent alarm bells jangling in Darla’s head. Could Hilda possess some knowledge of what had actually happened to the man?

Carefully skirting a direct answer, Darla replied, “The police made us leave the building, so I really don’t know any more. But I didn’t want Tera to hear this kind of news on the radio or read it online.”

“That’s good of you, Darla.” Sounding distracted now, Hilda reached into her jacket and pulled out a slim white cell phone. “I’d better call Tera right now and tell her. You know how young people are . . . they take things so personally. She shouldn’t find this out from anyone but her mother.”

Realizing she had been dismissed, Darla took the hint. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said as she headed toward the door. “And I’ll think about those compresses.”

Hilda nodded, but her attention was on her phone as she dialed. Before she stepped outside, Darla heard Hilda genteelly shout her daughter’s name—“Maria Teresa Aguilar!”—followed by a flurry of Spanish that Darla roughly translated with her minimal knowledge of the language to mean, “It’s your mother. Get your lazy butt out of bed and pick up the phone!”

Darla let the door close behind her on that little drama, her concern more over Hilda’s earlier reaction than what Tera might say or do. While Reese hadn’t specifically told her not to speak to Hilda, she suspected that he might consider it interference in police business. But as she started down the street toward her own store, another concern was on her mind: Hamlet. Some wily animal had been in the brownstone’s basement during the early morning hours. For her own peace of mind, she needed to know if Hamlet was the creature in question. She had an idea how to prove that that he’d been present—or else how to eliminate him as a four-legged suspect—but it would take Jake’s help.

She pulled out her cell phone and pressed the speed dial for Jake. The ex-cop picked up on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for Darla’s call. “Hey, kid, I heard via the blue grapevine that there was some trouble over at your friend Barry’s place.”

“You can say that again. Curt’s dead—probably murdered, according to Reese—and Barry and I were unlucky enough to find him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard. A shame,” Jake replied, sounding like she meant it. “Are you back at the store yet?”

“I’m a block away. Can I meet you at your place in about fifteen minutes, once I make sure everything is okay in the store? I need your help with something related to this whole awful business.”

“Sure, what’s the problem?” Jake wanted to know.

Darla took a deep breath. “If you talk to Reese before I see you, tell him he’d better take a crash course in Meow 101. You see, I think I have a witness to Curt’s murder.”