A Novel Way to Die

NINE





“MR. BENEDETTO IS DEAD?” JAMES ECHOED IN WELL-BRED disbelief once Darla had broken the news back in the shop. “Are you quite certain?”

“Yeah, it was pretty obvious from that whole stiff-as-a-board-not-breathing thing he had going on.”

James shot her a long-suffering look. “I am not questioning your diagnosis of death, Darla, only your identification of the decedent.”

She gave a weary sigh. “Sorry. Yes, we’re absolutely certain it was Curt. He was still, um, identifiable.”

“And how fortunate that Officer Reese is the one handling the case,” her manager went on. “Do we know the official cause of death?”

“For the moment, the police are treating Curt’s death as a homicide until the medical examiner says otherwise. But I’m pretty sure Reese thinks he was murdered. Barry thought at first that he’d fallen, but there was a crowbar lying on top of Curt, and he had a crowbar-shaped dent in his head. So it’s a logical leap that someone whacked him with it.”

“I would assume so,” her manager agreed. “Even if the man had been holding the crowbar when he fell down the steps, what are the chances that he could hit himself in the head with it and manage to fall so that it landed on top of him?”

“I knew someone who, you know, did that,” Robert interjected, setting down the carton of paperbacks he was unloading and walking over to join them at the register.

When she and James both turned to stare at him, he shrugged, or rather, tried to. With Hamlet slung around his neck like an inky fur stole, the cat’s forepaws and back paws draping over either shoulder, it was not an easy gesture to make.

Darla shook her head. She wasn’t sure who had come up with this sartorial idea, Robert or Hamlet, but the latter was staring at her with gleaming green eyes that seemed to say, No way would I let you get away with carting me around like this. She shot him a sour look in return. She’d deal with Mr. Furry Witness for the Prosecution later.

“It wasn’t a crowbar, though,” Robert clarified. “The dude, he was on a skateboard and tried to, like, skate down the handrail. He fell off, and the skateboard hit him in the head in midair. And then when he landed, it was, you know, on top of him. I can show you on YouTube if you want to see it.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass,” Darla said. “But until we know what really happened to Curt, the new rule is that no one works alone in the evenings, and the doors all stay locked and the alarm stays set before and after business hours, no exceptions.”

“I concur with your plan,” James said. “Better to be overly cautious than overly confident in this sort of situation. Between the Russian gangs and the scrap thieves, we could be dealing with some very dangerous customers, indeed. Perhaps we should review the schedule to make certain that our shifts will overlap accordingly?”

“Yeah, and I can look at the security videos in the mornings for you if, you know, you want me to,” Robert added. “See if anyone is prowling around outside.”

Darla nodded as she pulled up the weekly schedule on the computer. “Good idea, Robert. That can be your job every morning from now on. I’ll show you how to play back the recordings. James, see what you think if I switch around your hours a bit on these days.”

She made some quick adjustments to the schedule and got James’s blessing, then printed off a few copies. “Robert,” she said, “can you stay on the clock a little longer? I need to run down to Jake’s place for a bit. I’ll show you the security system routine as soon as I get back.”

“Okay. Hey, are you gonna look at the window display I made?”

He sounded so eager that she smiled. She’d forgotten that she had given him free rein to do something with the two political autobiographies that had been gathering dust for a week. So distracted had she been by thoughts of Curt that she’d walked right past the window without even looking at it. She glanced over at James, who merely nodded. She wasn’t sure if the gesture indicated a positive review of the teen’s artistic abilities or not. But if his skills were good enough for Bill’s Books and Stuff . . .

“You should look at it from the outside,” he added. “I’ll go with you, if you want.”

“Sure,” she agreed, “but leave Hamlet in the store. He’s not allowed out of the building.”

The feline in question gave her a peeved look as Robert obediently dislodged him onto the register counter. “Sorry, bro,” he explained as Hamlet stalked to the counter’s far edge and sat with his back deliberately to them, “but Ms. Pettistone is, like, the boss.”

Darla could almost hear the she’s-not-the-boss-of-me vibes emanating from the disgruntled cat. But whether or not Hamlet liked it, she was on a campaign to keep him safely indoors, particularly in light of recent incidents.

With Robert trailing her, she left James to deal with Hamlet’s mood and headed outside. Unlike Hilda’s shop, which was at ground level, the windows of Darla’s bookstore were almost head high—one reason she’d been lax in doing much more than putting out the occasional “Big Sale” sign behind the glass. Almost any halfway competent display would thus be an improvement. She only hoped that Robert’s efforts were not so amateurish that she’d have to find some excuse to redo his work that wouldn’t hurt his feelings.

“So, uh, what do you think?” he asked as she dismounted the final step and turned for a look at what he’d done.

Darla stared in surprise. The end result was as professional as any window display that Hilda had ever created. She recognized the two table runners—one blue, one red—that had been tucked on a shelf in the storeroom ever since she’d taken over the shop. Robert had arranged the fabric on the broad inner sill so that the two pieces met in the middle of the display, each half of the display space lined now in its own color. The two authors were of different political persuasions, and she saw that he had put their respective books on the appropriate color for their particular affiliation. Even better, both covers featured three-quarter photos of their authors, so the two politicians appeared to be facing each other in point-counterpoint style. In between the figuratively dueling politicos, Robert had built a pedestal combining both of the books, which he’d topped with a Statue of Liberty figure he must’ve found somewhere.

As a final touch, he had strung a length of red, white, and blue twinkle lights left over from a July Fourth display like bunting from the window’s top edge. Red letters spelling out “Hot Seller” ran along the bottom edge.

“If you don’t, you know, like it, I can change it,” Robert said in a diffident tone when a few moments had passed and Darla still had made no comment.

Smiling, she turned toward him. “You did a wonderful job, Robert. I was simply admiring your work. But wherever did you find Lady Liberty?”

“I remembered seeing it in Mr. Plinski’s store, and Ms. Plinski said I could borrow it.”

“Very clever. I think I’ll make you our official window dresser from here on out. That is, if you don’t mind taking on an extra duty.”

“Yeah, I could do that. And maybe some stuff inside, too. No offense, but the Halloween decorations inside are kinda lame.”

Once again, the tone was offhanded, though she could see the pleased color in his cheeks. Darla’s smile broadened. Really, Robert was a good kid despite a few annoying quirks. She’d have to ask James if he’d noted the vest homage thing.

Then, recalling her errand, Darla’s smile faded. “Finish up the stocking with James, and I’ll be back in a few minutes. Oh, and see if you can keep Hamlet somewhere readily accessible. I might need him.”

“You’ve got it, boss.”

He took the stairs in two oversized hops and went back inside while she made her way more conventionally down the few steps to Jake’s place. With luck, her friend wouldn’t think what she was about to suggest crossed some sort of crazy-woman line.

“Hey, kid,” Jake greeted her as Darla gave a perfunctory knock and stepped inside. Gesturing Darla to join her at the kitchen table turned desk, she asked, “How are you holding up?”

“It’s still a bit of a shock,” Darla admitted as she sank onto one of the chrome chairs. “I mean, Curt was a royal pain in the butt, and I didn’t much like him, but no way did I want to see him dead, especially like that.”

“Don’t worry, you’re allowed to be upset. In fact, I’d be concerned if you weren’t. I was a cop for twenty years, and I still wanted to puke every time I had to call in another stiff.” She paused and gave a dismissive wave. “Oh, they claim you get used to it after a while, but if you’re halfway human, you never really do. The kids, they’re the hardest . . .”

She trailed off, and Darla saw a fleeting expression of remembered pain in the older woman’s eyes before she focused back on Darla again.

“But what was all that you said on the phone about meows and witnesses?” Then, as Darla opened her mouth to reply, Jake shook her curly mane and put out a restraining hand. “Wait. If this involves a certain black cat, you’d better start from the very beginning and tell me what happened from the time you arrived at the brownstone until the police showed up.”

Darla complied, starting with Barry’s concern that the door had not been properly locked and ending when she had left Reese and Barry at the scene—omitting, of course, the whole “tick, tock” conversation. Jake listened intently and then flatly stated, “Okay, so you saw cat paw prints near Curt’s body. Why would you think they belong to Hamlet? There’s got to be two dozen feral cats in the neighborhood.”

“Yes, but remember I told you last week how I found what looked like grease on his fur, and that I thought he was getting out of the apartment somehow? Well, the same day that Porn Shop Bill came by to harass Robert, Curt told me that he’d seen a cat he was sure was Hamlet running out of his building that very morning. And the prints I saw next to Curt’s body today were pretty darned big. The feral cats I’ve seen around the neighborhood are all scrawny things.”

Jake sighed. “All right, so maybe it was the little hell-raiser who was down in the dead guy’s basement. But it’s not like Reese can drag his furry butt down to the precinct and question him about what he saw. So why does it matter?”

“Curt’s death might still have been accidental,” Darla explained. “If it was, I-I need to know if it was Hamlet’s fault that it happened. You’ve seen that game he plays, running between people’s legs on the stairs. If that had something to do with Curt falling, then I’d rather live with knowing my cat is guilty of—”

“Involuntary cat-slaughter?” Jake interjected with a hint of a smile.

Darla shot her a sour look but let that last good-natured jibe go unchallenged, knowing there was more to come. “—of causing a fatal accident, than always wondering about it. If you know what I mean.”

Darla took a deep breath before continuing. What she was about to say would doubtless make her sound like a crazy cat lady despite the fact that (a) she wasn’t crazy and (b) she wasn’t that much of a cat lover. Wincing a little, she forged on. “If Curt was murdered, and we can prove that Hamlet was a witness, maybe he can help identify the killer.”

Jake’s lips twisted in what was an obvious effort to hold back a laugh, but to her credit she merely said, “Okay, okay. What do you want me to do here?”

“Thanks, Jake,” Darla replied with genuine gratitude. “I figured maybe you could do one of those CSI things like you see on television and test Hamlet’s paws for blood.”

“Jeeze, they ought to outlaw those shows,” Jake said with a shake of her head. “You civilians watch that stuff and come away thinking every crime can be solved in under sixty minutes, counting commercials, just so long as you have a full lab at your disposal. Well, that ain’t the way it works, kid.”

“I know that, but isn’t there some sort of home test you can do?”

“Like a home pregnancy test?” Jake asked with a grin. “Yeah, actually, there is. Let me see what I have in my bag of tricks. Wait right here.”

She headed off in the direction of her bedroom while Darla waited at the table, virtuously resisting the temptation to do a little upside-down reading of the open file on the table. She could see the preprinted tab on the folder with its big “A” and assumed this was Hilda’s file. So much for Jake’s first official case.

“Here you go,” Jake said, returning to the room with a smaller version of the tackle box the crime scene investigators had carried. “Ye olde evidence-collecting kit,” she explained, “aka my bag of tricks.”

Popping it open, she pulled out a screw-top cylinder that resembled a skinny plastic vitamin bottle. “We can swab Hamlet’s paws with these test strips and see if they detect any blood residue,” she went on. “They won’t distinguish between animal or human blood, but for some quick and dirty results, they’ll do the job.”

Then she frowned. “Wait. We’re talking maybe eight, ten hours since he would have stepped in the blood. And then he walked a couple of blocks through God knows what kind of crud on the streets to get back home again? If there was any blood left behind after all that, he probably licked it off.”

Darla felt her stomach roil at the mental image that statement conjured and was abruptly glad she’d missed lunch. Even considering everything else that had happened today, the idea of Hamlet casually licking Curt’s blood from his paws somehow seemed more ghastly than the rest. “Ew, Jake!” she exclaimed.

Jake snorted. “Darla, he’s a cat. What did you expect him to do, grab himself a pawful of hand sanitizer and tidy up? He probably ate a few nasty little mice while he was out, too.”

“Stop!”

Now it was Darla’s turn to raise a warning hand, even as a giggle bubbled up in her throat. Despite her best efforts, the giggle ballooned into a laugh. The mental picture of Hamlet pumping a few squirts from the industrial-sized container she kept by the store register was ludicrous enough to counteract the unpleasant images of Curt that had been drifting in her mind since that morning.

Finally regaining her composure, she conceded, “You’re right, I didn’t even think of that—I mean, the part about it being so many hours and him walking around. Bad idea, I guess.”

“Not necessarily. The pad on a cat’s paw has creases just like your skin does, so there is a chance some blood residue might be left. If you want to bring him down, we can give it a try.”

“Actually, I was hoping you could come up to the store. The only way to get him down here is in his cat carrier, which means any blood you’d find on him would probably be mine.”

Darla had endured a similar scenario when she’d had to take Hamlet to the vet for his annual exam a few months earlier. Her first attempt to load him into the plastic crate had dissolved into a contest of strength, with Hamlet gripping the carrier’s opening with all four paws and stubbornly refusing to be pushed inside. A second try had ended much like the first, save that Hamlet had cut short that round with a swipe of claws that nicked one of Darla’s fingers and left her muttering bad words as she sucked on that bloody digit.

She’d finally resorted to donning elbow-length oven gloves as protective gear. Then, sneaking up on him from behind, she managed to grab Hamlet and stuff him into the carrier before he had time to react. She doubted he could be fooled with that tactic a second time.

Jake grinned, apparently familiar with Hamlet’s aversion to being transported via crate. “Let me grab my keys and phone, and I’ll go up with you,” she said and then packed the vial back into her evidence-collecting case.

Not surprisingly, Jake’s trip upstairs took a couple of minutes longer than Darla’s, since she paused outside for a few clandestine puffs on a cigarette before heading into the store. By the time she walked in, Darla had already taken stock of her employees. James was in the reference section assisting two college boys—in what Darla could only assume was an homage to ghosts of students past, they wielded briefcases rather than the requisite backpacks—while Robert was busy rearranging the new arrivals table. As for Hamlet, he was still in classic p.o.’d mode, sitting on the register counter, tail tucked around him, ears flat. But Darla took the fact that he hadn’t stalked back up to the apartment as a positive sign.

“Robert,” she called out, “Jake and I need your help for a minute.”

“Sure.” Carefully squaring off one of the stacks, Robert sauntered over, fists crammed into the pockets of his black vest. “Hi, Ms. Jake. How’s the PI biz?”

“Not bad, kid. Say, do you think you could hold Hamlet still for a minute while I rub a little something on his paws?”

Robert looked alarmed. “What, like, medicine?”

“Nothing bad,” Darla hurried to assure him. The last thing she wanted to tell the teen was that they were swabbing her cat for a dead man’s blood. Though, knowing Robert, he would probably find that pretty cool. “We’re afraid he got out last night and stepped in, er, something he shouldn’t have. We need to clean him up.”

“Oh, okay, then.”

He scooped up the cat and cradled him so that all four paws were sticking out. “Hey, little bro,” he comforted Hamlet, who was giving Darla a suspicious look, “don’t get all bent. They just want to wash your feet.”

“This will only take a minute and a little bit of water,” Jake added as she dug into her metal box. She pulled out four test sticks and an ampoule of clear liquid. While Darla watched in interest, Jake applied a drop of water to the pad on the first test stick and then rubbed the dampened strip against Hamlet’s right-front paw pad. The “little bro” squirmed, but to Darla’s relief he let Jake repeat the process on his other three feet, using a fresh stick each time.

“All finished,” Jake cheerfully said as she set the final strip on the counter. “You can let the witness, er, cat, go now.”

“Good job,” Robert praised him and set him down on the floor.

Hamlet hissed and shot the youth a narrow green look that said, Yeah, bro, and this better not happen again. Darla suppressed a smile, feeling vindicated. Apparently, even Robert was subject to dropping a notch down Hamlet’s ever-sliding scale of acceptable human behavior.

Jake, meanwhile, was comparing each strip against a little chart on the side of the bottle that reminded Darla of a swimming pool chlorine test.

“Anything there?” she anxiously asked her friend. Then, recalling that Robert was still standing there and listening in while pretending ennui, she reached under the counter. She dragged out a three-ring binder the size of a New York City phone book—assuming such a thing was even printed anymore.

“Here you go,” she said and thrust the manual in his direction. “These are the instructions to the security system. Why don’t you thumb through it for a few minutes while I finish up with Jake, and then we’ll do a test run on how to do a replay?”

“Sure, boss,” he obligingly agreed and headed over to the children’s section, landing with an alarmingly loud plop in the beanbag chair. At another time, Darla would have lectured him on the proper care and handling of beanbags, but now her attention was on Jake and her test sticks.

“We have a winner,” the older woman said, holding up one strip that now sported a faint bit of green on the formerly white pad surface. “Definitely blood, but like I told you, there’s no way to tell if it’s human or not.”

Darla stared uncertainly at the strip. Finding the blood traces could mean that Hamlet had indeed been at the crime scene and been the one to leave the paw prints. On the other hand, the blood could be his own, or else have been the aftermath of Jake’s suggested nasty little mouse massacre. Bottom line, they still had no proof one way or the other that Hamlet had witnessed the crime.

Jake, meanwhile, had pulled out her phone. She snapped a quick picture of the strip next to the container’s color chart, then slipped the strip into a small paper bag and wrote Hamlet, left-rear paw and the date before initialing and sealing it. The remaining used strips she stuck into a mini biohaz bag.

“Normally, we’d need the original item as evidence,” she explained as she stowed everything back into her kit, “but I don’t think Hamlet will let me lop off his back paw.”

“And why would you want to perform an amputation on our store mascot’s extremity?” James asked—rhetorically, Darla assumed—as he slid past them to reach the register. With swift efficiency, he rang up his customers’ purchases (Latin grammar; Darla saw him nod in approval) while she and Jake prudently hung back and did their best to be invisible.

“Wonder what’s in those briefcases,” Jake whispered in her ear.

Darla gave the customers a professional smile as she murmured back, “Either dirty laundry or bomb-making materials.”

James finished the transaction but waited until the two young men had left the store before he coolly replied, “I believe it was the former, as I detected a distinct whiff of gym socks emanating from one of the gentlemen. And now, would you care to share what sort of experiments you were performing on Hamlet?”

“Just testing a theory of Darla’s,” Jake airily dismissed the question as she collected her kit. “Gotta go. I’ve got some reports to write up and a couple of errands to run.” To Darla, she added, “I keep forgetting, the man has bionic hearing. I swear he could hear a mouse farting in the next room.”

Not waiting for a reply, she headed for the door. James fixed Darla with a quizzical look, one gray brow quirked in question. Darla debated fobbing him off the same way that Jake had, but she couldn’t just leave, as the store didn’t close for a few more hours yet. Finally, she said softly, “I’ll tell you more, but wait until after our part-timer goes home for the day.”

“Yo, I can hear mice farting, too,” Robert called from the beanbag. “It’s not nice, keeping secrets from the hired help.”

“Actually, keeping employees in the dark is a time-honored tradition,” James countered before Darla could respond. “I presume you are familiar with the concept of information being dispersed on a need-to-know basis?” At Robert’s nod, he clarified, “Let us just say that you do not need to know.”

Darla heard a bit of grumbling from the beanbag, but Robert obediently subsided back into his study of the manual. Hamlet, meanwhile, had slipped out from behind the main shelf in the kids’ section. He planted himself beside the beanbag in what appeared to be a gesture of solidarity with the teen, despite Robert’s earlier bit of betrayal.

Shaking her head, Darla said, “Robert, let’s do this training now, so I can throw you out of here before James dies of curiosity.”

“Believe me, there is no danger of that,” James countered with a hint of a smile. Tugging his vest into place, he headed toward the stairs leading up to the storeroom.

Robert slapped shut the manual and flung himself out of the beanbag with much the same gusto as he’d dropped into it. Darla waited until he’d joined her at the counter and then opened the security program on the computer.

“That’s the icon,” she said, pointing at the screen, “and here’s how you get in.”

Taking the manual back from him, she flipped it open to page 99 and showed him where she’d written the password information. She typed that in, and a welcome screen appeared. She used the mouse to click on the button marked “Menu.”

“You’ve seen the cameras inside the store. There are six total: the four inside, and one each at the front and back doors.”

“You mean there’s, like, one in the courtyard?”

“It’s pointed at the door,” she explained, pulling up a screen that showed all six views at once. “You don’t need to be paranoid; no one is spying on you if you sit out there to eat your lunch. Though pretty soon, it’s going to be too cold to be out there without a parka.”

“Yeah, I heard there might even be snow for Halloween. I think about how that would suck, you know, being homeless in the snow.”

“Don’t worry, there are plenty of shelters and volunteers to help folks in need when the weather gets bad,” she absently assured him, concentrating on the screen. “Here, the program’s set to run automatically. This is how you can tell it’s in real time, and here’s how to play back what you’ve previously recorded.”

She spent the next twenty minutes going over the features and letting Robert try it himself, until she was sure he had it down pat. “You can go through the review first thing tomorrow when you get here. You won’t have to watch every minute, just fast-forward through until you make it back to real time. Or you can stop it sooner if you see something that needs a closer look . . . like Hamlet sneaking out of the building. We’ve got to put a stop to that before he gets hurt.”

Or before he stumbles over another dead body.

“Don’t worry, boss, I’ll keep a sharp eye out,” the teen said with another of his snappy salutes. “And I’ll try to, you know, think like a cat so I can figure out where he’s getting out.”

“I’d appreciate that.” She glanced at her watch and added, “You can sign out now, but why don’t you plan on getting here about thirty minutes early tomorrow morning so you can look at the video.”

“Got it.” He initialed the printed schedule on the clipboard she kept beneath the register, and then reached for the backpack he kept stashed beneath the counter. As he did so, a couple of candy bars tumbled out of the unzipped side. While he stuffed the snacks back in and zipped up the pack again, Darla noticed that today he had a thin sleeping bag cinched to the bottom.

“Going camping tonight?” she asked with a smile.

He shrugged and then pulled the straps over his narrow shoulders. “Sometimes some of us go to the park at night to hang out. The girls, they always complain that it’s, like, too cold. But if I bring along a sleeping bag, we can crawl inside, and they don’t have an excuse to, you know, leave early.”

“Got the picture,” Darla said, hurriedly cutting him short. She didn’t want to think about what else might go on in that sleeping bag. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Robert headed for the door, sending a long-distance fist bump in the direction of Hamlet, who had taken over his spot on the beanbag chair. Darla frowned a little as she watched him leave. She’d hung out in parks at night as a teen a time or two herself. Still, that had been close to twenty years ago and in Dallas, which—contrary to its natives’ protests—had still clung to a small-town mentality despite its sprawling geographic bounds. But what was it like in Brooklyn, in this day and age? Besides, there could be a killer on the loose!

“You’re acting like someone’s mom,” she told herself with a wry smile. Robert was over eighteen and presumably had a mother of his own. If he wanted to go out at night, that was his call. But as for another of her employees—

She glanced again at Hamlet, who was busy kneading the beanbag chair into a more comfortable shape to accommodate his furry self. He’d been darned lucky so far to have returned home unscathed from his unauthorized forays outside the building. With luck, Robert would eventually discover the crafty feline’s escape route, but until then, she intended to keep a keen eye on Hamlet, as well as on her shop’s exterior fixtures . . . at least, until the roaming scrap thieves were caught and jailed.

Though heaven help any scrap thief—or murderer—unfortunate enough to cross paths with the official mascot of Pettistone’s Fine Books.