My soldier softened up a bit then, shoulders slumping. “And you know it was murder . . . how?”
“Dr. Rusted was caught out in the rain, like so many others, but he was able to get inside before he suffered anything worse than light injuries. He bandaged himself up and stretched out to rest and recover in his bedroom. I believe he was awakened by the sound of someone moving around in his daughter’s bedroom upstairs. He was so surprised he didn’t even bother to put on his glasses but went straight up to see who was there. Perhaps he thought his daughter had returned home. But when he got up there, he found a looter. There was a confrontation. Only God and Dr. Rusted’s assailant could tell you what happened next, but I believe that in the course of the struggle Dr. Rusted toppled down the stairs and suffered the fatal injury.”
The soldier scratched the back of his head. “You don’t want to bring the National Guard into a crime scene. You want someone who knows about the art of detection.”
“There’s nothing to detect. The man who killed him is locked in the trunk of Dr. Rusted’s Crown Victoria. He visited the house last night to kill me as well, but I was ready for him and slugged him with a frying pan. He won’t suffocate—I drilled some holes in the lid of the trunk—but he might get awfully hot, so I recommend going right over there.”
When I said that, the soldier’s eyes about came out of his head. “Why’d he try to kill you, too?”
“He knew I had identified him as Dr. Rusted’s murderer. The guy in the trunk has a grudge against the entire Rusted family. Yolanda Rusted, the doctor’s daughter and my girlfriend, used to babysit this guy’s daughter. After he found out Yolanda is gay, he was horrified and demanded that the doctor refund every cent of the babysitting money he’d paid over the year. The doctor rightly refused. Well, after the rain fell, this neighbor noticed that a car was missing from the garage, assumed the house was empty, and decided it would be a good time to do some stealing and settle the bill. I’m sure he thought he was justified in looting Yolanda’s jewelry box, but the doctor had a different point of view. While they were grappling, the intruder lost his watch. Later, when I asked this neighbor if he’d heard any ruckus in the doctor’s house, I saw him looking at his bare wrist, as if to check the time.”
“You figured out he killed your girlfriend’s daddy just because he glanced at his wrist?”
“Well, it didn’t help that his daughter was wearing one of Yolanda’s bracelets. I recognized it straightaway,” I lifted my wrist to show him the silver bangle. “I asked for it back this morning. Besides, if there was any doubt about what the neighbor did, it was cleared up when he entered the house at two in the morning to suffocate me with a pillow.”
He studied me for a moment longer, then turned his head and called to a couple of his compadres pushing brooms in the street. “You guys want a break from cleanup?”
“To do what?” one of them asked.
“To grab a murdering bigot and drag his ass to the lockup.”
The two soldiers looked at each other. The one leaning on his broom said, “Shit, why not? It’ll give us something to do while we’re waiting on the world to end.”
My soldier said, “Come on. Let’s go. Jump in the Humvee.”
“No, sir, I can’t. I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to Dr. Rusted’s house without me.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? We haul this guy in to Denver PD, they’re going to want you to give a statement.”
“And I will, but they’ll have to contact me at my house on Jackdaw Street. I left Dr. Rusted’s daughter up in Boulder. I need to get back to her.”
“Oh,” he said, and looked away from me. “Yeah. All right. I suppose she’ll want to know about her old man.”
I didn’t tell him the girl I wanted to get back to wasn’t waiting on news of her father, on account of being just as dead as he was. I was glad to let my soldier think what he wanted, as long as I could keep moving. As restless and antsy as I was, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Dr. Rusted’s and maybe losing another day in Denver.
I told him where the police could find the doctor and his assailant and where they could locate me in Boulder when they wanted my statement.
“If they want a statement. If this even goes to a judge.” My soldier took an uneasy look at the sky. “If the rains keep falling, I think trial by jury might be a fond memory in a few months. We’ll be back to frontier justice soon enough. Hanging people on the spot. Saves time and trouble.”
“Eye for an eye?” I asked.
“You know it,” he told me, and turned to glare at the crow. “I hope you’re paying attention, you filthy beast.”
The crow, half a block away, squawked at us, then lifted its prize, opened its wings, and flapped laboriously away—getting while the getting was good.
I WAS ALMOST BACK TO the pike when I came across Dillett’s John Deere, crashed through a fence of slender wooden posts and dumped in a dusty lot, just shy of a bridge over the brown, noisy rush of the South Platte River. The windshield had been shattered into a dozen spiderweb fractures from the evening’s rain. The driver’s-side door hung open on darkness.
I climbed up on the running board for a peek inside. The interior was empty but scattered with bloody hundred-dollar bills. The handcuffs hung from the steel bar under the dash. Someone had left what at first looked like a filthy, uncooked sausage on the driver’s seat. I leaned close, squinting at it, trying to figure out what it was, then realized it was a thumb and recoiled so fast I almost fell out onto the dirt. My stomach turned. Someone had clipped Teasdale’s thumb off so he could slip the cuffs, and then his mystery accomplice had attempted to stanch the bleeding with money. There were some torn strips of bloody white silk on the floor and something glittering in the footwell of the passenger seat. I reached in and picked it out. A fake golden tiara.
I don’t know for sure that Teasdale met the Queen of the Apocalypse. I can’t swear that she cut off part of his hand to enable his escape or that she bandaged him with ribbons torn from her wedding dress, padded with money out of her carpetbag. I could not tell you if the two of them went to Canada together. Maybe they did, though.
Maybe she taught him how to walk between raindrops.