Little Dead Riding Hood

by Blake Banner

  I glanced at Dehan and stood, wincing with the pain as I straightened. Samuel was still staring at his father with bulging eyes, his mouth drawn down into an ugly, silent sob. Dehan stood, too.

  I said, “You’d better let him rest, Samuel. And call the doctor, to be on the safe side.”

  He stood and followed us silently into the hall, then turned to walk away toward the kitchen. I said, “Samuel, do you work with a partner?”

  He frowned at me like the question was an insane one, then shook his head. “No, I work alone, like my dad before me.” Then he added, almost by rote, “Don’t see no sense paying out good money when I can do the work myself.”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  He turned and continued on his way to the kitchen, and we made our way to the front door. As I was opening it, I became aware of a presence on the stairs and turned to look. Helen was standing halfway up, with her bare legs and feet caught in the light from the hall, but her upper body in semi-darkness.

  “Hello, Helen.”

  Her voice was unemotional. “Is Celeste killing us?”

  “No. She’s not.”

  “I thought, once she was dead, she couldn’t hurt us anymore.”

  I nodded. “She can’t. Good night, Helen.”

  “Good night.”

  We stepped out into the drizzle and closed the door behind us. The porch light made the wet concrete path shiny, but the street was mainly in darkness because the streetlamps were enclosed by the trees. I looked again at the white pickup with its blue tarp on the back, covering the plastic sacks of rubble. I stepped past it and it occurred to me I must be getting old, because the sight of my ancient burgundy Jaguar, with its leather and walnut interior, was somehow calming and reassuring. I limped over to the passenger side and climbed in as Dehan got behind the wheel again. The doors clunked shut and she put the key in the ignition.

  “You ready to go home now?”

  “I am.”

  “You sure you don’t want to go and drop any more bombshells on any more dysfunctional families before bed?”

  “Quite sure, Dehan. You can’t deny,” I said as she turned the key and the big engine roared into life, “that it was a very instructive exercise.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  She was quiet then all the way down Gleason until we turned left onto White Plains. Then she said, “Instructive.” Not as a question, but as a statement.

  I looked at her along my eyes without moving my head.

  She said, “I don’t know, Stone. How was it instructive?”

  I watched a cluster of rain drops gather on the windshield, turning the world outside into a jumble of broken light and pictures. Then the wipers swept it away, so that the nocturnal street was clear again for a moment, until the drops started gathering once more.

  “I’m guessing,” I said, “that while we were there, you were feeling sullen and grumpy, and what you were focusing on was your desire to go home and have a bubble bath, surrounded by evil smelling candles.”

  She raised a hand and grinned. “Guilty.”

  “I don’t blame you, but now ask yourself. If you had not been focusing on that, but on them, what would you have noticed?”

  “OK, my bad. Let me think.” She sighed. “The old man in deep denial about his daughter and Lenny.”

  “That old man is only ten or fifteen years older than me.”

  “That’s what denial will do for you. What else? Samuel.” She shook her head. “Man, that guy has a lot of pent up…” She stopped. She drove in silence for a good two or three minutes. Finally she said, “OK, you made your point. His motive is at least as credible as Lenny’s and Chad’s. He really hated his sister.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Something else?” She thought for a bit. “Yeah,” she said after a while. “He wasn’t so much mad at the fact that she was having an affair with Lenny, as the fact that she did it under the family roof.”

  I nodded. “His dad didn’t seem all that surprised. But he was outraged that they had done it in the house. Anything else?”

  “Jeez, Batman! Uh… Well, yeah, the whole thing about how Celeste had been systematically destroying the family. She had the devil in her heart…”

  I grunted. “That’s more of the same, Little Grasshopper. Anything else?”

  She glanced at me. “Your weird, untimely question about whether Samuel worked alone? No, nothing else, but you obviously did.”

  I laughed softly. She slowed and turned right onto Morris Park Avenue.

  “Oh, I noticed lots and lots, but there was one thing in particular I had hoped you had spotted.”

  “Go on, tell me.”

  “What was in the back of the white pickup?”

  She went very still. “Uh… A blue tarp…”

  “Under the blue tarp.”

  “I don’t know, Stone. Jesus. You noticed?”

  “Ooooh, Ritoo Glasshopper, Sensei notice everything!” I laughed painfully, then said, “It was full of those toughened plastic sacks that builders use. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, all full of sand.”

  “Yeah? Is that important?”

  “How heavy do you figure each of those sacks is?”

  “I don’t know, a hundred, hundred and ten pounds?”

  “Could you heft fifteen or twenty of them into the back of a pickup truck?”

  “Probably not.”

  “How about Lenny? You think he could? I know I’d find it hard work.”

  She was quiet for a long while. Then she lifted both hands off the wheel in a gesture of exasperation. “Come on, Stone! OK, the guy is strong enough to heft a girl of ninety or a hundred pounds over a fence or a railway line and onto the riverbank. That is circumstantial at best! Lenny was having an affair with her! He concealed evidence! He ran when we went to get him! He shot at cops! He tried to run you down, for crying out loud! Come on, Stone! The guy is as guilty as a bishop in a whorehouse!”

  I nodded silently a few times. “Lenny fired high and he swerved to miss me. He was reckless, he didn’t aim to kill me. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it was Lenny—I surely would like to know how he disposed of the body though, and why he did it so incompetently.” I watched her face for a bit, bathed in soft amber, concentrating on the road. After a bit I went on, “Lenny has been on the force twenty years. Fifteen in homicide. How many murders do you think he has dealt with in that time?”

  She sighed, slowed and turned left into Haight Avenue. Then she pulled up in front of our house and killed the engine and the lights. The rain drummed softly on the roof.

  I said, “He finds, suddenly, that in a fit of rage he has killed this girl, in the middle of the street. What does he do? He picks her up, carries her to his Jeep, and after all the homicides he has worked, instead of taking her to a remote, desolate place close to his home, like Ferry Hill or Castle Point, where the body will be carried out to the East River and probably never found again, he takes it to a highly populated area, where he has to carry it over difficult, wet, slippery objects and dump it in a river that will not carry it immediately out. What would make Lenny do something as stupid as that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You owe me a large whiskey and a curry.”

  We clambered out into the drizzle, put our arms around each other and staggered up the steps to the front door.

  FIFTEEN

  Next morning brought with it more steady rain. The sky had changed from big, bellying, menacing watercolor clouds to a uniform ceiling of gunmetal gray. The wind had dropped and with it the squally lash of raindrops had gone, replaced by the slow, steady tap of heavy drizzle and the splash of overflowing guttering. We got up late, around ten, though the dull light and lack of contrast suggested it could be anything between six AM and six PM.

  We made coffee in silence. She cooked bacon while I fried eggs and made toast. Then we sat and had breakfast, stared out the gray
window and felt sorry for ourselves. Finally, at eleven, while we were washing up, I said:

  “I’m going to go and see Chad.”

  She dried her hands on a tea towel, gazing dreamily at the sodden lawn in the back yard, and said, “Why?” Then she blinked and looked at me, frowning. “What for?”

  “Something happened that night, Dehan. We haven’t got the whole picture.”

  She heaved a big sigh. “I know. I was thinking about it last night. I even dreamed about it.” She shrugged. “You’re right. As it stands, there is something missing in the picture. Lenny would not and could not have disposed of the body the way it was disposed of.” She rested her ass against the sink. “Which means either he didn’t do it, or he had an accomplice. If he didn’t do it, it is really hard to explain his behavior at the aiport.”

  I studied her face for a bit. After a moment, she asked me, “What do you think Chad can tell you?”

  “What happened that night.”

  “How would he know, Stone?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  She looked unhappy. “I wish you’d let me in on your thought processes sometimes, Big Guy.”

  I grabbed my phone from the breakfast bar and spoke as I looked for his number and dialed. “There is no special thought process, Dehan. It just doesn’t makes sense that it went down the way people are saying it went down. So it must have gone down in a different way. And I have a hunch Chad knows more than he’s saying, because his story doesn’t quite make sense either.”

  We arranged to meet outside the law school on West 116th Street. We picked him up in the Jag and drove down Amsterdam to Friedman’s, where we managed to park right outside and duck in out of the rain. The place was almost empty. We found a booth against the wall and ordered three burgers and three beers.

  When the waitress had gone, Chad spread his hands. “You said you had news.”

  Dehan was quiet, watching me.

  I nodded. “Detective Leonard Davis is in hospital, in a critical condition. If he pulls through, he will be charged with Celeste’s murder.”

  He frowned and looked down at his hands on the table. “A cop?”

  “You don’t know who Leonard Davis is.”

  He squinted at me and shook his head. “Should I?”

  “He was the detective in charge of investigating Celeste’s murder.”

  He made a face that indicated what he thought of cops in general. “That’s great. So why would this Davis want to kill Celeste?”

  “It seems he was Rod.”

  I waited. I watched his eyes. They darted around the table with small, quick movements, like thoughts and memories were laid out there and he was reading and cross-referencing them, trying to make sense of them. A couple of times he gave a small frown.

  Finally, I said: “What? That doesn’t make sense to you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not the detective. You’ll build your case and see what the jury makes of it.”

  “I’m curious what you make of it.”

  “I don’t know what evidence you’ve got.”

  I watched his eyes carefully. “A white truck?”

  He looked away at the empty tables and after a moment shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re driving at, Detective Stone. You’re obviously trying to trap me or draw me into admitting something. I have no idea what it is. Why don’t you just come out and ask me?”

  I nodded. “What really happened that night, Chad?”

  “I already told you.”

  “You told me half the truth.”

  “So you say.”

  “Here’s my problem. Detective Leonard Davis and Celeste had been having an affair for about six months. She was wild, out of control. Then she met you. From what you have told me, and I believe you, you were very focused on building a career, and she liked that in you. I don’t believe that back then, when you met her, you were the embittered cynic you pretend to be now. I think you both had chemistry and liked each other, and she felt she had found something in you. See, her dad and her brother are always talking about family, but actually Celeste had no family at all in any meaningful sense of the word. But I believe she felt she had found some kind of family in you. And I think that feeling was mutual. How am I doing?”

  The waitress brought the beers and set them before us. As she walked away, Chad shrugged and made a face. “Pop psychology, a cop’s gut, who cares? How is any of this relevant to anything?”

  “It’s relevant because, as you well know, about ninety percent of murders are motivated by love.”

  “You have the man you’re going to charge, now you want to frame me?”

  “No.” I gave my head a small shake. “You see, I think, when you found out about Rod…”

  “Detective Leonard Davis.”

  “When you found out about him, and read his text messages, I think that was a major blow to you. I think you felt hurt and betrayed.”

  “OK, maybe I did, so what?”

  “I think that’s why instead of kicking her out, the way you kicked out your roommate, Nigel, without a second thought, you had a big, almighty row which ended, as you said, in make up sex.”

  “Again, so what? I told you all of this already.”

  I nodded again. “And she told you, at least partly, who Rod was, and why she hadn’t shaken him off yet. Am I right?”

  He didn’t answer for a bit. Then he said simply, “Yes. She didn’t say he was a cop…”

  “She told you he was an older man, a friend of the family, and that he’d helped her through a difficult time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But then she promised she was going to break it off with him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So she went home, telling you she’d be back that evening, but when it started to get late and she didn’t show, you called her. What did she say?”

  “Late Sunday morning, she said she was going to go home, collect a few things, call Rod—she said his name was Lenny—tell him she had met somebody and it was over with him. We were going to try living part of the week together and see how that went. She was going to get a job…”

  “You were thinking of making a life together?”

  “We were going to give it a go. When she wasn’t crazy, she was great. She was smart, you know, actually intelligent. I thought we had a shot at making it work. But then it was getting late and she didn’t show. So I called her. She said she’d spoken to him and broken it off. I asked her why she was late. She said she’d had a bad row with her dad and her brother. They’d called her evil, the Devil had a hold of her and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. She’d been crying in her room and fallen asleep. But she said she was on her way and couldn’t wait to…” He paused and sighed. “She couldn’t wait to get home.”

  “It’s a ten minute walk from her house to yours. But she didn’t show.”

  “I eventually called again. It was before nine. I was worried. She said she was actually walking, on her way, literally. I could hear that she was outside. She said Lenny kept calling. She also said her brother had called. Something in her voice made me worried. So I went to meet her.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense. What you told me before didn’t make sense. Whichever way I tried to see it, you went to meet her. You had to.”

  “Yeah, I had to. I grabbed my keys and my coat and walked out. It was a two minute walk to the playground, but when I got to the corner, I saw her, in her Red Riding Hood coat.”

  “Where?”

  “At the playground.”

  “Where exactly?”

  He sat back. His eyes became abstracted. “Memory plays tricks, but I’m pretty sure she was opposite the grocery store, in the shadow of the big tree there. She wasn’t alone. There was a man there with her.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Not in much detail. The light was poor. But Celeste was five-five, and this guy was head and shoulders over her, a good seven to ten inches taller than she was.”


  Dehan spoke for the first time. “How can you be so precise?”

  He took a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh. “Because he was embracing her. He had his arms around her and they were swaying slightly side to side.”

  I raised a hand. “Let’s be clear, Chad. You are saying that he was hugging her, not holding her by the shoulders?”

  “No, no way. I was no more than fifty or sixty feet away. You can measure it. There are four big trees along there. I was standing by the second tree and I could see them clearly. He was holding her in his arms. Then he picked her up.”

  Dehan sounded incredulous. “He picked her up?”

  “Yeah, like a groom carrying a bride over the threshold. He turned around and carried her back to the corner, to a white truck.”

  “What did he do next?”

  “I don’t know. I turned and went back home, and swore to myself that I would never trust another woman so long as I lived.”

  “OK, Chad, I need you to be absolutely certain about your next answer. What kind of truck was it?”

  “I can’t tell you the make, but it was a pickup, maybe a Ford or a Toyota.”

  “Not an SUV with passenger seats in the back? A Jeep maybe?”

  “No. It was a pickup.”

  The waitress arrived with our burgers, told us to enjoy our meal and withdrew. I sat back, staring at my food, unseeing. I shook my head and said, “Chad, I don’t know whether to tell you this or not. The man you saw was not Lenny, Rod, Detective Leonard Davis, whatever you want to call him.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Who the hell was it, then?”

  “I’m not sure, but Detective Davis is about five foot six or seven at the most, and he drives a white Jeep Cherokee.”

  “Then I might have saved her?”

  “I don’t think so, Chad. I think by the time you saw them, she was already dead. I think what he did after you turned away, was to put her in the back of the truck, under the tarpaulin. I’m sorry.”

  He was silent for a long time. None of us ate. Eventually he said, “So she didn’t lie to me…”

  It was Dehan who answered. “That has to be some kind of consolation, Chad.”