Cleanup on Aisle Six

by Daniel Stallings

  What did the Lady want? Morley swore under his breath as he thought about how he was sent on another goddamn rainbow chase. However, the Lady was in charge, the big boss, the numero uno, the biggest cheese of them all. She knew too much. It was how she got everything she wanted. She knew things. She liked knowing things.

  Morley remembered that her ex-husband loved to know things too. Perhaps he still did.

  She knew about Morley’s little problem. His frequent nose bleeds and nights without sleep. She knew about his suspended license and the girl with the red sweater now buried under the Shorewood Memorial Lawn. She knew about his whiskey breath, his probation, and his dropped charge of manslaughter.

  She knew that charge should have been murder. However, she knew she could use Morley, and she kept his leash tighter than a noose.

  Morley rifled through the scant array of clothes hung neatly in the shoebox of a closet. “Very few personal belongings. The kid’s nearly broke and starving. There was no food in his kitchen.” He never added editorial comments to his reports, but felt compelled in this one case. “This kid’s not a threat. He has nothing. This job is probably his last hope. Just let his situation take him down. He—”

  Full stop. Morley’s sensitive ears caught the minute jingle of keys on the other side of the door. The brittle clicks of the lock.

  Morley dove into the closet and closed the door, leaving a hair of a crack open for observation. He managed to still his breathing, melting into the shadows, a sniper lining up a shot through his scope. He would wait and watch.

  The quarry was home.

  Waiting for the other end to answer their phone was a torture worse than looking into the self-satisfied sneer of Oscar Lindstrom, that face he made when he knew he had you cornered. The man wrung the corner of his brown apron in his quivering hands. Anxiety made a muscle twitch in his jaw. Damn this modern compulsion to text message everything. This was one conversation he didn’t want to have a print record of.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s me. We have a problem. Have you seen the paper?”

  “What about it?”

  “Oscar’s dead.”

  A pause. A long pause. “So?”

  “You … You didn’t … do anything, did you?”

  “How could you ask me something like that?” Another pause. “Did you do anything?”

  “Do you really think I’m … I’m a killer?”

  “Let’s not fight about this. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “But we did do something. And what if the police—?”

  “No.” The voice was hard, a flint-like sound that could spark a blaze of bad temper in half a second. “You will say nothing, got it? You don’t know anything. We didn’t do anything wrong, remember? We did nothing wrong.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Threats

  “Back again, Detective?”

  Jason’s tone was just a shade off from being a sneer.

  “Yes, Mr. Lindstrom. I’d like to examine your father’s office, if I may.”

  Jason prickled like a porcupine, his nostrils flared, his shoulder hiked up to his ears. “Where’s your warrant?”

  Kathryn swept—literally—from the dining room, clad in her gingham apron and wielding her broom. She looked up, frowning at the interruption in her chore schedule, and then warming into her charming hostess role. “They don’t need a warrant, Jason. We want to help them catch your father’s killer. Now why don’t you be polite and go show them where it is?”

  Jason turned a splotchy red and his head drooped, chin buried in his shrunken chest. Tears threaded his eyelashes. He rubbed his secret scarred arms under his baggy sweatshirt.

  Poor kid, Detective Hughes thought. Loathes his father so much. Thought he was the Devil incarnate. Only to be told to support him by the stepmother he secretly loves. His life must be hell. He looks physically sick with hatred.

  Jason looked up again, his jawline rigid, his eyes cold behind his glasses. “Follow me.”

  As the son led them up the entry stairs with its dark ebony banister and glacier-white spindles, Detective Hughes took the opportunity to survey the design of the house again. Every couch, every rug, every clock, every knickknack was magazine-flawless. The house was a move-in ready showroom model. The detective could just catch the scent of furniture polish and cleaning solution. A sterile stink.

  There were no family photographs. Oscar wasn’t one for preserving memories, it seemed. Detective Hughes recalled, when his son was born, he and his wife cluttered the walls with his pictures, finger paintings, and drawings. Photos of his family warmed up his desk at work. But the Lindstrom residence was not a place to celebrate family. All this gray, cream, silver, mirror, and glass made this house a modern ice palace. Sunlight reflected off the finishes here in hard white bands as opposed to the dappled gold that flowed through the windows in the detective’s home. To live in this sterile showroom box without an atom of love displayed anywhere had to be like living in a chic padded cell. Jason looked ready to snap. How did Kathryn stand it?

  Jason brought them to a white door about midway down the second-floor landing. He stood by it, his emaciated arms knotted over his chest, his face stiff. “This is it.”

  Detective Hughes rattled the knob. “It’s locked.”

  “Exactly. Dad locked it. Dad always locks it. Dad locked it the night he died.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  Jason snorted. “You really think my father trusted me? He thought I was stupid.”

  “Then where is the key?”

  “Beats me. Hidden on his person somewhere. I think he liked to hide it in his shoe when he left the house.”

  “And what do you suggest we should do?”

  Jason glared at the detective, breathing heavily. Jason’s hands shook with effort as he popped the lock out of place with brute force. The door slid open. Jason Lindstrom was stronger than he looked.

  Strong enough to drive a scanner into his father’s skull?

  Detective Hughes kept his face guarded. “Thank you, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  Oscar’s office. The king’s private chambers. Detective Hughes hoped this room—Oscar’s inner sanctum—would give him clues to Oscar’s character when he was alone. He had a lot of testimony regarding Oscar’s public persona. What was the man like when he was by himself? What ideas and memories did he cherish in his solitary hours? What tokens of his globe-trekking past did he celebrate in his secret world?

  His hopes fizzled. The office matched the rest of the house: luxuriously furnished, meticulously maintained, and chromatically austere. No photographs. No souvenirs. No treasures. There was no personality in this house.

  He spoke over his shoulder. “Were you allowed in this room, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  “At times,” Jason replied. “And only when he wanted me here. I was his tech guy for the blog. He didn’t have the patience to learn how to work a computer. So he’d let me in here to work on it.”

  “And anyone else?”

  “Kathryn cleans it every day. But Dad was a neat freak, so there wasn’t much to do. And he’s had colleagues and his boss, Frank Dixon, over a few times. Again, only when he wanted them there. I feel bound to add that he could easily keep us out when he didn’t want anyone to disturb him.”

  Detective Hughes’s eyes roamed around the room. Ebony bookcases matching the ones downstairs stretched across the two walls to his left and right. They were stuffed with books and reference material. Straight ahead was a large window, so spotless it was like a hole cut into the wall. This was the window easily viewed from the neighbors and the street below. Oscar’s royal perch. Angled in front of the window, its chair facing the door, was a slick glass desk topped with tidy, docketed files and the latest computer model money could buy. The office lights were burning bright, lights left lit from the night before.

  It was the window that fixed everyone’s attention. Part of the view was muffled by creamy linen sheers. Behind these sheers was a dark
blot. A human-sized blot.

  All three men strode forward. Detective Hughes, after slipping on gloves, slid back the curtain and frowned at what he saw. As if there weren’t enough weird complications in this case.

  A human silhouette cut out of plywood and painted black. Detective Hughes cautiously tilted the silhouette back to reveal that a large poster of Oscar Lindstrom, scowling as always, had been cut to fit the plywood backing.

  “Interesting,” Detective Hughes said. “Follow my train of thought, Adam. The office lights are on. This silhouette is placed in the window with a photograph of Oscar on it. If anyone on the street looks up, they’d see what they’d expect to see: a shadowy Oscar Lindstrom looking out his office window. Nobody gave this more than a cursory glance.”

  “Instant alibi,” Adam replied.

  “But why? Why form an alibi for your own death?”

  Jason stared at the silhouette of his father in mute disbelief. “Oh God … is that what he was doing up here?”

  Detective Hughes rounded on him. “Did you suspect he was doing something else?”

  Jason retreated, his pale brown eyes wider than the windows, all his hate and hostility shattering. He was now the frightened and trembling boy underneath his flimsy pretense. “I … I-I sometimes heard Dad messing around up here. It sounded like he was fussing with the window. I … I-I just w-wondered …”

  “… what he was doing? Yes, we wonder that as well. And I wonder what you were doing when you were listening to him.”

  Terror scuttled into the boy’s face. His fingers throttled the hem of his floppy sweatshirt. “I-I … I …”

  Detective Hughes’s tone softened but his eyes stayed firm. “You were listening to see how occupied your father was before you escaped the house, weren’t you? You listened to make sure he was busy before you left. Am I close?”

  The naked fear in Jason’s eyes told Detective Hughes everything he needed to know.

  “Did you hear anything in here the night your father died, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  Jason’s head wilted, his complexion gray and his lips strained. His voice had collapsed to a monotone. “Yes. Not … Not long after he went into the office, I listened at the door. He was working on something. There were bumps and scuffles. I … I thought he was working at the window. I was going to leave the house, but then I heard his footsteps move toward the office door while I was listening outside it. I panicked and fled to my room. I decided to wait it out for an hour or two before trying to leave.”

  “Why did you want to escape?”

  Jason’s head snapped up, narrow stripes of red inflaming his cheeks, tears threatening to spill. His voice quavered, but stayed low and controlled. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Before Detective Hughes could ask anything else, Jason fled.

  There was nothing else to do but search the office.

  Detective Hughes rummaged through the neat files on the desk. “Interesting. It seems Oscar recently bought a house in the LA area. Plans to move? And look at this—he sent his résumé to the LA Times to be their restaurant critic. He was definitely making plans to leave Shorewood. That explains his resignation from The Gazette.”

  Adam, sifting through the wastebasket like an archaeologist, excavated an important bit of evidence. “Sir? Look at this. I think this was the note found in that package with the beef heart Mrs. Lindstrom told us about.”

  Detective Hughes took the note from his partner. It was a page torn out of a book. Probably a hardcover, given the size of the page. The title at the top of the page said Full Plate. Oscar’s first book. Blood from the beef heart smeared the paper, and it had been crumpled into a ball. Two words had been scrawled shakily across the page in vivid red marker.

  FIRST WARNING.

  This was a desecration.

  “Someone certainly was a critic of Oscar’s work”

  Adam, for once, looked a bit awkward. “Sir, I know you might not want to hear any theories, but … um …”

  “Theories are cheap, Adam. It never hurts to share your ideas.”

  “Well, sir, I think this feels like an act based on betrayal.”

  Detective Hughes bent his head and cocked an eyebrow. “Why would you think that?”

  Adam brushed a hand over his dishwater-blond hair, smoothing its already smooth texture. “The note came from Oscar’s first book. Someone who was very angry at Oscar had a copy of it on their shelves. I believe this person must have respected Oscar once. He or she bought this book because they were a fan. Now they felt betrayed by something Oscar did to them, so they betrayed him by defiling his work.”

  A brief nod. “Not a bad thought. It’s definitely a point to clear up. Check out these notes here, will you? I want to examine these bills.”

  Adam flipped through a legal pad packed with microscopic handwriting. “Looks like he was working on a new book. No title yet. There’s a weird note here: Discuss with Miranda. Got any ideas who that could be, Tony?”

  A small smile curled the detective’s lips. “I think she may have something to do with this. Bills and invoices for roses, jewelry, fancy dinners … the works for an extramarital affair. But the big red flag—hell, it’s a red billboard at this point—is that Oscar paid the mortgage on a house in town, a house that wasn’t his own. Address is 413 Helen Street. Sound familiar?”

  413 Helen Street. What did Jason Lindstrom say about it?

  You’ll learn something.

  Morley pressed his body into the meager wardrobe inside the closet, silent as death, watching with the intensity of a bird of prey. The shadows closed over him like a cloak of invisibility. He didn’t dare to breathe. He watched his quarry enter the apartment and take off his chocolate-colored apron, part of the uniform of that hole-in-the-wall grocery store where he worked. Morley, his hawk eyes tracing the stress and strain in every line and untimely wrinkle in his quarry’s face, could tell that the kid had a lot on his mind. He moved through the apartment in that dreamy, hazy, floating way of a mind on autopilot. If the kid went to the bathroom, Morley could slip out undetected.

  Luck did not favor him. The kid started shuffling toward the closet to hang up his apron.

  Morley’s hand, blind in the shadows, swam through the darkness to find something to use. His long, agile fingers stroked something wooden. He tried to divine its shape and form with nothing but his fingertips, keeping his eyes fastened on the kid’s movements.

  A baseball bat. The kid kept a bat in his closet. For protection or for sport? For Morley, it would be used for the former.

  The kid’s hand lifted to grasp the closet doorknob.

  Morley, a cornered panther, pounced out of the closet, swung the bat, and slammed it into the kid’s head. The boy, stunned by the speed and efficiency of the blow, spun on his toes before crumbling to the floor into deep unconsciousness. He lay on the floor like a used rag, crumpled and tossed aside. He could have been dead for all Morley cared.

  Morley dumped the baseball bat by the kid’s body. His face when he stared at the prone figure was as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar. It wasn’t his fault if the damn kid showed up too early.

  He left the apartment to deliver his report to the Lady.

  CHAPTER 10

  Clean Plate

  413 Helen Street.

  Altogether, a good impression. A cozy bungalow painted the exact shade of a key lime pie with tufts of ornamental white trim to mimic the meringue. The garden was a well-loved jubilee of color, a stark contrast to the fiercely maintained rings of nondescript white at the Lindstrom house. Sandstone pavers serpentined through the trimmed lawn in a path leading to the sky-blue front door. Somewhere in the distant trees, songbirds trilled. So might a cottage in a fairy tale would have looked.

  This was the home of Miranda Raglietti.

  Detective Hughes knocked on the door, his buckeye-brown eyes taking in the vibrant red-and-yellow welcome mat cheerfully inviting visitors to COME ON IN! He doubted if that request would ever truly be welcome.


  A boy, probably no older than four or five, pulled open the door. He regarded the two men standing at the doorstep with a mature, rather calculating expression. “Are you my new daddies? Mom is always bringing home new daddies.”

  Detective Hughes and Adam exchanged a look.

  Detective Hughes crouched so he would be on the same level as the boy. “We’re the police,” he said, his tone friendly. “Is your mom around?”

  The boy’s eyes lit up like twin Jumbotrons. “The police! Cool! Can I see your badge?”

  Detective Hughes indulged him. The boy bellowed over his shoulder. “HEY, MOM! THE POLICE ARE HERE!” He turned back to the detective, his face eager. “Do you guys have the car with the big lights on it?”

  A woman’s voice, sharp and cutting, shouted back at him. “For God’s sake, Trevor! How many times do I have to tell you not to shout? Do you even listen to me?”

  Trevor howled even louder. “THE POLICE ARE HERE!”

  The woman, grumbling, emerged from the small hallway balancing a tiny laundry basket on her hip and a glass of what smelled like scotch. She was a young mother, mid- to late-twenties. She wore a floppy tank top that laughed at the idea of covering her body and shorts hiked to her upper thigh. Her bottle-blonde hair, yanked into a high ponytail, needed a root touch-up. She faltered when she saw the two policemen at her doorstep, one of whom was holding up his badge for inspection.

  “What do you want?” she asked, suspicion and fear making a potent cocktail in her cognac-colored eyes.

  “Miranda Raglietti?” At her nod, he continued. “Detective Hughes and Officer Schafer-Schmidt, ma’am. We’d like to talk to you about Oscar Lindstrom.”

  A double shot of fear to those eyes. Miranda shooed her son into his bedroom to play with his Legos, despite his protests that he wanted to see “the police car with the big lights.” Once Trevor was safely ensconced, she invited her guests into her small but pleasant living room. They declined her offer of a cocktail.