Frozen Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  I feel my stomach knot up. When I look over at Richmond, I’m hoping to see indifference on his face and a quick dismissal of Patricia’s idea. But instead I see keen interest.

  “Do you know this neighbor’s name?” Richmond asks.

  Patricia nods and with a flash of frightening clarity, I know what’s coming next. “I believe his name is Hurley,” she says. “Steve Hurley.”

  Chapter 14

  Though I expect Bob Richmond to discuss Patricia’s revelations during our short ride back to the station, he doesn’t get a chance. His cell phone rings and after answering the call and grunting a couple of times, he says, “Okay, be right there,” and hangs up.

  He looks over at me and says, “They found Callie Dunkirk’s car.”

  “Where?”

  “It was left parked on a side street, ironically not far from where this Minniver guy lived. I’m heading over to check it out now and my guys have called Izzy to meet us there since the car might also be the murder site. Want to come along?”

  I swallow hard, realizing that if Callie’s car is near Minniver’s house, it’s also near Hurley’s. “Sure,” I say.

  A few minutes later we pull up on the scene, which is on a side street a couple of blocks down from Minniver’s house. There are two cop cars on site, one behind a silver sedan parked against the curb, and the other idling with its lights flashing in the traffic lane beside it. A police evidence tech, a guy named Jonas, is standing beside the silver sedan, waiting. Also standing nearby are two uniformed cops: Ron Colbert and Alan Nielsen.

  Richmond slides his car in front of the lit-up cruiser and shifts it into park. He opens his door to get out but it takes several attempts and a lot of groaning before he makes it.

  “Is it locked?” he asks the cops as we approach.

  Colbert and Nielsen both nod and then Nielsen raises his hand, which is holding a Slim Jim. “We’re ready to open it whenever you say so. Looks like the keys are in it, along with her purse.”

  Thank goodness we live in a small town where most of the people are honest. In a large city, I doubt a parked car containing visible keys and a purse would last very long.

  “Did you dust the handles yet?” Richmond asks.

  “Yep, looks like they were all wiped clean,” Jonas says.

  “Okay, then, go ahead and open her up.”

  Nielsen deftly slides the Slim Jim down inside the driver side door and after a few seconds of finagling, he pops the lock. Jonas hands around a box of gloves and I take a pair and put them on. Richmond pulls out a pair, too, but when he tries to pull one on over his huge hand, it tears. “Cheap crap,” he mutters, ripping the tattered glove off. He walks over to his own car, unlocks the trunk, and grabs some gloves from a box he has stashed inside.

  I hear the rumble of a familiar car engine behind me and when I look I see Izzy’s Impala turn the corner. He pulls in along the curb behind the parked cruiser and gets out, carrying his scene kit.

  “You’re just in time, Doc,” Richmond says.

  Izzy walks up and sets his kit down on the street beside the just-unlocked door. He dons some gloves and then carefully opens the driver side door. We all peer inside, looking for signs of blood pools, drops, or splatter, anything that might indicate that this is where Callie Dunkirk was killed. But the car appears to be clean.

  “I don’t see any evidence to indicate she was stabbed in here,” Izzy says. We all take a step back as Izzy removes his gloves, stuffs them in his pocket, and picks up his scene kit. “I’ll leave the rest to you fellows,” he says.

  Jonas moves in with a small, battery-operated, hand-held vacuum and starts running it over the driver’s seat and floor.

  Izzy looks over at Richmond and me. “How did it go with Minniver’s daughter?”

  “Okay,” I say with a shrug. “She took it well, considering.”

  “Did she have any ideas on who might have wanted to poison her father?”

  Richmond snorts. “Yeah, she thinks it might have been Steve Hurley.” He says this with obvious derision, making it clear what he thinks of the idea.

  “Hurley?” Izzy echoes. “Where did that come from?”

  “Apparently Hurley is a neighbor,” I explain, “and there was some kind of property line dispute between him and this Minniver guy. Frankly, the whole idea of a cop or anyone, for that matter, killing someone over something so petty seems pretty absurd to me.”

  “Yeah, I have to agree,” Richmond says. “Though Hurley is kind of an unknown quantity in these parts. He’s still pretty new here.”

  “I’ve worked a few cases with him and he seems like a pretty straight-up guy to me,” I say.

  Richmond snorts. “Yeah, like you’re an objective judge.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Mattie. Everyone knows there’s something going on between you two. Even I’ve heard the rumors, and I’m hardly in the regular loop.”

  “There is nothing going on between me and Hurley.” I try to look offended by the suggestion but I can tell from Richmond’s amused expression that he isn’t buying it. Can’t say I blame him. But while my denial isn’t exactly the truth, it isn’t an all-out lie, either. Sure, Hurley and I have had a kiss or two, but that’s as far as things have gone.

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” Richmond says. “Rumor has it your attraction to Hurley couldn’t be more obvious if you were humping his leg every time you’re together.”

  Great. The last thing I need is to be the topic of more rumors in this town. It’s not bad enough that I’m already the object of pity, thanks to David’s indiscretions. Now I’m being labeled as the town hound dog as well. And given my current situation with Hurley, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  “I don’t give a hoot what you’ve heard,” I tell Richmond. “I swear there is nothing going on between me and Hurley.”

  “Whatever,” he says with a dismissive shrug. “Like I said, I don’t see this property line dispute as much of a motive anyway. I need to dig a little deeper into Minniver’s life, see what other motives and suspects pop up.”

  Jonas turns off his vacuum, sets it aside, and dons some shoe covers. Then he gets his fingerprint kit and settles into the front seat of Callie’s car. He sits there a moment, frowning, and then he calls Richmond over.

  “Do me a favor,” he says, offering Richmond the fingerprint powder and brush. “Check the seat lever down there for prints. I need to move the seat back but I don’t want to smudge anything that might be there and I can’t quite reach it from here.”

  Richmond takes the kit, and when he bends over to brush the powder on the lever, his shirt rides up along his back, exposing a wide expanse of derriere and a butt crack that rivals the Grand Canyon.

  Izzy, who is watching along with me, quickly turns away and says, “That’s my cue to leave. Need a ride back to your car?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  As soon as Izzy drops me off, I take out my cell phone and call Hurley to give him a heads-up. He doesn’t answer, so I leave a message letting him know about the car and what Patricia told us. Knowing I have a long drive ahead of me tomorrow, I stop off on my way home and top off my gas tank at the Kwik-E-Mart, which just happens to be located right next to the strip mall that serves as home to Mancini’s Pizzeria.

  Ten minutes later, I’m sitting at home eating my takeout pizza and wondering if Richmond is being equally bad. In an effort to mitigate my sin, I drop the end crusts onto the floor so Hoover can do the thing that earned him his name. After sucking up every last crumb, he goes to the door and whines to be let out. That’s when it hits me. Tomorrow’s trip to Chicago is likely to be an all-day event. And Hoover, though he has done remarkably well thus far, hasn’t had his bladder tested for more than an eight-hour span.

  The responsibilities of dog ownership weren’t uppermost in my mind when I found him, especially since I wasn’t sure I’d be keeping him. I ran a lost-and-found ad in the l
ocal paper, but got no response. I’ve had him for nearly a month now and with each passing day he steals a little more of my heart. Even Rubbish adores him. It’s easy to see why, because as companions go, Hoover is damned near perfect. He senses when my mood needs lifting, listens patiently to everything I say, keeps me warm in bed at night, and shares my taste in ice cream. If only I could find all those traits in a man.

  While I’m overjoyed to have Hoover, his presence does leave me with certain scheduling issues I didn’t have before. As I let him outside and watch him wander about sniffing until he finds the perfect place to piddle, I consider taking him along tomorrow. But we’ll be riding in Hurley’s car to who knows where and for how long, so I quickly dismiss that idea. I then think about asking Izzy and Dom to take care of him but I’m hesitant to impose on Izzy any more than I already have, and besides, the less I have to face Izzy while I’m withholding information from him, the better.

  I would ask my sister, Desi, but she, Lucien, and the kids all left town early this morning to drive to Arizona to spend Thanksgiving with Lucien’s parents.

  That leaves my mother. The obvious problem with this idea is that my mother is a serious germaphobe and I suspect a puppy will look like a giant agar plate to her. But she is also a hypochondriac, and that aspect of her personality gives me an idea.

  “Come on, Hoover,” I say. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Thanks to today’s rising temperature, a good deal of the snow that fell Thursday night has melted. As a result, a lot of what was white and pristine yesterday is now gray and slushy, turning Hoover’s tootsies into mud magnets. I’m not too worried about him muddying up the back of the hearse. I was told when I bought it that the rear carpeting was some industrial-strength commercial stuff that would resist the most insistent of stains. Given the cargo that was typically carried back there before I bought it, I shudder to think what tests the carpet company ran to be able to make that claim. But because my mother would probably go screaming in terror at the site of mud-caked paws, I grab an old towel from the house and clean off Hoover’s feet the best I can.

  There’s no need to call ahead to see if Mother will be home because the woman rarely ventures out of the house. According to her, the outside world is full of horrible threats: germs, radiation, cancer-inducing sun rays, skin-wrinkling poisons, secondhand smoke, airborne pesticides . . . and that’s before she starts thinking up the more bizarre dangers, like getting your head split open by “turdites”—her word for those frozen, blue meteorites that are created when crap gets jettisoned from airliner toilets. I’ve always thought Mother could score big in Hollywood—the makers of disaster movies could learn a thing or two from her when it comes to thinking up ways for people to be annihilated.

  Mother’s long-term paranoia and hypochondria have definitely shaped my psyche and may have been why I chose to be a nurse. As a young child I kept expecting her to turn up dead any time, either from one her many supposed ailments, or some uncanny and unfortunate accident. As a result, I was always choosing alternative caregivers from among my friends’ parents and imagining what a more normal life might be like. Over the years Mom dragged me along with her to hundreds of doctor appointments, an experience that always proved terrifying. But my fright didn’t stem from a fear of Mom’s illnesses or possible death—by the age of ten I began to suspect that her only real sickness was a mental one. Instead I was scared to death of being mortified by her behavior.

  Because of her fear of germs and her belief that doctors’ offices are giant petri dishes, incubating all the horrific diseases of every patient ever seen there—a fear that unfortunately has some foundation in truth—she would always refuse to sit in the waiting room. Instead she would insist on being taken back to an exam room immediately upon her arrival. If she wasn’t, she would raise a fuss until she got her way, something that typically happened pretty quickly since the front desk people were always anxious to shut her up and get her in the back so she would quit scaring the other patients.

  Unfortunately, getting past the waiting room was only half the battle. Once Mom got to an exam room, she would make the nurses go through a rigorous cleaning procedure that she had to personally supervise, an exhausting process that often took fifteen minutes or more and plucked the last nerve on the most patient of nurses.

  As a result of all these idiosyncrasies, Mom knows every generalist and specialist in town because she has seen and made herself persona non grata with most of them. Nowadays she travels nearly an hour to see her doctor and she has toned down her behavior quite a bit. I think she finally realized she was running out of options and would soon be forced to weigh her fear of flying against her fear of death because the only doctors left who would be willing to see her would be too far away to drive to.

  My marrying a doctor certainly helped things, and in my mother’s eyes it’s the one thing in life I did right. When I started dating David, she was ecstatic; when we became engaged, she nearly had an orgasm. She can’t understand why I now want to divorce him over something as mundane as infidelity. I have to admit that David, despite his many faults, has always been a veritable font of patience when it comes to my mother. And she definitely pushes the limits, calling him often and at all hours of the day and night. If I had a dollar for every house call David ever made to my mother, I’d be pulling into her driveway right now in something a whole lot nicer than a hearse.

  Today there is another car in Mom’s drive and it’s one I recognize. It belongs to William-not-Bill Hanover, a nerdy, germaphobic accountant with a bad case of OCD and an even worse comb-over. William was my blind date for a Halloween party a few weeks ago and the results were nothing short of catastrophic. However, he proved to be a perfect, albeit younger match for my mother. Apparently the sharing of a common mental illness is a powerful aphrodisiac.

  I leash Hoover and head for the front door, trying to sidestep the slush piles to keep his paws as clean as possible. Apparently Mother either saw or heard me pull up because the door whips open before I reach the porch. She looks at Hoover with a horrified expression and claps a hand to her chest. Her normally pale skin is whiter than usual; she looks like one of those pale, see-through creatures you might see on a National Geographic special about the denizens of the Mariana Trench.

  “What is that?” she says, pointing at Hoover and curling her lip in repugnance.

  “It’s a dog, Mom. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen one before.”

  She gives me a disgusted look. “I know it’s a dog. I meant why do you have it? And what is it doing here?”

  “It is a he,” I say. “And he’s mine. I found him a few weeks ago starving and abandoned, so I took him in.”

  “Dogs are filthy creatures,” she says, wrinkling her face. “They harbor fleas and worms and that mange stuff where their skin sloughs off like someone with Hansen’s disease.”

  Hansen’s disease is better known to the non-medical public as leprosy, but my mother’s hypochondria has given her a better than average knowledge of medical information and terminology. She has four bookshelves filled with nothing but medical resources and texts, and I’d bet every bookmark on her computer is a Web MD knockoff.

  “Hoover doesn’t have fleas, mange, or worms,” I assure her. Actually, I’m not sure of the latter since I haven’t taken him to a vet yet, but the fact that I gave him a store-bought deworming agent and he hasn’t been walking around scooting his butt on the ground makes me think he’s okay. I wisely decide to withhold the fact that Hoover has a fascination with the crotches on my worn underwear and the deposits my cat, Rubbish, leaves in his litter box.

  “Why are you here?” Mom asks. She is staring at Hoover like she wishes she had a crucifix and a garlic necklace to ward him off.

  “What?” I say all innocence. “I can’t drop in for a visit with my loving mother?”

  Mom narrows her glacial-blue eyes and gives me The Look. It’s an expression she mastered years ago, one that can cut through the th
ickest bullshit like a laser scalpel through soft fat. The first time I remember her using it on me was some thirty years ago when I tried to convince her I wasn’t the one who had scraped off and rearranged the frosting on the German chocolate cake she had baked for the company coming that night. At first I tried to deny that the cake had been tampered with at all, despite the fact that, by then, the frosting consisted of a thin, sugary glaze dotted with a few scattered strands of coconut and a handful of nut pieces. When that didn’t fly, I tried to blame the tampering on my sister, Desi, ignoring the fact that she was still in diapers and confined to a playpen. Then I offered up the theory that the frosting had simply melted and been absorbed into the cake. It was an insane defense but I was naive enough at the time not to let the laws of physics get in my way. It was at that point that Mother gave me The Look. It left me shaking and trembling with fear. I not only confessed immediately, I cried for hours afterward, begging the whole time for forgiveness.

  I haven’t touched another German chocolate cake since then, though I have been known to buy cans of the frosting and eat it with a spoon.

  Mom’s Look now has nearly the same effect on me it had during the cake debacle, minus the blubbering part. I confess. “I admit I have an ulterior motive. I want to spend the day in Chicago tomorrow and I need someone to dogsit for me.”

  “Chicago? What are you going to do in Chicago?”

  “Shop. I want to get my holiday stuff done early this year.”

  I look away, knowing Mom will likely smell a rat. She knows I love shopping about as much as I love getting what Desi calls the annual spread-’em-and-let-’em exam. Hoping to distract Mom from sniffing out the truth, I stomp my feet and blow into my hands. “It’s cold out here,” I say.

  Mom chews on one side of her cheek, eyeing Hoover warily. Worried that she’s about to say no, I play my trump card.