Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon 2014 Anthology

by Patricia Abbott

  “Portland Police, ma’am. I need you to put the gun down so I can talk to you about your neighbor.”

  “Old Long?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  For a second, the barrel wavered, and I wondered if I was going to explain to my sergeant how I let a little old lady get the drop on me. But then the gun disappeared and she stuck her face between the bars of her security gate. After I dragged her name out of her, she said, “You gonna arrest that shit-bird?” Lights came on, one on the porch and another inside. She was of indeterminate age—fifty, seventy. I had no idea. Her hair was the color of old paper and her eyes were hard, but her round cheeks had the rosy glow of a character in a Christmas special. Standing behind her holding a bowl of popcorn was a little girl, maybe four or five.

  “Did you shoot Mr. Long, ma’am?”

  From the look on her face, maybe she thought it was a trick question. “I most certainly did. He bangs on the side of my house all night long.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know? You’re the detective.”

  Actually I wasn’t. I had plans to be a detective—someday—but she didn’t need a detective anyway. “Have you called us?”

  “Why would I bother? All you numbnuts do is drive by shining your light so he knows to hide.” The gun appeared for a second and I stepped back. “You’re useless.”

  Through the security bars, I could see every surface was stacked with paperbacks. The little girl—Marcy, I would learn—followed my eyes and said, “Gramma Daisy reads all the books.”

  “Pretty late for you to be up, isn’t it, sweetie?”

  “We’re watching Little Mermaid.”

  “Not that it’s any of your damn business,” her grandmother added.

  I sighed and looked back at the street. George Long was long gone—either inside his own house or back to Sewickley’s for more lubrication.

  “Ma’am, if you promise to stop shooting people with that paint gun, I’ll promise to do a better job of keeping an eye on things around here. Deal?”

  “If you don’t, Detective—”

  “Officer.”

  “Officer—” She pointedly examined my name tag, never a good sign. “—Kadash, next time maybe I’ll shoot you.” With that, she slammed the door.

  Not my most successful citizen encounter, but I’d escaped pigment-free. I drove away, relieved to put Daisy Morgan and George Long in my rearview mirror for good.

  In my dreams.

  “I’m not giving your Grandma Daisy a weapon. She can call the police like a normal person.”

  Marcy rolled her eyes. Like that was gonna happen. “You should talk to her at least.”

  “I’m not a cop anymore. I’m respectable now.”

  “Just talk to her, Skin.”

  I argued, but not only was Marcy my boss—she was the manager and I was a mere part-time barista—she was also damnably persistent. So after our shift, we strolled over to her grandmother’s—far too short a walk from the shop if you asked me.

  Daisy lived in a Depression-era shotgun house—three rooms in a line with a bathroom tacked onto the back during a mid-60s remodel. Apparently she had an outhouse before that. The house was set forward on a raised, narrow lot, with a shallow bank in front planted with strawberries. In back, a well-kept garden filled the yard all the way back to the overgrown alley. Wisteria grew over the narrow porch.

  Next door, George Long’s house was a study in contrasts. It was a largish Old Portland bungalow, the kind of place that even in its rundown state would be snapped up for a ridiculous sum the very day he could be bothered to put it on the market. The paint was ten years past its sell-by date, the front porch sagged, and the foundation along the driveway which separated the two houses was cracked—where it wasn’t hidden by stacks of old tires, broken crates, and scrap metal.

  “Curb appeal was never his thing, was it?”

  Marcy’s tight lips answered that question.

  Daisy met us at the front door. Unarmed, thank God. “You a detective yet?”

  “Not so much.” I’d been retired from the police bureau almost five years. “How you been, Daisy?”

  She waved dismissively. “I got the cancer and they chopped out half my guts. I told the doctor if it came down to me pooping into a bag he might as well let me die on the table, because if I woke up like that I’d have his balls for Christmas ornaments.”

  “I don’t see you dragging a colostomy bag, so—”

  Marcy smacked me on the back of the head and pushed me into the front room. The walls were still floor-to-ceiling paperbacks, but otherwise the place was tidy. I sat in a wing chair that was older—but in better shape—than I was. Marcy plopped down on the lumpy couch across from me.

  “No bag, no, but I can’t eat peppers anymore.” Before I could protest, Daisy handed me a jelly jar filled to the brim with a viscous purple fluid. Wine—allegedly—homemade from Welch’s concentrate. She’d had been selling it over her back fence for years. Ten bucks if you brought your own bottle, twelve if you took one of hers.

  “Marcy says you have a little problem.”

  “She tells it better.”

  I let my eyes stray to Marcy. She shrugged, as if dragging me over here just to spin a tale she could have shared back the shop was her plan all along.

  I sighed. “Spill it.”

  “I stopped by on my way work today. Grandma Daisy was making a pie, and asked me to pick some rhubarb. I knew something was off when I saw the raccoon in the yard in broad daylight.”

  I sipped from my jar. The wine was thick as syrup and packed all the punch of rubbing alcohol. “Did you scream and run away?”

  Marcy didn’t bother to roll her eyes. She’s more badass than ten of me. “I chased him off with a rake, and then, under a rhubarb leaf I found...” Her eyes strayed to her grandmother, “...it.”

  “It.”

  “A foot.”

  “What do you mean, a foot?”

  “A human foot.” She swallowed. “The raccoon was eating it.”

  “Did I need to know that?” But I was actually relieved. Before I was a barista, I worked homicide. When it came right down to it, I was more at ease with a dismembered foot than a giant rat with thumbs.

  “So what do you want from me? To run interference with the cops?” They should have called the police immediately, but I’d known Daisy too long.

  They exchanged a look.

  “Where’s the foot now?”

  Daisy tsk-tsked dismissively. “I wanted to chuck it right back where it came from, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  A memory tickled at the base of my neck. “Where it came from.”

  “Yeah, right through Old Long’s front window.”

  “You’re telling me it’s George’s foot—his actual foot?” I closed my eyes for a second and imagined myself somewhere else—say, on a rocket being launched into the sun.

  “It gets worse, Skin.”

  I down my wine and hold out my jar for more. “Tell me.”

  “There was a note. He said he we’ve gotta hand over Grandma Daisy’s pot, or else.”

  Over the years, I would cross paths with Grandma Daisy and George Long many times. Usually, it was more of the same. A neighbor would call about some ruckus and I’d arrive to find her accusing him of banging on her house, or throwing crap in her yard, or stealing her returnables right the hell off her enclosed back porch. His defense, offered with a grin, was always the same.

  “She’s a kook, man.”

  And he was a drunk who, near as I could tell, had no visible means of support. But there was also no visible evidence he was doing any of the things she claimed—aside from the stray bowling shoe which, in this neighborhood, was one of the least weird items which might mysteriously turn up in your yard. I never found any other trash or debris. The enclosed porch showed no signs of forced entry. Part of me was willing to believe he banged on her house—a kind of middle-aged
souse’s version of Ding Dong Ditch—but no one ever caught him in the act. When I suggested Daisy install security cameras, she scoffed.

  “What am I, made of money?”

  During the years before she grew up to be my manager at Uncommon Cup, Marcy visited often. Once, when her grandmother went to the back room to answer the phone, I asked her if she ever heard the banging. Her answer was an icy stare, and the solemn declaration, “Grandma Daisy isn’t a cop. She doesn’t have to lie.”

  Ouch.

  The closest to a legitimate call was the time Long was doing a little archery, his target tacked to the cedar fence which separated the two yards. One of his shots went high and the arrow lodged in a birdhouse in Daisy’s yard. Fortunately no one was home.

  Except for Daisy, of course. She was screaming bloody murder when I pulled up. “He’s damn lucky he didn’t hit one of my fledges!”

  The arrow sticking out the birdhouse was a rare piece of hard evidence.

  Even so, Long insisted it was an accident. “I was just practicing. A man has a right to defend himself.”

  “You expecting the Battle of Agincourt to break out around here, George?”

  I gave him a choice: hand over his bow or answer charges of unlawful discharge of a dangerous weapon within city limits. He tried to argue, so I quoted the relevant statute in detail until he threw up his hands in surrender.

  But as he made his way back into his house, he emitted a braying laugh. “Joke’s on you. That’s not even my good bow.”

  The door slammed before I could formulate an appropriate retort.

  Most of my visits were little more than counseling sessions. I tried to get the neighborhood mediator involved, but Daisy would only talk to me, and Long insisted there was no problem. She was just a kook.

  It was a stalemate, until the spring of 2003. I was a detective by then, and had worked my way from property to person crimes. I’d been out of a patrol car long enough my memories of Grandma Daisy and George Long had faded to the stuff of half-forgotten nightmare. Then I got a call-out to the scene of a shooting in southeast Portland. Hawthorne neighborhood, a few blocks from Sewickley’s Addition.

  Sure enough, Crazy Daisy had tried to plug her shit-bird neighbor.

  I insisted on seeing the weed before the foot. It was a matter of priorities. I needed to know what we were dealing with.

  The house sat on a cinderblock foundation which had been insulated as part of the addition in the 1960s. More recently, Daisy had excavated a ten-by-ten pit under the trapdoor hatch deep enough for me to stand upright when I climbed down from the kitchen. She’d lined the excavation with landscaping blocks and sealed them with a skin of concrete, leaving a hole in the center to serve as a drain. Grow lights hung from the floor joists overhead, and a hose ran under the house from the backyard tap. Sacks of potting soil, empty pots, and fertilizer were heaped on the dirt floor of the crawlspace around the grow pit, home to a dozen squat specimens of cannabis indica.

  “Daisy, are you out of your flippin’ mind?”

  “You try living on Social Security. Lord knows what I’ll do if Oregon pulls a Colorado and they start stocking weed at the Plaid Pantry. Not that I’m copping to anything.”

  I climbed out of the pit and polished off my second jar of wine, then regretted it and asked Marcy to make me some coffee. “Strong.” While she fussed with an ancient percolator, I followed Daisy into the backyard.

  They’d covered the foot with a terracotta pot to protect it from the local wildlife. The skin was leathery and the exposed ankle bone looked like a knob of cracked ivory. I straightened up and peered over the fence at Long’s house. “How is it he even has his foot?”

  Daisy shrugged. “He wanted a keepsake. I guess he knew a guy who worked at the hospital.”

  “When did you talk to him? I thought he was your arch nemesis.”

  “You think Superman doesn’t talk to Lex Luthor from time to time? We share a fence. He buys wine. Even taught me a few things about...gardening.”

  “That’s true, Skin,” Marcy said from the back steps, “Grandma’s crops used to be no better than grass clippings.”

  “I’m not copping to anything.”

  I shook my head, wondering why I was even here. “So this friend somehow salvaged his amputated foot?”

  “Who said they were friends?”

  I didn’t want to know why Long felt compelled to chuck his “keepsake” over their shared fence. Not eager to touch the offending appendage, I covered it back up with the terracotta pot. Back inside, Marcy offered me an iced coffee and a sheet of greasy bakers parchment. Someone—Long, I presumed—had scrawled on it with a black Sharpie.

  I know wats growing in the crowlspace. Hand it over if you dont want any trubel.

  “It was on the ground near the back door,” Marcy said. “I assume it was wrapped around the foot, but the raccoon must have pulled it off.”

  The page was none the worse for wear.

  “No instructions? Call a burner phone at midnight? Leave the weed under the Portlandia statue? Scratch your head and hop on one—?”

  “Skin, you really ought to take this seriously.”

  The note—and the foot—struck me as more prank than threat. “I still don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Daisy snorted. “You could drive by and shine your light.”

  Marcy put a soothing hand on her grandmother’s forearm, then turned back to me. “A show of force might scare him off.”

  “So would the police, Marcy. Sheesh.”

  “They’ll ask questions.”

  “I’m not copping to anything. I’m just saying you try living on Social Security.”

  I sighed. I’d heard her the first time.

  I was between partners the night Daisy shot her neighbor, but three uniformed officers were on hand along with a pair of EMTs. George Long lay on an ambulance gurney, howling to the skies about his damn foot. Daisy sat on her porch swing with Marcy and one of the uniforms, content as Buddha.

  Lights from the ambulance and two patrol cars bathed the chattering onlookers gathering in the street in front of the house—the usual crowd, faces I’d grown familiar with over the years, a few I’d even met. The Hawthorne neighborhood was home to an eclectic population, from soft-voiced earth mothers to larval hipsters and everything in between. I saw a fellow who might have been the leader of an outlaw biker gang, holding hands with a Vietnamese woman half his size. Kids poked their faces between the legs of their parents, or ran back and forth from yard to yard. Across the street, a cheerful couple named Diane and Janet sat in lawn chairs on their front lawn and raised beer bottles in salute when they saw me look their way.

  Oh boy.

  The first responder was a friend from my patrol days.

  “What happened here, Jeff?”

  “The old bat says someone was trying to pick her lock and she stuck her gun between the security bars. The desperado—her word, not mine—hollered loud enough to startle her, and the gun went off.”

  “Magically, no doubt.”

  Jeff gave me a wry smile and consulted his note pad. “The intruder fled, but she called ‘useless as a chin dick 9-1-1’ anyway—her words, not mine. First and last time, she insists. My guess is this guy—” He pointed over his shoulder at Long, “—jumped the fence, but got his foot caught between the pickets. He was hanging there when I pulled up.”

  I wondered when Daisy upgraded from paintball to lead.

  “Where’d she hit him?”

  “She didn’t. Not exactly. There’s a hole in his boot heel, but his injuries are all from getting tangled up in the fence. Compound fracture, lacerations, damaged pride, you name it.”

  I wasn’t aware Long had any pride. “How many shots?”

  “Just the one.” Officer Jefferson held up a plastic evidence bag containing the offending weapon, a single-action .32 revolver. “She must’ve come to the door cocked.”

  I didn’t bother to make the half-cocked joke
. It was time to talk to Long. I forced myself over to the gurney and told him to put a sock in it. Give the man his due, he shut up.

  “What were you doing up on Daisy’s porch, George?”

  “I was just—I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “We both know better than that.”

  He pooched out his lip. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Tell it to me, tell it to a judge. Your choice.”

  “Who says I was up on the porch anyway? Maybe it was someone else.”

  I sighed. “Daisy does?”

  But Jeff cleared his throat. “She’s actually not certain of that. Says she saw a figure, but never made out who it was.”

  “You found him tangled up in her fence though, right?”

  “Yeah, but...”

  “There’s a bullet hole through his boot heel, right?”

  Jeff had the same look of exasperation I no doubt wore whenever I dealt with Daisy and Long. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s get this dingbat to the hospital, and I’ll check for witnesses among these fine neighbors, see what I can sort out.”

  But none of the fine neighbors stuck around for question time. Janet and Diane took their lawn chairs inside, the children all vanished into their squirrel holes. The outlaw biker went one way and the Vietnamese lady another.

  In the end, I managed to sort out very little. Daisy offered nothing more and Long insisted it was a misunderstanding. He was just trying to be neighborly. In what way, exactly, he never made clear. The DA managed a plea deal for criminal trespass—suspended sentence—and was damn grateful to get that much.

  As for Daisy, we held her revolver for several weeks while the DA waffled. In the end, no charges were filed against her. A divot in the concrete of her porch suggested she’d fired before Long fled, and the DA was willing to concede Daisy reasonably believed she was defending her home against burglary. Still, the gun never made it out of evidence—conveniently lost in the kind of bureaucratic mix-up big city police departments excel at. Seemed to me the last thing Daisy Morgan needed was another opportunity to shoot at George Long.