Softly, he said, “Suck it up, sis.”
She smiled. He’d told her that on her first murder scene after she’d vomited. She sniffed. “I really love her, you know?”
His lips were closer to her ear. “I know. Everybody knows.”
Another nurse came toward them. “The DON just came in. She’d like to see you in her office.”
Henry said, “She’ll talk to her later. Right now she needs some time to herself.”
The nurse protested.
But Henry guided Morgan back out the door to his waiting Explorer. Inside and fastening their seat belts, he passed Morgan his cell phone. “Call work. Tell them you’re taking the day off.”
Morgan checked her watch. She’d forgotten about work. She dialed Captain Ward’s office, but the secretary answered. “He isn’t in yet.”
“Tell him I’ll be late—” But before she could finish the sentence the secretary had transferred her into the Homicide office. Robert Redick picked up.
“This is Morgan Holiday. I’ll be late,” she told him. It galled her to be reporting this to a subordinate.
“A call just came in.” He sounded upset.
“I can’t help it. Go on yourself. Give me the details and I’ll meet you there.”
“Women,” he said with contempt.
She shouted, “Give me the goddamn address.”
“Get it from dispatch.” He hung up.
*
Before Morgan entered the building, the uniform at the door told her, “We got a ripe one up there.”
Morgan nodded and turned back to the car. She took off her coat and blazer and laid it across the front seat. The slacks and blouse she wore were washable. The smell might come out—sometimes it did and others it didn’t. She’d had to throw out a new outfit once. She dug in the glove box for her jar of Vicks.
When she got off the elevator at the fourth floor, the CSI tech waved to catch her attention. It was Rachel, still getting the crap jobs. Morgan stopped next to her.
“You got a problem in there.” Rachel pointed toward the open doorway.
“What?”
“Your partner. I think he’s about to lose his breakfast.”
Morgan said, “Thanks,” and hurried forward. With each step the smell grew stronger. At the doorway, she saw Redick kneeling over the body, or what was left of the body, of a woman. His eyes were closed. His head was weaving. She rushed to his side, took him by the arm and helped him stand, then led him to the door. They’d just stepped into the hall when projectile vomit splattered on the walls.
Then Redick leaned over in surrender and let the rest go.
Morgan was so angry with him for all the things he’d said and done over the last several months that she wanted to humiliate him. But she remembered Henry on her first nasty crime scene, which was by far less repugnant than this one, and she patted his shoulder. She could settle the other stuff any time. If he was ever going to be any good, he had to know that he’d get used to it, that he would learn tricks, like the Vicks in each nostril. “Easy there, buddy,” she said. “Sit down a minute. It’ll be better now.”
Redick groaned.
“Why don’t you go out front? Get some fresh air.”
He reached for the chair rail that ran along both sides of the hall and steadied himself, then managed to pull himself to a standing position. “I’ll be all right.”
“You can take a break if you need to,” Morgan said. “Everybody goes through this. You’ll get used to it.”
“Actually, the puke smells better than what’s in there,” he said, making an effort to smile.
“I agree.”
They stepped over the vomit and went inside. Rachel started talking. “Look of things, she’s a junkie. Haven’t found any ID.”
Morgan glanced at Redick. “Go tell the officer out there to talk to the front desk. She may not have registered with her real name, but at least we won’t have to call her Jane Doe.”
Redick left the room and headed toward the elevator.
Rachel watched him, then asked, “His first?”
Morgan nodded. “In the months since he’s been a detective, we’ve had a shooting during a gas-station robbery, a homeless man beaten to death by another homeless man, an Iraq-veteran wife murderer, and a drug-related drive-by. This is his first stinker.”
“Poor guy.”
Morgan stood over the fly-and-maggot-covered corpse of a woman. Her skin was ebony, close to the color of what little dried blood they could see. Thin braided brown and maroon extensions spilled in a tangled riot around her head. “Who found her?”
Rachel looked at her notes. “Oscar Crenshaw. Landlord. Tenants complained of the smell. Her rent was past due.”
“Did anyone interview him?”
Rachel nodded. “First officer on the scene. Willows.”
“Do we know if he touched anything?”
“He told me he didn’t even come in. Just opened the door, saw the body, and closed it.”
“Looks like a gunshot wound,” Morgan said. “You find any casings?”
“I don’t think the shooter was in the apartment.”
“Why not?”
“Over here.” Rachel beckoned.
Morgan followed her to one of the two windows that faced the street. Glass lay in ragged shards. In the center of what remained of the window was a large hole with cracks spidering outward. She leaned close. The fire escape hung by a single screw. No one could have shot from there. Looking down at the street, she said, “What the hell? We’re on the fourth floor.”
“My guess would be the roof of the building across the street.”
The voice came from behind her. “A sniper.” It was Redick.
“We’ll need to cordon off that building. Detective, get an officer over there right away. No one on the roof until the crime-scene tech gets her work done.”
“Right.” Redick turned to go.
“Wait. Either of you call body pickup?”
Rachel looked toward Redick.
He said, “I asked her not to call until you got here. I didn’t want to miss something important.”
Morgan didn’t comment, but she wondered how he could be so obnoxious to her two hours ago and afford this bit of respect for her skills now. She skeptically watched him leave the room. It was the fifth homicide they’d worked together, and for the first time since Henry’s last day, she felt like she had a partner. She said, “Good,” and jerked her chin toward the doorway. “Go on and get that building secured.” To Rachel she said, “How long you think she’s been dead?”
“Cool temperatures. Broken window. Fourth floor. I’d say a week. Not much more.”
“You print her?”
“Got a good set. We’ll run them, and if she’s in the system, we’ll get an ID.”
Morgan approached the corpse again. “Looks like a body shot.”
“A lucky one or a damn good one,” Rachel said. “Entrance front. Exit back. And look.” Rachel pointed to arterial spatter across the top of a messy coffee table and the edge of an unmade futon. “She bled out fast. Looks like she struggled a little. But not long.”
Morgan knelt beside the body and said softly, “Well, sister, just what’s your story?”
Chapter Eleven
Sophie had been looking for the ScumBuster all morning because the bathtub needed cleaning. This product was fairly effective if the batteries were charged, but they usually weren’t. The day they bought the ScumBuster, Lois had sworn they’d use it often. Despite those intentions, neither one of them had seen the gadget for a couple of years, but now Sophie just wanted the work to be easier. Probably, she thought, it would be easier to clean the tub the hard way.
Sophie liked to have things put away where they belonged, but Lois generally left stuff where she last used it—then couldn’t remember where. Lois had more tools than a carpenter but rarely knew where they were. So when Sophie went to use a hammer or a screwdriver, she had to look for one and
sometimes buy one.
This day Sophie dragged the full laundry basket from the bathroom to the mudroom and began to sort. The two, now three, of them didn’t have more than two full baskets in a week, so she made only two piles—light and dark. She started the washing machine and poured in the detergent, then turned to the catch-all cabinet next to the cats’ litter box and opened the door. The stuff in the mudroom was usually Lois’s. Always trying to save money, Lois bought economy-size cleaning products and, when the bottles were empty, used them again for other things. So nothing was ever in the right bottle. The Tilex bottle contained bleach and water, a hair-conditioner bottle contained Febreze.
Lois also had some selective pack-rat behavior and wasn’t above pulling items out of the trash that she thought she might use someday. Sophie found three empty bleach bottles and some kind of clear liquid in the Windex bottle. She pulled out paint and cleaning rags, also known as worn-out underwear and holey socks that Lois had rescued from the trash. One Saturday a few years back, Lois had washed the truck. When Sophie went out to work in the yard, she found her dirt-stained, pink cotton underpants hanging on the railing, before God and everybody, drying. She’d pulled them down quickly and put them in the trash. But they’d ended up back in the house a few days later.
Once Sophie had threatened to go through all of Lois’s stashes and throw the stuff away, but the task of getting any of it out of the house seemed insurmountable, unless she loaded it all while Lois slept, put it in the car, and drove down a dark alley to an open dumpster.
In the back of the cabinet she found a box of empty bottles and old underwear that looked promising, and there in the bottom was the ScumBuster. She lifted it, carrier and all, out of the box. Beneath it she found a used toothbrush, then another that Sophie recognized as her own. The toothbrushes were color-coded in their household. Sophie’s color was green. She moved some things around and found several more. An image of Cool Hand Luke cleaning the latrine flashed in her mind.
Lois came into the mudroom and tossed a pair of jeans on the pile of dark clothes.
Sophie said, “Why are you saving all these toothbrushes?”
Lois shrugged. “They’ll come in handy. You’ll see.”
Sophie sighed and held the ScumBuster up to Lois and said, “Find the battery charger and plug this in.”
“What battery charger?”
“We have about six of them on top of the fridge. See if one of them—”
Lois turned around mid-sentence and carried the ScumBuster into the kitchen.
Later, while loading the second load of laundry in the machine, Sophie smelled something familiar. The pair of jeans that Lois had tossed on top smelled of gunpowder.
*
Lois stood in a narrow aisle before the cat litter. When she was a child, they’d used dirt for the kitten they wanted to keep inside. Dirt was free. Now, before her, stacked almost to the ceiling, were thirty or forty kinds of cat litter. Certainly, with two cats, some thought was necessary.
Her lower back radiated pain, arthritis around her old shrapnel wound. She pushed a grocery cart even when she had only one or two items because she could hold on to the thing and take a little weight off her back.
A round woman with dark glasses wheeled a cart around the corner, scooped up several cans of cat food, and noisily dropped them into her cart. When Lois realized it was Myrtle Dixon she started to turn away, hoping she hadn’t been noticed. Then she realized something was wrong.
Lois let out a heavy sigh. She didn’t want to get involved in Myrtle’s drama. Sophie would have handled this better. Lois wasn’t the sentimental type. If something was hard, she cowboyed up. She didn’t cry—especially in public. Cursing beneath her breath and dragging her cart with her, Lois closed the distance between them.
“Myrtle?”
“Huh?” Myrtle looked toward her. “Oh, hi.”
“Are you crying?”
Myrtle made a honking sound as she blew her nose in an already wadded-up tissue. “I’m okay,” she said dismissively. “Just a bad day.”
Good, Lois thought; she doesn’t want to talk about it. To cheer her up, Lois said, “At our age, as long as you’re still taking care of your cat and walking upright, it’s a good day.”
Myrtle’s lips trembled, but she gave a weak smile. “That’s true.”
“If you want to find a lesbian,” Lois said, grinning, “just look in the cat aisle.”
“Maybe I should give up the Internet and just stand here in my spare time.”
Two little boys rounded the corner with their arms out like airplane wings and, making an annoying sound, flew down the aisle, brushing against a display of cat toys and knocking off several fuzzy-feathery items. Then, without stopping, they rounded the next corner.
Lois waited. There had to be more. After a moment she prodded Myrtle. “What’s the problem?”
Myrtle burst into shoulder-shaking sobs. “I’m so lonely. It seems like every time I connect with a woman on the Internet, I get rejected.”
Lois reached into her own cart and retrieved a box of generic tissues, ripped it open, and held it out to Myrtle. “I’m sorry.”
Myrtle blew her nose again. “When I was young, I never had any problems. I had thick, dark hair and a good figure. I could have given the ex-Bunny a run for her money in those days.”
Lois wasn’t sure quite how it happened, but suddenly Myrtle was in her arms, sobbing on her shoulder. A woman with a baby in her cart started to turn in to the pet aisle, saw the two of them, and backed out.
Lois patted her back and said, “There, there.”
“Hey, lady,” came a child’s voice, “are you a man?”
The two airplanes had stopped long enough to point and giggle.
Lois looked down at her clothes. She wore baggy jeans (not stylishly baggy, but loose in the seat), scuffed tennis shoes, and an old tie-dyed T-shirt (from the days when people did that by hand, not the bright colors of today). She looked over the tops of her dark-rimmed glasses and said, “Where’s your mother?”
The younger of the two looked frightened and, with a “Waaaaannnaaa,” ran away. The older one didn’t run but coolly walked the opposite direction.
Myrtle sniffed. “You know what I miss the most?”
“What?” Lois asked, hoping she wouldn’t say sex.
“Is everything all right here?” a red-faced, teenaged bag boy asked.
Both of them turned toward him. Lois could see why he was concerned. Myrtle’s eyes were swollen, her face was blotchy, and her hair was wilder than Lois had ever seen it.
“We’re fine,” Myrtle said.
“Ma’am, I can call the police if there’s a problem.” The kid gave Lois a hard look.
“You don’t understand,” Lois said. “My friend’s cat just died. She’s upset.”
The kid’s expression softened. “I’m so sorry. You have my condolences. I sure don’t know what I’d do if I lost my cat.”
Bravely Myrtle squared her shoulders. “Thank you.”
“I’ll just leave you two to, ah, to whatever you were doing.”
Myrtle laughed a bit. “What the hell will I do when he sees me in the cat aisle again?”
“What should I have said? That your girlfriend ran off with an ex-Bunny?”
Myrtle laughed more. This made her swollen eyes and blotchy skin look like Elvira before morning coffee. “What about all this cat food today?”
Lois shrugged. “Tell him you have a new kitten. He’ll be happy for you.”
“Before we were so rudely interrupted, I asked if you knew what I miss the most.”
Now that she was smiling, it felt safer for Lois to ask, “What?”
“Having someone to scratch my back.”
Lois could certainly relate to dry-skin problems. “Turn around.”
Myrtle didn’t hesitate.
Lois started at her shoulders and worked her way down the back of Myrtle’s T-shirt. “Sorry my fingernails aren’t l
onger.”
“You’re so lucky. You and Sophie never seem to have any problems,” Myrtle said over her shoulder.
Lois remembered her most recent conflict with Sophie, about Ruby coming home. “We disagree,” she admitted. “I usually just let her have her way. She’s right most of the time anyway.”
“You’re a smart woman.”
“You know what the most important thing about Sophie has turned out to be?” Lois didn’t wait for Myrtle to answer. “Companionship.”
Myrtle sighed and faced Lois. “Thanks, my back feels better.”
“You have a lot of friends and people who care about you,” Lois said. “Reach out to some of them. Let them help you. Have dinner or go to a movie. You’ll probably find Miss Right just when you least expect it.”
A short time later Lois stood behind Myrtle in the only open checkout lane. She heard the checker (a thin woman in an oversized smock) say, “Sammy told me your cat died. I’m so sorry. We get to where our pets are like our children, don’t we?”
Lois eyed her and wondered if the woman was a lesbian. She couldn’t imagine a straight woman saying that.
As the woman scanned twelve cans of cat food, she asked, “Are you getting another cat?”
Myrtle, caught up in the deception, said, “A kitten. I’m looking for a kitten.”
The cashier pointed with her chin toward the exit. “Bulletin board over there, someone’s giving away kittens.”
As Lois was swinging the bag of cat litter up onto the checkout counter, she saw Myrtle looking at the bulletin board.
*
Sophie folded the jeans, put the rest of the dark clothes in the washing machine, and went into the kitchen. She tossed them on the table at Lois’s place, poured herself a glass of iced tea, and sat down to wait.
Retirement Plan Page 13
