A Berry Clever Corpse

by WINTERS, A. R.

  To my surprise, rather than attack me, Tina spoke, and her speech slowed immensely. The words sounded breathy, like they were a struggle to harness to do the bidding of her mouth. “Not anymore. Not for months. He was a man whore. Worthless. Useless. A man whore.”

  “Do you know who he was seeing at the time of his death?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Zoey crossed her arms, the taser still in hand. “You’re the liar. You kept tabs on him. Watched every move he made. You knew everyone who came and left his house. That means that if you can’t name the person who was here when he died, then that person was you.”

  “No,” Tina declared. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Then talk,” I said. “Give us something we can use.”

  “Why are you here? You two ain’t even cops.”

  “Consider us concerned citizens,” Zoey said. “Now talk.”

  Tina’s bulging eyes somehow managed to squint and her lips became nothing more than a thin line. “He slept with all his female tenants. He bragged to me once that he was nice to the ones that were nice to him, a scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours type of thing. When they stopped scratching his back, he’d mess with ‘em.”

  “Mess with them how?” I asked.

  “He’d make life hard on them. He’d mess around with their contracts, push to see how much money he could get from them. He’d make a game of it, see how fast he’d get them to move out. If they moved out, he could get someone new in, someone to scratch his back.”

  I felt a little sick. I felt like I wanted to high five whoever it was who had shoved that scarf of his into his shredder and killed him.

  “And if they wouldn’t scratch his back at all?” I asked.

  Tina shrugged. “He’d make their life miserable.”

  Zoey spoke up. “But he rented to some men, too, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Said it provided stability of income or something like that. He didn’t mess with their contracts unless they started annoying him by complaining about needing maintenance to the property.”

  “You knew this? And you had an affair with him?” I didn’t know why I was pointing an accusatory finger at her. Why should I hold her to blame for things her one-time lover had done?

  Tina shrugged again. “He was charming.” I looked at her dumbfounded. “Really charming. He made me happy. Made me feel like a princess.”

  “What went wrong?” I asked. I was afraid to know. I imagined him driving a dump truck up to her front door and unloading an entire load of doggie droppings as a practical joke, not caring that he was the only one who thought it was funny. He sounded like that kind of guy.

  Tina shoved both her hands deep into her front pockets. “He ended it.”

  “How?” I asked, suspicion flaring.

  “He decided in his head that it was done but didn’t tell me. Acted annoyed every time I talked to him. Acted inconvenienced. Then the girls started back up. Couldn’t always tell who they were.”

  “Were any of them his tenants?” Zoey asked.

  “Pretty sure. He started having them come at night and he kept his lights off. I put flood lights in my yard so I could see, but he kept painting over them. I aimed floodlights right at his house after that.”

  “What he do?” I asked.

  “He offered to buy my house.”

  “Oh…”

  “At a quarter of its value.”

  “Ohhhh…”

  “He started slapping me with lawsuits. Dumb stuff. Stuff like for watering my flower garden and the water running onto his land. So I started calling the cops on him.”

  “What for?”

  “Indecent exposure.”

  “He exposed himself to you?”

  “He exposed himself to someone.”

  “Within the privacy of his house?” Zoey asked.

  “No, to skanky women whores.”

  The conversation had officially looped back on itself.

  “What properties did he own?” I asked.

  “He had properties all over town. He liked to buy up sections.”

  I wasn’t expecting that answer. That created a much larger scope for our investigation. Possibly too large.

  “Did he have any favorite sections he liked to harass more than others?” Zoey asked.

  “Yeah, the tenants on Brunt Street.” That was where Susie’s shop was.

  “Who on that street rented from him?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like I knew all his business.”

  “Try,” I encouraged.

  “I seen both them hairdressers over here, that snooty lady with the coffee shop, the goody two shoes with the flower shop. Oh, and Grace, she’d been here a lot lately, but she didn’t rent from him. She works at the gift shop out at the visitor’s center.”

  “What color hair does she have?” I asked on a hunch.

  “Dark brown.”

  “Thought you said you couldn’t see who was coming and going from his house,” Zoey said.

  “People got car plates, don’t they?” Tina countered. “He wasn’t gonna beat me. Men like him need to be held accountable.”

  “What does that look like?” I asked.

  “What look like?”

  “Mike being held accountable.”

  “I reckon it looks like him being strangled with his own scarf,” Tina said, her buggy eyes unflinching as she stared straight at us.

  It was time for us to go. I reached for the door.

  “Where were you the Monday morning that Mike died?” Zoey asked.

  “Sleeping. Here.”

  “Sleeping? In the middle of the day?” Zoey challenged.

  “The girls always came at night, so I slept during the day.”

  We didn’t let her door hit us on the way out, and I walked a little fast moving away from her house than I had toward it.

  “She’s a loon,” Zoey said. “She did it.”

  She certainly had been obsessed with Mike while he’d been alive. “I don’t know. Sounds like Mike had a lot of people coming and going. Maybe it was one of his late night women… or their boyfriend or husband.”

  “Tina’s got no alibi. She said Mike had to be held accountable, and she showed no remorse for his death. She’s a vigilante psycho.”

  We got halfway across Tina’s lawn before her sprinklers came on. The water smelled like fish, which meant we smelled like fish by the time we got done sprinting to the street. She’d had the water laced with fish fertilizer.

  I glared back at Tina’s house and saw a curtain move. She’d turned on the sprinklers on purpose.

  The woman did like her vengeance. And maybe, just maybe, Mike had choked on it.

  Chapter 25

  I sank down lower into the steaming water of my tub. It was a hard-earned luxury that I was quickly becoming addicted to. I had my face smeared in cold cream, my hair knotted into a messy bun, and Sage perched on the rounded edge of the tub. She was sitting with her front paws tucked under her and her eyelids almost—but not quite—completely closed.

  “Mmm, you tell it, girl,” I said, envious of her. She was in the bliss that I was searching for. I touched her nose with the tip of one wet finger and was rewarded with the sound of her gentle purr echoing off the tile surfaces of the bathroom.

  I closed my eyes and sank a little deeper into the water. My process for heating water up on the stove had gained efficiency, and it hadn’t taken me as long to fill the tub tonight. But even after the long day and the labor of getting ready to relax once I’d been able to call it a night, my mind wouldn’t rest. Everything-Tina kept playing over and over again in my head. Her uber-aggression. Her wild eyes. Her tommy gun-style of throwing accusations at anyone and everyone. And the unnerving sensation that she had a knife stashed behind her back with plans to pull it out and run at you.

  If anyone was ready to snap, it was her. She was small, but the scarf-eating shredder could have provided a lot of the muscle necessary to overpower Mik
e during his final moments.

  “Susie gets to Mike’s house on Monday, for the first visit, not the second one,” I said to Sage. “Susie and Mike have it out. Susie leaves. Tina walks over from next door to Mike’s place. It takes her all of forty-five seconds to get there from her house, and nobody notices her make the trip. She goes inside. She and Mike argue. He tries to ignore her and go about his work. She grabs the end of his scarf and feeds it into the shredder. Mike tries to pull away, tries to turn the shredder of or unplug it, but she cups her hands behind his head and gives it all her weight to pull his head down until the shredder chokes him out.”

  Sage continued to purr but didn’t open her eyes anymore.

  “What? You don’t like it?”

  Sage made a half chirp, half meow but otherwise remained unchanged. I could tell she wasn’t impressed with my theory.

  “You know,” I said, “sometimes the most obvious solution is the actual solution.”

  No luck. Sage was taking the high road and refusing to enter into the debate.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and did my best to adopt Sage’s zen master technique. One minute passed. Two minutes. No luck. Sage’s yogi impression kept getting superseded by Tina’s speed talking, vigilante antics. She’d talked obsessively about all the women coming and going, and I let it all replay in my mind.

  That’s when I heard it. A jiggle. It was a familiar jiggle, one that I’d heard twice before.

  Someone was at the fire escape window-door.

  My eyes flew open and I stared at Sage staring at me. Then with a growl, Sage jumped off the edge of the bed and slinked her way out of the bathroom, moving fast and with her body mass low to the floor.

  “Son of a biscuit maker!” I swore. I had never dreamed that my new home would become the Grand Central Station of break-in attempts when I’d moved into the second story apartment. But this time I wasn’t scared. I was mad. Really mad.

  Like Rambo coming up out of the water, I stood. I didn’t have a towel handy, so I pulled my shower curtain off its hooks and wrapped its opaque length around me. Then, I grabbed up my comb… and flipped it around to its pointy end.

  I was going to war…

  * * *

  Indecent exposure? How does that even work? Wasn’t she at home?” Jack asked from his spot at the grill’s counter. Joel, Agatha and Zoey were sitting next to him, and Brad was standing next to me, behind the counter and in front of them. Everyone had a breakfast plate, but no one touched their food.

  “Exactly—it’s ridiculous!” Brad said, wiping a laughter tear from the corner of his eye. “So, the complaint comes into the station and I come over here to see what’s what. Kylie had been in the tub when she heard someone jiggling her window. She gets out, wraps herself in her shower curtain, and goes running down the hall toward her window screaming like a banshee. Her feet get tangled in the shower curtain and she’s either got to let it go to keep running or fall flat on her face in a heap of plastic.”

  “You know, I was there. You weren’t. I should be the one telling this story,” I said grumpily.

  “But there’s someone standing outside on her fire escape, so she keeps running,” Brad continued, completely ignoring me. “Naked as a jaybird, waving a comb over her head and with cold cream all over her face.”

  There were looks of disbelief and awe on the faces of those sitting at the counter.

  I glared. “Really! Do you have to repeat everything I told you? I was only that specific for the sake of your police report.”

  Absolutely no one cared what I had to say. Everyone’s eyes were on Brad.

  “So she drops the curtain but she’s out of control, arms flailing, still trying not to fall,” Brad said, fighting through his laughter.

  “Stop it! Now you’re embellishing. I never told you my arms were flailing.”

  “Shhh!” Zoey chastised as she hung on Brad’s every word, her eyes big with unbridled glee.

  “Nothing she tries stops her. Then, bam!” Brad cried, slapping his hands together for effect. “She goes plowing face first right into the window. I get there twenty minutes later, and I think some pervert’s had their jollies on her window, but it’s just where she went face first into the thing. When I looked”—he broke down laughing—“when I looked, I could actually see the outline of her face. Distorted like a horror show, but it was her.”

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Joel said while Brad stood bent double with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

  “I still don’t understand how someone could call in a complaint against you for indecent exposure,” Jack said. “It must have been whoever was outside your window. Weren’t they concerned about getting caught?”

  “It was an anonymous call,” I said.

  “They called using the old pay phone on the side of the old Wal-Mart,” Brad said, finally regaining his composure. “Disguised their voice. Could have been anyone.”

  “Sweetheart,” Agatha said, “did you get a look at whoever was outside your window?”

  “Nooo, they cut through my string of sparkly lights. Ruined them, and everything was in shadow.”

  “This is the third time someone has tried to break into your place by way of the fire escape,” Joel said. He hadn’t been laughing at all, and he didn’t look happy that Brad had. “It needs a security system, and I’m going to help you set one up.”

  “I can’t afford one,” I hurriedly said, then felt my cheeks heat at the admission. The truth was that the fairy lights I’d put outside had been a hard stretch for my budget. Now they were gone.

  “Naw, I’ve got it covered. I’ve got a wedge tapped into the hinge side of that weird window-door of hers. Only way that window is going to open is if that wedge is removed, and a person would need to be already inside to do that. If someone is outside and wants in, they’ll have to break the glass, and it’s some thick glass. Good quality. They’d have to work at it.”

  I headed into the kitchen. Brenda was walking me through making a big pot of chili. It wasn’t my cousin Sarah’s secret chili recipe, but Brenda figured she could get us close enough. It was already smelling good enough to go on the regular menu board instead of the Oops Board.

  Zoey followed me back. “Indecent exposure?” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s Tina’s trick. She did it with Mike. And I didn’t tell Brad this, but I spotted a small tin of lighter fluid on the ground beneath the fire escape. I think she dropped it when I startled her.”

  “She was meaning to set your apartment on fire,” Zoey said. “We’ve got out killer.”

  “Now we’ve got to find a way to prove it.”

  Chapter 26

  A morning of scrambled eggs, bacon and biscuits had moved seamlessly into an afternoon of chili and baked potatoes. Nothing but the first batch of biscuits had gone on the Oops Board.

  Now I was sitting in Zoey’s car across the street from Tina’s house. Waiting and watching. Watching and waiting. Zoey was getting impatient.

  “We could burn her out. Do to her what she’d planned to do to you.”

  A part of me liked that idea. A lot. But a bigger part of me didn’t want to go to prison for arson. “Maybe she’s taking a nap.” We’d walked around her whole house, peeking in the windows. We hadn’t been able to see anything, though. Turns out that someone obsessed with watching others is especially guarded about others watching them. From all the effort we’d put into trying to get a glimpse of the inside of her house, beyond what we’d already seen of her foyer, I couldn’t even say if she had carpet or hardwood floors.

  “Maybe we could—”

  A tap on my passenger side window cut Zoey off and made us both jump. Turning my head with the expectation of seeing Tina’s bug eyes staring back at me, I breathed a sigh of relief when I instead saw a handsome, well-groomed man in his late 40s to early 50s. He was tethered to a dog or a dog was tethered to him—I couldn’t tell which. One of them was taking the other one for a
walk, and since the dog looked as though it weighed my and Zoey’s weight combined, I thought it was a toss-up as to which one of them was in charge.

  I power rolled my window down.

  “Hi,” the man said, all smiles. The dog didn’t smile, but I did see some teeth. “I’m Gerald Thompson. You’re parked in front of my house.” He motioned to the house behind him. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “We were hoping to talk to Tina.”

  The big shaggy dog leaned against his leash, and Gerald’s arm was pulled out to full extension, but he held his spot next to the car. “Tina teaches a gymnastics class on Monday afternoon. She won’t be back for a while yet.”

  I looked at Zoey. Monday afternoon. Mike had died last Monday. If Tina taught a class on Mondays, she wouldn’t have been here to do it.

  “Do you know what time she usually leaves on Mondays to go to her class?” Zoey asked.

  “I come home for lunch and to walk Button most days,” Gerald said.

  I couldn’t help myself. I had to interject. I glanced over at the dog. If he sneezed, he could swallow Sage whole on the inhale. “You named him Button?”

  “It was my wife’s doing. When we brought him home, she’d said he was cute as a button. It stuck.”

  “You were saying,” Zoey said, getting us back on track.

  “Tina usually leaves for class at the same time I head back to work, around twelve forty-five.”

  Mike was already dead and cooling by that time last Monday. That meant that Tina could still have done it.

  “What time did you get home for lunch last Monday?” I asked.

  “Usual time, around eleven-thirty.”

  “And Tina was here?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. She keeps her car in her garage. Well, and there was such a commotion that day with the ambulance and the police cars. I don’t recall seeing her.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a squirrel dart across the road in front of Zoey’s car. Button saw it too. He lunged, but like a trooper, Button’s owner dug his heels in and held onto Zoey’s car’s side mirror. His voice now strained from his battle of wills with Button, he asked, “You’re not thinking that Tina had anything to do with Mike’s death, are you?”