“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. It’ll take a few minutes but someone will be there. Do you need an ambulance?”
“No, I’m okay,” she told him, pushing the button on the phone to disconnect.
“Joe, do me a favor, will you? Go down to the second floor and check out the last apartment on the south end. I think it was 209. Make sure the kid is okay. He’s about six, light skin, cute, likes to play with balls. Come back and tell me.”
She sat quietly while Joe was gone, wondering about her new partner and what experience he had. Maude was tired of breaking in rookies and really hoped this time she had drawn a man with some experience. She sighed loudly, accepting her lot, knowing that a good partner was hard to find. Sometimes you couldn’t get along with the person sitting next to you in a car.
Personality clashes were baloney. Maude was beyond caring what other cops thought about her. She did her job and expected them to do theirs but it didn’t always work that way. Lazy partners who liked to sit on their behinds and let someone else do the legwork didn’t set well with her. So far this Joe guy had showed enough gumption to find her. Maybe he had something going.
Joe was gone about ten minutes and returned to find Maude hadn’t moved much, except to light another cigarette.
“Don’t you think you smoke too much?” he ventured, smiling. Not waiting for a reply he went on. “There was no one in 209. Seems to me they got out pretty fast. I looked in. The door was left open, closets empty. The faucet was dripping at the sink and dishes about to get washed. You know, stacked, with the knives and forks separated. This ball was outside the door,” he added, showing Maude the same ball that the kid Maurice had been playing with earlier.
“We have to find the owner of this building,” Maude interrupted. “When we get some help, begin knocking on doors till someone tells me what I need to know. Who is the kid and who does he live with? Where did they go so fast? Was someone after them or are they hiding? You know, Joe, the kid’s mama might be on the run. Just a thought, but Maurice got all tongue-tied when I asked about her. She might have gone running because there are police in the building.”
Ten minutes later the street cops and Joe were door-knocking, finding few people home. They got a name and phone number of the landlord from the old woman who lived on the third floor. Joe sat down on the stairs and shared information with Maude.
“Jackson Enterprises manages the place; here’s the phone number. Rent has to be mailed on the first of the month. No pay, no stay. They send a strong-arm around to scare the delinquents. She didn’t know the kid or his family.
He volunteered, “I can call the number for Jackson Enterprises. The eight hundred part of the number might make it a message center. I can tell them to call you back, that it’s urgent.”
“First get in touch with dispatch and see if they can find their physical location,” Maude said haltingly, trying to remember where she had heard the name before. She flipped tobacco shreds off her tongue and took another drag off the cigarette. “And yeah, I smoke too much.” she said, in answer to his earlier question.
The street cops had finished their rounds in the building but found only a few people in the apartments just as it was the night before. Most of the doors opened into rooms that were empty and showed signs of long vacancies.
“The decent people moved out sometime back,” the woman on the third floor had told Detective Allen.
According to the woman the building had become a ‘hit house’ about a year ago. Empty apartments were kept rented by a few tenants who lived somewhere else but collected their drugs and dough from the scum that shot up on the filthy floors of the apartments. The woman was old and alone, living on a small pension with chains and locks on her door, afraid to go out of her home, except in the daylight. She had said there was no other place for her to go, and guessed she would die there. Maude made a decision to see her later, but right then, she wanted to see what it was about 507 that tugged at her. Something she missed or forgot last night.
She sat on the stairs and reread the incident report from the night before. The finding of the body had been straightforward, open the door, catch the smell, an obvious lump under the covers. She took out her notebook and found an empty page, beginning to put down some thoughts about 507. It was too easy, planned, a setup. Whoever did the cutting on the women knew the cops would be out looking for Almondera when he failed to show up for court. Maybe earlier, maybe later, but eventually someone would be looking to arrest the man.
The second murder was a puzzle, the pieces scattered. The murderer duplicated the arterial cuts and arranged the same positioning in the bed under a just alike coverlet; the bloodletting was intense and awful savagery. The missing breast tissue, was it a statement? What was his purpose in recreating the first murder? What were his motives?
Maude wrote it all down as she thought it, knowing that later she would look back and maybe find some answers. The process of investigation required studying the obvious, looking for clues that were hidden, mistakes made by criminals were often what solved cases. Sometimes it was just dumb luck on the investigators part. She hoped for some of that now, fearful that it wasn’t over, the killer unfinished in his destruction. He had a taste for it and liked it. She believed the killer to be a male with serious personality issues. Breast violations were seldom a woman’s touch.
Rising from the stairs took all her effort; the blow to the head had affected her balance and left a residual amount of dizziness. She thought if it got worse she would go by the hospital on the way home and get seen by one of the doctors. Her head was hard but the blow had been harder. The kid’s caretaker might have attacked her. Maude had been getting information from the boy and that could have put the killer wise to where it came from. The kid might have been in danger. There were too many variables to nail it down.
A description, though vague, was better than what they had before. She needed to find the boy. Her thinking was that he knew something to help find the man who had taken the lives of the young women. They really needed identifications of the women before any real questions could be asked. The frustration was telling on her.
The lock on 507 opened easily. Clearing the yellow tape away just enough to allow the door to swing inside she entered the apartment. The carpet stuck to the bottom of the door and the hinges creaked stiffly from years of usage and neglect, slowing the movement into the murder room. Earlier she had found the door open and didn’t notice the sticking. Inside the room, death’s smells still held sway over the ambient air. The odor of corrupt flesh would coat the walls and furniture for a long time.
Maude had brought her chest rub from the house and its sharp menthol fought against the pervasive odor in the room, winning a little. She took out her notebook and scanned the same areas that were scrutinized the day before: the kitchen, the empty chair, the television. She walked to the small screen and turned the set on, watching for a minute as a cooking show host on the food network made potato pancakes and red velvet cake for dinner. Sounds good for another time, she thought.
The arms of the empty chair had a light coating of black powder, courtesy of the lab techs checking for prints. Maude glanced at the furniture label on the chair back, standard apartment supply. The small closet beside the chair had three wire hangers, but no clothing or boxes on the storage shelf above.
She slid the chair across to the closet, waiting for Joe to get back, intending to use his youthful flexibility to explore the area above the storage shelf. The hinges were stiff the same as the front door. Maude figured that the windows allowed morning and nighttime humidity which would cause the rust and paint peel.
The same held true when she moved the chair to the kitchen cabinets. They were as bad as the hinges on the door. Although the air conditioning unit pumped chilled air slowly into the room, most tenants probably opened their window to help with cooling and save money. That could also explain how the flies got at the bodies.
Looking out of the sol
itary window from her elevated height Maude could see that the glass opened outwards. Five stories above the pavement the two feet by three feet window was slick on the outside of the building. Not even a hint of a balcony to hang onto. It was a sheer drop from the narrow sill placed higher than standard windows because of child safety rules. The stairs within the building had been approved by the city as the necessary means of egress in an emergency. There was no outside metal fire escape. Maude concentrated on that thought for a minute as she entered the small bathroom, taking more time today to look it over. She heard the front door open with its noticeable creak, and drew her weapon, hoping it was Joe coming in with good news about the landlord. It could also have been the killer returning.
“Is that you, Joe?” she said, waiting behind the bathroom door. “If it is, holler up and get in here.”
Joe’s dark hair showed up along with his “Yes ma’am, it’s me”, easing Maude’s tension. She put the gun away but said “I guess you really do want me to shoot you.”
“Maude, I’m sorry. It’s my mama’s raising. Being polite to ladies was always important to her, so it might take me awhile to stop my good manners.”
Maude smiled to herself, understanding the young man. Her own grandmother had been the same. Yes ma’am and No ma’am were strictly enforced in the family, but she liked giving Joe a few gouges. He seemed such an innocent. She hoped he had good news.
“Find out anything?” she asked him.
“Real Estate records show that Jackson Enterprises houses in Austin, a major player in the housing industry there. No real owner, a consortium. Man named Alex Bathgate runs the day to day business, a hard man to catch up with.” Joe shook his head and continued, “The thing is, Jackson Enterprises has been skipping around Federal Court because of consumer complaints of unsafe construction. There was been some accidents with renters, like patios falling down, and ceilings crashing through onto the floor below-one person dead and some injuries. Got a bunch of big time lawyers keeping them out of court, so, maybe we need to see for ourselves who runs the place.”
Maude thought for a minute and nodded her head. “Good idea,” she said. “Let me get with the Boss in a while,” she said. “Right now I need for you to climb up in that chair and see what’s in the closet, if it has a chase that goes to the roof. Our man may have used it for his entry or getaway.”
“Uh, Maude, I don’t like heights. They say I have acrophobia. Do I have to do it?”
“Sorry Joe, but yeah, you do. I can’t bend my knees enough to get up there if it does lead anywhere. Besides, if it is what I think it is, you won’t know you’re up high, you’ll be inside some kind of tunnel.” Maude felt a little sympathy for the young man, but not as much as he would have liked. Part of the job, my young friend, she thought. If you weren’t here, I’d have to do it.
The shower in the bathroom was black from fingerprinting, adding to the black marks that were already there. If Almondera had lived in this dive he never picked up a scrub brush or any other cleaning tool. The small cabinet in the room had once held medications but now it was empty of anything but slivers of soap and an old disposable razor. Maude looked at the razor closely wondering how the techs missed it. There might be some DNA on the blade. At least it was something. She put the item in one of the envelopes from her pocket, hoping the killer had used the blade or handled the razor for some purpose.
She left the bathroom and went straight to the bed or what was left of it. The boys from the lab had taken the mattress and the coverlet and were probably testing it for fluids. That could take several hours because of all the tenants who might have slept on the bed over time. Police work was slow, she thought, the work happened in real time, not like the fast paced television show results.
The dried blood on the floor under the bed had been scraped in places, evidence of the lab’s work, the odor of the blood and tissue still strong on the bed frame and throughout the room. Maude found nothing more of interest and returned to Joe to see how he was getting on with his climb.
“You up there Joe?” she yelled. “Yes ma’am,” he returned. “There’s a kind of attic up here, not really an attic, more like a crawlspace. Kind of spooky.”
“Get some pictures so we can look at it later.” she yelled again, deciding to ignore the ma’am since she found out about his mother. “See anything up there?”
“Nothing, no, wait, there’s something ahead of me. Some white powder in a plastic bag, a fair amount.”
“Use gloves Joe”, she yelled. “Don’t foul it.”
“No ma’am,” he answered. “I won’t mess it up.”
“What else Joe, what else is up there?” she yelled again, her neck starting to hurt from holding her head up looking at the top of the closet.
He didn’t answer, what she got back was shuffling above her head, and an ‘ouch’.
“What’s the matter Joe, are you hurt?”
“No ma’am, I bumped my head against a metal pipe. This crawlspace goes out onto the roof. Want me to follow it?”
“Yes, but be careful. The man who killed those women might have used that way out of the building and left a piece of evidence in his hurry to get away.”
Maude glanced at the chair in front of the closet, realizing she had no other choice but to follow her trainee. Or at least, she thought she was training him; could be the lieutenant was thinking of retraining her. Either way, she owed it to the young detective to cover his back. Stepping up into the empty chair was harder than it looked. Her knees rebelled and began burning across the cap, threatening to buckle if she put her weight on them. Disregarding her physical pains, she secured her weapon and began climbing into the upper part of the closet, groaning with each movement.
“I really have to go back to the gym,’ she thought aloud. “I hope I don’t have cancer in my joints, hope it’s just arthritis.” The crawl space was small and tunnel like, but even though her legs were long, they were skinny, like her butt, so she didn’t get hung up in the small enclosure.
Joe was too quiet and she was worried. He hadn’t called to her for a while, not since he offered to climb to the roof.
“Hey, where are you,” she yelled. ”Are you alright? Just hold on and I’ll be right there.” His lack of response was bothering her, making her wonder if he had been really hurt. The tunnel she crawled through housed some of the wiring for the building, and the ductwork of the air conditioner. She removed her flashlight from her belt, shining it ahead of her, brightening the way. The metal crawl space reflected the light back in her face, blinding her at times. Maude’s elbows were raw from the crawl; she wished for long sleeves instead of the tucked in tank top and over-shirt.
There was light ahead of her, independent of her flashlight, and she hoped it was sunlight on the roof. She didn’t see Joe and hadn’t heard from him. Maybe he had climbed out already and was waiting for her.
Maude realized two things during the last five minutes of the crawl through the construction tunnel. One realization was that cigarette smoking was really messing with her breathing. The other was that she really needed a cigarette. That epiphany only added to her desire to get out of the long metal coffin she had been crawling through. She was not yet ready to face the fact that she might be forced to go back through it to get out of the building. She had answered her own question though, could a man travel back and forth through the crawl space carrying items with him to room 507? The answer was yes. It could be done. For a really motivated person it would be a simple task.
The tunnel opened up in the middle of the roof where it merged with other similar passageways. Maude crawled out, and stood, holding onto the metal pipe that led out of the tunnel. The area was covered with a metal top and sides making it a small room of pipework and ductwork, protected by a door that opened outside. Inside the pipe room, opposite where she stood, was a set of metal stairs leading down and into the building, connecting with the main staircase through a large metal door attached to the buildi
ng.
Anyone entering or exiting the building through that door could be observed by any of the residents. The room was unlocked, allowing unauthorized traffic inside. She looked for Joe and not seeing him, decided he must be outside looking things over. Whatever happened, Maude decided, she was going down the stairs on the way back.
Besides the stairs, the room housed several lines of ductwork and tunnel-like crawlspaces. Maude marked the place she had just come through then hurriedly began looking for her newly assigned partner. She found him just outside the door, lying on his side clinging to a vent pipe, bleeding from a large cut on his forehead.
“Joe,” she said, “What happened?”
“Someone got me Maude, just as I was coming out the door. A tall man grabbed my arms and began forcing me to the edge of the roof. I thought I was a goner.”
“Who was he? Did you see his face?”
“No”, Joe said sadly, “I didn’t see anything. I don’t know how he did it but he cut me. I thought I was going over, but I held onto the vent pipe as hard as I could until the blood started getting in my eyes and I had to wipe them. He ran off while I was trying to get to my feet.”
“We need to get you to a hospital. I’m calling the medics. How do you feel about helicopters?” Maude asked him, pulling a handkerchief from his pants pocket. She knew he would have one, because his mother would have taught him to carry it.
”Here,” she said, “hold this against your head to stop the bleeding.”
The young detective groaned with the thought of flying, of crashing into one of the high rise buildings near the hospital, and bleeding to death, while the rotary blade plowed into a large picture window of someone’s office.
The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) Page 4
