Serpent's Tooth

by Michael R Collings

  “No. I didn’t think of it at first, all I could think of was that Miz Victoria would know what to do, and then later, while I was waiting for you to get here, I...I didn’t want to call them. I didn’t want to talk to them.”

  “I suppose you didn’t call the coroner’s office, either.” It was not a question.

  Carver shook his head.

  “Or Doc Anderson’s?”

  Again, the silent answer.

  “Good Lord,” Victoria murmured almost under her breath—it was as close as she would come to a profanity...and obscenities were utterly beneath her dignity.

  “Well, it can’t be helped now. Carver, you come with me. And you too, Lynn dear, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” I said, not quite knowing what I was getting myself in for.

  “Janet, while we’re gone, do you think you could call the substation and let them know? Someone should get out here as quickly as possible.”

  Janet Ellis looked up from the couch. The older woman didn’t move. She seemed almost asleep.

  “I’ll help Greta into the guest room and then call. Where will you be? Over there?”

  “Yes.”

  And then, for the first time, I had a clear inkling of what was going to happen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  We drove to the house next door.

  Turning down the long gravel-strewn driveway felt eerily familiar...the same crunch of tires on dirty grey stone, the same beds of roses bordering both sides of the drive, differing from those along the Ellises’ driveway only in color—Janet’s, which I had barely noticed earlier that morning, had been white, while Greta’s were pink shaded with yellow, what used to be called Peace roses.

  Otherwise the two places seemed almost identical.

  When we approached closer, however, I could see signs that things were not quite the same. The clapboard panels on Greta’s house were beginning to peel and splinter, as if they had not been tended for some years. The house needed a new coat of paint and the windows were dusty, suggesting that they hadn’t been washed since the last rainstorm some time before.

  The kitchen door was just as dilapidated as the rest of the house. Where Janet’s had opened silently, mute testimony to Carver’s carpentering skill and his resolute concern for keeping his mother’s house in good shape, Greta’s door squealed and balked. The noise grated on our ears, especially in the quiet of the early morning.

  “I tried to come by when I could and take care of things,” Carver muttered as if in apology, “but I haven’t had much time lately.”

  “Didn’t Eric...,” I began.

  “Most people called him ‘Rick,’” Carver said. “Except for his grandmother. And Miz Sears. They always called him ‘Eric.’ And he wasn’t much...he didn’t....” Carver faltered.

  “He was not much into manual labor,” Victoria completed. “Unless he was paid for it.” She glanced quickly around the place, taking in the shaggy grass, the scraggly appearance of the un-pruned roses. “Greta thought that he might learn to like working with his hands, but he never did.”

  I had more questions but now didn’t seem like the right time.

  The kitchen smelled.

  It wasn’t rank or anything like that. There was just a trace of unpleasant odors—the garbage can by the door was covered and clean, but it smelled like it should have been taken out a day or two before. There were several pots and pans stacked on the counter, their contents crusted and dried. They should have been long since washed and put away.

  And the place smelled old.

  You know what I mean. It’s really nothing quite identifiable. Just an occasional whiff of something slightly medicinal, something nearly like talc or baby powder, mixed with the slightest suggestion of staleness.

  Victoria’s house would never smell old, no matter how many more years she spent there.

  Greta’s house had probably smelled that way for decades. Victoria had mentioned on the way over from Janet’s that Arnie Johansson, Greta’s husband, had died some years before of a particularly virulent cancer. First they had noted a few slight swellings in his armpits and groin. By the time the couple—then in their sixties—had finally overcome their fears sufficiently to visit a doctor, the only news they received was bad.

  Mr. Johansson was given three to six months to live, a year at the absolute most.

  He had lasted fewer than six weeks.

  Basically, once he received the word, he had given up. He went home that day, Victoria said, sat down in an old bentwood rocker, and had barely moved again—had barely even spoken again—until Greta had made him a bed on the living room sofa.

  There he had died.

  The house still carried the lingering scent of death.

  Or perhaps I just imagined it.

  The living room was as disheveled-looking as the kitchen had been. A newspaper lay open on the carpet. A man’s T-shirt hung limply over the back of an armchair. An old-fashioned knitting bag crouched by the foot of the sofa, its balls of yarn tangled around a bit of half-completed work.

  Everything looked as if Greta, like her husband before her, had faced something unpleasant and unwanted and had simply given up.

  “He’s upstairs.”

  Carver’s voice was startlingly loud. The only other sound was the hollow, solemn tick-tick-tick of a grandmother clock on the mantle. I glanced over.

  It read half past three.

  Greta had apparently been careful to keep it wound but had not cared enough to correct the time.

  “Right, then,” Victoria said. She led the way through the living room toward a staircase in the far corner.

  The stairs were as old and worn as the rest of the house. The treads were unpolished, uncarpeted, splintering along the leading edge. I would not have cared to go up or down them barefoot. There was only one rail and it was smooth, more from constant wear than from any particular care. It felt slightly greasy to the touch.

  At the top of the stairs, Victoria paused and motioned for Carver to lead the way.

  The first two doors were closed. Guest rooms perhaps, or simply bedrooms once intended to be filled with the playful offspring of the original builders—always assuming that the Johanssons hadn’t actually built the place themselves—but now empty and dusty, the air inside hot and musty and thick.

  The third door was ajar.

  Carver halted outside the door. His hand reached out as if to push it further open, then dropped to his side.

  “That’s all right, dear,” Victoria said and she stepped past him into the room.

  “Oh.”

  That was all she said. But it was enough.

  I looked through the doorway.

  The room was a shambles, even discounting the still figure of the young man lying on the bed, the blood that had seeped from an unknown number of wounds both seen and unseen staining the yellowing sheet beneath the body and already beginning to crust. What had once—not that long ago—been startlingly red was now rusty-looking and brown.

  The rest of the room looked as if it had been, as the police might have said, “tossed.”

  Clothing lay everywhere, scattered on the single dingy orange dresser that looked as if it had to have been picked up in a moment of utmost need at some garage sale or second-hand flea market. Most of the drawers hung partially open, and the one that did not, fit badly into the frame, leaving thick lines of darkness surrounding the front. One pull was missing; the raw ends of a screw protruded an inch or so outward.

  More clothing covered the single chair, a straight-backed, uncomfortable piece of furniture that looked as if it might serve more adequately as a repository for soiled underwear and filthy-soled socks than as a place to sit. I half believed that I could smell the dirty laundry from where I stood, clear across the room.

  The closet door stood open, revealing a tangle of old-fashioned wire hangers jutting from the rod, as if whatever had been hanging there had been torn away, even violently torn away. A T-shirt—with t
he faded imprint “Go, Longhorns” visible on the back, hung from the top corner of the door. Most of the clothing that the closet was originally designed to hold was apparently piled pell-mell on the floor.

  The carpet was almost invisible beneath a layer of cast-off jeans, several sweatshirts, at least a dozen shoes—all of them sneakers in various stages of disintegration—no two of which seemed like pairs, and a sprinkling of fast-food wrappers, stained pizza boxes, and assorted other detritus sprinkled like inedible condiments across the mess.

  Only one piece of furniture looked untouched, although even there the top was laden with unidentifiable lumps and piles. On the four shelves beneath, rows of books stood, to all appearances untouched, certainly unread.

  The room stank of dirty socks and old pizza...and, faintly, of urine and something worse.

  “What happened here?” I think my voice must have communicated how stunned I was. “Was he robbed, do you think?”

  “No, ma’am. It always looked like this. Sometimes when I would come by and his grandmother was already up, I would hear her screaming at him to clean up after himself. But he never would.”

  “Nor will he ever again,” Victoria said quietly, bringing us back to the present and the horrible fact that the mess, however appalling, was the least of our current concerns.

  At a small gesture from her, Carver and I both entered the room, taking care not to tread on anything, if possible, and standing as far from the bed as we could.

  Even that precaution was not particularly helpful, since the room was smallish and the bed stuck out from the wall like a rumpled peninsula in a sea of trash.

  Victoria stepped closer, however, like us trying not to disturb anything. I could almost read her mind: “We’ll have to be able to tell the police that this was the way we found it...but I need a closer look.”

  She stood next to the bed, occasionally leaning forward slightly.

  Eric Johansson lay stretched out on the bed. There was no pillow—it had somehow ended up on the floor under the half-closed window. The only bedding still on the bed was the single sheet on which the body rested. The remainder was twisted and knotted on the floor at the foot of the bed, as if at some time he had had a truly bad night and kicked off the other sheet and the thin, worn quilt.

  I didn’t think that it had happened last night. There were a couple of odds and ends of clothing on top of the bedding, including a black leather belt studded with what looked like three rows of tiny silver pyramids along its entire length, that coiled on itself like a snake, its metal buckle half-hidden and glinting sinisterly in the light.

  “Was this the way you left him when you put him to bed?” Victoria did not turn to face Carver but we knew that she was talking to him.

  “Yeah. Pretty much. I got his boots and socks off,” he said, pointing to a pair of mud-caked books nearly hidden beneath the bed. “And his shirt.” This time he indicated a crumpled wad of plaid near the head of the bed. “It was warm last night. I didn’t want to undress him anymore so I left his jeans and T-shirt on, and besides he was almost asleep by that time. And I didn’t think he would need to be covered up.”

  Victoria nodded.

  By this time, both Carver and I had shuffled a bit nearer the bed and could see the body—which had been partially hidden by Victoria standing between us and it—clearly and completely.

  The young man—the boy really, since he was barely out of his teens, I would guess, if that—was flat on his back, both arms straight along his side, as if he had been arranged that way. I didn’t ask Carver if he had done that.

  One hip was canted slightly, and his right leg, the one nearest us, was bent at the knee.

  Victoria pointed to the boy’s jeans.

  “Did that happen last night?”

  “What?”

  “Those rips along the knees. I can tell that he was in a fight of some sort before you brought him home”—she didn’t mention the alternative...that Carver had beaten the boy—“and I need to know if that was when he tore his pants.”

  “Uh...no. No, all of his jeans were like that. He wore them like that on purpose. I don’t know if he did it himself or bought them already torn.”

  I leaned in a bit more and studied the leg.

  The flesh, where it was exposed by a long ragged rip that extended from seam to seam and was feathered along the edges until the remaining thread looked like small fluffs of dirty cotton, resembled raw meat loaf gone bad. The knee itself was swollen, taut and shiny. The skin along the upper surface was raw, scored, and bloody, crusted, with bits of something that might have been gravel, or just clotted blood, caught in the scabs. It must have been painful...except that Rick Johansson was dead and would never feel it or anything else again.

  “What about the other leg?” Victoria asked.

  I was in the best position, so I leaned a bit further over the body.

  The left leg was straight, so the tear—artfully arranged, apparently to give the wearer of the jeans just the right touch of insousciance about things sartorial—was nearly closed. It was harder to see beneath to the knee and I didn’t want to pull the material away to check any more closely. But....

  “I think so. At any rate, there is blood on the denim, and the edges where the jeans are torn look like...like the fringe on a cheap rug after it’s been on the floor for a while...,” I finished, rather lamely.

  “Yes,” Victoria said. “I see.”

  “But what about the rest, the...the cuts and bruises?” I was standing at the foot of the bed but I could see the boy’s head well enough to tell that something dreadful had happened to him, and not that long before.

  “Yes,” Victoria said, but now she turned toward Carver. “What about the rest?”

  Carver looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if the thought had just struck him that he might be held accountable for the shape the body was in.

  “Well, part of it came from yesterday afternoon, I know that. He and Mr....he got into a fight at the field where we were working and...someone gave him a good right across the jaw. It knocked him ass over teakett....” Carver stopped abruptly.

  “I’m familiar with the expression, dear. So don’t worry about your language right now. But I’m afraid that you are going to have to tell us...or at least tell someone...who was fighting with this boy.”

  Carver swallowed hard but did not speak.

  “Yes, I can see a large bruise along the jawbone,” Victoria said, pointing with one finger—a remarkably calm and steady finger. “That would be where he was first struck.

  “But what about the rest?” and here she gestured toward a wicked looking cut over Rick’s right eye, another along the curve of his cheek next to his eye, and a huge bruise on his temple. Against the pallor of the bloodless flesh, the cuts looked like living things, white-edged lips caught half-open in some horrible kind of stasis. The bruise was vivid purple.

  “I don’t know,” Carver said simply. “He was like that when I picked him up last night at the bar.”

  “Did he say anything about another fight?”

  “No. Actually, he never said anything much about anything. Just grunted and moaned now and then when I loaded him into the car. By the time I got him here and up the stairs—now that was a real chore—he was pretty much out of it.”

  “I wonder,” Victoria said, more to herself than to any of us.

  She caught the lower edge of the boy’s T-shirt with one finger and gently lifted.

  “Oh no,” I breathed, not able to stop myself.

  “Shit,” Carver said at the same time, then: “Sorry, Miz Sears, Miz Hanson.”

  Neither of us responded to his apology.

  We were mesmerized, I think, by what Victoria had just revealed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The T-shirt had once been white but was now torn and dirty, with smudges across the chest and shoulders, a long rip along the ribs, and more than a spattering of blood down the front. From the evidence of the sheet beneath
the body, it was saturated with blood on the back as well.

  I suppose that we had all assumed that the blood was from the head wounds, that at some time the night before Rick Johansson had wiped his face with his T-shirt, trying to clean up after the beating he had received at the hands of an unknown assailant...or unknown assailants.

  What we hadn’t expected was the massive bruising along his stomach and ribcage. It looked as if he had been treated like a punching bag, or perhaps he had been knocked to the ground and then kicked in the ribs by someone wearing heavy shoes.

  Or boots.

  “Do you know anything about this, Carver?”

  “No, Miz Sears. Absolutely not. All I knew was that Rick called me late last night to have me pick him up from Land’s End....”

  “That’s a rather sleazy bar on the far side of town, Lynn dear. It has quite an unsavory reputation. Or so I’m told. I’ve never been there.”

  I couldn’t help asking: “Did Rick go there often?”

  “I don’t know. He’d never called me from there before,” Carver said, his forehead creased in thought. “I wouldn’t have expected to find him there, and I know that if Miz Johansson had known that he was hanging out there last night she would have pitched a grade-A-one fit.”

  “No,” Victoria said. “I’m sure you’re right. Greta would never have countenanced her grandson frequenting a place like that. It would have killed her to find out.”

  She stood for a long while musing about something. Once she leaned over and took a closer look at the torn up flesh revealed by the rip over the knee.

  “I wonder if we would find bruising and cuts on his upper thighs as well. If he was down, and someone kicked at him, it would probably show on his legs”

  Again, it looked as if she was thinking about something.

  Then: “No, we had better not. Wiser to leave him as he is.”

  “Should we maybe cover him, you know, with a sheet or something?” Carver looked around as if a pristine sheet might suddenly materialize in front of us.

  “No,” I said quietly. “I think it would be best for us to leave him just like this. That way....”