The Magic of Murder

by Susan Lynn Solomon

  I glared at her. “Would you rather get dead?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. The SUV had gained on us. “I see your point,” she said.

  We picked up speed.

  “Hold on!”

  Elvira screeched.

  We raced past the Italian deli and bounced into the intersection. My car thudded as the shock absorbers pushed back against gravity. We shot through.

  Brakes screamed on vehicles coming from both directions. Thank goodness not everyone in Niagara Falls was moving as fast as my car. Although, I did hear a thud behind us, but no police sirens. There’s never a cop when you need one. Even a cop waving a ticket book would have been welcome.

  I looked back. The SUV had stopped at the light. This didn’t mean those weren’t the guys from the barn.

  I directed Rebecca though another series of turns. Down a dead end street, through a backyard where a stunned older man was pouring seed into a bird feeder, then onto a road near the casino. After another mile, we drove onto the entrance ramp of a parkway Robert Moses had laid out. The parkway merged into the LaSalle Highway. At eighty-miles-an-hour, we reached the highway’s end. The black SUV wasn’t behind us. I exhaled. Two more turns and we were on River Road. Home.

  Rebecca pulled toward my driveway, my car still moving fast. I didn’t lean over to check the speedometer.

  “Where’s the garage door opener?” she asked.

  Her foot wasn’t on the brake.

  “Don’t have one.”

  From the way she blinked, I thought my friend intended to crash through the garage door.

  “Damn!” she muttered.

  My body lurched forward when she slammed her foot on the brakes. Elvira bounced against the dashboard.

  Rebecca jumped from the car. In a few seconds she had the garage door open. Back in the car, she drove inside. She jammed the driver’s-side door against the wall as she leaped out to close the garage.

  My hand shaking, I leaned over and turned off the ignition. We’d escaped the guys who chased us. No reason to let carbon monoxide do the job they hadn’t.

  Rebecca climbed back into the car and sat, panting, behind the wheel. Equally out of breath, I clutched Elvira to my chest.

  We sat there, our eyes dead ahead, staring at the tire hanging on the back wall, at the garden hose dangling like a snake from a hook screwed into a stud. At the hood of my Valiant that was no more than a millimeter from the tire and the hose.

  Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Our breathing slowed.

  Elvira squiggled out of my arms. Her hind legs on the floor, her front legs on my lap, she looked up at me with an expression that asked, Are we gonna sit here the rest of our lives?

  “We should get into the house,” I whispered.

  Rebecca’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Speak for yourself.”

  Another minute passed.

  I shivered. “I’m cold.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  Neither of us moved.

  “We should go in,” I said a minute later.

  She shook her head. “Those men may be out there.”

  I glanced at the side door my father had built into the garage. Beyond the garage, a brick path led to the side door that opened into my kitchen.

  “If we duck, stay below the top of the fence,” I said, “chances are no one will see us.”

  “But they might.”

  I shrugged. “Either we risk being seen, or catch pneumonia.”

  The crutches poked under my arm, I opened the door. Rebecca slid across the bench seat and followed me out of the garage. Elvira slunk along next to us.

  Inside, I slammed the kitchen door and double-locked it. Rebecca drew the shades. We didn’t dare turn on any lights.

  Now on my sofa, huddled together under the knitted cover, we began to giggle. Then laugh hysterically with tears in our eyes. We couldn’t stop.

  That is, until my cell phone rang.

  ***

  Before I had a chance to say hello, Roger hollered at me.

  “What the hell have you been up to?”

  As if the bad guys were parked outside, waiting for the slightest sound to tell them we were here, I whispered, “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “The desk sergeant just got a report about two maniacs barreling though Niagara Falls like Thelma and Louise on the lam. A brown Plymouth—the description sounded like your car.”

  “There…are lots of cars like mine.”

  “With your license plate hitched to them?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I told you to stay put!”

  “You told me nothing of the sort!” I yelled back. “And don’t you dare holler at me.”

  At the sound of my raised voice, Elvira scampered to her hiding place under the skirt of my wingback chair.

  Rebecca’s face fell. “Shhh,” she said, “they’ll hear us.”

  Angry, my fear fled as quickly as the cat. “No one’s out there.” I tossed off the cover, stumbled from the sofa, and stood on tiptoe to peek through a window in the front door. What I saw probably turned my face as white as the walls.

  A black SUV pulled up in front of my mailbox. The passenger door opened. A figure in black leaned out, and peered up and down the road.

  I gasped.

  “What’s going on there?” Roger asked. “Another bottle of wine?”

  I dropped to my knees, cringing against the door. Shielding the phone and my mouth with a hand, I whispered, “They’re outside.”

  “Who’s outside? Emlyn, what’s going on?” Roger no longer sounded angry, not even annoyed. “Talk to me.”

  I found my voice. “The men.”

  “What men?”

  “From the barn.”

  “The— What?

  Rebecca was now crouched at the door. She leaned on me, her ear against the phone.

  “Emlyn, you’re not making sense,” Roger said.

  “Help us, Roger!” I said.

  He didn’t hesitate. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Tell him we haven’t got that long!”

  “Rebecca?” Roger said.

  “They know we’re here.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Okay, stay calm. Go down the basement. Now! I’ll get a squad car over there.”

  Rebecca grabbed my shoulders and yanked me to my feet. Bent low so we would remain below the white Formica counter separating the hall from the kitchen, we moved—almost crawled—the eight feet along the wooden hallway floor to the basement door. When she opened the door, I latched onto the jamb.

  “Elvira! Where’s Elvira?” I said.

  “Don’t worry about her. She’ll be all right.”

  Glass shattered behind me. My eyes shot open wide. I clasped a hand across my mouth to hold in a scream.

  Rebecca all but lifted me from the floor. She turned me around and pushed me toward the basement steps. The door squeaked when she closed it behind us.

  I don’t know how long we remained in the dark, huddled on the cement floor against the cinderblocks in a corner of the frigid basement. I don’t recall taking the hammer from the tool bench beside me. The next thing I remember, I heard heavy footsteps in the hall above. The footsteps stopped at the basement door.

  Rebecca clutched my blouse.

  The door creaked open.

  I leaned back to get a bit of purchase. Then, with all my might, I heaved the hammer at legs descending the stairs.

  “Ouch!” Roger howled. He dropped heavily onto a wooden step and rubbed his shin. Peering at us through the darkness, he said, “You could’ve killed me.”

  Relieved it was him instead of the men in ski masks, I laughed. “I only need one crutch. Here, you can have the other.”

  I guess I didn’t sound sufficiently repentant. His cheeks pinched in as though he had sucked on a lemon. For a minute, I thought he might grab the crutch I offered and beat me with it.

>   ***

  For the second time in three days, I had a shattered window in my living room. At least the guys who chased us hadn’t burned my carpet—the condition my leg was in, I couldn’t have gotten on my knees to scrub it clean.

  When he could walk again, Roger hobbled to his house and returned with a sheet of plywood. Rebecca and I resumed our places on the sofa. Elvira crawled from under the chair and stretched out across our laps. Roger nailed the plywood over the window then began to carefully caulk the edges. While he worked, he questioned us about our afternoon.

  Who were the men in the SUV? Why were they after us?

  We didn’t know who they were, we told him. We saw them back out of the broken-down barn in the alley off a street north of Pine Avenue. We didn’t know why they aimed a rifle at us then chased us through the Falls.

  “I thought we lost them,” I said. “How’d they learn where I live?”

  Roger stepped off the dinette chair he’d set near the window and turned to us. His face was drawn. He didn’t have to answer. It was clear he thought those men had a connection in the police department, someone who could access the Department of Motor Vehicle’s database.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why’d they come after us?”

  He stared at me.

  It was a foolish question. While we tried to learn if my ex was connected to the drug ring the DEA believed was active in the area, and how that connection might have led to the murders of a Niagara Falls detective and the wife of the detective chief, we’d accidentally stubbed a toe on the place from which the ring operated.

  Nervously bouncing words off each other, Rebecca and I described the barn and what we’d seen in the lane off Nineteenth Street.

  “It was the alley from my vision,” I said. “The place where I saw Amy Woodward killed. Except it wasn’t exactly like it.”

  Rebecca jumped in. “But it was close enough, so we had to see. Visions aren’t always precise. Sometimes they’re more metaphoric—”

  “And while I tried to figure out where—”

  Like a traffic cop, Roger held up his hand. When we stopped jabbering, he pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket. In a few terse words, he told about the barn, the SUV, and the men in black ski masks.

  As soon as he snapped the lid of his phone closed, I asked, “They’re letting you work the case?”

  It was another rhetorical question.

  He came to the sofa and tucked the afghan tight around me and Rebecca. “With Woody locked up while we investigate his wife’s homicide,” he said, “the Feds decided to let me work with them. Deputy Chief Reynolds vouched for me.”

  He picked up the caulking gun and returned to the window.

  Rebecca glanced at me. “Kevin?” she whispered.

  After fearing for my life while we were chased, and the utter relief when it turned out the legs on my basement step were attached to Roger’s body, I’d completely lost sight of the reason Rebecca and I left my house in the first place.

  “Roger, was Kevin at the stone house?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Your ex was there sometime in the past few days, though. Seems like he camped out in one of the bedrooms. We found a sleeping bag and fast food wrappers on the floor.”

  Rebecca and I exchanged glances.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

  Without hesitation, she spoke about the tarot readings she’d done for Ira Smith, how nervous he’d been at their last session, and what he told her about Kevin getting him involved with dangerous people. “Only he didn’t mention Kevin Reinhart’s name. That’s why I didn’t know Ira was connected to all this.”

  Roger was again on the chair, sealing the upper edge of the window. When Rebecca got to the part about her own reading and the funeral the cards showed her, a long line of clay spurted from the caulking gun. His back to me, I saw the muscles twitch in his shoulders and tense in his neck. I was glad I couldn’t see his face when, in words almost hissed, he said, “That won’t happen on my watch.”

  He climbed from the chair, carefully laid the caulking gun on the old sheet he’d spread across the carpet and turned to us. “In ten minutes there’ll be a squad car in front of your house. A cop will check your backyard regularly. No way those guys are gonna get another chance at you—” he glanced at Rebecca “—at either of you. You know why?”

  I figured he didn’t expect an answer. I knew I was right when he strode to the sofa, loomed over us, and answered his own question in a staccato monotone.

  “Because you are both going to stay put, is why.”

  The way Roger’s forehead creased and his eyes flared, he was more frightening than the man in a black ski mask who’d aimed a rifle at my car.

  Rebecca latched onto my blouse and meekly nodded.

  Elvira buried her head between us.

  “But—” I got no further.

  “Am I being perfectly clear this time?”

  My mouth snapped shut.

  I guess he thought my compliance came too easy, because he glanced around and said, “Where are your car keys?”

  My lips tight, I dropped my eyes to my lap.

  Her face still buried and her body shaking, Elvira whined in a way that said, Don’t ask me, sir. I’m just a cat. I don’t drive.

  Rebecca pulled her hand from under the cover. She pointed at her floral shoulder bag on the coffee table.

  I glared at her.

  “Your keys in there, too?” Roger said.

  She nodded.

  “Are you going to let him get away with this?” I said.

  Again Rebecca nodded.

  This time Elvira’s whine told me to shut up, Roger was already angry enough.

  After dropping our keys in his pocket, he said, “I suppose I won’t have to worry about you pushing your car back to the Falls?”

  I hadn’t been scolded this way since Mrs. Keller made me stand in the corner for hours when I was in the third grade. Or maybe it was Mrs. Edelman, my seventh grade gym teacher. Regardless, it had been a long time. My face grew hot. My temper was about to flare.

  Roger must have sensed this. He slowly turned back to us with a tight-lipped grin. “Of course, I could lock you both in a cell for reckless driving if you prefer. I hear the traffic squad would like to have a few words with the maniacs who ran a light and caused an accident on Pine Avenue this afternoon.”

  I had to hand it to him, he played quite a good trump card. It shut me up.

  For the moment.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sarah’s Goode Advice

  Before he left for the Hyde Park Road precinct, Roger checked the windows and the locks on the French doors and the kitchen door.

  “These stay closed,” he instructed. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  “But my window,” I said. “I have to call Fred Silbert, have him come over and fix it.”

  Roger dropped his hands to his hips. “You aren’t deaf. I know you heard me. No one gets in here. Not Fred, not even one of the cops from the patrol car. No one.”

  I gazed at the plywood sheet nailed over my front window. I dropped my eyes to the burn marks on my living room carpet. In my mind, my house had begun to look like the ramshackle hovels I saw in my vision. Soon, it would look like the falling-apart barn those masked men came out of. This wasn’t a hovel. It was my home, my sanctuary. No way would I let it stay a rundown mess.

  Roger must have seen my eyes roam around the room, because he muttered, “You are such a pain.”

  He lifted the skirt of his camelhair coat and reached into his back pocket. When his hand emerged, a pair of handcuffs dangled from his fingers. He took a step toward me, and held them out. “Let’s go.”

  The man was serious.

  I grabbed the armrest of the sofa and shook my head. Hard.

  “Let’s go,” he said more firmly. “I don’t need to be distracted by worrying about you.”

  I pulled the afghan up to my chin. The mo
vement shook Elvira to the floor. She rolled over and sat for a moment with a stunned expression.

  “Coming?” Roger said.

  If I didn’t know better, I would swear the cat stuck out her front paws for him to cuff (what was it I said about my strange imagination?).

  I leaned as far from Roger as I could. “Okay.” I said.

  A satisfied smile crossed his lips. “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, we’ll stay put.”

  “And no one gets in?”

  I sighed. “I won’t let anyone in.”

  A writer, I try to use words precisely.

  Roger had known me long enough to sense what was on my mind. He held the handcuffs out to Rebecca, “You won’t let anyone in, either. Right?”

  She raised her hand, three fingers up as if giving the Girl Scout oath.

  “Good, now we understand each other,” he said, and headed for the front door. As he opened it, he called over his shoulder, “Elvira, you’re the only one here with any sense. Make sure they keep their promise.”

  I looked down. The big white suck-up wore a smug expression.

  ***

  As soon as I heard Roger’s Trailblazer pull out of my driveway, I turned to Rebecca. “Now what do we do?”

  “We do what we promised,” she said. “We stay put.”

  “I can’t do that. I won’t be a sitting target when people are trying to kill me.”

  “Trying to kill us,” she said with a pout.

  “Okay, us. You don’t want to make it easy for them, do you?”

  She shoved the knit cover from her lap. “I swear to you, Emlyn Goode, if the cards had shown you’d get me into this kind of trouble, I…I would have let that stupid Molotov cocktail burn you to a cinder.”

  She jumped from the sofa, sidled around the coffee table, and stormed past the wingback chair and into the kitchen. Water hissed in the sink. Metal clanked, a cabinet opened. How could she make tea at a time like this?

  I heard her mutter, “I can’t believe the way I drove today. I never do anything like that. Never even drive as fast as the speed limit.”

  My eyes turned down to Elvira. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  She gave a long meeeeow.

  I had really gotten to understand her. She’d just told me, Uh-uh. I don’t want to land in jail. That’s where Sarah Goode wound up, and you know what happened to her.