by Don Weston
“Earl,” Angel hollered. “I’m over here.”
“He turned his head in our direction and got out of the BMW. “What happened?” he said. “Are you okay?”
She ran to him in tears, and he grabbed her tight and squeezed.
“I was so scared,” she said. “A bomb in the garage exploded right after we got out. I thought I was a gonner.”
“There, there,” he said. “I’m here. You’ll be okay.” He held her in his arms and whispered something into her ear. She put her chin on his shoulder and winked at me. See, this is how you do it, she was telling me. I felt more alone in the moment than any time in my entire life. Angel had someone to hold her and tell her he was there for her, and I didn’t. Steve circled the garage in the distance.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Earl, after their embrace.
“I came to see if my best girl wanted to go out to dinner. When I saw the fire, I was stunned. It never occurred to me anyone would be in there.”
As if taking a cue from Earl, Steve finally stepped up to me and draped his arm around my shoulder. I should have been thrilled, but for some reason it made me feel creepy. I pulled his arm from me, and he took a step back.
“Everybody okay back here?” It was Officer McGraw. “I called the fire department.”
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked.
“I was doing my rounds. The Mayor told us not to follow you anymore, but he said we should patrol the neighborhood a couple times a day to make sure you were okay. I decided to swing by on my way home.”
“Maybe if you’d come around a little earlier, you might have noticed someone putting a bomb in my garage.”
“Now that you mention it, I did see someone around here earlier,” he said. “It was that Chris guy. He was knocking at your door about lunch time. He waited and when nobody answered he sat on the porch for a few minutes and then got into his fancy car and drove away.”
In the following minutes, three fire engines, an ambulance, and several patrol cars screamed up to my burning garage. A west wind blew the flames toward my house and firefighters raced to put them out before they made contact. The heat from the fire became so intense we had to go out to the street and watch helplessly.
When the bomb squad arrived, the neighborhood was evacuated up and down the block and most of the neighbors gave me dirty looks. This wasn’t the first time I had interrupted their routines with one of my little situations. All I could do was stand helplessly answering questions from a bomb squad technician as my neighbors gawked from Northwest 23rd, which was now closed to rush hour traffic and causing one hell of a traffic jam in Northwest Portland.
TV news crews filmed as firefighters shot streams of water from across the street at angles as far away as they could get from another possible explosion. The result was they were able to keep water on my house and my next-door neighbor’s houses, but the garage and my car were left to burn.
It was eight o’clock, about two and a half hours after the blast, before the last ember was extinguished. My brothers had arrived concerned and left frustrated at their inability to find my assassin.
My little Miata was so hot you could see steam rising from molten metal when the lights hit it. The firefighters saved my house, but the paint on its side blistered and peeled badly.
Sgt. George Arthurs pulled me to the side of what used to be the garage. The side the bomb had been located. He had a pleasant round face, balding grey hair and a patient if not fatherly demeanor. He had worked with my father on the force before my dad’s death and remained close to our family.
“From what you’ve told me, it sounds like it was an improvised explosive device or IED,” George said. “The kind militants used in Iraq to take out armored trucks. This was nasty one. Someone wired it to your garage door opener to explode when you crossed the red safety beam or used your garage door remote or wall switch.
“They must have crossed a wire somewhere and that’s why your garage door failed to open. Maybe they broke the overhead lights so you wouldn’t see their handiwork, but we have no way of knowing for sure. Everything’s gone.”
“I noticed a black wire near the door that didn’t seem to belong,” I said.
“Yeah, well lucky for you,” he said. “If you hadn’t seen it, you might have crossed the path of that beam and detonated the bomb when you tried to open the door manually.”
“But it exploded when I tried to turn my car alarm off,” I said.
He shook his head. “Your car remote wouldn’t have affected anything.”
“Why did the bomb explode then?”
“Probably somebody was parked nearby with another remote to the bomb. When they heard the car alarm honking and realized you were in the garage, they decided to go for it.”
“They were watching me?” I shuddered and realized how close I’d come to death again.
“That’d be my guess. Did you see anyone before the blast?”
I watched Steve and Earl engaged in animated conversation with Angel on the porch. I hadn’t seen anyone before the blast, but Steve was on my doorstep during the explosion, Earl and McGraw showed up seconds later, and McGraw said he’d seen Chris hanging around earlier in the day.
“No,” I said, absently. “Not until after.”
“That could be important too. Make sure you tell the investigating officer.”
“Steve was the investigating officer until today. He filled in Detective Richards a few minutes ago.”
“Well that simplifies things,” Sgt. Arthurs said. “I hate to keep seeing you under these circumstances. First your poor brother was killed and now this. Be careful. Maybe you should take a little vacation until things settle down.”
“I can’t do that, George.”
“Yeah, I know. But stay safe.” He gave me a hug and sauntered off to sift through the debris.
“Any luck coming up with a suspect?” I asked, approaching Angel, Earl and Steve.
“Steve’s come up with some new information about Mrs. Fleming,” Angel said. “He said the police have her pegged for the murder of her husband.”
“That’s insane.”
“I told him, but he thinks otherwise.”
“It’s not what I think, it’s what the investigating detectives think,” Steve said.
I knew in any murder the spouse was always the top suspect. However, Stella Fleming was in another state when he was killed. At least I hoped she was. I never thought to check. To me she was just a woman frantic to find her husband.
“What would be her motive?” I asked.
“She had an insurance policy which pays $500,000, double for accidental or violent death,” Steve said.
“They think she arranged his death to appear like an accident?”
“They did at first,” Steve said. “But upon further investigation of the bloated body, the coroner found two small caliber slugs in him.”
“I didn’t see any bullet wounds.”
“The swollen body hid the bullet holes, but the coroner found them on a second look. The detectives think he knew the person who shot him because he was killed at close range.”
“Then, it had to be his wife? Maybe he had a girlfriend here.”
“They’re considering the possibility, but they haven’t been able to find anyone in Portland who knew him. It makes it hard to come up with another suspect. And apparently his wife has been asking the insurance company for payment. Of course, they didn’t want to pay without finding a body.”
“Seems logical to me,” Earl said.
“Do you think you could put up with a houseguest tonight,” I said to Angel. “I don’t think I could sleep here after this.”
“Probably a good idea,” Steve said. “It’s not safe to be alone.”
I ignored the comment and kept my attention on Angel.
“I think it’s a good idea too,” she said. “You don’t mind her staying tonight do you, Earl?”
Earl greeted me with a sour
puss. “No, I think it’s best under the circumstances.”
“Oh, I forgot. You two wanted to go to dinner.”
Angel smiled sheepishly. “Earl’s been staying the night lately.”
“Oh, I didn’t know things had progressed that quickly.”
We rode in Earl’s sedan because Angel’s little Volkswagen was totaled and my Miata resembled burnt toast. I sat in the back and suggested we go by Stella Fleming’s hotel on the chance that she might be home this time of night. I wanted to get her side of the story and didn’t want Steve tagging along for obvious reasons.
When we got to the hotel we stopped at the office and got her room number. The clerk tried calling her but got no answer. The hotel was new and modern with a glass elevator that sported a view of the airport lights and a busy little strip of motels and fast food restaurants.
We rode the elevator to the fourth floor and stepped out into a hallway with commercial paisley brown carpet, beige walls, and a slight smell of cigarette smoke. When we approached Stella Fleming’s door, I noticed a Do Not Disturb door hanger and rapped on the door anyway.
We waited, but there was no answer so I rapped again, louder.
“I’ll be right back, I have something in my car that will help,” Earl said. He returned a few minutes later with thick copper tubing rolled in a loop and slipped up to the door.
“These aren’t too hard to get open.” He unwound the copper and began bending it while measuring it from the floor to the lever-style door knob. He shaped a hook at the door handle and bent it so it resembled a “V” with a hook at the top. I watched as he slid the tubing sideways under the door and turned it upright, snaking the hook up to the door lever. He brought the tubing back out and reshaped it, then slid it back under, snagged the inside door latch and tugged a few times. The door eased open and Earl smiled. “See what I mean?”
Where did you learn to do that?” Angel said.
“I’d like to take credit for the idea, but I saw a 17-year-old do it on a YouTube Video.”
I shook my head at the ever-resourceful Earl and stepped through the door. When we entered it was obvious someone been there before us. A few of her clothes and underwear lay on the floor. The rest were jumbled in a dresser drawer. The bed was made up, but the covers were loose and the mattress sat slightly off-kilter. A notebook mouse sat on the nightstand but there was no laptop in sight.
A slim black purse lay open next to her bed. I bent over it and didn’t like what I found inside. It was a small caliber hand gun. I lifted it by the trigger guard with a motel pen. It was a revolver similar to Angel’s and it was easy to see two bullet chambers were empty. I wondered if it was the murder weapon used to kill her husband.
“Looks like we were wrong about Mrs. Fleming,” Angel said.
“It appears that way.” I said.
I laid the gun on the bed and picked through the purse with the pen. Things were all mixed together like someone dug through it, but I couldn’t see anything obvious that might be missing. There were car keys, makeup, a checkbook, more makeup, lip balm, a few pens and eyeglasses in a case. What I didn’t find was the picture of Mr. Fleming she had shown me when we met last.
“Uh oh.” Earl stood at the bathroom door. “Better come and see this.”
I went over to the door and opened it wider. In a bathtub of crimson water, lay Mrs. Art Fleming. A blue pallor colored her chin and lips. Her head slumped over the back of the tub. A bloodied straight razor blade lay on the bathtub ledge.
We stepped closer and Earl reached over and lifted her arm. There was a deep cut across the inside of her wrist. Earl frowned. “Suicide?”
“Or meant to look that way,” I said.
“Oh my, poor Mrs. Fleming,” said Angel. “This hasn’t been a very good day.”
“It’s been a terrible day for Stella.” I bent over and touched the bloodied water. “It’s cold and from the looks of her she’s been dead for a long time.”
“Maybe since this morning after she called you,” Earl said.
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I said. “The Do not Disturb sign on the door would have been put there for the maid this morning.”
“A private suicide,” Earl said. “No one would find her in time to rescue her.”
Angel shook her head. “Or a private murder.”
Chapter 22
I watched somberly through the fourth-floor hallway windows as blue and red lights flashed along Airport Way and glided into the hotel parking lot below. I couldn’t believe so many people were dying around me.
First Darrin, then The Jet, Art Fleming, and now Stella. My life continued to spin out of control, and I needed to stop the spinning before I got sucked into the vortex of death and depression.
As the proverbial noose tightened around the neck of a dead person who could no longer defend herself, I refused to believe the evidence onstage. The gun in Stella’s purse obviously was a plant. A very short, unsigned suicide note, implicating her in her husband’s death, sat on display on the bathroom vanity and the scrawling was illegible enough to be considered the scratches of an insane person, despondent enough to end her life.
We watched as the police sealed off the room. Angel went for coffee and brought a cardboard Starbucks box back for the investigators. Officer McGraw showed up and interviewed Earl, then me, and finally Angel. He seemed satisfied we were, for the most part, telling the truth.
McGraw grilled me the longest, wanting to know her identity. He winced when I told him about her hiring me to find her husband and about Art Fleming’s body being discovered a few days ago.
“Crap. She’s the lady who was going to be arrested for her husband’s death,” he said. “I talked with the investigating detective at lunch today. We’ll have the gun in her purse checked to see if it matches the slugs they found in her husband’s body. Her conscience must have caught up with her.”
“There’s something wrong with this whole scenario,” I said. “She had a picture of her husband in her purse when I met her. She held onto it like it was the most important thing in her life. It’s not there now and . . .”
“You went through her purse? Christ, you may have contaminated vital evidence.”
“It was before I knew she was dead. We found her in the bathtub a few minutes later.”
“Did you handle the gun?”
“No. I mean I fished it out with a hotel pen. I didn’t touch it. I know it appears bad for her, but I don’t think Mrs. Fleming killed her husband. The suicide note looks bogus to me and someone went through her purse and took her husband’s picture.”
“Why would anyone take a picture?” McGraw asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe her killer thought it might be too sentimental for her to be carrying if she murdered her husband.”
“Doubtful. The coroner ought to be able to tell if she was restrained or if she suffered any trauma prior to her death, but all the evidence points to suicide.”
“What do you mean, you want us to drop you off downtown?” Angel said. “I thought you were going to spend the night at my house.”
“I’ve already ruined your night enough,” I said. “You and Earl were going to go out to dinner and spend a nice evening together. I still have some unfinished business. Earl, can you drop me off at City Hall?”
“I guess we could do that,” he said. “But what are you going to do there this time of night?”
“Hopefully meet a friend.” I dialed Eileen’s phone number and got her on the third ring. “Eileen? Are you busy?”
“Just curled up with a good book,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I’d like a little tour of your office and maybe a few of the commissioner’s offices.”
“Are you crazy? I can’t get you past the guard this time of night.”
“You can get past the guard, can’t you?”
“Well, I can tell him I have some important work to do before morning, but the commissioners’ offices only work by key ca
rd at night.”
“I know. I remember seeing the slots for them when I paid a surprise visit to the Mayor.”
“They’re on a timer,” she said.
“Can you get me in the building?”
“Not through the main lobby. Okay, if you meet me at the exit door on the Fifth Street side of the building I can get you up the back stairs from there. But we’ll still be locked out of the commissioners’ offices.”
“Let me worry about that. Can you meet me there in fifteen minutes?”
She hesitated. “Okay. But I look dreadful.”
Earl dropped me off down the street from City Hall and he showed concern. Bless his duplicitous little heart.
“What are you up to?” he said.
“I’m up to finding out how The Jet got out of City Hall without being seen by the cameras.” I thought Earl went a little green around the gills. It was too dark to tell for sure.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “They’ll throw the book at you, if you get caught.”
“If I get caught, I’ll know who to blame.” I bent over and glared at Earl through the open car window.
“Well I’m not going to say anything,” he said. “But I still think it’s a bad idea. You want we should hang around? Just in case?”
“No. I’ll be fine. Eileen will be with me.”
“Be careful,” Angel said. “Call and let us know you got home safe. Otherwise I won’t sleep a wink.”
“I will. And Earl, if you really want to make sure I don’t get caught, there’s one thing you can do.”
A few minutes later I was cooling my heels outside the City Hall doors on Fifth Street. I cooled them for twenty minutes before a door opened with a piercing whine, which was louder than any alarm that might have gone off. It probably wasn’t that loud, but as it was nearing the midnight hour it certainly seemed so.
“Sorry,” Eileen said. “One of the guards wanted to gab. Then he wanted to walk me up to my office, and I had to come down the back stairway.”
