Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

Krebbs turned away, like figuring out how he was supposed to look. His face came back about the same. “I’m sorry it all happened. But she never learned respect, never figured it out.”

  “There was one thing Lainie could figure out, Mr Krebbs,” I said. “How to call the police when you were beating her. And file restraining orders, which you twice violated. That was just the last Mrs Krebbs. Seems you have a record of this kind of action with the Krebbs wife corps.”

  The eyes flashed. “I fall for these, these ridiculous sensitive women. Once they settle into the cushy life, they turn on me.”

  “Seems Lainie was the one who filed the order, not you.”

  Krebbs’s face reddened with anger. “I never touched the bitch. I’d yell at her – hell yes, she pissed me off – and she’d gimme this big shit-eating grin and smack her face against the fridge or the microwave, call the cops. You people would show up, see a tiny little scrape on her face, and fucking pull me out of my own home.”

  Harry held up his notes. “So all these charges should have been filed against your appliances?”

  Krebbs spun to my partner, fists balled, the anger-control classes a waste of time. Or maybe they weren’t. Krebbs closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I watched his shoulders relax and the hands loosen.

  “You think I did it, right?” he said.

  “Everyone’s a suspect,” Harry said. “Until they’re not.”

  Krebbs stared at the floor. “Boy, that slut really got me good.”

  “Got you how, Mr Krebbs?” I asked.

  “When she was alive she gave me a police record. Then she dies and makes me a suspect.” He jammed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I sure can pick ’em, can’t I?”

  Chapter 11

  The peaks of the Rocky Mountains rising around her, Treeka snapped one side of Tommy’s blue bikini briefs to the clothes rope, grabbed a pin, fixed the other side tight, making a line of blue flags waving in the breeze. Tommy wore briefs because boxers were for fags and niggers. The rest of the line was denim cowboy-style work shirts and skin-tight jeans. Tommy liked his clothes spread wide so sun and breeze could make them smell fresh. Treeka’s clothes were bunched at the end of the line, her yellow shopping dress as bright as neon.

  Treeka grabbed another pair of damp briefs from the basket and shot a glance toward the doublewide modular at her back. Sided with wood slats to resemble a mountain cabin, it was a pair of trailers in disguise. Tommy had inherited the house from his daddy, a diabetic who ignored medical advice by drinking hard and eating wrong, even as the doctors amputated pieces until he was little more than a torso with an angry head.

  Tommy’s mother had run off when he was twelve. There one day, gone the next, leaving only a note saying I cant take it no more. Both of Tommy’s parents disappeared on him, Treeka thought, the old man just took more time to do it.

  Though it was a workday, Tommy was inside sleeping. Yesterday had been payday and Tommy never came home before ten p.m., heading straight from cashing his check to his favorite saloon. He’d gotten up and felt like shit and called in sick at the awning factory.

  Tommy boasted to strangers that he was a cattle rancher, but of the dozen cattle he’d bought with Treeka’s Toyota money – his starter herd, he’d called it – four died of the bloat, three wandered off through the fence he could never keep patched, one died of infection when Tommy thought he could do better than a veterinarian at fixing a cut, and one tumbled into the abandoned mine at the back end of the property. The other four he sold at a loss, since they looked so sickly. For the last year he’d worked at a place that made canvas awnings for mobile homes, named assistant foreman when the company’s absentee owner discovered Tommy’s ability to browbeat extra work from the mostly undocumented Hispanic labor.

  Treeka was holding the briefs tight against the line, clothespins in hand, when her head snapped back so hard she screamed. Tommy had her pulled tight to him by her hair. His other hand grabbed her neck beneath her chin.

  “Where have you been?” he hissed into her ear. She smelled whiskey on his breath. He’d already started drinking.

  “W-what are you talking about, b-baby?” Treeka said through clenched teeth. “I been r-right here doin’ the clothes.”

  “Other days. You been sneaking out.” Tommy’s voice was fire against her ear.

  “I d-don’t know what you’re sayin’, baby. How could I get anywhere if I d-don’t have a car?”

  “You got some guy picks you up,” he slurred. “Or one a your lesbians.”

  “I don’t know any lesbians. An’ there ain’t no one picks me up. You’re my man, Tommy. It’s just us. You and me, forever. Come on, baby, let go my neck. It’s hard to breathe.”

  His hand fell from her throat as he spun her to him, slapping her face with a gunshot sound. She let herself fall to the dirt, hoping for safety on the ground.

  “I work my ass off for you and you’re fucking around on me,” he hissed. “This is the thanks I get.”

  “Your imagination is running away on you again, baby,” Treeka gasped, trying to catch her breath. “I ain’t been anywhere but here all day ever’ day.”

  Tommy reached into his shirt pocket, made a flicking motion. A flash of color appeared in the air and a tiny bird fluttered to the ground in front of Treeka. The blue paper bird the lady at the woman center gave Treeka when they were done talking, setting it in Treeka’s palm and gently closing her fingers around it like the bird was alive.

  “I found it in your special drawer,” Tommy said. “In back, hiding.”

  Treeka felt sick. As soon as she’d returned from the trip to Boulder she’d put the paper bird in her cosmetic drawer until she could find a better hiding place. Tommy had probably gone through her face creams for something he could grease up and whack off with.

  “The bird was up b-by the highway, baby,” Treeka stammered. “It must have got blown out of someone’s car. It was pretty so I kept it, Tommy. That’s all. It was a pretty little bird.”

  “I TOL’ YOU NEVER TO GO TO THE HIGHWAY!”

  “I was just looking, Tommy. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, baby, I promise I –”

  Tommy’s boot came down and stomped the blue bird flat. He pulled a pair of his jeans from the line and flung them around Treeka, her head caught in the crotch. He spun them tight and dragged her by the neck into the house.

  Chapter 12

  We had nothing on Larry Krebbs. That meant studying him from the periphery, starting with his employer. Allied Technologies was a big green steel box in a warehouse district in south Mobile. A fenced-in compound outside held stake trucks, outsized crates and sections of industrial tubing. traffic whizzed by, work vehicles and semis hauling goods.

  Inside the building it was cool and smelled of plastics. The reception area was a room with a desk and several battered filing cabinets. Behind the desk was a chunky woman in her early forties wearing a purple pantsuit. Her face was big-eyed and button-nose cute, but overly powdered and hard at the eye-corners. The nameplate on her desk said Marge Glenny, Office Mgr. She finished ticking out something on a keyboard before looking up.

  “Help you fellas?”

  We showed our credentials and Harry asked to see the boss.

  “That’s Mr Choy,” Miz Glenny said. “Sam Choy. He’s our CEO, COO, and C-about everything else. Can I tell him what it’s about?”

  “Larry Krebbs works here, right?” I asked.

  “Not my fault,” Miz Glenny said with a frown.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “You don’t want to talk to me about Larry, because I don’t have much to say and not much of it is good.”

  I felt a thrill run down my spine as office Mgr Glenny picked up the phone to announce us. We’d fer-sure stop back at her desk.

  Choy’s office had paneled walls, acoustic ceiling tiles with fluorescent fixtures, a simple desk. In the corner was a drawing table strewn with blueprints. Choy was in his mid forties, compact, wi
th intelligent eyes behind red-framed glasses, wearing khakis and a gray silk shirt rolled to the elbows. His short hair was hipster-spiked and he less resembled a guy who made pipes than a partner in a Silicon Valley start-up.

  “Larry’s worked with us for three years,” Choy said, frowning through the lenses. “Is there a problem?”

  We laid out the facts. Choy seemed shaken initially, but gained composure after a few quiet seconds. “Larry rarely talks about his personal life. I only met Mrs Krebbs once. She was very quiet.”

  Harry leaned in. “Mr Krebbs has something of a strident personality, Mr Choy. When I think of office accountants I think of quiet people with –”

  “With thick glasses and a pocket full of pens and so forth,” Choy nodded. “People who let the numbers speak.”

  “Pretty much. Mr Krebbs seems to enjoy goading people.”

  Choy looked out the window as a semi rolled past with coils of steel chained to the trailer. He turned back to Harry and me, his voice lowered. “We’re a small company that stays alive by underbidding competitors. That means keeping costs low. We don’t short-change our people, but we take advantage of economic advantages when it comes to hiring.”

  It took a beat for me to catch on. “You’re saying Krebbs works cheap, Mr Choy?”

  “We pay him eighty-two grand a year. Someone with a comparable skill set could get a hundred.”

  “Because Krebbs’s skill set doesn’t include people skills, right?”

  Choy nodded. “Larry’s a bit … opinionated. Probably why he had a checkered employment history. But when he applied here, we figured the pairing would work if he stayed in his office and ran numbers.”

  I wanted to see Krebbs’s work environment and nodded down the hall. “Which office is his?”

  “There isn’t one. Nine months back Larry decided he could do everything from home, e-commute. Given his effect on some of our staff, we thought the arrangement worked out better for everyone.”

  Except his wife, I thought. The best part of Lainie Krebbs’s day probably started the moment hubby walked out the door. Then, nine months ago, Krebbs is home every second of every day, watching, complaining, correcting. Miz K takes several months of it, then books for greener pastures. But somehow, Lainie Krebbs ends up submerged in excrement in Denver’s sewage treatment center, her corpse blind and mutilated.

  We stopped at Miz Glenny’s desk on our way out. When we asked if she felt comfortable talking about Larry Krebbs, her eyes sparkled. “He brought Lainie to an office party, a mousy little thing with no hips but decent tits. She was always shooting Larry the nervous eye like she was being graded on how she did. It was funny at first, then it got sad when I heard things about him.”

  “Heard from where, Miz Glenny?” I asked.

  A smug smile. “Larry’s aunt moved in next to one of my best friends. The aunt says Larry’s messed up about women. He’s got two college degrees, but every woman he dated or married was a high-school dropout. The oldest one he ever married was twenty-nine and he was forty-one. That was Lainie.”

  Harry said, “Larry is a charmer?”

  Glenny cawed. “Think it through. You’re a half-pretty bimbo with no education, a string of leech boyfriends, and living hand to mouth in some rathole. One day you meet this big white-collar dude with all his teeth and a barber haircut, a guy with a college degree and a real job. It feels like you hit the lottery … until he starts weirding out.” Glenny cackled wickedly.

  Harry said, “How’d you and Krebbs get along, Miz Glenny?”

  “The first week he was hitting on me, wanting to get me out to lunch. Then I was talking one day to a delivery lady – Myrna from FedEx – telling her how I’d left my first husband and got the house. Larry was eavesdropping. When Myrna left he accused me of betraying my husband, stealing from him, saying I should hang my head in shame. Larry was really hot, shaking and everything. I actually felt scared.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told him spying was a chickenshit thing to do and if he said one more word I’d go to Mr Choy and file a complaint.”

  “What did Larry do?”

  “He started wringing his hands like a little kid and hauled ass back to his office, slammed the door. He never spoke to me after that. Of course, we hardly crossed paths either.”

  “That being about the time Larry switched to working at home?” I ventured, taking a shot in the dark.

  “Yep. Just a couple weeks later.”

  I pictured Krebbs huffing and puffing, then Glenny getting in his face and forcing him to retreat. In the mind of a guy like Krebbs, he’d been defeated, shamed. So he retreated to a situation he could control: Home with the wife.

  “Do you know if Lainie Krebbs held a job?” Harry asked.

  “Larry said a real wife stayed home to cook and clean and be spread-ready when hubby has the hornies.” Glenny paused, as if replaying in her head what she’d been saying. She shook her head.

  “What is it, Miz Glenny?” I asked.

  “I said I didn’t have much good to say about Larry. Guess I don’t have anything good to say about him.”

  When Tommy had rolled in the night before with a case of beer and proceeded to ignore her while he spooled fresh line on to a fishing reel, Treeka had hidden her joy – it meant he and his buddies were blowing off work for a day of angling in the mountains. Twenty minutes after Tommy left, she was on the bus to Boulder, this time alerting the center that she was coming.

  Treeka arrived to find the paper-folding woman, Carol, had been joined by three other women. Carol told Treeka to tell all of her story, to leave nothing out, especially the worst stuff. One lady, older and dressed in a business suit, did nothing but take notes while the others asked questions.

  “No children, right?”

  “Tommy hates kids. He faked like he liked them ’til we got married. Then he made me get pills and an IUD. He watches me take the pills. When we get some money ahead he says I have to get my tubes tied.”

  “Did you ever call the police?”

  “Tommy hunts and fishes with some county cops, so maybe they wouldn’t do anything. And even if the cops put Tommy in jail, when he got out he’d tear me apart and bury my parts in the mountains. He says he can put them where even the coyotes won’t find them.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Treeka thought for several long moments. The women had told her to be completely truthful, it was very important.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “All the way.”

  “Do you have anyone close to you? So close you couldn’t bear to not see them again?”

  “Not any more. All the people I love are gone.”

  “How often does your husband beat you?”

  “Two–three times a week. It’s getting worse.”

  “Does he rape you?”

  “I’m his wife and Tommy says a man can –”

  “Does he force you to have sex when you don’t want it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In a way.”

  “What do you mean, ‘in a way’?”

  “A lot of time he can’t, I mean, he doesn’t …”

  “We understand. Your black eye … from Tommy?”

  Treeka nodded. “As soon as one starts to fade, another takes its place.”

  “Are there other ways he hurts you?”

  Treeka lifted her blouse, showing scrapes from punches and skin pinched purple with bruises. The women gave Treeka a cup of tea and went to a back room to talk together. Treeka didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were gone a long time. When they returned, Carol sat beside Treeka and took her hand.

  “We’re going to tell you about an option you might consider, Treeka. But before we tell you, you have to take a vow of secrecy. You can never tell anyone what we’re about to discuss …”

  Chapter 13

  Harry and I spent the next day investigating Krebbs, finding nothing beyond his sorrowful history with women. We found ex-wives two and three
: Two was a frightfully heavy woman who slammed the door in our face and said she never wanted to hear “that goddamn name again”. The other was a blank-faced woman in a decayed trailer park, her skin and teeth ravaged by Methedrine. She was stoned or tripping and said she’d been married three times since then and “Larry wasn’t real bad”, though I didn’t think she was remembering Krebbs.

  I called the Krebbster and said we had a few more questions to ask, hoping to push him into a misstep. When the forensics types figured out a decent time-of-death estimate, we could find out where sweet Larry was at the time of our murders.

  Krebbs opened the door with a flourish, the toupee pasted tight, grinning like man who’d just filled an inside straight. Harry and I pulled off our shoes and stepped inside. I took the lead.

  “We’ve been talking to a few folks, Mr Krebbs, and a few more questions come to mind, all involving your former relationships with women. The unions don’t seem real, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for, Detective Nautilus?”

  “Stable,” Harry said. “Or mature, maybe.”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s it. Like a guy with deep insecurities. I’m thinking troubled adolescent here … a guy who needs to elevate himself by –”

  “That’s all I need to hear,” boomed a voice from behind us.

  Harry and I spun to see a guy about five-eight, lean and whippy, with cold eyes and tight-pursed lips, a self-important mouth. The face was angular, photogenic and topped with a haircut that probably cost more than any suit in my closet, a face we knew only from the news. T. Nathaniel Bromley was a prosecutor-turned-partner at the law firm of Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley, its clients including some the largest concerns in the region.

  “Are you harassing my client?” Bromley snapped.

  “Harassing how?” Harry said, trying to hide his amazement. We weren’t surprised Krebbs had lawyered up, but had expected one of those attorneys that advertises at bus stops. Plus word had it that Bromley had retired last year at age forty-six. The move had surprised many, but it was what I’d have done in Bromley’s expensive shoes. The man had big money and big connections, socially and politically. Why not relax and live it up?