by Mike Markel
The North End is home to working-class folks, students living six to a house, and some highly educated types, including professors and low-level administrators at the university and people who run the little art museum, the food bank, and the refugee center. The kind of people we admire rather than reward.
If Rawlings were a hipper city, the North End would have a more colorful name, perhaps something with the phrase People’s Republic in it. But here in tiny Rawlings, Montana, the neighborhood is called the North End, which says a lot about our no-nonsense approach to things—the North End being the end that’s north of downtown—but also says something about our lack of whimsy. In our defense, it’s Montana. It gets real cold and stays real cold for what seems like six or eight months a year. Whimsy would freeze and shatter by late November.
I parked my Honda at the curb in front of one of the two coffee shops on the 400 block of Harkins and put down my visor with the sign that says Official Police Business. It being colder than fifty degrees on a bright blue late April morning, and there being only one squad car in front of the house—parked alongside the curb, no lights flashing—there were no civilians milling about.
The house at 411 Harkins was built around World War II, a two-story Craftsman with concrete steps leading to a little porch with a couple of wicker chairs too ratty to bother stealing. The asbestos shingles were painted a dark red, although the ones on the north side of the house were lighter from the annual sandblasting we call winter. The white paint on the short picket fence was showing a lot of weathered grey wood, the lawn a mix of bare spots as big as manhole covers and tall, scraggly grass full of dandelions.
The gate creaked as I pushed it open and followed the flagstone path to the concrete steps, then up to the porch.
“Hey,” I said to Officer Truman. That’s me chatting with my colleagues.
“Detective.” He nodded.
“You the first officer?”
“Dispatch got a call around 6:30. Woman wanted us to check the house.”
“Did she say why?”
“No.”
“Name?”
“No.”
“So you swung by?”
Truman nodded. “Looked in through the glass.” He pointed to the front door. “Saw her there.”
“How’d you get in?”
“Turned the doorknob.”
“How about that?” I said. “So that was around 6:40?”
He nodded. “I cleared the house. Nobody else inside. Radioed it in. Detective Miner got here eight minutes ago.”
I like Truman. When he speaks, you get a lot of facts per word.
I’d met my partner, Ryan, at a crime scene before shift at least fifteen times, and he’d beaten me there every time, even though he lives about five miles out of town. I think he sleeps in his clothes, waiting for a call.
“Thanks, Truman.” He nodded. I slipped on a pair of paper booties and snapped on a pair of gloves. I pulled the storm door open without touching the handle, even though Truman had probably smudged any prints.
I pushed open the wooden door and walked in. It was a standard-issue North End house, a small foyer at the landing of a center staircase. Off to the left was the living room; to the right, the formal dining room and the kitchen. The oak floor, scratched up and dull, was covered by a mat to catch some of the dirt and crap. Then a braided oval rug at the stair landing. And on the stairs—more precisely, on the third through the ninth treads—was a dead woman. Her left arm trailed, back near her hip. Her right hand dangled over the third riser. The wrist was swollen.
Her hair, brown and grey, cut medium length, was half-covering her face. I crouched down and lifted the hair carefully to get a look at her face. Her grey eyes were half-closed. She looked about forty-five. No makeup. Her mouth was open, the jaws encircling the edge of a riser, as if she was about to chomp down on it. One of her canine teeth, dislodged but still attached to her jaw by some stringy pink roots, was touching the edge of the tread.
She wore a grey blazer with a single brass button, black jeans, new but simple, and a red cotton turtleneck, the kind that women our age wear when the neck starts to go all turkey.
“Good morning, Karen.”
I looked up. Ryan was standing at the top of the landing, hands on his hips. He was wearing one of his navy blue suits. I couldn’t quite tell if it was one of the plain ones or a pinstripe or a chalk stripe. White button-down shirt and rep tie—this one red and green. The shiny dot on the tie was his gold tie tack. This guy lives in a town where some of the bars still have spittoons, and he looks like he’s ready for the board of directors’ annual meeting.
He was also wearing the other part of his uniform: a big, broad grin. It’s not one of those phony grimaces, the kind where the eyebrows are tight and knotted but the mouth is doing all the work. No, Ryan’s grin is one-hundred percent joy. It starts at the mouth, with his many sparkly teeth, and heads north, all the way past his blue eyes.
When we first partnered up, a couple years ago, when I was drinking heavily, the grin put me off, like he was laughing at me for saying or doing something dumb, which happened even more frequently then than now. I checked his file to see if the grin came from a brain injury in the army or a car crash or something. That wasn’t it. One day, we’re in some idiot’s back yard, the uniforms digging the guy’s fiancée out of a half-hearted grave next to a Pontiac with no doors. We’re checking to see if the tat on her wrist matches the one in the photo from the bedroom, and I say to Ryan, Why so chipper? He grins and says it’s just a beautiful day to be alive. It wasn’t that he was insensitive to the dead fiancée. Turned out he’s Mormon.
I didn’t say “Good morning” back to him. He doesn’t get offended. He understands that I’m crankier than usual when we have to talk about dead people before shift starts. “Natural causes?”
He put on a thoughtful expression and rubbed his chin theatrically. “I like it. She has a massive heart attack, falls down the stairs.”
“Accident?”
“Sure. She’s standing at the top of the stairs, slips and falls.”
“Suicide?”
“Could be—but that would make her a masochist, as well. The wooden stairs must have hurt. Personally, I’d have gone over right here.” He pointed a few feet to his side, where she could have climbed over the bannister or just pushed on it hard and ridden gravity for a second until she hit the oak floor on the main level.
“Murder?”
Now his grin was gone. “Can’t tell. She’s pretty beat up, maybe from the stairs and hitting the wall. Or maybe from getting beat up first, then tossed down the stairs.”
“The carpet up there thick enough to take an impression from a shoe?” I knew he used to lay carpets.
He crouched down and ran his fingers over the nap. “I don’t think so.”
“Can you tell what she was doing before she came down the stairs?”
“Not specifically, no. There was some kind of party here. Lots of wine glasses, grocery-store veggie platters, cheese. Someone was washing the dishes but hadn’t finished yet. Broken plates and glasses on the kitchen floor, near the sink, and a bread knife.”
“So if someone grabbed her, it probably happened in the kitchen.”
“What it looks like.”
“But nothing tells you why she went upstairs? How she got there?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say.”
“Maybe Harold can tell us.” I paused. “Can you give her a name?”
“Her wallet’s in her room. Virginia Rinaldi, age forty-six. Professor of sociology at Central Montana.”
“Anyone else live here?”
“The photos throughout the house show a guy, college age. But the person living here is a young woman.”
“Name?”
“Can’t find anything. But she’s living here.”
“You mean, stuff in the bathroom?”
He nodded. “That and the clothes and a few CDs put her in her tw
enties. But no wallet or ID or photos. Nothing to identify her on the walls or on the little desk or anything.”
“Phone? Computer?”
“No and no.”
“You think the professor went down the stairs last night, right?”
“My guess. I can’t tell from the rigor, but with all the food and glasses still out in the living room, I’d say last night more likely than this morning.”
“If it was me, I’d’ve left everything till morning.”
“Maybe so, but someone started to clean up, then stopped.”
“Maybe she needed to wash up some of the glasses and shit during the party?”
“I checked the cabinets.” Ryan shook his head. “She had plenty of clean glasses and shit.”
When I curse, Ryan often quotes me back to myself. When we first started working together, I think he was trying to show me a better way. He was so polite he wouldn’t come right out and tell me that, you know, it doesn’t really showcase your intelligence and creativity to say shit four- or five-hundred times in an eight-hour shift. So he tried to demonstrate how to speak in actual English.
In the last year or so, however, I’ve heard him work a shit or two into conversation even when I haven’t used the word. Perhaps he’s starting to enjoy cursing. For all I know, it’s how a Mormon takes a walk on the wild side.
I’m not proud of my language. I wish I could speak better. But I’m just so tired most of the time I don’t have the energy to think of the right word. I was never that bright to begin with. Plus, over the years, most of my brain cells drowned in a Jack Daniel’s marinade.
In my defense, however, shit is often the right word, especially if you’re a detective. An eighteen-year-old girl, first week on campus, dies from doing a dozen shots? Shit. A guy pops his girlfriend in the face, and now she’s dead and he’s gone? Shit. A middle-aged guy gets laid off third time this year, walks into the office and starts shooting? Shit.
No, I’m not proud of my language. But fuck it: You are what you are, and this, unfortunately, is what I am.
I called up to Ryan. “While we wait for Harold, you figure out who the young woman is, okay?”
“Absolutely.” He turned and disappeared down the upstairs hall.
I looked at Virginia Rinaldi, lying there on the steps, her wrist all swollen up, her busted tooth hanging from her mouth, her grey eyes half-closed. Was it about twelve hours ago she was standing in front of the mirror, smoothing her hair, making sure the collar of the red turtleneck folded over evenly? Buttoning the grey blazer, frowning a little and shaking her head, then unbuttoning it. Turning to the left, standing up straight. Then turning to the right. Sighing, walking out of her bedroom and heading downstairs for the party.
Shit.
Chapter 2
I walked into the living room, an obstacle course of mismatched, moth-eaten old chairs, end tables, and loveseats—Victorian, early American, mid-century Scandinavian—cluttered with cheap Wal-Mart pillows and throws. I lifted one of the throws, which covered a large stain. I checked another: a three-inch tear in the fabric, stitched up by an amateur. On various end tables and shelves I counted six statues, including a nude couple sitting on a rock, embracing; a girl in a ballet outfit, one leg out in a pose; and a teenage girl wearing armor, sitting on a horse and waving a big flag.
All the tables were crowded with glasses, plates, and silverware. The food included vegetables and guacamole dip, a few different kinds of coffee cakes, and a pretty nice-looking cheesecake, which I lingered over for a moment. There was serious dark coffee, plus tea, soda, and wines both red and white. One woman had left a pair of glasses, and there were a couple of cheap pens.
I stepped around little clusters of crumbs on the old blue wall-to-wall to look at the framed posters on the walls. Some were prints of famous paintings. I recognized the one with the guy with the lightbulb head and his hands over his ears, like the kid in Home Alone. I also thought I’d seen the landscape painting with the swirly purple and blue sky and the yellow moon off to the right.
But most of the posters were photographs of famous people with important things they’d said. Fidel Castro, dressed in fatigues and smoking a cigar, said, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” Another poster said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” It had about fifty tiny black-and-white photographs of women. I recognized Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Billie Jean King, and Helen Keller. My favorite poster showed a forty-year-old Gloria Steinem, who apparently said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.” I knew the second part was true. I hadn’t experienced the first part yet.
On the mantel above the white brick fireplace were six photos, head shots of Virginia Rinaldi and a guy who had to be her son. The photos were all shot outdoors in the sunlight. They spanned about twenty years, the infant morphing into a college-age man. Virginia was once a young, pretty woman with sleek chestnut hair, an unlined face, and bright eyes. Then she became a middle-aged woman, comfortably wrinkled, the hair losing its sheen and going grey.
In each of the photos, the pose was the same: Virginia Rinaldi’s face was right up against her son’s. When he was little, he was laughing at something someone had said or was kissing his mother on the cheek. As he became a teenager, he tried to pull away from her, and his expression had become uncomfortable, almost hostile. In the two most recent photos, he was wearing a polite smile, as if he had decided his mother had earned this small but embarrassing indulgence.
Virginia Rinaldi’s expression remained the same in each of the photos. Her big, radiant smile promised a limitless future full of joy for herself and her son. I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, then turned and headed out of the living room.
I crossed the foyer and walked into the formal dining room, barely big enough for the heavy old table that seats eight. It smelled like old carpet. I glanced down at a threadbare old Persian. A long, dark buffet spanned most of the inside wall. Next to it was a corner cabinet with some formal dishes and glassware. The walls were covered with hideous wallpaper full of red and white roses. There were no pictures or posters or anything on the walls. It didn’t look like Virginia Rinaldi and her son or the woman living here spent any time in this room.
I walked up to the entryway to the kitchen but didn’t go in. If Ryan was right about how she was washing dishes when the killer grabbed her, there was a decent chance there would be forensic evidence on the old linoleum. Most of the broken shit on the floor was to the right side of the sink. Only a long bread knife was on the floor to the left. On the counter, left of the sink, were more dirty plates and glasses. To the right of the sink, the counter was mostly clear.
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize what had happened. She heard the killer, stopped the water, and turned to face him. If she was right-handed, which Robin, our evidence tech, would be able to confirm, she already had the bread knife in her right hand or had the presence of mind to pick it up. The killer came at her; she tried to defend herself, but he overpowered her and grabbed the knife from her, in the process screwing up her wrist. At some point, her body got bent back against the counter, to the right of the sink, sending the plates and glasses to the floor. He must have beaten her up some so he could get her up the stairs. Harold would be able to tell us how he beat her up.
I walked back to the foyer, carefully stepped over the body, and climbed the stairs. I went down the hall for a quick look in the rooms. The last bedroom was her son’s. The mattress on the single bed had no linens on it. The walls were covered in rock posters. He liked Radiohead, which I had heard of, and Spoon, Blur, and Wilco, which I hadn’t. There were some high-school pennants and ticket stubs and assorted teenager crap on a small bulletin board. Five student trophies for track and field sat on top of a small pine bookcase, which was full of study guides for AP math and science courses, as well as some science-fiction books I didn’t recognize. I walked over to a fiberboard desk that had nothing on it but
a fairly thick layer of dust. In the small closet were a Boy Scout shirt, covered in sewn-on badges, a VCR, an old hamster cage, and a fish tank with colored rocks and a plastic castle.
Next was the bathroom. Ryan was right about a woman living here. I looked in the medicine chest and opened the doors to the vanity. She was post-menstrual and pre-menopausal. The razors, waxes, creams, portable laser things, and chemicals said she had a zero-tolerance policy on body hair. All the tubes, bottles, boxes, hairdryers, and rollers were fairly neatly arranged by function, although some of the stuff was in the wrong place. My guess was she’d moved in about a month ago, during which time the system had started to break down. I checked the shower. She was a little cleaner than me: not an oblivious teenager, but not anal about making the shower shine.
I walked into her bedroom. There was nothing on the little desk or on the walls. The narrow bed was half-made: the blankets were pulled up and sort of in place, but she hadn’t tucked anything in neat. I lifted the blanket and top sheet up so I could check out the bottom sheet. I leaned down. No obvious stains or any evidence she’d been nailing anyone there. The dresser had a few pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, and some cotton blouses and T-shirts. College-girl tastes and sizes. The closet, with its vague aroma of high-end perfume, told a different story: a few dozen pairs of heels, and twenty or twenty-five dresses, most with high hemlines, low necklines, and sheer tops. On a shelf above the dresses were the bras and panties that went with the dresses. They were definitely not for college girls.
I left the woman’s room and met up with Ryan in the master bedroom. He looked up when he heard me.
“You seen the mystery woman’s closet?” I said.
He nodded. “She’s quite a people person.”
“That’s what they call hookers these days?”
He smiled. “I don’t like to judge.”
“You didn’t find anything identifying her?”
“No, I didn’t. No mail, no paperwork. Nothing.”
“What’d you get in here?” I scanned Virginia’s room. It had a queen-size bed, a couple of soft chairs off to the side, a desk with a laptop, muted area rugs on dark wood floors, and lots of art prints and photos of her son on the walls. Off to the side was the entrance to the bathroom. I glanced over there. It looked like a recent re-model.
