The Incident

by Andrew Neiderman

  ‘He look better to you from that angle or something?’ Ralph quipped. He glanced at Tony Gibson, who stood off to the side, still in something of a state of shock. Marvin’s one steady assistant was the one who had discovered his body this morning when he appeared for work. He was a lean, six-feet-one-inch man with a body that looked as if it had been stretched to reach that height. His friends called him Plastic Man, after the comic book character. His thin narrow face was habitually mournful because of the way the sides of his mouth dipped. Despite his twenty-two years, he looked like someone who could count his lifelong smiles on one hand.

  Rob didn’t respond immediately. He continued studying Marvin’s body, looked at the shelves on the right and then at the floor around the sprawled corpse.

  ‘Anybody touch him?’ he asked without looking at Ralph.

  Ralph looked at Tony.

  ‘I shook him and I felt how cold he was and that was it. Then I called you guys.’

  ‘Who put the sheet over his body?’ Rob asked.

  ‘It’s not a sheet. It’s what we use to put over a car when we’re workin’ on the engine sometimes, so we don’t scratch it or somethin’,’ Tony said. ‘I did. I thought I should. I put it over him. Ralph here uncovered him somewhat,’ he added in an accusatory tone.

  Rob looked at him.

  ‘Confirming he was deceased,’ Ralph said. ‘He’s deceased. He’s good and deceased. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies,’ he added, like someone listing his qualifications.

  Rob carefully knelt beside Marvin’s corpse and looked at the head trauma without touching the body.

  ‘Doc Lewis is on his way,’ he said, referring to the medical examiner. ‘When did you last see him alive?’ he asked Tony when he stood.

  ‘About eight last night. We were workin’ on that truck over there,’ he added, nodding at a 1960 Ford pickup that was getting a new paint job after some body repairs. ‘I’d a’ stayed later, but he called it quits. We ate that pizza,’ he added for no apparent reason and nodded at a pizza box on the makeshift desk. There were empty beer bottles beside it.

  ‘Do you know if he was expecting anyone?’ Rob asked.

  ‘Not that I knew, no. His mother called over because she thought he was coming to dinner and he told her no. I remember that.’

  ‘Did you speak with her yet?’ Rob asked Ralph.

  ‘No. I thought I’d leave that pleasure for you.’

  Rob squinted.

  ‘I haven’t seen that woman for years,’ Ralph continued. ‘The two times I did were not very pleasant. One minute with her and you’ll know how someone like Marvin and his brother Louis was spawned.’

  Rob nodded and looked at Tony. ‘Any other relatives nearby who could be with his mother after she gets the news?’

  ‘There’s a cousin, Arron Cook, lives in Woodbourne, but they don’t talk. He didn’t like his uncles much. None live in New York. I don’t know what the fight with his cousin was over. Just know they don’t like each other. There’s nobody else I know offhand. His twin brother Louis was killed in Vietnam this year.’

  Rob turned to Ralph.

  ‘February,’ he said.

  ‘Twin brother, huh?’

  ‘Not enough brain power between the two of them to light a cigarette,’ Ralph muttered. He glared at Tony to see if he would say something in Marvin’s defense. He looked down quickly.

  ‘You and Marvin get along all right?’ Rob asked him.

  Tony looked up quickly. ‘Sure. We know each other since high school. I was in the class behind him and Lou. I’ve been workin’ for him ever since I graduated high school.’ He looked mournfully at the body. ‘Guess I’m goin’ to need to look for another job.’

  ‘As you can see, he’s all broke up about it,’ Ralph said.

  Rob looked at the body again. ‘I don’t need the medical examiner to tell me he was hit with a blunt instrument.’ He looked around. ‘Where are the sledgehammers you guys use?’

  ‘There’s one short-handle in my tool kit there. There’s a long-handle against the wall,’ he added, nodding at it.

  Rob walked over to it and, without touching it, examined the head. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a plastic bag. He put it carefully over the head of the sledgehammer.

  ‘Let’s see yours,’ he told Tony, who quickly opened his tool kit and took it out.

  Rob looked at it and then placed another evidence bag over it and placed it on the floor. He looked at Tony, whose eyes were wide with surprise.

  ‘I wouldn’t a’ done that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like everythin’ he said or did, but I wouldn’t a’ killed him. Shit.’

  ‘Where did you go after you left about eight?’ Rob asked.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Anyone see you? Anyone there?’

  ‘No, not until I went out about ten.’

  ‘Any other sledgehammers?’ Rob asked, ignoring him.

  ‘Well, there’s another usually on that shelf,’ he said, pointing to the wall shelf near Marvin’s body. ‘It ain’t there.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  Tony looked around the shop and shook his head. ‘Don’t see it,’ he said.

  Rob looked at Ralph. ‘Possible murder weapon might be gone,’ he said. ‘Let’s check here carefully and then we’ll need to check around the property and the sides of the road leading in both directions just in case it was tossed.’

  ‘We’ll get some of the volunteer police officers to help with that. I’ll give the place a good going over,’ Ralph said. Despite his attitude, he was beginning to respect Rob Luden. His slow, careful manner spoke of self-confidence and efficiency as well as experience.

  ‘You have any ideas about who he might have had a fight with? Any particular enemies?’ he asked Tony.

  He shrugged. ‘He had some arguments with customers lately. He threw one guy out of here – Chuck Porter, who accused him of putting used spark plugs in his car. That happened last week.’

  ‘Physically threw him out?’

  ‘Grabbed him by his neck and shoved him out the door. Chuck said he was going to call the cops.’

  Rob looked at Ralph.

  ‘No complaint filed as far as I know, but you’re probably going to run into a list as long as your arm when it comes to people who weren’t particularly fond of Marvin Hacker. I personally had to see to a few commotions between him and some other men in Whiskey Joe’s this year.’

  ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ Rob muttered.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Agatha Christie detective story about a murder on the train. Practically everyone else on the train had a motive for killing the victim.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re on that train,’ Ralph said. They both looked at Marvin’s body.

  Rob looked up when the door opened and Dr Lewis entered. He was a short, stout sixty-four-year-old man with a dark brown goatee showing encroaching gray strands and a balding head with age spots that looked like coffee stains. Rob knew him from a half-dozen unattended deaths that were determined to be heart attacks and strokes.

  He paused and looked at Ralph and Tony first.

  ‘What do we have?’ he asked, like someone hoping all his work had been done for him.

  ‘You tell us, Doc,’ Ralph said. ‘Detective Luden believes he was murdered with a blow to his skull.’

  Dr Lewis nodded and approached Marvin’s body. He contemplated it for a moment. Then he pulled back the sheet Tony and Marvin used to protect a car’s surface while they worked on it. He knelt beside the body and examined the head trauma.

  ‘Feels like some of the skull was fractured. Hard blow, all right. Nothing sharp – a blunt tool perhaps,’ he added.

  Ralph looked at Rob Luden with even more appreciation.

  Dr Lewis turned the head. ‘No other trauma visible.’ He looked at Marvin’s hands. ‘Didn’t draw blood from anyone else with a punch or anything. Rigor set in.’

  ‘Tony saw him last about eight last night,’ Rob offered.


  The medical examiner nodded. ‘At least that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it more exact.’

  He turned Marvin’s body so he was flat on his back and then opened his bag.

  ‘Hold it,’ Rob said. He stared down at Marvin.

  Dr Lewis looked up. ‘What?’

  It leaped out at him. A garage smell of gasoline.

  ‘That – on his belt … ring of keys,’ Rob said.

  ‘I’d say you hit it on the head as good as whoever did this,’ Dr Lewis replied. ‘Yes, that is a ring of keys,’ he added and looked at Ralph, who smiled broadly.

  ‘Ingenious,’ Ralph said, smiling. ‘The case is solved.’

  ‘Might just be,’ Rob countered. He turned to Tony. ‘When you knew him in high school, did he carry a ring of keys on his belt like this?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess. They had keys to cars they were workin’ on sometimes and took them for rides. I remember that. And there’s all sorts of stuff locked up in the garage. I think that made Marvin feel like a big deal.’

  ‘A ring of keys?’ Ralph said.

  Tony shrugged again. ‘I guess you look like you’re in charge or somethin’.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ Ralph asked Rob. ‘Not enough brain power to light a cigarette.’

  ‘OK. I’ll go speak to Mrs Hacker,’ Rob said.

  They all watched him leave.

  ‘Ring of keys. Dick Tracy has arrived,’ Ralph said.

  Even Tony found he could laugh.

  When Rob stepped up on the porch, he saw the two boxes lying smack in front of the door. He slid them out of the way and pushed the door buzzer, but realized quickly that it didn’t work so he knocked. He looked back when he heard a second and then a third patrol car arrive, one of them being the state police. Probably more excitement than they’ve had around here for some time, he thought.

  He knocked again, harder this time. He waited, put his ear to the door and then tried the door knob. It opened, so he stepped in and called, ‘Hello? Mrs Hacker?’

  The house had a moldy, stale odor. There was brown wallpaper with small white circles on the entryway walls and the hall. It had peeled in some places. The floor was laid with a coffee-colored linoleum and looked as if it had been last washed on D-Day. He walked farther in and gazed into the living room on his right. The floor was a dull, battered hardwood with a single light brown area rug that was threadbare. An oval cherrywood table, which had on it some magazines, an ashtray with the remnants of cigarettes filling it to the brim, and two empty glasses beside a half-empty bottle of beer, was the best piece of furniture in the room. The light green sofa on the right had torn arms and the bottom visibly leaking a spring or two.

  He turned slowly to his right and stepped back when he saw the scrawny woman in a faded blue robe sitting in the oversized cushioned chair. Her thin gray hair revealed some balding. The strands looked as if they had been left to do what they wanted for years, some of them lying over her forehead and some down the sides of her head like broken, thin wires. She had a head that looked too big for her nearly emaciated body, with arms that were nothing more than bones with skin, ending in boney, high-knuckled hands with spidery thin fingers slightly curled.

  For a moment, he thought she was dead too and wondered if whoever had killed Marvin had decided to kill what was left of the family as well.

  ‘Mrs Hacker?’ he said and then repeated it much louder.

  Her eyes opened as if the lids had to be prized apart the way you might open a clam shell. Nothing else in her face moved. In fact, her face looked like a Halloween mask with its thin, long nose and curled, thin, pale lips. She blinked, but she didn’t sit up.

  ‘He ain’t here,’ she said. ‘Go look in the garage.’

  She closed her eyes again.

  ‘I’m not looking for your son, ma’am,’ he said.

  She opened her eyes again. ‘When you see him, you tell him I told him that if any of them niggas bring his parts and stuff, I warned him I wouldn’t touch nothin’ or sign nothin’. They should be bringin’ that stuff to the garage. His father never let no blacks bring stuff to the house neither.’

  Rob simply stared at her. ‘There’s been some trouble,’ he began. ‘Your son was either in a fight or attacked last night. I’m sorry to say he’s dead, ma’am.’

  Normally, he eased into such a revelation, but the bitterness of this woman and her prejudice stripped away any decency in him.

  ‘Louis is dead. Marvin’s not,’ she replied. ‘I told him not to join the army, but he was as stubborn as his father.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’re talking about your son Marvin, ma’am.’

  She stared. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s been killed either in a fight or in a premeditated murder.’

  She closed and opened her eyes. ‘He was in a fight? Well, who’s going to make my coffee?’ she asked.

  He had a litany of questions to ask, hoping that she would be able to tell him something that would serve as a lead, but he swallowed them all back. She either didn’t understand or refused to. In either case, she was not much good to anybody or anything, he thought.

  ‘Is there anyone you would like me to call for you?’ he asked, hoping that would emphasize the seriousness of what he was saying.

  ‘Call my butler,’ she said. She didn’t laugh at her own joke so much as choke on it, coughing and then spitting into what looked like a well-soaked yellowed handkerchief. ‘Can you make some coffee?’

  ‘I’ll get someone to help,’ he promised and left quickly, suddenly needing to get into the fresh air.

  Ralph Baldwin came walking up from the garage.

  ‘I’ve got a few volunteers on their way. We’ll search the area for that sledgehammer or whatever. So far, no others in there. How’s the old lady taking it?’

  ‘She’s heartbroken,’ he said. ‘I never realized you had rednecks living here.’

  ‘We don’t call them that. We call them stump jumpers. So she impressed you?’

  ‘She’s not all there. We’ll have to call in social services and an exterminator.’

  ‘Exterminator?’

  ‘I’m exaggerating, but maybe not as much as even I think. Get on the horn. I’ll start on what we have after I speak with Doctor Lewis. I think we should bring Tony in for some more questioning.’

  ‘You think he did it?’

  ‘I don’t know. None of the rules that govern the behavior of civilized people seem to apply here,’ Rob added.

  Ralph laughed. He didn’t expect it, but he was starting to like this guy, like him a lot.

  When Rob returned to the station after arranging for the two sledgehammers to go to forensics to be examined closely for fingerprints and evidence of blood or tissue, he filled in Chief Skyler on what he knew. It was easy to see the man was overwhelmed. Rob then went into his own office.

  He went straight to the file cabinet that contained the cold cases and pulled out the Victoria Myers rape and assault case. He looked at that note he had discovered, the one that referred to repressed memories. Then he thumbed through the attached stack of interviews and found Lieutenant Marcus’s interview of the Hacker brothers. From the length and the detail of it, he sensed that they ranked high in her list of possibles. What threw her off or prevented her from closing? He noted the name at the bottom of the report, which led to another interview, the purpose of which was to verify statements made by the Hacker twins.

  He paused and thought about them. He could feel his eyes widen with the realization that came bursting into his mind like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  Wasn’t this the name of the young man who was now engaged to Victoria Myers?

  It didn’t make any sense … Then again, maybe it did. Maybe he wasn’t kidding at all when he told Tony and Ralph in the body shop that the keys were going to lead him to the killer.

  He rose and went into the examination room where Ralph had brought Tony Gibson. Tony was sipping a soda and eating from
a bag of potato chips as if he had been brought in to watch a baseball game on television. He looked relaxed, too relaxed to be their killer, Rob thought.

  He sat across from Gibson and opened a folder. That always spooked suspects because they thought you had some sort of evidence at your fingertips.

  ‘Were you very friendly with Marvin and Louis in high school?’ he asked.

  ‘I wasn’t best friends or anything like that. Unless you paid for gas or somethin’, they weren’t too interested in you.’

  ‘So they liked to hang with richer kids?’

  Tony shrugged. That was obvious.

  ‘What does the name Victoria Myers mean to you?’

  ‘Mean? I know who she is,’ he said.

  ‘You know more than just who she is, Tony,’ he said, leaning toward him.

  ‘Yeah. Who doesn’t?’

  ‘Did you know Bart Stonefield?’

  ‘Yeah, I knew him.’

  ‘How friendly was he with the Hacker twins?’

  ‘I told you, they liked to hang with rich kids who paid for everythin’ when he drove them around because they weren’t old enough to drive. Bart was one, so they were good friends once.’

  ‘Why did they stop being good friends?’

  ‘I don’t know. As I said, he’s a rich kid and probably decided not to hang out with them because they were milkin’ him like a cow.’

  ‘Where were you the night Victoria Myers was attacked?’

  ‘Where was I? I was at this girl’s house. Lois Zalsky. We were kinda goin’ together.’

  ‘So you weren’t at the lake?’

  ‘No. What’s that got to do with anything?’ he asked.

  Rob sat back. ‘What did Marvin tell you about that night? And don’t bullshit me,’ he added quickly. ‘You were with him for years. He talked.’

  Tony’s face went through a small contortion as he moved from quiet confidence into a gray area that was full of booby traps.

  ‘He bragged a bit, didn’t he?’ Rob said. ‘He’s dead now, so what’s the difference to you? I’m not looking to get you into trouble. I just want you to tell me the truth.’