“Gray, I think he’s hurt,” I said.
Gray knelt by my side and slowly stretched the back of his hand toward the snarling animal, offering him a sniff and talking in a low soothing tone.
“Hey, boy,” he whispered. “It’s all right. You hurt, buddy?”
Durrell whimpered and crept slowly forward, favoring his back left leg. “You think he’s been hit by a car?” I asked.
Gray shrugged, inching up to pat Durrell’s shaggy head, his fingers stroking the dog’s back and then moving down to check the injured leg. “It doesn’t feel broken,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t. Who does he belong to?”
I told him about Della and Durrell’s Handy Work, “No Job Too Large.” As a welcome breath of air crossed the porch, a square of white paper wedged in the front door rustled. I stood up and pulled it down. Gray would’ve stopped me, I think, but he turned too late and the paper was already in my hand.
“‘Your carpenter was working on the eaves and fell off the ladder. I’m taking him to the emergency room. He thinks his leg is broke,’” I read aloud. “‘I’m leaving Durrell here. Be back later.’” If the scrawl was any indication, the note had been hastily written. Della hadn’t even taken the time to sign her name.
“You hear that?” I asked Durrell. “Your mom will be back as soon as she can. In the meantime, how’s about we try to make you a little more comfortable?” The little dog wagged his tail and took a few cautious steps toward the front door.
Durrell’s eyes were sad, but his tail wagged furiously. He limped up to me, sat and placed a paw on my knee. I could’ve sworn he was trying to reassure me. “I bet you’re hungry,” I said.
I turned to Gray. “He and Della lead a rough life. If I hadn’t hired them, they’d be eating Velveeta cheese and Minute Rice for supper. I think they live in a trailer somewhere out in the county. Of course there’s no air-conditioning. Hell, they might not even have electricity.”
“She tell you that, did she?” Gray asked, his expression clearly skeptical.
“Not exactly, but I imagine that’s pretty close to how it is for them.”
Gray studied Durrell for a moment, then looked back at me. “You sure are a sucker for a sob story,” he said, but he smiled. “Durrell here says he walks twelve miles to obedience school, uphill each way, and when it snows, he skis.”
Durrell’s lips stretched back toward his ears in a huge dog grin. His long tongue hung out of his mouth and his white teeth gleamed.
“Okay,” I said, looking down at the dog. “Point taken. Durrell, I’ll feed you but I’m not cooking anything.” Behind us, I heard Gray chuckle.
I unlocked the door, pushed it open and felt around for the light switch. Durrell began to growl again, this time louder than before. He wiggled his way through my legs and plunged into the darkened house. He was barking like a maniac.
“Durrell!” My fingers found the switch, but when I flipped it, nothing happened.
“Wait here,” Gray said, passing me and moving through the darkened living room. He switched the flashlight to his left hand as he sought out the Beretta that sat nestled in its holster.
I ignored Gray’s order and followed him, crossing the almost empty room and making a beeline for my bedroom.
Durrell stopped in the doorway, his bark becoming a menacing growl. Hackles slowly rose on his back as his entire body began to tremble. My heart pounded as my skin began to prickle with little shocks of fear. Was someone hiding in there?
Gray’s flashlight moved slowly around the darkened room. I picked up a faint odor, sickly sweet and unmistakable. It smelled like my uncle Vito’s butcher shop, a childhood memory that had been all but forgotten until now. At that moment, Gray’s light hit my bed and caught a puddle of dark red blood that covered my pillow.
I heard someone gasp, realized it was me, and moved forward as Gray did, approaching the bed and the tiny figure lying on the pillow. It was a doll. Gray didn’t attempt to touch the carefully arranged tableau, and held his arm out to keep me back.
“Don’t come any closer,” he cautioned. “I’ll call the forensics people in a minute.”
As we studied the scene before us, Durrell began to wail, a high-pitched, single-noted howl of unmistakable fear. I bent down and attempted to comfort the frightened animal, but I found myself unable to look away from the bed. The doll on the pillow was fashioned from modeling clay, her hair made to look black and curly like mine. She was naked and posed so that she lay in the center of the pool of blood. A spot of the red liquid dripped realistically from a wound made by a tiny dagger stuck dead center in the doll’s chest.
Without warning, Gray’s pager went off, making us both jump. The shrill beeping seemed to echo in the high-ceilinged room, followed by Wendell Arrow’s voice, clear and unhurried.
“Gray, give me a call ASAP,” he said in his low, deep drawl. “I heard back from NCIS.”
Gray reached into his pants pocket, pulled out his flip phone and hit a button. He paused, and then said, “Yeah, I’ve got something for you, too. Call the crime scene unit and y’all come on over to Sophie’s house.” He listened briefly to something Wendell said, flipped the phone shut and turned to me.
“Kind of spoils the evening, doesn’t it?” I said. I tried to smile, tried to act like death threats were an everyday occurrence, because above all else, I didn’t want him to see how scared I was. I didn’t want him to think I was the kind of person who fell apart and needed the protection of a big strong knight in shining armor.
Gray frowned. “That’s an understatement,” he said, watching me. “Are you all right?” He gestured toward my bed.
I felt a wave of nausea wash over me, intensify and then recede.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. “I’m just a little surprised, that’s all. I didn’t know Nick was the artistic type. Guess he learned that in prison.”
“You think Nick did this?” Gray asked.
“Who else? I haven’t been in town long enough to make any enemies—well, other than Agent Cole, and she doesn’t look like the artistic type, either. And Nick’s car was found around the corner. I think everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours is courtesy of my ex-husband.”
“Even the woman in the backyard?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. Was Nick capable of murder? I closed my eyes, envisioning him as I’d last seen him, escorted from the courtroom after sentencing, his face contorted with rage and hatred. “Maybe,” I answered, “but I don’t see a connection there. The woman in the backyard didn’t look like Nick’s type, but then I guess I don’t know what Nick’s type is anymore.”
“How did you—” He broke off, probably not wanting to ask, How did you make such a foolish mistake? or How did you get taken in like that?
“It’s all right,” I said. “You wouldn’t be asking anything that I haven’t already asked myself.” I wandered a few steps away from the bed and pretended to examine the antique perfume bottles on my dresser. “I could say that I was young and too naive to know better, but that isn’t true. I was twenty-six when I met him. And it wasn’t love at first sight, either. I think I made myself fall in love with him.”
Gray had turned to watch me, but hadn’t moved from his post by my bed. “Why?” he asked.
Harsh truths are sometimes best faced and answered in the dark. For some reason I felt almost like I was sitting across from Father Thomas in the confessional booth of my childhood church, St. Mary of Everlasting Peace.
“I think I thought it was time to grow up,” I said. “I was still living in my parents’ home, working but not out on my own. I was tired of the slick men I’d been dating, the bad boys and the pretty men. I saw Nick and bought the package. I thought he was reliable—you know, steady and predictable.”
“That must’ve been some act he put on,” Gray said.
I heard a car pull up to the curb outside. Wendell Arrow arriving just in time to k
eep me from confessing to every sin of ignorance I’d ever committed in my life.
“Maybe I just wanted to believe in him, because when I look back, I see there were warning signs, some little but some not so little at all. Maybe I was too scared to try making it on my own.” I shivered. “I hate to admit it, but I think back then I believed my parents when they said a woman needs a man to take care of her. But that was then…”
“And this is now,” Gray finished.
“Yeah, this is now.”
Before either one of us could say anything else, Wendell Arrow knocked on the front door, driving Durrell crazy. The moment was successfully broken. As Gray headed toward his partner, I lagged behind, staring at the doll on the bed and thinking how easily Nick had reinserted himself into my new life, ruining it as surely as he had ruined the old one.
I had wanted to tell Gray more. I wanted him to see and feel things as I had almost twelve years ago: Nick, short and plain, but somehow charismatically charming; the succession of men before him, predictable in their unreliability; and finally, my family, mired in tradition and unable to see my desperation. I wanted Gray to know where I’d been so he could see that I never intended to let myself get caught up in that kind of entanglement again.
I heard the two men talking in low voices, but as I entered the living room, they stopped.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Gray looked at me, then back at Wendell. “The crime scene unit is en route,” he said, his professional voice replacing the personal tone he’d used with me all evening.
Wendell looked ill at ease. He fidgeted with the pockets of his suit coat, adjusted his tie and fingered the clip on his holster. “I’ll just go out front and wait for them,” he said. “I’ll check the panel box after they dust it. Somebody probably just hit the circuit breaker. Shouldn’t take no time at all to get the lights back on.” He tipped his head briefly to me and was gone.
“What is it?” I asked. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Gray was staring at me. Even in the darkened room I could see the somber expression on his face and feel the change in his demeanor.
“Sophie,” he said, “we need to talk. How about we go sit at the kitchen table?”
I felt an uneasy caution spread through me, and protective walls slid into place around my heart.
“Sure. Good idea. Let’s talk.” I knew I sounded like a stilted version of myself.
I led him into the kitchen, following the beam of his Maglite, took a seat at the table and waited.
“We’ve got an ID on the woman in your backyard,” he said. “Her name is Connie Bono.” He looked at me, eyebrow raised, waiting for me to indicate that I knew her. I shook my head and he went on. “She played guitar in a garage punk band that was actually starting to make a name for itself. But she couldn’t quit her day job on what the band made, so she supported herself dancing in a strip club in Chester.”
“Chester, as in the suburb of Philadelphia?” Surrounded by oil refineries and the airport, Chester was a pretty rough neighborhood. I imagined the type of clubs where Connie Bono could’ve danced—rough biker bars with frequent fights and more drugs than alcohol.
“Yeah,” Gray answered. “Chester, Pennsylvania.” Then he dropped the hammer. “She was Nick’s girlfriend. In fact, that was the address he gave his parole officer.”
The familiar sense of dread overtook me. My hands began to shake and I hid them beneath the table so Gray wouldn’t see.
“What else?” I asked, because there had to be more. With Nick there was always more bad news.
“Connie Bono’s skull was fractured,” Gray said, his voice even and unemotional. “She was hit with a tire iron. We recovered it yesterday in a Dumpster behind the public housing complex.”
I shuddered. “God,” I breathed, “that’s awful.”
Gray gave no indication he even heard me. “The tire iron came from the trunk of Nick’s car. It was the same type of tire iron that comes standard with his Mercedes.”
“So Nick killed his girlfriend?” Nick a murderer? I just couldn’t see it, not yet. “You know this? You found his prints on the tire iron?”
Gray’s eyes burned into me. “No, Sophie, your prints were the only ones we found on the murder weapon. There were smudges, but no other prints.”
There, he’d said it. This was the bad news I’d seen sitting on his shoulders, the whispered information Wendell Arrow had passed on to him in the living room before I got curious and wandered out to see what they were discussing. Now there were doubts, suspicions that might have been easily laid to rest had I not been Nick the Criminal’s ex-wife.
I could guess at the thoughts forming in Gray’s head. First Nick betrays her, he’d think, and then he comes to town with his girlfriend. Maybe Sophie even invited them, luring them into her new neighborhood. Maybe she wanted to set it up so it would look like Nick did it. Maybe Sophie, the deranged ex-wife of a pervert, killed Nick, too. Or maybe she was so shocked to see Nick following her that she acted without really thinking. After all, Sophie’s prints were all over that tire iron….
The more I tried to think for Gray, the angrier I became. When I could stand it no more, I dropped my hands, palms down, onto the table. The sharp slap echoed like a gunshot in the semidark room.
“For as long as I have known Nick, he has been incompetent. He couldn’t make it as an accountant, he couldn’t make it as a criminal and he couldn’t even make it as a husband. Nick couldn’t change his tie, let alone a tire. So when that car had a flat three years ago, guess who changed it?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. “Me. Stopped by the side of the road in a bad neighborhood at night, I changed that tire, all by myself. And did I call that man to come help me? No I did not. I didn’t even have a cell phone back then because my husband was too cheap to buy one. He knew I was going to meetings and classes at night, but my safety wasn’t worth the price of an emergency cell phone. I let him convince me that we were too poor. And you know what? We were. Don’t you wanna know why?”
Again I didn’t wait for Gray’s answer. “Because Nick was using all of our money to buy cameras so he could spy on me and every other innocent woman he could find in our neighborhood. And when he ran through the decent women, he bought whores. I was too stupid to see any of it. So, yes, those are my prints on that tire iron. No doubt about it, but does that make me a murderer? I think not. It just makes me stupid and gullible.”
“Sophie, I—” Gray said, but I interrupted.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said. “Process your ‘scene’ and leave me alone.”
I walked off, out the back door, across the porch and down the steps. There wasn’t even anywhere for me to go, not really. I had to stick around. My home was a crime scene and I was a suspect.
Gray didn’t try to follow me and I was surprised to find that it hurt to suddenly find my world empty again. I could’ve made excuses for him, valid ones, too. He was on duty; the slamming doors of the crime scene van were proof enough of that. Still, I wanted to be trusted instantly. I wanted him to instinctively know that I was incapable of murder. I wanted a miracle, someone and something that didn’t exist.
I don’t know how long I stood in my tangled backyard. I was dimly aware of the sound of another car door slamming. I could hear voices and music thumping from cars that cruised past my street and headed into the projects. I could smell the honeysuckle and jasmine that bloomed on my back fence, their scents almost masking the briny salt air. And I could hear people inside my house, taking pictures, dusting for prints and talking to each other as they went about their jobs.
When I did hear the screen door softly slam on the old back porch and the sound of footsteps descending the steps, I didn’t turn around.
“I couldn’t sleep because I was so happy,” Darlene said, sounding miserable. “I thought maybe you couldn’t sleep, either, so I thought I’d drive by and just see.” Her voice trailed off as she reac
hed my side and stretched one hand up to rest softly on my shoulder. She squeezed gently. “I guess the night didn’t end so good, huh?”
I didn’t say anything.
“But Gray’s here. He’ll take good care of you. Nick wouldn’t dare hurt you with him here.”
“Gray thinks I killed that woman,” I said softly. “He says she was killed with Nick’s tire iron and that my prints were all over it. Oh, he’ll take care of me, all right. He’ll probably slap cuffs on me and read me my rights!”
Darlene wrapped her arms around me and squeezed softly. “Oh. honey,” she whispered. “Gray doesn’t think you killed Nick. He’s smarter than that.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “After all, he’s not an architect.”
Darlene giggled. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she said. “And he is a man. What do they know?” She breathed deeply. “I smell something wonderful,” she said.
“I know. It’s whatever that vine is that’s blooming on the back fence.”
Darlene sniffed. “No, that’s not it.” She inhaled, held her breath and then exhaled. “I think someone’s smoking pot.” She stopped, looked confused and then shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s making me hungry. Let’s get out of here and go to the Waffle House.”
That was my sister, always hungry. It didn’t matter if she was happy or sad, angry or tired, the first thing Darlene turned to for comfort was food. Of course, Ma was responsible for that. It’s the Italian way.
“I should stick around,” I said. “I need to know what they find out. I need to find Gray and get this mess straightened out.”
Darlene wasn’t having it. “That is so like you. You’re too responsible for your own good.” She grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward the driveway. “Let him wonder. Vanish. If you’re a suspect, act like one. Become a fugitive.” Darlene giggled again. “Let him hunt you down. Let him push you up against his car and frisk you. Maybe he’ll tell you to ‘assume the position.’”
Sophie’s Last Stand Page 9
