Although she didn’t say the word, the implication was clear. Sex.
“We’re in love,” Allison said. “I know that probably sounds weird.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Faith whispered.
“It’s just amazing when I’m with him,” she said. “I must be immature, or he must be old for his age.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about him when we had coffee this afternoon?” Faith asked.
“It just wasn’t the right time,” Allison said. “We were talking about Ken. I didn’t feel like I could confide in you because of Ken.”
Staying on the phone, Faith pulled her car around to the side of the donut shop.
“I’ll be right there,” Faith said. “Meet me around back.”
Forgetting her earlier, heartfelt longing that she could be friends with Allison if it weren’t for Ken, anger over a second betrayal with Chris, dear, simple Chris destroyed all of that idealistic garbage. At the center of her rage was the ring which represented so much to Faith. Allison could have Chris, but she wasn’t keeping the ring, too.
Faith determined to get that ring back. Almost $20,000 was a lot of money, even for a lawyer. At coffee, she couldn’t take her eyes off the ring; it was a much nicer quality diamond than her own, and that rankled now, although at the time, she hoped she could let it go.
Allison left the shop and came running to the car. Pressing the unlock mechanism; Faith was playing this second by second.
As Allison climbed in, happy to see Faith, Faith saw her disheveled clothing, lipstick smeared, beard burn on her cheek and wanted to reach out and slap her face.
“Thank you so much for coming back. I can’t believe what just happened,” she said, out of breath.
“I wasn’t that far away. Tell me about it,” Faith said, hardly recognizing her own voice.
“Chris and I were in his car and his mother must have been watching the whole time! She just had a fit, screaming at me, calling me names, telling me I was committing statutory rape because Chris is just a teenager.
“She screamed at him to get home, and he left me here. My purse, my phone, my car keys, all in his car!’
“When did you start seeing Chris?” Faith asked, the rest of Allison’s rant white noise to Faith’s growing rage.
“Last weekend,” she said. “Not long ago.”
“So if you’re seeing Chris, you won’t need that ring,” Faith said, exposing an edge to her voice that was unmistakable.
Allison held her hand up, the ring sparkling in the light from the parking lot. “Ken hasn’t asked for it back yet,” she said.
“I’m asking for it,” Faith said. “Ken’s my husband. We work hard for that money, and I want the ring back.”
“I think I’ll wait for him to ask, Faith. And I doubt that he will. He’s never mentioned the ring anytime we’ve talked.”
“If you bat your eyelashes at him and probably more, like I watched you do with Chris, I don’t doubt it.”
“Wait, when did you see…Oh, I get it now. You were following us!”
A side of Allison that she hadn’t revealed was then exposed when she laughed in Faith’s face. “Well, well, well. Now it’s clear. I wasn’t sure before, everything Ken had said about you didn’t ring true during our little tete a tete. But now I see it! You’re not getting this ring back!”
“The hell I’m not!” Faith shouted, grabbing for her hand.
They wrestled in the front seat of the car, Allison crying out as Faith bent her fingers back to get the ring off. When she could get away, she wrenched the door handle and jumped from the car.
Quickly reaching under the seat for a small, black gun safe, she would use it to frighten Allison into giving up the ring. The combination to the safe was their wedding anniversary, easy for both to remember. She pulled the gun out and stuck it in her sweater pocket. Allison hadn’t gone far, midway between Faith’s car and the rear door, out of range of the camera when she realized she couldn’t get away. Faith was right behind Allison.
Jumping on Allison like a mad woman, Faith knocked her to the ground. Allison bit into Faith’s shoulder, sending shockwaves through her body. Faith got the gun out of her pocket while she was lying on top of Allison, bashed it up to her forehead to just frighten her but instinctively pulled the trigger instead. Sputtering, she had blood in her mouth and on her clothes, she spit into her sweater, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. Crawling off Allison, she didn’t think of the ring again until she stood up.
“Allison?” she cried. “Allison are you okay?”
But Allison was looking at her with one, vacant eye open, blood running down her face. Working fast, getting the ring off Allison’s finger, Faith didn’t realize she was crying, had no cognizance of wrong doing, or that she needed to run or hide from view, or leave before she was discovered with a dying body.
The wounds Allison had imposed on Faith’s body; bites and bruises acquired during the wrestling match to get the ring, were hidden by her clothing but would be photographed later.
Once she wrestled the ring off Allison’s finger, she walked calmly to her car, got in and drove away, never looking back, ostensibly forgetting most of what happened. The gun would be found under the passenger seat of her car, recently fired. The bullet casing discovered by Jill the morning after under the dumpster, had a partial thumb print of Ken Cooper’s; he’d loaded the gun for his wife before stashing it under the car seat.
As soon as she arrived home, she bathed. Everything she wore went into the trash. Tapping on Ken’s den door, he answered it, looking exhausted.
“Come with me to my parent’s house will you please? My mom cooked and we can work on the ramp.”
“You mean I can work on the ramp,” he said, but good-naturedly.
After trying to reach Allison all afternoon, her phone going to voice mail, Ken was resigned the relationship was over. There was nothing left to do but go with his wife. Working with a saw and hammer might be therapeutic, so he went along to work on his father-in-law’s wheelchair ramp. Doing so helped clear his mind and for a few hours at least, he didn’t think of Allison.
***
Later that night, cleaning up the shop after closing, Mr. Gupta walked out to the dumpster with bags of trash to throw away. Returning to the shop, he glanced over just as a cloud which had covered the moon moved on, beams of moonlight reflecting off white tennis shoes. There was a body at the end of the concrete where the dirt and weeds began. Running to it, he saw a lifeless young woman. Scanning the area to make sure he was unobserved, he knelt down beside her and reached for her wrist, but she was ice cold, and he quickly dropped her hand, wiping his hands on his pants. It appeared she’d had some kind of head wound because there was blood on the right side of her face, and he thought he could see a puddle of blood under her head which had run off into the dirt.
Standing over her as dread and confusion swarmed through him, he was not calling the police. The last thing his shop needed was the notoriety of a dead body, with the press, the television cameras; no, he couldn’t allow it. Doing business in Detroit came with a certain disregard for rules and laws, and protecting his donut shop from being a statistic caused adrenaline to surge through his body.
Quickly returning to the shop for his keys, he’d drive his new car over to the body for removal. It was the only way to deal with the problem. Lining the trunk with newspapers, plastic bags and a tarp, and with his arms ensconced in more plastic trash bags to protect his clothes, he picked up the body and gently laid her inside.
Carefully obeying the speed limit so he wouldn’t get pulled over, the first residential street he came to was dark enough due to burned out lightbulbs in the street lamps. Opening the trunk, he reached inside to get her out. Careful not to jostle her around, a non-practicing Hindu, he wasn’t sure where it stood on the subject of the desecration of a dead body and wasn’t about to find out.
Gently placing her on the gr
ound, he straightened out her limbs and pulled hair over the wound and blood on her face. Looking at her one more time before he got back into the car to drive away, he was satisfied she looked like someone cared for her. Once in the car again, however, he feared he might be having a heart attack his heart was pounding so violently, but he didn’t wait to stop to try to calm down, frightened that a police car might decide to take a ride down that street.
Back at the shop, he spent the rest of the night scrubbing down the parking lot in back, and raking up the grass along the driveway. First thing the next morning, he called for a pick up for his dumpster. For an hour after the trash truck came he thought everything would be okay, and then the cops showed up.
***
“How’d you ever figure that one out?” Albert asked. “Faith Cooper was the last person on our radar.”
They were sitting around the large dining table in the apartment above Gus’s Greektown Grocery. The detritus of Thanksgiving dinner littered the table; piles of used plates, a turkey carcass that was stripped of everything edible, empty bowls nested with serving spoons. Soon, Aunt Maria would rise, and moaning, begin clearing off a space to bring out tray after tray of desserts.
At one of the end of the table, the non-Greek aunts with heads together gossiped and plotted in English. In the middle, the Greek brothers speaking Greek, shared stories of their triumphs and mishaps since the last time they were all together, the previous Sunday.
At the other end, the Greek aunts, and the younger members of the family sat; Jill and Alex, her cousin Andy and his mother, Anna, Albert and his partner Roger, Gus and a few other friends listening raptly to Albert’s assessment of Jill’s prowess.
Embarrassed being the center of attention, Jill frowned. “Thanks, Albert,” she said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Out of nowhere, she thinks of something and pow, it sets everything else in motion.”
“It was something my dad said about a mother’s jealousy and the story of Adonis. If Chris was Adonis, his mother, Mrs. Burns would be Aphrodite. But who was Persephone, the other woman who loved Adonis? In our modern tale, it would be Allison, correct? That’s what I thought.
“Then I remembered the ring. The ring wouldn’t mean anything to Mrs. Burns. But to Faith it was a powerful symbol. She’d break off fingers to get that ring.”
“What about the Oldsmobile?” Albert said. “I was sure that was the answer, especially after Chris implicated her.”
“It was a random visit by Chris’s mother who followed her son by that tracking device in his phone. She scolded him and told him to leave. Chris was afraid of her and didn’t stop to argue, possibly protecting Allison from his mother by obeying her. In the end, Chris wanted us to think it was his mother who’d committed the crime, not his beloved teacher.
“Thinking she was ostensibly stranded at the donut shop, later in the tapes, we saw Allison go inside the shop and use Mr. Gupta’s phone to make the call that would lead to her death. Allison called Faith Cooper, who was already there, waiting, and told her what had happened with Chris’s mother and that her keys and purse were in Chris’s car. She’d never gone back out front to her car, or she would have discovered that Chris put the keys and purse back in the car where her family found them later.
“Faith was furious with Allison for interfering with Chris. She fully intended on getting involved with him herself once graduation was over with. If Faith had had gloves on that night, we’d never have our proof, gunpowder residue on the steering wheel. Her husband’s thumb print was on the casing, but he’d admitted he loaded her gun for her. “
“I still don’t get it,” Cousin Andy said.
Patting his hand, Jill smiled. “Andy, duh,” she whispered.
Pausing, he looked at her, he then looked up at the ceiling. “Really? It came from above?”
“Yep, it just came to me out of nowhere,” she whispered. “Like a voice.”
Laughing, she shook her head when he looked shocked. “No voices, okay? It just came to me, like things come to you all the time.”
“Information doesn’t come to me like that,” Andy said.
“Me either,” Albert said.”
“Jeesh, do you mind?” she asked. “Who’s side are you on, anyway?”
“What about the body?” Gus asked. “How’d it end up in Midtown?”
“Mr. Gupta didn’t want a body found behind his shop. He was already in trouble with the bureau of licensing about other issues. So he thought he could just move her along without suffering any consequences.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“If he pleads guilty, the judge might give him a light sentence,” Albert said. “His troubles have just started.”
“What happened to the girl’s car?” Cousin Andy asked.
“It sat with her purse and keys in it until Tuesday afternoon when the family came to get it,” Albert answered.
“In Detroit? Now that must be a first,” Alex said.
“Time for dessert!” Aunt Maria shouted. “Jill, do you want to grab that layer cake in the kitchen?”
“Sure, Aunt Maria. I’m dying for cake.”
Jill got up from the table to get cake for her family and friends, a rich reward for a job well done.
The End
***
I hope you enjoyed The Donut Shop Murder. To learn more about Detective Jill Zannos and her partner, Detective Wong, see the Greektown Stories, beginning with The Greeks of Beaubien Street.
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#1 Pam of Babylon Always FREE! Long Island housewife Pam Smith is called to the hospital after her husband Jack suffers a heart attack on the train from Manhattan. It is the beginning of a journey of self-discovery and sadness, growth and regrets, as she realizes a wife and mother’s worst nightmare.
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The Donut Shop Murder Page 10
