by Ali Brandon
Handing off the weapon to the teen, who promptly shouldered the bat as if he were at home plate, she hurried over to where Darla lay, her throbbing head pillowed by her coat.
“Hey, kid, you look like hell,” she said with small smile, joining James in kneeling beside her. She brushed Darla’s tangled red hair from her face in a motherly gesture. “Are you up to telling me what happened? James told me on the way over that he and Robert were certain Barry was responsible for murdering Curt. Given what happened to you, I’m guessing they were right.”
Darla tried to nod, and then winced as her head began pounding again. “He killed Curt,” she managed in a ragged whisper, “and Tera, too.”
“Tera?” Jake’s dark eyes opened wide, while James gave an audible gasp. “You’re sure of that, kid?”
“All I saw was blond hair, but I’m sure it’s her. She’s in the basement.”
Struggling into a sitting position despite James’s protests, Darla pointed in the direction of the basement door. Her voice still hoarse, she added, “Jake, she was an innocent victim. She saw Barry kill Curt, so he killed her, too.”
“Oh my God.”
Jake’s words were little more than a whisper, and her olive cheeks went ashen. She sunk back on her heels and slowly shook her head. “Tera’s dead. Damn it, she was just a kid, too. I don’t know how I’m going to break it to Hilda.”
Then, with a sharp look in Barry’s direction, she added, “It’s a damn good thing there are plenty of witnesses here, or I might be telling Reese how I had to defend myself with a baseball bat against that son of a bitch when he attacked me.”
“Swing away,” James said in hard voice Darla barely recognized. “I will be happy to testify as to an unprovoked attack and a necessarily prolonged attempt at self-defense.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Robert chimed in and raised the bat in a threatening gesture over the prone Barry.
Jake, however, shook her head. “Satisfying as it might be, I won’t have you guys perjure yourselves over that piece of garbage.” Then, turning her attention back to Darla, she said more softly, “You said she’s in the basement. Can you tell me where, so I can show Reese when he gets here?”
“Behind the boiler,” she whispered, swiping at a tear that had rolled down her cheek. “She-she was wrapped in black plastic, like she was trash.”
She paused, wishing she could forget that horrifyingly poignant sight but knowing she never would. Even though she had suspected all along that harm might have befallen the girl, she had continued to hope until that last moment for her safe return.
“He told me he was going to Connecticut today,” she went on, “but instead he stayed behind to take care of Tera. He was digging a hole in the basement floor to bury her, and then he was going to plaster over the door so no one would ever go down there again. But I messed up his plans when I came here to look for Hamlet.”
“Yeah, where is he? Where’s Hamlet?” Robert demanded.
Darla took a deep breath, the pain in her throat intensified by the sob she found herself holding back.
“He was the one who found Tera first,” she managed. “I heard him meowing in the basement. I ran down there to look for him, and he showed me where she was. When Barry went after me, Hamlet tried to save me . . . that’s why Barry had scratches on his neck. But then Barry hit him with a flashlight.”
She paused and then in a rush finished, “I-I think Hamlet’s dead.”
“No!” Robert’s disbelieving cry was that of a young boy. “Hamlet can’t be dead. I’m going to go see for myself!”
“Wait!”
Jake leaped to her feet and hurried to intercept the youth. He had dropped the bat and was headed for the basement, tears streaming down his face.
“Robert, I know you’re upset, but if there’s a body down there, it’s a crime scene. I can’t let you go trampling around there, even for Hamlet.”
“But what if he’s not dead? Ms. Pettistone said she didn’t know for sure.”
“He’s right. I-I don’t know,” Darla choked out, aware that her own tears had begun to spill in a similar storm of grief. “Please, Jake, let him look.”
Jake pursed her lips and then nodded. “Can you tell him exactly where you saw Hamlet last?”
“He was lying on the bricks. Barry picked him up and threw him in the boiler firebox.”
At her words, Robert’s grief-stricken expression turned murderous. He rounded on Barry, who had begun to moan and stir.
“Dude, you’d better hope that Hamlet is all right. My friend Alex Putin . . . he, you know, likes cats,” he threatened and ran to the basement door.
“Don’t touch the handle of the firebox with your bare hands,” Jake called after him as she returned to kneel beside Darla. “Fingerprints! Use your shirttail.”
Robert nodded and vanished behind the door. James, meanwhile, picked up the discarded bat and took up position near Barry. Cocking his head in the direction of the front windows, he said, “I believe I hear sirens.”
“About damn time,” Jake replied. She gave Darla’s hand a reassuring squeeze and said, “Hang in there, kid. The paramedics will be here in a minute, and we’ll get you to the hospital so the docs can check you out.”
Darla hugged James’s coat to her like a security blanket. In a small voice that reminded her of herself thirty years earlier, she rocked back and forth there where she sat on the floor and whispered, “I don’t want an ambulance. I want my kitty.”
As if in answer, a faint shout came from the basement. Darla couldn’t guess if it reflected Robert’s shock at seeing Tera’s body or if it was an indication that he’d found Hamlet. She hugged the coat more tightly, trying to tell herself that she didn’t care that all much, that she’d never wanted a cat.
It didn’t work. All she could see in her mind’s eye was Hamlet valiantly trying to hold off Barry so that she could escape from the basement, rather than slipping off into the shadows and leaving her alone.
Now, the emergency sirens sounded like they were just outside, so Darla didn’t hear Robert come back up from the basement until he abruptly emerged through the doorway. He was cradling a furry black form that lay limply in his arms, looking like little more than a large black pelt. Darla gasped.
“Is he . . . ?”
Is he okay? Is he dead?
She didn’t know which question to ask . . . didn’t dare ask either.
And then youth gave a tremulous smile. “He’s breathing. But we should, like, get him to the vet.”
The sirens abruptly cut off then, and over the shouted commands of the emergency personnel outside, Darla heard a querulous meow. The limp black form began to squirm, and a pair of emerald eyes blinked open.
“Hamlet!” Darla cried, or rather, tried to. Instead, what came out was a relieved sob.
Robert, meanwhile, had broken into a grin as the squirming was followed by another, more insistent meow. “Hey, little bro. What’s the matter? Do you want down?”
Gently, he set Hamlet down on the floor. The feline blinked and gazed around him, as if taking roll of everyone in attendance. Spying a groggy Barry lying several feet from him, he took a step back and gave an evil hiss.
“I think we all second that sentiment,” James remarked, and Darla saw him swipe away what appeared to be a suspicious bit of moisture from his eyes.
Darla blinked back her own tears. “Hey, Hamlet, thanks for taking care of me,” she croaked. “You’re a true cat hero.”
Hamlet stared at her, green eyes bright; then, quite deliberately, he padded his way toward her.
It was at that point that the front door burst open, and Reese and two uniformed patrolmen rushed in. One of the latter shouted an all clear, and the paramedics followed inside, their gear clattering as they demanded to know where their patient might be. Jake sprang to her feet and was telling Reese what had happened, with James chiming in with his own version. At the detective’s quick word, the nearest officer slapped a pair of
cuffs on Barry and then dragged him to his feet—roughly, Darla was glad to see.
But exciting as it all was, the distraction held her attention only until she felt a soft paw touch her knee. She looked down to see Hamlet gazing up at her, green eyes inscrutable. Then, with the flick of a whisker, he settled himself on her lap and began to purr.
TWENTY-THREE
“HILDA SAYS TO TELL YOU THAT SHE HOPES YOU’RE FEELING better,” Jake said as she snapped her phone shut again and leaned against the counter not far from the stool where Darla sat behind the register. Then, setting a gift bag embossed with the Great Scentsations logo on the counter, she added, “And here’s a combination thanks and get-well gift from her.”
“Well, you deserve as much thanks as I do,” Darla protested. Still, she eagerly glanced into the bag to find it filled with several products she recalled from her last foray into Hilda’s shop. She smiled wryly when she saw that one was a jar of cucumber eye compresses.
Jake, meanwhile, reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a familiar, genie-bottle-shaped vial, which she displayed with a satisfied smile of her own. “Hey, I got mine. Oh, and Hilda said she’ll email you the names of some ointments that will help fade the rest of that bruising.”
Darla put a self-conscious hand to her throat, which was wrapped in a bright blue paisley scarf of Great-Aunt Dee’s that she’d found in a box in the back of her closet. She’d donned it less as a wry fashion statement and more to stave off questions and dismayed looks from her customers who might peg her for a battered woman and decide she needed intervention. Of course, the concealing fabric was no defense against the curious shoppers who’d seen the evening television news a few days earlier and already knew her backstory, having caught the report about what Robert had been referring to as the “Showdown at the Brownstone Corral.”
The aftermath of that event, while nowhere nearly as dramatic, had been in its own way equally as trying. The ER doctor treating her had insisted that Darla stay overnight in the hospital while they assessed her head injury. A mild concussion, along with some tracheal trauma, was the doctor’s determination.
Dressed in her green ER scrubs, the young doctor had looked to Darla like a kid who’d escaped a slumber party. Still, her soft voice had an unmistakable air of authority as she reminded Darla that not all her injuries were outwardly visible.
“Let’s not forget there’s a certain psychological trauma involved with being almost murdered,” the woman had added, eyeing her over her clipboard with an expression that seemed to indicate she’d seen a few things in her short tenure. “You don’t want to go home and pretend everything’s normal, because it’s not.”
Though Darla had been determined to prove the doctor wrong, she’d not succeeded. Sleep was hard to come by, mostly because her dreams invariably devolved into a hazy re-creation of those frightening minutes when she’d truly feared for her life. And even safely ensconced in her apartment, she found herself jumping at every small noise and constantly looking over her shoulder lest Barry suddenly be there.
Physically, things were only a little better. Four days after her struggle with Barry, the distinct pattern of splayed fingertips was still visible on her pale flesh. The original reddish-blue coloring now had faded to a gruesome-looking combination of green and yellow; still, Jake had warned her that it would take at least another week or more for the bruising to fade completely. And while her voice was almost back to normal—the hoarseness relieved by repeated doses of hot tea and honey—the bruises were a constant reminder of just how close she’d come to being Barry Eisen’s third victim.
Which brought to mind the man’s second victim . . .
“That’s nice of Hilda to think of me, considering what she’s coping with right now,” Darla said, meaning it. “So how is Tera doing?”
That the missing girl had resurfaced later that same day, while Darla had been recuperating at the hospital, had been the one bright spot in the whole tragic affair. Barely had Darla learned to her immense relief that the body she’d found in the brownstone basement had not been Tera—according to Jake, the victim was instead the blond ponytailed building inspector who’d had words with Barry a few days earlier—than Reese had called her hospital room. Fearing dire news, she’d instead been overjoyed to hear that Tera Aguilar had been discovered alive, and relatively well despite a broken arm, and was being reunited with her mother.
You won’t believe this, Red, the cop had told her, but the whole time she’s been holed up with a couple of her girlfriends. And the real kicker? The girls are Alex Putin’s daughters.
The fact that Tera had been suffering from mild amnesia and was obviously in fear of her life had convinced her friends that it wasn’t safe for anyone else to know where she was.
This Putin guy made a couple of phone calls and got a doc to patch her up on the QT, Reese had continued. They figured she was hiding from an abusive boyfriend, so no way were they going to let her out in public. And Tera couldn’t remember enough about what had happened to know if it was safe for her to tell her mother where she was. It wasn’t until you made the news, Red, that she knew it was okay to come out of hiding.
“The doctor said whoever set her broken arm did a decent job of it, so she won’t need any follow-up surgery once she’d out of the cast,” Jake said. “And she doesn’t seem to have any lasting damage from the concussion, though she really doesn’t remember much of what happened before she crawled out of that Dumpster and went looking for help.” Jake shook her head and added, “Too bad we can’t say the same thing for that building inspector friend of Eisen’s. But if it comes down to a choice between either his or her body wrapped in that plastic, I’m damn glad it wasn’t Tera.”
“Tell me about it!” Darla agreed with a sigh. “When I saw that long blond hair sticking out of the tarp, I was sure that Barry had killed her, too. It never occurred to me it could have been Toby who had been murdered.”
Now, Darla wanted to know, “Did Reese get anything out of Barry that would explain what the heck happened there?”
“At this point, since Tera is still iffy as a witness, it’s mostly conjecture,” Jake replied, idly playing with the tassels on the display of bookmarks beside her. “Eisen’s no fool. He lawyered himself up and isn’t talking. But I can make a few educated guesses.”
“Go ahead,” Darla urged. “I want to hear it.”
“Okay. From what Reese pieced together from Tera’s statement, she showed up at the brownstone Wednesday night sometime after midnight. That fits in with when Robert said he saw her on the street. Unfortunately for her, she arrives just in time to witness Eisen club her boyfriend with the crowbar. She panics and tries to run out of there. Barry doesn’t want any witnesses, so he goes after her and gives her the old crowbar treatment, too. That’s how she got the broken arm and concussion.”
“But the whole thing about the Dumpster . . . how did Tera end up in there?” Darla wanted to know.
Jake let the tassels fall back into place and moved on to the cartoon pencil display.
“In the heat of the moment, Eisen probably didn’t check Tera too closely,” she replied. “He just assumed he’d killed her. And then he had the problem of two bodies lying around the brownstone. I’m sure he figured he would be pretty safe in trying to pass off Curt’s death as an accident. And if the ME ruled it murder, he’d have the scrap thieves or someone else to pin it on. That’s why he made sure that you were there when the body was found, to bolster that story.”
Jake gave a humorless smile. “But Tera was one body too many . . . it would be pushing things to have you find both of her and Curt dead. He probably assumed he was safe enough stashing her in the Dumpster for a day or so until the cops released the crime scene. Then he could get a car and dump her somewhere, or else bury her in the basement like he was going to do with the building inspector. Then Reese threw a monkey wrench in his plan by doing a little Dumpster diving before he could move Tera’s body.”
“Except that Tera wasn’t really dead,” Darla added, stating the obvious.
This time, Jake’s smile held true amusement as she nodded.
“The girl has more lives than Hamlet, and she’s just as gutsy. Apparently, when she came to in the container, she managed to drag herself out—broken arm and concussion and all—and get the heck away without Eisen knowing she was gone. But she left behind her cell phone in the Dumpster.”
Jake paused and chuckled outright. “Can you imagine what was going through Eisen’s head while Reese was digging around in that container looking for the phone? He had to have been sweating bullets the whole time, expecting Tera’s body to pop up any minute. And then the only thing Reese found was the cell. The man must have been going out of his mind wondering where she was.”
“He did seem nervous,” Darla told her, “but when I asked him about it later, he said it was because he was afraid Reese was there to arrest him for illegal dumping.”
“Yeah, the guy has an answer for everything, doesn’t he? I’m sorry that you got taken in like that, kid.”
Darla nodded, not trusting herself to speak on that subject. She didn’t want to go there . . . not now. Instead, she asked, “So how did Toby the building inspector fit into this? Why did Barry need to kill him, too?”
“Unless Eisen sings, we might not ever know for sure what really went down. But the police did identify the dead guy as one Toby Armbruster. He really was a building inspector for the city, but let’s just say he was putting in some unauthorized overtime. Reese found a couple of complaints against him that raised a few flags.”
As Darla listened with interest, Jake went on, “Best Reese can guess, Armbruster would show up at a small restaurant or business, flash his city credentials, and claim to find a problem with wiring or plumbing or something. Then he’d threaten to shut them down if they didn’t get the issue fixed, pronto. The next day, they’d conveniently get a visit from Barry Eisen, who would tell them he was an approved contractor for the city. Long story short, Eisen pretends to make the fixes, collects the cash, then Armbruster does a reinspection and tells them they pass. No one’s the wiser, and the two of them split the money for work that wasn’t ever done.”
