Rubbed Out

by Barbara Block

  I could have felt the hood of the car to make sure it was cold—Paul probably would have—but it seemed unnecessary. I could hear the television playing from where I was standing. I rang the bell. No one answered. I rang it again, even though I didn’t expect anyone to come to the door. I was right. No one did.

  I touched the door handle. It moved slightly, which was when I realized that the door wasn’t completely closed. Later, the cops asked me why I hadn’t waited and called them before going in, like any normal person would have done. I didn’t have a really good answer. I felt as if I was caught in a drama and I had to play out the scene. I pushed the door open and went inside.

  Even from my position in the hallway, I could see something bad had happened. One of the chairs in the living room was on its side. So was the coffee table. Magazines and papers had been scattered all over the floor. There was a splatter mark on the wall where someone had thrown something. Shards from one of the mirrors on the wall lay on the floor.

  Two of the dining room chairs were lodged on top of the sideboard, looking as if they’d been thrown there, while a third, with one of its legs missing, was lying on its side. Pieces of shattered china and crystal were spread over the floor and the table. A landscape was impaled on one of the chair finials. So much for Janet Wilcox’s decorating scheme.

  The kitchen hadn’t fared much better. The cupboard doors were hanging open. The floor and the counter were littered with cans and boxes. Smashed plates and glasses covered the floor and the kitchen table. Given their spread, it looked as if someone had heaved them at someone else. I spotted what looked like a smear of blood on the edge of the counter. Then I noticed another one on the floor. I was squatting down to look at it when the refrigerator turned on. The noise made me jump. I straightened up.

  “Wilcox!” I yelled.

  I didn’t get an answer. But I hadn’t expected one. When I wiped my hands on the side of my jeans, I was surprised to see that I was sweating. I straightened up and tried to recreate what had happened. Wilcox coming to the door, opening it, letting people in. And then the fight. Somehow I didn’t think that Wilcox had won.

  It turned out I was right.

  He hadn’t.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sometimes I still see Wilcox’s body in my dreams. I think I always will.

  I found him upstairs.

  The acrid odor of burning flesh engulfed me when I stepped inside his bedroom. And there was the heat. Then I saw Wilcox.

  Someone had stripped him naked, slapped duct tape over his mouth, and staked him out on his bed over a portable electric heater, the kind people use to heat their garages and bedrooms. The heater was turned up full blast. I couldn’t imagine the agony he must have felt as he was slowly roasted alive.

  I noticed cigarette burn marks on his legs and feet, and someone had cut large strips of skin off his chest and arms and stomach.

  From the look on Wilcox’s face, it had taken him a long time to die.

  I began to gag. I averted my eyes from the body on the bed, yanked the plug from the heater out of the wall socket, then stumbled out of the room and threw up in the middle of the hall.

  The kind of violence where you get mad and shoot someone I can understand, but not something like this. As I walked down the stairs, I noticed tiny splatters of blood on the wall. Wilcox’s, no doubt. I thought I was okay, but I had trouble extracting my phone from my pocket. When I finally got it out, my fingers felt thick and clumsy as I punched in the numbers to Paul’s cell phone.

  This time he answered.

  “Wilcox is dead,” I told him. “I’m going to call the police. I just wanted to let you know first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said.”

  “Wait. Let me call them.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At his house.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be right over.”

  “Make it fast.”

  I clicked the phone off and tried to concentrate on other things. Like Tiger Lily and her puppies and how nice it would be to go to Maui, but my mind kept going back to what I’d seen upstairs. I couldn’t help myself.

  Ten minutes later, I heard Paul’s car pulling up outside.

  “He’s upstairs,” I said as he came through the door. “Second room on the right. And be careful where you step.”

  Paul took the steps two at a time.

  He came back down a couple of minutes later.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  I noticed there were beads of sweat on his upper lip, and the veins in his nose were redder.

  “That poor sonofabitch.” He reached for his phone and called the police.

  “I thought you said you were calling it in when I spoke to you,” I said as I lit two cigarettes and handed him one.

  “I wanted to take a look first. Now I’m sorry I did.” He took a puff. “We shouldn’t smoke in here,” he said. “We’ll contaminate the crime scene.”

  I got up and we headed outside.

  “Jesus,” Paul repeated. “All my years on the force, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.”

  “I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

  “What made you come over?”

  “I couldn’t get you. I couldn’t get Wilcox. I guess I just wanted to tell him I found his wife.”

  Paul took another puff of his cigarette, snubbed it out with his fingers, and put the butt in his pocket. “No sense in confusing forensics,” he explained. He squared his shoulders. “Listen, about not being able to get me . . . I’m sorry. I’ve been in the hospital till this morning. Kidney stones.” He shook his head. “God, they hurt like a sonofabitch. They say it’s the worst pain you can ever have.”

  “Not the worst,” I said thinking of Wilcox.

  “No. Not the worst,” Paul said softly. “You’re right about that.”

  Both of us stood there for a minute not saying anything.

  “It’s cold out here.” Paul rubbed his hands together. “Let’s wait in my car.”

  I nodded and we walked toward his Explorer, taking care to retrace our footsteps.

  When we got inside, Paul reached under the seat and came out with a flask. He unscrewed the top, took a swig, and handed it to me.

  “For the cold,” he said.

  I took a gulp and handed it back.

  “Feel better?” Paul asked.

  “Marginally.”

  He took another swig and passed it back to me. I took another drink. It was the same stuff that we’d had in his office. I could feel my insides begin to loosen up.

  Paul hadn’t shaved and the shirt and pants he was wearing looked as if he’d picked them off the top of the laundry pile.

  “It’s amazing what a person can live through before he dies,” he said.

  “We should all be equipped with circuit breakers. Too much and we switch off.”

  “We are, but if you’re good, you know how to circumvent them. That’s the art.”

  I shivered and reached for the flask. It was something I didn’t want to think about. “Who would do something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Wilcox must have really pissed someone off.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Maybe the cops will get lucky,” Paul said. “Maybe one of the neighbors noticed a strange car parked in the driveway. Or on the road. From the looks of it, whoever did this was here for a while.”

  “I hope I don’t run into them.”

  Paul reached over, took the flask out of my hand, and took a big swallow. “Me either,” he said as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Me either.”

  A snowplow lumbered by down the street. I lowered the window and tossed what was left of my cigarette out in the snow.

  “Some guys, they just have no luck. No luck at all.”

  “I’ve always thought you make your own,” Paul said.

  “Maybe” I lit another cigarette and thought about how muc
h I wanted to call George all of a sudden.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Dewitt police arrived before I had time to finish my cigarette. Paul and I got out of the Explorer to greet them. Paul did all the talking. We stayed outside while they went in. They didn’t look too steady when they came out.

  They secured the scene and called the Criminal Investigative Division, who rolled in within ten minutes of the call. An Officer Profit took down my initial statement while waiting for the CID unit to show up. I told him about the front door to Wilcox’s house being opened and about why I had walked in. I told him about why Wilcox had hired me, I told him about the trip down to New York, about finding Janet Wilcox, and about my concern at not being able to contact Walter Wilcox.

  Profit looked up from his writing. “Because you thought he was passed out?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “He’d been drinking a lot?”

  “Enough the last couple of times I saw him.”

  “He seemed nervous to you? Scared?”

  “Nervous. Mostly nervous.”

  “Did you have a feeling why that was?”

  “I put it down to being anxious about finding his wife. In retrospect, I was wrong.”

  “So he never said anything about people threatening him?”

  I shook my head. “Not to me.”

  “And you found his wife?”

  “She’s staying with a guy called Quintillo down in New York City.” And I gave Profit Quintillo’s phone number and address.

  “Any other family?”

  “A daughter.” I was giving him Stephanie’s number when one of the officers went into the kitchen. He must have hit the play button on the answering machine because I could hear myself saying, “Wilcox, are you there? Pick up the phone.” My voice sounded tinny.

  I wondered if Wilcox’s killers had heard me. Thinking about it gave me an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “You think there’s a relationship between Wilcox’s wife’s disappearance and what happened upstairs?” Profit asked me.

  “I don’t think I know enough to know,” I replied.

  “Terrific.” Profit snapped his notebook shut. “A philosopher. Anything else?”

  “I pulled the heater plug out of the upstairs wall.”

  He nodded, pointed to the wall in the hallway, and instructed me to stand over there. I did as I was told. A few minutes later, Paul came over and stood next to me.

  “No one is answering at Quintillo’s apartment,” he said.

  “Maybe Quintillo and Janet went out to a movie or something.”

  “Maybe.” Paul was chewing gum. I asked for a piece. He dug in his pocket and brought out a package of Bazooka bubble gum. “This is all I have.”

  As I unwrapped it, a detective, a young guy wearing a navy blue blazer, a crisp white shirt, a blue-and-red paisley tie, and a pair of gray slacks came over and asked me to recreate my route through the house.

  “How long are you going to keep Paul and me here?” I asked as I mounted the steps.

  “Probably another half hour. How do you know Santini?”

  “Through George Samson.” It was a measure of how I was feeling that saying George’s name didn’t bother me.

  “How’s George doing?”

  “Well enough. How do you know him?”

  “Mutual friends. What’s your connection?”

  “He was friends with my husband.”

  “Small world.” And the detective gestured for me to go ahead of him.

  Wilcox’s bedroom had become a busy place since I was in there last.

  As I walked through the door, one of the techs was saying to his partner, “My wife is threatening to make me take swing dancing lessons.”

  “Get some balls. Tell her no.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one that can’t go out because I have to do the laundry.”

  “At least I have clean clothes.”

  His partner laughed and got out his camera. “So how’s your kid’s skiing doing?”

  The tech grinned. “I think he’s going to make it to the state finals.”

  Both men looked up briefly when I came in then returned to going about their business. I showed the detective where I’d stood and what I’d touched, which wasn’t much.

  Maybe it was the effects of shock, but this time I didn’t feel anything as I gazed down at Wilcox. I indicated the rope that had been used to bind Wilcox’s hands and feet. It was heavy duty, industrial-strength twine.

  “You think the person that did this brought that with them?”

  “Probably,” the detective said. He looked around. “It doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing you’d find in a place like this.”

  As I was going down the stairs, the EMTs were bringing the stretcher up the steps. I flattened myself against the wall to let them pass. Walter Wilcox was headed for the Medical Examiner’s office and his autopsy—not that there was much question about what had killed him. Why was another matter.

  I wanted to talk to Paul some more, but he and his cop friends were schmoozing it up, and he showed no disposition to leave. I lingered for a while hoping I could snag him, then gave it up as a bad job.

  I was on my way out the door when he called out to me, “Hey, don’t go hog wild with the rest of the expense money. I need it back.”

  “Gee. There goes my trip to the Keys. Don’t worry, I’ll have your invoice for you tomorrow.”

  Outside, the driveway had been roped off with crime-scene tape. There were two more squad cars, plus the ambulance outside. A policeman was directing traffic. The neighbors who were at home had come out of their houses and were standing around, clustered in tight little knots, watching the proceedings. I recognized a few of the faces from before. I could tell they recognized me too, but before anyone could come over a camera crew arrived and I slipped away. This would definitely be the lead story on the six o’clock news.

  “Jeez,” Manuel said when I walked into Noah’s Ark. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I look that bad?”

  “You look awful.”

  I went into the bathroom and glanced in the mirror. He was right. I did. I was sheet white, which emphasized the dark circles under my eyes. I spent the rest of the day working at the store. There was something soothing about the routine and about being with the animals.

  Zsa Zsa seemed to know something was wrong, and she spent the day alternately following me around, rubbing up against my leg, and bringing me her toys to play with. The beating in my chest had almost slowed to normal levels by the time I put the CLOSED sign on the door.

  I was looking forward to going over to Calli’s to see the pups. I’d made up a little gift basket to take to Tiger Lily consisting of a variety of dog treats. I was busy arranging them when the phone rang. Expecting it to be Calli, I picked it up.

  Silence reigned on the other end of the line. I could hear someone breathing and the sound of traffic. Whoever was calling was probably using a cell phone.

  “George, is that you?”

  A car started honking.

  “Last chance.”

  Nothing.

  I hung up.

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry or scream.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in Calli’s spare bedroom petting Tiger Lily’s head while six naked blobs of protoplasm rooted around her belly, sucking on her teats. She wasn’t doing badly for a first-time mother. I know humans who have done a lot, lot worse.

  She’d made a cozy nest for herself between the bed and the wall, a space of about twenty-four inches. Like the Three Bears nursery rhyme said, the space wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small. It was just right. In addition, it was out of the line of sight of the door and protected on three sides by two walls and the bed.

  “You are such a good girl,” I crooned in her ear.

  I could feel the tension I’d been carrying in my neck dissipating
as I inhaled the odors of dog and puppy, milk and newsprint. Lily furrowed her forehead, put her head down between her paws, and looked at me imploringly with those eyes the color of dark chocolate.

  “It could have been worse. You could have had ten.” She just looked at me. “I know, I know,” I told her as I untangled a matt behind her ear. “Motherhood is a pain in the ass. But the pups will be gone soon. Six, seven weeks. Eight at the most. I promise.”

  She sighed the same sigh I’d heard from my grandmother. Then, resigned to her fate, she sighed for the second time, turned around, and nudged at the nearest pup with her nose. It let out a squeak and kept on sucking.

  I took one of the treats I’d bought for Lily out of its package and gave it to her. She took it from my hand delicately and ate it slowly, without great enthusiasm. Clearly it was okay, but not great. She probably would have liked something from Purina better, but at the moment corporate was out and homespun was in. The dog world followed the same fashion laws as everything else.

  I’d been thinking the other day that in a way we’d gone back to the time when my grandmother had fed our dog the leftover scraps that she got from the butcher combined with whatever we were having for dinner that night. Only things are more artful now. And expensive. Sincerity and simplicity are today’s new marketing ploys. You get that perfect five-hundred-dollar meditation mat, and enlightenment will automatically follow.

  In line with that concept, the packaging on Laura’s Doggie Delights had the requisite length of sisal cord around the top and a label made of coarse brown paper. Of course the label was handwritten. What else?

  According to it, Laura’s Doggies Delights were an all-organic peanut-butter biscuit that contained only healthy, natural ingredients. They’d been mixed by hand, rolled out in Laura’s own kitchen, and baked in her oven. I was thinking I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they had been baked on a brick hearth, powered by hardwood oak logs cut with a hand saw and split with an axe, when Calli opened the door a crack and slipped in.

  “Aren’t they wonderful?” she asked, gesturing toward the puppies. “I wish I could stay home with them all day. And by the way, Zsa Zsa is not pleased. At all.”