The Book of Judges

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  I froze, fist poised to knock again.

  Women who lived in buildings with doormen and buzzers for security didn’t leave their front doors off the latch. Not in this town, anyway. I pulled gloves out of my purse and slipped them on. If something had gone down, my fingerprints didn’t need to be on the doorknob.

  I pushed the door the rest of the way open with just my fingertips at head height, so I didn’t smear anything that might be on the doorknob. “Linda?” I called out.

  I could hear music somewhere in the distance. The low thrumming of strings playing jazz. I followed the sound.

  Linda was stretched across her bed, arm over her eyes.

  “Linda, your door was open. Are you all right?”

  To my great relief, her arm shifted.

  “Migraine.”

  “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. We need to have a talk.”

  She didn’t rise or open her eyes. “I know.”

  “We’re both here now.” I took a seat in the white leather wingback chair across from the bed. “Let’s talk.”

  “What is there to say? Adam is gone. I’m leaving. It’s all over. Everything I’ve worked for.” Her voice was a low rumble like she didn’t want to move her jaw.

  “We don’t need to talk about any of that.”

  “Hmmm.” This time she didn’t even try to make words.

  “I want to talk about my contract.”

  “Calls, all day. All night. All week. They won’t stop calling.” She struggled for a breath. “You promised they wouldn’t call.”

  “I never promised anything.” My back was up. She couldn’t hold me responsible for media phone calls. It was ludicrous. “The calls can’t hurt you now. The worst has already happened.” This was the literal definition of cold comfort, but the despairing lady in front of me needed to buck up.

  She murmured more nonsense at me. “I don’t answer. I just see the number and don’t answer.” Her breathing sounded labored. Whether she was sincerely struggling or not was up in the air still. She seemed to enjoy the role of victim. “Can you get me an aspirin. We can talk, but I can’t, the light, the noise, I can’t sit up.”

  “Do you want me to turn the music off? Or the lights?”

  “Please do, and an aspirin, from the dresser.” She had a glass of water by her bed, but there were no pills on the dresser. I flicked the lights off and hunted for the sound system. A small gold colored Bose sat on a side table. I turned it off.

  “He wanted to turn on the music, but my head…I just want quiet.” her voice trailed off. I searched her master bath for some aspirin and found a bottle of Excedrin Migraine in the drawer.

  I stepped softly back into her bedroom. Migraines were the worst. Even after this pill she might not be able to talk. “Got it, Linda.” I knelt by the side of her bed to give her the pill.

  She didn’t respond.

  I nudged her arm, not knowing if she was a migraine barfer or not.

  She really didn’t respond.

  Her round face glistened feverishly in the dim light that came through the window, but that was the only sign of life. I placed two fingers under her jawbone, but there was no pulse.

  I slammed my hands on her and began chest compressions. While doing it, I took a gamble and cried out, “Alexa, call 911.”

  “Calling 911.”

  God bless rich people.

  I went through the motions of the 911 call while performing CPR. I couldn’t get the pressure I needed while she was on the mattress, but moving her risked her heart stopping, if it hadn’t already.

  I risked it.

  She wasn’t a small woman, but I managed it. I laid her out on the floor as quickly as I could. I didn’t have time to be gentle.

  After what felt like an hour of pumping her chest with enough force to break a rib, while singing We Will Rock You to keep the right rhythm, the paramedics entered. Four of them, brisk and efficient. They nodded approval, ripped her shirt open, and applied the paddles. She jerked with the jolt. The woman with the paddles nodded to another one, a smile on her face. It had worked.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “She complained of a migraine, but I don’t know her well enough to know what was going on. I came over, uninvited, about five minutes before she passed out.”

  They were putting her on oxygen, putting her on a cot, carrying the cot out of the room.

  I followed them to the elevator, but they let the door shut in front of me.

  I stared at the door and wondered: who was this man who had wanted the music on? And could you simulate a migraine with poison? If so, had someone just tried to kill Linda?

  Her apartment, full of answers, was right behind me, and I still had my gloves on. No one had told me to go home, so I didn’t.

  Linda’s apartment was sparse and modern. Clean lines, low furniture. Welded steel and white leather. Polished marble tile floors with no rugs. Her large television was mounted on the wall above a low lacquered table.

  Her male visitor had been with her in the bedroom, so he was someone she was close to, and felt safe with. I’d bet that someone her age still had photo albums and phone books. She might even have a calendar lying around. I went to her kitchen, the age-old hub of the home.

  The kitchen was white, sleek, and well stocked with liquor, but there was no sign of a calendar, or phone book.

  Being an old building there were only two closets outside of the bedroom, a coat closet by the front door and a linen closet at the end of the one hall. I checked those next. The coat closet was stocked with an assortment of winter looks and one set of winter boots. But not one of the pockets held a note reminding her an old friend was coming today. The linen closet held what you would expect, all in white, as well as a spare feather pillow, two minky blankets and a shelf full of unscented white pillar candles. No photo albums tucked into the shelves.

  She had nothing stored under her bed, and her dresser and bedroom closet only held clothes. Nice clothes. Clothes I really liked.

  The office, separated from the living room by French doors was better.

  Her desk was cluttered with notes on the local shelters. I skimmed through a list of how many beds were currently empty, another list ordered by who was running out of food fastest. A short stack of spiral notebooks full of handwritten notes, also on the committee work was under the jumble of papers.

  Her one file cabinet was crammed with city business stuff. Nothing personal as far as I could tell, certainly no photo albums. The desk drawers were cluttered with the usual office detritus—pens, paperclips, sticky notes.

  But, in all that work-oriented, depersonalized space, she still had an old leather phone book. I exhaled in relief as I flipped it open. Phone numbers for Mom and Dad were scratched on the wrong side of the cover. I snapped a picture of them with my phone and flipped through the pages. Names and numbers. No notes to indicate who she knew well, or who was a personal friend. And very few numbers per page. I would never call every number to find out who had come to the house, but I took a picture of each page anyway and put the phonebook back where I had found it.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something. Even if Linda lived after this, she would disappear any day now, never to be heard from again. If she had been poisoned…

  I stared at the phone book.

  If she had been poisoned it was literally a federal case and she had literal case managers to handle it. If someone had tried to kill her, people with better training than me would be on it before I could figure out who to call first.

  Then again, the Feds would never tell me what they knew. If this was related to my case, I’d have to find out for myself.

  I was on my way out when I remembered that “he” had wanted the music on. If “he” had been the one to turn it on, I might have a good chance of getting his identity. I grabbed a roll of scotch tape and a blank piece of printer paper from the office and went back to her bedroom.

  I found some eye shadow
in her bathroom and scratched the top of it, just enough to loosen the silvery dust. Then I took it to her Bose and blew it over the top.

  I pressed a piece of scotch tape over the dusty buttons, ripped it off fast, and then pressed the tape to the paper. I did all the buttons. Of course, “he” might have made her turn it on herself. If he was trying to kill her, and was at all smart, he hadn’t left any prints in the room.

  I blew the dust off the Bose and put my supplies away. Perhaps I had ruined the prints for the Feds, but I had a feeling they didn’t need a little thing like fingerprints to get their job done.

  I stared at my paper, proud of my quick thinking.

  I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, I saw it differently. My stomach flipped. My head spun. This was a misstep. If she died, there would be an autopsy. That would reveal foul play and the Feds would absolutely come looking for prints. Instead, they’d find smudges covered in eyeshadow. And they already knew I had been here.

  I swallowed my shame, owned my mistake, and drove directly to the police station. I only had my word that she had welcomed me to her apartment, and that she had mentioned someone else being there before me. And my word wasn’t worth too much to the police. But never mind all of that, I had to fix this as best as I could.

  I had to hope Julie had a sense of humor and some patience left for her only church friend.

  * * *

  Julie met me at one of the private interview rooms at the station. She didn’t look like she hated me.

  “I have been waiting for you to call.” She passed me a cup of bad police station coffee. “Please tell me you’ve dug through all of your Bible books and found the answer to all of our problems.”

  I set the paper of poorly and illegally acquired prints on the table between us. “I just made a very bad decision and need to own up to it.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “A professional-license-risking kind of decision?”

  “When do I go for less than that?”

  I told her about Linda, the paramedics, and my search of her apartment.

  “You let yourself in.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she welcomed you.”

  “Yes, and if she lives and doesn’t suffer from serious lack-of-oxygen related brain damage, she will back me up.”

  “Do you have a written agreement that shows she is your client?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, you’re not going to need to prove it wasn’t breaking and entering. Also, you tried to save her life and called paramedics. If you had done that as some kind of ruse you would have made sure she was dead before you called.”

  “It would make more sense.”

  She smiled. “It’s the prints that are the problem.”

  “Obviously. She mentioned that some man had wanted the music on despite her headache, so I had got to thinking he might have left prints on the radio.”

  “When you get home, burn that paper.”

  I winced.

  “Seriously. Burn it. It’s not admissible. It only makes you look bad. Right now, you’re concerned about foul play. You’re here to report suspicious activity, on her behalf. We’ll have officers down there ASAP to see what we can find. If the man who wanted the music on was dumb enough to go there, turn the music on without gloves and then kill her, he is the kind of person to leave his prints other places too. Besides,” She glanced at the paper with a disgusted look, “Does that look like a quality fingerprint sample to you?”

  I stared at the page. It did not.

  “Don’t do dumb things and you’ll get to keep your job, okay? Let’s file a report right now and get the move on before someone else pops by the apartment to clean up.”

  “I locked it when I left. Will that be a problem?”

  “We’ll work with what we’ve got.” She passed me a piece of clean paper. “Go ahead and write out a statement. Put it all in, even the thing about taking the prints.” She pulled my sloppy paper towards her. “And never mind about burning these. I’m not saying they are the least bit useful, but we’d better keep them.”

  I agreed and began writing in my nicest printing. It was slow going, but I didn’t leave out even the stupidest thing I had done. Including taking the photos of Linda’s phone book. I left nothing out and left the results to God.

  If he was real, anyway.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next afternoon Julie called. Linda Smith was dead.

  I felt an unusual level of grief, perhaps because I hadn’t been able to save her. Or maybe because she had been about to start her life over, at almost seventy years old, and that had been my fault, too. Linda had begged me to keep her out of the newspaper and I had failed. More than failed, I had advertised her presence to the people who had been looking for her. And now she was dead. She might have survived this crisis if it hadn’t been for me and my suspicions. I had leaked her location, and whoever she had been hiding from had killed her.

  I wanted to do something right. Needed to. I called Bruce and told him the news. He prayed, and then said it was time we all met again. Tonight, at his home, for dinner. He’d call the rest of the committee.

  I was staring at the wall, feeling sorry for Linda and for myself when Christine burst through the front door like the Spirit of Christmas past—weighed down with pans of food that smelled better than anything that had ever come out of my oven. She set three pans of something that filled the room with the essence of Italy, on my tiled countertop. “You haven’t been eating.”

  “I have.”

  “That’s not likely.”

  I lifted the tin foil of one pan to reveal a cheesy rigatoni-like dish.

  “Mom’s pasta al Norma. The other is baked ziti, and the big pan is filled with Sicilian Arancine.”

  “I love it when you’re nesting.” I dipped my finger in the sauce and tasted.

  “Any movement on the marriage front?” Christine settled onto a barstool.

  “No.”

  “Do you hesitate because you love him so much?”

  “Yes.” The word popped out in a way that only happens when you are with old friends who know you deeply.

  “I’m for not rushing anything, but don’t trust him overmuch, okay?” She heaved a sigh, a tired sigh, clearly worn out with my marriage, like I was.

  “Not much risk of that.” I was having my morning coffee and a piece of toast—evidence that I had indeed been eating something even if it wasn’t comfort food. “How’s your mom?”

  “A little worse. I’m taking her in to the wound care center again today. We’re a little afraid it’s MRSA now. It’s just not healing.”

  “That’s awful.” My words were shallow, but my feeling wasn’t. Christine’s mom, like Christine herself, had always been a giver, not a taker. Thinking of her fighting so long against an infection seemed like a crime.

  “Yup, but the center is good, and so’s her insurance. She’ll check in for a few days and see what they can do.”

  “How do you manage all of this?” I waved my hands at the pans of food to her. “And I assume you are going in to work today as well?”

  “Yup. Phones won’t answer themselves.” She grinned, because of course phones could answer themselves, and answering them was the least of her duties.

  “I swear if you were the only Christian I had ever met…”

  She sighed. “If I were the only Christian everyone had ever met I’d be quite a bit more worn out than I am now.”

  “You’re just, like, the only one doing what they say they do.”

  “I’m not.”

  I shrugged. “The only one I know.”

  “You know that’s not true.” She shifted out of her coat, ready to stay a while. “How long will you take to forgive yourself for your anger?”

  “I prefer to call it righteous indignation.”

  “What was it, ten, eleven years ago you all moved off to the seminary?”

  “Twelve. We moved two months after we got married.”r />
  “Twelve years is a long time to punish yourself.” She paused to give me a soft smile, then continued, her voice was tired. “No one ever wants to do hard things. You were a baby Christian at that seminary and loved God a lot.”

  “So?”

  She just stared at me, her eyes big and warm, not sad, or angry, or punishing.

  “You think I am protesting too much. I know that. You know I know that. Why bring it up again?”

  “Because if you could forgive yourself for walking away from God in anger at a bunch of stupid young girls who were acting like stupid young girls, you would ….”

  “Go to heaven?”

  “Sure, but also you’d be free from the weight that hangs on you constantly. Be free from trying to prove to all of us that you aren’t wrong. You’d be free to know God again. And you loved knowing God.”

  I swallowed. Only Christine could call me angry with myself and get away with it.

  We watched each other, neither of us saying anything. Her words always hit home, and she knew it. I knew she had been praying for years for my heart to soften. I had been biding my time for her to give up. How on earth did she think my current situation with the godless-wonder Rick Styles would soften my heart towards God’s people?

  After what seemed like a lifetime she softly changed the subject. “How’s the case coming?”

  “As well as the marriage.”

  “Any word from your cop friend?”

  “Yeah, we finally had lunch.” My cop friend’s words about me being a church lady hung over me like a rainy day. As did Linda’s death, which I did not want to talk about.

  “What do they know that you don’t?”

  “Nothing. None of us know anything. That said, all of us ignorant ones are getting together for dinner with Bruce and Vivian tonight. I don’t think you know them…”

  “Sure, I do. He runs The Bulletin. Good guy. He, or one of his guys, delivers the paper to us once a month.”

  “Ahh.”

  “He’s not a suspect, is he?”

  “He ought to be, I guess. They all ought to be. His little group is weird.”