All Due Respect Issue #2

by Owen Laukkanen

  Roger couldn’t bring himself to hold it again.

  From out of the back came Mrs. Zucco. She was young, like Dottie, same blonde hair, same great figure. Completely different history. Mrs. Zucco went to private school, never was a taxi dancer. Never was any other kind of dancer, not like Dottie.

  She held a handful of receipts and her face was pinched like she had a headache.

  “Hello, Loraine,” Dottie said.

  Loraine looked up, noticing her for the first time. “Hi, Dot.”

  They were never friends, despite the hours they spent in each other’s company merely due to proximity. They tried to get along, but exhausted any conversation within the first two minutes. They were left to discuss what pictures they’d seen lately, or the last bastion of awkward small talk—the weather.

  Dottie waited for Loraine to break down and spill that Anthony hadn’t come home last night, but she took her headache face and began entering numbers into a ledger.

  Roger handed off Mrs. Eastway’s order and the shop fell into silence.

  “Well,” Dottie said, “I’ll leave your sandwich here, Roger.” She set it on the counter and left. If Loraine had a headache, Roger had stomach pains. The place looked like Ward D at county hospital.

  4.

  THE NEXT WEEK WENT by with Roger drinking himself to sleep, Dottie going about her routine, and Loraine pretending that Anthony wasn’t gone.

  It could all work out, thought Dottie. Loraine can’t run the business by herself. She’ll have to sell. And she’ll sell it to Roger. Then all the meat she can cook won’t come at a discount, it’ll come for free.

  Damned if she was going to do all that numbers work though. They could hire a college boy for that.

  On Saturday, with Roger sleeping it off in the bedroom, Dottie answered a knock at the door.

  Loraine stood there with thin red veins visible in her eyes. Her hair was down and ran stringy lines across her face, pasted in place by tears and sweat and maybe a little bourbon.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  “He’s sleeping,” Dottie said. She cocked her head at the haggard woman before her. “Is everything all right?”

  “You’d best wake him up,” Loraine said, and she raised a gun she’d been holding by her side.

  Dottie remained calm. “What are you doing with that, Loraine?”

  “I found him.”

  “Found who?” As if she didn’t know.

  “Are you gonna get him out here or do I need to go and get him?” The anger brought out her southern roots, a little twang creeping into her voice.

  Dottie put her hands up, calming. So it had finally come home to roost. She knew when she put the pieces of Anthony in the freezer that he’d be found eventually. She honestly thought Roger would have blown it by then. She also thought Loraine would be grieving for her missing husband and spend a few days out of the shop so Dottie could get in there and dispose of the parts properly. But Loraine spent even more time at the store. The accounting had never been so organized, the floors never been so clean.

  “What are you going to do?” Dottie asked. Loraine stared at her. The gun trembled in her hand, her eyes poised to begin leaking tears again. “If you kill him, then what?”

  Loraine had no answer, but Dottie had a plan. A perfect plan that crystalized in her mind in an instant.

  “Let me help you.”

  Loraine blinked twice, the tears retreated in the confusion swirling on her face. “What?”

  “You want to kill Roger, right? For what he did to your husband.”

  “You knew about it?”

  “But if you come in here blasting away the whole block will hear.” Dottie leaned her head out into the hallway. “I’m surprised Mrs. Eastway isn’t out here already.”

  Loraine glanced down the hall, suddenly aware of the gun in her hand.

  “You want to do this the right way, you need my help.”

  Dottie held out a hand, inviting the gun into her palm. Loraine blinked a few more times, replayed the offer in her mind, then handed over the gun.

  “Good,” Dottie said. “Now come inside and let’s figure this thing out.”

  5.

  DOTTIE AND LORAINE MADE perfect bookends. Loraine brought the white hot rage and willingness to kill, Dottie brought the plan and the ice cold heart—chilly enough to send her husband to the gallows.

  Her plan was this: Loraine needed an alibi. Dottie would be it. If it ever came to it, she would testify the girls had been good friends ever since Roger started working at the meat market. They went shopping all the time on the weekends.

  She also convinced Loraine that a gun would never do. Too loud, too messy. She handed Loraine Roger’s straight razor. At first, Loraine blanched. “Won’t it be too…too much clean up?”

  “Let me handle that,” Dottie said. “I take the sheets, the pillow and his clothes down to the incinerator and it’s all over in a flash. If I have to go digging a bullet out of the woodwork, I’ll have the landlord asking questions I don’t want to answer.”

  “What do we do with the body?”

  “Has anyone besides you found Anthony?” Loraine shook her head. “Well, there you go. We deep freeze him. Then you parse it out, bit by bit, with the scrap and bone chips.”

  “But those all get sent to the dog food factory.”

  “And so will he. Don’t he deserve it?”

  Dottie worked hard to keep the fire in Loraine burning. She could see her protégé was losing steam.

  “And in exchange,” Dottie went on, “you and I split the store and whatever else Anthony left you in the will. He did leave a will, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Okay then.” Dottie held out a hand to shake on the deal. Loraine looked dubious, but slowly moved her hand to take Dottie’s.

  “When do we do it?”

  “Come back tonight. I’ll make sure I don’t nag him about his drinking and he’ll be passed out by ten o’clock.”

  Roger was out by nine thirty.

  Dottie stripped the bedspread off, leaving only the old sheets on the bed, then paced around the apartment smoking. She was lighting her third Chesterfield when she heard a timid knock.

  Loraine stood in the hallway, dressed in black. Her collar was turned up and she looked like she’d been up for days. Dark rings hung under her eyes.

  Dottie took her by the arm and gently pulled her inside.

  “Okay, let’s go over this again,” Dottie said. “Where were we?”

  “At the movies.”

  “What picture?”

  “Kiss Of Death.”

  “Right. What time did we get back?”

  “Eleven thirty.”

  “I’ll go down and slam that door shut real hard around then. Old lady Eastway is sure to note the time so she can lodge a complaint. I’ll have everything in the incinerator by then and we’ll be home free.”

  Loraine looked pained. Dottie put a hand on her arm.

  “Look, chances are slim we’ll even need a story like that. Who’s gonna file a complaint about a missing husband, me? No one will even know he’s gone. Lord knows we got no kind of social life. Who’s gonna miss him?”

  “Dottie, I don’t know if—”

  “What’s to know? You just go in there and take care of the guy who chopped your husband with a cleaver. You didn’t forget that part, did you?”

  Loraine slowly shook her head. “No.” Dottie watched her bring the razor out of her pocket. Loraine took slow, shuffling steps toward the bedroom.

  Dottie had left the lights out. Only the deep neon red of the Zucco Meats sign lit the room. Better to hide the blood, Dottie thought.

  Dottie waited in the doorway and Loraine made her way deliberately to the side of the bed. Roger’s drunken snores filled the room. Between deep, rattling breaths the only sound was the buzzing of neon through the glass.

  Dottie wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to watch. She chewed a finger
nail as Loraine got closer.

  Loraine thumbed the handle on the razor and it unfolded in her hand. Roger’s head leaned half off the pillow, his passed-out pose making his neck a perfect open target for her. She had thought about whether or not she’d have to lift his chin to get at his neck, or if she’d have to roll him over on his back.

  What she got was a pig ready for slaughter.

  Loraine stopped, looming over the sleeping figure.

  Dottie clenched her fist. Just do it, already.

  Loraine didn’t move. The razor hung loosely in her hand. Her breathing started to match the steady rhythm of Roger’s.

  Dottie shifted her feet. The red glow and faint buzz started a headache behind her eyes.

  Loraine watched Roger’s chest rise and fall, a line of drool had dried a crusty white from the corner of his mouth down to the bed sheet.

  Dottie couldn’t stand it anymore. She moved into the room and came to a stop beside Loraine.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? He killed your husband.”

  “I know that, but…I’m not a killer.”

  “If it’s not you, it’s just gonna be some guy flipping the switch on the chair a few months from now. Don’t you believe in an eye for an eye?”

  “I do, but…” Loraine stood still, her eyes zeroed in on Roger’s neck—the pulse visible through his skin.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Dottie said. She reached down and took the razor from Loraine’s hand. She elbowed Loraine out of the way as she leaned over Roger and placed the blade just under his right ear.

  “Be ready to roll him if any starts to leak over the side. I don’t want to have to burn the rug too.”

  Dottie pulled downward. The razor carved a line across Roger’s throat. His eyes sprung open, but his voicebox was already cut. The blood came immediately.

  He stared up at Dottie, confusion and panic cutting through the alcohol. Loraine turned away, putting her face in her hands.

  Dottie gripped a fistful of his hair and kept his head from moving side to side.

  “Get the pillow and mop that up,” Dottie said to Loraine. “Don’t let it get on the rug.”

  Loraine was frozen.

  “Hurry up, damn it.”

  Loud sobs came from behind Loraine’s hands.

  “God damn it!” Dottie let go of his hair and ripped the pillow out from under his head. She made a barrier at the edge of the mattress for the growing pool of blood to soak into the white pillowcase and absorb into the down feathers inside.

  In a matter of seconds his movements slowed. The hollow, airy sound in his open throat hissed away to nothing, and his eyes closed again. Moments later, Roger was dead.

  6.

  GETTING LORAINE TO LIFT Roger’s legs so they could move his body to the bathtub took some effort. Dottie tried to be soothing at first, cooing to her that it was “all over now.” When that didn’t work, she went merciless.

  “We had a deal. You came to my door with a gun. You came after my husband with murder in your heart. You don’t get to change your mind after it’s done.”

  As the rest of Roger’s blood ran down the drain, Loraine sat and cried in a heap next to the toilet. Dottie got to work rolling up the sheets in a ball. She stripped off his clothes and piled them in the middle of the top sheet, put the blood-soaked pillow in, and then wrapped it all up in a bundle.

  She took the bloody sheets down to the incinerator to give Loraine a few more minutes to get it together. When she returned to her apartment, Loraine was standing at the kitchen counter with a half empty glass of scotch. Good for her, Dottie thought, and joined her in a drink.

  Loraine was drowning her sorrows. Dottie was celebrating.

  Dottie knew Loraine would have no stomach for what needed to be done in the back room of the butcher shop once they got Roger’s body downstairs, so she sent Mrs. Zucco home and told her to have a few more drinks. It would all be clearer in the morning.

  Dottie fulfilled the part of the plan meant to seal their alibi as she slammed the apartment door at 11:35. She saw a light come on in Mrs. Eastway’s room. Satisfied, Dottie went back to the butcher shop to get to work.

  Over the next two weeks Dottie helped out at the store. Loraine did most of the work, having picked up the gist of it from Anthony over the years. Dottie ran the register, got the pre-cut chops and steaks out of the refrigerated case, and tried to put a happy face on the business-as-usual to counteract Loraine’s pained expression.

  Dottie went out late on the third night and dropped one of Anthony’s hands in a creek by the fire station. She left it up on the bank so it wouldn’t get swept away in the water. She wanted people to find it. And they did.

  Loraine’s natural tendency toward tears since the night with Roger served them well when the police came to the shop.

  “Mrs. Zucco, when was the last time you saw your husband?”

  “About a week ago. He and his employee went fishing together. Why?”

  Dottie watched from the back room. Good girl, Loraine. Keep it together.

  The police showed her a set of fingerprints and a ring. Anthony’s wedding ring. She let loose the flood of tears she’d been holding back. They took one of his knives to pull prints from, but everyone in the room knew the severed hand was his.

  That night, Dottie left two more body parts about a mile away from each other. When the cops returned the next day to tell Loraine the fingerprints matched, they told her about the other parts. One of them was his head.

  Dottie told Loraine to bring the paperwork to cash in Anthony’s life insurance right away.

  Two days later, Dottie parsed out several of Roger’s parts for the police to find. The sleepy town had never seen anything like it. Dottie watched the faces of the detectives who came to her door and she knew there was a hint of glee at getting to work such a big time case as this.

  Dottie broke down when they brought her the news. She first buried her face in her hands, then pulled a tall homicide detective close to her and cried into his lapel. The men stood stoically, waiting for her to regain her composure, which she did with scripted timing.

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted your husband and Mr. Zucco dead?”

  “Have you ever worked in the meat business, detective?” He shook his head. “It’s a real cutthroat industry.”

  They offered their sympathies, vowed to catch the killer, and also admitted they had no leads. She thanked them for their service to the community.

  Loraine moved around the shop like a rat in a room full of traps. Dottie scolded her after work one night.

  “If this was gonna come back and bite us, it would have already. Now would you calm down? No one is looking for him. Either one of them. They went for a fishing trip and never came home. That’s all.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dottie thought about slapping her, trying to get her to come around. It was like having Roger back again. What’s with these people and their murderous intentions, and then they can’t handle it?

  “Look, maybe we should close the shop for a few days. We can look around to hire someone. This isn’t my racket and it ain’t yours. We’re owners now. We got to learn how to act like it.”

  Loraine nodded her head. “Yeah. I could use a break.”

  “We both could.” Dottie put a hand on Loraine’s knee. She tamped down her desire to slap the woman across the face. “It’s all over, Loraine. We did it. Scot free.” Dottie patted her knee. “Have you heard from the lawyer about the estate?”

  Anthony had been well insured. Dottie was holding off on drafting an official document that made them equal partners until after the dust had settled.

  “Yeah, I spoke to him yesterday,” Loraine said. “The check cleared.”

  “What? Why didn’t you say so?” Another strong urge to slap
her came and went. “We should definitely take a few days off then. We’ve got cash now. We don’t need the two-bit nickels and dimes from a pile of ground chuck. We’ve got prime rib sitting in that bank. How much is there?”

  “Four hundred thousand.” Loraine said, barely above a whisper.

  Dottie almost choked. That was four hundred thousand more than she got off Roger.

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll take a week off, find a new butcher, and we can relax.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Loraine managed a weak smile. Who says money can’t buy happiness? “I suppose I should take all these receipts to the bank in the morning.”

  “Aw, it’ll keep.”

  “No, I’ve been putting it off. Anthony used to handle all the banking.” At the mention of his name, Loraine started to tear up a little. She reached into the desk drawer and took out weeks’ worth of bank deposits. Dottie’s eyes went wide.

  “How long have you been sitting on those?”

  “Since Anthony went missing. I told you, he handled the bank.”

  “Loraine, we’re supposed to be business as usual. This isn’t—” Dottie flashed on an idea. “Wait, you’ve never been to the bank?”

  “No. I hate being around all that money. It makes me nervous. Maybe when we hire a new butcher, we can hire an accountant.”

  “Sure, sure,” Dottie said, but her mind was elsewhere. An idea was coalescing in her mind. The final step in the plan. A plan she thought was over, but turned out was only halfway there.

  “We don’t need to hire an accountant. I’ll handle it.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Mind? Loraine, what do you think I did before I married Roger?”

  7.

  DOTTIE BROUGHT THREE WEEKS’ worth of deposits up to her apartment. The next day she took cash from the pile and went dress shopping. She bypassed the new styles from Paris. She walked by the light summer frocks and flower prints. She bought a black dress, black pillbox hat, and a black veil.

  She called Loraine to see how she was feeling.

  “Okay, I guess. When do we need to start looking for a new butcher?”

  “It’ll keep. Let’s do something fun, just for us. We both need to let off a little steam, don’t you think?”