Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics)

by Brendan DuBois

  Barry fell from my grasp. I squinted several times, swallowed hard, and shook my head. Once I refocused, I saw him lying, blood spattered, behind the bar. Footsteps pounded up the stairs and two uniformed cops, guns drawn, burst in. Captain Crowley was right behind them. He looked about, then said, “What happened?”

  “Barry panicked. Started waving the gun. So I tried to grab it. Next thing I knew, he was dead on the floor.”

  Crowley shot me an odd look, then shrugged. “One less case for our overburdened legal system.”

  The police raided Connors’ Corner that very night, and found quite a stash of narcotics hidden around the premises. Faro was wedging packets of cocaine between the toilet tank and the wall in the men’s room when Crowley nailed him. Obviously, the customers would close the stall door, remove the product, and replace it with cash.

  But Cynthia had nothing on her person and denied everything, saying the goods must have belonged to Barry. The captain later persuaded her that she could do time anyway, then convinced the District Attorney to grant her immunity if she flipped. So Cynthia turned “State’s Evidence” against the love of her life. Faro’s going to do some heavy time according to Captain Crowley’s prediction. It also came out in court that Barry, my friend of many years, succumbed to his gambling addiction and owed his existence to bookies and loan sharks, one of whom had taken me for a ride. Barry chose to redress his problems by selling cocaine.

  Tammy feels justice was satisfied somewhat, but that it was grossly unfair for Cynthia to walk away free. I agreed, saying, “Sometimes people just get away with murder in this city.”

  The Trouble with Harry

  Stefanie Mattson

  “Would you mind picking up your feet, please?” Barbara asked.

  Harry didn’t hear her. He had turned the TV volume up high so he could hear it over the sound of the vacuum cleaner, pressing the volume control on the remote repeatedly in irritation at being disturbed.

  Barbara wondered just when she was supposed to vacuum. He sat in front of the TV a good eighteen hours a day. And the volume was loud even when the vacuum cleaner wasn’t running. Though he never would have admitted it, insisting that the problem was due to the fact that everyone around him mumbled, Harry was a little deaf.

  But even with perfect hearing, there was no need to have the sound on at all, much less at top volume. He always watched the same shows. High-speed car chases and natural disasters were his favorites, along with real-life emergency and police dramas. Sirens and gunshots, along with some commentary—always at the same hyper-excited pitch—were all the volume delivered.

  Barbara despised the constant blaring. The noise was wearing her nerves to a frazzle. And there was nowhere to get away from it; the house was too small. Even earplugs didn’t work. For that matter, the constant blaring had become such a part of her life that it droned away in her head even when she wasn’t in the house.

  If she had to be married to a couch potato, why couldn’t she at least have been married to someone who was addicted to golf tournaments, with the quiet, civilized voices of their commentators? But then, there was a lot to regret about being married to Harry.

  It was a high-speed chase he was watching now—an aerial view of a motorcycle speeding down a palm-lined California freeway, police cruiser in hot pursuit. “The speed of the motorcycle is now in excess of one hundred and twenty miles per hour,’’ said the commentator. The motorcycle zoomed past the traffic as if it were standing still.

  Barbara waited until the motorcycle hit the bus at the intersection. She had seen the clip so many times that she knew what was going to happen. Then she restated her question: “Would you mind picking up your feet, please?” she shouted. She was standing at the side of his recliner with the nozzle poised in her hand.

  Harry shot her an irritated glance, punched up the volume a couple of more notches—Didn’t she know she was disturbing him? was his unspoken comment—and then reluctantly obliged her by lifting his slipper-clad feet while simultaneously reaching into the bowl on his lap for another handful of popcorn.

  Bits of popcorn tumbled to the floor, and Barbara vacuumed them up. “If you put a squash in a chair, you’d get more life out of it than you do out of Harry,” her sister had said just last week. Her sister had never understood why Barbara stayed with him. Nor, much of the time, did she. It was fall, and her sister had been reminded of the huge orange squashes that are displayed at farm stands, which Harry, in the orange T-shirt he had been wearing that day, did closely resemble.

  That was the trouble with Harry. He never moved. The upholstery on the arms of his recliner was worn away, the stuffing coming away in little bits, and it was only a year and a half old.

  She had hoped it wouldn’t be like this. Counted on it, in fact. “We’ll get a motor home when you retire,” he had said. (He had retired two years before her.) “Travel the country. See the national parks. Go to Alaska.”

  She’d always wanted to see Alaska. It was only this prospect that had gotten her through the last couple of years as an ER nurse, the years that Harry had been at home and underfoot. But all she had seen was her own backyard on the fringes of the New York suburbs.

  They had bought the motor home all right. With funds from her 401k. Far be it for Harry to dip into his retirement fund. It was secondhand, but it still had enough bells and whistles to thrill Barbara: a TV over the dresser, snugly fitting natural wood cabinets, a refrigerator, stove, and microwave—even air-conditioning and its own burglar alarm! Small but perfect, like a ship’s cabin. All they needed, really. She often ate her dinner out there in the evenings with her toy poodle, Daisy, then stayed on to watch the news. She’d made curtains and throw pillows to coordinate with the floral bedspread and fastened down her knickknacks with poster adhesive to prevent them from breaking on the road. She’d even picked up a coordinating china pattern on sale— a service for four, which was more than enough for the two of them. After forty years of keeping house, she loved the sweet compactness of it—not a square inch wasted, everything fitting together as neatly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  But they had never gone anywhere in it. In fact, she didn’t think Harry had ever set foot in it, apart from the day they’d looked at it in the dealer’s lot.

  It just sat there in the driveway, arousing a welter of confused feelings in Barbara’s breast every time she set eyes on it, which was about twenty times a day, since she could see it from her kitchen sink. There was the urge to hit the open highway, despair that it would never happen, and hope that one day Harry would decide he was finally going to start enjoying life. As she was always pointing out to him, it wasn’t as if he’d been doled out an unlimited supply: there was only so much of it left.

  And that was dwindling away, moment by moment, day by day, Barbara thought as she stood at the sink after finishing with the vacuuming, drinking a glass of water, and looking out at the vehicle that was to have been the agent of her liberation.

  It was while she was standing there that she heard it: a squeal of brakes, a sickening thud. Daisy! Her heart leaped into her throat. But the little dog was curled up on her bed in the corner. Which meant that the car had hit a deer. It happened several times a year, and it was the only thing Barbara knew of that would arouse Harry from his vegetative state. He hated the deer that had overrun this corner of suburbia. Hated the way they ate the shrubbery, hated the way they crapped all over the yard, hated the way they stood in the driveway when you pulled in, refusing to get out of the way. “Deer with attitude,” he called them.

  It was typical that the only emotion Harry seemed to feel was hate. He maintained an extensive list of categorical hates, to which he referred with tiresome regularity. Shellfish, children, piano music, New York City, green leafy vegetables. At the top of the list were incompetents, which in Harry’s eyes was a category to which most of the world belonged. Next was deer. Barbara, on the other hand, loved them: their lustrous brown eyes, their graceful leaps, their a
ttitude of quiet repose.

  “The kings of Europe spent huge amounts of money to create deer parks on the grounds of their castles, and here we have a deer park right in our own backyard!” she would point out to him when they argued about it, which was often.

  “But that was for the purpose of killing them,” Harry would reply. He had done some deer hunting in his younger days, and liked to think of himself as a big-game hunter.

  After calling the police, Barbara headed out to assure the driver that an officer was on the way. Harry’s chair was empty, she noticed as she passed through the living room. He must already have gone out. It looked oddly vacant without Harry in it. Many nights he even slept there; she would awake in the morning to find the TV still on. At least she could look forward to him being in a good mood, she thought. Nothing made his day like a dead deer, especially one that had met its end right in front of the house.

  Warren Miller was just pulling up in the police cruiser as she reached the road. The dead deer—a good-sized doe— lay in front of their privet hedge, its entrails scattered over the pavement. The car must have broad-sided it. The driver had pulled over on the opposite shoulder; the left fender of his car was crumpled.

  Harry stood at the side of the car in his slippers, probably reassuring the driver that his wife had called the police and that an officer would be there shortly.

  The police were good about coming out right away. Getting the road crew out right away to clear the carcass too, before it started to putrefy. Residents didn’t like dead deer decaying in front of their houses. The dogs were also apt to get to them. Barbara would never forget the day Daisy had come home proudly clutching a foreleg in her teeth.

  “Another dead deer. You must be happy, Harry,” Warren said after he finished writing up his report. “And a doe besides,” he added, sharing in Harry’s pleasure that one less doe meant one less opportunity for the despised animals to reproduce. “How many are we up to so far this year?”

  Harry kept a running tally of the town’s deer fatalities, along with their locations. He gleaned the information from a combination of anecdotal accounts, empirical observation, and the Police Beat” column in the local newspaper. In the event of any confusion, he checked directly with the police department.

  Which meant that Warren Miller was well acquainted with Harry’s peculiar obsession.

  “This makes a hundred and fifty-two. Twenty-nine on Prospect Street alone,” he replied. His indignation at the fact that the deer population was greatest in his own neighborhood was tempered by the fact that this meant that the most deer fatalities took place there. “Thirty-four more than last year.”

  Warren nodded. “At this rate, the lime pit’s going to be full before the year’s out; we’re probably going to have to dig another one.” He was referring to the pit behind the public works garage where the municipal road crew dumped the deer carcasses.

  Warren had dismissed the driver of the car and was now adding a few notations to the accident report. Finishing, he closed the cover of his book and nodded at the motor home that sat in the driveway behind the small white Cape Cod- style home. “When are you planning on heading out in that thing?”

  He raised this subject every time they saw him, which was several times a year. His interest was prompted by a personal dream of taking a summer off with his family to tour the country in a motor home.

  “In the spring,” Harry replied. “Now that Barbara’s retired, there’s nothing to hold us back. But we’re going to wait until the weather’s better. We want to head up to Alaska—that’s always been Barbara’s dream: to see Denali National Park.”

  “Like to see that myself,” Warren said as he got back into the cruiser. “That, and a whole lot else.” He started the engine. “You take care now,” he said, and drove off.

  Nothing to hold us back, thought Barbara, except a remote control.

  The irony was that it was the death of the doe that finally blasted Harry out of his chair. The sight of the mangled carcass had ignited a blood lust that he claimed could be quenched only by hunting. “I’m going to get my license this year and get myself a deer,” he announced.

  Barbara paid no attention. She’d heard it all before. Plus, the idea of her overweight, diabetic couch potato of a husband traipsing around in the woods was too preposterous to bear contemplation.

  But to her surprise, he actually did it: got the license, the grunt tubes and rattling devices, and the 30.06 with a fancy scope—the whole nine yards. And to her even greater surprise, he actually shot a deer—a trophy buck with a nineteen-inch rack—which was probably due more to the fact that deer were thicker than ants at a picnic than any hunting expertise on his part. But at nearly two hundred pounds, Harry’s buck not only kept them in venison chops, it lifted Harry out of his depression. He now devoted the hours that he used to spend watching TV to reading hunting magazines; his intimacy with the remote control was replaced by that with his shotgun; and he spent hours planning his campaign for next hunting season. As far as Barbara was concerned, if it took the life of a single trophy buck to bring about this transformation, the sacrifice was well worth the price.

  Meanwhile, the motor home still sat in the driveway. But Barbara was hopeful that Harry’s newfound success as a whitetail hunter would provide the psychological boost to finally realize their dream of seeing the United States. And at Christmas, wearing the new orange vest she’d ordered from a hunting catalog, he had stunned her by saying: “I think we should head out west right after Saint Patrick’s Day. Start in the Southwest, then work our way up to Alaska. If we hit Alaska in late summer, we could be back down to Oregon for elk season. I’d like to do some elk hunting.”

  Barbara’s jaw fell open. A plan at last! Then he kissed her under the mistletoe. That night, they made love for the first time in years.

  In fact, she was delighted with the new Harry, even if his attire did make him look like a mercenary for a banana republic. The only aspect of their new life together that she found to complain about was, well...“Harry.”

  That’s what they called the deer hide that was the souvenir of the buck Harry had taken, along with the ten-point rack that now hung over the fireplace in the family room. The hide was huge: it must have been five feet long, including the legs. And it was smelly, the odor being a product of the tanning process that Harry had been assured would fade, but had yet to do so.

  It was their little joke. They’d named the hide after the old Hitchcock movie in which “Harry” was the corpse that the characters couldn’t find a place to dispose of. “Harry” had started out in the living room, but Barbara complained that it ruined her decorating scheme. Then they tried it in the family room, but it was too big to fit on the only wall that came close to accommodating it. It finally ended up in the rec room, but when they realized that the smell wasn’t going to fade, they moved it out to the motor home.

  It was now being used as a coverlet in the sleeping compartment over the cab, and if that meant the motor home smelled too much for Barbara to eat her dinners out there, that was fine. She was eating dinners with Harry now anyway.

  “Where’d you put ‘Harry’ now?” was the running joke. And after all those dreary years, it was nice to have something to laugh about with her husband.

  The second honeymoon didn’t last. By the end of January, Harry was back in his chair, his hand in its usual death grip around the neck of the remote. In fact, the remote had become more of an issue than ever. Harry had become forgetful and would leave it around the house. But would he admit to this? No. He would blame her, bellowing accusations from the depths of the recliner. Then the search would commence, and she would find the remote on the vanity next to the toilet seat or on the counter next to the refrigerator or buried in the seat of the chair. It didn’t take a Sherlock to figure out where he had left it given the fact that he now moved for only three reasons: to eat, to use the bathroom, and to get his daily shot of insulin, for which he didn’t even leave the
chair, but merely adjusted his position. He’d even gotten lax about personal hygiene, neglecting to shower and shave. Any talk of a trip had been abandoned. She’d suggested that he see a counselor, but this only provoked his ire: the problem didn’t lie with him, but with her. She was a controlling bitch; she was never satisfied; she only wanted to spend his hard-earned money; she only thought of herself. His list went on and on.

  Barbara tried not to take it personally. His complaints were the same about the rest of the world; nobody could do anything right. She ate in the motor home almost every night now, which no longer smelled since the hide had been banished to a box in the garage. Once her refuge, her house had become her prison, and it was only in the motor home that she felt at peace.

  After delivering Harry’s dinner on a tray, she would head out to the motor home, where she would spend the evening organizing her trip. She had bought a file box, which she had fitted with hanging files for each of the states. Into these, she put maps, travel brochures, information on campsites, and articles on tourist destinations. She also spent time learning about how to set up the vehicle’s various systems. Occasionally she even took it out for a test drive so she could practice backing up and making sharp turns. She wanted to be ready when the time arrived.

  It was on an evening in early March that Harry finally pushed her over the edge. She had eaten her dinner in the motor home and was coming back for her dessert. She could hear him as she approached the house. “Come here, you stupid bitch!” he was shouting, a note of hysteria in his voice. He must have been calling for her ever since she’d left.

  She presented herself at the side of his chair. He was watching a disaster documentary that he’d probably seen a dozen times already; it was about tornadoes. He was still wearing the bathrobe and slippers he’d been wearing the night before. “Where’s my remote?” he growled, his voice hard with anger. His eyes didn’t leave the screen, where two tornado chasers were speeding after a huge funnel.