by Joel Goldman
A woman had been sitting on my landlady's couch, her feet on my landlady's coffee table, eating my popcorn and watching my landlady's television. The images on the screen were frozen, two women and a man struggling over a gun. She'd stopped the action with my landlady's remote control and bolted to her feet.
She looked to be in her early thirties, lean and muscled with light brown curly hair framing a round face, her eyes wide open and curious but not afraid, her arms hanging loose at her sides, a compact light featherweight. She shifted her weight, subtly setting herself for a confrontation. I recognized the automatic response of someone who been trained and under the gun.
"Who the hell are you?" she asked me.
Ruby sprang off the couch and into my lap, planted her front paws on my chest, and licked my face, cleaning my chin and both cheeks.
"I'm Jack Davis. I live here. Who the hell are you?"
"I'm Lucy Trent and this is my house."
"I don't think so. I mean you may be Lucy Trent but this isn't your house. I rented this place from Lorraine Trent."
"She's my stepmother."
I pulled myself off the floor, taking a breath and holding onto the stairway banister.
"She's my landlady."
Another burst of shakes whipped through me.
"Are you okay? Why are you shaking?"
"It's what I do."
"All the time?"
I walked into the living room. Lorraine Trent had called it the living den, the house not big enough for both a living room and a den. She'd bragged about the new hardwood floors, the fresh paint, and the new appliances that justified the rent she was charging me.
"No. Not all the time."
I was within arm's reach of her but Lucy didn't back up or relax, telling me with a wry smile that she didn't consider a middle-aged man with the shakes to be much of a threat.
"Well that's a relief. I'd hate to put someone on the street who shakes all the time."
Chapter Seven
"Don't be in such a hurry. Follow me," I told her. I kept the lease in the top drawer of a desk in the kitchen. I showed it to her. "Like I said. It's my house for another eight months."
She skimmed it, nodding at the signatures. "My turn."
She led the way to the bedroom that overlooked the driveway. A duffel bag and backpack lay on the bed. She rummaged through the backpack, handing me an envelope. I opened it. Inside was a copy of the deed to the house naming Lucy Trent as the owner.
"Lorraine didn't say anything to me about this."
"Don't feel bad. She didn't say anything to me about you but, then again, we don't talk much. My father left my mother for her when I was ten. Kind of chilled the whole stepmother-stepdaughter bonding thing. Dad's will provided she could live in the house for five years after he died. Then the house went to me. The five years was up four months ago. I wasn't ready to move back until now."
"She said she was a biologist, that she was going to Africa to do research for a year."
"With luck, she'll lose her passport."
I sat on the bed, another tremor rippling through me. My ex-wife, Joy, and I bought a house in the suburbs when the FBI transferred me to Kansas City. We sold it when we got divorced, the proceeds paying our debts and our lawyers and putting a small stake in both our pockets. Either of us could have left, picked a place without the raw memories of our failed marriage and dead children, but Kansas City was a good place to heal. The pace was easy, the people friendly. The city was comfortable and comforting, like a soft sweatshirt on a cool day.
The house I'd rented was part of that fabric. The fireplace, the overstuffed furniture, and the trees that towered over the front and back, home to enough birds and squirrels for Ruby to chase until she was exhausted, were all part of the balm.
"I'll buy it. The house, I mean. Plus the furniture, everything."
She laughed. "If you could afford that, you wouldn't be renting."
Ruby found us, first jumping on Lucy who was standing in the middle of the room, then leaping onto the bed, sticking her nose in my face.
"That doesn't sound like no. It sounds like how much."
She put her hands on her hips. "All it sounds like is that I'm not going to kick you out tonight."
"Suppose I come up with enough money to make you an offer to sell?"
"I have a rule, Jack. I only deal with what's in front of me."
"Fair enough."
My cell phone rang. I flipped it open and recognized the voice.
"Jack, it's Ammara Iverson."
Ammara had been one of my agents when I ran the Violent Crimes Squad in the FBI's Kansas City office. Most of my Bureau friendships had faded once the shared work that held them together ended. Ammara was different. Though we hadn't seen each other very often, the bond was still there.
"Hey, it's great to hear your voice. What's up?"
"You doing anything?"
"Just trying to decide whether to buy a house or get evicted from it. Why?"
"I've got a dead man wants to talk to you."
The dead man was what my squad called the scene of a homicide, the scene telling us what the victim couldn't. Ammara knew that I trusted the dead man more than anyone or anything but that didn't explain why she was calling me.
"Tell the dead man I'm retired."
"You might wish you weren't when you talk to this one. You better get over here." She hung up after giving me the address and directions.
The FBI had rules for everything including the handling of crime scenes. Preserving the integrity of the physical evidence was critical to solving a crime and getting a conviction. Access to the scene was tightly controlled. Ex-FBI agents didn't qualify. Whatever her reasons, Ammara wanted me inside the yellow tape.
Lucy watched me throughout my brief conversation, making no pretense of not listening.
"Who's the dead man?"
"Inside joke. I've got to go meet a friend of mine."
"What are you retired from?"
"The FBI."
"Your friend with the FBI?"
"For someone who's throwing me out of my house, you ask a lot of questions."
"Best way I know to learn."
"Find another teacher."
I stood for an instant before muscle contractions jackknifed my head to my knees. I reached for something to hold onto, finding Lucy's arm, her steady grip stabilizing me.
"I'll drive," she said. "You're in no shape."
Some lessons are forced on me. One of them is accepting help when I didn't have a choice. I was in worse condition than the snow-packed streets. If Ammara needed me, my first concern was getting there, not who drove. The contractions released me.
"Okay, let's go."
Chapter Eight
Kansas City covers a lot of territory from the airport north of the Missouri River, to the NASCAR track across the state line in western Wyandotte County, Kansas, to the Truman Sports Complex in eastern Jackson County, Missouri. There are better than forty municipalities spread over five counties and two states, enough for everyone to claim a fiefdom yet many will tell a stranger that they live in Kansas City rather than Raytown, Prairie Village, Independence, or Overland Park.
The southern reaches aren't identified with an iconic landmark. On the Kansas side, they are defined by large, new, and expensive rooftops sheltering more per capita disposable income than many of the country's zip codes, extending beyond the eye's reach much as prairie grasses must have in another time. The rooftops on the Missouri side are smaller, older, and modest, covering the working middle class. The address Ammara gave me was for one of these.
Despite its reach, you could drive from one edge of the metropolitan area to the other in forty-five minutes, sixty in traffic. Snow changed that. The storm had singled out midtown where six inches had fallen. As we crept south, the accumulation was less, the streets more navigable. The slow drive gave my body time to stuff the clown back into the jack-in-the-box. My breathing eased, my muscles rel
axed, my head cleared. I was back in control.
Lucy limited her questions to the directions Ammara had given me. I watched her as she drove, turning into a skid when ice grabbed the tires, grinning as we spun. I wondered how she had earned her swagger. She carried herself like someone who came from my world, someone who was trained for the perpetual scrum between the good guys and the bad guys, someone who knew the dead man.
Uniformed cops had established a perimeter, closing off traffic at both ends of the block. They let us through after checking with Ammara. Lucy pulled into a driveway across the street and opened her door.
"Stay in the car," I told her. She held onto the door handle, one foot on the pavement, sizing me up again, her eyes hard, her mouth firm, the look letting me know that she'd damn well go if she wanted. "Listen, I appreciate that you drove. But you have to wait here. This isn't your show."
She eased back and smiled. "You're right. Sorry."
"Habit?"
"Yeah."
"Thought so."
The house sat back from the curb on a slight rise, the front door shrouded by a low-pitched roof jutting over a deep set front porch, most of which was screened in, an irregular wall of bushes and stunted trees, leafless in winter, dividing the far property line from the neighbor to the west. Stout pillars of inlaid Missouri limestone supported both front corners. Two dormers poked out of the roof, signaling an attic long ago converted to bedrooms.
A walkway led from the driveway across the middle of the lawn, three steps completing the journey to the narrow front door. The storm had petered out by the time it reached this part of the city, dusting old snow with a sprinkling of new. Patches of dark ice hid on the walk, waiting patiently for hurried, careless feet.
Ammara was waiting for me on the front porch, standing next to another uniformed cop in charge of the crime scene sign-in sheet taped onto the front door. Her black leather jacket was open, her FBI shield hanging on a chain around her neck, a green turtleneck sweater highlighting her ebony skin. She had the height, reach, and power to have been an All American volleyball player in college, traits she'd used to her advantage during ten years with the Bureau, the last three in Kansas City.
I hadn't seen her since Wendy's funeral. She hugged me long and hard that day, skipping the platitudes that time healed all wounds and that heaven was a better place and that Wendy was finally at peace because we both knew they were total bullshit. That day was personal. Today was business and we both knew the difference.
"Thanks for coming, Jack."
"You made it sound irresistible. What do you got?"
"Walter Enoch. Fifty-four years old. Worked for the post office as a mail carrier."
FBI agents, cops, DEA, it didn't matter, we all liked to tell stories. There was no fun in cutting to the chase whether the news was good or bad so there was no point in pushing her.
"What happened to him?"
"He died. Probably yesterday, probably of natural causes but we won't know for certain until we get the autopsy results."
"So why the yellow tape and why did you call me?"
"Come inside."
Mail was stacked like cord wood in the entry hall. More stacks narrowed the passage on the stairs to the second floor.
"The guy was a mail carrier but he never opened his mail?" I asked.
"No. The guy was a mail carrier who stole other people's mail, which he didn't open. It'll take a month or more to sort through all of it, figure out what to throw away and what to try to deliver. Some of this stuff goes back years. A whole lot of people are going to find out whether better late than never really is better. This is just part of it."
We walked into the dining room. The table was buried under a mountain of magazines and catalogs. Foothills made of unopened bills, checks, coupons, sweepstakes, and credit card offers spread from the dining room into the kitchen. Unread love letters, thank-you notes, demands, denials, rejections, acceptances, rants, raves, promises, apologies, and more were piled in silent drifts against windowsills, yellowed and coated with dust.
More mail sealed off bookcases, a fireplace, and a television in the den. The ceiling light was yellow and faint, the walls paneled with dark pine.
Walter Enoch's body, rank with the rotten, gaseous odor of decomposition, was slumped in a recliner upholstered in a blue and red tartan plaid shoved against one wall. His gray, bloodless face was hairless, rutted and ribbed with flesh bunched into ridges around his eyes, stretched thin around his mouth, his cheeks pocked and mottled, the residue of severe burns. A large plastic bin with U.S. POSTAL SERVICE stenciled on the sides sat next to the chair.
"Who found him?" I asked.
"His supervisor came to check on him when he didn't show up for work. When no one answered, he called the cops. They forced the door and the supervisor identified the body. There was no sign of foul play but KCPD treated it as a crime scene because of the stolen mail. That makes it federal so they called the Bureau. I was the first agent on the scene and I found this in his lap."
She handed me a plastic evidence bag containing an empty square-shaped pink envelope, the kind that would be used for a greeting card or personal stationery. It was addressed to me at the house I had lived in before the divorce, the handwriting so familiar it hurt. A postal sticker forwarding it to my new address was pasted beneath the old one. A burst of shakes bolted from my belly to my breast, my question stumbling out of my mouth.
"What was inside the envelope?"
"I don't know. It was empty when I found it. The only name in the return address is the initials MG. Any idea whose initials they are?"
I took a deep breath. "Yeah. MG stands for Monkey Girl. It was a nickname I gave Wendy when she was little. She had a stuffed animal, a monkey that she never let go of. She called it Monkey Girl too. The handwriting is hers."
I didn't tell her that Wendy kept Monkey Girl until the day she died or that I had claimed it as my inheritance. I had pictures of Wendy growing up taken at birthday parties, holidays, and for no reason at all. They chronicled her life, visual confirmation of moments in time. Monkey Girl was more than that. Its fake fur and rubber face was a link between the two of us, an indelible reminder of silly names and games, happy times and infinite possibilities.
"Then take a look at the postmark."
The postmark was hard to read because the ink was smeared and the plastic bag made it look like it was underwater. I held it close, angled it in the light and stopped breathing. The envelope and whatever had been inside it had been mailed to me from New York City a month ago, ten months after I buried my daughter.
"You said that the envelope was empty when you found it."
"And, it was in Enoch's lap."
"Maybe he was reading whatever was inside the envelope when he died," I said.
"Then we should have found it on him or next to him and we didn't. We haven't been through everything in the house, but we didn't find anything on the surface of this mess that matches up with the envelope. And none of the rest of the stolen mail has been opened."
I looked at Ammara, now understanding why she had called me. An empty envelope addressed to me by my deceased daughter was cause enough for an investigation. Finding it in the lap of a dead man whose job was to deliver the mail and whose hobby was stealing the mail but not opening it was a bonanza of coincidences. I hated coincidences. They deceived you with their convenient explanations for things that weren't so easily understood.
"You think someone took whatever was in the envelope?" I asked.
"What do you think?"
I surveyed the mail in the den, thought about the unopened stacks and piles I'd seen in the rest of the house.
"I think that makes the most sense based on what we see so far."
"So do I. If we're right, whoever took your mail could have been here when Walter died."
I nodded. "Most people would have tried to help him, called an ambulance, done something."
"Unless they wanted Enoch to d
ie," Lucy Trent said.
Chapter Nine
Ammara and I were facing Enoch's body, our backs to Lucy, unaware she was watching and listening. We turned around. She was standing in the entryway from the dining room to the den, one hand in her coat pocket, the other at her side, palming her cell phone, rotating it in a slow arc, the cell phone camera capturing the scene with faint whirrs and clicks. I glanced at Ammara to see whether she realized what Lucy was doing but her eyes were fixed over Lucy's shoulder, searching for the soon-to-be-demoted street cop that let Lucy past the yellow tape.
"There's always that," I said, wondering why Lucy was photographing the scene and why my instincts told me not to bust her.
"I got bored waiting for you in the car," Lucy said.
"Who's she and what's she doing in the middle of my dead man?" Ammara asked me.
"It's complicated," I said.
"Not really," Lucy said as she slipped her phone into the purse slung over her shoulder. "I'm Lucy Trent. I own the house where Jack lives until I kick him out, which could happen sooner rather than later the way things are going. I drove him out here because he was shaking too badly to do it himself. That's not so complicated."
"This is a crime scene," Ammara told her. "Authorized personnel only and you aren't authorized."
Lucy smiled and nodded. "So that's what the dead man means. Crime scene. I like it."
Ammara took two steps toward Lucy. I cut her off, my back to Lucy again. "It's okay."
Ammara leaned in toward me, her voice hard but too quiet for Lucy to hear us. "What do you mean it's okay? This is my scene, not yours. Your invitation didn't include a date."
"Understood," I said, my voice matching hers. "I'll handle it."
