Leather Maiden

26

I got the surprising news Monday morning.

Mrs. Timpson came out of her office and placed her ample ass on my desk corner and looked at me with eyes that had probably seen the first star pop alive in the first night sky.

“Oswald isn’t here today,” she said.

“I noticed that. He isn’t at his desk and has not been all morning. So, I deduced he was not here.”

“Well, that’s goddamn observant of you, Cason.”

“I’m a highly trained and skilled reporter.”

“And because you are so goddamn observant, and a little bit of a smartass, you can put your column on hold for today and do his job. My guess is you have a couple columns in reserve anyway. Am I right?”

“Well…”

“Yeah. I’m right. You still remember how to do a police report, I presume? You have done a police report, am I right?”

“I’ve done a few. Yes. For the Houston paper. It’s a pretty big paper. They even have color funnies on Sunday and a crossword puzzle.”

“That was my guess. Well, the police report is Oswald’s job, and since he isn’t here, today it’s your job. It’s also your job to take Oswald’s job of running down a story off the police report, and there is a story to run down. You still with me?”

“Clinging to your every word like a sloth clinging to a limb.”

I was pushing it, I knew, but I was tired and feeling irritable.

She gave me a hard look and shifted her false teeth in her mouth. “I glanced the report over, and what I want you to do is look at it, and follow up on this murder and kidnapping.”

My ears perked up. I liked being a columnist, but the idea of some real raw news appealed to me.

“There’s been a murder and kidnapping?” I asked.

“Well, I suppose the police who sent the e-mail could just be messing with us, but that’s what the story they gave us says, and they’re sticking to it.”

“I’ll get right on it,” I said.

“There’s two things I can smell quicker than anybody,” she said. “One is shit, and the other is a good news story, and I’m pretty sure what I’m smelling now is a news story, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s related to that girl who went missing sometime back, one you wrote about.”

“Caroline Allison.”

“That’s her. My take is this is related. Mark my words. The only reasoning I have behind that is my reporter’s nose is twitching. I sense a connection. I could just need to pass gas, but I’m going to stand by the connection theory.”

“Probably be more pleasant for all of us if you do,” I said.

“Get on it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I was about to stand up from my desk chair when Timpson leaned forward and gave me the watery eyeball. “Cason, you’ve done a good job on that column. I don’t give out compliments other than to tell the truth and because it seems to make people want to keep doing better, and that makes for a better paper, even if it makes my gums ache to say that crap. But you’ve done well. And you haven’t come in drunk. Those are two things I wanted to congratulate you on.”

“Thank you.”

“But you do seem a little distracted.”

“Nothing serious.”

“I just want you to know that I’m not here for you. I want the paper run right. That’s all I care about. If you got family problems, even if your mother is dying of some terminal cancer problem and it is eating her alive from the asshole out, you got to stay focused. She dies, you go to the funeral, and there’s a hot news story, you better be taking notes with your pad pressed up against her coffin. Understand?”

I started to tell her to go to hell, but since my mother wasn’t sick, I said, “I got you.”

“Just wanted to remind you that you’re always a worker here, and we’re never friends.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said. “I mean, sometimes, I think, wouldn’t it be great if you and me could just, you know, hang? Maybe shoot some pool. Take a bike ride. Moon some nuns together, just me and you. But mostly I think I’d rather not.”

“As I’ve told you, I like a little comedy, Cason, but that’s about as little as I like. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Get with it,” she said, and walked away, back to her shadowed foyer in the back, disappeared behind the boxes there, possibly to kick a puppy or cut the head off a child’s teddy bear.

The police reports had been e-mailed, and I read them over at Oswald’s desk on his computer. One of them, the one the old bat had wanted me to look into, hit me like a truck. I felt weak in the knees and my stomach turned queasy.

Ernie was dead and his girlfriend, Tabitha, was missing.

It took me a minute to take in that information and believe it. I thought about calling the police department, asking some questions, but I decided to drive over to Ernie and Tabitha’s place, get things a little more direct.

On my way out I passed Belinda and she looked a question at me, but I just nodded at her and went on.

I drove over to Ernie and Tabitha’s house. The address had been listed on the police report, but of course I knew where it was.

When I got there the police were still working it. There were a lot of cop cars and unmarked cars along the curb. Uniformed cops were running about, and there were people wearing hospital footsies and plastic gloves and little masks pulled down under their chins. My first thought after seeing so many Houston crime scenes was simple. The Camp Rapture yahoos didn’t have a clue what they were doing and if there were any clues in the yard, they were stomping them flat, contaminating the crime scene.

As expected, there were yellow strips across the front door of the house with POLICE, DO NOT CROSS written on them in big black letters. A couple of guys wearing the footsies and plastic gloves pulled their masks up and ducked under the tape and entered the house.

The chief was leaning against an unmarked car, glaring up at the sky, waiting for a revelation, or perhaps the Rapture.

He looked at me as I came up. “Reporter, how are you? I’m so goddamn glad to see you.”

He sounded more than a little insincere.

“What’s the scoop?” I said.

“It’s ugly, Jason.”

“Cason. How ugly?”

“Dead is pretty ugly,” he said. “And the next-door neighbors, they tell us there was a girl, and she’s missing. They don’t think she could do such a thing, so maybe she got ’napped since we can’t find her. That’s what we’re saying for now.”

“But you’re not so sure?”

“We got her name and we’ve notified her family, and we’re going to notify the boy’s family. Holding off on that for a little bit, wait until we can get him sacked up.”

“Was the girl a student?” I knew she was, but if she was missing, it might give them a lead. An idea to start checking the school and who might have known her. Of course, that could lead them right to Jimmy, but it was better at the moment for me to fish a bit, find out what they knew.

“Yeah. She’s a student. We’ve checked at school, class she’s supposed to be in. Followed up a few leads we got from the neighbors. Doesn’t look good. Damn. I need a drink.”

I thought what he really meant was he needed another.

“No note?” I asked.

“Note?”

“From the kidnappers.”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. If there was a note, I’d know for a fact she got ’napped, now wouldn’t I? I got that much savvy. I know how to pull my socks on one at a time, shit in the pot and not on the floor. I’m not totally useless. So, there was a note, I’d know if she was kidnapped, now wouldn’t I, Jason?”

“Cason.”

“You’re not saying Jason?”

“No. Cason. With a C.”

“I’ll be damned. Could have sworn you were saying Jason.”

“Nope.”

“Huh.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re right. You would.”

“Would what?”

“Know if she had been kidnapped…if there was a note.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Of course. They leave a note, you got their word, and who wouldn’t believe the word of a murderer? I see you got a camera there. Nice little camera, small, easy to handle. Maybe you should have been sneakier.”

“Why would I be sneaky?”

“There’s nothing you’re going to be photographing inside.”

“I was gonna take some outside photos. You know, the POLICE, DO NOT CROSS strips. Maybe a shot of you looking very investigative.”

“Again, you’re not going inside. You did, you’d wish you hadn’t. I did. I wish I hadn’t.”

“That bad?” I said.

“I’m always surprised at how much blood is in the human body. It’s spread from one end of that shithole to the other. And it’s pretty fresh, he’s been dead, oh, I don’t know, maybe today early, before light. Maybe yesterday late. Guy was naked and in bed. Well, a lot of him was. There was some more of him elsewhere, and, I’m sure you know this, being a crack reporter and all, but he shit all over the place too.”

“How was he killed?”

“Machete or axe would be my guess. Sword if one was available. Might have been more than one person did it. It was one killer, it was a goddamn tiger. It was like someone held him down and ran a lawn mower over him. Meth heads is a good guess. They seem to always be hacking people or chopping heads off.”

I tried to keep my face neutral, but what I was thinking was Jimmy and I had been in that house, our fingerprints might be in there. Then I remembered we had been wearing gloves and felt a shade better.

“So a tiger did it with a machete, or possibly a lawn mower?” I said.

“Find your own comparison. I’m not that poetic. Do I look like fuckin’ Dylan Thomas?”

“No. But a lot of people will be surprised you know who he is, and a lot of them will wonder who it is you know about.”

“I’m surprised you know who he is,” the chief said.

“Touché.”

“Literature major. That was me. Should have stuck with it. I’d be in a university somewhere, teaching kids that would hang on my every word. I could be looking up coeds’ dresses watching beaver move inside underpants, and I could be talking. I like to talk. I’m good at it. Everything else for me sucks the big old donkey dong. I’m not cop material, you know? But don’t tell the town council. I need the job. My wife and kids like to eat.”

“So you don’t know anything about the girl?”

“Officially, we haven’t got a clue. Me, I’m thinking she might have done it, woke up in the night, worked the dirty deed.”

He pushed away from the car to stand for a moment, took a deep breath. I decided he wasn’t drunk after all. He hung his head and patted at his pocket like he might be looking for cigarettes, but nothing was there. I tagged him for an ex-smoker.

“Why would she do it?” I asked.

“He left the toilet lid up. I don’t know. It could be anything. That’s another thing to be answered, and guess who doesn’t have the answers yet? Your one and only swinging dick of a chief of police, that’s who, and that would be me, pardner. Shit, Jason—”

“Cason.”

“Damn, I’m sorry. We just went through that. But I was going to say, I seen some car wrecks, shit like that, even a murder, a suicide, a guy jumped from an overpass and did a one-point on his noggin. He was all over the highway, like a dropped watermelon. Saw some things like that even before I was a cop. Had a job once where I cleaned apartments. Back in college. And this guy, he blew his brains out with a shotgun, and it was all over the place. And the company I worked with, we got hired to clean it up, and I thought that was bad, but now I got this, and let me tell you, this is bad, boy, bad. It looks like there was a tomato fight in the bedroom. Except it don’t smell like tomatoes. It smells like what’s in there, and there’s some kind of cat piss smell too, only there isn’t a cat. Let me just boil it down, and say it is some ugly goddamn business.”

“I’m starting to get the picture,” I said.

I remembered that cat piss smell from when Jimmy and I were in the house. It could have been from former renters; cat piss stays with a place better than fresh paint.

“Shit, boy. They chopped off his dick. Looked like a little sausage lying there on the floor. One of them, what do you call them, Vienna sausages, isn’t that it? Isn’t that the little ones?”

He was chattering on like a squirrel. He didn’t wait for me to respond.

“I don’t like this at all,” he continued. “Not even one little bit. Today I have looked at the abyss, and let me tell you, it has looked back with both eyeballs and it is one hideous motherfucker.”

“You should have finished college,” I said. “Quoting philosophers and the like.”

“I got too deep in debt. I only lack a year. Don’t think I don’t think about going back. As of today, I’m thinking about it a lot more. I got the job here because I thought it was even sleepier than the town I came from. Truth is, though, there’s always something, and there isn’t any such thing as a quiet town, unless maybe there are only two people in it and one of them is dead.”

“So,” I said, “you’re thinking the girl gets up in the middle of the night and does a Lizzie Borden. That’s not much of a theory.”

“It isn’t much of a theory,” the chief said, “but I’m not much of a police chief either.”

“Nothing else you can share?”

“Someone cut off the air conditioner,” he said, “and I don’t think it was to save on electricity. They did it so the body would get hot and stink. It worked. And there is a little thing we’re holding back, so I won’t tell you that. You can just say we’re holding back some things that only the killer/kidnapper could know. That’s good enough right now.”

“Will you tell me in confidence what you’re holding back?”

“No.”

“Is it a good lead?”

“No. We’re just a Podunk police department, did I tell you that?”

“You did.”

A cop came out of the front door of the house then, and though we were a good distance away, out by the curb, an odor came out with him. The cop leaned over and threw up in the shrubbery.

“Close that goddamn door,” the chief yelled. Another uniformed cop leaped out of the yard, padded up there in his paper pullover footsies, his gloves, grabbed the doorknob and closed it.

“Everybody here, get some goddamn masks on,” the chief said. “Not just some of you, all of you. You’re wearing one around your neck, get near that house, pull it up.”

The cops scuttled about when he was finished yelling.

“I doubt murder is contagious,” I said.

“These days, so much murder going around, you got to wonder. It’s like some kind of disease. And you got the smell. A mask helps that…I know I don’t sound like much of a cop, but I don’t give a shit. I’m not much of a cop.”

“You said that already.”

“I’m just making sure the word gets out.”

“At least you showed up. I heard the old chief didn’t get out of the office much.”

“He was smarter than me.”

“What’s okay for me to print? What facts are there?”

“Well, the guy is dead. That one is a fact. The girl is gone, and that’s fact two. It’s also bloody in there and the deed was done with something big and sharp. That’s about it.”

“Sign of forced entry?” I asked.

“Nope. Front door was unlocked. One of the neighbors remembers seeing a dark-colored van parked in the drive. It could have been black, green, blue, just about any color but white. Saw it late, before he went to bed. Didn’t notice the time. Said he thought he had seen it before, sometime back. Few months back. But couldn’t be sure. Looked out the window for no other reason than he wanted to look. Saw the van and didn’t think anything of it. No reason he should. People have visitors all the time. He didn’t hear any yelling, but says his air conditioner runs loud and he had the TV on. None of the other neighbors saw or heard anything. Look, I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and worry about it later.”

“I’d like to take those photos of the outside of the house, a shot or two of you.”

“You do that, but you do it from the road. I don’t want you on the lawn. A valuable clue that we probably won’t find anyway might be there. As for me, I’m not up for pictures, and believe me, I like my picture taken, like it so much you bought some National Geographic footage you’d probably find me on it or in it. I’ll jump in front of a camera, I get the chance. But not today. No fucking way. We catch whoever did this, it’ll be an accident. Someone saw something and tells us, we might catch a break. Someone comes forward and admits it. Someone knows who did it because they bragged. My God, that bedroom was coated in blood. All over the bed, the walls. And there were bloody tracks, and there was that boy’s shit smell. Jesus. A mess. A sickening mess.”

“It’s as bloody as you said, you ought to have some shoe prints.”

“Oh, yeah. No one was trying to be careful, either because they were in a frenzy, didn’t care or didn’t expect to be caught. We got footprints, but it’ll be a Cinderella job, going to everyone with that size shoe, matching it to their foot. I might as well just put an ad in the paper begging the killer to turn himself in.”

“Cheaper than DNA.”

“I told you about our budget. What DNA? Guy doing the fingerprints, sucker took a two-day fingerprint course. He might as well have got his training off the back of a gum wrapper.”

“Was the place ransacked?”

“Torn apart, looked like the Tasmanian Devil had been in there. But that could have been a plan on the woman’s part. Make it look like murder and robbery, and her taken by the killer. She could plan on showing up later, having escaped from her killers, so to speak. That would be clever.”

He chattered on some more, finally got in his car and drove away. I walked around the outside of the house and took the photos, then I went back to the office and typed up a generic kind of report. When I finished typing it up, I filed it with Timpson, went to lunch, pulled up at the curb in front of the café. Before I went inside for a sandwich, I got out my cell phone and called Jimmy.

His cell went to voice mail, and I left a message: “Call me.”