Leather Maiden

27

Went all day and didn’t hear from Jimmy. I thought about going over to the university, but didn’t. I didn’t go to his house, because I didn’t want to give Trixie anything to think about. She was a smart woman. I wasn’t sure how well I could hide what was on my mind, pretend that nothing was wrong.

Belinda and I had dinner together at my parents’ place. They loved her, and Mother fussed over her and made sure she had plenty to eat and asked her all manner of questions.

Belinda was a real hit.

When we went out, I saw Jazzy in her tree. She hadn’t been there when we drove up, but now that it was growing dark, when she should have been inside, she was in the tree.

I looked up and said, “Hi, Jazzy.”

She raised her hand and waved like she didn’t really mean it.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Jazzy said.

“This is my friend, Belinda.”

“Hello, Jazzy,” Belinda said.

“Are you still my friend?” Jazzy asked.

“Sure, honey,” I said. “We’re always friends.”

“Okay,” she said, but she didn’t act like she meant it. She turned her back to us and sat on the other side of the little platform and looked toward her own house.

“Bye, Jazzy,” I said.

“Glad to meet you, Jazzy,” Belinda said.

Without turning, Jazzy lifted her hand in a goodbye wave.

We went out to the car. When we were inside, Belinda said, “That little girl has a crush on you.”

“That’s obscene.”

“Nothing like that. She doesn’t like seeing you with me. She thinks that’s the end for her. In psych class I learned about that. She’s not used to having friends, or they leave her. Trust issues.”

“You can’t know all that meeting her once,” I said, starting the engine.

“No. But you’ve told me about her, and now I’ve met her. Didn’t you say her mother is…well, a tramp?”

I eased the car out into the street. “That seems to be the case.”

“We have to help her, Cason.”

“I know. I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. Though that’s not a good excuse. I get my head straight here in a few days, I’m going to push Child Protective Services hard. I may write a piece about their incompetence. They should have already done something. They’ve let Jazzy fall through the cracks.”

“You’re an all-right guy,” Belinda said.

“And you’re not so bad yourself,” I said.

We didn’t go to Belinda’s place or mine. I told her I had some research to do, a column I was thinking about writing. She took it well enough, but I figured she was already thinking I was looking for a way to dump her; thinking maybe she had made a mistake with Jazzy, saying “we” had to do something, therefore making us a couple.

I couldn’t let that worry me right then. I went home and sat in a chair and read a bit of a book, and then I paced awhile. I set the alarm and tried to take a two-hour nap, but I just lay there the whole time looking up, trying to make animals and insect shapes out of the water spots on the ceiling, then the alarm went off and I got up and walked around some more.

At about one a.m. I got a screwdriver out of my toolbox under the kitchen sink, got a container of Vicks VapoRub, put it in my coat pocket along with a neckerchief and the screwdriver. I added gloves and a flashlight to the pocket, pulled on the coat, which was a little too warm for the weather, wore my old tennis shoes, picked up an extra pair of shoes, walked out to my car and drove over to the murder site.

I drove past the place and glanced at it. I could see the yellow tape was still there. I wondered if the chief had stationed someone to wait and see if Tabitha came back, but truth was, I doubted he had thought of it. He was quite the mess, and the way he was handling things, it might end up with him hosing oil off a filling station driveway, maybe greeting people at the Wal-Mart.

I circled anyway, just to be sure. Second time I went by, I decided there was no one outside watching, not unless they were in a tree. To be safe, I checked those as much as the dark would allow.

There was one advantage: the house wasn’t well lit from the streetlights. In fact, all the streetlights along that way had been knocked out; probably kids with BB guns or pellet rifles. Still, I didn’t pull up in the driveway or park out front at the curb. I went around the block and found a place to stop under a tree in a little park. The park consisted of about a half acre, a dozen big trees and a picnic table. I locked the car and walked back to the house. As I went dogs barked, and one light went on in a house nearby, but no one came to the window and no one opened the door.

I walked faster, and pretty soon I was down at the corner of the block. The coat made me warm, but I liked the pockets. They held my tools.

I stood there for just a moment, then went back a few steps, slipped over a wooden fence without snagging my balls and went through a backyard that was dark. I went over the other side of the fence without getting attacked by a dog that turned out to be a stone yard ornament, and landed in the backyard of the house I wanted.

I got the gloves out of my coat and pulled them on. I took hold of the screwdriver. I went to the back window and tested it with my hands. I didn’t need the screwdriver. It went right up. Maybe whoever had come in had come in this way. Or maybe the cops had unlocked it from the inside and left it that way. I could see it like that, in there with the stench and the body, and someone had to throw open the window, get some air.

When the window was up, a foul odor like the graveyard of all things long dead gusted out at me. I turned without considering and threw up in the unkempt shrubbery there. I got the Vicks jar out of my pocket, opened it up and dunked my finger in and rubbed it under my nose, and pushed some of it up each nostril. I pulled the neckerchief out and tied it around my face.

I stepped through the window and pulled myself inside, turned on the flashlight. The air conditioner was humming. One of the cops had turned it back on, to preserve the crime scene maybe. More likely because he couldn’t take the heat and the stench. It didn’t help much in the latter department, even with it on and my nose full of Vicks.

I took off the coat and draped it over the windowsill and took a look around.

First thing I saw was the bed. It was deeply stained with blood and feces; it drooped in the middle. There were hacks in the old-style mattress and the stuffing was poking out in spots, and the part of it that was not stained stood out prominently, white as ready-to-pick cotton.

The chief was right. It was hard to imagine there was that much blood in the human body. Because of the air conditioner, the blood was still drying and it had all gone dark as motor oil. The walls were splattered with it. The killer had moved around, striking from all angles; I knew that much from investigating crime scenes in Houston.

I took a deep breath of Vicks, flashed the light at my feet, and then spread the pool of yellow forward until it fell on the bloody shoe tracks the chief told me about. They were all around the bed. It looked as if someone had danced there. I eased over without stepping in the mess, and saw amongst the shoe prints bloody little bare footprints. I knew that would be Tabitha. The chief had either been playing coy with me or he was as stupid as he thought he was, because it was obvious she had been nabbed. And then I thought, maybe they fought alongside the bed, her with the machete, or the axe, and finally she had pushed him back on the bed and finished him off; that would explain some things.

But it wasn’t an explanation I was buying.

I eased around the bed, had to tiptoe to keep from stepping on the prints and smears of prints that were everywhere. I could figure what had happened pretty easy. Whoever had hacked Ernie to death had then grabbed the girl and waltzed her through the bedroom and out the front door, into the van in the driveway. I went into the living room following her bloody prints; they went bloody to the door.

I went back to the bedroom and flashed the flashlight back on the wall. There was a spot where someone had put their finger in the blood and drawn little V-like shapes, like a series of shots of a blood-red bird rising. It went up from behind the bedstead to near the ceiling. There was writing there too, done in blood with a fingertip. It read: “And the birds of prey, having plucked the bones, had flown, leaving neither flesh nor soul.”

The crude bird drawing and the verse must have been the bit the chief was holding back. Something he could use to nail the killer later, something only the killer and the police would know. I had a pad and pen in my pocket. As a reporter, I always carried them. I put the light in my teeth and wrote on the pad what I had read off the wall. I drew my impression of the V-winged birds too. I put the pad and pen away and stood there for a while with the flashlight back in my hand, moving it slowly around the room, just looking, unhurried and careful.

I came back to the birds and the verse. The way they were positioned meant someone had stood on the bed to do it, and that doing it meant something to them.

I thought about Tabitha again, and followed her tracks back through the door that went into the living room. There were a lot of bloody shoe prints, and I bent down and looked at them. There were two sets. I was sure of it. They were the same kind of shoes, same kind of treads. Tennis shoes most likely. But it was two pairs, no question. One large and one small.

I went to the front door, flipped the lock and cracked the door easily and looked out at the yellow tape across the door, and then I looked out into the driveway where the van would have been. From the door to the van was about ten feet. I could see faint bloody footprints on the driveway.

Nothing clever here. They had pulled up in the driveway and come inside and killed Ernie and hijacked Tabitha. Must have worked the door somehow and caught them sleeping, or maybe the couple knew them and let them in.

But who did it, and why?

Whatever the reason, I was pretty certain it had something to do with the DVDs, and maybe with me and Jimmy. Maybe it was as simple as them trying to blackmail someone who had the same idea Jimmy had, about killing them. Only it was more than an idea for this guy, and he had wanted to take it out on Ernie, big-time. But why kidnap Tabitha? Did he have other plans for her?

I locked the front door and watched my footing. I looked around with my flashlight. The computer was smashed and there were clothes thrown about and drawers were dumped and shattered dishes were on the floor. Maybe they wanted it to look like some kind of insane druggies committing a murder, or maybe they really were looking for something, like the computer discs and hard drive I had hidden in my closet ceiling. Maybe Ernie and Tabitha had hidden other copies, stuffed them under dinner plates, inside the couch, anywhere, and the searcher, or searchers, had found them. Or maybe what caused all the blood was that they didn’t find them. No doubt in my mind Tabitha or Ernie would have told them about Jimmy and me, about us taking the DVDs. The thought of that made it feel as if someone had dropped an ice cube down my back.

I went through the bedroom and got my coat and went out the back window, and closed it. I put the neckerchief in my coat pocket, and went over the fence, across the yard and over the fence on the other side. I started walking back toward my car. I pulled off my gloves and put them in my pockets.

When I got to the car, I drove out toward San Augustine, a nearby town. I drove on out that way until the woods got thick. A few miles before I came to the town I came across a little red clay road and I took that. I parked alongside the road next to a slough of water, shining silver in the moonlight. I took off my tennis shoes and put on the leather shoes I had brought. I got out of the car and took the tennis shoes and tossed them out into the slough. If the police found my tracks back at the house, printed in some of the blood I might have accidentally stepped in, and if anything led them back to me, I didn’t want to have the shoes in my closet for them to look at. When I got home, I had to remember to clean the gas and brake pedals with paper towels and flush them down the commode, in case any of the blood from my shoes had ended up there. It wasn’t exactly a superhuman effort to elude the police, as I couldn’t imagine them having anything that might lead them to me. But it was something to do, and it was all I knew to do, and it made me feel better to think about doing it.

I got back in my car, and when I put my hands on the wheel they were trembling. I drove down the road a ways because it was too narrow to turn around, drove with the window down, letting air blow on me, keeping me alert.

I imagined I could still smell that stink of death from the house. I even paused and pulled over to put some more Vicks up my nose. I drove until I found a narrow drive with a cattle guard. I pulled in there, backed out, got on the road and went back to the highway and drove into town.

I tried not to do it, but I drove by Gabby’s. I didn’t get the rush I usually got. Sometimes it was an angry rush, sometimes a nostalgic feeling. But tonight what I got was nothing short of a dead sensation, as if all my nerves had died and been hauled off for incineration.

When I got home, Jimmy’s motorcycle was parked out front and he was sitting on my doorstep under the porch light.