Better Off Dead

Better Off Dead
By Katy Munger

A Casey Jones Mystery

Copyright © 2011 by Katy Munger

Smashwords Edition Published
by Thalia Press

This novel is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of
either the author or publisher.
 

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the hard work of this author.

It was a dark day in Durham. Duke had just
lost its sixth straight football game—the worst season opening
anyone could remember. Worse yet, the disgrace had played out on
regional television as the featured evening game.

My boyfriend Burly was jubilant.

"Yankee bastards!" he screamed at the
television set, bouncing a crumpled beer can off the blue-painted
face of a Duke fan in mourning.

"Watch it," I warned him. "That's my
appliance you're abusing."

Burly ignored me. He was too busy wheeling
toward the bedroom window. He liked to come in from the country and
watch the Duke home games at my downtown Durham apartment, then sit
by a window and shout anonymous insults at the students filing
past, fresh from another defeat at Wallace Wade Stadium.

"Yankee college bastards," Burly yelled, his
arms pumping like pistons as he raced toward the window. He didn't
want to waste a moment of gloating.

"May I remind you that it was a 'Yankee
college bastard' who built the ramp outside that lets you get your
ass up and over the new steps?" I said.

"That guy is from Vermont," Burly replied.
"He doesn't count."

Maybe he had a point. Vermont was like a
whole other country.

"Burly, you are going to get us shot one
night." I spotted students heading our way and pulled the curtains
shut.

"Are you kidding me?" he crowed. “Those Duke
pansies don't carry guns. What are they going to do? Squirt me with
ink from their fucking fountain pens?" He bellowed out the window
with all the subtlety of Ralph Kramden: "Suck my ass, Duke
University!"

Burly is not really the Neanderthal he
appears to be after a six-pack of Bud and a Duke defeat. He just
hates anyone who has the money to attend a college that has ivy
either on its campus or as part of its reputation. Duke had both.
Its pretensions were evident in its self-proclaimed status as the
"Ivy League of the South." This did not sit well with the many
other Southern colleges nearby. Was Duke not content with being a
mere university? Did it have to go around claiming to be an entire
league? Jeepers. Most Southerners felt that bragging about your
pedigree was a sure sign you were hanging by your fingertips from
the wrong branch of the family tree.

"Eat dookie, you Duke Blue Goobers," Burly
screamed in a burst of maturity. He laughed as shouts broke out
from a group of Duke students across the street.

"Who said that?" a male voice yelled
back.

"Your mother!" Burly screamed out the
window, laughing hysterically.

Maybe if I'd had fourteen more beers, I
would have laughed along.

Instead I turned off the bedroom lights,
just in case.

Burly began to howl like a wolf—a reference
to the victors who were returning in glory to nearby N.C. State
University.

I shook my head and went back into the
living room to pick up the crumpled beer cans left in Burly's wake.
For a guy in a wheelchair, he sure can cover a lot of ground when
it comes to littering.

The doorbell rang.

Shit. I was not in the mood for a rumble.
Burly never hesitated to jump into the fray, paralyzed legs or not.
And most people in a similar state of non-sobriety did not hesitate
to beat the shit out of him in return, one having gone so far as to
ask his buddy to prop Burly up so he could have a better shot at
his face. Once that testosterone starts pumping, I've found it's
every man for himself.

The doorbell rang again.

"Burly," I warned him. "I'm gonna be real
pissed off if—"

"Maybe they'll refund your forty thousand!"
he screamed out the window, ignoring me. "You can use it to go to
mechanic's school."

The doorbell rang again, insistently. I
answered it, fully prepared to lead with my right.

It was not what I expected. At all.

A tallish woman stood in the hallway,
swathed from head to toe in the veils and flowing robes of a
practicing Muslim. Only her dark eyes and the upper half of her
nose showed above the pale orange scarf masking her face.

"Are you Missus Jones?" she asked in an
accent I was pretty sure was Turkish. It was not the first time I
had heard one. North Carolina was becoming a regular United
Nations. As a devotee of restaurants that serve something beyond
barbecue, I applauded the change.

"Yes?" I said warily.

"You must help my friend," she said. Her
dark eyes filled with tears. "She is a prisoner and needs your
help."

It took a moment for the words to sink in.
Miss Turkey stared at me, waiting, a bit dumbstruck, I suppose, by
my size—which is large for a woman—and my attire, which is not. I
was wearing my traditional home-at-night-with-Burly fare: a sheer
black teddy and matching see through robe. I wore pink marabou
mules on my feet. Hey, what was I supposed to be wearing? A
cheerleading outfit? Hmmm... maybe next time.

"Want to come in and tell me about it?" I
finally said. Would you have turned her away? It's not every night
Scheherazade shows up on your doorstep. Besides, my job is helping
people. And curiosity keeps me doing my job.

"How did you know where I live?" I asked, as
she sat tentatively on the edge of my worn pink sofa. I had rescued
it from a curbside dump just minutes before the garbage truck
arrived. With pastel satin pillows, it looked pretty good—in a
Miami whorehouse sort of way.

"Your employer tell me where you live," she
explained slowly. "He very big and very wet."

"I'll say," I agreed, though what she had
probably meant was a more literal interpretation of "wet" than what
I had in mind. Our office roof had recently sprung a bigger leak
than the West Wing of the White House. With the heaviest rainfall
on record for an autumn in North Carolina ever, our carpet had been
soaked for a solid month with no sign yet of the landlord. Bilge
water had started to collect and we now had the beginnings of a
baby pool at our feet. Bobby D. had taken to wearing hip-high
waders to work and storing his ever-present Little Debbie cakes in
the tops of them. I could only imagine what this poor woman had
thought when he had reached inside his rubber britches and fished
around for a snack.

"You met Bobby D.?" I asked, studying her
eyes.

To my surprise, they sparkled. "Oh, yes.
Very big heart," she said.

"Very big everything," I added.

"He say you will help me. He say it right up
your street."

"Alley," I corrected her. "Bobby said that,
did he?"

She nodded vigorously. "He give me your
address and say you work out of home because of the water."

That was one of the reasons, I thought.
After too many years in partnership with him, Bobby was starting to
get on my nerves. His innate inertia, always annoying, had grown
even worse in recent months, thanks to his doctor's warnings to
take it easy on his overloaded heart. Plus, he had found true bliss
with a woman just his size, oops, I mean type, and kept harping on
me to do the same. Is there anything on this planet more annoying
than a person who has discovered domestic bliss and wants the rest
of the world to imitate their decision to settle? I think not.
Well, maybe natural blonds.

"Could you excuse me just a moment?" I asked
as yet another obscene bellow from Burly was followed by the
unmistakable sound of a beer bottle crashing against my building's
brick facade.

The woman nodded, eyes wide, as I marched
into the bedroom to issue my traditional post-Duke defeat
ultimatum. "Open your mouth again and I'll break both your
legs."

"Go ahead," Burly invited me. "I won't feel
a thing."

"Okay then, try this: open your mouth again
and I'll puncture every tire on your brand new customized Voyager,"
I threatened.

That shut him up.

"I have a client in the other room. It would
help my credibility if my apartment did not sound like an insane
asylum."

"I'm just trying to have some fun." He
pouted.

I pointed toward the bed. "Get in there and
wait for me. Then you'll have your fun."

He let out a war whoop and did a wheelie as
he turned from the window. Do I know how to handle my guy, or
what?

I called Bobby D. on the way back to the
living room. He answered with his usual idiocy: "Acme
Investigations. Robert Dodd, owner and proprietor, speaking."

"What is this woman doing at my home?" I
asked without preamble.

"Talk to her," he ordered me. "You'll thank
me next time we speak." He hung up without another word. Probably
in the middle of a meal or something.

"Okay," I told my guest as I sat down beside
her on the sofa. “Tell me about your friend."

Her English was rusty, but her compassion
was certainly up to speed. From what I could glean, the Turkish
babe in front of me was about to quit her job cleaning house for
some woman who was afraid to leave her home. "My neighbor tell me
she must be angoraphobic," the girl explained.

I doubted the prisoner-in-her-own-home was
allergic to sweaters, and decided she meant "agoraphobic," as in a
fear of open spaces. "Why does she want my help?" I asked. "I'm not
a shrink. I'm a private investigator."

The woman's eyes looked puzzled.

"You know?" I prompted her. "Like Columbo on
TV." Only I had a better-looking raincoat, of course.

Her dark eyes blazed. "I know what you are.
That's why I am here. She is in danger. In the mail. On telephone.
Ugly voices." She leaned forward and I caught a glimpse of a
slender nose beneath the veil. "Man on the telephone say he kill
her again and again." She made a slashing gesture with one hand.
Her robes fluttered like prayer flags in the wind. "I hear his
voice and I believe him."

"Is that why you're quitting your job?"

She told me she was leaving her job at her
husband's urging, but felt guilty at abandoning her employer. "I
leave also because the old lady make me cuckoo-cuckoo," the woman
explained, smoothing her robe over her knees. "She is evil."

"How old is this woman?" I asked. Why would
someone threaten to murder a little old lady? Little old ladies
were supposed to solve crimes, not be victims of them.

"No, no, my employer is young," my visitor
explained. "She your age. My age. Is her evil mother driving me
cuckoo-cuckoo."

Oh, god. The poor woman really was a
prisoner in her own home. Trapped, living with her mother at my
age?

"Okay," I agreed. "I'll go see her. I'll see
if she wants my help."

"Good person!" the woman cried, leaping to
her feet. She pressed my right hand between her own far more
slender palms. She'd left a piece of paper in my hand: a name and
address.

"You're the good person, not me," I
corrected her as I tucked the paper into a corner of my hallway
mirror. "You cared enough to come here in the first place."

We were interrupted in our "I'm Okay, You're
Okay" congratulatory session by frantic honking outside my
apartment house.

"My husband," the woman cried, just as Burly
shouted a warning from the bedroom.

“Trouble!" he called in gleeful triumph.

"Stay here," I warned as I threw my raincoat
over my negligee and raced outside. The Turkish woman made mewing
sounds of distress right behind me.

A group of drunken Duke students had
surrounded a battered Chevy parked at the curb in front of my
building. The driver was a small man with a heavy black mustache.
He was crouched low behind the steering wheel, his eyes darting
from one student to the next.

"Break it up," I ordered, grabbing a
shoulder and shoving one student out of the way.

"This guy started it," another kid
complained in a New York whine. "He's been shouting shit at us."
The others nodded their agreement.