Looming Murder (8 page)

T
h
e ringing of the phone pierced the silence. It was David Swanson.

“Hi, Della. I just got permission to get back into the building. If you have time right now, why don’t you meet me there?”

I spotted him standing by the entrance to the building. He waved and I waved back. “How are—” I stopped short, shocked. “What happened to you?” His right eye was swollen shut, and his upper lip was crimson and crisscrossed with stitches.

“It looks worse than it is.” He felt his lip carefully. “I was ambushed. Whoever the bastard was, he hit me from behind.” He put the key in the door and pushed it open. “Okay, ready to see the place?”

“Whoa, not so fast. Tell me what happened.”

He ushered me in, and I followed him up the stairs, being careful to avoid the nail he’d pointed out last night.

“There isn’t much to tell. It was dark. I’d just turned onto the walk in front of my house when I heard a rustling in the bushes. And before I could see what it was—wham!—somebody hit me over the head.”

I stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to look at him again. “Are you sure you’re all right? Those bruises look bad.”

“After I came to—”

“You mean you passed out?”

He nodded cautiously. “I must have, because the next thing I knew, it was daylight, and I was lying facedown on the sidewalk, feeling like I’d just been mistaken for a football.”

I was horrified. “Did you call the police?”

“What would be the point? They’d take down my statement and then forget about it. I went to the hospital and got stitched up. I’ll be like new in no time.” He tried to give me a smile, but it came out as a grimace. He slipped the apartment key into the lock, fiddling with it until it turned.

“Still, you should have reported it.” I followed him in, feeling slightly uncomfortable about being there—no doubt a remnant of the confrontation I had witnessed the night before. I shook off the unpleasant sensation.

In my rush to get out of the building the previous day I was left with little more than the impression of a smallish space. Now I took in the first room, a combination kitchen, dining, and sitting area. It held many of the same charming details as the other apartment: old-fashioned cupboards in the kitchen, leaded-glass windows in the living area and hardwood floors throughout.

“It’s nice, but not as nice as the other apartment.” I’d been right. It was much smaller—almost half the size.

“The bedroom is down the hall.” He indicated the area from which Jeremy and Marsha had appeared. For some reason, I dreaded going in the room. But I decided I was being silly, and so I marched over, the clickety-click of my heels echoing through the empty apartment.

“Do you know if the floors are sound insulated?” I asked over my shoulder.

“We can easily check that out later. After we finish in here, you can go downstairs and listen while I stomp around up here.”

I pushed the bedroom door open and had just stepped in when I was overcome by a sickly sweet metallic odor. My eyes darted around the dim room and came to rest on a bundle on the floor. Gradually my vision adjusted and—I screamed. There, in the middle of the empty room, was a man lying in a pool of blood.

Feeling faint, I crouched down, my hands reaching out to the solid floor for support.

David bounded over and brushed past me. He gasped, and stood frozen while I tried to regain my breath. He took a few hesitant steps into the room and bent over the body. “Shit,” he said, followed by a long list of other expletives. He crouched and picked up a limp hand, feeling for a pulse. A wave of nausea hit me.

“Is he dead?” I whispered hoarsely.

“Dead as a doorknob,” he said, dropping the hand.

The room seemed to tilt, and I forced myself to breathe slowly, regularly. I dared another glance. There was something familiar, something—I squelched another rush of nausea and looked again. “Do you know who— Oh, my God!” I exclaimed, getting a look at the dead man’s face. “Is this who I think it is?”

“It’s Jeremy Fox,” he muttered, and when he looked up at me, his face was as pale as the dead man’s. He took a shaky breath and said, “I think he’s been murdered.”

I got to my feet and on unsteady legs stumbled to the bathroom, where I braced myself against the counter. My head was spinning and my heart was thudding hard and fast against my ribs. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force the image out of my mind. I turned on the tap, wet my hands and pressed them to my face.

When David joined me a second later, the room was still spinning.

“Are you okay?”

I wasn’t. But I nodded.

He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. “I’m calling to report a body.” He answered a stream of questions while I struggled to calm my racing heart. “An ambulance?” He looked at me questioningly. I stared back, and shrugged. “I’m sure he’s dead. There’s an awful lot of blood.”

He hung up and hurried to the door. I wasn’t sure which of us was in more of a hurry to get out. He held the door open and I scrambled down the stairs. I didn’t know how it happened, but one minute I was on my feet and the next I was rolling down, head over heels, thumping and bumping, until I came to a rib-crushing stop at the bottom.

I knew I was alive because I was hurting all over.

M
y
eyes fluttered open. “Owwww.”

David leaned over me, his brow furrowed. “Are you all right?”

“I—I think so,” I said, uncomfortably aware that the skirt of my little sundress was now somewhere north of the equator, exposing an indecent amount of thigh. I tugged it back down. And then I remembered my gorgeous sandals. “Did I break a heel?” I asked with sudden panic. I sat up. “I paid a fortune for those shoes.” To my relief, my precious heels were intact. And then I remembered the dead body upstairs. “I want to get out of here. Help me up.”

David was studying my sandals disapprovingly. “No wonder you fell. How can you even walk on those things? They’re not shoes. They’re stilts.”

“I can walk perfectly well,” I said, still woozy from my tumble. “I just lost my balance because of—you know.” I indicated upstairs.

“Are you sure you want to try standing?” I nodded and he helped me to my feet, where I stood wobbling for a few seconds.

“Can you move your legs?”

I was in such pain that I was having trouble moving anything, but I took inventory, wiggling my right foot and then my left, and winced. “Ouch!”

“What’s wrong?”

“My ankle,” I squeaked.

“Can you move it?”

I shook my head, trying to rotate it. I succeeded only in wiggling my toes. “I think I sprained it,” I moaned.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s only bruised.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I wasn’t convinced. I took a deep breath and almost shrieked as I put my foot down. I grabbed the doorjamb to steady myself. I took a few shallow breaths and decided I’d be fine as long as I kept that foot off the ground. “If it’s not sprained, it must be really badly bruised.”

“Maybe you should go to the hospital. You look a bit pale.”

I’d just found a body, tumbled down a flight of stairs, and he thought I looked a bit pale? All I said was, “That makes two of us.”

Leaning on him, I hopped outside on one foot, just in time to see a police car careening around the corner. It came to a tire-screeching stop across the street, and two police officers jumped out and hurried over to us. One of them, a heavyset, dark-haired man with a mustache, shouted, “Did you just call in a body?”

David nodded and pointed up the stairs. “He’s in the apartment on the right.”

The second officer—he looked about sixteen, with his curly red hair and face full of freckles—called out, “Stay right where you are,” in our direction. The way my ankle was throbbing, I couldn’t have run away if I’d wanted to. Not to mention that I was still reeling from discovering the body. If I didn’t sit down right now, I was going to pass out. I held on to David’s arm as I lowered myself to the ground.

The officers took the stairs two at a time. I was still breathing shallow little breaths, holding back moans, when a moment later a second police car showed up. The driver—this one dressed in civilian clothes—stepped out and walked over to us. He was tall and thin—too thin—with sandy hair and piercing blue eyes.

“Did you call 911, David?” he asked officiously as he pulled out a small pad and a pencil.

David nodded. “I did.” He looked as if he was about to be sick, which probably wasn’t any worse than how I looked. My ankle throbbed painfully. Would I have to pass out from the pain before anyone took notice?

“Officer,” I said, “I think I should go to the hospital. Would you mind calling a cab?”

He looked at me, raised an eyebrow as if to say, “Give me a break.” Without bothering to answer, he turned to David, studying his injured face. “Care to tell me what happened?”

Already people were gathering, coming out of the surrounding buildings and forming a small crowd—if you can call half a dozen people a crowd. They craned their necks, studying David and me, whispering to each other. I heard the name “Mike” murmured, followed by, “chief of police.”

So this was Jenny’s ex-husband. I might have looked at him more closely, but whether from the shock of finding the body or from the tumble down the stairs, I was shaking uncontrollably, which only made breathing more difficult. The pain in my ribs now almost rivaled that in my ankle. Mike turned to look at me again, this time with a feverish intensity that suggested he was seeing clear inside my mind. It gave me the creeps.

I was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in my Ralph Lauren floral sundress. Any moron should know that no woman would do that unless she was in real pain. I gritted my teeth. “Excuse me. I really think I should go to the hospital. I think my ankle might be broken.”

Mike Davis smirked at me cynically and looked down at my ankle. “I’ll get someone to drive you there in a minute. We have some important issues to take care of first.” He repeated his question to David. “What happened?”

A sickly pallor covered David’s face. “I have no idea. I swear. I was just showing Della the apartment when we found him.”

“How’d you get those bruises?” He sounded suspicious. That was when it hit me. Poor David was sure to be the cops’ first suspect. Wasn’t that the way it always worked? Whoever found the body—especially since the whole town knew he had threatened to kill Jeremy just a few days ago.

He touched his stitches lightly with an index finger and explained about the previous night’s ambush.

“What time was that?” asked Mike.

“I must have left the bar around eleven.” He avoided Mike’s eyes. “I went straight to the hospital as soon as I came to, and that’s where I was from around six this morning until about nine, when I met up with Della.”

“Why the rush? You say you just came out of the hospital. You could have arranged to meet her later.”

“It would be just like my wife to put an offer on it just because she saw me showing it to a prospect. We ran into her last night,” he said without going into any detail. “I wanted Della to see it before it was too late.”

Mike looked at me as if for confirmation. I felt the intensity of his gaze again, like lasers boring into me. My shaking morphed into a shiver. He stepped closer and I just had time to register an odor. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And just when I decided that I would scream if nobody took me to the hospital, he said, “And you are?”

“Della Wright. I own Dream Weaver, just up the street.” To my embarrassment, tears gathered in my eyes. I blinked them away. He either chose to ignore my loss of composure or was distracted by the arrival of the ambulance.

At that moment, the two officers came down the stairs. The freckled policeman nodded to Mike and said, “He won’t be needing the ambulance. You better call the coroner.”

Mike scowled. “Dead?”

“Oh, yeah. And it looks like murder.”

The other officer grimaced. “There’s blood all over the place.”

Mike addressed the younger officer. “Why don’t you drive Miss Wright to the hospital and get her version of the events at the same time?” To the heavier officer, he said, “You take David to the station.” And then, dismissing us, he entered the building and disappeared up the stairs.

By now, the crowd had grown to nearly a dozen people, and one of them, an old lady, tugged at my arm. “What happened?” she asked. “Did somebody die?”

Officer Freckle Face turned to the group and said, “All right, folks. There’s nothing to see here. Go on home, everybody.” They moved back a few feet but kept staring.

He tilted his head toward the patrol car. “Can you walk?”

I shook my head and struggled back to my one good foot. If not for the officer catching me, I would have toppled to the ground. He picked me up and carried me—as if I was light as a feather—to the patrol car. This cop wasn’t so bad—a real sweetie, in fact.

O
f
ficer Bellows introduced himself during the drive (still Officer Freckle Face in my mind). He pulled up to the emergency entrance and walked around the car.

“Hold on to my neck.” I wrapped my arms around him and he swooped me out of the car effortlessly. The painful throbbing of my ankle ran up to my calf. During the ten-minute drive it had swollen to almost double its size. I might not have been exaggerating when I said it was broken.

He carried me through the automatic doors to the reception area in the waiting room. The doughy blonde at the desk glanced from me to the officer and back at me with a veiled expression. She threw a furtive look at my wrists—checking for cuffs, I realized with a shock.

“Let me get you a wheelchair.” She reappeared a moment later pushing a very worn and primitive contraption. She and Officer Bellows helped me into the stiff leather seat, and she hurriedly retreated behind her desk, clearly relieved to be putting some distance between the criminal (me) and herself.

“Name?” she said coldly.

“Della Wright.” I explained that I’d fallen down some stairs and that my ankle might be broken, just so she knew I hadn’t been injured while running from the law.

She typed away on her computer, seemingly more concerned about my insurance coverage than my injuries. I fumbled through my bag for my health card. She copied down the information and said dismissively, “The waiting time will be about an hour.”

For anybody who has ever been in the ER waiting room of a city hospital, a ten-hour wait is normal. An hour was like a gift from the gods. But I was wracked with pain, and even a minute would have sounded like forever. I stifled a moan and followed her finger to the area where she was pointing—clear across the room, as far from other patients as she could possibly send me.

“You can wait over there.” What did she think I was, a murderer? “The doctor will call you when it’s your turn.” Without another word, she returned to her keyboard.

Officer Bellows wheeled me over to the far wall as a dozen pairs of eyes followed me. I would so be fodder for the gossip mill once news of the murder got out. As long as I wasn’t a suspect, I could deal with it.

Now, if I could only get this cop to leave. “Thank you for taking the time to drive me.” I was still shaking from finding the body. The last thing I wanted was to be forced to go over the details; all I wanted to do was to forget them. Bellows did seem nice enough, but after my brush with the law last year, cops were not up there on my list of favorite people. It was just lucky I’d been assigned to him rather than to the older one, who hadn’t looked nearly as friendly. “I’ll just call myself a cab when I’m done.”

His eyes registered amusement. “I didn’t drive you here out of the goodness of my heart.” He pulled a pen and a small notebook from his breast pocket. “I need you to tell me your version of the events that led up to finding the body this morning. I have to do this while the details are still fresh in your mind.”

“You mean you want to question me right here? Right now? While I’m in pain, and with all these people listening?” I whispered back, horrified.

“It won’t take long and if you keep your voice low, nobody will hear.”

I had serious doubts about that, but looking around now, I saw that people had already lost interest. They were reading or chatting, nobody so much as glancing our way. Or were they just pretending? Wasn’t that what I would do if I wanted to eavesdrop?

“Why don’t you start by telling me everything that happened this morning? Did David Swanson pick you up?”

I shook my head. “We met in front of the building.” I went over every detail, from the sweetish metallic smell that greeted me when I opened the bedroom door to the pooled blood on the floor and my tumble down the stairs. I had to fight to keep the quiver out of my voice as I recounted the events. “And then you and your partner showed up. That’s all I know. Now why don’t you leave me alone and go find the killer?” I was praying for him to please just go away and let me erase the awful picture from my mind.

He ignored my last barb, writing as fast as he could. “So, what gave you the impression it was murder?”

I bobbed my eyebrows. “You’re kidding, right? With all that blood, only an idiot would think it was a heart attack.”

His face flushed and he busied himself jotting down a few more words. He cleared his throat. “Did you know the victim?”

A fresh image of Jeremy Fox’s pale face flashed through my mind. “I’d heard about him, but the only time I ever met him was last night—if you can call that a meeting. He didn’t exactly introduce himself.”

He put down his pen and cocked his head, reminding me of Jack McCoy on
Law and Order
. “So if you’d already seen the building, why did you need to go back again?” He was becoming less and less sweet with every question. On the other hand, maybe I deserved the attitude, since I had given him a bit myself.

“I’d seen the other apartment, but we had only just walked into this one last night when Mr. Fox and his girlfriend unexpectedly came out of the bedroom. We didn’t exactly stick around after that.” I glanced around. To my relief, except for one little girl hanging over the back of her chair and picking her nose, all the other patients were absorbed in whatever they were doing—flipping through old issues of
Reader’s Digest
, conversing in whispers or just nodding off.

I described the run-in with Jeremy and David’s estranged wife.

“So the scene was confrontational—is that correct?”

“David didn’t lose his temper, even though Jeremy goaded him. He kept his cool the whole time.” The officer raised his eyebrows, and I already knew what he was about to say. “It only lasted about two minutes, and then we just turned around and walked out.” I kept David’s clenched fists and his reaction during the drive home to myself.

He tilted his head, waiting for my answer to his next question. “And whose idea was it to see the place this morning?”

“Mine, er, I mean, I’d asked David to take me back so I could see the second apartment.”

“Why did you want to see it this morning? Why not later in the day?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t ask to see it at any specific time, but when David phoned and said he could get me inside right away, I happened to be free. But he wasn’t pushy about it. I mean, I could have asked to see it later and he would have been fine with it.”

“You have no way of knowing that for sure, do you?” He saw me hesitate, and continued. “Who got there first?”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “David was waiting when I arrived.”

“So for all you know, he could have entered the apartment before you got there, killed Fox and gone back outside to wait for you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said a bit too loudly. A few people craned their necks in their seats to look at me. I adopted a casual expression and waited for them to turn around again. I lowered my voice. “I was right there when he unlocked the door.” Tears trembled on my lashes. I blinked them away. “You’re trying to put words in my mouth. And if I don’t tell you what you want to hear, you’ll twist everything around. That’s it. I’m through.”

He looked at me coldly. “He could have been inside and come back out before you got there, couldn’t he?” I opened my mouth to argue, then stopped. Actually, David
could
have done that. I really didn’t know, did I? Officer Bellows continued. “I’m going to ask you something very important. I want you to think carefully before you answer. Did you see David touch the body or anything else in the room?”

I hesitated. “He touched Jeremy’s wrist when he felt for a pulse.”

“Did he touch anything else?”

“Anything else?” I asked, not understanding. “Like what?”

“Like a weapon, for starters,” he said.

My eyes grew wide. “No, absolutely not. I didn’t see any weapon. There was nothing in the room—nothing but the body.”

He studied me for a long moment, then looked down at his notebook and scribbled a few words. “Did
you
take anything from the scene?”

I gasped. “No, of course not.”

“Was David alone with the body, at any point”—I started shaking my head—“even for a moment?”

“No.” I suddenly remembered something, though. I had left the room a few seconds before he did, but he couldn’t possibly have had time to take anything. “No,” I repeated.

Bellows shrugged. “One second is all it takes to pick up something and slip it in a pocket. He could have done that while he was checking the victim’s pulse and you might never have noticed.”

I shook my head, determined to appear convinced, but if Officer Bellows’s goal had been to rattle me, he had succeeded. I wasn’t at all sure of David’s innocence anymore. He could
have taken something from the crime scene and with my eyes focused on the victim as they’d been, I wouldn’t have noticed.

At last he flipped his notebook closed. “Thank you for answering my questions, Miss Wright. I might need to talk to you again at some point. In the meantime, if you think of anything, please call me.” He offered me his card, which I slipped into my bag. “Are you sure you can find a ride back?” he asked.

I refrained from telling him that I’d rather crawl all the way home than have to suffer one minute more with him. “Yes, yes, no problem.”

“Have a good day.” He nodded curtly and left. I had rarely been so relieved to see somebody walk away. I was just wondering how much longer I’d have to wait before getting a painkiller when a doctor stepped out of the emergency room, grabbed a file from the rack on the wall, looked at it and called out, “Della Wright.”