Primed for Murder
Primed for Murder
By Jack Ewing
Copyright 2012 by Jack Ewing
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Jack Ewing and Untreed Reads Publishing
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Incentive
Member of the Banned
Pointed
Primed for Murder
By Jack Ewing
Chapter 1
Death hung in the air. Toby Rew couldn’t smell it, because the odor of paint overpowered everything. His work was the source of the dominant smell, at a place on Charbold Street, on the north side of town in the old part of Syracuse. It was an aged house, on a block of elderly dwellings, all standing shoulder to shoulder like war veterans on parade. All built with two high-ceilinged floors behind narrow fronts under tall, steep-sloped roofs. Gingerbread bedecked the eaves of some.
Plenty of guys in the trade wouldn’t take jobs over one story—afraid of heights and broken bones, probably. Not Toby. His custom-made three-section aluminum extension ladder went up thirty-six feet, so that’s how high he’d climb. If he had to go higher, he rented scaffolding and doubled his rates.
On this particular, murderous day, Toby was giving the final coat to the final side—the most difficult side—at the front of the Charbold house. It would have been a hard job, even without old Mrs. Cratty, the owner, calling the shots. She’d seen his card on the corkboard at a self-service laundry and called Toby to come over and scope out the house. Mrs. Cratty turned out to be a widow, about eighty, with a beaky nose, the profile of a pigeon and one leg shorter than the other. She was a tough old bird. Toby looked her place over, told her his estimate. After a little haggling she’d given the go-ahead.
It took a week to prep the house, because it hadn’t been worked on since the Eisenhower administration: seven backbreaking, bone-tiring days of scraping, brushing with steel wool, and power sanding to remove flecks of petrified paint. Each day, Mrs. Cratty hopped along after Toby like a wounded robin. She watched from a lawn chair, moving as necessary to keep him in view, sipping lemonade as he worked. Now and then she’d point with a gnarled talon and caw: “You missed a spot!” She wouldn’t be satisfied until he corrected the oversight then and there.
When it was time for undercoating, they had a big argument about paint. “I want you to use all oil-based.” Mrs. Cratty’s eyes sat bright behind steel-rimmed glasses.
“Why not use Latex,” Toby said. “It’s just as good.”
She waved a spotty hand in his face. “Oil lasts longer. My late husband said so.”
How could he argue with a dead man? “The Latex is good for twenty years.”
“I’ll get thirty years with oil.” Her wrinkle-lined mouth bowed.
Toby gave her the point. Why mention she would be in her grave long before the house needed repainting, no matter what he used? “Oil will cost a lot more,” he said. “Fifteen, twenty dollars extra per gallon.” It didn’t hurt to pad a little.
“Cost is no object.” Mrs. Cratty fluffed her blue-tinted hair. “I want the best.” Her metallic stare probed his eyes. “And I want good coverage. You’re to use a brush. No rollers, no sprayers.”
“A brush!” Toby looked up in despair at ten thousand square feet of dingy wood. “It’ll take two weeks to finish your home by hand. I can do it in a week if—”
“Do you want the job or not?”
Toby thought for an instant before replying. He already had a long week invested in the project. He needed the money. His landlady was getting on his case about back rent. The phone company had threatened to cut off his lifeline to work. A couple of once open-handed acquaintances were clamoring for the repayment of loans. He swallowed his pride and loosed two words: “Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Cratty bobbed her head as if pecking for seed. “Good. Then you’ll do it my way.” She aimed a time-warped finger at him. “And use canvas drop cloths—no plastic. I won’t have you smothering my roses.”
Toby bit back a string of nasty remarks and did it her way. Thanks to the advance he demanded and received, he managed to pocket a cool seven hundred with his markup on primer and forty gallons of oil paint needed to do the job.
As he prepared to climb the ladder again, Toby had to admit the house was shaping up. At least it would look clean and fresh when he was done. The last coat had finally wiped out a dull tinge where dark green paint had covered age-bleached wood. When he polished off the front and finished the trim, it would be the showplace of the street. Not that it meant much in this tired old neighborhood.
Toby squinted up into sunshine. It was a nice August day in the middle of the week, not too hot, not awfully humid. Too pleasant a day to work, but a guy’s got to pay the bills. After stocking groceries and making installments on debts—twenty here, thirty there—Toby was down to a hundred dollars left of his profits from buying supplies. It had to last until the job was done. He’d pick up three grand then and could finally be solvent for a while. If he did a really bang-up job, Mrs. Cratty might feel generous enough to give him a bonus. Fat chance.
That morning, Mrs. Cratty had boarded her showroom-shiny, sixty-year-old Buick for the fifty-mile drive to visit her daughter in Oswego. The trip would take two hours because she refused to drive over thirty. Until she waved as she crept away, Toby could barely see the old woman over the dashboard of the four-wheeled boat.
Now, it was early afternoon. Toby sat in the shade of the old lady’s back stoop, munching the last bite of a tuna-mayo sandwich and planning ahead. Knock off at five, five-thirty. Drive home. Flop and sop up a cold beer or three. It would have to be generic beer from an outlet that sold seconds, off-brands, foreign labels, and damaged goods, because that was all he could afford. The kind in plain aluminum cans. The kind that tasted like carbonated water—and had the same effect unless you chugged a couple six-packs. Toby sighed. At least it would be cold and wet going down.
Until then, more sweat. More building upon shoulder twinges and backaches.
More splotches of something the paint people called “Cultured Pearl” drying on his hands, freckling his face and hair. More dribbles to blend with variegated hardened streaks and drips that made his coveralls look like a Jackson Pollock original.
More paint fumes rising up his nose, making him spacey and probably eating away at his brain.
The air was library-still, museum-stale. The whole neighborhood seemed preserved under glass. Streets were quiet: not another human to be seen or heard, as if they’d known in advance what was about to happen and hadn’t wanted to be a part of it.
Hours earlier, this end of town had bustled with activity. Toby had watched adults leave for jobs, to go shopping, to have their hair done. He’d seen several whole families jump in cars, headed for nearby P & C Stadium, where the Syracuse AAA baseball team was playing a double-header. He’d noticed two thirty-something couples down the street climbing into a SUV, bound for a picnic beside the toxic waters of Onondaga Lake. He’d traded jibes with the mailman, waved at a door-to-door salesman, a meter reader and a delivery truck driver.
They’d all come and gone. No cars had driven down Charbold for more than an hour. Not a vehicle, moving or stationary, could be seen anywhere. Nothing budged: no cats or dogs, no squirrels or birds. Not a kid in sight—until dusk, they’d frolic at a park or wander the zoo or splash around a public pool.
It appeared nobody was stirring for blocks around but Toby. He finished putting the wrist to another five-gallon bucket of paint. When it was well mixed, he poured a one-gallon can full, stuck his paintbrush in a leg loop, hefted the bail of the can and started up the ladder. He took it slow and easy, as always, getting both feet up on one rung before he took the next step. He was being paid for the job, not by the hour. Why rush it?
From midpoint on, the ladder trembled under him with every foot gained.
To reach the highest point on the front wall, Toby had to stand tiptoe on the second rung from the top, stretching to his full 6’3” height and holding onto the edge of the roof with fingertips. Several steps below his boots clung the worn, paint-splattered remains of a sticker the custom ladder man had applied that once read:
DANGER: DO NOT STAND ON OR ABOVE THIS STEP
YOU CAN LOSE YOUR BALANCE.
The ladder wobbled as he hung the brimming can on a built-in retractable hook of his own design. Toby looked around as he caught his breath, admiring the view.
You can see a lot from the top of a thirty-six-foot ladder, he thought. You can tell which houses need re-roofing, which could use masonry work on their chimneys, which could stand to have their gutters cleaned.
It was better not to think what went on beneath the roofs.
From his lofty perch Toby had occasionally glimpsed naked men and women, sometimes separately, sometimes together. He’d witnessed individuals hitting the sauce or smacking one another. He’d overseen some nasty arguments and other transgressions. From up here, he got a whole new angle on the world, and it wasn’t always pretty.
He dipped the brush a neat two inches and cleaned excess on the curved rim. Then he straightened and slapped nylon bristles against clapboard, moved them lightly with the grain until the paint, all wet and gleaming in sunlight, feathered out, overlapping the stroke before. By the third time he reloaded the brush, Toby fell back into rhythm again. The muscles of his arms, the tendons in his neck and the ligaments of his shoulders settled into the familiar dance.
A-one: dip. A-two: clean. A-three: paint. It was a slow, flowing tempo, like a waltz for tortoises. Only Toby could hear the melody.
After a few dozen choruses, something occurred to interrupt the music: Toby heard a muted cry somewhere behind him. He stopped mid-stroke, got a better grip on the roof, and turned his head slowly to look over one shoulder, then the other. No sound, no action, nothing. He must be hearing things. Toby turned back to his work.
There it was again! A faint bleat, like a sparrow trapped in a shoebox.
He looked straight down to the concrete walk thirty-odd feet below and let his gaze travel outward: nothing to be seen on this side of the street. Toby widened his vista, craned his neck, swiveled his upper body and took in the row of houses on the opposite side of the narrow, tree-lined street.
The faded yellow house shaded by a towering oak on the corner was silent. Ditto, the second, a mousy brown number behind a sickly-looking willow on its lawn. Quiet also reigned at the third, a puke-greenish-yellowish horror half-hidden by a young red maple. And the—
There: the fourth house, the one straight across the street with the lousy blue paint job. Through bare, leafless branches of a half-dead elm, Toby saw movement and carefully rotated his whole body 180 degrees. He braced his back against the ladder and hooked his boot heels over a rung to watch.
Blinds at the ground floor corner window of the blue house were angled up but not completely closed. Toby could look down into a lighted room where, once his eyes adjusted, he glimpsed horizontally fragmented images. He identified the corner of a carpet. A lampshade with a light bulb glowing—and on a bright, sunshiny summer day, too. Then there was the edge of a couch or chair.
