A Novel Way to Die (19 page)

Finishing off her own two biscuits, and vowing to have nothing but salad for lunch
and supper as penance, she settled back in her chair and fixed him with a serious
look. “All right, that’s taken care of. Now, do you feel like telling me how you’ve
been getting along these past few months? You said you stay with your cousin sometimes?”

“Yeah, except when he, you know, has a girl over. Or when he lets some other friend
stay there. He’s only got, like, one room, so I can’t live with him permanently.”

“So what do you do when you can’t stay with him?”

“I stay with a friend, sometimes, or else in the park. And this girl I know who works
at a gym, she sneaks me in some mornings so I can use their shower and washing machine.
And I can lock one of the dressing rooms and sleep in there for a while, too.”

He paused and took another swallow of orange juice. “Oh, I almost forgot. A couple
of weeks before he fired me, Bill found out I needed a place and let me stay in his
basement. He only charged me, like, a week’s salary. I mean, there was a cot and a
dresser and this old TV, and except one time when it leaked after it rained real hard,
it wasn’t too bad. But after what happened, I had to pack up again.”

She wanted to ask him if he’d considered finding someplace where he could split the
rent with a friend. But then it occurred to her that in this part of town it would
probably take four or five friends to afford anything that wasn’t another Bill’s basement.

“I tried a homeless shelter one time,” he went on, “but it was, like, kind of sad.
Old dudes and ladies with kids, mostly. I figured they needed the space more than
me, so I didn’t go back. I mean, I’d feel bad if some five-year-old little dude had
to sleep on the sidewalk because of me.”

“But aren’t you ever scared out there alone?” Darla persisted, recalling horror stories
she’d heard about life on the streets.

He shrugged. “It’s okay. Except one time two guys jumped me and, you know, stole my
phone. Oh, and my shoes. But nothing, like, bad ever happened. I can take care of
myself.”

His tone as he related all this had been matter-of-fact, but now Darla saw a brief
flicker of uncertainty in his expression that belied his air of unconcern. By her
calculations, he’d been homeless for maybe six months, long enough that any feeling
of adventure at fending for himself had likely been replaced by a growing sense of
hopelessness. But if she had anything to say about it, last night’s courtyard campout
would be his last night on the streets.

Not wanting to push the subject, however, she turned the conversation back to southern
cooking while they drank their coffee. Finally, glancing at her watch, she told him,
“It’s almost ten. Go ahead and stack all these dishes in the picnic basket while I
get the register set up. If you think you can hold down the fort by yourself for a
bit, I need to run down and visit with Jake.”

She’d had a text message from the ex-cop waiting for her when she got up that morning:
the words
cryptic much
followed by several question marks. She’d grinned a little at that virtual jab and
texted back half a dozen exclamation points followed by
will stop by @ 10
. After all, given the number of times that Jake had left her hanging, a little payback
was in order.

A few minutes after opening, Darla left Robert and Hamlet—who’d wandered down in search
of more bacon—to talk to Jake. Besides needing to explain the Robert situation and
perhaps get some advice, she still had the bit of pink plastic to pass on to Reese.
She also wanted to know if there was an update on Tera. The fact that Jake had not
been answering her phone last night might mean some new developments. On the other
hand, she was almost certain that Jake’s breezy text indicated that nothing earth-shattering
had occurred in the interim.

Even before she knocked at Jake’s door, Darla could hear the faint echoes of distorted
guitar licks and throbbing bass drifting up from the basement apartment. Not exactly
the sort of music she’d expect to hear playing at that hour of the morning, but then,
she’d seen Jake’s music collection before. Save for a scattering of jazz and classical,
everything in her library was 1980s or earlier rock, emphasis on guitars, bass, and
drums, from bands with names that included words like “death” and “black.” Since Darla’s
own music tastes ran more toward light rock, with an occasional segue into country
or New Age for variety, the two of them had agreed to disagree on that particular
subject.

Figuring she’d never be heard over the headbanging if she knocked, Darla opened the
door and walked on in.

Jake sat at her table typing at her computer, her mane of black curls bobbing in time
to the music. She might have passed for a college student studying for a final save
for the reading glasses, which Darla had never seen her wear before, perched on her
nose. Jake glanced up at Darla’s approached, waved her in, and snatched up a small
remote control. The music promptly quieted from an unholy roar down to a breathy growl.

“Sorry,” she said, plucking off the glasses and giving Darla a grin. “After yesterday,
I had this urge to play a little music from the good old days.”

“Which days were those, the Inquisition?” Darla replied with an answering smile. “Talk
about torture, having to listen to that. What is it, grunge?”

Jake shook her head in mock dismay. “You really did lead a sheltered life back in
Dallas, didn’t you? Well, let me give you a little music education, kid.”

She assumed an exaggerated storytelling tone, as if she were trying out for the Jersey
version of
Faerie Tale Theatre
.

“Once upon a time, somewhere between the long-ago embarrassment that was disco and
the current abomination that is Britney Spears, lived a genius of a musical genre
known as heavy metal. Their name is legion—Black Sabbath, Metallica, Judas Priest.
And, of course, Iron Maiden, which is playing for your listening enjoyment as we speak.
Some of these groups have spent thirty years on the charts, which I kinda doubt Britney
is gonna do. And these guys”—she pointed in the direction of her very 1990s stereo—“are
as old as me and still putting out new albums and touring. So listen and learn.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I value my eardrums and my sanity.” Darla plopped herself
into one of the chrome chairs. “Besides, I’m here to tell you about last night.”

While Jake listened attentively, Darla recounted how she’d found Robert and Hamlet
sleeping in the courtyard, and the teen’s explanation as to how he’d become homeless.
When she was finished, Jake shook her head.

“I hate to tell you, but I’ve seen that happen more times than I care to count. Not
that the other extreme where you let your kid live with you until he’s forty is much
better, but you just don’t toss a teenager into a city like this without any money
or life skills or some kind of plan. At least Robert has a good head on his shoulders
and has managed to take care of himself to this point, but most of those kids aren’t
as savvy as he is. They’re out there looking for a place to live, needing something
to eat, wanting a little cash in their pockets. Pretty soon they’ve hooked up with
a gang or a pimp or a dealer, just to survive. And that’s why the teen crime rate
is so high, and the teen victim rate is even higher. And don’t even get me started
on teen suicide statistics.”

“So what do we do with him?” Darla asked in concern. “He can’t sleep in the bookstore
lounge indefinitely. And I don’t have room in my apartment for him.”

“What about the Plinskis? Didn’t Mary Ann say she was looking for a new tenant?”

Darla nodded. “Actually, I thought about that on the way down here, but no way could
he afford the place working part-time hours here and for Putin’s construction business.
And I don’t think the Plinskis would be too keen on a whole herd of teenage boys living
in their garden apartment, which is what it would take to make the rent.”

Then she brightened. “Maybe James has a spare room, at least temporarily until we
figure something out.”

“Yeah, I like how they have that whole father-son look going with the vests these
days,” Jake replied with a snicker. “Or maybe Reese would know a place.”

“Reese! That reminds me.”

Darla stood and reached into the pocket of her slacks to pull out the small plastic
ziplock bag where, in emulation of Jake, she’d carefully placed the found piece of
pink plastic. “When I was helping Barry clean up after Reese dumped all the construction
junk onto his lawn, I found this caught in a piece of wood. It must have broken off
the plastic case on Tera’s phone. I don’t know if it will do him any good, but I thought
I should give it to him.”

“Good work, kid. You never know about stuff like that.”

Turning in her chair, Jake opened one drawer of the file cabinet behind her and pulled
out a pair of long curved tweezers. Then, setting a clean sheet of paper on the table,
she opened the small plastic bag and carefully shook out the piece of pink plastic
onto that page. Putting on her reading glasses again, she used the tweezers to pick
up the fragment and studied it with a frown. Finally, she set it down again and gave
Darla a sharp look.

“I hate to break it to you, kid, but what you’ve got here isn’t part of a cell phone
case. It’s a fingernail.”

SEVENTEEN

“A FINGERNAIL!?”

Darla shoved back away from the table with the same sense of revulsion as if Jake
had announced that she’d been carrying around an actual finger in her pocket. Jake,
meanwhile, had used the tweezers again to pick up the bit of evidence and reseal it
inside the bag.

“Actually, it’s one of those acrylic nail tips,” the ex-cop clarified. “You know,
the kind you pay big bucks for at the salon. And once they’re on, they’re on. It takes
a lot of work to pry those suckers off again.”

Abruptly, Darla recalled the picture of Tera that Hilda had brought in the day before.
A few of the fliers that Jake had made from the photo were still sitting on her table.
Hands shaking, she snatched one up.

Jake had printed the poster in color. Despite the photo’s small size, Darla could
make out quite clearly the girl’s manicure, her fingernails the same vibrant shade
of pink as the nail tip that Darla had found. A sense of foreboding gripped her, and
she could almost feel the warm biscuits and gravy that she’d enjoyed less than an
hour before congealing into a cold lump in her stomach.

She looked up to see Jake nodding.

“Yeah, I’d put money on it that the nail tip belonged to Tera,” the older woman said
in a flat tone. “The question is, how did it—and Tera’s phone, for that matter—get
into the Dumpster?”

When Darla waited expectantly for an answer, she sighed and went on, “All right, I
can think of a couple of possibilities. Number one: the fingernail fell off when she
tossed the phone in there herself.”

“But why would Tera throw her phone away?”

Jake gave her a hard look. “We’ve got to face it, Darla, there’s a chance that she
was the one who killed Curt. Maybe she planned it; maybe it happened in the heat of
the moment. Either way, she wouldn’t want anyone tracking her down. If she’s like
most kids her age, she would know about cell phone pinging from those detective shows
on television, or maybe the movies. She runs out of the building, stops to toss her
phone into the container, catches one of those fake nails on a piece of lumber, and
pops it right off.”

“And if she didn’t kill Curt?”

“Then we move on to possibility number two. Maybe Tera had the bad luck to walk in
on the killer as he was whacking her boyfriend, and gets killed, too, but taken elsewhere,
and the murderer tosses her phone in the Dumpster.”

Darla sat silent for a moment, grateful for the music that filled the unsettling gap
in their conversation. She wasn’t sure which scenario she found more comforting: Tera,
alive but a murderer, or Tera, dead but an innocent victim. “I think I prefer possibility
number three, whatever that might be,” she finally said, drawing an answering nod
from Jake.

“Yeah, me, too,” the older woman said with a weary sigh. “So try to keep a positive
attitude. Right now, this bit of plastic isn’t anything more than another piece of
evidence for Reese. I’ll give him a call and let him know what you found.”

Darla nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a moment. What Jake had said earlier
about homeless teens like Robert could apply equally well to Tera. She might have
an indulgent mother and a nice roof over her head; still, she was young and likely
as naïve as most twenty-one-year-old girls. If she’d hooked up with Curt—who might
have had his own share of shady acquaintances—who knew what sort of situation she
had stumbled into by proxy?

While she considered this, a lyric from the music Jake was playing knocked at the
door of her subconscious and then all but slapped her to full attention. Darla sat
up straighter in her chair. The mournful introductory instrumental passage that had
gone on for a good minute had given way to fast, pulsing lyrics. She could have sworn
the lead vocalist had just rasped out the words “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

“This song . . . what’s playing right now?” she demanded, straining to catch more
of the spill of words.

Jake shrugged. “It’s still Iron Maiden. I told you, that gruesome graphic novel you
had on the counter yesterday made me remember this album of theirs. This cut is called
‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’”

The chorus repeated, and to Darla’s surprise Jake joined in singing. “
Murders in the Rue Morgue,
running from the Gendarmes, Murders in the Rue Morgue, running from the arms of the
law.”

As the ex-cop continued singing along with the next verse, Darla stared openmouthed
at her. “The Man in the Iron Mask . . . Murders in the Rue Morgue . . . Iron Maiden,”
she murmured while Jake sang along. “Could they all be related? But how?”

The song ended just then, and Jake shut off the player with her remote. “I’m heading
out to meet Reese in a few,” she said. “I’ll let you know later if he has any ideas
about Robert’s situation. In the meantime, try not to worry about Tera. That’s my
job.”

“I can’t help but worry, it’s in my DNA.” Darla managed a small smile as she said
that, but in truth she was more than a little fearful that the search for the missing
Tera was not going to end well. As for learning the identity of the person responsible
for Curt’s death—and, possibly, Tera’s fate—it seemed that Hamlet was still the only
one with any insight into that. But as soon as she got back to the bookstore, she
was going to start flipping through the clues he had left her and figure out what
she’d missed.

*   *   *

“I SUGGEST THAT WE RETURN TO THE GRAPHIC NOVEL,
THE MURDERS IN
the Rue Morgue
,” James said soon after he arrived for his two o’clock shift. “For starters, I would
make note of the fact that the title says ‘murders,’ meaning multiple. And if you
will recall the particulars of the story, the two victims were mother and daughter.”

“As in, Hilda and Tera?” Darla speculated before shaking her head. “Except that Hilda
isn’t dead. And hopefully Tera isn’t, either.”

Despite her resolution to work on Hamlet’s clues first thing, the bookstore had been
busy as usual on a Saturday morning, leaving her no time for detecting. But now that
James had arrived for his afternoon shift, Darla had pulled out her list from the
day before and was making new notes. James, after hearing about her Dumpster find
and the interesting coincidence regarding the heavy metal song title, had agreed to
contribute his own opinions.

And Darla’s quick dismissal of his first observation did not go unchallenged.

“I will concede the fact that at least one of the pair is demonstrably still breathing,
so perhaps we should view it as a symbolic death. The death of trust, the death of
innocence, the death of—”

“Fine, I get the picture.”

Darla added a second column labeled
Murders in the Rue Morgue
, under which she wrote the names
Hilda
and
Tera
, each followed by a question mark. “And don’t forget our perfect tie-in to Porn Shop
Bill. He’s got the orangutan looks and the motive and bad temper to make him a killer.
He definitely stays on the suspect list,” she said, circling his name for good measure.

Though, to be fair, Reese had said that the man had only ever been convicted of assault,
she reminded herself. Still, who was to say he didn’t up the ante with Curt?

“Now, about the song.” She wrote the words
Murders in the Rue Morgue (song)
over a third column, and beneath that added
Iron Maiden
.

“That’s two ‘irons,’” she pointed out, underlining the words in question, “plus a
‘man’ and a ‘maiden’ . . . and as you said, we’ve got the word ‘murders’ twice.”

She underlined the rest of the words and then looked up at James, stricken. “It sure
seems like the clues all tell us that Tera is dead, too. You’ve got a man, Curt, and
a maiden, Tera . . . and two murders.”

“Remember, Darla, it is
all
speculation at this point. Before we jump to more conclusions, perhaps we need to
try our hand at word association.”

James’s words were calm, but Darla had seen a flash of dismay in his expression. No
doubt he was struggling not to concede that she most likely was right. To keep up
both their spirits, she decided not to harp on the theory.

“Fine. Let’s start with Iron Maiden. What else do you think of when you hear those
words besides a heavy metal band?”

“For the record, that would not have been my first association,” James replied with
pointed look. “I would go with the medieval instrument of torture, although I have
read speculation that the Maiden never actually existed but was something of an archeological
hoax.”

Hoax or not, Darla reluctantly added
torture
to the list. “All right, what else?”

“The former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher,” was James’s second response.
“She was nicknamed the Iron Lady. And, if memory serves me correctly”—he paused and
typed in a few swift words on the computer—“yes, it does appear that the prime minister’s
middle name is Hilda.”

“You’re kidding.”

Darla peered over his shoulder at the official biography that he’d pulled up online.
To her amazement, she saw that the British politician’s middle name was indeed the
same as that of the missing Tera’s mother. Shaking her head, she added Hilda’s name
to the song column.

“Okay. What else do you think of when I say ‘iron’?”

“How about, you know, Iron Man?”

The question came from Robert, who apparently had finished the task Darla had assigned
him of stacking cartons of books upstairs and had wandered back down to the shop floor
again. When she and James both turned slightly dumbfounded looks on him, the teen
rolled his eyes.

“Don’t you ever, like, go to the movies? The comic book guy in the red metal suit.
His real name is Tony Stark.”

“I saw the movie,” Darla loftily informed him. “It’s just that some ‘comic book guy’
sounds so, well, random.”

“No more random than a British politician,” James interjected, defending his protégé.

Darla shrugged. “All right, I’ll give you that one. Maybe Curt knew a guy named Tony,”
she agreed and added that name to her growing list.

Robert was looking over her shoulder as she wrote. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. The
theme song to the movie is called ‘Iron Man.’ It’s by this ancient metal band called
Black Sabbath . . . you know, the one with that guy that, like, eats bats. He’s got
a reality show or something on cable.”

“Ozzy Osbourne,” Darla supplied, feeling unduly proud to realize that she knew something
about a band that an eighteen-year-old did not.

Then she frowned. Black Sabbath had been one of the names that Jake had mentioned
in her paean to heavy metal music. Could this all be mere coincidence? It was as if
anyone and everyone might have had a hand in Curt’s murder.

“We’re still missing some vital clue,” she said, setting her pen down and trying to
tamp down the frustration she could feel welling inside her. She glanced around for
Hamlet, who’d been keeping himself scarce since breakfast. If he could snag one more
book for her, maybe that would somehow make the connection clear.

James picked up the list and perused it for a moment. “It would seem we have sufficient
data but, as you say, no logical tie. I fear that Hamlet is falling down on the job
as a detective.”

“Hamlet solves crimes?” Robert asked, eyes wide. “Hey, sweet!”

“I swear, we’re not a bunch of crackpots,” Darla said, “but Hamlet does seem to have
a special knack for this detecting thing.” She gave him a quick rundown on how Hamlet
had helped solve crimes in the past. “But for heaven’s sake don’t say anything about
Hamlet’s book snagging to our customers,” she warned him. “Who knows what people would
think? Besides,” she joked, “we don’t want to be overrun with crazies wanting Hamlet
to solve Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance and the Kennedy assassination.”
Though the wily cat likely has insights into both crimes
, Darla wryly told herself.

Robert pantomimed zipping his lips. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell. And I’ll keep an eye
out for books on the floor.”

“You do that. So, you feel like working a full shift today?”

The offer was not entirely altruistic. While the extra hours would give a small boost
to the teen’s paycheck—and the work would keep him off the streets for a few hours—she
had another reason to hold him there. She wanted to pay another visit to Hilda to
see if she could learn a bit more about the woman’s relationship with her daughter.
Maybe she’d be more forthcoming with Darla than with Reese or even Jake.

Robert, meanwhile, was eagerly nodding. “Yeah, sure. I’ll stay.”

“Perfect. James, Robert is going to finish out the shift with you. And I’m going to
take off an hour or so to run an errand.”

Once she was sure the pair had things under control, she grabbed her coat—the temperatures
hadn’t climbed above the midfifties, which was brutally cold as far as she was concerned—and
started down the street. Mary Ann was on her stoop sweeping, and Darla paused for
a quick greeting. After a few words about the weather, which the native New Yorker
Mary Ann referred to as simply “mild,” the old woman asked, “Did you get a chance
to ask Detective Reese about the neighborhood watch yet?”