A Novel Way to Die (8 page)

Obediently he swung around and began moving the flashlight beam back and forth in
wide arcs toward the area she’d indicated. “Tell me when you—”

“There!”

Shaking now, so that she didn’t dare let go of the doorjamb, Darla stared down at
the spot where Barry’s flashlight beam had paused. It could be a blue tarp, she tried
to tell herself. But as Barry slowly moved down the stairs, the pool of light around
the fabric widened.
No, not a tarp.
It was a blue Windbreaker . . . the same jacket that Curt had been wearing last time
he had stopped by the bookstore.

And as the flashlight beam zeroed in on it even more closely, she now could see what
appeared to be a human hand protruding from the jacket’s sleeve.

SEVEN

“CURT!” BARRY YELLED AND WENT STUMBLING DOWN THE
steps toward the still figure lying on the basement floor.

Darla rushed after him as fast as she could, given the spotty light. Surely Curt was
simply unconscious, she frantically told herself. No doubt he had tripped on the steps
and hit his head when he landed. A tumble could explain why his phone had been lying
on the stairway rather than in his pocket. Frankly, she was surprised that neither
of the men had injured themselves before today. The brownstone was nothing short of
a disaster site.

By now, Barry was already kneeling beside his friend. Darla could see by the flashlight’s
yellow beam that Curt was lying on his belly a few feet away and to one side of the
bottom step. What looked like a crowbar lay across his back, reminding Darla of Curt’s
previous threats to lay in wait for the salvage thieves in case they made a return
visit.

A chilling thought came to her: had Curt tried to wield the bar against an intruder
only to come out on the losing side of the encounter?

She barely had time to consider that possibility before Barry grabbed the crowbar
and tossed it aside, and then leaned over his friend’s prone form.

“Curt, can you hear me?” he demanded as Darla breathlessly knelt beside him on the
dusty concrete floor.

For the space of a heartbeat, she held out hope that Curt would groan and then begin
to move. That optimism lasted only until the flashlight beam illuminated both the
bloody gash across the back of his skull and his wide-open, sightless eyes. Darla
bit back another gasp. Curt couldn’t hear them . . . wasn’t ever going to hear anything
ever again.

“Son of a bitch,” Barry choked out, and made as if to turn his friend over. Hastily,
Darla grabbed his arm.

“Leave him alone, Barry . . . there’s nothing we can do. Besides, the police won’t
want us touching anything.”

“The police?” He rose and rubbed a frantic hand over his thinning hair. “Yeah, you’re
right. Call 9-1-1, while I get some more light in here.”

It took her two tries to punch in the right sequence of numbers, for her hands were
shaking. Barry, meanwhile, had rushed back up the steps and plugged in a pair of the
clamp lights so that they shone like faint headlights down the wooden stairway. The
additional illumination made Darla blink and gave Curt’s unnaturally still form an
even more unreal appearance. She promptly scooted several feet away from the corpse,
preferring the relative darkness of the rest of the basement to being right next to
the dead man as she made her call.

Why couldn’t this have happened upstairs?
She already had something of an aversion to dark basements. She suspected she would
end up with a full-blown basement phobia now that she’d managed to find a dead body
lying in one.

After what seemed an interminable wait, though surely it had been but a matter of
seconds, the emergency operator came on the line. In a strained voice she barely recognized
as her own, Darla gave her name and explained the situation.

“It could have been an accident, but we don’t really know. An ambulance?” she answered
the dispatcher’s question. “You can send one, but I’m pretty sure he’s been dead awhile.
Address? Barry,” she called to the man, who now sat silently beside his friend, “what’s
the street number of the building?”

Barry stirred from his reverie long enough to give her the address, which she hurriedly
repeated into the phone, along with a few more details about the body’s location in
the building. The dispatcher instructed her to remain on scene and not touch anything
in the vicinity of the dead man . . . too late, as Darla recalled how Barry had moved
the crowbar off Curt’s body.

“They’re sending the police and an ambulance right out,” Darla told him once she’d
hung up. Then, carefully avoiding looking at Curt again, she suggested, “Maybe we
should wait upstairs until they get here.”

“But I don’t want to just leave him here like this,” Barry countered with a miserable
shake of his head. “I should find a blanket or something to put over him.”

“The dispatcher said not to touch anything,” she reminded him. “We don’t know what
actually happened to him, so we don’t want to accidentally destroy any evidence.”
Like picking up the pry bar
, she told herself, though she probably would have reflexively done the same thing
had she been first to reach Curt.

Barry gave a grim nod and gestured her toward the stairs. “I guess I should take a
look around while we’re waiting on the cops to see if any wire or tools are missing.
Curt’s been worried about those bastards who stole our copper last week paying another
visit.”

Darla had come to much the same conclusion. Bad enough that since Curt’s warning the
week before, she’d worried over the possible loss of her street numbers to the scrap
thieves. Now she had to fear the possibility of falling victim to criminals who were
bold enough to commit murder if they were crossed?

They retreated upstairs to the main floor again, leaving the body alone in the basement.
The body
. Darla felt uncomfortable referring to someone whom she’d personally known in such
a manner, but she found it hard to reconcile the ghastly corpse sprawled beneath the
stairs with her boisterous if obnoxious customer Curt. To be sure, she had tolerated
the man rather than liked him, but never would she have wished such a fate on him.
And of course, the situation was far different for Barry, who had been both a friend
and a business partner to Curt for more than half their lives.

She glanced Barry’s way. Once he had determined that nothing seemed to be missing
from the work area, he had joined her in the parlor. Now, he sat slumped against the
wall, hands limply propped on his knees as he stared at a gaping hole in the plaster
opposite him. She couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude for this particular situation,
and so she simply sat with him in what she hoped he’d view as sympathetic silence,
though the truth was that she was guiltily wishing she’d turned down his lunch invitation
and thus avoided the whole unpleasantness.

She remembered abruptly that Robert was alone at the bookstore. She’d better let him
know she was going to be delayed.

Robert answered on the second ring, his “Pettistone’s Fine Books, this is Robert,
and how may I assist you today?” greeting enunciated in respectable imitation of James’s
precise tones.

Feeling rather like she was breaching some major etiquette rule by making her call,
she murmured, “Robert, this is Darla. Yes, your boss,” she clarified before he could
ask for further identification. “There’s been a bit of trouble here at Barry’s place.
I-I might be later than I thought. Will you be all right until James gets in?”

“Under control,” he replied. “It’s a bit slow, so I’m working on a window display
for those new political autobiographies from last week. You know, the ones that turned
out to be, like, real dogs.”

Momentarily returning to retailer mode, Darla winced, knowing to which ones he referred.
Nothing worse than moving only a half dozen copies in a week of what was supposedly
a blazing
New York Times
best seller. “A window display, huh? Do you know how to do that?”

“Sure,” was his enthusiastic answer. “There was this one the time Bill meant to order
two copies of an old
Naughty Teacher Nancy
DVD but got two cases instead. You should have seen the cool display I made with
a chalkboard and some notebooks. We sold, like, twenty DVDs in one day.”

Great. Marketing tips courtesy of the adult bookstore industry.
Darla rolled her eyes. But hey, if it had worked for
Naughty Teacher Nancy
, maybe it would work for the flavor-of-the-month politicians, too.

“Go ahead, then,” she agreed, “but only use whatever you find lying around the shop
for props. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

As she hung up the call, Robert’s mention of window displays made her think of Hilda
Aguilar, whose talent at window dressing had always made her envious. What would happen
to Jake’s investigation, given that the subject of said investigation was now dead?
And more important, what would Tera Aguilar’s reaction be to her boyfriend’s untimely
end? Even if Tera had felt as casual about the relationship as Curt apparently had,
this would still have to come as a huge shock.

A heavy pounding on the open front door was accompanied by a barked demand: “Police.
Anyone home?”

“In here,” Barry called, promptly rising and offering Darla a hand up.

Her relief at seeing a uniformed officer arriving on the scene was tempered by the
fact that she recognized the broad-faced, mustachioed cop. Officer Hallonquist had
once caught her parked in Great-Aunt Dee’s old Mercedes in a no-parking zone. Despite
Darla’s honeyed attempt at explanation, Hallonquist had gleefully written her a traffic
citation, disproving her previous theory that all middle-aged New York men were suckers
for women with southern accents. The fact that Jake’s former partner Detective Reese
had later managed to get the ticket dismissed hadn’t tempered Darla’s displeasure
over the situation. Would the officer remember her now, with equal annoyance?

He did.

“You again,” Hallonquist said with a shake of his head as he trudged through the open
door to join them. Giving Barry a curt nod, he turned back to her and went on, “Dispatch
says you got something worse than an illegally parked Mercedes this time.”

“Hello, Officer Hallonquist. Nice to see you again, too,” she said with deliberate
politeness, stretching her Texas accent into an even more exaggerated twang for his
benefit. “And, unfortunately, yes. There’s been a bad . . . accident.”

“I’ll show you,” Barry interrupted and pointed toward the open basement door.

He led the way down the steps, Hallonquist behind him and Darla bringing up the rear.
Not that she cared to see Curt’s body a second time, but she wanted to be there when
Hallonquist took his first look at the scene. With luck, the officer would immediately
tag the incident as a likely accident, so that she could stop worrying about scrap
thieves and random, bloody violence. But then she remembered something Reese had told
her once: that unless a doctor was holding the corpse’s hand, any unexpected death
was treated as a homicide until proved otherwise. “Stop right here, sir,” Hallonquist
told Barry when they were a few steps from the bottom. “Homicide will be here in a
minute to secure the area, but in the meantime we don’t want you wandering around
the scene any more than you already have.”

He’d drawn his oversized police flashlight, and now he clicked it on, the burst of
LED illumination far brighter than the clamp-on lights that Barry had set up earlier.
He swept his beam in the direction that Barry indicated, the white light washing over
Curt’s stiff form. Hallonquist reached for his radio, and Darla heard him speak briefly
into it, though she couldn’t make out his words or the answering squawk he got in
return from his dispatcher. But from the stern expression on his face, she suspected
that he had decided there was nothing natural about Curt’s death.

“All right, folks,” Hallonquist announced as he turned his radio down again, “time
to go back upstairs so we can get some statements.”

He swung his flashlight beam over the scene again, and that was when Darla noticed
something she had not spied earlier. At the sight, her stomach gave a small lurch.

Half a dozen rust-colored paw prints, each successively fainter than the previous,
led away from Curt’s body.

EIGHT

��HELL, DARLA, IF YOU’D WANTED TO SEE ME AGAIN THAT BAD,
you could’ve just dialed my cell.”

Detective Fiorello Reese—known simply as Reese by those who wished to avoid extreme
bodily injury—had walked through the open front door just as she, Barry, and Officer
Hallonquist exited the basement. She’d almost not recognized him, however, given that
he’d exchanged his usual personal uniform of jeans and black leather jacket for navy
slacks, striped tie, and brown tweed sport coat.

Tall and blond, with the physique of someone who hung out in the gym a lot, Reese
was a year or two younger than Darla and possessed of what she called midwestern corn-fed
good looks—this despite the fact he was Italian on his mother’s side—though he was
saved from being a pretty boy by a strong nose that had been broken and never reset.
And he had the reputation to go along with the nose. In fact, Reese had been the one
to pull an injured Jake to safety during the gun battle with a homicide suspect that
had left her permanently disabled.

Darla’s relief that Reese was the homicide detective apparently assigned to the case
had been tempered by a flash of annoyance at this bit of levity on his part. Reese
didn’t seem to notice her consternation. After delivering that offhanded greeting,
he switched into detective mode and hustled them all outside again.

“Sir,” he addressed Barry, “I need you and the lady to wait out here until I can take
your statements. Please don’t leave the scene yet.”

Not waiting for Barry’s assent, Reese turned to confer with Hallonquist for a few
moments. Then he headed back inside the brownstone and presumably down into the basement
for a look while a dour Hallonquist remained behind to stand guard over her and Barry.
As he was jotting down their names and other pertinent information, Darla saw the
crime scene van pull up. Two technicians—both blond, female, middle-aged, and wearing
dark blue medical scrubs—fastened official yellow “Do Not Cross” tape along the perimeter
of the narrow property. Then, reaching into the back of their van to don gloves and
what resembled shower caps, each picked up what appeared to be a metal tackle box
and marched over to where Officer Hallonquist stood.

“Body?” the shorter of the pair barked, not bothering with a greeting.

Hallonquist thrust a thumb in the direction of the front door, from which Reese was
now emerging. “Basement,” was his equally succinct reply.

She nodded. “Gimme the Cliff Notes,” she commanded in a strong Brooklyn accent overlaid
with the characteristic rasp of a two-pack-a-day smoker.

Hallonquist gave the woman a terse recitation of what was obvious from the scene:
middle-aged male, dead several hours, apparent cause a blow to the head, possibly
from a fall down the steps, but a crowbar had been found near the body.

“Anyone touch anything?” Shorty asked when he’d finished, her pointed look encompassing
Darla and Barry. The latter nodded.

“I, er, moved the crowbar off him,” he admitted, earning a snort of disgust from the
tech.

“Civilians! They’ll screw up a scene every time. We’ll need his prints, and hers,
too,” she added with a meaningful glare at Darla before she headed up the steps.

Her partner, meanwhile, shot the rest of them a baleful look. “No one comes back inside
until we give the okay.”

“All right, folks, statement time,” Reese said, all business now as he gestured Barry
to join him. “Darla, why don’t you hang with Officer Hallonquist for a minute while
I talk to your friend?”

The officer appeared just about as thrilled as Darla felt at the prospect. To her
relief, however, Hallonquist’s definition of “hang” turned out to be “stand around
silently and shoot dirty looks at the passersby who were gaping at the police vehicles
and yellow tape.” Since the strip of trampled grass in front of the brownstone hardly
qualified as a lawn, that meant Darla was close enough to Reese and Barry to catch
bits of their conversation. She noted that when the latter got to the part about how
they had located Curt by means of the dead man’s ringing cell phone, Reese quickly
confiscated the phone in question still in Barry’s pocket. No doubt some official
police hacker would be able to get all of Curt’s saved messages even without the benefit
of the man’s password. Knowing Curt, she hoped for his sake that he had deleted any
suggestive voice mails from Tera or any of his other conquests.

When it was Darla’s turn to talk, Reese went through the timetable of the morning’s
events with her, up to and including their discovery of Curt. She included how they’d
followed the ring of the cell phone, earning an approving nod from the cop at the
unconventional tactic. When she mentioned how Curt had warned her about the scrap
thieves last time he stopped in at the bookstore, Reese prodded her for everything
she could recall about that conversation.

“Curt seemed pretty upset about having that copper tubing stolen,” she explained.
“I’m sure he thought they were some street punks who’d run off at the first sign of
trouble, but he warned me that they were hitting occupied buildings, too, and that
I’d better keep a close eye on my place.”

“No mention of anyone else he was having trouble with? Creditors, ex-wives?”

“Actually, there is someone,” Darla replied, abruptly recalling the recent confrontation
in her store. “You heard about my new employee, Robert? Last week, his old boss stopped
by the store basically to harass him. Curt happened to come in at the same time, and
it turned out the two of them knew each other. They got into a pretty nasty argument
before I kicked Bill out, and he said something about unfinished business between
them.”

“I don’t suppose you know Bill’s last name, do you?” Reese asked, looking up from
his notes to give her a keen look.

Darla shook her head. “I can find out from Robert if you need me to. All I know is
that he owns an adult bookstore a few blocks away called Bill’s Books and Stuff.”

“Short, ugly guy, looks like he escaped from the monkey house?”

At Darla’s nod, Reese gave a cold, satisfied smile, though his look for her was one
of approval. “That would be Bill Ferguson. Let’s just say he’s not a stranger to the
department. I’ll stop by that cesspool he calls a store and have a little chat with
him. Anyone else?”

“You might want to ask Jake that,” Darla replied. “She’s poking around into Curt’s
background for a new client. She might have something for you.”

The suggestion earned her another approving nod, and Darla tried not to feel guilty.
It was probably more than she should have said without Jake’s permission, but maybe
it would offset the one thing she did not intend to mention: the set of bloody paw
prints she’d noticed near Curt’s body. No way was she going to implicate Hamlet—and,
by default, herself—by telling Reese she suspected her store mascot might know something
about what happened to Curt. The crime scene tech looked like a pro. She would surely
spot the paw prints and draw her own conclusions as to what they meant.

Not that the prints were necessarily Hamlet’s, or even feline in origin, Darla reassured
herself. For all she knew, they might belong to one of those giant rats she was always
hearing about that lived in the New York City sewers. But she couldn’t help recalling
Curt’s assumption that it had been Hamlet he’d seen the previous week slinking out
of the brownstone.

What if Hamlet had found his way outside again last night and paid a return visit
to Curt and Barry’s brownstone in the wee hours of the morning? While Curt was headed
up the basement steps with his crowbar, Hamlet might have been lurking down there
looking for some entertainment. What if he had decided to play his favorite cat game
of rushing up the stairs while dodging a human’s legs? If he’d startled Curt and the
man had actually tripped over him, could Hamlet be guilty of manslaughter?

Darla had no idea what the ramifications might be, but she suspected it would not
bode well for either Hamlet or Pettistone’s Fine Books. Animal control for Hamlet,
perhaps, definitely a lawsuit for her! She suppressed a shudder.

“Getting chilly?” Reese asked sympathetically as he shut his notebook.

She nodded. “A little.”

“I think we’re done here. You can go, and we’ll see about getting your prints later,
if we end up needing them. Mr. Eisen,” he called to Barry, “I’m finished with the
witness statements. You can wait here until our techs are finished and the body is
removed to lock up the place, or you can go and we’ll lock up for you. But I can’t
let you back inside again until probably tomorrow, when we’ll release the scene.”

Barry left his post by the construction Dumpster and joined them. “Yeah, I’ll stick
around. It doesn’t seem right to leave Curt there with strangers.”

“Do you want me to wait with you?” Darla asked, a lump in her throat. Though her emotion
was not so much for Curt as it was for Barry. If something like this had happened
to one of her friends, she couldn’t imagine wanting to stay and watch the blanketed
body being carried out on a gurney . . . and yet she knew she’d feel compelled to
do so, all the same. Having been friends with Curt since high school, Barry must surely
feel as if he’d lost a brother.

He gave her a faint smile and shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but you need
to get back to the store. You don’t want to leave that kid running the place by himself
all afternoon. I’ll be fine here. I’ll give you a call or something later, okay?”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she replied and managed a smile in return.

While Barry took a seat on the partially demolished stoop, Reese walked with her the
short distance to the sidewalk. Holding up the crime scene tape so that she could
walk under it, he asked, “So, you dating that guy?”

Darla stared at him in surprise. The detective’s words had been casual, but something
in his deliberately bland expression told her that his interest in the answer was
not. Surely Reese wasn’t jealous . . . was he?

“We’re just friends. At least, at this point,” she replied, surprised to find herself
complimented by Reese’s apparent interest in her love life. Maybe he was regretting
not putting forth a little effort back when they’d first met. Maybe now he was gauging
the situation to see if he should try moving in on what he considered Barry’s territory.
The question was, should she give him any encouragement?

What the heck
, she decided.
Why not?
True, she couldn’t see things between her and Reese going anywhere—for one thing,
he had a distinct aversion to the printed word—but the notion that he was interested
in her added a cheery note to what had been a distinctly unpleasant day. And so, with
a deliberately casual air of her own, she clarified, “We’re not exactly dating, but
Jake has been encouraging me to go out with him. She thinks he’d be good for me.”

“Hey, that’s great.” Reese gave her a brotherly slap on the back. “I sure hope it
works out for you. A broad your age, you can’t afford to wait around too much longer
for the right guy to show up. Tick, tock, and all that.”

Tick, tock?

Darla’s previous warm, fuzzy feeling took an abrupt header into cold and prickly territory.
Seriously, Reese’s whole “hates books” attitude should have been fair warning. Good
a friend as he might be to Jake, the man was definitely a Cro-Magnon when it came
to more personal relationships.

“If that was a crude reference to my biological clock, then I’ll pretend I didn’t
hear you,” she replied in as frosty a tone as she could muster. “In case you didn’t
get the memo, a woman doesn’t need a man to have a fulfilling life. And she sure doesn’t
need one to have a baby . . . at least, not after that first ten minutes.”

“Hey, that first ten minutes is the best part,” Reese countered with a wink that made
her blush despite her outrage. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Red. I was just
kidding with you.”

“And I’ve told you before, don’t call me Red,” Darla gritted out. Her ex had called
her that—usually followed by some obnoxious statement that he’d thought was unduly
clever—and she had come to loathe the nickname.

He pantomimed an erasing motion with one hand. “Sorry, I forgot about that whole Red
thing. Don’t send your boyfriend over to kick my ass about it, okay?”

“I can handle my own ass-kicking, thank you very much.” She was about to add a few
more choice remarks, when she glanced past Reese to see Barry staring curiously at
the pair of them. No point in creating a scene, particularly under the circumstances.

Favoring Barry with a sympathetic wave—and Reese with a parting glare—Darla started
back in the direction of the bookstore. The weather seemed colder now than when she
and Barry had so companionably made their way to the brownstone a couple of hours
earlier. Also, reaction to Curt’s death had begun to set in, and she felt suddenly
drained of energy.

Still, visions of crowbar-wielding thieves kept her moving at a brisk pace down the
street, though force of habit made her slow as she passed by Great Scentsations. The
Halloween graveyard scene had been modified by the addition of a stuffed figure of
a sexy, miniskirted witch chasing a fuzzy black cat through the soap tombstones.