Half-Price Homicide (19 page)

“Here’s your cell phone, too,” Kathy said, putting it carefully on Helen’s chair arm. “Call 911 if he touches you.”

Rob waited until Kathy had closed the kitchen door, then said, “Where’s my money, Helen? And don’t get cute. You know the judge awarded me half your income. You haven’t paid me a penny yet. I need fifteen thousand dollars and I need it fast.”

“Wrong,” Helen said. “I don’t owe you a dime, Rob. In fact, you owe me a fortune.”

“Hah! Are you on drugs? Wanna see a copy of our divorce decree?” Rob asked. “That could refresh your memory. Or I could show it to the police.”

“The police will be looking for you, probably by tomorrow. You’re going to be arrested,” Helen said. “I’ll even tell you why. Consider it my last favor for old times’ sake.”

Rob’s smug smile disappeared as she explained that Phil had found evidence of bribery and that ex-judge Smathers was expected to rat out Rob.

“So you will probably owe me ALL the money from the sale of our house,” Helen said, “plus whatever was in our joint account when we divorced. And you’re facing charges of bribery.”

She looked directly at Rob. The smug grin was gone. He seemed asleep.

“Rob? Did you hear me?” Helen asked. No answer.

Helen was furious. “Are you drunk?” she said. “Did you pass out? Answer me.”

Rob didn’t respond. His eyes were at half-mast and his jaw was slack. Helen started shaking him, then slapped him. “Wake up!” she shrieked. “Wake up!”

“Helen!” Kathy was on the back porch. “Quiet! I could hear you upstairs. What are you doing?”

“Rob won’t answer,” Helen said. “I’m sick of his games. He’s pretending not to hear me.”

Kathy came closer and examined Rob. She pinched the back of his hand. Rob didn’t react.

“No response to pain,” she said.

Kathy put a hand on his chest, then put her ear over his shirt pocket. “No heartbeat.”

Kathy put her ear over his mouth. “No air movement,” she said. “He’s not breathing.”

She lifted one eyelid. “His pupils are fixed,” she said. “That’s not good.”

Kathy felt for a pulse, first in Rob’s wrist, then at his neck. “He’s dead. Definitely dead. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. My son is a killer,” she said, over and over.

“It was an accident,” Helen said. “We’ll call 911 and explain that to the police.”

Kathy grabbed Helen’s arm, her eyes frantic. “We can’t!” she said. “Tommy will be ruined.”

“But he’s not guilty,” Helen said.

“Listen to me,” Kathy said. “Remember Kevin, the kid at school who dropped his baby brother and killed him?”

“You mean—” The words died on Helen’s lips.

“Yes. Killer Kevin. That’s what everyone called him, didn’t they? Kevin was a bright, sweet boy until his little brother died,” Kathy said. “That was an accident, too, but Kevin never shook the nicknames. He’s been Killer Kevin, or Klumsy Killer Kevin, or KKK, ever since.

“Kevin should have gone to college. But he never finished high school. He couldn’t hold a job. Two years ago, he was arrested for armed robbery at a convenience store. Now he’s in jail. I don’t want my son’s life destroyed. Tommy shouldn’t suffer for that worthless Rob.”

“Tommy was trying to defend me,” Helen said. “I’ll say I did it. It was an accident. Call the police.”

“The police will never believe you,” Kathy said. “They’ll find out the court is looking for you after your divorce. They’ll check in Florida and find the assault charges from the time you hit Rob.”

“Those charges were dropped,” Helen said.

“Someone will talk,” Kathy said. “You’ll be arrested. Then my son will tell the truth to save his aunt Helen and his life will be ruined. I won’t allow it.” She slammed her hand on the picnic table. Easygoing Kathy had turned into a lioness defending her cub.

“What are we going to do?” Helen asked.

“Get rid of Rob’s body,” Kathy said. “I have to save my son.”

“I’ll help,” Helen said. “But this is so unfair.”

“Why?” Kathy asked.

“I prayed for Rob to die for years,” Helen said. “But nothing would kill him—not even when he moved in with a multiple murderess.

“Now when I need him alive, he up and dies.”

“What do we do with Rob?” Kathy asked. “We have to get him out of here fast.”

Rob’s body was slouched in the lawn chair like an overgrown doll. Helen wanted to pick up the baseball bat and keep pounding his body, but that wouldn’t help Kathy—or Tommy.

“We could dress him up as a scarecrow and put him on the front lawn for Halloween,” Helen said. A slightly hysterical laugh escaped her.

Kathy turned on her. “This is no time for you to get giddy. Your nephew’s future is at stake. Tom and Phil could return any moment. They are such straight arrows, they’ll call the cops.”

Helen was instantly serious. “Can the neighbors see Rob in the backyard here?” she asked. “He may look drunk from a distance, but if we start packing him in a steamer trunk or something, the neighbors will call the cops. What if someone saw Tommy slug him with the bat?”

“I doubt it,” Kathy said. “Old Mrs. Kiley next door is probably asleep. She goes to bed right after dinner. The house behind us belongs to the Kerchers, and they’re on vacation. That leaves the Cooks on the west side, and their view of our yard is blocked by our house. We’re safe so far. But we’d better move Rob soon. Let me pour you an iced tea and we’ll decide what to do.”

“Iced tea, my eye,” Helen said. “I want a big glass of wine.”

Kathy came out with another chilled bottle and poured generous glasses. The sisters sat at the picnic table. In the gathering dusk, Rob seemed to be watching them through slitted eyes.

“It will be dark in less than thirty minutes,” Kathy said. “We need that.”

“We could drag him around the corner to the bar’s parking lot,” Helen said. “Then he’d look like he was mugged.”

“People don’t get mugged in this neighborhood,” Kathy said. “There would be a major investigation. The autopsy would show he’d been hit with a blunt instrument. We’d have cops everywhere.”

“We could drop him in the river,” Helen said.

“Bodies float back up,” Kathy said. “The rivers are lower in August. You know Rob would be trouble. He was all his life.”

“Then we’ll have to bury him,” Helen said. She surveyed Kathy’s smooth green lawn and well-tended flower beds. “But we can’t dig up your yard. I don’t think we can put him in Mom’s grave.”

“The grave is already open,” Kathy said. “But we’d have to dig down at least three feet in hard clay.”

“That would take all night,” Helen said, “and Phil and Tom would wonder where we were.”

“Wait, I’ve got it! We’ll bury him in the church’s new hall,” Kathy said. “It’s an open construction site. They’ve torn down the old building. The new hall is being built on the same site. The concrete sides for the new basement have been poured. The drains and pipes are already in, and the basement floor is covered with crushed stone. They’re pouring the concrete tomorrow. I had to tell the funeral director so he could direct the mourners’ cars to the west lot, away from the construction. We could put Rob under the crushed stone. We won’t have to do much digging.”

“How do we get him there?” Helen asked.

“Tom has plenty of plastic drop cloths in our garage,” Kathy said. “We’ll wrap Rob’s body in some, tie him to a dolly and wheel him to the hall basement. We can use my minivan.”

Kathy slipped on her gardening gloves and handed Helen a pair of work gloves from Tom’s workbench. “Put them on,” she said. “Plastic takes fingerprints.”

Kathy opened four drop cloths on the garage floor. Then she draped more plastic drop cloths on the van’s front seats and put newspapers from the recycling bin in the foot wells. “To collect hair and fibers,” she said.

The two women lifted Rob out of the lawn chair and draped his arms over their shoulders, carrying him as if he were dead drunk, instead of dead.

“Good thing I’m used to hauling Allison,” Kathy said. “He’s heavy.”

“He stinks, too. And he’s a deadweight,” Helen said, and started giggling.

“Stop it!” Kathy said. “Concentrate.”

With a grunt, they dumped the body on the drop cloths. “Let’s go through his pockets and remove his identification,” Helen said. “In case he’s found, it will make Rob harder to trace.”

Rob’s wallet had a Florida driver’s license, thirty-one dollars and two credit cards. His pocket held the keys to a rental car.

“You take the money,” Helen said. She shoved the credit cards in her jeans. “I’ll cut up the cards and drop them down a sewer by our hotel. We’ll have to get rid of his rental. We can leave it at the gates of the car agency tonight and they’ll think he left in a hurry. It’s a shame to leave that expensive watch on his wrist, but it could be traced back to him if we take it.”

Helen spotted a roll of duct tape on a shelf by Tom’s workbench and reached for it.

“We’ll have to throw out the whole roll,” Kathy said. “Foren-sics experts can match up duct tape. I saw that on TV.”

“You really do watch those
CSI
-type shows,” Helen said.

“I also read murder mysteries,” Kathy said. “I thought they were entertainment. Turns out they were educational.”

They folded the drop cloths around Rob and crisscrossed them with duct tape, then strapped the plastic-wrapped body to the handcart with bungee cords. Kathy threw two shovels and a rake in the van. Helen stuck the nearly empty tape roll in her purse.

It was dark by the time they had Rob ready for his last ride. Kathy backed up her minivan and parked it sideways in front of the garage door. She and Helen rolled the body aboard.

“Let me check on the kids,” Kathy said.

She came back and said, “I left a note for the guys that we’d run out of wine and will be back soon. Allison was already asleep. Tommy was engrossed in his Nintendo DS. He has my cell number if there’s a problem. What kind of mother checks on her children before she goes off to bury their uncle?”

“A good mother,” Helen said. “Anyway, Rob is an ex-uncle, and he wasn’t much of one, dead or alive. Let’s get out of here.”

Kathy drove carefully through Webster Groves to the church. “I wonder what the neighbors would think if they knew what I had stashed in my minivan,” Kathy said.

“Good thing women in minivans are invisible,” Helen said. “I can’t believe Rob died on me. I thought I was finally free. Now I have to worry about his body.”

“You will be free soon,” Kathy said. “We’re at the church.”

“Wait!” Helen said. “There’s an SUV in the lot. On the other side of the church.”

“Oh, that belongs to Horndog Hal,” Kathy said. “He’s having an affair with Mrs. Snyder. He tells his trusting wife he’s at choir practice. She never checks on him. What Hal is practicing may have Mrs. S. hitting the high notes, but not in the church choir. Hal won’t notice anything until his lady love staggers off to her Toyota, which she parks around the corner. I swear she’ll be bow-legged before this affair is over.”

“Kathy!” Helen said.

The lights were off inside the church building, the grade school and the rectory. The site of the new church hall was a deep hole surrounded by a chain-link fence. “There’s no guard on duty,” Kathy said. “The construction gate is padlocked, but I think we can squeeze through that gap in the fence. Just wish I hadn’t had that extra helping of potato salad.”

The open basement was covered with white crushed rock. Poured concrete lined the sides.

Kathy expertly maneuvered the minivan in front of the gap in the fence, then opened the van’s side doors. She and Helen dragged the handcart with the wrapped Rob to the fence opening. Helen crawled through and emerged with a scratch on her right arm. She and Kathy pushed and pulled Rob until he fell over the edge into the huge hole, landing on the crushed rock with a loud crunch.

“Rob has hit rock bottom,” Helen said.

“Shut up!” her sister said.

Kathy tossed the two shovels and the rake on the rock. She squeezed through the fence opening, muttering words she’d never say in front of her children. A ladder led down to the hall floor. Helen climbed down it and Kathy followed her. They dragged Rob’s body to the closest corner. The handcart was hard to move in the rock. It tipped sideways when they hit a drain.

“Here,” Kathy said. She was panting. “Let’s put him here. There are no pipes or drains nearby.”

Helen and Kathy shoveled and raked the rock out of the way until they had a shallow hole about six feet long. They took off the bungee cords, rolled Rob into the hole and covered him with the rock. Kathy raked the crushed stone several times until it was smooth. The two women walked over the site a few times so it would have footprints like the rest of the rock.

“Can you see the grave now?” she asked.

Helen climbed the ladder and surveyed their work. She saw no sign that Rob’s body was under there. “I can’t see any difference.”

Helen helped Kathy carry the handcart and shovels up the ladder and push them through the fence hole. She climbed out, then lay down on her stomach in the mud and helped pull her sister out.

“I look like I’ve been mud wrestling,” Helen said, back in the van. “Good thing you put plastic on these seats.”