The Cantaloupe Thief (25 page)

Liam chuckled at the memory. No, he wasn't confusing silliness with theology. There was something else niggling at his brain.

He leaned back in his desk chair and closed his eyes. Rita was killed on Conestee Avenue, the most prestigious address in Grambling. Mrs Resnick's street, in fact. What was she doing there?

Police hadn't solved Vesuvius's death, perhaps hadn't even tried very hard, given the victim. What if — Liam bolted upright at the thought — what if he was killed by the church van as well?

Oh God, what if someone connected to the church had killed two of its homeless parishioners? The place might close down. All his hard work would be for naught if people thought it was a harbor for murderers.

Liam stood and paced his office. He looked at its artwork — two canvases depicting Jesus' crucifixion, an intricate Celtic cross purchased during a trip to Scotland, a crucifix given by a grateful job-seeker. He sat heavily in the green-upholstered rocker, put his head in his hands, and prayed to the God who'd hung on a cross.

He started for the prayer room down the hall. He often got more clarity in that quiet and sacred space. But before he could leave his office, the phone rang.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“L
iam?” Branigan asked. “Can you come to Mrs Resnick's? Everything points back to the pool house, so Jody and I are going through it again. We'd love to have your eye.”

He hesitated for a moment, but assented. Branigan ended the call.

Marjorie was at the Grambling Rescue Mission, getting a crash course in homelessness — lack of affordable housing, medical crises, mental health issues, addiction, unemployment, day labor, and the lingering effects of a felony or sex offense on one's record.

Jody and Branigan stood on Conestee Avenue, in front of Mrs Resnick's gracious old house, its front porch invitingly shady. It was quiet this mid-morning, and Branigan was beginning to think of the house itself as a
grande dame.
A
grande dame
with secrets.

“What do you know, Old Girl?” she whispered.

Branigan knew from her parents that the Resnick heirs had been unable to sell it. The murder was too publicized, too gory, too distasteful for the kind of people who would otherwise treasure such a house. Instead, Heath and Ramsey Resnick rented it to high-level executives who moved in and out of Grambling's diversifying industries with some regularity.

She and Jody had discussed sneaking onto the property and asking forgiveness later. But they gambled that if they asked Ramsey to let them look around, he would. They were right.

The police, meantime, were working the same street, canvassing neighbors, measuring tire marks, trying to get something, anything, on the incident that had killed Rita.
The Rambler
's online letters to the editor reflected outrage at the casual dispatching of the city's homeless. The irony that their deaths inspired indignation in a way their lives hadn't wasn't lost on the reporters.

Ramsey had told them no one was home, so they walked up the driveway and around the back without knocking. The hedge separating the parking area from the back yard was neatly trimmed — and standing half as high as Branigan remembered from a decade before. They stepped onto the pathway and found it unencumbered by shrubbery or tree limbs.

“Apparently, they let landscapers in after Mrs Resnick died,” Jody said.

“They probably couldn't rent it otherwise.”

The maintenance stopped with the yard, however. The pool was empty, covered by an electric blue tarp. The pool house looked abandoned. A pile of outdoor furniture under another blue tarp was partially protected by the roof's overhang.

Jody had Ramsey's front door key. It took some wrestling, but finally the bolt slid open with a thump, and he and Branigan entered the recreation room. As well as they could remember, it was unchanged.

They walked to the bedroom. Branigan went straight to the bureau Ben Jr had described, and pulled open the top drawer. Empty except for a blackened spoon. Odd. The second drawer revealed faded bathing suits, women's and men's. In the third, she found the paperbacks — not cheap or lurid, but high quality.

She flipped through the covers:
Ironweed, Requiem for a Dream, Cold Sassy Tree, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Old Man and the Sea, The Shipping News.
She reached to the very bottom:
Invisible Man.
She agreed with Ben's assessment — first rate.

“Branigan!” They heard a shout from outside. “Jody!”

“Back here, Liam!” Jody called.

The men shook hands, did some kind of guy-thing shoulder bump. “Good to see you, buddy,” Jody said. “How's the gospel game?”

“It has its moments.”

Branigan brought Liam up to date on what they had learned about Rita Mae Jones, and what Ben Brissey Jr had said about her presence at the Fourth of July party.

“I didn't even know her last name,” Liam admitted, rifling through the bureau drawers. “You say they did crack in here? That explains the spoon.”

“That's why we needed you,” she said. “So the spoon was used to heat crack.”

The three split up and walked silently from room to room. Branigan thought about the police files she'd read and tried to imagine where Billy Shepherd had slept. Everything mentioned in the files — his blankets, food, cigarettes — had been found in the main recreation room. Had someone else been in the back bedroom? If so, did Billy know? Was it a girlfriend? Another homeless man?

And Rita? She'd been in these very rooms on the night of the party. But she wasn't homeless then. She was a party guest — a guest attractive enough to catch the eye of young Ben Brissey Jr.

Did she return the next day and kill Mrs Resnick? Did the guilt drive her into addiction?
God help me,
Branigan thought,
but I hope she did. That's better than me getting an innocent woman killed.

Unfortunately, the downward angle of the stab wounds suggested not. So did she see something that got her killed? And if so, why ten years later?

Branigan was getting a headache. She trailed after Liam and Jody as they walked outside. Liam circled the pool house once, then began a second lap. He had a puzzled look on his face.

In a moment, he called from the rear, “Brani G, come look at this!”

The landscapers' pruning had not extended to the back of the pool house. It was much wilder back there, with only a few feet of stone pavers before the woods encroached. Liam took her by the shoulders and marched her to the far corner of the property where a mighty cedar stretched its floppy branches toward the building.

“Look at the pool house from this angle,” he commanded. She stood for a moment, uncomprehending, gazing at the towering trees and undergrowth crowding the house. Then she gasped, and took off running for the pool side of the house, toward the jumble of covered furniture. She yanked the tarp off. And there beside a stack of plastic-strapped lounge chairs was what she was looking for: two Adirondack chairs, up-ended.

Jody was staring, mystified, from Branigan to Liam.

“The psychics,” she told him. “This is the house a psychic drew. She said Mrs Resnick's killer hid out here.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

JULY 5, TEN YEARS AGO

Alberta Resnick answered the back door, brushing crumbs from her hands. She took one look and opened the door without hesitation, a quizzical look, maybe even a half-smile, on her face.

That was before the request for money. Then her face closed, contemptuously it seemed. The question didn't come again. It was a demand the second time. She slammed the door.

Her yelling began when the rock shattered the window panes. Then it had to stop, didn't it? All that noise had to stop before someone heard.

It didn't take a lot. Four, maybe six, thrusts of the knife snatched from a wooden block on her kitchen counter. It wasn't intentional. Not really. There had been a genuine fondness between them once. But the angry, accusatory screams had to stop.

She could have prevented this. All it would have taken was money, and she had plenty. But she wasn't afraid; she complained about her interrupted lunch. That was a little surprising, her lack of fear. Even her screaming wasn't fear. That was rage, pure rage.

The same cold rage she'd directed at Billy, when Billy wanted to live in her pool house, when he inexplicably wanted to play her piano.

Now the rage had seeped out along with her blood, puddling, trailing from her thin contorted body. But the noise continued from her yapping dog. It sounded loud, but surely no one outside the house could hear it. A half-hearted kick to the chihuahua sent it skidding across the linoleum.

Now for the money. She used to call it her “ice cream money”, and kept it in the freezer. Decades ago, when her husband was still alive, she'd give Ramsey or Amanda or Heath a few dollars to buy treats from the ice cream truck for the grandchildren or neighborhood children.

Mrs Resnick didn't like things to change, so chances were she still kept money in her freezer. A yank of the top door of the ancient appliance revealed an aluminum-foil-wrapped package the length of a brick, but slimmer. It slid easily inside a shirt pocket.

That's when the visitor saw the blood. Not the blood on the floor — its pools were pristine, untouched. But her blood had spattered all over the visitor's shirt and, yes, the pants as well.

The visitor glanced around, suddenly frantic. Were there fingerprints? Straddling her body, again being careful not to step in the blood, tugging the steak knife from her chest. In that moment, the sickness hit.

The visitor looked around wildly, spotted the old woman's car keys hanging from a wooden peg beside the wall phone, and grabbed them, not thinking clearly, not thinking at all really, just obeying an almost primitive instinct to get far, far from this place.

Wiping off the door knob with a shirt tail, the visitor darted out for a quick look. No one was around. Across the parking area and through the side door into the detached garage. The old woman's quarter-century-old Thunderbird was crowded by a wheelbarrow, dirt-encrusted flower pots, tools, half-empty bags of fertilizer, potting soil, mulch — the detritus of a once-avid gardener, long sidelined. But hanging from rusty hooks were ragged gardening clothes, men's clothes, so worn and dirty they looked like they might fall apart at a touch.

The visitor grabbed a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved work shirt, thankful that Mr Resnick had been a big man, pulling the clothes over blood-spattered ones and hiding the one thing that might scare someone, might make someone notice an otherwise unnoticeable person.

Lifting the garage door manually, the visitor backed the T-bird out, then had the presence of mind to exit the car, pull the door back down and wipe the surfaces. Back in the car, heart accelerating, the visitor's body boomeranged in and out of panic. The heart flutter hit again backing down the driveway, going too fast, squealing into the street, stopping abruptly, then consciously keeping a steady foot to drive down Conestee. Passing a teenager on a bicycle, the visitor was careful to turn away.

What now? Back to Atlanta?

An idea came. Billy. Weren't the police already looking at Billy? The poor guy — he might as well live in prison. He wouldn't know any difference, most likely.

Billy was probably in some homeless encampment, maybe even that abandoned grocery store.

This could work. Of course, the old woman's car would have to be ditched. It had been handy for getting out of the neighborhood unseen. But it was too recognizable. There ahead was the sprawling grocery store, windows broken, baking in the mid-day sun. Pulling in, the visitor left the T-bird, checking that the knife was in Mr Resnick's pants, pocketing the keys to dispose of later, wiping the steering wheel clean of sweat.

Then the visitor glanced around and began walking. Should anyone see these shabby clothes they'd make a quick assessment: homeless. Then they'd look away. That's what people usually did.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

PRESENT DAY

Chan came up behind Malachi in the Jericho Road dining hall. When his mom was working late, he liked to come down and eat at the church, then help the men clean up. The shelter residents and the homeless people who ate here were always pleasant to him: he was, after all, Pastor Liam's son. But he wanted something more. He wanted to understand their lives. He wanted to forge relationships apart from his dad.

Malachi was his favorite. The two often worked side by side, not necessarily speaking, but moving in tandem, one sweeping, one holding the dustbin, one lifting the trash bag, one tying it off to prevent leaks.

Chan returned from a trash run to the parking lot to help Malachi stack the chairs on the tables, the last step before mopping.

“You 'bout ready for college?” Malachi asked.

“Nah, I've got two months before orientation. Lots to get into before then.”

They lifted a few more chairs, placing them upside down on the long tables.

“Did you go to college, Malachi? Or straight into the military?”

“Directly into the US Army. Desert Storm.”

“Were your dad and granddad Army too?” Malachi looked at Chan. What was it with all the questions about his family, back at the library and now?

“No, just me.”

“My dad went to Georgia. That's where Charlie's going.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wanted something different, you know? Nobody in our family has gone to Furman. I won't run into my whole high school class there either.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nobody will care who my family is.”

Malachi stacked a few more chairs. “Mr Chan, you got a problem with your fam'ly?”

Chan took a long moment to answer. “Not a problem,” he said slowly. “But do you ever worry if who they are determines who you are?”