The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (16 page)

“Sure,” she yelled back, laughing at the sound of her own voice.

They went to a small coffee shop not far from the bar and talked for a while. Susan was fun to be with, a pretty woman, well put together, but no beauty queen. He liked her, liked how she looked. Joe walked her to his car, stopping in the half light of a streetlamp to pull her to him, a soft kiss on her lips for luck, the next one because it felt nice to hold a real woman. Susan got in the car and he drove them back to her apartment, she had ridden to the bar with friends so no car to bother with. She asked him to come up, stay a while, talk some more.

The evening passed quickly, the kisses grew more heated,
both of them adults with needs. She molded herself to his body, the warmth of her skin delightful to his hands.

“You are so soft, your skin so smooth.”

Susan felt the strength in Joe’s arms, his shoulders muscular from the gym workouts every other day. Her body responded to him, taking him into her secret places, matching him with her own movements.

Afterward they lay there, liking what they had found
, finding it again, only this time slower, with deeper thrusts, holding the spot for a second more. She moaned as he moved within her, filling her with long gentle strokes. The moment came, the release explosive.

“I have to go home,” he finally said. “Work tomorrow.”

He had told her about the job, about his kids, but it didn’t scare her. He was glad because he liked Susan and wanted to see her again. She walked him to the front door, naked, handed him a slip of paper with her phone number, and kissed him goodbye. He liked that too.

The trip home was short
, which was a good thing, because Joe was exhausted. Susan’s phone number was tucked into his wallet where he wouldn’t lose it. Already he missed being with her.

She was the first woman he had spent any time with since his wife left and it had felt good to hold the flesh of a real woman instead of clinging to the memory of one who left him high and dry with nothing but a depression in the mattress
and an unwrinkled pillow case.

Since her return to Madison was at a late hour and very tiring, Maude’s work output for the next day was sketchy at best. Paperwork was piled on the desk to be completed, the important ones being the sign off sheets for Joe’s training and her expense sheets for out-of-town travel. So far her only real accomplishment of the day was the visit with Mary Ellen’s parents. The Boss had made the original call to them when Maude was out of town, breaking the bad news over the phone because the girl’s family lived in another state.

The man and woman made the trip to Ma
dison to collect their daughter and made the arrangements to have her body returned to their hometown. They were aware that an autopsy had to be performed before they could take her, but they chose to wait in the city, staying in a hotel near downtown. Maude had found where they were staying and went to pay her respects. The deplorable part of the job was interacting with the families who lost loved ones to senseless crime when no comfort could be given to ease the loss. They always wanted to know if the victim had suffered, if their child felt pain or fear at the end. Maude chose to avoid the truth whenever possible, if such facts served no purpose except to cause greater pain to the victim’s family.

W
ith Mary Ellen’s mother and father, there was no avoidance. They knew already. A reporter from the local news rag had approached them at the hotel and asked their feelings about the savage murder of their daughter, hoping for the shock effect that would sell papers. They now knew about the empty eye sockets, about the soft brown eyes that had looked out on the world with joy and hope, now missing. They knew about the knife protruding from her back, her tongue cut away, the coarse thread used to sew her lips together in permanent silence. There was no lie big enough to give those people comfort.

Maude had been in a hurry to get away from the couple’s pain. She asked a few questions about their communication with Mary Ellen, had she mentioned meeting anyone new or was anyone bothering her lately
? They both shook their heads, wishing they could help. When she closed the door, Maude thought about their grief, about leaving them holding onto each other’s hands, their tears streaming. They had been trying to put on a brave front with her, but like all similar situations, the rawness of the hurt always seemed to break through.

“Justice, there will be justice,” Maude had spoken to the elevator walls as she left the
hotel room. “We
will
get him. He’s leaving his spoor and we’ll find it.”

Joe came in to work, happy to see his partner, glad she was back. After her phone call the day before he had been researching the company name she had given him.
Porcelain Worx
was an old established firm that was started sixty years earlier by a man in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had found a supplier with the equipment needed to make the products, put the prototypes in the back of his van. He went on the road to sell orders for toilets, shower stalls, sinks and bathtubs to businesses, for either bulk use or retail.

The man’s name was Theodore Worxslaven, a hard selling businessman who used honesty as part of his sells spiel. He proclaimed that anyone who dealt with Theodore Worxslaven would never be cheated in the transaction. The man’s son became his business partner and
named the company
Porcelain Worx
, a play on the family surname.

The company presented
an idea that encouraged progress through change and grew throughout all the United States, hiring employees as contract salesmen who sold the company line of products to major businesses. The nearest
Porcelain Worx
satellite was in Oklahoma, about two hundred miles from the Texas border. After the first successes of the business, the owner had decided to build his own factory in Philadelphia producing his signature fine line of porcelain products.  Later the son moved to the west coast and built another factory there. Joe had never known there was so much money in bathroom equipment and kitchen sinks.

There were over
fifteen hundred people on staff at
Porcelain Worx
, some selling the company wares by computer, phone, and old fashioned business to business door knocking. The main office in Philadelphia where the old man still ran the business with the help of a board of directors was the hiring and firing part of the company.

Maude and Joe asked for permission
to make a trip to Philadelphia in hopes of finding a lead to the man who was the suspect in the murder case they were trying to solve. City employees were never given money outright, the person going on the trip had to spend his money first then be reimbursed. A lousy system, no doubt, but it kept people honest about spending taxpayer money. Lieutenant Patterson was pleased by the almost rapid fire closings of the two homicide cases within the last week. Right now, Maude and Joe were the golden children.

Maude still had to turn in her last expenses from Buena Vista
, figuring there would be more on the horizon, especially if they could get permission to go to Philadelphia

T
he airplane flight to Philadelphia was bumpy and gave her a sinus headache complete with blocked ears and pain in her jaw. Joe was unaffected by the bouncing of the aircraft, however; his fear of heights had traumatized him the moment the wheels of the plane lifted off the ground.
What a pair, they both thought
.

At the Philadelphia airport, they rent
ed a compact car, the small two-seater variety, believing that a short stay was in store and it didn’t matter what manner of transportation they used. A motel outside of town near the airport advertised low rates and free breakfast, the type place Maude was accustomed to renting on her trips out of the city.
It looks a little seedy but what do I care
, she thought at the time;
I’m not buying the place.

Philadelphia ha
d a much larger city police department than Madison, Texas, though if crime statistics were compared, the smaller city had recently been more violent. The population of Philadelphia required many more uniformed cops to drive the different beats, keeping the peace among both the cream and the detritus of society.

Joe had lived in Philadelphia when he was a kid, traveling the road with his father the career soldier. The streets looked familiar in the daytime hours, but that first night when he and Maude deplaned and began searching for the necessities for the night, Joe was unsure of the city’s good and bad sides. A few feet into the door of his motel room was enough to assure him that he had picked the wrong side of town after Maude asked his opinion of where they should stay. The place was run-down, dirty, and had some dark stains on the carpet that appeared questionable to a homicide detective.

Maude checked her room, pulled back the brown coverlet and inspected the sheets. She grimaced a little then headed for the door. Joe thought she was leaving, but it wasn’t that simple. The manager’s office was across the parking lot from their room, catty cornered from the driveway that entered the property. At the side of the office was a room with an opened door where the housekeepers kept the replacement items for the rooms
. That room was where Maude was headed.

Hardly any time passed before she returned with an armful of towels, sheets, and a bottle of some kind of s
pray. The woman was not smiling. In fact, she had a lip-lock on one of her cigarettes, the smoke curling from the side of her mouth as she plowed across the parking lot, her eyes blazing with the fire of indignation.

“Here, Joe,” she said, poking one of the two bundles she carried into
his arms. “Do yourself a favor and change your sheets. I doubt yours are any cleaner than mine. I spotted a whole family of roaches having a picnic under the covers of my bed. Soon as I’m done with the roach spray, you can have it. If it doesn’t kill them outright, maybe it’ll drown them with time.”

“I’m sorry Maude,” Joe said with his hands full of sheets, “this place really is bad. Maybe we can target practice later and knock out a few of the unwanted creatures. I’m just guessing, but we are probably on the wrong side of town.”

“It’ll be okay,” she said, “just for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll try to get out of town before night. Our flight is scheduled for the evening, and I hope we don’t have to change it. Let’s get this done and go find a place to eat.”

The two detectives drove around until they found a decent
-looking chain restaurant advertising twenty-four hour service. Food was surprisingly good in the diner, upping Maude’s mood a little. After the meal she sat back in the booth, content to smoke, watching the cars on the street, lost in her thoughts.

“Joe, did you ever ask yourself if what you are doing is the right thing? You know, the way we have to go about the job, sometimes making a lie sound like the truth, just to get to the facts.”

They sat in the booth of the diner, both of them tired and apprehensive about the upcoming trip to the
Porcelain Worx
factory. Joe looked thoughtful for a minute, nodded his head and agreed.

“Sometimes I feel real
bad,” he said, adding an off-color word that surprised Maude. “But I think about those dead women, the way they were tortured or strangled, the pain they must have felt dying then it doesn’t bother me anymore. Getting to the answers we need to find the persons doing the killing is worth whatever it takes. Those women deserve that from me and I’ll take the knock to my conscience for lying or being deceptive to find the killers.”

The bed in Maude’s room was lumpy,
testifying to the many bodies that had lain upon it. She tossed and turned for a while, slept a little then got up and sat on the end of the bed, smoking. Her arthritis was worse in the night, the joints of her knees recalling every time she had chased someone down and hit the ground, pounding her kneecaps with concrete, wrestling with a perp who was trying to get away. She was good at what she did, and if it meant pummeling someone until he gave up enough for her to handcuff him, then amen to painkillers, because she would take them later when the suspect was behind bars.

Maude was no sissy
-girl, she was a police officer and most of her aches and pains could be traced back to the many people she wrestled with and took into police custody. All that and two ibuprofen every four hours for the pain was the payback.

On th
at night before chasing down the best lead yet on the brutal killer who took Mary Ellen’s life, Maude was pensive, questioning her ability, hoping she still had what it took to trap the man. Joe would be a great help. He was inexperienced, but seemed to have a real knack for getting through to people. They would need all their skills before the woman-killer was put away.

The street lights shone upon the cars traveling back and forth from the south side of Philadelphia, their windows wet with the recent rain that poured down on the motel roof and the surrounding streets. Her joints were always more painful when the rain was coming, she should have known there would be wet streets before morning.

Fitful sleep with nightmares plagued Maude and Joe both during the night, but at least the sheets were clean and bug-free. When morning finally came the sky had cleared, leaving a humid day ahead. The first place on their agenda was the police department, to show respect for the Chief of Police by acknowledging his authority in his city. It was considered proper police etiquette to appear as visitors, stating their mission.

Of course
, all secrets would not be told; however, it was good to tell enough to have the local cops on their side if they should need them to respond. An angry police chief was not always the best friend an out-of-town cop could have, especially if the cop had been the cause of the anger.

The drive downtown to the
Philadelphia Police Department took about twenty minutes, a trip that showed great improvement in real estate over the place where they had spent the night. Parking was hard to find around the city square, but after a few minutes, they got out of the two-seater and made their way to the watch commander’s office. The two detectives showed their identification and were briefly greeted, given some strong coffee, and showed into the shift sergeant’s meeting area. The day had already begun, cops going out on their day’s assignments, clerks busy at computer desks and copy machines; the hubbub of big city law enforcement reminding Maude of Chicago.

A cursory report wa
s required from the out-of-towners, ‘state your business, please’. Maude spoke up, eyeing Joe. “Sergeant, we’re here to visit a factory on the outskirts of your town. There’s a suspect in a case in Madison, Texas that we believe works there. We hope to find out more about the individual and question him, if possible.”

“Fill out the form,” the bored sergeant said,
never looking up from his desk. “You understand that the Philadelphia Police Department has jurisdiction in all cases happening within the city limits. Contact the Watch Commander’s office should you become involved in any incident requiring the use of firearms. Sign here.”

The door to the sergeant’s office closed behind them, almost catching Maude’s heel.

“‘Not in any hurry to get rid of us, was he?” she said, sarcasm heavy in her speech. “Is it me? Lately I’ve been thrown out of a sheriff’s office in Buena Vista, Texas, and now a sergeant in Philly hits me in the rear with his door.”