The East Avenue Murders (The Maude Rogers Crime Novels Book 1) (4 page)

“Hang on a minute, let me stand up. Now, does your mom know you’re up here?” she asked. “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Nah. She don’t know it.” the boy said
, staring at her struggling to stand up straight.

“What’s your name so I don’t have to call you kid?”

“Maurice. Maurice Elroy Brown. Thas my name. I’m six years old. How come you bent over like that?”

“
My back hurts and I’m old. How come you aren’t in school Maurice?” Maude asked.

The kid looked at her as
if she had just fallen from the sky. “It’s Saturday. No school on Saturday. You stupid or somethin?”

She
slapped her forehead as though overcome with amazement. “Of course, it’s Saturday! No school on Saturday. But
I
have to work on Saturday.”

“Whacha doin?” Maurice asked her. “Wha kinda work?”

“Looking for the bad guy who came up here and hurt someone.” she ventured, wondering how far to go with the child.

Maurice was quiet for a minute. “He had a
cool hat.” the boy said. “Brown hat. He skeered me.”

She
felt the jolt in her stomach. “Who had a brown hat Maurice?”

“That man who come up here
,” the boy said, suddenly distracted by a skinny tomcat that slid by them headed downstairs to the fourth floor.

Could it be
, she wondered
, that this kid had seen the man who violated and killed two young women?

“Maurice, I need you to listen real good
.” she said quietly. “Can you tell me what that man looked like? Was he tall or short?”

“Like you,” the boy said. “
He like you.”

“Was he a white man, Maurice? Did you see a white man in a brown hat come up here?”

“Yeah. I gotta go. My mama get mad,” he said, turning and running down the stairs, back to the second floor apartment where he lived.

“Maurice, wait,” she called desperately. “Don’t run away.”

The boy was gone. Maude thought about chasing after the kid, but she felt movement behind her and a hard slam on the back of her head. Her knees weakened and her lights went out as she fell toward the filthy carpet beneath her feet. Blackness came, and she felt nothing for what seemed a long time.

“
Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am,” the voice droned on so loud it hurt her ears, filled her sinuses with water and started a cough in the lower part of her chest.

“
Ma’am, are you alright?” someone asked.  “Are you hurt?” Maude lay still, coming to her senses, waiting for the fog to clear out of her head.

“I need a cigarette,” she said, rising on one elbow.
“Oh. My head! Someone hit me. Felt like a sap big as a hammer. Coward got me from behind,” Maude said, not understanding who was beside her. She finally looked up through bleary eyes and saw a dark haired man in his late twenties with green eyes and a puckish smile that lit up his face. A police shield was on the pocket of his light blue shirt.

“You’re alive.
I was wondering if you were coming back.”

“Who are you?” she asked groggily. “And why are you so cheerful?”

“Name is Joseph Conrad Allen, ma’am, but you can call me Joe,” the young man said, reaching under Maude’s arms, lifting her to a sitting position on the floor.

“I found you like this,” Joe said, “laid out on the carpet. You have a big lump on
the back of your head. Want to go to the hospital?” he continued without taking a breath.

“Slow down and light my cigarette,” she told him gruffly. “If we’re talking about what I want.  I’m going to sit on the stairs over there and rest myself for a minute, choking my lungs with smoke while you tell me who you are and why you
’re standing at the door of my crime scene.”

“Yes
ma’am, I sure will. Lieutenant Patterson put me on Homicide detail yesterday, but I didn’t get to leave my other post until late last night. He said I would be working with you and for me to show up here last night but I couldn’t, so here I am today. It seems I came along just in time.”

“Hold on.” Maude said, letting the soothing smoke fill her nostrils as she rubbed the goose egg on the back of her head and crawled to the stair landing. “Joe, if you call me
ma’am one more time, I’m going to pull my gun and shoot you,” she said.

“Oh, okay,
ma’am...uh Detective Rogers,” the young man managed to get out.

“Just Maude t
o you,” she said. “I can’t believe the creep got me in broad daylight. He must have been trying to get out of the building, maybe taking the kid with him.”

She began worrying about Maurice, wondering if he was
okay, or if the perp had seen the kid talking to her. Again, maybe the sap-wielding scum had nothing to do with Maurice’s family.

She looked
around the hallway from her position on the stairs wondering how the person who hit her managed to get behind her. Where was he? There were ten small apartments on the fifth floor, two of them closed off with yellow tape and police locks. That left eight places where the sneak could have hidden. She got on her cell phone and called dispatch, asking for a couple of street cops to search the fifth floor. The Saturday supervisor was reluctant to help saying there was a street shortage and it would be difficult. After Maude explained what had happened and the immediacy of the need, she got a better reception.

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry. It’ll take a few minutes but someone will be there
. Do you need an ambulance?”

“
No, I’m okay,” she told him, pushing the button on the phone to disconnect.

“
Joe, do me a favor, will you? Go down to the second floor and check out the last apartment on the south end. I think it was 209. Make sure the kid is okay. He’s about six, light skin, cute, likes to play with balls. Come back and tell me.”

She sat quietly while Joe was gone, wondering about her new partner and what experience he had. Maude was tired of breaking in rookies and really hoped this time she had drawn a man with some experience. She sighed loudly, accepting her lot, knowing that a good partner was hard to find. Sometimes you couldn’t get along with the person
sitting next to you in a car.

Personality clashes
were baloney. Maude was beyond caring what other cops thought about her. She did her job and expected them to do theirs but it didn’t always work that way. Lazy partners who liked to sit on their behinds and let someone else do the legwork didn’t set well with her. So far this Joe guy had showed enough gumption to find her. Maybe he had something going.

Joe was gone about ten minutes and returned to find Maude hadn’t moved much
, except to light another cigarette.

“Don’t you think you smoke too much?” he ventured, smiling. Not waiting for a reply he went on. “There was no one in 209. See
ms to me they got out pretty fast. I looked in. The door was left open, closets empty. The faucet was dripping at the sink and dishes about to get washed. You know, stacked, with the knives and forks separated. This ball was outside the door,” he added, showing Maude the same ball that the kid Maurice had been playing with earlier.

“We
have to find the owner of this building,” Maude interrupted. “When we get some help, begin knocking on doors till someone tells me what I need to know. Who is the kid and who does he live with? Where did they go so fast? Was someone after them or are they hiding? You know, Joe, the kid’s mama might be on the run. Just a thought, but Maurice got all tongue-tied when I asked about her. She might have gone running because there are police in the building.”

Ten minutes
later the street cops and Joe were door-knocking, finding few people home. They got a name and phone number of the landlord from the old woman who lived on the third floor. Joe sat down on the stairs and shared information with Maude.

“Jackson Enterprises man
ages the place; here’s the phone number. Rent has to be mailed on the first of the month. No pay, no stay. They send a strong-arm around to scare the delinquents. She didn’t know the kid or his family.

He
volunteered, “I can call the number for Jackson Enterprises. The eight hundred part of the number might make it a message center. I can tell them to call you back, that it’s urgent.”

“
First get in touch with dispatch and see if they can find their physical location,” Maude said haltingly, trying to remember where she had heard the name before. She flipped tobacco shreds off her tongue and took another drag off the cigarette. “And yeah, I smoke too much.” she said, in answer to his earlier question.

The street cops had finished their rounds in the building but found only a few people in the apartments
just as it was the night before. Most of the doors opened into rooms that were empty and showed signs of long vacancies.

“The decent people moved out sometime back,” the woman on the third floor
had told Detective Allen.

According to the woman t
he building had become a ‘hit house’ about a year ago. Empty apartments were kept rented by a few tenants who lived somewhere else but collected their drugs and dough from the scum that shot up on the filthy floors of the apartments. The woman was old and alone, living on a small pension with chains and locks on her door, afraid to go out of her home, except in the daylight. She had said there was no other place for her to go, and guessed she would die there. Maude made a decision to see her later, but right then, she wanted to see what it was about 507 that tugged at her. Something she missed or forgot last night.

She sat on the stairs and reread the incident report from the night before.
The finding of the body had been straightforward, open the door, catch the smell, an obvious lump under the covers. She took out her notebook and found an empty page, beginning to put down some thoughts about 507.
It was too easy, planned, a setup. Whoever did the cutting on the women knew the cops would be out looking for Almondera when he failed to show up for court. Maybe earlier, maybe later, but eventually someone would be looking to arrest the man.

The second murder was a puzzle, the pieces scattered. The murder
er duplicated the arterial cuts and arranged the same positioning in the bed under a just alike coverlet; the bloodletting was intense and awful savagery. The missing breast tissue, was it a statement? What was his purpose in recreating the first murder? What were his motives?

Maude wrote it all down as she thought it, knowing
that later she would look back and maybe find some answers. The process of investigation required studying the obvious, looking for clues that were hidden, mistakes made by criminals were often what solved cases. Sometimes it was just dumb luck on the investigators part. She hoped for some of that now, fearful that it wasn’t over, the killer unfinished in his destruction. He had a taste for it and liked it. She believed the killer to be a male with serious personality issues. Breast violations were seldom a woman’s touch.

Rising from
the stairs took all her effort; the blow to the head had affected her balance and left a residual amount of dizziness. She thought if it got worse she would go by the hospital on the way home and get seen by one of the doctors. Her head was hard but the blow had been harder. The kid’s caretaker might have attacked her. Maude had been getting information from the boy and that could have put the killer wise to where it came from. The kid might have been in danger. There were too many variables to nail it down.

A description, though vague, was better than what they had befo
re. She needed to find the boy. Her thinking was that he knew something to help find the man who had taken the lives of the young women. They really needed identifications of the women before any real questions could be asked. The frustration was telling on her.

The lock on 507 opened easily. Clearing the yellow tape away just enough to allow the door to swing inside
she entered the apartment. The carpet stuck to the bottom of the door and the hinges creaked stiffly from years of usage and neglect, slowing the movement into the murder room. Earlier she had found the door open and didn’t notice the sticking. Inside the room, death’s smells still held sway over the ambient air. The odor of corrupt flesh would coat the walls and furniture for a long time.

Maude had brought her chest rub from the house
and its sharp menthol fought against the pervasive odor in the room, winning a little. She took out her notebook and scanned the same areas that were scrutinized the day before: the kitchen, the empty chair, the television. She walked to the small screen and turned the set on, watching for a minute as a cooking show host on the food network made potato pancakes and red velvet cake for dinner.
Sounds good for
another time,
she thought.

The arms of the empty chair had a light coating of black
powder, courtesy of the lab techs checking for prints. Maude glanced at the furniture label on the chair back, standard apartment supply. The small closet beside the chair had three wire hangers, but no clothing or boxes on the storage shelf above.