The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery, page 7
For Maddie, being lead on a front-page murder case was like being the cutie in a trapeze act, without the net. If you can spin around in the air and snag the guy’s arms, you’re the world’s newest heroine. Miss and you’re a temporary stain on the dirt floor inside the big tent.
Fifteen minutes later, Maddie walked out of the examination room breathing more naturally. She had survived the cold and gore of another autopsy. She quickened her stride to get outside and when the warmth of the sun touched her cheeks, she realized what she had to do next.
Chapter 11
The light summer rain, untypical for the season, dotted the hood on Maddie’s car as she started up the hill toward the home where Abigail Knight had lived until her fateful night. The neighborhood now appeared much as Maddie imagined it had the day before death had visited. From the cars she could see stabled in the opened garages, she knew her used Taurus belonged here like a mongrel belonged kenneled with show dogs.
A young boy, his pant legs soaked from the splash off his basketball, dribbled toward the hoop over his garage. After her next turn a sudden splat of hard rain hit her windshield like dive-bombing flies wearing body armor. She hoped, but doubted, the boy had gone indoors.
When Maddie had last been at Abigail Knight’s home, the street had been crowded with the department’s cruisers, their sirens filling the air like buzzing bees around a hive. This time she wanted to see the house in solitude, hopeful she would find something that might link Folami Stowe and Abigail Knight, something that might then triangulate to their killer.
The red bougainvillea leaves the hot desert winds had bunched in the corners of the Knight’s front porch created the feel of an abandoned outpost, an elegant abandoned outpost.
Inside, Maddie stared up the sloping stairway past the life-sized oil painting of Abigail Knight in her flowing white gown, the train trailing on the steps behind her. The background color of the portrait matched the staircase wall, giving the appearance Abigail was descending the stairs at that very moment, staring at Maddie, asking, “Are you good enough to catch this butcher?”
Maddie’s mother would probably call Abigail Knight a gold-digger, that her rich husband and her fancy clothes didn’t change that, but who would say she still didn’t have a right to life.
The living room was busy with leather furniture and glass-topped tables sitting on thick southwestern area rugs over a travertine stone floor. A large window overlooked the backyard and a spillover pool with a five-foot waterfall. The landscaping, alive with small runs of rainwater, gave the appearance the world was melting before her eyes and running down some unseen drain at the bottom of the earth.
Maddie changed her focus to the individual droplets of rain hitting the window pane to move choreographed by the wind until joining with other drops to form mini rivers in a mad dash toward the bottom sill. It was the kind of day that made her want to sit back and ponder things too complex to resolve. The world was now short two women. Would their abrupt departure somehow tilt everything that followed, or were we all significant only in the way we touched those around us who would be left to carry on after we’d been carried out?
Bill Molitor’s crew had not been able to match the moisture ring on Abby’s nightstand to anything in the house, so one thing Maddie hoped to do was locate whatever had made that ring. On the one hand, it seemed a trivial item, but Maddie had so little to go on that until she knew it was trivial she would assign it some importance. She searched every cabinet in the kitchen and the pantry, without success, then the garage and found no possibles. Whatever had made that ring must have been taken by the killer, perhaps brought there as well.
She entered the laundry room off to one side of a hallway leading to their four-car garage. The room had a front-loading washer and dryer topped by a black granite counter and backsplash. Next to the machines was something Maddie had in her working-class home, a slop sink, although the Knights had likely preferred the Parisian name: évier de slop, if Maddie correctly remembered her high school French. The upstairs laundry chute ended in this room and was, like the washer and dryer, empty of clothes.
“That’s it! Clothes! ” Maddie said excitedly to the empty room.
Marta, the maid, said she had picked up the clothes Abby had worn before changing into her bathing suit. And what Marta had not laundered, she had taken to the cleaners. Abby would have had to put on something to meet her friends for a shrimp cocktail that Thursday afternoon before her death. Whatever she had worn, she would have hung up, tossed down the chute or, according to Marta, dropped on a chair or the floor until Marta came in on Friday.
Maddie took the stairs two at a time.
Abby’s friends who had seen her in the afternoon on the day she died, had all agreed that she had worn a sleeveless, light-blue silk dress. But they hadn’t agreed about her shoes. One friend remembered Abby wearing tan strapless heels with a cloth top and leather sides, while the others said she always wore her calfskin boots with that dress. Maddie quickly found the strapless heels in the master closet, but not the boots. Feverishly, Maddie worked Abby’s clothes across the cedar hanging rod, finding nothing that made her pause except for a pair of leather pants that matched the leather fainting couch in the bedroom sitting area, but no blue dress.
The closets in the second and third bedrooms were empty. The fourth had a large closet stuffed with nainsook bags containing clothes that were all the wrong styles and fabrics for a lady with an unlimited clothing budget to wear during an Arizona summer, but still, no blue dress.
The marble, brass, and beveled mirrors of the master bath sparkled like a jeweled box. The room scented by lemon-grass soap in a crystal bowl. Two large hampers sat next to a double-sized jetted tub. Plugged into the wall, a floor-standing towel rack patiently held warm towels waiting for clean wet bodies that would never come. The large tub indicated sharing had been the plan, while the two hampers announced that disharmony had conquered Camelot from within. Abby’s bath vanity had two long glass shelves crowded with cosmetics. Maddie had a brief image of the skinny drawer next to her sink that held all her facial and hair treatments.
Damon Runyon would have said the Knights lived large, and Runyon would have been right.
Both the hampers were empty. The laundry room had one chute so somewhere between the floors their two chutes joined before ending their free fall. Maddie spread out the two bath towels from the heated towel rack, and dropped one down each of the chutes in their respective closets, then dashed downstairs. The chute at the bottom held only the two towels. Abigail Knight’s missing outfit had not snagged in the chute.
Of course, Abby could have taken off her Thursday outfit and delivered it to the cleaners herself, or called a dry cleaner with a pick-up service, but given what the maid had told them about Abby’s habits, that seemed out of character.
Could clothes be part of the killer’s fantasy?
She needed to find someone who had seen Folami the day she died, someone who could remember what she had worn that day. If Folami’s last outfit was also missing, the killer had also taken the clothing each of his victims had been wearing. If so, maybe there was a place each of the women had visited earlier on the day they were killed, a place where their killer would have seen them. She knew this was a string of maybes, each weakened by the addition of the next. But if there were such a place the beast could well live, work, or hang out at or near that place. It wasn’t much, but it was something and something added to nothing felt like progress.
When she left the Knight’s home, the rain had stopped and the sun had wedged itself through the torn fabric of the clouds, and steam was rising from the wet, heated blacktop pavement.
***
This morning, at Maddie’s request, Officer Sue Martin, a hard-at-it weightlifter with thick arms and hard breasts had been assigned to Maddie’s squad. Sue had gone to school with Maddie and Katie Carson, but Sue had never been more than a casual friend. Maddie would assign Sue the task of finding the outfits Abby and Folami had worn the days of their deaths.
Katie Carson, Maddie’s friend and nemesis, called as Maddie drove down Central Avenue past the tall palm trees the old-timers said had been planted in the 1930s.
“Where are you, Maddie?”
“On my way home, it’s been a long day. By the way, isn’t this your mother’s birthday?”
“How do you remember? Every year you remember.”
“Your mother’s a good woman. I haven’t gotten her a card this year. Tell her I’m sorry. That I didn’t forget her, I just got busy.”
“I’m on my way to see her now. I’ll tell her, but the odds are she won’t remember you or that it’s her birthday. Some days she doesn’t even remember me.”
“I’m sorry, KC. I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad.”
“She’s getting worse faster. Alzheimer’s a bitch. Look, I called to see if you’d meet me in the morning for breakfast.”
“Sorry. I already have plans.”
“I want to talk about your case.”
“No can do. I’ve got to play this one by the book. The big suits are all over it.”
“Maddie, I know this is the highest-profile case you’ve ever handled. I want you to bust it girl. Oh, be sure to watch my newscast tomorrow at five. I’ll be doing a special fifteen-minute segment on the murder of Abigail Knight. You won’t want to miss it.”
“What does that mean?” Maddie jammed on her brakes to keep from running a red light. KC had already hung up.
Chapter 12
Maddie met Jed and a pair of large breasts for breakfast. She didn’t think of her own bust as small, certainly not when considered together with her twenty-seven-inch waist and thirty-four-inch hips, but today’s featured attraction was Jed’s favorite waitress, Theresa, who Maddie figured topped her own 34-C by at least two inches and one letter. Maddie wasn’t envious of Theresa’s size, although she admitted to being a little jealous that Theresa was young enough for her braless boobs to look perky under the colorful Mexican scoop-neck blouse she wore stretched out over the ends of bare shoulders. The restaurant served excellent huevos rancheros, so Maddie had agreed to meet Jed with his promise not to drool at Theresa while Maddie was with him.
They ordered and after Maddie got Jed’s attention, she told him about the petition for a change in the custody of her son. “The language,” Maddie said, “makes it sound like I’ve got no chance to keep Bradley.”
“Not to worry,” Jed said. “I spoke to a friend of mine. He or she is going to take care of that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, obviously annoyed in spite of her effort not to let it show.
“Don’t worry. This somebody has owed me a favor for a long time, and he or she knows the right people. After I explained your situation, the person said it would be a piece of cake. Like I said, this person owes me and figures this’ll square things between us.”
“What’s this, ‘this person’ crap? You aren’t even going to tell me if it’s a man or woman?”
“You don’t wanna know, plausible disavowal, Maddie. No sweat. It’s in the bag.”
“You mean plausible deniability.”
“That, too, I’m glad we agree.”
Whatever it was, Jed had already done it, and by the time their food arrived Maddie knew he would not tell her anything more about it.
“Sarge,” Jed always called her Sarge when he had a zinger, “Dr. Knight lied. He was back in town from San Diego before his wife was murdered.”
“What?” Maddie went stiff, her fork in midair, dripping huevos.
“Read my lips: he’d come back! When I called Thursday night, he said, ‘I’m in Dego. I’ll leave now and meet you at the house at midnight.’ You know about that meeting. Well, the shrink had really gotten back that morning.”
They paused while Theresa refilled their cups and Jed’s eyes. Almond-fragrance lotion on Theresa’s hands mingled pleasantly with the aroma from the coffee. Maddie also noticed a slight yellowing on Theresa’s forefinger. Maybe Theresa had gotten Jed back on smoking?
As Theresa bounced out of sight, Maddie gave Jed a verbal nudge. “You think the doc did his wife?”
“I don’t think so, but who the hell knows. The good doctor admitted he knew about his wife porkin’ her trainer, Rex Bronson.”
The accurate word picture should have been that Bronson had been porkin’ Abigail, but remembering her mother’s rejoinders about talking like a lady, Maddie did not correct Jed.
“The doc had hired a local PI,” Jed said, “Benny Gilkinson. Dr. Knight gave the PI a key to the house. According to the doc, Gilkinson followed Abby for a couple of weeks to get down her routine. The doc gave me a copy of Gilkinson’s report. It confirms what Marta the maid told us. The wife got it on with her trainer as part of their Thursday workouts.”
Maddie tore off a piece of tortilla to sop up some yolk. “Sounds like a big fat motive. Why don’t you like him for it?”
“Part of it’s intuition.” He smiled and spread his hands. “What? You think women are the only creatures with it? I try to stay in touch with my feminine side. Anyway, the doc had it all set up to come back early from Dego, meet up with Gilkinson and bust in to catch his wife and her trainer doing the ugly. The plan called for Gilkinson to take pictures and appear as the doc’s star witness in the divorce proceedings. According to the PI, the doc and his wife signed a prenup chock full of conditions, including her getting nothing if she fooled around. So why bump her off when he could have left her penniless?”
“Anger gone berserk,” Maddie replied immediately. “Sooth the pain. Avoid a scandal. Garner sympathy rather than ridicule. Who knows why you crazy guys do what you do?”
“I can hear your testimony now. Your honor, who knows why you crazy guys do what you do?”
Maddie frowned but refused to get sucked in. “Maybe the good doctor paid the trainer to seduce Abby so he could invoke his prenup, but Bronson got carried away. Or he could’ve paid the trainer to kill her.”
“Mebbe.” Jed forked some refried beans into a piece of tortilla and folded it before stubbing the end into his sunny-side-up yokes. “If so, one of them had to knock off Folami Stowe so we’d chase a serial killer.”
Maddie could remember her dad using terms like knock off, or bump off, or rub out, as well as other colorful euphemisms for the ugly act of murder.
“Ho-kay,” she said, tossing Jed another of his favorite made-up words. “So the odds are against the doctor doing his wife, but let’s look into this Rex Bronson character. Folami and Bronson are both black. Maybe they knew each other. But wait a minute, what happened to the doc’s plan to bust in on Abby and the trainer?”
“I spoke to the PI after the doc called him to okay his talking with me. He told me Knight had called that morning and canceled. Gilkinson remembered Knight saying, ‘Abby lights up my life. I can’t divorce her, even if she’s being unfaithful.’” Jed shook his head. “She lights up my life. Do you believe that shit?”
“Get on with it,” Maddie said, thinking, I wish some man thought I lit up his life.
“Gilkinson says, ‘so, you liked the sex, too, eh doc?’ And Knight screamed, ‘Fuck you!’ ‘I’ll send you my bill,’ Gilkinson said, and hung up.”
“That could have been Dr. Knight’s creative way to explain why he came back early from San Diego,” Maddie mused. “He still could’ve knocked her off himself.”
“I’m just telling you what my gut’s telling me. I caught him in the lie because his cell phone records showed he was in Phoenix when I called from the murder scene. When I braced him, he said he spent that Wednesday night drinking hard in the downtown Marriott. The next morning he called Gilkinson, canceled their plan, and opened a new bottle.”
Historically, a big chunk of the married people who get murdered, are done in by their spouses, so Maddie knew they would have to follow that trail. Still, it was hard to imagine the doctor killing an innocent person just to set up the murder of his wife. Then again, once he was predisposed for murder, he might have decided that the hooker Folami Stowe was no big loss.
“The bartender at the Marriott has confirmed Knight sat alone drinking all afternoon Thursday and into the night,” Jed continued. “The records in the parking garage show that Knight’s car never left the hotel until Thursday night around eleven, which would have been his leaving to meet me. Dr. Knight’s credit card shows a buy at a liquor store near the hotel, and housekeeping said they cleaned up empty bottles in his room after he checked out. So, at least for now, that dog don’t hunt.”
Maddie had learned long ago that her partner really enjoyed the streets and the cat-and-mouse part of detection. He especially liked doing it without holding a rank that would make him accountable for the outcome of the cases he worked.
“I smelled booze on him that night, but I gave him a pass,” Jed went on. “The guy’s wife had just been killed. But I couldn’t imagine him driving all the way from San Diego half drunk, so I got curious enough to check the records on his cell phone, which he actually gave me permission to do. The only way he could have known enough about the Stowe murder to have been able to copycat it, would be if he killed Stowe himself or had someone do it following his script.”
“Does the good doctor have an alibi for the time of Stowe’s murder?” Maddie asked.
“The doc said he and Abby were home alone the night Stowe was killed. That they had a quiet dinner and then he got his turn. That would’ve been the same day of the week the wife got it on with Bronson, so, if the doc told it straight, his wife played a doubleheader that Thursday.”
“Anything else?”
“I found Bronson early this morning, before I headed over here, got his ass outta bed. After I suggested we could always check with the other ladies he trained, Bronson got more cooperative. He admitted to having sex with Abby the afternoon of her death. He consented to giving a DNA sample and followed me to the lab.” Jed glanced at his watch. “He’d’ve left there by now. I figure he’ll match up with the sperm and hair Rip found at the scene.”
