Murder on a Hot Tin Roof Page 4

  “Omigod!” he squealed when he saw us. “Who are you? What do you think you’re doing?” He suddenly ducked back into his apartment and shielded himself behind the door. Just his head was sticking out. I could tell from the growing pink-ness on his pudgy cheeks that he was embarrassed to have been seen in his unusual… um… outfit. “I thought you were somebody else!” he said, speaking a bit louder than was necessary. “What happened? Did you ring my bell by mistake?”

  Nice of him to provide us with a credible explanation.

  “Gee, I guess I did!” Abby said, hitting him with her most charming smile. “I’m so sorry we bothered you, sir. I must have gotten the buzzers mixed up. I meant to ring 2B, Gray Gordon’s apartment.”

  “Oh,” he said, blue eyes popping wide as golf balls. He blotted his damp cheeks on the billowy sleeve of his kimono, then quickly pulled his head inside and slammed his door. I could hear him clicking the locks. The show was over.

  “What a kook!” I whispered to Abby. “Did you see what he had on?”

  “Yeah,” she whispered back. “He’s a fashion idol-a real gone geisha. I’ll have to find out where he shops.” Then she turned back around to Gray’s door and pounded on it with all her might.

  To our great, jaw-dropping surprise, the door flew open and crashed against a nearby wall.

  “Oh, my Lord!” I cried. “You broke it!” I was on the verge of wigging out again. “We could be arrested for this, you know!” Breaking and entering? This was more like bashing and entering, except we hadn’t entered yet.

  Abby gave me a weary look. “Don’t be stupid, Paige. I didn’t break a thing. The door wasn’t locked, it wasn’t even all the way closed.” She stepped into the dim, narrow hallway and started walking toward the sunlit room ahead. “I wonder where Gray is. He must have heard the noise… Hey, Gray! Gray! Are you here, babe? It’s me, Abby. I came to tell you what a great big gorgeous star you are!”

  There was no answer to her call. There was no sound at all. I held my breath and strained my ears, but no noises came from inside the apartment. No clattering dishes, whistling tea kettles, or irksome radio commercials. No singing in the shower. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

  Except for Abby, who had breezed all the way down the hall and was now entering Gray’s living room with such ease and abandonment you’d have thought it was her own. She turned the corner to her left and disappeared from my view. “Where are you hiding, Sweetpants?” she warbled. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  Still no response.

  Feeling certain that Gray wasn’t at home, and that I wouldn’t be disturbing him in any way, I finally ventured into the apartment and began slinking through the shadows toward the sunny room at the end of the corridor. I was about halfway there when Abby started screaming.

  Chapter 4

  I HURTLED TO THE END OF THE ENTRANCE hall and rocketed into the living room. What was happening? Where was Abby? Was she hurt? Had somebody attacked her? Was she unconscious? She wasn’t screaming anymore.

  She was crying, however, and although I couldn’t see her anywhere in the large bright room, I had only to follow the sounds of her sobbing to figure out where she was. I found her down on her knees behind the couch, hugging her arms tightly across her breast like a distraught mental patient strapped in a straitjacket. She was kneeling in an enormous pool of blood.

  At first I thought it was her own blood, but-praise be to every deity who ever rented space in Heaven!-it wasn’t. It was the blood of Gray Gordon, whose dead and naked body was lying just four feet away-splayed out like a poor sacrificed lamb-in the middle of the wide passage between the back of the couch and a wall of windows. His throat had been slit and there were numerous stab wounds in his chest. There were many other deep slashes in his limbs, belly, and groin, but I won’t say anything more about that. Believe me, you don’t want to know.

  I didn’t want to look at the butchered mess of bone and flesh before me, but my inquisitive nature overpowered my revulsion. What monster had done this hideous thing? When had the murder taken place? How long had Gray been lying here like this? Judging from the thick coagulation of his blood, and the dry opaqueness of his gaping eyes, and the sickeningly rancid stench that permeated every breath I took, it had been a few hours at least.

  Fighting back my own tears, and a violent urge to throw up, I dropped down to my knees next to Abby and threw my arms around her. Still sobbing and gasping for air, she turned and wrapped her arms around me. Then we held on to each other for dear life, rocking to and fro in a steady, continuous rhythm, like two orthodox Jews in prayer.

  After a few anguished and mournful minutes of kneeling, hugging, rocking, and praying, I grabbed hold of the back of the couch and pulled myself to my feet. Then I helped Abby stand up. Our knees, shins, and shoes were covered with blood. Abby’s hands were coated, too, until she wiped them-over and over and over again-on the cotton contours of her powder blue capris. Struck dumb by the carnage, she didn’t utter a word.

  “I think you’d better sit down,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulders and gently guiding her around the couch. Then I steered her across the floor to a chair on the opposite side of the room, where the body would be out of her sight. “Will you be okay here for a couple of seconds?” I asked, helping her lower herself into the dark green club chair. “I need to go next door and call the police. I don’t want to put my fingerprints on Gray’s phone. You stay right here, okay? Don’t move. Don’t get up and walk around. And don’t touch anything.”

  She stared straight ahead and mumbled something I couldn’t understand. But then she nodded in my direction, so I figured she wasn’t in a total daze.

  “Just sit tight,” I reiterated, using the calmest and firmest voice I could conjure up. “I’ll be right back.”

  Careening out into the hall, I lurched over to the door marked 2A and started knocking as hard as I could. “Help! Help!” I bellowed. “There’s been a murder! Please open up! This is urgent! I need to use your phone!”

  Gray’s strange-looking neighbor opened his door right away, looking not quite so strange as before. Instead of a yellow silk kimono, he was wearing a crisp white shirt and a pair of tan trousers. He even had on a tie.

  “Murder?” he spluttered, eyes bugged to the limit. “Did you say murder?” He yanked his door wide and motioned me inside, eyes protruding even further at the sight of my gory shins. “Omigod!” he shrieked. “Is that blood? What happened? Are you hurt? Who’s dead? Where is the killer? Is he still in the building?” The man was scared out of his wits. As soon as I walked through his door, he slammed it and locked it again.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, hurrying to calm the poor fellow’s fears. “The murderer’s gone.”

  But the minute those words flew out of my mouth, I realized how wrong they could be. I didn’t know if the killer was still there or not! What an idiot I was! I hadn’t searched the rest of Gray’s apartment! Thinking that Gray had been dead for hours, I had jumped to the conclusion that his slaughterer had fled the premises. But what if I was mistaken? What if the fiend was still in there-hiding in the bedroom closet or behind the shower curtain-waiting to plunge his bloody knife into another hapless victim?

  Oh, my god! I shouldn’t have left Abby in there by herself!

  “Open up!” I cried out to Gray’s neighbor, jumping back over to his double-locked front door, so frantic to get out of there he probably thought I’d lost my senses. “I’ve got to go back across the hall! Please let me out right now! And then call the police immediately. Tell them there’s been a murder and they’ve got to come at once.”

  “Who, me? I can’t call the police! I don’t like them and they don’t like me. And I don’t have their number!”

  “Then get it from the operator!” I screeched, unlocking and opening his door myself. Then I sucked up all my courage (and a big supply of stench-free air) and scrambled back to the murder zone.

  ABBY WAS NOWH
ERE IN SIGHT. THE club chair I’d left her sitting in was empty, and the partially concealed passage behind the couch-the area where Gray’s body was lying-was devoid of any other bodies, alive or dead.

  There were lots of bloody footprints, though, stamped all over the floor around Gray’s corpse, and tracked across the thick beige carpet in the living room. A slew of ruddy smudges were concentrated around the legs of the club chair, and several rust-colored streaks stretched from the chair to the small hallway leading to the rear of the apartment.

  Oh, no! What happened while I was gone?! Did the killer grab Abby and drag her into the bedroom to slit her throat?

  “Abby!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, following the rusty streaks across the carpet and part of the way down the hall. “Where are you?!” I was so panicked I was practically howling.

  “Keep your shirt on, Sherlock,” Abby yelled back. “I’m in the bathroom!”

  I felt a giant whoosh of relief, which comforted me for a moment or two, but quickly turned into a blinding surge of anger. “What the hell are you doing in there?” I roared, wrenching open what I thought was the bathroom door. “I told you not to move or touch anything!”

  Oops. Linen closet. I was screaming at a stack of beige bath towels.

  The toilet flushed, then Abby exited the bathroom one door down. “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” she said, “and I wanted to wash the blood off my hands.” When she saw me standing nose-to-nose with the towels, she gave me an exaggeratedly puzzled look. “What are you doing now, Miss Marple? Interrogating the terry cloth?”

  She was putting up a good front-doing her best to act as brave and brazen as usual-but I could tell from her colorless complexion, and the way her lips were quivering, that she was all torn up inside.

  Sidestepping Abby’s sad attempt at humor, I gave her a deceptive but perfectly reasonable explanation for my discourse with the bath linens. “After I went next door to call the police,” I said, using my most professional tone, “I realized the killer could still be here, hiding in Gray’s apartment. I thought I’d better come back and check the place out, inspect all the rooms and closets, make sure you weren’t in any danger.”

  “That was very sweet of you,” she said, with just a hint of a whimper, “but as you can see, I’m quite safe. The bastard who killed Gray is long gone. There’s no sign of him anywhere. No murder weapon, either.”

  “You looked?”

  “In every room.”

  “What about the closets?”

  “They’re clean.”

  “Well, then, the doorknobs aren’t so clean,” I said, worrying about the evidence again. “They’ve got your bloody fingerprints all over them now. I thought I told you not to touch anything.”

  “I didn’t!” she protested. “I opened the doors with a dish-towel over my hand. Which is more than I can say for you, Little Miss Perfect.” She shot a glance at my bare hands, then aimed her gaze at the open linen closet. “Whose prints do you think are decorating that doorknob?”

  She had me there. I’d left my share of fingerprints at the crime scene. And my bloody footprints were probably all over the place, too. The homicide dicks were not going to be happy.

  “Okay, so we both goofed up,” I admitted. “But we can’t do anything about that now. All we can do is make sure we don’t corrupt any more evidence. We’ve got to vacate this apartment immediately. We have to go next door and wait for the police to come.”

  “Oh?… well… if you think so…” Abby reluctantly agreed. Some color had returned to her cheeks, but her lips were still trembling. “It breaks my heart to leave Gray here all alone,” she said, dark thoughts gathering like storm clouds in her grief-stricken eyes, “… but I guess he won’t mind.”

  Chapter 5

  TWO HOURS LATER, ABBY AND I WERE still sitting on the purple couch in apartment 2A-the poshly decorated domain of Gray’s pudgy blond neighbor, Willard Sinclair-answering Detective Sergeant Nick Flannagan’s relentless and repetitious questions.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Flannagan said for the umpteenth time, “you both got covered with the victim’s blood because you were kneeling in it?” His thin, youthful, clean-shaven face was wrinkled in disgust and disbelief (as it had been every time he’d made the same inquiry). “And then you hopped up and tracked it all over the place without realizing it?”

  “Yes, that’s right, Detective Flannagan,” I wearily repeated, “except for the hopping part. I’m sure we didn’t hop anywhere.” I was so ashamed of my heedless behavior at the crime scene that I couldn’t raise my voice above a murmur. “We were both in shock, you see, and in a kind of stupor. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you stated before,” he said, glowering at me as if I were his prime suspect. “You also claimed you didn’t notice whether or not there were any bloody footprints on the carpet before you discovered the body. But, you know what, Mrs. Turner? Much as I want to believe you, I just can’t bring myself to accept that explanation. It seems farfetched to me. It seems very unlikely that-”

  “Things aren’t always as they seem,” Abby interrupted, brown eyes flashing with fury. Detective Flannagan was getting under her skin. Way under her skin. “Paige has given you the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” she seethed, quoting the corny, overused line from the

  Dragnet television series-and casting aspersions on Flannagan’s masculinity in the same breath. And with a totally straight face.

  Luckily, Flannagan didn’t catch on.

  Under different circumstances, I’d have laughed my head off. (Abby really slays me sometimes.) In my current state, however-slick with sweat, sticky with blood, sweltering on the hot seat in a weird-looking stranger’s insufferably warm apartment, trying to defend my thoughtless actions at the scene of a brutal murder-well, I couldn’t muster up a snicker, much less a laugh.

  I was about to apologize, once again, for the way Abby and I had messed up the evidence at Gray’s apartment-thereby causing a whole lot of confusion and extra work for the medical examiner and crime scene investigators-when one of the uniformed cops who’d been stationed out in the hall marched into Willard Sinclair’s living room and told Detective Flannagan that he was needed next door.

  “All right!” Flannagan said, grinning like a kid at an amusement park, obviously raring to return to the recreation at the murder scene. He took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt. “That’ll be all for today, ladies. You’re free to go. We know where you live and we have your phone numbers. But you’re under strict instructions not to leave town, understand? And I want to see you both in my office tomorrow morning at ten.”

  “What?!” I sputtered, sounding like Donald Duck on the brink of a breakdown. “Tomorrow is Sunday-the day of rest. Don’t you want to spend it with your family? This is the Fourth of July weekend, for Pete’s sake! We’re all entitled to a little time off.”

  Flannagan looked at me and grinned again. “When you’re on the homicide squad, and there’s been a murder, there’s no such thing as time off.” He was having the time of his life. I swear he was. You could tell from the way his small hazel eyes were sparkling. “That goes for the people who discovered the body, too.”

  “But we’ve told you everything we know,” Abby said, keeping her anger under admirable control.

  “We’ll see about that tomorrow,” he replied. “Ten o’clock sharp.” Hooking his suit jacket on one finger and slinging it over his shoulder, Flannagan turned and headed for the door. Then, just as he was about to step out into the hall, he swung back around and glared at Willard Sinclair, our potbellied host-the queer little man who’d been sitting in shock on a chair in the corner, saying nothing and chewing his nails to the quick.

  “As for you, Mr. Sinclair,” Flannagan said, puckering his boyish features in obvious but uncalled-for aversion, “stay right where you are. That’s an order. Don’t set foot outside this apartment. I’ll
be back to question you later.”

  AS SOON AS FLANNAGAN WAS GONE, Abby let out a humongous groan. “That man is a raving putz!” she croaked, jumping up off the couch and pacing around the living room. “I wanted to knock his snotty block off! He was treating us like we were the ones who killed Gray. He should be spanked. No, he should be fired!”

  I agreed with her, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have the energy.

  Willard Sinclair, on the other hand, had energy to burn. He sprang out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box, shot across the room in a flash, and then quickly, but ever so quietly, pushed his front door all the way closed. “Oh, mercy me!” he cried, darting back to the middle of the living room and joining Abby in her anxious pacing. He was wringing his hands as well. “What am I going to do now?” he said, speaking with a faint Southern accent I hadn’t noticed before. “That awful little worm is coming back to give me the third degree. I know the way he works! He’ll grill me till I’m limp as a wet noodle, and then he’ll do it all over again, just for fun-like the last time.”

  I snapped to attention and sat up straighter on the couch. “The last time? You mean Flannagan has questioned you before? About another murder?” My wheels were spinning like crazy. Could it be that Gray’s peculiar, kimono-wearing next door neighbor was a deranged serial killer?

  Sinclair stopped his frantic pacing and combed his fingers through his gummy hair. “Yes… Flannagan has interrogated me before,” he admitted, staring down at his pink-flowered living room rug, avoiding eye-contact like the plague. “But it didn’t have anything to do with murder.”