The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery, page 5
“But Grandma says dinner’s ready.”
“Grandma will understand,” Maddie said with her hand on her son’s shoulder. “I’ll come in to see you when I come home. Okay?”
“Even if I’m asleep?”
“Even if you’re asleep. Please take the mail in the house for me.” As she handed the envelopes to her son, she noticed that one was from her attorney. Bradley ran for the house jumping up over the step onto the porch. She recalled her son going up those stairs one at a time on his hands and knees.
She shrugged and waved at Gary as she got into the car, wondering as she did so, when they would ever get past the waving stage.
***
“Ms. Gonzales,” Maddie said, “we’re talking murder here, so don’t hold anything back. You understand?”
Marta Gonzales, a pudgy middle-aged woman with puffy eyes and well-established laugh lines, glanced at Maddie’s left hand, then said, “Si, Señorita.” After twisting a dust rag as if the wringing might squeeze out her troubles, she added, “I tell you the truth.”
Maddie started with some easy questions to help the woman relax. “Tell us about your schedule at the Knights’ home.”
Marta continued wrestling with the rag. “I clean all day Fridays. On Mondays and Wednesdays I work from twelve to four to pick up after Señora Knight. I want mornings, but the señora don’t get out of bed. I not want to be disrespectful, but you want the truth. Señora Knight was not a nice woman, but the señor is a fine man. I would quit if not for him.”
“You were there this past Wednesday, the day before she died?” Marta’s brown eyes wincing when Maddie said died.
“Si.”
“Go on,” Jed urged. “Did you see her?” He then extended his question after she nodded. “What was she doing?”
“She went out by the pool in one of her tiny suits,” Marta said. “She always there until I go. I do the laundry and pick up after her, even the clothes she takes off to put on her bikini. I take the clothes she throws on the shelf in the laundry room to the dry cleaners and leave the bills in the kitchen.”
“Last Wednesday, did you bring back a bill from the dry cleaners?”
“Si. I put in the kitchen like always.”
“What fragrance air freshener do you use in the Knights house?” Maddie asked. Jed turned to stare at her.
“None. Never. The lady of the house does—did not like them.” Marta could not resist sneering when referring to Abigail Knight, even after her death.
“Do you ever clean the thermostat on the bedroom wall? Not just dusting, washing.”
“Si. I wash them every other month. Dust every week. The señora hollers whenever she find dust. Last Wednesday I wash.”
“Do you have any reason to believe Abigail Knight played around on Doctor Knight?” Jed asked in his jump-in-the-deep-end style.
“Marta,” Maddie raised her hand in front of the maid. “You did not like Mrs. Knight. That is fine. But we need you to be honest with us. Tell us what you know. Okay?”
“Si.” She tossed her dust rag on the table and cleared her throat. “Rex Bronson, the señora’s trainer, a black man, exercise her hard so the wine don’t make her fat. They have sex too.”
“How do you know this?” Jed asked, his eyes narrowing as he turned the page in his memo pad.
“I see them one time. Hear them sex talk on the phone many times. The señora don’t think I speak English. She call me ‘the fat no-speak-um.’ I don’t want to talk to her so I never tell her. Doctor Knight, he knows I speak English. It is our little secret.”
“Tell us what you saw.”
“One week my Thursday customer have a party. That lady say, ‘Come Friday.’ Doctor Knight, he refer me to her, so he say I can do his home that week on Thursday. I guess he no tell her. When I walk in, the señora and Rex make so much noise they not hear me. From the hall I see into the exercise room. Señor Bronson ees lying on the exercise bench. Señora Knight sit him like a vaquero, her feet hooked behind the bench legs. I see her boobies flopping and hear her yelling, ‘gitty up.’”
Marta blushed, then continued. “I tiptoe out and come back in an hour. When I come back Señora Knight angry I come Thursday. I play no-speak-um and do my work. She never know I see her riding Rex.” Marta blushed again, and then giggled. “I tell no one, till you. Every Thursday, the trainer’s van ees in the Knight’s driveway when I go to my regular Thursday house around the corner.”
Abigail Knight’s weekly affair with her trainer could explain why she opted not to go to La Jolla with her husband. Did Abigail Knight have more, “other men” in her life?
“The señora drops clothes all over,” Marta said, bringing Maddie back from her thoughts. “Leaves dirty dishes and glasses everywhere. When she ees mad, she swear, how you say … I hear once in a movie … like a sailor. No, like a drunk sailor. I do all the washing and almost no panties. In my country, we call her a puta. Señor Knight, he crazy for her, but she twist him around her finger. He a fool. A good fool. I would like my daughter, Rosa, to meet such a man. She would know how to treat him.”
“Did Señora Knight wear nightgowns?” Jed asked.
“Si. I wash six or seven each week.”
Maddie described the red babydoll she had seen folded on the vanity at the crime scene.
“Si, I wash it many times.”
“Did you often find their thermostat set at a really low temperature?” Maddie asked.
“No. Always at seventy.”
“Always?”
“Si.”
The low temperature that night must have been set by her killer. It was also low at the Stowe scene; at least it was until the building super changed the setting.
Maddie tried a presumptive question. “What did the Knights fight about?”
“The señor ees never home when I clean, but I hear her once on the phone telling somebody the señor very mad because the señora she get fixed to not have child. I hear her laugh. She say she not going to ruin her body just to be saddled with a brat. That is what she call a baby. A brat.”
Marta shook her head in disgust before adding a few words in Spanish; Maddie didn’t need a literal translation.
Jed asked, “Marta, have you ever heard the name Folami Stowe?”
Maddie didn’t expect she had, but as the fictional, inscrutable Charlie Chan might say: “Unexpected question sometimes get unexpected answer.”
“I see this name in the newspaper, I think,” Marta said, “or maybe on the TV.”
***
Late that night, Maddie crawled into bed and turned on her little bedside television. The picture quickly lost her attention as her mind went back over the interview of Marta the maid, and the images of a butchered Abigail Knight. Maddie had been given the point on a major case. Just what she needed while her ex-husband was trying to destroy her life.
On both fronts, the worst was yet to come.
Chapter 9
The odor of sun-ripened vomit rose from the weedy patch along the side street when Maddie and Jed got out of the car to visit Folami Stowe’s director of marketing, Clarence Clark Johnson. According to the vice department, the pimp ran his take from his girls through BB’s Tavern on Broadway which occupied the center spot in a commercial triplex, sandwiched between a 24/7 coin-operated laundry and a tattoo parlor. Clarence Johnson’s girls and customers called him BB; the city’s head vice detective, Brackett, called him Popcorn.
“Surrender to Jesus and be saved,” an old man in rags screeched, holding a Bible above his head while pacing the sidewalk on Broadway. From the look of the neighborhood, not many had taken his message to heart.
After the sunlight, the inside of the tavern seemed dark as a cave, with a mixture of odors that provoked an urge to chew.
When Maddie’s eyes adjusted, she saw Clarence Clark Johnson standing near the far end of the bar. He looked just as Brackett had described him, a high shiny forehead surrounded by thinning, burr hair. Johnson moved his tongue across his lips, tossed popcorn into his mouth, and allowed a slight upturn to the ends of his lips. It wasn’t a smile, just his way of letting Maddie and Jed know he had made them as cops.
The six-foot pimp had a sallow complexion and a beer gut that oozed over the bar suggesting he drank up a significant chunk of the profits.
There were two other people in the tavern. A white man around twenty-five wearing a sleeveless shirt with gang tattoos cresting over his shoulders, sat slouched near a pool table. He looked at Maddie and suggestively slid his hand up and down the cue stick propped between his thighs. A black woman sat at the far end of the bar, holding a cell phone, wearing a red dress cut low enough to suggest being suspended on velcroed nipples.
The woman shot a glance toward BB. He shook his head once. She put down the cell phone and pulled the short chain dangling below a rectangular green plastic shade. The light that had spilled across the bar in front of her disappeared.
“We’re homicide, BB, not vice,” Maddie said. “We aren’t interested in your side business. Our job is to find the person who killed Folami Stowe. We’re assuming you want that, too. Don’t change our minds.”
“Whatchu want from me?” he asked, waving an empty popcorn basket in their direction on his way over to the popper in the corner that had just dumped a fresh batch of puffy whites. Maddie shook her head.
“We’ll need a list of Folami’s customers for the past two months,” she told him. “Include the days and times of her appointments and how we can contact them. I’m sure your secretary over there can give us the list, and include anybody who hung around here who had the hots for Folami.”
“Angel didn’t hang here.” BB ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “I never dug that African name Folami shit, but you saw that face. I never permitted no rough stuff with Angel.”
“We’ve seen pictures,” Maddie said, without getting into the current condition of Folami’s face. The media had not yet learned of the mutilation of the victims.
“She had her reg’lars,” BB admitted, “but they was all meek. Anybody roughed Angel know’d they’d get double. No hard ass took a turn on Angel. I got my ethics you know.”
“Sure you do, and you keep them in that jar on the back bar down among the pickled eggs,” Maddie wisecracked.
“Whachu talking about, woman?”
“Forget it.”
Jed tossed a pad and pencil on the bar. “Names. Dates. Times. Addresses. Phone numbers.”
In accordance with the ancient philosophers who taught that men were warriors and women nurturers, Maddie added a word of caution. “This is a high-profile case, BB. Don’t get on our wrong side.”
“So now its high profile,” BB said, coming out of his slouch. “Now that some rich, white bread got toasted.”
“Save the civil rights speech for an audience,” Maddie said, standing as tall as she could, her forehead at his chin.
BB chomped down hard to bust an unpopped kernel before beckoning his appointments’ secretary from the end of the bar. She got off the stool and moved toward them, her too-tight red dress resembling a one-hundred-pound gunnysack lumpy with two-hundred-pounds of pinto beans.
“Give ‘em what they want,” he said. Then to Maddie, “We worked Angel only by phone. She took all her assignments from Scarlett there.” He nodded toward the lady in red.
“Brackett’s report says you told him that Folami’s parents were dead and that she was an only child. Not many twenty-two-year-olds are without any living family. Flesh it out for us.”
“Her momma done run off with some horn player. After that her daddy became a steady customer in here. Angel … ah, Folami, was raised by her father’s mother. You already know about Angel’s old man kidnapping the girl when she was ten. The crazy jerkoff held her in the basement of some old vacant house.”
“Where was this?”
“A few blocks over where they put in that big-ass gas station. Listen, I ain’t gonna do your job for you, Sergeant, for Christ’s sake. Look it up, eleven, twelve years ago. You all got the file. The cops found her after they put her old man down permanent. The crazy fuck had killed his own momma—Angel’s grandmother. Beat her to death with a hammer. Them who don’t buy the skinny about the horn player, says he killed his wife, Angel’s momma, too. I hope there lots of cheap whores in hell, ‘cause that man never got enough of ‘em up here, try as he did.”
“After that what happened to Folami?”
“She bounced around. One foster home, then another, then another, like that.”
“Where were you the night she was killed?” Jed asked.
BB, who had been leaning onto the bar, flopped one arm sideways like a bird with an injured wing. “What? Me hurt Angel?” His beer breath invaded Maddie’s air space. “That’s bullshit! Angel was a cash register with legs.”
Maddie stood tall to match the pimp’s attitude. “Answer my partner.”
“Right here!” He plopped his forearms back onto the bar. “I was right here. I got witnesses. Okay? You want their names, too?”
“She have any regulars who had to get rough to get hard?” Jed asked.
“The slappers pay extra, but they don’t get near Angel. Like I tol’ ya, we saved Angel for the sweet guys. The ones who cry about what their old ladies won’t do, and only them whose got a fat wallet. I’d be a fool to let some sicko dickhead damage that face.”
Well, some sicko dickhead did, Maddie thought, feeling she had just enunciated a police equivalent of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
BB twisted the little wheel on the toothpick dispenser and put the pick to work hunting husks.
“Angel took about ten or fifteen service calls a week,” he said while the toothpick danced across the piano keys in his mouth. “They’ll all be on that there pad Scarlett’s working up. Angel wouldn’t do no women. Every Thursday afternoon she had a soft touch for a couple of hours with some old man. Angel spent Monday nights with me, a slow night for business. We usually had dinner and went to a movie, then to my place.”
After a smug smile, Maddie said, “And who said a man can’t mix business with pleasure.”
BB appeared to have a point, though. Given his perspective, Folami had been all about revenue and private pleasure. On the surface he didn’t have reason to kill her, but he was a player in the city’s soft underbelly of sexual perversion.
Maddie would send Brackett back to brace the pimp, push him into getting mad, hoping he might say something that could point them somewhere. Brackett was the right man for that job. Brackett would third degree his own mother, and probably like doing so.
Maddie pulled a three-foot piece of clothesline from her bag while Jed tilted one of the tavern chairs forward until the back touched the floor. Maddie looped the rope through the rods on the back of the chair.
“Tie a knot,” she told the pimp.
“What’s this shit?”
“Patronize us, BB,” Maddie said. “We’re on the same side on this. Right?”
BB rolled his eyes and said, “Whatever.” He reached down and tied the knot the same way the murderer had tied Folami Stowe’s and Abigail Knight’s legs.
Maddie knew that thousands of other people in town would have tied the knot that same way. So did this make BB a suspect? If he was the killer, would he have intentionally tied it differently? If he was the killer, would he tie the knots on his next victim differently?
“How does a guy with the name Clarence Clark Johnson end up with the nickname BB?” Maddie asked while Jed went over to check on Scarlett’s list of Folami’s customers.
“That’s easy, Sergeant. The place was BB’s Tavern before I bought it—prior owner. Folks was used to calling the boss man BB, why change what folks is used to.”
***
On the way back to the station, Maddie asked Jed, “Did Scarlett know the name Rex Bronson?”
“She struck out on that pitch, and she checked her book back fifteen months. Folami never had a john with the name Rex Bronson, and Scarlett said, ‘Ain’t no black Arnold Schwarzenegger coming ‘round here, sweetcakes. I’d know.’”
“Sweetcakes! I like that. It fits ya.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, you’ve never watched yourself walk from the backside … sweetcakes.”
“Can we get back to work, Sergeant Richards?”
“If you insist, Sweetcakes.”
Maddie had never worked vice, but learning about Folami Stowe had made her realize something about which she had never given any real thought: hookers were more than just mindless depositories. They had their dreams just like the rest of us.
***
At the station, Maddie used the computer to check BB’s story about Folami’s father kidnapping his daughter, murdering his own mother, and being killed by the department. It had gone down like BB said.
She hit the blinking message button on her phone. The first message had been left by the crime-beat writer for the Arizona Republic. The second and last message had been left by an old beau she hadn’t heard from in months. The man had magic hands and outward charm, but it was all backed up by a lot of nothing. His favorite topics were his aerobic workouts, a new pair of designer jeans, and whether or not he was having a good hair day. She deleted both messages.
Before leaving, Maddie researched the name Folami. In the language of the Yoruba region of Nigeria, Folami meant: “Respect and honor me.”
“I hope finding your killer will count,” Maddie said quietly.
***
After a quick stop at the supermarket, Maddie went home to find Bradley playing catch with Gary Packard in the street.
“Hey Maddie,” Gary shouted. “Brad’s got quite an arm.”
“It’s Bradley,” Maddie replied sharply, “not Brad.”
“Whoa, Mom, Gary’s like awesome. He played one season in the minor leagues.”
She put her hand over her mouth. His father had called him Brad. “Sorry, Gary, didn’t mean to snap. Bad day.”
“No problem. Hey, Bradley, I’m done in. Why don’t you help your mother with one of those grocery bags? We’ll play some more catch another time.” When he looked back, Maddie tossed him an apologetic gesture. He smiled.
