Good Lord, Deliver Us (38 page)

Wrong!

Guns and people don't kill
people --
bullets
kill people, any idiot from the N.R.A. eager to testify to
that in court. (Surely, Z thought, shoveling dirt into a child's
grave would change the outlook of the most rabid gun-nut. ... On
reflection, decided that it wouldn't.)

Viewing the severed heads
of these unfortunate ancients -- a result of something more than
what was normally considered to be "woman's work" -- Z thought of
Mrs. Smith. That she had murder on her mind was a certainty since
she'd attempted to get Z to kill her husband. Nor could there be a
doubt that she'd set up Ruble to kill Z. Why? Maybe because her
husband was right when he said she was filled with hatred
for
all
men. She
hated her husband. Hated things that reminded her of her husband.
The dog. Z. Men in general? Her ... son?

Mr. Smith had said his wife owned a gun. If
so, where was it? Since the only gun the cops found was the one
beside her on the bed, didn't that indicate the gun on the bed was
hers?

There was another way to look at all this,
starting with the question: why would a woman who hated gardening
... garden? Could the answer be found in the old saying, "Build a
better mouse trap and ....."

An early piece of information that had been
rattling around inside Z's skull now settled into place. A question
about who a certain V.I. Smith might be, V.I. Smith, the name of
the chairman (on Dean Ashlock's list) of the committee of citizens
concerned about preserving the "historic" ghost house.

Though Z still didn't want
to consider the implication of the answer, he had to ask himself if
this house-loving V.I. Smith could possibly be a certain
Vivian
Smith, recently
of 2610 Pennsylvania. If so, might there be a connection between
the Smith woman wanting to keep the ghost house standing and the
fact that bodies were buried in that house's basement?

Speaking of bodies decaying under the
basement soil, Addison had speculated that the corpses were in such
bad shape because of the summer's heat -- that conjecture not
making that much sense.

Heat?

Basements were cool, so much so that, in the
days before refrigeration, you kept vegetables underground in the
summer time, basements in those days called "root cellars." Didn't
this mean that bodies in an advanced state of decomposition in the
basement's "cool," must have been buried for some months?

"Are you tired? You look tired." Susan,
being concerned about him.

"A little."

"Want to get something to eat?"

"Sure."

It was a ritual. After ambling around the
gallery, they stopped in the Nelson's Rozzelle Court, a space at
the gallery's heart that had been made into a high class (and
high-priced) cafeteria. Rozzelle Court was a beautiful, two-story,
sky-lighted room of aged limestone, a large, splashing fountain in
the room's center, the fountain ringed by twelve evenly spaced
bronze medallions set in the room's terrazzo floor, each medal a
two-feet-in-diameter, low-relief celebration of a sign of the
zodiac.

Entering the court, they found the usual
glass-topped, black steel luncheon tables, a scattering of late
afternoon patrons seated at them. The cafeteria line was to the
right, the cuisine featuring upscale entrees, plus soup, salads,
breads, teas of one kind or the other, and wine.

"Sit," ordered Susan, Z pulling out the
nearest wire-legged chair and sitting down. "I'll pick out
something for both of us." Not too hard a call since Z always had
the same thing: Diet Coke and a blueberry muffin.

With Susan gone to stand in line, Z felt,
not only tired, but also ... uneasy ... unhappy with the police
version of the Ruble affair.

Maybe, he thought, if he arranged the clues
of the "vagrant murder" case in chronological order he'd find an
explanation that satisfied him.

A checklist was in order.

The whole thing started with Ruble's escape
from a New York asylum no more than a month ago.

Picking up a flier from the tastefully
designed metal rack in the table's center, the folded sheet
advertising a coming exhibition, Z slipped his pen from the pocket
of his Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt to jot notes on the leaflet's
margin.

Starting with -- Ruble was crazy. A slasher.
Had a reputation for mutilating corpses in the war. Was on his way
to Kansas City.

Mrs. Smith was Ruble's cousin. She'd lied
when she said she didn't know Ruble, knowing him well enough let
him hide in her house.

The Smith woman was also mentally unstable.
(Did psychological problems run in the family?) She hated her
Husband, hated men in general, her Husband said. She'd tried to get
Z to kill her Husband, at the same time hoping "the Mister" would
kill Z. (The more Z thought about it, the more he was certain the
woman had mutual-mayhem in mind for Z and the Mr. Smith.)

Both Z and the Husband
surviving their first encounter, the Mrs. had then tried to get
Ruble to kill
both
Z
and
her
Husband, a plan that hadn't worked either. Maddened by the
blast-burns Z had inflicted on him, Ruble had returned to the Smith
house and killed the woman -- slashed her, a Ruble specialty. (Cut,
but not mutilated.) Z tried to remember what Addison had said about
Ruble. Did the K.C. detective say Ruble had hacked up the men he'd
killed on his way from the New York funny farm to Kansas City? In
Vietnam, yes. But in K.C.? Z didn't think so. Surely, if Ruble had
carved up his
American
victims in interesting ways, Addison would have mentioned it.
You don't overlook something like that.

For a moment, Z listened to the gushing
fountain; was caught up in the froth and foam of it ... before
returning to reality.

There were other facts to be put in
context.

Someone (Addison thought Ruble) had killed
the K.C. vagrants -- no doubt at the Smith house -- using the
garden tractor's carryall to transport the bodies across the
soon-to-be-soccer field to the "ghost house" basement, just across
the way.

Someone (though no one but Z knew it) had
also killed the boy, shot him in the head with the gun found beside
the dead mother.

Then, there was the marked decomposition of
the deceased, Addison believing they'd rotted quickly because of
the summer's heat -- Addison taking that to mean Ruble could have
killed them all within the space of his return to Kansas City.

Z noticing that the
basement was cool -- maybe not. Didn't a cool basement mean that
those bodies in an advanced state of rot
had
to have been killed and buried
over a
period
of
months -- meaning they'd been murdered long before Ruble arrived on
the scene?

Throw in the dead dog.

Toss in the gallery paintings that had
struck Z so forcefully.

And what did you have?
...................

Mrs. Smith, as vagrant killer!

As the Jewish widow,
Judith, had chopped off the head of the Babylonian general, as the
Biblical woman had been responsible for the execution of John the
Baptist, so had the Smith woman murdered the vagrants. Though Z
hadn't wanted to face it, women
could
commit the ultimate
crime.

Mentally unstable herself, hating her
Husband -- a hate she had generalized to all men -- Mrs. Smith had
lured destitute workmen to her garden. There, strengthened by hate
and exercise, she'd paid them with death and emasculation. Month -
after - murderous - month!

The garden was the twisted woman's
battleground; the place she'd slaughtered her hated Husband's
surrogates in her own sick war. (Z found himself shivering. Willed
himself to stop.)

Zeroing in on Ruble's
appearance at the Smith house, Z was
certain
Ruble had come there only
recently. Narrowing the man's arrival time even further, Ruble had
not showed up until
after
Z had made his first trip to question Mrs. Smith.
How did Z know that? Like the case of the dog that
didn't
bark, the first
time Z had spoken to the Smith woman there'd been no smell of Ruble
in the lady's sterile living room. Furniture polish and the woman's
sweat. But no smell of
man
at all.

With cousin Ruble showing up toward the end
of June, Mrs. Smith -- knowing her relative had been put away
because of violent tendencies -- had gotten him to make attempts on
Z's life and on her Husband's life. Injured as a result of the last
murderous outburst, Ruble had returned to the Smith house where he
found the woman packed up, ready to leave.

Hurt and feeling deserted, he'd killed her,
too.

It had to be that way. No other way the
puzzle pieces fit. Except for ....

The wild card -- the "card" no one know
about because Z had it hidden "up his sleeve."

The murdered boy.

Shot.

The gun found beside the mother.

The mother's gun.

The same gun she'd used to shoot the
vagrants.

No suitcases packed for the boy. ........
Because ... he wasn't going anywhere.

The reason for Z's resistance to the obvious
conclusion was his horror of it! Impossible. A mother couldn't
..........

Surfacing through the sludge of Z's tiring
mind came a repressed memory of something that happened several
years ago. Right here in Kansas City. A tragedy in which, after
losing a custody battle, a divorcee had stabbed her young children
to death rather than let the children's father rear them.

So in the end, the case of the murdered
vagrants came down to simplicity itself.

Mrs. Smith, a crazed man-hater, had been
luring unfortunate "food for work" men to her house; murdering them
on her home ground. Not so insane she wanted to be caught, she'd
killed only men who wouldn't be missed, burying them in the
basement of an abandoned house across the field behind her own
home. (Butchering the dead also seemed to run in the family.)

When she learned the vacant death-house was
to be razed to construct soccer fields, she'd organized a committee
to stop the soccer project until she could make a "clean sweep" of
her life by killing her Husband, the dog, and ... the boy.
Following which, she planned to vanish.

Meanwhile, the cousin had shown up, the
Misses trading him sanctuary for his homicidal skills -- this
logical progression taking Z to the last fateful night. Taking her
boy somewhere else, Mrs. Smith had let Ruble have her car so he
could do his slasher act, first on Z, then on her husband, the
woman using other transportation to return home later that night.
Assuming her murderous cousin had disposed of Z's body, then knifed
her Husband, Mrs. Smith had gone for the triple-play by shooting
her son, after that, packing her bags.

Given her phobic nature, there was not a
doubt in Z's mind that she'd have shot Ruble too, had she not been
surprised by the enraged madman.

As horrible as this scenario was, that was
what had happened, the grizzly details to be known ... by Z alone.
Z had then taken the little boy, plus some of his clothes to make
it look like he still lived, to the soccer field for burial.

"Penny for your thoughts," Susan said,
rattling down the laden food tray, Z's girl sliding gracefully into
her chair across from him.

"Overpriced at a penny," Z replied.

###

While
Good Lord, Deliver Us
is set in
Kansas City, Missouri (largely in Kansas City North), the book is a
work of fiction -- all the way. Fiction in this book also means
that, in addition to the characters being fictitious, so are many
aspects of the city. While major roads, shopping centers, theaters,
restaurants, etc., appear in the books, the reader will find that
little is "as it should be." The roads don't go where they should;
buildings that don't exist have been "created"; actual buildings
sometimes changed and/or relocated. (One of the joys of
fiction-writing is that you're not bound by the truth.) Besides
"manufacturing" locales where I needed them, I also "rearranged"
the city to keep readers with nothing better to do from trying to
find the detective's home or his office, or the homes and
businesses of friends. (People are still writing to Sherlock Holmes
at Number 221 B Baker Street -- because it is an actual address!)
What this means is that no one will be annoying you by showing up
at your house or place of business to ask stupid questions about
your connection to Big Bob Zapolska.

* * * * *

John G. Stockmyer is an individual whose
irrepressible creativity has manifested itself in many ways: as a
poet, teacher, produced playwright, author, co-owner of an
educational materials business, creator of a time-machine
simulator, and, more recently, as a podcaster and producer of
eBooks. During his career he has received awards for scholarship,
numerous teaching awards and, as a writer, was a Thorpe Menn
finalist.

He is the co-author of three non-fiction
books:
Unleashing the Right Side of the Brain
- The Stephen
Greene Press,
Life Trek: The Odyssey of Adult Development
-
Humanics, and
Right Brain Romance
- Ginn Press. He is also
the author of over 20 works of fiction, including the
Crime/Hard-Boiled "Z-Detective" Series, and the
Science-Fiction/Fantasy "Under The Stairs" Series. He has also
written a quirky vampire novel titled,
The Gentleman
Vampire
.