“’at’s me.” Toby straightened with a goofy grin.
The man displayed a leather-encased badge in one hand and held out the other. “Detective Frank Dixon.” The two men exchanged a brief shake. “Get in and let’s talk.” The detective opened a back door of the blue car. Toby slid onto the rear seat. The car smelled faintly of vomit, tobacco smoke and cheap after-shave. The driver, a stocky, sandy-haired man in his early thirties, watched him as if expecting trouble.
Dixon slammed the door and climbed into the front seat, indicating the driver. “This is my partner, Detective Dave French.” French, his eyes locked onto Toby in the rear-view mirror, nodded once, unsmiling. Toby duplicated the motion.
“Fourteen-thirteen Charbold, wasn’t it?” Dixon asked.
“Yes,” Toby said. He buckled up.
French moved the mirror enough to adjust the knot of a plum-colored tie hanging between the lapels of his tan jacket. His reflected gaze swept swiftly across Toby’s features again. He put the car in gear and they shot away from the curb.
Dixon half-turned in the seat. “Lean towards me, Mr. Rew.” Toby obliged. The detective sniffed. Dixon’s thin nostrils flared and his bloodshot blue eyes narrowed. “Marcella was right, as usual. You have been drinking.”
“A little,” Toby said defensively. Marcella must be the dispatcher he’d spoken with. “I told her I’d had a couple. Doesn’t change what I saw.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Let’s hear what you witnessed.” Dixon had a small notebook out and a fountain pen poised over a blank page.
“Well, I was up on my ladder—”
“What were you doing on a ladder?” French interrupted.
“Painting. I’m a housepainter.” Toby glanced at the driver and gestured at his coveralls. “See, Mrs. Cratty hired me to do her house, and it was a big job. So I’d been there for a couple weeks—”
“Never mind that now,” Dixon said. “You’re up on the ladder.”
“Right. I’m up on the ladder—”
“What time was this?” French asked. He snuffled a couple times.
“About one, one-thirty.”
“What took you so long to report it?”
“I explained all that when I called,” Toby said. “See—”
“Forget that,” Dixon barked. “You’re up on the damn ladder.”
“Right. I’m up on the ladder painting. Then I heard a sound.”
“What kind of sound?” Dixon asked.
“Like somebody yelling. Or crying out in pain.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I looked around and saw two men fighting in a house across the street.”
“Across the street?” French’s eyes darted to the mirror, back to the road. He sniffed a mile a minute. It could have been a summer cold or a nervous habit. Either way, it was damned annoying.
“It’s a narrow street,” Toby said. “From the top of the ladder I could look right down into the room.”
“How tall is the ladder?” French asked.
“Thirty-six feet, fully extended, a custom job. I was near the top.”
Dixon opened his mouth to speak but French beat him to it. “How far away were you when you saw all this?” The younger detective glanced back at Toby, his nose working like a rabbit’s.
“Don’t know.” Toby thought about it: the two lanes of the street couldn’t be much more than thirty feet, and front lawns on either side weren’t over ten feet deep. “Say fifty feet, more or less.”
“You wear glasses?” French asked.
Toby said proudly: “Nope, I have better than twenty-twenty vision.” When he’d been younger, he had taken pleasure in showing off during high school vision tests, easily rattling off the bottom line of the eye chart from twice the recommended distance. His grandpa, whose trifocals were thick as magnifying glasses that made his eyes huge and distorted, used to declare: “That boy could spot a flea on a tick.”
French ran out of questions. Dixon took over again. “So what were you doing all the time the murder was going on?” His gaze probed Toby’s face.
Toby ran a nervous hand through his hair, feeling spots like scabs where paint had dried. “Not much. Just standing at the top of the ladder, hanging on to the roof to keep from falling. It all happened so fast.”
“Go on, Mr. Rew,” Dixon coaxed.
Toby’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Like I said, I saw two men fighting. Then one went down. The other stood over him, whaling away with a stick or club.” He felt clever for not saying “poker.”
“Can you describe the men?” Dixon asked, scribbling away.
“The one getting hit was an older fellow. I’m not good at guessing peoples’ ages or weights.” In his mind, Toby saw again the man on the floor, the canary-colored shirt stained with blood, the silvery hair dripping red. “Very tan. On the slender side.”
“How tall?”
Who knew? The dead man seemed smaller than life. “Average height?”
“How about the man doing the hitting?”
“He peeked out the blinds to check if anybody had seen him.” Toby wiped moisture off his brow. “He was much younger. Not too tall but well built. A white guy with dark hair: I got a gander when he came out of the house.”
“Would you recognize him again?”
“I didn’t really see his face.”
“Great!” French snorted. “A dark-haired suspect in Syracuse, Wop City. That’s like saying it was a spook in D.C., a kraut in Milwaukee or a spic in El Paso.”
Dixon gave his partner a sour look. “He came out the front?”
“The back. He ran out, jumped into a car parked in the alley, and drove away.”
“What kind of car?” French asked.
“Couldn’t tell—too far away. Besides all cars these days look the same to me.” It was a sad commentary on how long it had been since he’d driven a vehicle of recent vintage. “But it was slate-gray. Looked like a late model. Full-size, not a compact.”
“Big help.” French’s double sniff echoed his words.
“What did you do after the man drove away?” Dixon asked.
This is where it gets sticky, Toby thought. “I came down off the ladder and went over to the other house to see about the injured man. I tried doors, front and back, but they were locked.” Dixon stared at him, waiting for the rest of it.
Toby swallowed. “Then I got my stepladder and looked in the window where I’d seen the man peek out. It was open.”
“And?” Dixon prompted.
“I saw the older man lying on the den floor, his head all bloody.”
Dixon made Toby describe the scene, getting it all down in his notebook, then asked: “Did you go into the room?”
Toby looked at the paint-spattered hands clasped in his lap. They were unfeeling, as though they belonged to somebody else. The air in the car was close and hot. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Shouldn’t have done that, Mr. Rew,” Dixon admonished. “Might have tainted the crime scene.” You have no idea, Toby thought, remembering the papers under the seat of his truck. He hadn’t told the cops about those.
“Why did you go in?” asked French sharply.
Toby looked up, met the penetrating glare in the mirror. “I told you: I thought he might need help. But he was dead.”
“You touch anything?” asked French.
“Just the man. I checked his pulse. There wasn’t any.”
“Didn’t touch anything else?” French asked again.
“No.” Toby felt his stomach knot at the lie.
“Didn’t help yourself to a couple trinkets lying around?” French’s mouth twisted and went ugly. “Maybe take some loose cash from the dead man’s pockets?” He took a long, luxurious snort.
Toby’s face flushed. “Of course not! What kind of guy do you take me for?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, isn’t it?” French smirked.
“Look—” Toby began hotly.
“Take it easy, Mr. Rew.” Dixon made a placating gesture with a hand. “French here gets carried away with legal zeal.” The older detective gave the driver a stern look.
“My partner has difficulty telling the difference between the lowlifes we usually have to deal with and honest citizens like yourself. He forgets it takes a special person to report a crime like you did—most people don’t want to get involved.”
Toby remained silent but felt miffed. He stared at his hands, wishing he’d remained a member of the Silent Majority. The detectives didn’t say anything, though Toby could feel their eyes on him.
At last, Dixon sighed. “Here we are.” Toby looked up as the car pulled against the curb and parked opposite the blue house. Shadows were a little longer and a few cars were now parked here and there up and down the street, but otherwise nothing much had changed. His truck still stood in the driveway beside Mrs. Cratty’s unfinished paint job. The blue house was still silent. The window he’d climbed through was still open.
The ignition was shut off. Everybody stared at the blue house without speaking for what seemed like a long time. Finally, French and Dixon opened their doors at the same time and simultaneously climbed out. Dixon unlatched the back door from the exterior because there was no handle on the inside. When Toby didn’t move, the detective leaned in to lay his hand on Toby’s shoulder. “Let’s all check into this, shall we?”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, you do.” Dixon tightened his grip by a fraction.
Chapter 4
The detectives—Toby between them—stepped first to the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Cratty’s. A dusty blue-gray minivan was now parked on the crumbling driveway beside the blue house. “Where were you standing, Mr. Rew?” Dixon asked.
“My ladder was right here.” Toby indicated deep indentations in the lawn where the ladder’s legs had rested, then pointed up to the small patch of fresh paint at the housetop. “I was up there.” Dixon’s eyes tilted down and up where Toby pointed.
French scowled. “Should have left the ladder where it was.” Moving only their heads, both detectives followed the line of sight to the open window of the blue house.
“Want me to set the ladder up so you can see what I saw?” Toby asked. “Just take a second. It’s on my truck out back.” He thumbed over a shoulder.
“Maybe later,” Dixon said. “For now, let’s go over to the other house and see what we can find out.”
French rolled his eyes. “A waste of time.”
“You’ve got something better to do?” Dixon asked dryly.
Toby got the feeling the two men hadn’t worked together long, hadn’t yet learned to adapt to each other’s rhythms, or maybe they simply didn’t care much for one another as partners were supposed to.
They moved together as a unit across the street and along the cracked walk, up the spotty front steps to the door of the splashed blue house where murder had occurred. French pounded on the door.
“I tried that.” Toby fidgeted. “No answer. Which isn’t surprising, since the only occupant is dead.” It felt funny saying it out loud, giving it a name. His first dead body, if you didn’t count his father’s waxy-looking corpse, dressed in an old-fashioned wide-lapel suit and laid out in a shiny, satin-lined coffin resting in the chapel of a funeral parlor. That was more than twenty years ago.
French bent a glance at him and knocked again, louder. He sniffed an S-O-S. “I tried the back door, too,” Toby said helpfully. “It’s locked.”
French rapped a third time. “If you like,” Toby said, “I can get my stepladder so you can crawl through the window like I did.”
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Rew.” Dixon pointed. Toby looked: behind the window left of the door, the curtain moved.
“Thought you said nobody was home,” French said.
“There wasn’t, unless you count the dead man.”
“Let me do the talking,” Dixon said, as much to French as to Toby.
The door swung open. A woman stood framed in the opening. “Yes?”
Toby gaped. It was the lady in photos on the mantel inside. She was older than the latest snapshot, had rounded forty, maybe, but looked light years better. She’d lost weight, for starters. Upswept hair with carefully applied blond highlights, a deep tan, skillful makeup, a clinging floral silk dress all did wonders for her.
Dixon gave her his name and his partner’s, showing his badge. “We’ve received a report of a crime committed here.”
“A crime? Here?” The woman sounded incredulous. Her faded-denim eyes, enhanced by blue shadow, widened attractively.
“Yes, Mrs.—?”
“Puterbaugh. Mrs. James Puterbaugh. When was this crime supposed to have happened?” Her lips held the suggestion of a smile.
“Just today. A few hours ago.”
Her gaze traveled coolly to the other detective, slid from him to linger on Toby. “What sort of crime was it alleged to be?”
Dixon gave Toby a warning glance. “We’re not sure. We’ve had a report of strange noises coming from this house. People yelling, that sort of thing.”
Mrs. Puterbaugh studied Toby’s clothing. Her eyes flashed up, past his face, and took in Mrs. Cratty’s house, an obvious work in progress. “Is yelling a crime?”
“Not usually.”
Her attention returned to Dixon. “Perhaps someone merely overheard an argument between me and James.”
“Do you argue often?” French asked. He stared at her breasts, a hungry look on his face. His innocuous words sounded somehow slimy.
She gave French a frosty look. Her words were icicles. “No, but our quarrels are quite noisy, like our lovemaking. I’ve been known to scream when I climax.”
French’s face flushed red. His nasal noises were heartbeat-paced.
“Have you been home all day?” Dixon managed not to grin at his partner’s momentary discomfort, but crinkled flesh at the corners of his eyes gave him away.
She hesitated for a tick. “We just got back from out of town and were grocery shopping from noon until three o’clock. There wasn’t a thing to eat in the house.”
“You said ‘we,’” Dixon noted. “Who else lives here?”
“Our two children. They’re staying with teenaged friends for a few days. My husband, James, and I are the only ones here now.”
On cue, the man in the photographs showed up beside her. “What is it, dear?” The man had improved since his last portrait, too. Now mid-forties, he was mahogany-brown.
The clunky glasses were gone. He was wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe with a palm tree, a stylized wave, and the words “Vista del Mar” and “Xaxpak” embroidered on one breast. Mr. Puterbaugh vigorously toweled his hair, worn stylishly long to minimize encroaching baldness.