A Cutthroat Business Read online

  I hesitated for a second on the doorstep. The house was cool and dark, with all the draperies closed against the sun, and there was a certain safety in being outside, in the open. Inside the thick walls, nobody could hear me if I screamed. Not that I had any reason to think I’d be doing any screaming, but I’m a woman, and not stupid, so the possibility is usually at the back of my mind.

  “After you,” Rafe said. I looked back at him. He quirked an eyebrow. I couldn’t very well refuse to go in, considering how I’d practically begged for the chance to come here. So I forced a professional smile, took a deep breath, and stepped over the threshold. Rafe came in behind me and pushed the door shut. I moved a little further into the hall, out of his reach, before I looked around.

  We were standing in a huge entry, giving way to a long hall running the depth of the house, with doors leading off it to the left and right. It didn’t look as if anyone had lifted a finger in here for at least twenty years. There were cobwebs draping the 15-foot ceiling like canopies, and mouse droppings scattered across the scuffed wood floor. There was peeling wallpaper, sagging doors, and posts missing from the banister, and everything was overlaid by a thick layer of dust. A faint metallic scent that I knew I’d smelled before, but which I couldn’t place, hung in the air, along with the odors of dankness, mold, dirt, and dust.

  “Know anything about the owner?” Rafe asked, looking around. His nostrils were quivering too, I noticed.

  I shook my head. “Not other than that he or she hasn’t been taking care of the place. But when I see Brenda on Monday, I’ll ask her.” He didn’t answer, and I added, “There should be five rooms down here and five more upstairs, plus the third floor and basement. Where would you like to begin?”

  “May as well go up.” He stepped onto the staircase, just to our left.

  The second floor looked much like the first. Rafe wandered down the hall and opened one of the doors. A room with peeling paint and a sagging ceiling met our eyes. It was empty except for dust and debris and a soiled mattress in the corner. The mattress squeaked and rustled, and I squeaked too, and backed up hastily. Rafe shot me a look over his shoulder.

  “I don’t like mice,” I said defensively. He smirked.

  “Those ain’t mice, darlin’. Those’re rats.”

  I took another step back, feeling the color draining from my face. Rafe grinned and closed the door.

  The rest of the second floor looked pretty much like the first room, with shredded wallpaper and cracking plaster, scuffed and gouged wood floors, and chunks missing from the ceilings where water had gotten in. As Rafe walked from room to room taking it all in, his face impassive, I snuck glances at him, wondering what he was doing here.

  All right, so I know that just because a guy was a bit of a hellion in high school, doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have straightened himself out by 30 or so. People do it all the time. He might have a good job and a stock portfolio and be able to qualify for a quarter-million dollar loan without any problem. Anything was possible. Unlikely, but possible.

  “You know,” I said casually, “I didn’t ask what you do.”

  He glanced at me, in the act of opening another door. “Do?”

  “For a living.”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “This’n that.”

  He turned back to the door. I nodded gravely. This and that? What did that mean?

  Eventually we ended up in the third floor ballroom, where I stood at the top of the stairs admiring the dust motes dancing in the streaks of sunlight while Rafe prowled and peered into closets and dark corners.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” I asked finally. He shot me a look over his shoulder.

  “Why?”

  “I thought maybe I could help. If you’re checking for dry-rot or something.”

  “Oh. No, I ain’t looking for anything special.”

  He turned away, to contemplate a picture of a black Baby Jesus forgotten on the wall behind the door. I left him to it. If he was looking for something in particular, he obviously wasn’t going to tell me what it was, and whatever it might have been, he didn’t find it, because he was still empty-handed and silent when we went back down the stairs.

  “Just the first floor left,” I said brightly when we stood in the downstairs hall again. “Parlors, sitting rooms, dining rooms, and other formal-rooms. Ready?”

  Rafe nodded, unmoved. I headed off down the hallway with him right behind.

  The first room we entered was empty. It was a formal parlor or sitting room, with faded, peeling wallpaper sporting big, red cabbage roses, and a rather nice fireplace on one wall. The moth-eaten draperies were closed, leaving the room in semi-darkness, and while I walked over to the window to pull them aside, Rafe went directly to the adjoining door into the next room. And stopped in the doorway, as quickly and completely as if he had walked into an invisible wall. I took one look at him, at the tense muscles and somehow brittle posture, and moved to join him.

  Chapter 2.

  I think I knew before I got there what I would see. (Although if I had known how bad it was going to be, I would have stayed where I was.) Somewhere in the back of my head, I must have recognized that metallic scent of blood; plus, it just wasn’t like Brenda Puckett not to show up for an appointment. She prided herself on her punctuality, and always made sure she was early, so she could sit with one plump leg crossed over the other, and one plump foot swinging, when her client or colleague came wandering in on time.

  This time she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was lying on her back in front of the fireplace, in a pool of blood. Her fat, little hands were outflung and her black skirt was twisted around her ample hips, exposing chubby, dimpled thighs. Her eyes were staring straight up at the ceiling, surprised, and across her throat was a gaping wound. And that was all I saw, because the room started spinning very fast, and everything went dark while small, glowing specks danced in front of my eyes. From very far away I could hear a voice saying, “Savannah... Savannah! Oh, shit!” I felt an arm snaking around my waist, pulling me close to a hard, masculine body, and then I really did faint.

  I came back to myself as I was unceremoniously dumped on the front porch. A strong hand pushed my head down between my knees and that same voice said, rather critically, “Keep your head down. I’ll be back.”

  His steps retreated into the house. I concentrated on breathing slowly in and out, and clenching my stomach against the nausea rising in my chest.

  It felt like I was sitting there forever, while the world spun and Brenda’s dead body floated before my eyes, but I don’t think it can have been more than a couple of minutes before Rafe sat down next to me, with a dripping wad of paper towels and a searching glance. “You all right?”

  I nodded shakily, wiping my face with the cool water. “I think so, thanks. What...?”

  “Think maybe you oughta call this in?”

  “What?... Oh, the police! God, yes!” I fumbled in my bag for my cell phone. Rafe watched my hands shake, but he didn’t offer to help. After a long few seconds I managed to pull the phone out and turn it on, but I couldn’t keep my fingers steady enough to punch in the numbers. “Here. You do it.”

  I handed him the phone and listened while he dialed 911 and gave a terse account of what had happened. “They’re on their way.” He returned the phone to me. I dropped it into my purse without looking. My voice shook.

  “You know, when you called and told me she wasn’t here, I thought she’d screwed up. I thought she’d forgotten about you, and that I could take advantage of it to pull one over on her. I imagined the look on her face, and I gloated. And all the time she was lying there...!”

  I buried my face in my hands. I wouldn’t have turned my nose up at a comforting pat on the back or a few kind words, or even a polite hug, but Rafe didn’t comply. I sniffed a few times and looked over at him. His face was remote, like a bronze statue, and his eyes were fixed in the distance. “You’re remarkably cold abou
t the whole thing, I must say,” I added spitefully. “From the way you’re acting, one might think you saw dead bodies every day.”

  He glanced at me, but didn’t answer.

  “Didn’t it bother you?” I persisted. “Seeing her like that?”

  “Didn’t know her,” Rafe answered.

  “She was a human being!” Granted, I hadn’t always remembered that myself, in my dislike of her, but it didn’t seem right that he should be so unemotional about her death — her murder — as if she had been no more important than a fly. “And nobody deserves to die like that. Alone and scared...”

  Rafe turned toward me, and I recoiled. His eyes were black as pitch, and about as friendly. I had to work to keep my voice steady. “I’ll just... um... sit here quietly while we wait. OK?”

  I turned away and contemplated the as-yet empty driveway. After a few seconds, Rafe stood up and walked off in the other direction. A moment later, I heard a creak when he sat down in the porch swing.

  We were still in the same positions eight minutes later, when the ambulance came roaring up Potsdam Street with sirens screaming and lights flashing. It entered the circular drive with a spurt of gravel. Hard on its heels was a police car, also flashing lights and sirens. I got up, a little shakily, to greet the incoming horde, while Rafe continued to lounge in the swing.

  “Miz Martin?” the first of the cops said. He was around forty-five or fifty, with graying hair and a paunch. “I’m Officer Spicer. This is my partner, Officer Truman.”

  Truman was younger, no more than twenty two, and in deference to the occasion, had taken off his uniform cap. “Ma’am,” he said politely, as if I were seventy years old instead of twenty seven.

  One of the paramedics, a girl with a nose ring and a wad of pink bubblegum in her mouth, came up to stand next to him. “Where’s the diseased?”

  I opened my mouth to explain the difference between having a disease and being deceased, but Rafe intercepted me. “I’ll show you.” He led the way into the house with the girl and her colleague, a boy not much older and still pimply, right behind. Truman joined the influx while I turned back to Officer Spicer.

  “They’re just kids!”

  “It’s their job,” Officer Spicer said, interpreting my remark, and the feelings behind it, correctly. “They’ve seen more of it than you.” He waited a beat before adding, a little maliciously, “And they may not look as fresh when they come back out. Bad, is it?”

  I nodded. “Her throat is cut. There’s blood everywhere.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Officer Spicer said. “I’d better go make sure those eager beavers don’t go messing around with anything. Don’t go anywhere.” He walked into the house.

  I stayed where I was. After a few minutes Officer Truman came back out, looking pale and clammy, and took a walk in the garden. He might have been looking for evidence, but I suspect that what he was after, was a handy bush to throw up behind.

  At about the same time, Rafe came back, and sat down on the porch swing without a word. No queasy feelings there, apparently. Time passed. A few plain-clothes police officers showed up, and finally, Officer Spicer came back. “I’ve been told to bring you downtown,” he said. “We’re gonna take your fingerprints, and you’ll need to make a formal statement. Let’s go.”

  “My car...” I began.

  “It’ll be safe here till we get back. This place’ll be crawling with cops before long.” He hollered for Truman. Rafe, whose bike was worth at least as much as my five-year-old Volvo, didn’t say a word.

  The ten minute trip into downtown passed in silence. Rafe and I sat on opposite sides of the squad car without saying a word to each other, and Truman still looked a little green. Spicer was whistling tunelessly between his teeth as he drove, but he didn’t talk, either.

  Nashville police headquarters are located in a modern four-story building with a fenced, monitored parking lot in the back. Had I been visiting in the regular way, I would have found a parking space somewhere on the street and entered the building by the main entrance. Spicer drove through the chain link fence into the parking lot and parked in a marked slot.

  “I’ll walk’em in,” he said to Truman, “You stay out here and get some air.”

  He herded us through the reinforced steel door in the back and into a utilitarian corridor. Another uniformed officer was sitting behind a desk just to the inside of the door, and we stopped while Spicer told him our names and business. I wondered if Rafe felt as guilty and uncomfortable as I did. If so, I couldn’t tell by looking at him.

  After the indignity of the fingerprinting, I ended up in an interrogation room like the ones I had seen on TV. The kind with a big mirrored window on one wall and a table with a couple of uncomfortable chairs around it in the middle of the room; nothing else. And there I sat, with nothing to do but twiddle my ink-stained thumbs and picture Brenda Puckett’s dead body in my mind, for more than thirty minutes. I don’t know what the detectives were doing during that time — grilling Rafe, or just watching me sweat through the two-way mirror — but whatever it was, it had me in a complete twitter by the time the door opened and a woman came in.

  She gave me a curt nod. “Good morning. I’m Detective Grimaldi.”

  “Savannah Martin,” I said faintly. Detective Grimaldi sat down on the other side of the table.

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A soda? Some water?”

  “A Diet Coke would be good.” Maybe it would help to settle my stomach. She nodded, but didn’t leave to get it.

  “Tell me what happened earlier,” she said instead. I started going over the story again, and had only gotten to the time of Rafe’s early morning phone call when the door opened and Officer Truman came in carrying an ice-cold can of Diet Coke. I guess maybe he and/or Spicer were outside the two-way mirror, looking in. I thanked him, opened the can, and took a sip. “I got to Potsdam Street about 9:15. Rafe was waiting out front.”

  Detective Grimaldi consulted a folder she kept in front of her. “Had you been working with him before this morning?” I shook my head. “How did you come to be calling him by his first name?” The look she sent me held a hint of triumph, as if she imagined she had caught me doing something I shouldn’t be. My mother would undoubtedly agree.

  “I’ve met him before,” I said, telling myself I had no reason to feel defensive, but feeling defensive anyway. “We grew up together. Or rather, we grew up in the same town. Small place in Maury County, south of Columbia.”

  “You weren’t friends?”

  I shook my head. “He’s three years older than me and hung out with a whole different crowd.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Before today? The day he graduated from high school. Twelve years ago.” It was the one and only time I had spoken to Rafe, and although I hadn’t thought about it for twelve years, I could still remember every detail. “My girlfriend Charlotte and I had gone to the movies with my brother Dix and his best friend Todd. The movie theatre was in downtown Columbia, fifteen or twenty minutes from Sweetwater. When the movie was over and we were walking back to Todd’s car, we saw Rafe.”

  Detective Grimaldi was silent. I waited, but when she didn’t order me to cease and desist, I continued. “He was sitting on the curb. I think he was drunk, but it looked like someone had beaten him up, too. There was blood on his shirt, and he had a black eye.”

  I had felt sorry for him, and when Todd had grabbed my arm and tried to hustle me past, I had dug my heels in and insisted we stop. It’s the duty of every well-bred Southern Belle to administer to those less fortunate, and Rafe was clearly less fortunate. He was also a school-mate, although calling him a mate of any of us was surely stretching the point. Still, I felt we owed it to him to make sure he was all right. Dix and Charlotte had been too preoccupied with one another to notice anything less than an earthquake, and Todd had been reluctant, to say the least, to get mixed up in anything. So I had gathered what courage I possessed and had walked o
ver to Rafe to offer him a ride back to Sweetwater.

  “Did he accept?” Detective Grimaldi asked. She sounded intrigued in spite of herself.

  I nodded. “I doubt he would have, otherwise. He isn’t the type to accept charity. But it was very obvious that Todd didn’t want him to, so he said yes. He sat next to Todd the whole way home, bleeding on the leather seat of the new car Todd had gotten for his sixteenth birthday, and keeping Todd on the edge of his seat in case Rafe decided to throw up all over the dashboard. If it had been a television sitcom, it would have been funny.” It crossed my mind to wonder if he remembered, or if he’d been too drunk or in too much pain to even realize who I was.

  “Interesting,” Detective Grimaldi said. “But if that was the last time you saw him, I guess you can’t tell me anything about his life now? Where he lives? What he does for a living?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about him at all anymore. Why don’t you ask him? He’s around here somewhere, isn’t he?” I glanced around the gray concrete walls of the interrogation room.

  “He’s not being forthcoming.” Detective Grimaldi made another note in her folder. “Let’s go back to what happened this morning. Mr. Collier called your office and you drove to 101 Potsdam Street to meet him. Then what happened?”

  I recapped the talk with Rafe and our trip through the house, doing my best to remember the details.

  Yes, the front door had been unlocked.

  No, only members of the Association of Realtors could open the lockbox; it took a special key card and an individual code. The cards are not available to the general public, and even if a member of the public were to get their hands on one ― by bashing the agent over the head and stealing it, for instance ― said member of the public wouldn’t be able to use it without knowing the agent’s personal code. Joe Blow coming in off the street wouldn’t have a prayer.

  No, I hadn’t seen anyone else around, except for a lady at the bus stop and a few cars that had gone by down on the road.