Primed for Murder (3 page)

He moved to the fireplace, examined framed photos on mantel and floor. These people weren’t related to the victim. Family portrait: a thin, tweedy-looking guy, late thirties, dressed in a poor-fitting suit and wearing thick glasses, stood beside an attractive, chubby mid-thirties woman in a print dress. In front of them, a blond boy with a burr cut showed all his teeth. Next to him and a half-head taller was a pretty, dark-haired preteen girl. Her mouth was slightly open revealing the glint of braces, and she had a hairdo that made her head look deformed.

Were these the Puterbaughs? Where did the dead man fit into the picture?

Other snapshots showed the same people at different stages of their lives. Here, the guy with the glasses had more hair and was wearing a graduation gown. There, the wife was younger, slimmer and prettier. In this one, the boy was costumed like a pirate for Halloween. In that one, the pigtailed girl had lost baby teeth. The dead man wasn’t in any of the photos.

Toby peeled back a sleeve to glance at his cheap, paint-spotted watch, feeling sure he’d been in the house for hours. Only five minutes since he’d crawled in the window. It was just a matter of time before a neighbor got back from an area mall or returned home instead of going back to work after a dental appointment. Chances were, somebody seeing the ladder would either come snooping or call the police. Neither option would do him any good. But Toby had his own curiosity to satisfy. “Five more minutes, max.”

He walked to the oak desk, paper crinkling beneath his boots. Next to the desk stood a brass wastebasket, empty, and a smashed terra-cotta figure. A beat-up brown vinyl-covered metal case on the floor contained an old portable manual typewriter.

Nothing much on the desktop: brass lamp next to an ink-stained blotter, pen and pencil set upright in a marble base, brass ashtray. Scratch pad. An old-fashioned beige push-button telephone sat on a directory beside an address book. Toby flipped through addresses. Most of several dozen names and numbers written in a crabbed hand were local. Many listings were for the same number with various extensions.

Nothing lay under the blotter. But between the absorbent green sheet and its brown leather-like holder was a folded piece of paper with a name and address printed boldly: McFarland, 412 South Street, Morrisville. Underneath was written and underlined “Codex?” He copied the information on scratch paper, wondering what a brand of sanitary napkins had to do with anything, and returned the scrap to its hiding place. He tucked the note away in one of his many coverall pockets.

Toby considered checking out the rest of the house, curious if the killer had searched throughout. What was he looking for? Had he found it? Were other bodies lying around to be stumbled over?

But the feeling kept building in him: get out, now. He became aware of the tick of his watch. With every second that passed, he grew more nervous about being discovered where he didn’t belong. He practically vibrated with tension a full minute before the end of his self-imposed time limit. “The hell with this.” Toby strode to the window, pulled back the blinds and lifted a leg to straddle the sill. Something made him take a last look at the still figure on the floor. His eyes went wide.

In a shaft of sunlight, wet marks glinted dully, dotting papers scattered around the body. Toby squatted, tested a spot with a finger and sniffed it. Paint. On another page, a fragment of shoeprint was stamped in red: His or the killer’s? From a lowered angle he could see lacy streamers of blood on walls and ceiling, cast off on the backswing. Toby felt his coveralls: dozens of tiny, wet droplets of paint clung to the fabric, waiting to be transferred elsewhere. He checked his boot soles. Tacky white liquid, dotted with red, hugged the lugs. He must have trod in the small spill on Mrs. Cratty’s front lawn where he’d poured paint from a larger bucket to a smaller, and picked up the second color in this room. He’d left paint-stained, bloody imprints everywhere he’d walked.

“Talk about a dead giveaway! It’s like signing my name.” He’d seen the shows on TV. He knew the miracles cops could perform in a lab.

Toby hastily gathered loose sheets, using papers as stepping-stones and moved backwards in a ragged circle that began and would end at the window. He had to get them all, every page. He didn’t know which ones he’d touched or stepped on. He grimaced as he rolled the reluctant weight of the dead man first one way then the other to get at sheets trapped beneath the body. Several pages were heavily stained with blood. He gingerly tucked them in the middle of the sheaf. He aligned the papers into a sloppy, three-inch-thick bundle and wadded the whole mess down the front of his coveralls, turning his flat stomach into a square-cornered potbelly.

Toby threw himself out the window and onto the ladder. He bent to retrieve the last papers he’d stood on, and rammed them into a pocket.

A few steps down and he stood on the ground. He glanced around: still nobody in sight. What luck! Toby folded the ladder shut and charged across to Mrs. Cratty’s. He hung the stepladder back in its rack and opened the truck cab long enough to stash the bundle of papers under the seat. He withdrew crumpled pages from his pockets, smoothed them out and added them to the stack. He quickly stowed the rest of his gear, collapsing the extension ladder and securing it, piling empty five-gallon paint drums into the truck bed, slinging in brushes, drop cloths. He efficiently tied down a spattered tarp over everything. He’d finish the job the next day, or the next after that, well before Mrs. Cratty got back.

Toby locked the cab and set out on foot. There was no rush, and besides, why waste precious, expensive gas driving his fifteen-year-old guzzler? The walk would help clear his head, too.

He’d aim for a public phone. Sure, it was an inconvenience, but with his irregular income he couldn’t afford the luxury of mobile service, or replacement costs for the fancy, all-the-bells-and-whistles cell phone he’d accidentally dropped from a thirty-foot height onto concrete. There had to be a booth somewhere on Salina, a main north-south drag through downtown Syracuse.

Time to call the cops.

Chapter 3

Fourteen blocks later, as he approached an old-style glassed-in phone booth on the edge of a parking lot on the corner of Charbold and Salina, Toby slowed to practice his speech. “I’ll just call 911, tell them what I saw, give ’em the address and hang up. Won’t mention my name.” He nodded, satisfied. That would do the trick. He fumbled for a coin, flung himself into the coffin-sized glass cubicle and sealed it. It felt like an oven in there. Toby’s hand darted towards the coin slot but paused mid-air: the cord had been cut and the handset was missing. He came out of the booth with beads of perspiration standing like blisters on his face. “I should’ve called from the blue house,” he grumped aloud.

“Be glad you didn’t,” a voice in his head contradicted. “Fingerprints, remember? What if you were caught in there? What if they traced the call? Who needs more grief?”

“Should’ve taken the truck.” Toby looked south down Salina. “Too late now.” He’d come this far—no way was he trudging back in the rising afternoon heat to start over.

There was a neon sign perpendicular to the sidewalk a few blocks away in the direction of town. He plodded towards it, drenched in sweat.

Antonio’s was a dingy, narrow bar with a lit-up Schaefer’s Beer sign in the window: “The one to have when you’re having more than one.” Good idea. Toby went in, figuring they’d have a phone. He invested in a sixteen-ounce draft to fortify himself for his conversation with the police. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and the beer practically evaporated. As he ordered a second glass, Toby learned from the proprietor—a rail-thin man with cheeks pitted by purplish acne scars and a jet-black pompadour like patent leather—that there was no public phone in the place.

“No,” the man responded to Toby’s question about a big, black dial phone visible behind the bar, “you can’t use that.” He draped skeletal fingers protectively on the receiver. “I’m expecting an important call.”

Cursing under his breath, Toby swallowed the last inch of foam in his glass and left. Six blocks closer to town, past cheap, boxy, two-story houses flung up in the ’40s, he entered Julio’s Pub. Over a bottle of Miller’s he inquired about a phone. “Had it yanked.” The fat young bartender sucked at a ragged moustache whose ends didn’t match in length. He combed thin strands of hair across a muskmelon-shaped head and waved pudgy fingers at surly-looking men hunched over drinks at a scarred twenty-foot bar. “Too many broads calling to check on their guys. Don’t you have a cell?”

Inhaling beer an inch at a time, Toby pondered what to do next. He could call from his apartment. But that was stupid because the cops probably had caller ID and would be onto him in a flash. Besides, he lived way on the other side of town. He’d still have to walk back more than twenty long blocks—must be a mile, at least—and fetch the truck anyway. It was hot outside. The bar was cool. Beer really hit the spot.

He could forget about calling altogether. But over the past two weeks too many people had seen him in the neighborhood of the crime. He might even get blamed for the murder if he didn’t come forward first.

Toby pictured again the bloody face, the still body. Shudders tiptoed up and down his spine, made a neck muscle spasm involuntarily. His nerves were a mess.

There was only one answer if he wanted to be able to sleep nights. He’d just have to look for another phone from which to make his anonymous call, though today the odds seemed stacked against finding one. He sighed and went outside, pointing himself toward downtown Syracuse. After air conditioning the outdoors was a furnace.

Toby found a working pay phone eight blocks farther south at Fortunato’s Pizzeria. He bought a goblet of beer to get change for the call and took it with him to a working World War II-era wooden phone booth in one corner. When he closed the folding doors, a light came on. A fan in the ceiling started to hum. Should he call 9-1-1? It wasn’t really an emergency, was it? That guy in the blue house was dead, so it didn’t matter how fast the police got there.

The reasoning seemed sound to him. Toby took a healthy slug and set his beer down on a shelf under the phone. He flipped through the directory hanging by a chain, inserted a coin and dialed the number listed under CITY GOVERNMENT for “Police—Non-Emergency Request for Officer.” A bored female answered. “Sar-a-cuse Po-lice Depar’men’.” By the intonation of her voice, he guessed she was black.

“I’d like to report a crime,” Toby said.

“Your name, sir?”

“Toby Rew.” It just slipped out. Damn his alcohol-numbed brain, anyway! Forget remaining anonymous. They were probably recording every word too—they could compare voiceprints, so he couldn’t later claim somebody had called in his name.

“Where are you at, Mr. Rew?”

“A pizza joint on North Salina. Fortunato’s.”

Over the phone he heard the soft, dull tick of computer keys as she typed the information. “Okay. What’s the problem, Mr. Rew?”

He chose words carefully. “I think I saw a murder.”

“You think?” She sounded angry. “Did you or didn’t you?”

“Okay. I saw a murder.”

“Did this happen at Fortunato’s?”

“No, the house across the street where I was working. See, I was—”

“What’s the address, Mr. Rew?”

“The number of the house where I was working? It’s—”

“No, the number of the house where the crime occurred.”

“Fourteen-thirteen.” He was proud for remembering.

“What street?”

“Charbold.”

“Fourteen-thirteen Charbold Street. Is that correct?” He confirmed it with a grunt and the woman said, “What are you doing so far from the crime scene?”

“What do you mean?”

“According to my map, Fortunato’s is three miles from Charbold.”

Three miles? “I had a problem finding a phone so I could call.”

“Why didn’t you use your cell phone?”

“Don’t have one any more.”

She clucked her tongue as though he’d said he wasn’t wearing pants. “Tell me—” From her tone, she already didn’t believe him—“When did this crime occur?”

“Don’t know, exactly. After lunch, say one, one-thirty.”

“What took you so long to report this?”

Toby glanced at his watch and was astonished to learn it was after four o’clock. “I had to put my gear away. Then, like I said, I looked for a phone. I had to go to three different places.” He didn’t like the whiny tone that crept into his voice.

Her skepticism came through over the wire. “No offense, Mr. Rew, but it sounds to me like you’ve been drinking.”

How could she tell? To Toby, his voice sounded fine: no stuttering, slurring or mispronunciations. “I had a couple beers. You blame me? It’s hot. I was pretty shook.”

Sarcasm laced her words. “Well, what do you think you saw?”

Toby described what he’d witnessed without mentioning he’d gone into the blue house. The woman helped him along with skeptical-sounding insertions of “uh-huh” and “is that right?” She asked a few more questions, then told him to sit tight and wait for the police to arrive, probably within the hour.

Toby meanwhile finished three goblets of beer and then visited the restroom. Feeling bloated and slightly tipsy he went out to hold up a street lamp in front of Fortunato’s. The five o’clock rush hour was in full swing. Sedans containing solitary businessmen in shirtsleeves vied with vans full of screaming kids and produce trucks for possession of Salina Street. Toby waved when a passing car honked, then felt foolish when he realized the driver was merely issuing a parting shot after another vehicle suddenly turned without signaling, nearly causing a fender-bender.

At twenty after, an unmarked blue car pulled up at the curb beside Toby. The driver remained behind the wheel while a thin man in a rumpled lightweight blue sports jacket and navy slacks got out. “Mr. Rew?” the man asked in a nasally voice, pronouncing it to rhyme with “view,” instead of the usual “zoo.” He approached within a few feet. His hair was gray with a yellowish tinge. Stubble showed on his chin. He bore a harelip’s scar and his teeth were crooked and stained.