Black Cat Weekly #66

Chapter 5

by“What is it with you?”

Breitwieser’s tone matched his cop glare. The combination would have intimidated most people, but Diana had tangled with him before.

“Is that a philosophical question?” she asked. “Or do you have something specific in mind?”

She could never resist messing with him when he had no choice but to put up with her.

“Why can’t I ever get a crime scene without you in the middle of it? Maybe you’re the problem.”

“I’m still your favorite hooker, though.”

“My favorite hooker is the last one I put in jail.”

“Give it a rest. I’ll still do your job for you, even if you don’t push me around first.”

Most cops would have made her pay for that c***k, but he ignored her. She would never admit it, but his thick skin was one of the things she liked about him.

His comb-over and 46-regular polyester suits, not so much. Today he looked worse than usual. Five minutes after climbing out of his Lumina he was mopping his forehead.

“Who gets horny on a day like this?”

“The same guys who get horny every other day,” said Diana. “Or else I’d be in the pool, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

The words came out sounding heartless, but right now she couldn’t afford more delicate sentiments. Since making the 911 call, she had been trying to avoid looking at the body on the ground under the open-sided tent. The compulsion to peek had overcome her squeamishness several times, and it was about to win again.

She looked. Her client’s face was a pulpy mess, and blood had soaked into the patch of grass under him. His gray T-shirt had ridden up, exposing white skin that made a striking contrast with his deeply tanned face and arms.

The dead man was the worst part of the c*****e, but tomatoes, nectarines, and plums also littered the ground and the wooden tables. Much of the produce was smashed to a nasty puree. The drawer of the cash register gaped, but it was full of currency.

Breitwieser saw her looking.

“You didn’t help yourself.”

“You’ve told me often enough. Stay put and don’t touch anything.”

That put her down a point. He had ignored her provocation, but here she was rising to his.

“The killer didn’t take it either,” she said. “This doesn’t look like a robbery.”

Point for her. Her detective act always annoyed him.

Since the dead man wasn’t going anywhere, she searched for something to distract her. A half dozen clear plastic bags on the ground looked like a clue to something. A rampaging animal seemed to have trampled the bags into the worn grass, but they looked as if no one had shaken them open.

She was finding it difficult to examine the evidence and hold her breath at the same time. The stench of blood and bowels were bad enough, but the odors of ripe fruit made her stomach lurch as if it had someplace urgent to go. A breeze might have moved the miasma along, but the stagnant air seemed determined to suffocate her.

The problem wasn’t just the olfactory overload. Two uniformed officers were starting to enclose the area in yellow tape. They weren’t really going to trap her in here with Breitwieser, but she still had to suppress a small flare of panic.

A white Morristown Police van came rolling down the gravel road that led off the state highway to two of the last farms in northern New Jersey. Diana seized the distraction.

“Do we have to do this here?”

Breitwieser waved her out of the tent. Unfortunately, that put them both in direct sunlight on the hottest day of the hottest summer in years.

He turned bright red as he followed her, but he would fall over dead before he admitted discomfort. She kept walking toward the aging whitewashed farmhouse about twenty yards from the tent. A patch of shade awaited her there. The house was air-conditioned, but Breitwieser wouldn’t want to lose sight of his crime scene.

As soon as the late afternoon sun disappeared behind the building, the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. Diana stopped and turned to watch what was going on under the canvas. Two crime scene technicians had appeared and were starting to process the scene. She wondered how they tolerated their Tyvek suits, which were basically man-sized plastic bags.

“No weapon that I could see,” Breitwieser said.

“Could be any number of things. This is a farm.”

It offered a huge selection of tools for pounding, cutting, or slashing.

“I shouldn’t be surprised you’re here. I think you know everybody on the planet.”

“It’s the job. It can take me anywhere.”

“So he was a regular?”

“Couple of years now. Since his wife left.”

“How was his pillow talk?”

“That’s probably one reason why the wife split. He basically had one topic of conversation—this feud he had going on with his neighbor.”

“What was the beef?”

“More like, what wasn’t? Supposedly the other guy was snaking his pick-your-own customers, stealing his spots at the farmers markets, hiring good people away from him.”

“Sounds like business to me.”

“That’s what I tried to tell him. But he never heard anything he didn’t want to hear.”

“You ever meet the neighbor?”

“Not exactly. I did get here one time while they were having a screaming match.”

“What was the other guy like?”

“Gave as good as he got for a while. Finally he just threw up his hands and left.”

“Makes you wonder why it went down the way it did. You’d think the neighbor would be the one who ended up dead.”

Diana heard an engine and the grinding of tires on gravel. She turned and saw a mud-encrusted Chevy Suburban pulling up to the fork in the road that serviced the two adjacent farms. The uniformed officer guarding the scene held up his hand, and the vehicle stopped. The officer approached, and the man behind the wheel produced a driver’s license. The officer waved the Suburban into the perimeter.

“Is that him?”

“The neighbor? Yeah.”

The vehicle parked, and the driver got out and approached. Diana liked what she saw—a weather-beaten, sun-streaked man in tan shorts, boots, and a pale blue T-shirt. She could tell he had acquired his powerful forearms the hard way, not in a gym. Somehow she never got to work for men like this.

“Detective Breitwieser? Bill Robie. I just got your voicemail. What’s up?”

The man’s eyes went to the scene under the tent. His mouth went slack for a moment, but he recovered, and his expression turned wary.

Breitwieser glanced at Diana.

“You can go.”

The words rankled. Like most of the men she knew, Breitwieser used her and dismissed her. Clients bought the right, but he wasn’t paying for her time. Worse, she wasn’t sure she had helped enough to earn points with him. That could cost her next time she came this way.

She turned toward her car without a word to him. Pretending he no longer existed felt good. So what if it was a little childish? But as she sat in her Taurus and let the air conditioning blow on her, she realized he was giving her a break. He should have kept her and questioned her about her movements today, because the person who found the body was always a suspect. So, in a backhanded way, he was extending her a professional courtesy.

She dropped the car into gear and pulled away. She barely registered the thump as the car left the dirt road and climbed onto the pavement of the two-lane county highway.

To her left a horn blared, and tires screeched on the blacktop. The noise shocked Diana’s attention back where it should have been—on her driving. She looked. A Ford F-150 had come to a stop inches from her front left fender.

She felt like an i***t.

Diana sent her window down. The pickup’s windows were already open.

“I’m sorry. My mistake.”

“You’re goddam right it’s your fault.”

She pulled her head back into the car. If he was going to take it that way, she had done what she could.

The driver’s door of the Ford opened, and the driver jumped out onto the road. He started toward her. She didn’t plan to be there when he arrived. She floored the gas pedal and wrenched the wheel to the right. The car settled into the single southbound lane. Home lay to the north, but she had to get away from this maniac first.

The man wasn’t going to make it easy. Her mirror showed him climbing back into his truck.

The powerful pickup caught up with her Taurus. The truck tapped her car, and she winced at the damage that even a slight impact could cause. The other vehicle’s bumper sat so much higher than hers.

The truck fell back until she could see the rage contorting the driver’s face. He started to move up on her again. The front grill filled her mirror.

Diana braked, and the man in the pickup instinctively did the same. She turned hard to the right, and her car left the road. The flat terrain and relatively short grass must have given her an idea.

So what was it?

She kept turning in a hard circle and bounced back onto the blacktop. Fortunately she had the road to herself, because she was accelerating in the oncoming lane. She moved right as fast as she could.

The driver of the pickup was slower to react, and he turned in a larger circle than hers. His lapse let her gain some ground on him. He started to close the gap again, but too late. The dirt road to the two farms appeared on her left. Diana forced the car into the turn and drove as fast as she dared, leaning on her horn as she went.

The uniformed cop was still at his post. He held up his hand to stop her.

The pickup truck appeared behind her. The vehicle stopped short, and Diana could sense the frustration of the man behind the wheel. He had his quarry in sight, but he could do nothing.

After a long moment the truck made a gravel-spitting U-turn and disappeared.

Diana sat for a moment and concentrated on beathing in and out. By the time the uniformed officer reached her, she could trust herself to speak.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“A little road rage.”

She climbed out into the first hints of dusk. She walked behind the car, but slowly, as if time might heal the damage to the rear. It didn’t. The dent didn’t look like much, but it would be expensive to fix. As she stood looking and calculating, she became aware of someone beside her.

“Couldn’t stay away,” said Breitwieser.

For such a lumpish man, he had a surprising knack for appearing out of nowhere.

“It wasn’t my idea to come back.”

She told him what had happened.

“Can’t do much if I didn’t see it.”

“I know. I did a dumb thing, and I guess I’m lucky.”

She waited for him to send her away again, but he looked toward the other farm.

“The neighbor’s alibi is the kind we hate.”

“Why?”

“Lots of leg work. He and his wife were supposedly here all day, until he closed up shop and went out for an errand. He has receipts for that little expedition. He gave us a whole list of customers to tell us he was at work when they came by.”

She knew the signs. He was getting ready to use her services again.

“Let’s take a walk.”

“It’s a hundred degrees.”

“To my car.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Darkness was starting to close in, but the heat still bore down on her. People saw her natural suntan and hair of the same color and assumed she craved heat, but in this weather every step cost her. She always dressed a little country to blend into this neighborhood, and her sneakers and shorts made the exertion more bearable than a skirt and heels would have done.

Breitwieser helped her into the passenger seat, but then he shut her into the oven that his Lumina had become. She made a point of opening the door again, until he had the air conditioning going. She didn’t bother asking their destination. It could only be the other farm.

The open-sided tent was identical to her client’s, but everything under it looked more ship-shape in the light of hanging mechanic’s lamps. Ready-picked produce sat piled up in baskets for customers who didn’t care to brave the heat.

Bill Robie glanced up without enthusiasm. He spoke to a woman who was probably his wife. The hot summer had given her the same coloring as her husband, and the look worked for her. The name patch on her T-shirt read, “Kate.”

The woman nodded and kept packing things. Robie hesitated, but when Breitwieser made no move to summon him, he went back to work.

“Look,” said Diana.

She pointed at a neatly lettered sign that hung over the cash register.

STATE LAW: IF YOU PICK IT, YOU BOUGHT IT.

“I didn’t know that,” she said.

“A lot of people see all that good stuff, and they go crazy,” said Breitwieser. “Then they see the bill, and they want to put it back on the tree. Which they can’t.”

“My guy didn’t have a sign like that.”

“Doesn’t strike me as smart business.”

“It’s just like him, though. If something is obvious to him, it should be obvious to you, and you’re an i***t if you don’t know it.”

“You sure you weren’t married to him?”

“My God.”

She paused to give the idea some horrified consideration.

“I’ve told you—s*x is ten percent of what I do. The other ninety is listening. I probably did more of it than his wife. He was like that about everything, and that’s why he was fighting with everybody he knew.”

Diana thought back to the crime scene.

“Remember those plastic bags on the ground? Torn off but not opened, like somebody was about to use them but never got to?”

“Yeah?”

“So what if my client met somebody just like him? Somebody who didn’t know that rule and didn’t think he should be held responsible? It started with a screaming match and got worse.”

“Hell of a thing to kill somebody over.”

“You’ve seen it before. Hell, I’ve seen it before. That jerk in the pickup was ready to kill me over something he’s probably done himself. Road rage, tomato rage. Same thing.”

Breitwieser didn’t look enthusiastic.

“Let’s talk to the witnesses,” he said.

He approached Robie, whose expression made it clear he could think of things he would rather do.

“I don’t know anything else, Detective. And if I’m a suspect, I’d have to be pretty stupid to talk to you.”

“Your alibi looks good.”

Like any detective, Breitwieser knew how to lie to a suspect.

The man’s wife was still bustling around the space under the tent, but as her work brought her closer to her husband, her pace slowed. She did a good job of listening while looking intent on her work.

“You said most of the customers were regulars.”

“That’s right.”

“Who wasn’t? Anything stand out about them?”

“You asked me that.”

“I’m asking again. Maybe you remember something.”

“I don’t.”

“Mrs. Robie?”

The woman glanced at her husband and shook her head.

Breitwieser probed some more, but he got nothing.

“Okay. You have my card if you think of anything.”

Robie didn’t bother to reply. Breitwieser started toward his Lumina. Diana followed. He drove back and parked next to her car.

“He’s giving me an itch,” he said. “You saw that look his wife gave him. I’m definitely running his alibi down. Thanks for your help.”

The words came out so easily that they left her gaping in astonishment.

“Uh, sure.”

He waited for her car to start and then drove off. She followed him out to the county highway. Breitwieser went south toward Morristown, and this time nothing prevented her from turning north. She checked again for traffic, to make up for her earlier lapse, and then settled down to cruising speed.

At first she thought nothing of the headlights that appeared behind her, but they came up on her too quickly. She looked at the speedometer and saw that she was exceeding the limit by ten miles. She normally didn’t press her luck, but the long, hot day had made her eager to get home. The other driver was doing some serious speeding. And the headlights sat higher than her own.

Like a pickup truck.

Diana gave the car more gas. She pulled away for a moment, but her pursuer caught up.

How should she handle it this time? The same maneuver wouldn’t work twice.

She had left it too late, anyway. The other vehicle was surging up on her left. In a second the center line would go from broken to solid double, and the pursuer might solve her problem by killing himself and some innocent motorist in a no-passing zone.

Diana glanced to her left, and everything changed. The vehicle was a large SUV. Even in the poor light she could see the mud on the side, and the driver’s female silhouette. Diana braked hard and pulled over to the shoulder. The other vehicle passed and then did the same. As Diana sat and calmed herself, the SUV reversed toward her. The driver’s door opened. Diana climbed out to meet the other woman.

“What the hell was that about?” Kate Robie asked.

“What would you have done? Somebody chasing you in the dark?”

Harshly illuminated in Diana’s headlights, the other woman grimaced.

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, I guess it must be important.”

“It is.”

But now the woman seemed reluctant.

“Something you need to tell me,” said Diana. “Without your husband around.”

“He should have mentioned it. He hated that jerk so much that he wouldn’t want anybody to go down for killing him. I get that, but the guy didn’t deserve to be murdered.”

“So what didn’t your husband tell us?”

“Who are you really? If you’re a cop, I’m Jennifer Lopez.”

“I’m…a consultant, I guess you could say.”

“Just so this gets to the cops.”

“It will.”

“Today, around six. We’re getting ready to close, and this man comes driving up to our place, way too fast. He steps on his brakes and sends dirt flying all over the place.”

More hesitation. Diana tried to look patient.

“So he gets out and comes into the tent. And he was a wreck. I mean, this kind of heat disagrees with everybody, but he looked like he’d been in a fight with a big bowl of fruit salad.”

That sounded familiar.

“He looks around, and then he gets this expression on his face, like something in the tent was the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life. Then he runs back to his car and drives away, just as fast as he came.”

“What was he looking at?” Diana asked, although she thought she knew.

“I could have sworn it was our sign.”

“You pick it, you bought it?”

“That’s the one.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like a middle-aged man. Like anybody you’d see on the street.”

“That’s not much help.”

“And he was driving a brand new gold Wrangler.”

“License plate?”

Diana made a face, as she caught herself sounding like a cop, and not a smart one. Nobody caught license plates.

“Jersey. That’s all I remember. But we see it all the time. City people move out to Morris County and see a few farms still operating, and they think they need four wheel drive. Like it’s Wyoming or something.”

Diana had clients who fit that description.

“And when I say new, I mean right out of the showroom.”

That should be enough for Breitwieser to work with.

Another pair of headlights joined Diana’s. Combined, they made Kate Robie look ninety years old in the harsh glare. Diana turned and squinted, as another vehicle slowed and parked in front of Kate’s Suburban. On a day like this, what else could it be but a Ford F-150?

The driver jumped down onto the highway, and damn, he was a big man in his wife-beater undershirt. He had the kind of bushy mustache that she hated on clients.

As if that made any difference.

She got ready to fight. She couldn’t ask Kate to join her, but if the woman felt like contributing, Diana wouldn’t say no.

“I didn’t expect to get a chance like this,” he said.

The words were pretty much what she had expected, but his tone threw her off.

“I owe you an apology for the way I acted today. I could have killed you.”

Diana let her breath out and felt her knees turn weak, now that she could afford the letdown.

The man waited for a moment and then shrugged.

“I’m sorry.”

He turned to go back to his vehicle. Diana found her voice.

“I understand. Anyone can have a day like that.”

Anyone could, including the man whose picture made the front page of the Newark Star-Ledger three days later. Kate had been right. He looked about as average as a man could be, except for his expression. Even the low-resolution newspaper photo showed his desire to go back to that day and do it over.

Star-LedgerBut he had no one left to apologize to.

Diana thought back to the call she had made to Breitwieser, and his reaction.

“I’ll look into it.”

“Try to contain your enthusiasm.”

“I said I’d look into it, and I will.”

He must have followed through, but he hadn’t bothered to inform her that he was making an arrest. Apparently their partnership was history. No surprise there, but experience told her she had earned a few months of Breitwieser looking the other way when she came into his territory.

And that worked for her.

Albert Tucher is the creator of s*x worker Diana Andrews, who has appeared in more than one hundred short stories and the novella The Same Mistake Twice. His most recent novel is Blood Like Rain, set on the Big Island of Hawaii. He lives in New Jersey, USA, and he loves NJ Turnpike jokes.

The Same Mistake Twice. Blood Like Rain,