Skeletons in the Closet (14 page)

“What’s the pay like for this job?” The caller had changed from befuddled to belligerent. Maybe it wasn’t Jason Macgregor, maybe my perception was off.

“Do you know someone who would be interested in the job?” I asked.

“That depends on what the money’s like.”

“Well it depends on the size of the house and the particular type of cleaning job,” I hedged, unsure of where this conversation was headed.

“I won’t take less than $8.50 an hour, and that’s under the table, right?”

“Um….”

“Damn social security, sucking the lifeblood out of us working stiffs, you know what I mean?”

Since I was certain the man I was speaking with was a recipient of social security, I decided to retrench. “Sir, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

A wheezy chuckle ensued. “That’s ‘cause I didn’t give it to you yet, Missy.”

“Actually, it’s Maggie.”

“Sure as hell ain’t!” was the incensed reply. “I’m Cooper C. Milton Jr., but you can call me Coop.”

The feisty old bugger had me tongue-tied. I looked at the wall clock with the mallards on the face. I had little less than eight hours until I needed to be at my next job and no partner in sight. Marty was taking the boys to the movies, Neil would be at work, and Sylvia was visiting Eric’s family in Concord for the holiday weekend.

“Looks like it’ll be you and me, Coop. Can you start today?”

Coop said that he would, and after I gave him directions to my house said goodbye.

Well he can’t be worse than Janice.

* * * *

When Marty and the boys got up we decided to take Kenny and Josh to the park, which was deserted due to the almost freezing temperatures. One good thing about having my brother around is that my sports self-esteem increased by multiples of ten. Marty is just as spastic as I am, but it’s so much worse because he thinks he’s hot stuff.

“Over here, Uncle Marty!” Kenny had managed to break away from his brother’s guard and positioned himself directly in front of the basketball hoop.

I waved my arms like Chicken Little in front of my brother, who’d already bounced the ball off his foot twice. The score was twelve-ten in favor of me and Josh, and guess who’d scored all the points?

“You’re going down, Laundry Hag.” What Marty lacked in skill he made up for in smack talk.

I can’t pass straight, dribble without traveling, or shoot to save my bank account, but I guarded as if the world was coming to an end. Neil calls it my mother bear instinct, which I decided to take as flattery.

Marty made a half-assed effort to dribble around me, and I shoulder-checked him for being a ball hog. “Pass it to Kenny,” I hissed under my breath. Kenny, who was responsible for all ten points on their side of the scoreboard, was still my baby, and I’d always feel a need to protect.

My brother was sweating like he’d spent an hour in a sauna, and the look of concentration on his face would have been comical if I wasn’t worried I’d have to perform CPR at any moment. Neil and the boys were natural athletes, and they made sports look so effortless that I sometimes forgot how difficult it could be for the mortal man. Women are different—we’re born without the competitive sports gene, and while some choose to pursue them, it isn’t expected.

“I’m open!” Kenny called out again, his voice tinged with frustration.

Marty paused, and the ball struck his size ten clodhopper for the third time. It rolled towards the boys, who scrambled at it like a priceless treasure, but Josh’s longer gait got him there first. He scooped up the ball, pivoted on the spot, and shot straight for the hoop. His aim was perfect, and he caught the far rim before the ball swished through the net.

Marty looked winded, and Kenny sullen, so I figured we’d had enough. “Good game,” I said to Marty and Kenny after completing a high five with Josh. I had to call about my van anyhow.

“You did real good, Kenny,” Josh consoled his brother on the walk home. He put his arm around Kenny’s shoulder, but his brother shrugged him off.

“What’s his deal?” Marty huffed alongside me.

I was glad my breathing didn’t sound so labored.

“You’re his hero and you let him down.” It was mostly true. While Josh and Kenny both adored their father, Kenny viewed his uncle through rose-colored lenses. It bothered me sometimes to see my little guy admire someone as aimless as my brother.

“Hey, I never claimed to being courted by the NBA,” Marty said, his tone indignant.

I pulled on his arm so the boys couldn’t overhear us. “You don’t have to be. What he needed was for his uncle to show him a little respect, to be a team player. You and I both know we suck, but it doesn’t have to matter. You respect the game and the talent, but most importantly you respect the players.”

“Well shit, you should go give advice on Dr. Phil’s show.”

“And you should go back to school, Sprout. You still have a great deal to learn.”

Marty looked ready for a retort, but I stopped as we caught sight of the house. A giant Oldsmobile had docked in the driveway, parked at such an angle that it blocked all other parking spaces and the garage.

“Mom, who’s that?” Josh had his father’s intuition, and so much strange stuff had been going on lately that any foreign car produced a heightened level of interest.

I saw the tufts of gray hair caressing a liver-spotted bald patch and had a pretty good idea who had staked out my front door.

“I think that’s my new cleaning partner.” My voice sounded faint, so I cleared my throat. “Maybe you guys should go in around back while I greet him.” I didn’t want to overwhelm the old guy and see him suffer a coronary on my front porch. “Mr. Coop?” I called out as sweetly as possible, at the same time raising my voice to be heard over the sound of his fists pounding the door.

“Dag-nabbit, Missy, don’t you sneak up on me like that!” The man put a fist over his plaid-covered chest. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you it’s dangerous to scare the elderly? I could’ve keeled over right into your flower beds!”

“I’m sorry that I startled you, sir—”

“Now I won’t be having none of that sir stuff. Stick with plain old Coop, and we’ll get along right nice like.”

I smiled and took his proffered hand. “Coop, then. I’m sorry, there must have been a miscommunication, because I won’t be ready to leave for a couple more hours.”

And I was going to spend every minute of that time figuring how to ditch Coop. Cataracts clouded his eyes, which explained the parking job, and while he wasn’t frail, he definitely looked like he’d be hard pressed to lift a mop and bucket. I guessed his age to be somewhere between seventy-five and ninety.

“I know I’m a might early, but my daughter is staying with me this weekend, and she’s driving me bananas! She’s a well-intentioned girl, but none too bright, and that sonuvabitch she’s married to annoys the hell outta me.”

I could empathize with the annoying relatives so I asked him to come in. “Would you like something to eat, Coop? We were just about to sit down to lunch.”

“What are you having?”

“Turkey soup with wild rice.” I headed into the kitchen and lifted the lid off of the crock pot.

Coop inspected the contents cagily. “You took all them bones out, right? Someone could choke to death on one of them poultry bones.”

I nodded to keep from wincing at his horrific grammar. I have a few slips and habits of my own, but Coop was a true connoisseur of American English.

“Well, all right. Would you mind if I used the john?”

I pointed him to the bathroom and set about serving the soup along with a plate of cheese and crackers.

Marty, Kenny, and Josh had changed and now sat at the table with raised eyebrows.

“He’s my new cleaning assistant.” I put the soup down and made vague circles with my hands.

“Huh.” Marty placed some cheese on a cracker and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“Does Dad know about him?” Josh managed to stir his soup and enhance my guilt at the same time. I knew Neil wouldn’t be happy about me taking Coop to my cleaning jobs, but all I really needed was a second body. The term lookout applied very thinly to Coop and his cataracts.

“No, I didn’t have the chance to tell him. Coop is a new addition.”

“Looks like more of an antique to me.” My brother slurped his soup, and I shuddered.

“Stop that; you have a few manners, use them. And Coop is a guest, so be polite.”

Coop shuffled into the dining room and sat at the head of the table. I set his soup down and moved to get my own bowl. “Don’t you have any crackers?”

I sat down “Here.” I offered him the plate of cheese and Ritz. He moved his face a few centimeters from the plate and sat up abruptly.

“I need saltines; don’t ‘cha got any saltines?”

I put the plate down and gave him a wan smile. “Let me check.” I dug through the pantry until I found a box of saltines and returned to the table. “Here you go, Coop.”

He took the box from me and squinted at it. “Are these the unsalted kind?”

I hesitated, unsure of what to say. My mother always told me to stick with the truth whenever possible. “They have salted tops.”

“Well I can’t eat them; high blood pressure, you know. Maybe I could have a piece of bread and butter.” The words sounded more like an order than a question.

As I fixed his bread and butter, he asked Kenny to pass the salt.

T
o my astonishment, Coop was an excellent cleaning partner, despite the fact that he couldn’t recognize anything five feet in front of his face. True, he couldn’t see well enough to dust or wash windows, but his methodical mopping put me to shame and he had a way of charming the clients.

“Now I just can’t believe that a pretty little gal like you has five great-grandchildren!” It was Sunday night, and Coop flirted shamelessly with the widowed Mrs. Duncan, who was one of our less well-to-do clients. Mrs. Duncan was hard of hearing, and Coop made his pronouncement in something close to a bellow. I thought they made a cute couple, especially since between the two of them they had a handle on all five senses.

“You are a rascal, Coop! How the girls must chase after you!” Mrs. Duncan hollered back.

With a stick!

I leaned over the plastic-sheathed sofa to dust the horizontal mini-blinds. Coop was growing on me kind of like a fungus, eating every meal he could at my table and sniping over the smallest of details. The White Cloud of Death was still in the auto body shop, not due back until the next morning. After some world-class haggling, Coop had agreed to let me drive his Olds to and from jobs, so long as I coughed up fifty-two cents a mile on top of his salary.

Coop waggled his caterpillar-like eyebrows at Mrs. Duncan as he pushed a Swiffer across her kitchen linoleum. I assumed he was gearing up to ask her to a bingo game so I made myself scarce.

I doubted Mrs. Duncan had anything to do with my murder investigation, but I was keeping my eyes open. The first two jobs had been for acquaintances of Francesca Carmichael and Alessandra Kline. The first woman had obviously gone to the same snooty finishing school as Mrs. Kline because she refused to address me and Coop directly. The maid, who’d acted as a translator, however, bubbled gossip like a freshly uncorked champagne bottle and filled me in on the upper-crust scuttlebutt.

The affair between Alessandra Kline and Greg the Gym Rat was common knowledge, but no one was sure of exactly how much Douglass knew. Greg the Gym Rat had been living off of his well-to-do paramours for several years, using each neglected woman’s need for affection as a gateway to his own greedy ambition. Slug slime as far as I could figure, especially since he’d pinned his sights on me not even twelve hours after her death.

The second cleaning job had been a privately owned banquet hall halfway between Boston and Hudson. The chairwoman for the Red Cross fund had worked on several projects with Alessandra, some even before the Kline’s had moved into my neighborhood.

“Sandra was meticulous,” she’d told me. “She was more comfortable taking on a job for herself than delegating responsibility. I once appointed her as the leader for one of our donation drives; it was a disaster. She kept shoving people out of the way to take over their work because according to her, they were too slow or not doing something correctly.”

“Wow,” I had said as I ironed table linens for the evening’s fund-raiser. “It sounds like Mrs. Kline didn’t get along with most people.”

“Hardly any,” the chairwoman admitted. She arranged place cards on a sterling tray. “We all respected Sandra for her hard work and dedication to a greater good, and her family dates back to the Mayflower, but she wasn’t someone who you’d think to put at the top of your invitation list, if you know what I mean.”

As I mused on all I had learned, two disturbing thoughts shook me. First, Mrs. Kline’s propensity to step on other people’s feet made for a much larger pool of suspects than I’d originally thought, despite Mr. Kline’s claims to the contrary. Then two, it was feasible that her death was the result of a mugging gone awry. While I was in cahoots with Bradley Patterson, I was only a source of information for the police, and as such, I wasn’t privy to forensic detail. But that still wouldn’t explain Greg’s death or why I kept being sucked into the thick of it all.

“Earth to Missy.” A wrinkled hand waved in front of my face, and I shook my head as I focused on Coop.

“I’m done in the kitchen and I need a break. I was going to take Darcy around the corner for a cup of joe.”

“Sounds good. I need to dust the lighting fixtures and scrub the bathroom, so take your time.”

Coop narrowed his gaze at me. “Everything better be here when we get back.”

“I’m not a thief, Coop!”

“All the same, I’d appreciate it if Darcy didn’t catch you at anything underhanded. Don’t want to cast any doubt on my affection for her.”

“Do you want me to place my hands on the Bible or is Scout’s Honor good enough?”

Coop grunted twice and departed. I waited for the front door to close and I started to search in earnest. I figured the more practice I had with sleuthing the better I’d be at it.

I looked behind paintings, between mattresses and box springs, and inside shoe boxes stacked in the closets. Other than mothballs and a collection of ancient
Playboys
hidden in with the Christmas decorations, there was nothing squirreled away. Deciding to abandon the search for my real job, I headed out to the Olds to get my cleaning supplies.

The door wouldn’t open.

“Damn it!” I shouted and tried the other door. The car was as tight as a freaking drum. Cooper had made sure I couldn’t steal his car. As the idea gripped me, I shook my head violently. Good Lord above, I was starting to think like the old stinker!

“Can I be of assistance?”

I whirled around. A heavy set man with a noticeable bald patch considered me with a smirk. Though only a few inches taller than me, he had me by about forty pounds. A flannel shirt worn jacket style and a faded pair of Levis would have made him look like a mountain man, except dress shoes peeked out from his hems.

My brain ticked off possible reasons for why I was shouting at a car but came up blank. I looked like a lunatic; there was no getting around that. “No, I, um, my partner locked up the car, and I need something out of the trunk.”

His smirk transformed into a sneer. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
   “Uh….” It was like my mind was an Etch-A-Sketch someone had shaken until it cleared.

He rolled his piggy black eyes at me, and I stepped back. No matter what I did, it was hard to forget there was a killer out there, orbiting my little reality. Mrs. Kline hadn’t seen him coming, maybe because the murder was unobtrusive and forgettable….

That’s when it struck me. “I met you at the Kline’s soirée,” I declared in triumph.

He didn’t appear mollified. “And at the Gould’s engagement party, and at Mrs. McFarlane’s garage sale, as well as Wal-Mart about half a dozen times. Do you even remember my name?”

It was like someone had run an ice cube along my spine. No, I was terrible with names, but I didn’t want to let him know that. “I’m sorry; I’ve been stressed lately, what with my new job and my family….”

“Not to mention a couple of homicides to investigate.”

The ice cube became a frostbitten fist, clamping onto my back until it seized up. Piggy Eyes watched me closely as I did one of those animated slow motion swallows. How did he know that? Was this guy stalking me? Or was it worse than that?

“Hey, Missy, you all set?” Coop shuffled across the street, and I put the car between myself and the man who had terrified me.

“No, I need my cleaning supplies for the bathroom.” I directed the comment at Coop without taking my attention from Piggy Eyes.

While Coop opened the trunk, Piggy Eyes gave an almost childlike giggle and went on his way.

Coop handed me the carry-all with my bathroom supplies. “You okay, Missy? You’re awful white.”

“I must be if you noticed.” I made the joke but the words fell flat. “Do me a favor, Coop, next time you decide to woo a client, do it after we finish the job.”

“There’s no need to get huffy, Missy.”

Piggy Eyes turned the corner, and I realized Coop was wrong. I had my pick of reasons to get huffy.

* * * *

Even after triple-checking all of the locks on the doors and windows, I still felt ill at ease. Marty, Neil, and the boys worked on some project in the garage, and they might as well have hung a No Girls Allowed sign. I wanted to stay up and talk to Neil, but the cleaning marathon had taken its toll, and I drifted off on the couch. I awoke to the sound of the birds’ pre-dawn symphony. Neil must have covered me when he came in because I was swaddled like a newborn under a blanket. I had so many things to do, but I couldn’t muster enough energy to get up.

Fear. I’d felt a few tendrils of it before, but that man I met yesterday made me want to sink to the ground and curl into a fetal position. There was a big difference between knowing a killer was wandering the streets and actually bumping into one. Neil was right, no matter how brave I pretended to be, I was an amateur in a situation where a professional was needed.

I huddled deeper in the blankets and listened to the birds twitter, figuring this wasn’t such a bad existence. The remote was an arm’s length away, and maybe I’d splurge and get a satellite dish. I could spend days watching the cooking channel, learning about the plethora of uses for parsley.

“You awake, Uncle Scrooge?” Neil’s disembodied voice called into the room.

I didn’t answer. I felt more than heard him enter the room, and I closed my eyes and focused on calming my ragged breaths. I was a coward, pure and simple.

“Quit playing possum.”

I opened my eyes. Neil sat only a few inches away.

“How’d you know?

“I’m a SEAL.”

Sometimes I get really sick of that answer.

“I’m gonna smell the freaking roses, okay?” I sat up so I gained the height advantage.

“Okay, that sounds like a plan. Where are you going to find roses in November in Massachusetts?”

“I haven’t gotten that far,” I admitted. Maybe there were some conservatories in Boston I could drive to. Thinking about it made me tired, and I fell back down onto my white cocoon.

“Talk to me, Maggie.” Neil slid his leg beneath my head and stroked my hair.

“Do you remember when we went to the Kline’s house? There was a man on the porch, about fifty, 5’6”, balding up top?”

“Kevin Bartley.” Neil and his photographic memory to the rescue.

“Do you know anything else about him?”

“He lives off of High Street with his mother. He’s had a series of business failures, first as a half-owner of an online bookstore, then as a wedding photographer, a restaurant owner, and more recently, a dog groomer. He has big dreams but little knowledge, and right now he’s working at Wal-Mart. No romantic associations to speak of, at least not in the past five years. He got arrested a while back for assaulting the UPS woman, but no charges were brought up. He claimed the lady deliberately damaged his package.” He chuckled at the double entendre.

I turned my head to look up at Neil. “How did you know all that?”

 Neil shrugged. “I’ve been researching all of the people we met at the party. I figured it was a place to start.”

“Do you think Bartley could be the killer?”

“No. He’s a bully, not a psychopath. From what I’ve found out, he’s an angry little man, disappointed with his lot in life, and he vents his spleen at those he views as more successful than himself.”

“And you don’t think that anger might cause him to do something rash?”

Neil shook his head again. “Why do you ask?”

I told him about my encounter with Bartley and the fear I’d experienced.

“Christ, I wish you’d told me about this yesterday. You need to speak up when you’re so upset.”

“You were having a good time with the boys, and you all deserve that after the last few weeks.”

“I still don’t want you to suffer in silence. You have to talk to me, Maggie.”

“So do you still think Bartley is incapable of murder?”

“Yes, but don’t let that stop you from mentioning his name to Patterson. He has resources I don’t, and if the guy scared you, he deserves someone else putting the fear of the Almighty in him too.” Neil sighed and stroked my hair again. “What’s on the agenda for the day?”

“I have one more job this afternoon at the Morgan’s. And I want to implement my plan with the PI.” As always, being with Neil helped calm me and put everything in perspective.