Amanda Matetsky - Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

“Who, me? I can’t call the police! I don’t like them and they don’t like me. And I don’t have their number!”

“Then get it from the operator!” I screeched, unlocking and opening his door myself. Then I sucked up all my courage (and a big supply of stench-free air) and scrambled back to the murder zone.

ABBY WAS NOWHERE IN SIGHT. THE club chair I’d left her sitting in was empty, and the partially concealed passage behind the couch-the area where Gray’s body was lying-was devoid of any other bodies, alive or dead.

There were lots of bloody footprints, though, stamped all over the floor around Gray’s corpse, and tracked across the thick beige carpet in the living room. A slew of ruddy smudges were concentrated around the legs of the club chair, and several rust-colored streaks stretched from the chair to the small hallway leading to the rear of the apartment.

Oh, no! What happened while I was gone?! Did the killer grab Abby and drag her into the bedroom to slit her throat?

“Abby!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, following the rusty streaks across the carpet and part of the way down the hall. “Where are you?!” I was so panicked I was practically howling.

“Keep your shirt on, Sherlock,” Abby yelled back. “I’m in the bathroom!”

I felt a giant whoosh of relief, which comforted me for a moment or two, but quickly turned into a blinding surge of anger. “What the hell are you doing in there?” I roared, wrenching open what I thought was the bathroom door. “I told you not to move or touch anything!”

Oops. Linen closet. I was screaming at a stack of beige bath towels.

The toilet flushed, then Abby exited the bathroom one door down. “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” she said, “and I wanted to wash the blood off my hands.” When she saw me standing nose-to-nose with the towels, she gave me an exaggeratedly puzzled look. “What are you doing now, Miss Marple? Interrogating the terry cloth?”

She was putting up a good front-doing her best to act as brave and brazen as usual-but I could tell from her colorless complexion, and the way her lips were quivering, that she was all torn up inside.

Sidestepping Abby’s sad attempt at humor, I gave her a deceptive but perfectly reasonable explanation for my discourse with the bath linens. “After I went next door to call the police,” I said, using my most professional tone, “I realized the killer could still be here, hiding in Gray’s apartment. I thought I’d better come back and check the place out, inspect all the rooms and closets, make sure you weren’t in any danger.”

“That was very sweet of you,” she said, with just a hint of a whimper, “but as you can see, I’m quite safe. The bastard who killed Gray is long gone. There’s no sign of him anywhere. No murder weapon, either.”

“You looked?”

“In every room.”

“What about the closets?”

“They’re clean.”

“Well, then, the doorknobs aren’t so clean,” I said, worrying about the evidence again. “They’ve got your bloody fingerprints all over them now. I thought I told you not to touch anything.”

“I didn’t!” she protested. “I opened the doors with a dish-towel over my hand. Which is more than I can say for you, Little Miss Perfect.” She shot a glance at my bare hands, then aimed her gaze at the open linen closet. “Whose prints do you think are decorating that doorknob?”

She had me there. I’d left my share of fingerprints at the crime scene. And my bloody footprints were probably all over the place, too. The homicide dicks were not going to be happy.

“Okay, so we both goofed up,” I admitted. “But we can’t do anything about that now. All we can do is make sure we don’t corrupt any more evidence. We’ve got to vacate this apartment immediately. We have to go next door and wait for the police to come.”

“Oh?… well… if you think so…” Abby reluctantly agreed. Some color had returned to her cheeks, but her lips were still trembling. “It breaks my heart to leave Gray here all alone,” she said, dark thoughts gathering like storm clouds in her grief-stricken eyes, “… but I guess he won’t mind.”

TWO HOURS LATER, ABBY AND I WERE still sitting on the purple couch in apartment 2A-the poshly decorated domain of Gray’s pudgy blond neighbor, Willard Sinclair-answering Detective Sergeant Nick Flannagan’s relentless and repetitious questions.

“So, let me get this straight,” Flannagan said for the umpteenth time, “you both got covered with the victim’s blood because you were kneeling in it?” His thin, youthful, clean-shaven face was wrinkled in disgust and disbelief (as it had been every time he’d made the same inquiry). “And then you hopped up and tracked it all over the place without realizing it?”

“Yes, that’s right, Detective Flannagan,” I wearily repeated, “except for the hopping part. I’m sure we didn’t hop anywhere.” I was so ashamed of my heedless behavior at the crime scene that I couldn’t raise my voice above a murmur. “We were both in shock, you see, and in a kind of stupor. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

“Yeah, that’s what you stated before,” he said, glowering at me as if I were his prime suspect. “You also claimed you didn’t notice whether or not there were any bloody footprints on the carpet before you discovered the body. But, you know what, Mrs. Turner? Much as I want to believe you, I just can’t bring myself to accept that explanation. It seems farfetched to me. It seems very unlikely that-”

“Things aren’t always as they seem,” Abby interrupted, brown eyes flashing with fury. Detective Flannagan was getting under her skin. Way under her skin. “Paige has given you the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” she seethed, quoting the corny, overused line from the

Dragnet television series-and casting aspersions on Flannagan’s masculinity in the same breath. And with a totally straight face.

Luckily, Flannagan didn’t catch on.

Under different circumstances, I’d have laughed my head off. (Abby really slays me sometimes.) In my current state, however-slick with sweat, sticky with blood, sweltering on the hot seat in a weird-looking stranger’s insufferably warm apartment, trying to defend my thoughtless actions at the scene of a brutal murder-well, I couldn’t muster up a snicker, much less a laugh.

I was about to apologize, once again, for the way Abby and I had messed up the evidence at Gray’s apartment-thereby causing a whole lot of confusion and extra work for the medical examiner and crime scene investigators-when one of the uniformed cops who’d been stationed out in the hall marched into Willard Sinclair’s living room and told Detective Flannagan that he was needed next door.

“All right!” Flannagan said, grinning like a kid at an amusement park, obviously raring to return to the recreation at the murder scene. He took off his suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt. “That’ll be all for today, ladies. You’re free to go. We know where you live and we have your phone numbers. But you’re under strict instructions not to leave town, understand? And I want to see you both in my office tomorrow morning at ten.”

“What?!” I sputtered, sounding like Donald Duck on the brink of a breakdown. “Tomorrow is Sunday-the day of rest. Don’t you want to spend it with your family? This is the Fourth of July weekend, for Pete’s sake! We’re all entitled to a little time off.”

Flannagan looked at me and grinned again. “When you’re on the homicide squad, and there’s been a murder, there’s no such thing as time off.” He was having the time of his life. I swear he was. You could tell from the way his small hazel eyes were sparkling. “That goes for the people who discovered the body, too.”