Max Collins: The Baby Blue Rip-Off

“Look at this place,” he said, looking at it. “Oh my God, look at it.” He peered into the living room and covered his face with a pudgy hand. “Jesus Christ, will you look at it! So much gone, so much ruined!”

He padded into the kitchen and the house seemed to tremble.

I heard him say, “She’s dead?”

There was a mumbling that must’ve been Brennan or somebody saying, “That’s right,” or something. It wasn’t a question that took much of an answer. It didn’t take a doctor to pronounce that body dead.

“What can be done?” he said. He spoke loud. His voice was baritone, but not very masculine.

There was another mumbling: somebody saying, “Nothing can be done,” or the equivalent. Maybe somebody said, “Bury her,” which is about all you can do for a dead person, after all.

It was silent for a while.

Brennan waved the ambulance boys in, and some of the people in there (which ones I don’t know, because I was still in the living room and couldn’t see into the kitchen) got Mrs. Jonsen’s remains untied from the chair and moved onto the stretcher. It was a slow process. Five minutes went by before the attendants passed through the dining room with the covered stretcher. The fat man in the brown suit followed along behind them like a pallbearer. Brennan closed the door after the fat man and the ambulance attendants.

No siren.

“Who was that?” I said, knowing.

“The son.”

“Edward Jonsen?”

“Edward Jonsen.”

“Isn’t there a married sister?”

“Lives out of town. Not contacted yet.”

“Oh. He sure seemed upset. About the house, that is.”

“People react funny in these situations. What do you know about it anyway, Mallory?” Brennan said that, and then his face flushed, as he remembered I had lost both my parents in recent years. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Why was this place torn up, Brennan?”

“I don’t know. Add insult to injury, I guess. Looking for something, maybe. Buried treasure. The Jonsens had a reputation for being hoarders, stingy, that sort of thing. Who knows? Now I want you out of here, Mallory.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“You thinking about getting involved in this, Mallory?”

That phrase again. Getting involved. Damn.

“What if I am?” As if I wasn’t.

“Just don’t. You used to be a cop once, I hear. Now you’re a big mystery writer, with a book coming out one of these days. Maybe you want some publicity. Forget about it.”

“Can I ask you one thing?”

“No.”

“Can you find the people that did this?”

“I don’t think that’s your concern.”

“Oh, it’s my concern. For one thing, I knew the woman they killed. She was a friend of mine. For another thing, those sons of bitches kicked me more than any man should ever have to get kicked. And one last thing, Brennan-I’m a taxpayer and you work for me ; I pay your goddamn salary, so don’t tell me it’s not my concern.”

I guess I expected my little speech to get a rise out of Brennan, but he disappointed me.

Because my outburst had cooled him down, if anything, and he touched my shoulder in a fatherly way that would’ve angered me if it hadn’t been sincere. “Let’s not bitch at each other,” he said. “Tonight you think you’re the detective in your book. Tomorrow morning you’re going to know better.”

“Answer my question, Brennan.”

“I don’t know, Mallory. I can tell you some about it tomorrow. Come talk to me. Can you wait till then?”

“I guess.”

“How you feeling?”

“Bruised. In every way imaginable.”

“Will you go on over to the hospital and get looked over? I’ll call them at Receiving and tell ’em you’re on your way.”

“That’s not necessary….”

“Yes, it is. Get checked over.”

“Well. Okay.”

“Feel up to driving there yourself? I’d like Lou to stick here with me awhile, or I’d have him drive you.”

“I can manage.”

“You take it easy, Mallory.”

“Yeah. You too, Brennan. Uh, sorry I….”

“Yeah, I know. We shouldn’t be bitching at each other right now. There’s a woman dead, and that’s more important than how we feel about each other.”

For once I agreed with him.

No great excitement had been stirred at the hospital by Brennan’s call that I was coming. A nurse glanced at me, saw that my head and limbs were still connected to my body, and said, “Have a seat.” I had one. I had one for about half an hour before the doctor came around.

The pin on his white tunic said “Jameson.” Jameson was sandy-haired, around thirty, and of medium height. He had brown-rimmed glasses over eyes that never looked at you, even when they did. He seemed bored.

“How are we feeling?” he said.

“So-so.”

“What have we had happen?”

“We were kicked in the nuts, and just about everywhere else.”

So he took us into an examining room, and we took off our pants. We coughed to the left and to the right while cold fingers poked. Then we sat on a cold steel table and were probed some more, all over. Occasionally we said ouch.

After a while the probing stopped. “We’d better have some X-rays taken.”

“Okay.”

“Can we have them taken tomorrow morning at nine? The X-ray technician will be on duty then.”

“What’s the problem anyway?”

More probing. “Some broken ribs, perhaps.”

“How many?”

“We won’t know for sure until we’ve had an X-ray. Awfully sensitive on the right side, and some ribs could well be broken. Or maybe just cracked.”

“I see.”

“You can pay at the desk.”

He was gone.

I knew there’d be a catch. We got examined, but I paid.

Which I did, at the desk, after getting back into my pants. As I was putting my lightened billfold back in my hip pocket, Lou Brown walked into the lobby. The deputy was as pale as ever and looked vaguely upset.

“Buy you some coffee, Mallory?”

I said okay and followed him into the hospital coffee shop. It was about 8:55 and they closed at nine, so we got dirty looks from the waitress to go with the coffee. I ordered a sandwich, too, and got a look so dirty I almost lost my appetite.

But the coffee was hot and good, and it came right away. Lou sipped his and said, “How you feeling, Mallory?”

“I’ve had better nights.”

“Me too. This is the first murder I ever worked.”

So that was why he seemed upset.

I said, “How long you been a deputy, Lou?”

“About eight months.”

There generally aren’t more than one or two murders a year in a small town like Port City, and when there is one, it’s the city police who handle it. This particular murder fell in the sheriff’s domain because it had occurred outside the city limits and was therefore county business.

“Well, Lou, in your job, you got to expect to come onto a crime of violence now and then.”

“Oh, it’s not that. I seen blood before. We’ve had plenty of accidents to cover, and hell, I was an MP in the service-saw some rough goddamn things. But never this. Never an old woman beat up and killed.”

“Is it pretty definite she was beaten?”

“I don’t know. Too early for any official word. But it looked that way to me.”

I nodded. “That was my impression, too. She wasn’t bloody or bruised, but her hair and clothes were all mussed up, and I just had the feeling she’d been slapped around before she died.”

“Heart attack, probably. You know, Mal, when I was taking those pictures of her, I kind of studied her, tied there in the chair, and I could almost see what happened to her. Guys asking her where she kept some damn thing and slapping her to make her tell, and her heart just gives way. Crazy thing is, these goddamn guys probably never intended killing her, just meant to tie her up and sack the place. Damn.”