Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

“I,” continued Robin, “would drop it in one of these garbage cans waiting to be emptied.”

That was why Robin was a very good mystery writer.

“I’m sure the police have searched them,” I said firmly. “I am not going to stand here and go through everyone’s garbage. Then someone really would call the police.” Or would they? Apparently no one had spotted us so far.

We’d reached the end of the alley, at the spot we’d entered.

“If you wouldn’t park here, you might just cross the street and go through the next alley,” he said thoughtfully. “Park even farther away, be even less likely to be seen and connected.”

So we slipped across the narrow street into the next alley. This one had been widened a little when some apartments had been built. Their parking was in the back, and in the construction process a drainage ditch had been put in the alley to keep the parking lots clear. There were culverts to provide entrances and exits to the lots. I thought, I would put the ax in one of the culverts. And I wondered if the police had searched this block.

This alley too was silent and lifeless, and I began to have the unsettling feeling that maybe Robin and I were the only people left in Lawrenceton. The sun came out briefly and Robin took my hand, so I tried hard to feel better. But when he crouched to retie his shoe, I began looking in the ditches.

Certainly the culvert right by us hadn’t been disturbed. The water oak leaves that half-blocked the opening were almost smoothly aligned, pointing in the same direction, by the heavy rain of the night before last. But the next one down… someone had been in that ditch, no doubt about it. The leaves had been shoved up around the opening so forcefully that the mud underneath had been uncovered. Perhaps the police had searched, but of course none of them were as short as I was, so they weren’t at an angle to see a little gleam from inside the culvert, a gleam sparked by the unexpected and short-lived sunshine. And their arms weren’t as long as Robin’s, so they couldn’t have reached in and pulled out…

“My briefcase?” Robin said in shock and amazement. “What’s it doing here?” His fingers pried the gold-tone locks.

“Don’t open it!” I shrieked, as Robin opened it, and out fell a bloodstained hatchet, to land with a thud on the packed leaves in the ditch.

While Robin stood guard over the horrible thing in the alley, I knocked on the door of one of the apartments. I could hear a baby screaming inside, so I knew someone was awake.

The exhausted young woman who answered the door was still in her nightgown. She was trusting enough to open the door to a stranger, and tired enough to accept my need to use her telephone incuriously. The baby screamed while I looked up the number of the police station, and kept it up while I dialled and talked to the desk officer, who had some trouble understanding what I was trying to tell him. When I hung up and thanked the young woman, the baby was still crying, though it had ebbed to a whimper.

“Poor baby,” I said tentatively.

“It’s colic,” she explained. “The doctor says the worst should be over soon.”

Aside from occasionally babysitting my half-brother Phillip when he was small, I knew nothing about babies. So I was glad to hear that the child had a specific complaint. By the time I thanked her and she shut the door behind me, I could hear the child starting to cry again.

I trudged back to the alley where Robin was sitting glumly, his back propped against the fence on the side opposite the apartments.

“Me and my great ideas,” I said bitterly, plopping down beside him.

He let that pass in a gentlemanly manner.

“Cover it up,” I suggested. “I can’t stand it.”

“How, without getting fingerprints on it? More fingerprints, that is.”

We solved that problem as a mist began to dampen my hair against my cheeks. I found a stick and Robin stuck it under the edge of the briefcase, lifting it and dragging it over the hatchet with its dreadful stains. We settled back against the fence, able now to hear the sirens approaching. I felt oddly calm.

“I wonder if I’ll ever get my briefcase back,” Robin said. “Someone came in our parking lot and reached in my car, and took my briefcase, so he could use it for hiding a murder weapon. I’d been thinking, Roe, when this case is all over, if it ever is, that I might try my hand at nonfiction. I’m here, I’m involved through knowing some of the people. I even met the Buckleys the very night before they were killed. I was there when you and your mother opened the chocolates. Now I’m here finding a murder weapon in my briefcase, and I’m telling you, I don’t like this much anymore. I don’t think I even want the damn briefcase as a memento, now that I think of it.” But after sitting for a moment in silence, he murmured, “Wait till I tell my agent.”

The surface of his glasses began to be speckled with tiny drops of moisture. I took my own off and wiped them with a Kleenex. “I’ve got to admire your lack of fear, Robin,” I said.

“Lack of fear?”

“You think they’re not going to want to ask you a few questions?” I said pointedly.

He had only seconds to absorb this and look dismayed before an unmarked car pulled in the alley, with a patrol car right behind it. For some reason, we stood up.

And God bless me, who should emerge from the unmarked car but my friend Lynn Liggett, and she was mad as a wet hen.

“You’re everywhere!” she said to me. “I know you didn’t do these murders, but I swear every time I turn around you’re right in front of me!” She shook her head, as if trying to shake me out of it. Then words seemed to fail her. Her glance fell on the overturned open briefcase, with the handle of the hatchet protruding slightly from underneath.

“Who covered it up?” she said next. After we told her, and she lifted the briefcase from the bloody hatchet with the same stick, all her attention was on the murder weapon.

Yet another car appeared behind the patrol car. My heart sank even deeper as Jack Burns heaved himself out and strolled towards us. His body language said he was out for a casual amble in a pleasant neighborhood but his dark eyes snapped with anger and menace.

He stopped at the patrolmen, apparently the ones who had conducted the original alley search the day before and blistered them up and down in language I had only seen in print. Robin and I watched with interest as they began to search the alley for anything that might have been left by the murderer. I was willing to bet that if he’d left any other trace in the alley, this time it would be found.

People began to emerge from the apartments, and the alley that had seemed so silent and deserted began to be positively crowded. I saw the curtain move at the apartment of the young mother, and hoped the baby had calmed down by now. It occurred to me that this woman was the most likely to have seen something the previous day, since she was probably up almost all the time. I started to suggest this to Detective Liggett, but I reconsidered in time to save my head from being bitten off.

The hatchet and briefcase bagged, the policewoman turned back to us.

“Did you touch the briefcase, Miss Teagarden?” she asked me directly.

I shook my head.

“So you did,” she said to Robin, who nodded meekly. “You’re someone else who turns up everywhere.”

Finally Robin began to look worried.

“You need to go down to the station and have your fingerprints taken,” Lynn said brusquely.

“I had them made the other night,” Robin reminded her. “Everyone at the Real Murders meeting had his or her prints taken.”