Charlaine Harris - Real Murders

Then a mother trailing two reluctant toddlers came through the door, and Jane slipped out to go home to her waiting house, to leaf through her true crime books in search of the pattern she would fit.

Thank God other people were in the library when Gifford Doakes came in, or I might have shrieked and run. Gifford, massacre enthusiast, had always sounded the warning bell in my brain that cautions me to pick and choose my conversation topics. Though I really didn’t know too much about him, I’d always kept my distance from Gifford and limited my contact with him to the bare bones of courtesy.

You wanted to be polite to Gifford. You were a little scared not to be.

I had no idea what Gifford did for a living, but he dressed like a “Miami Vice” drug lord, in extremely stylish clothes and with his long brown hair carefully arranged. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a shoulder holster under his jacket.

Maybe Gifford was a drug lord.

And here he came now, gliding over to the checkout desk. I glanced around; that dynamic twosome, Melanie Clark and Bankston Waites, had come in a few minutes previously, their heads close together and laughing, and I could now see Bankston upstairs in the biography section, while Melanie was flipping through Good Housekeeping in the magazine area on the ground floor. Probably looking for a new meatloaf recipe. But bless her, she was there within call.

Gifford was right across the desk from me, and my hand closed over the nearest thing, which proved to be the stapler. A really effective deterrent, I told myself bitterly. I could see his shadow, Reynaldo, standing outside the double glass doors, pacing around in the near-dark of the parking lot. He would pass through a pool of light from the arc lamps that provided safety for the lot-theoretically-and then vanish into the gloom, reappearing seconds later.

“How ya doing, Roe?” Gifford asked perfunctorily.

“Um. Okay.”

“Listen, I hear you and that writer found the murder weapon in the Buckley case today.”

The Buckley case? I had a sudden vision of an anthology of accounts of the decade’s most notable murders, and of Lizanne’s parents’ slaughter being included. Other people would read about their deaths, and speculate, as I had speculated about other unsolved cases. Could it have been The Daughter? Or the Policeman who also belonged to the Real Murders Club? I realized that these murders would be made into a book… maybe by Joe McGuinniss or Joan Barthel or Robin, if his taste for it revived… and I would be in it, because of the chocolates. Maybe just “when the candy arrived at the home of Mrs. Teagarden’s daughter Aurora…”

For a minute I was very confused. Was I in a book about old murders that I was reading, or was this all happening to me now? It would be nice to have the distance a book would give me. But Gifford’s one earring was all too real, and the leopard-like pacing of Reynaldo-in the prosaic library parking lot!-was all too real, too.

“Tell me about the ax,” Gifford was demanding.

“It was a hatchet, Gifford. An ax wouldn’t fit in a briefcase.” I was immediately furious with myself for contradicting a scarey guy like Gifford; but then I consciously realized what my unconscious must have noted. Gifford Doakes was a man with a mission, and he was not interested in sidetracks.

“This long?” He held his hands apart.

“Yes, about.” Standard hatchet size.

“Wood handle with black tape wrapped around the grip?”

“Yes,” I agreed. I had forgotten the tape until he mentioned it.

“Damn,” he hissed, and then he said a few other things, and his dark eyes blinked rapidly. Gifford Doakes was a frightened man and a furious one. I was scared as hell, too, not only of the murderer but more immediately of Gifford.

Who was maybe also the murderer.

I gripped the stapler even harder, and felt like a fool planning to battle a crazy man with a stapler that even, I suddenly remembered, contained no staples. Well, strike that line of defense.

“Now I have to go to the police station,” Gifford said unexpectedly. “That’s my hatchet, I’m almost positive. Reynaldo found out it was missing yesterday.”

I laid down the stapler very gently on my desk, glanced upward and saw Bankston looking over the second-floor railing. He raised his eyebrows in a silent query. I shook my head. I didn’t think I needed help anymore. I thought Gifford was just as nervous as the rest of us, and for good reason. At this moment, sophisticated pageboy and sharp clothes notwithstanding, Gifford was chewing on his thumbnail like a five-year-old facing a difficult world.

“You’d better go to the police now,” I said to him carefully. And he wheeled and was out the door before I could catch my breath.

Gifford’s hatchet, Robin’s briefcase. Those not cast as victims were being cast as murderers, to provide even more fun for the killer.

I wondered which category was scheduled for me. Surely finder-of-the-body would suffice.

I was still pondering this and other unpleasant related topics thirty minutes later when Perry Allison came in. I could hardly believe my luck at seeing Gifford and Perry in one evening. Two great guys. At least while Gifford had been here, so had a few other people, but in the intervening half hour Bankston and Melanie and the two other patrons had trickled out the door.

This time I quietly opened a drawer and slid out a pair of scissors. I checked my watch; only fifteen minutes to go till closing time.

“Roe!” he babbled. “Que pasa?” His hands beat a manic tattoo on the desk.

I felt a stirring of dismay. This wasn’t even the familiar unpleasant Perry, who had perhaps skipped some prescribed medication. Perry was on drugs no doctor had ever given him. The appeal of “recreational” drugs had completely passed me by, but I wasn’t totally naive.

“Nothing much, Perry,” I said cautiously.

“How can you say that? Things here are just hopping ,” he told me, his eyebrows flying all over his narrow face. “A murder a day, practically. Your honey, the cop, was at my place this afternoon. Asking questions. Making insinuations. About me! I couldn’t hurt a fly!”

And Perry laughed and came around the desk in a few quick steps.

“Scissors?” He whooped. “Ssssssscissssors?” He experimented with hissing. I was so taken aback by his quick moves and jerky head movements, so unlike the Perry I worked with, that it took me by surprise when his hand shot out to grasp the wrist of my hand that was holding the scissors. He gripped with manic pressure.

“That hurts, Perry,” I said sharply. “Let go.”

But Perry laughed and laughed, never relaxing his grip. I knew in a minute I would drop the scissors and I could not imagine what would happen after that.

Abruptly, he turned enraged. “You were going to stab me,” he shouted furiously. “Not one of you wants me to make it! Not one of you knows what that hospital was like!”

He was right, and under other circumstances I would have listened with some sympathy. But I was in pain and terrified.

I could just barely feel the scissors still gripped in my numbing fingers.

In a day filled with strange incidents, this crazed man screaming at me, his emotional intensity spilling over me in this quiet and civilized building where people came to pick out nice quiet civilized books.

Then he began shaking me to get me to listen, his other hand gripping my shoulder like a vise, and he never stopped talking, angry, sad, full of pain and self-pity.

I began to get angry myself, and suddenly something in me just snapped. I raised my foot and stomped on his instep with every ounce of force I could summon. With a wail of pain, he let go of me, and in that instant I turned and raced for the front door.