Gayle Roper - Caught In The Act

The foyer walls were covered with a yellow and cream floral sateen with thin navy stripes running through the pattern. I reached out a finger, and it bounced on the batting beneath the fabric. This was real class.

Jolene ignored the beauty of it all and kept talking. Of course she’d seen it all before.

“Arnie and me had differences over everything.” She waved at the foyer chandelier. “Electricity. Me working. Eating dinner at my parents.” I knew Jolene ate there every night. “Where to go on vacations. What wallpaper to pick. Can you believe he hated this?” She pointed at the fabric.

Arnie was obviously a philistine.

“Then we couldn’t decide whether to buy a weekend place down the shore or up the mountains. And he couldn’t decide on fidelity.”

I was so busy photographing the yellow living room with its pale yellow carpeting and its accent wall of navy paper patterned with white daisies that I almost missed Jolene’s last comment.

I lowered my camera and looked at her with compassion and sympathy, but she was stalking across the foyer toward the back of the house, apparently uninterested in my commiseration.

“Arnie!” she bellowed. “Where are you? I haven’t got all day. Dinner’s waiting and you aren’t invited.”

I followed her, my head swiveling as I walked. Suddenly I stopped before a painting of a Chester County stone farmhouse surrounded by snow-laden evergreens. I checked the bottom right corner, though I already knew what I’d see. Curtis Carlyle. GTG.

“Jolene, you’ve got an original Carlyle! How come you never told me?”

She stopped and turned to look at the picture. She shrugged. “I forgot. But I’ve got a question for you. What’s that GTG thing in the corner after his name?”

“He puts that on all his work. It stands for Glory to God.”

She looked at me without comprehension, then at the picture.

“It means that he’s thanking God for the talent and opportunity to paint,” I explained.

“Oh.” She looked at the picture once more, shrugged again, and continued her trek across the vast expanse of foyer.

I stretched out my hand and traced Curt’s name and the GTG. What a great guy he was.

I turned back to Jolene just as she entered the kitchen. In profile she was as beautiful as she was full on. I raised my camera, flicked the switch to continuous exposure, and pressed.

As the lens click-clicked, she stopped abruptly, frozen. I heard a quick intake of breath and saw a flash of tightening jaw through the viewfinder. Then she let out an unearthly shriek.

“Arnie!” She ran into the kitchen, out of my line of sight. “No! No! Arnie!”

The hairs on my arms rose at her tone, and I ran into the kitchen myself. I froze for an instant, too.

On the floor by the stove lay Arnie, staring upwards, blood puddling beneath and beside him on the yellow tiles. Jolene knelt in the blood, shaking him, calling him, trying to rouse him.

She would never succeed.

Poor Arnie. He would never need all his lights on ever again.

I set my camera on the table, ran to Jolene and caught her by the shoulders.

“Jo, come on away from him,” I said softly. “The police won’t want us to touch him or move him.”

“Merry, we’ve got to help him!” Her brown eyes shimmered with tears and pain. “CPR! Do you know CPR?”

I knelt and hugged her. I could feel the sticky blood beneath my knees. “Jo, it won’t help. He’s dead.”

“No, he’s not!” She reached for him again. “He’s still warm.”

I pulled her hands back. “He’s dead,” I repeated softly. “Someone has killed him. We don’t want to move him or do anything that would cover up evidence.”

She stared at me. “Someone killed him?”

We turned together and looked at Arnie. He stared blindly at the ceiling, gravity pulling his eyelids back into his skull. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows and one pant leg was crumpled about his calf. There was a round hole in the left lower chest area of his tan button-down shirt, not far below his heart. Blood had soaked his shirt front, though it wasn’t flowing anymore. Arnie’s heart no longer pumped.

I didn’t want to think about the exit wound beneath him from which blood must have rushed in a torrent. It was hard to comprehend that the great pool of it covering the yellow tiles had recently flowed through his veins as surely as mine swept through my body.

“Come away, Jo.” I stood and pulled her up with me. “We need to call the police.”

I led her to the kitchen table and pushed her into a chair. I grabbed the wall phone and dialed 911.

“Jo,” I said as I hung up in spite of the fact that the 911 voice wanted me to stay on the line. “Is there someone else we should call?”

She looked at me blankly. “Like who?”

Many days I wondered about Jo’s mental acuity, but tonight I knew the slowness was shock. “Like Arnie’s parents. Brothers and sisters. Pastor. Your parents.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “He didn’t have a family. His mom’s dead and his dad disappeared when he was four. There are no brothers and sisters. And there’s certainly no pastor.”

She sighed in pain. “I have to tell my parents face-to-face. It’s not telephone news, you know? My dad will be so upset. He loved Arnie. He was the son he never had.” She shook her head. “Poor Dad.”

I looked at the man on the floor. Poor Arnie was more like it.

Since Jolene had no calls to make, I quickly dialed The News, connecting with Mac’s desk.

“Mac, I’m at Jolene and Arnie Meister’s house where we just found Arnie shot to death.”

He made a distressed sound. “Let me talk to her.”

I gave Jolene the phone and listened to her murmur into it. Suddenly she held it out. “He wants you.”

“You know what you’ve got to do, right?” Mac asked.

“Yeah, I know.” A story by deadline tomorrow. The News is an afternoon paper of twelve to sixteen pages, and our deadline for news is nine, editing ten, and it’s ready for delivery by noon.

I hung up and led Jo to the foyer, away from Arnie. “Come on. We’ll wait in the living room.”

She kept wiping her bloody hands down her coat again and again. I caught them and held them and felt them shaking.

She looked over my shoulder. “He has the tree up.” She took a step toward the living room.

“Give me your coat before you go in there.” There was no need to track blood through the house. I helped her slip out of it.

I took mine off, too, and we dropped them in a pile on the parquet floor. Then we sat awkwardly next to the beautiful Christmas tree on the sofa bigger than my apartment. But there was blood on our shoes and clothes as well as our hands, and we marred the pale yellow carpet and the huge sofa. Jolene never noticed.

She stood up almost as soon as we sat down. “I can’t leave him alone on the kitchen floor.” Tears wet her cheeks. She started unsteadily toward the kitchen.

I nodded and followed her. “We’ll sit at the table.”

“I want to hold his hand.”

I remembered Sergeant William Poole of the Amhearst police saying to me once, “The first rule of any investigation is never touch anything at a crime scene. Never, never, never! It contaminates the evidence and makes convictions hard, should we find the perpetrator.”

“I think we can’t touch him, Jo. I’m sorry.” I led her to a kitchen chair with a yellow plaid seat cushion.

She sat and laid her head on her arms on the table. I looked at her sadly, wishing I could ease her sorrow and knowing I couldn’t.

I turned to the room. Putting my hands behind me, I made a slow circle, looking at everything and anything. Who knew what would be important for my story? Or for the solution of the crime?