Courting Trouble

hard to get Philadelphians excited about anything but the Sixers.

She scooted down the alley and almost fell on the moss-covered brick that sloped down toward a French drain, but grabbed a wooden privacy fence and righted her beard. She ducked low to account for the stovepipe as she hurried toward her house. She looked around for Mel, but the cat was nowhere in sight. He’d never been outside and even though he was chubby enough to survive without food for a while, she hated to think of him in city traffic. A dog started barking from one of the houses, and she darted toward the gray cinder-block wall, about six feet high, which enclosed her tiny backyard.

When she reached it, she slammed both hands on the scratchy blocks at the top, then boosted herself one, two, three bounces for a running start. She scrambled up the wall but stalled at the top, flopping on both sides like an Uncle Sam doll, then gritted her teeth and heaved herself over, landing with a hard bump on the unforgiving flagstone of her own backyard. Her mules flew off, and she gathered them up, otherwise taking inventory. She hadn’t broken her legs, arms, or a nail, so she got up, dusted soot from her skirt, and crept to her back door. Getting into her house would be easier than getting into her yard.

Anne reached into her skirt pocket for the keys.

5

The smell that greeted Anne when she opened the door into her kitchen wasn’t one she’d ever come home to. Strong, faintly metallic, and totally creepy. Suddenly she didn’t know how professional she could be, after all. She couldn’t stop thinking about Willa. She unhooked the big sunglasses from behind her ears and slid an earpiece into the collar of her T-shirt. She glanced around the kitchen, trying to appraise it with an objective eye. It was so small, made from a corner of the single room that once constituted the entire first floor.

Cherry veneer cabinets ringed the room on three sides, the countertop was butcher block, and the sink was stainless steel, clean only because she’d been too busy to cook lately, meaning last year. One of the cabinet doors was partway open, and Anne peeked inside. It contained the usual glazed clay mugs, jelly glasses, and a wiggly stack of oversized coffee cups used for late-night Captain Crunch.

She considered the open cabinet. She didn’t usually leave them that way, because she’d bonk her head on them if she did. Maybe Willa had. What had she taken? Anne peeked and realized what was missing almost immediately, because it was a souvenir. A pink mug with Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory, from “Job Switching.” Episode No. 39, September 15, 1952. Anne knew all the I Love Lucy episodes by heart, but kept that as secret as her spending habits and several hundred other things. Where was her Lucy mug? Had Willa used it? Did it matter?

She scanned the room. No mug anywhere, and no sign of a struggle. Nor was there any fingerprint dust, the sooty grime left behind by mobile crime technicians. The cops evidently hadn’t taken prints from the kitchen. It told Anne that the crime must have taken place elsewhere. She couldn’t shake the smell, or the dread, but she willed herself to go ahead. She had to learn what had happened to Willa.

She walked into the dining room, reached by a narrow doorway to the right. The dining room wasn’t much bigger than the kitchen, and there was a pine table against the wall on the left. Unopened Visa bills, offers for preapproved credit cards, and collection service notices sat stacked on the corner of the table, next to several Bic pens that Anne had personal knowledge did not work. Again, everything was as she’d left it, and there were no fingerprint smudges on the table or the two pine chairs that customarily sat catty-corner. On the rug near a table leg lay a catnip mouse with its gray fuzz loved off.

“Mel,” she called softly, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. The cat would normally come trotting at the sound of his name, but this time he didn’t. Anne felt like she shouldn’t be thinking about her cat at a time like this, but she couldn’t help it. “Mel!” she called again, but there was no answer.

She bit her lip. Had he gotten out? Was he alive? Had Kevin taken him? Hurt him? Anger drove her through another doorway, also narrow, and she scanned her living room. It was darker than the dining room and kitchen, the unhappy result of a northern exposure, and Anne was tempted to turn on a lamp but couldn’t risk the neighbors catching Uncle Sam on a B & E.

Again, still no sign of Mel, or of a struggle. A brown sisal rug covered the floor, and a TV, stereo, and bookshelves sat across from a gray couch, which was flush under the windows against the north wall. In front of the couch stood a glass coffee table covered with dark fingerprint smudges, and she walked over to it. Black powder dusted the edge of the table, and in the middle of the smudge was a mug-sized circle. It must have been from the Lucy mug, and the police must have collected the mug for evidence. Anne tried to reconstruct the scene. Willa had probably been watching TV and drinking something. Where had she been killed?

The smell was thick here, and Anne looked almost involuntarily toward the entrance hall, separated from the living room by a door with a frosted-glass pane. The door hung partway open but the entrance hallway was dark. She stepped closer and peered inside. What she saw made her gag.

The entrance hall was an abattoir. Blood was everywhere, splattered across the dark-gray walls and drenching the gray wall-to-wall carpet with a horrific red-brown stain. The door was covered with blood, drying in uneven patches like the most awful crimson paint. Formless, dark-red bits of tissue stuck to the glass of the door and on the far wall. A jagged shard of bone had been driven into the far wall. A patch of scalp with bloodied hair still on it stuck grotesquely to the near wall.

Anne felt her gorge rise, but held it down and forced herself to objectify the sight. Her gaze found the faint chalk outline of the body, sketched thickly into the rug. The legs of the outline—Willa’s legs—lay slightly apart and its feet lay close to the front door. The head—My God, Willa—lay straight behind it. It looked as if Willa had been shot as soon as she opened the front door.

Please God, the poor thing. Anne looked again at the blood on the rug. Most of it lay where Willa’s head would have been, which suggested that she had been shot in the head. More precisely, in the face, if she had been killed when she opened the door.

Anne looked again at the outline and noticed something else on the rug. She stepped forward, squinting toward the door, trying not to breathe in the awful carnal smell. Next to Willa’s body outline lay another chalk outline, on her left side, about a foot long. The smaller chalk shape looked blurry at a distance, then Anne realized what it was. A gun. Bennie had told her that cops always chalked a dropped gun. Had the murder weapon been left behind? The newspaper hadn’t reported that. But they wouldn’t.

She knelt down and examined the gun outline, covering her mouth with her Uncle Sam beard, only partly because of the odor. Since the outline lay on the left side of the body, it would have been the killer’s right side, and was only roughly the shape of a gun, with the handle nearest the door and the barrel slightly longish. It looked most like the outline of a sawed-off shotgun. Anne gasped.

Kevin’s weapon of choice.

It was what he had used on her when he attacked her at the door. He had put it to her head, but, incredibly, the DA hadn’t even charged him with attempted murder because he hadn’t gotten a shot off. She shed her resentment to concentrate on Willa. It had to have been Kevin who killed her. He was right-handed and smart enough to know he was better off dropping the weapon at the scene than getting caught in possession.

Then she flashed on the newspaper article she’d seen this morning. It had said something about “gunshots” at “close range.” She considered it. If Kevin had used a sawed-off shotgun and fired more than one shot at close range, Willa’s face—her very features—would have been completely blown off.

Anne felt her stomach wrench but maintained control. The wound would have made the misidentification possible. And all of the circumstances would point to Anne as the murder victim; it was Anne’s house and she would be expected to be in it. She and Willa had the same hair, were the same height and weight. And Willa was wearing her Rosato & Associates T-shirt. But Anne still didn’t get it. Who had identified Willa’s body? Was it somebody from the office? And one critical piece of the puzzle remained missing:

Why would Kevin kill a woman he knew wasn’t me?

She scanned the entrance hall for an answer, trying to ignore the blood soaked into the dry wall, and her gaze traveled to the ceiling fixture. It was a cheap builder’s-grade model with fake Victorian frosted glass, and was turned off. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used it. No one ever visited her.

She reached for the switch and flicked it, but the light didn’t go on. Maybe it had burned out. Wait a minute. She couldn’t remember ever putting a bulb in it when she had moved in. She was too short to reach it and hadn’t