At last, Inspector Annette Crawford arrived, took my statement, and began inspecting the scene for the third time.
I noticed Kobe standing by my car, petting Dog through the open window, watching the police, and nodding in a world-weary way.
“You know anything about this?” I handed him a bag full of bagels and cookies.
“I’m just sayin’.” He shrugged, then nodded his thanks for the food. “They don’t call this the Murder House for nothin’.”
I followed his gaze to where paramedics were carrying a stretcher with the woman’s remains. The black plastic body bag gleamed in the brilliant sunshine, an affront to her untimely death. We observed the sad procession in silence.
Suddenly, Inspector Crawford appeared.
With her typically imperious air, she looked at Kobe and said, “What did you call this place?”
“The house next door? They call that the Murder House,” said Kobe. “Everybody knows that.”
She looked at me. I shrugged.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she addressed Kobe. “Why do they call it the Murder House?”
“A man killed his family there. Only one kid escaped. Maybe two. Depends on who you believe.”
“Uh-huh,” murmured Crawford. “When was this?”
“Long time ago. In the eighties, I think,” he said, then added, “The nineteen-eighties.”
As though we might be confused as to which century.
“That’s twenty, thirty years ago,” the inspector said. “Why are you bugging me about something that happened in the neighbor’s house thirty years ago?”
“I’m just sayin’, is all.”
“How about recently? What do you know about this place?”
“Used as a drug drop sometimes, maybe. Only sometimes.”
“You know that, or are you making it up?”
“I hear things.”
“You have a name or description of these supposed drug runners?”
He shrugged.
“Got anything else for me?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then go get me a cup of coffee with sugar, no cream.”
To my surprise, Kobe shuffled off toward the refreshment table, where the big container of coffee still beckoned.
The inspector turned to me. “You and the college boy . . . Jefferson—you were the only ones who touched the shed door or the body?”
“As far as I know, yes. I asked the fraternity brothers to clean out the shed, though it seems we picked the wrong one. The homeowner meant the small metal garden shed, not the old wooden one. I’m not even sure that one’s even on Monty’s property.”
“Okay. I want to talk to the students. You can tell everybody else to leave.”
“I did. They didn’t leave.”
“Tell them again,” the inspector said, looking surprised. I doubted she ever had to say anything twice, unlike me. “Looks like the body’s been there for a few days, so I doubt any of you have anything to do with it.”
“About the project . . .”
She fixed me with her patented don’t-mess-with-my-crime-scene look. “The project is on hold until we figure out what happened.”
“You think it was a homicide?”
“Too early to tell. It’s a death under suspicious circumstances, that’s for sure. There are a whole lot of people who will have to weigh in on this one, starting with the medical examiner. Until he makes his determination as to cause of death, we gather evidence. It’s how we do it.”
“Gotcha.”
I glanced with regret toward the piles of donated food on the card tables, the hand-lettered signs directing the volunteers to the cleanup and first-aid and tool stations, the heaps of costly supplies, the stack of lumber for the handicap ramp, the proud Neighbors Together banner flapping in the wind.
No good deed goes unpunished.
• • •
Stan, Luz, Claire, and Stephen, as well as a handful of the volunteers—including Jefferson and a couple of other frat boys, who seemed to feel guilty about their late start—assured me they would return next weekend to help finish the renovations on Monty’s house. If I could guilt—or, at last resort, pay—a couple of my employees into joining us, we would be able to complete the unfinished projects without much trouble.
Fortunately, the most weather-sensitive project, the roof, was nearly finished, and the projects that remained could be completed come rain or shine. The ramp was three quarters of the way done, and several of the rooms inside had been primed and prepped for painting. The yard and shed cleanup had been bonus projects to make use of the volunteer labor and to make things nice, but they weren’t necessary for Monty’s health or safety, especially since he wasn’t able to access them anyway. Monty had said something about converting the above-ground basement into a rental studio, but that wasn’t in the scope of our project. He could hire someone to do that if he so desired.