City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (novels to read .txt) 📗

The letters to her father were about school, how different Phoenix was from Prescott, and each one pleaded with him to take better care of himself. The last one was dated a week before her murder. The letters from the fall semester were shorter than she had written the previous year. They were not in keeping with Pamela’s description of an aspiring author or artiste. I’d have expected pages of reflections, observations, and stories. Instead, they contained little more than what a postcard would hold.

That night, although mindful that someone might be watching us, we enjoyed a fine dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant. We sat at the back, both of us in a booth facing the door. Just in case.

“It doesn’t smell right,” Victoria said over cheese-and-onion enchiladas, refried beans, and Mexican rice. “Everybody up here says Carrie is such a sweet girl. But how does that jibe with the house we saw, with the alcoholic father?”

“Or with the transformation that was described by her friends at the teachers’ college,” I said.

We tried to piece together a timeline of Carrie’s last months but it was full of holes. Then we went back to our room, warmed up, and tried not to break the old bed.

Thirteen

The next morning, I wanted to take another run at Ezra Dell. Maybe the shock of his daughter’s death had worn off enough to jog his memory, or a long, cold night alone had made him willing to tell us something he had withheld the previous day.

But when we hiked up to Park Avenue, two cars were sitting in front of Dell’s house, the door was open, and a policeman stood on the porch. I was cold already but now a chill ran up the back of my neck.

“You’ll need to stay back,” the cop said. “What’s your business here?”

I held up my badge. “Phoenix Police.”

He looked barely out of high school and worked to conceal being impressed, curious, or plain disgusted with the interruption. “Stay.” He said it as if we were two pooches and disappeared inside. No smoke was coming out of the chimney.

In a couple of minutes an older man in plain clothes came out and waved us forward. Introductions were made. He was the Prescott Police chief. I abbreviated myself to Detective Hammons and again recklessly flashed my buzzer. But it would get me further than showing up as a private eye.

“Dell is dead,” he said. But I suspected that already. “Suicide.” That, I seriously doubted, but I had to handle this gently. No “big-city know-it-all detective” from me.

“Would you mind if I looked, Chief?”

He didn’t welcome me inside without an explanation of what brought us there the day before. I gave him the short version of Carrie’s murder, without all the details.

“Well.” he stamped his feet. “Would’ve been nice professional courtesy for you to check in with the local police.”

“I’m sorry about that, sir,” I said. I could be deferential, but I couldn’t change the fact that I was a head taller than him. “It was a routine death notification…”

“Nothing routine about a murder,” he snapped.

“No, sir. We should have contacted you when we got to town.”

That seemed to mollify him somewhat, but he looked Victoria over.

“Miss Vasquez is a police photographer who’s been involved in this case,” I said.

“I’d be happy to retrieve my camera and take photos here if you’d like,” she said. “For your departmental records.”

“Looks cut and dried to me, forgive my pun.” Was he flirting? But then he seemed to change his mind, deciding it was proper to add to his departmental records, such as they were. “That’d be real nice, Miss.”

Victoria gave me a sardonic look and started off.

“Wait, Miss,” the chief said. “I’ll have Officer Gibbons give you a ride downtown and bring you back.”

After they slid off down the snowy street, he turned and let me follow him inside.

As I suspected, the fire was dead and the stove cold. It felt chillier inside than outside, but maybe that was imagination. My bleak anticipation for what I would find.

Ezra Dell was seated in the same stuffed chair as the day before, but far beyond the comfort of his liquor. His throat was slit, a seeming bucketful of blood down the front of his shirt and pants, and into the upholstery. His head was lolled back, eyes glassy. In his right hand was a straight razor.

“See,” the Chief said. “Suicide, like I said. Looks very straightforward.”

It looked all wrong to me.

“How did you find him, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Got a call, check on him. Assumed it was a neighbor who didn’t want to deal directly with Ezra, who could be nasty. When Gibbons got here, the door was unlocked and he walked in and found him just like this.”

He pulled out a cigar, bit off the tip, and lit it. “Not the first suicide here since the hard times set in. I’m not at all surprised with Ezra, poor bastard. He was a conductor on the Santa Fe, you know. But the drink cost him his job. He really went downhill after his wife passed away. I knew him well in those days, a decent man. I’m surprised he didn’t kill himself earlier with the booze he made in his home still. Then, the news about his daughter, well, that obviously pushed him over the edge.”

I studied the wound, ear to ear. “That’s a very precise cut for somebody with as shaky hands as Ezra had.”

“Maybe. Hadn’t really thought about it.”

Having investigated many suicides, I knew that slitting one’s throat was exceedingly rare, much less being done with such exactness and going all the way across. One suicide I remembered was characterized by a cut that barely made it halfway. Once the man hit his carotid artery and it started gushing blood, he dropped the razor and, in a moment of regret, tried to stanch the bleeding. Too late, of course, but that was a normal involuntary