Murderous Passions (Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries Book 1) - B.R. Stateham

A Hard-Boiled Homicide Detective Novel

Murderous Passions (Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries Book 1) by B.R. Stateham

Book excerpt

We were sitting in the car eating double-decker burgers, scalding hot French fries, and washing our palates delicately with forty-four ounces worth of pure Coke syrup. The Cokes were strong enough to eat a man's ulcer and reroute his intestines at the same time. The car's engine was running, and the heater was roaring on full blast. The heat was almost taking the ice out of our veins. The little burger joint Frank and I liked to hit at least twice a week was just two blocks away from Anderson University. It's nothing but a cement block building, barely large enough to have a kitchen and a couple of rest rooms, painted a garish purple trimmed in yellow. It had to be the ugliest looking fast-food joint in the universe. There was no room to sit and eat. It was just a carry-out place. One dove in off the street and ordered the fine cuisine and then sat in their vehicles like caged dinosaurs eating the food before wiping the grease and ketchup off the steering wheel and seats. In the dead of winter, it sometimes was an empty place. But the food was good and any time the wind was not blowing, and the temperature was warm enough to allow a mammal's blood to flow unimpeded, the college kids came out in droves.

I glanced at my wristwatch and noted it was well past 9:00 p.m. when we pulled in and Frank got out to order. I was tired. I knew Frank was tired and we both were thinking about going home and getting some sleep. Despite our fatigue, we sat in the warm car eating our food and not talking. It was one of our ways of trying to wind down from a long and grueling day.

Holding a burger the size of a dinner plate and as thick as a Russian novel with both hands, I stared out my door window in a kind of hypnotic trance. The figure of one hundred million dollars kept circling through my head like some stuck record. Karen Murphy, the department head in physics at the university, said the school was close to receiving the huge grant from the Federal government. That was a lot of zeros behind the number one and this grant was due to her work. Her work. Not the victim's work. Her work. The doctor was a brilliant woman. A confident woman. She knew what she wanted, and she had the brains to go and get it. She also had the brains to murder someone. I was sure of that. And I was sure she had the mental toughness. Despite what many people believe it takes a certain type of toughness to kill someone in premeditation. Nevertheless, did that mean she did it? I didn't know.

And there was the student she had the affair with. Was there a possible connection? It sounded like a road which had to be thoroughly looked at before it could be dismissed. The only problem with that was finding out who that student lover might have been. That would be no problem. There was always someone out there who was willing to mention names. Someone on campus who was curious and intrigued on what trash might be collected on someone else’s reputation. Sooner or later, someone would eventually spill the beans. All it required was patience. And asking questions. And being willing to listen attentively to what everyone said.

We had two long lists of names. Frank had the list of faculty members who had some quarrel with the deceased. And I had a list of the deceased's students, both current and in the past, who had voiced their displeasures as well. In both cases they included just about everyone he met.

Let's face it. Dr. Holdridge was not a nice guy.

Frank belched as he rumpled up a hamburger wrapper and stuffed it into a paper bag. Sucking on his teeth loudly, he sat back and belched again, then looked at me and grinned.

“A hell of a mess this is,” he said in an all-knowing tone.

I nodded, finishing my Coke, and tossed it into the open sack on the floorboard. My stomach felt as if it were about to rumble dangerously as I sat back in the seat.

“Yes, I know. And it's going to get even worse before it gets better.”

“Sure. That's our luck. But hell, that's why they pay us these fabulous wages. We're servants of the people. Defenders of the Truth. It's our job to go wading ass-deep in shit and find a rose among the creeps.”

I grinned, lifting an amused eyebrow, and glanced at Frank. He was using a toothpick and elbowing his way around in the gaps between his teeth as he spoke and gazed idly out of the front window of the car. Shaking my head, I leaned forward and started to pull the gear shift down into reverse when the radio squawked.

“Unit six, unit six. Call Captain Flores as soon as you can. Unit six, call Captain Flores as soon as you can.”

“Flores?” barked Frank, looking at me with an irritated, puzzled grimace. “Who the hell is Flores?”

“Pull out some coins and use the pay phone inside to find out,” I said, sitting back in my seat and looking at my friend.

“Shit. I don't like this. I don't like this at all.” Frank growled, throwing open the car door and rolling out with a groan.

I watched him walk into the Burger Barn digging in a trouser pocket for change and not looking happy at the thought of telephoning someone we hadn't heard of before.

For three or four minutes I watched Frank speak on the phone through the large plate glass window of the little building. Believe it or not, there are a few pay phones around. And surprisingly enough, there are times we prefer using one instead of using our cell phones. It’s a paranoid thing. The fear of Big Brother listening. Frank is convinced it’s happening all the time. I’m not so sure.

But the car's engine was purring quietly to me. The fan was blasting away hot air. And I was feeling my eyelids growing heavier and heavier with each passing minute. My stomach was full, and my brain was gliding along in a holding pattern and not thinking of anything in particular. I was tired and I wanted to go home and get a few hours' sleep. But the way Frank was talking on the phone, intently for a few seconds, and worse, listening just as intently for long stretches of time, told me I wasn't going to go to bed soon.

When he rolled back into the car, slamming the door angrily in the process, one look at his face told me enough. Reaching forward I pulled the gearshift down into reverse and started to back out of the parking space.

“Where we going?”

“Some apartment building on the corner of 112th and Vanier.”

“What's there?”

“We got another body in the Pickford case. And you're gonna love this. It's Bruce Abbott.”

I grinned, glanced at my red-haired Neanderthal lookalike friend, then turned my attention back to the driving. Now we were working on another one of our homicide cases. Forget what’s seen on television where cops work just one case at a time. It doesn’t work that way in this city. Every detective we have in our three divisions works multiple cases at once. No one has the luxury to work exclusively on one case at a time.

That would be rich, I thought to myself, if Bruce Abbott were dead and murdered by someone else. Bruce Abbott was a murderer himself. As the eyewitnesses confirmed several times over, Bruce Abbott was the one who stabbed to death his girlfriend, Rebecca Pickford, in her apartment after an hours-long quarrel. They began the quarrel sometime after six in the evening. They continued for three hours, ending violently with the woman getting stabbed sixteen times with a butcher's knife Abbott supposedly had pulled out of a chef's culinary knife case which had been sitting on the kitchen cabinet beside the sink.

The problem with all this was that, even with all the witnesses, no one actually saw Bruce Abbott kill his girlfriend. The witnesses, all neighbors to Rebecca Pickford and living on the same floor as her apartment, had listened to them arguing. When they heard Rebecca screaming hysterically, several came out into the hall to see what was going on.

These witnesses stated, with matching detail and little variation to their stories, they saw Bruce Abbott come running out of Rebecca's apartment with the knife in his blood-soaked hands. They said Abbott looked dazed and desperate. Maybe he was even crazy. He staggered to one side and had to catch himself with his free hand. It, too, was coated with blood and he left a red smear of blood on the door sill where he caught himself. Several witnesses said he mumbled something incoherently. No one could make out what he said, before he dropped the knife as he ran past them to the stairwell and disappeared.

Two witnesses said he had the look of a wild man as he ran past them. Everyone agreed it had to be Abbott who killed such a nice girl as Rebecca Pickford. They had warned her on several occasions that they felt this Bruce Abbott was not the right type of man for her. Rebecca Pickford was fresh from rural Nebraska. She didn't know the types of men who lived in this city. It was her innocence, the witnesses kept telling us, that killed Rebecca Pickford. Her naivete, and a crazy man like Bruce Abbott.

Now we had Abbott dead. As I drove to the location of the body, I wondered how this death was going to relate to the death of Rebecca Pickford.

This city I call home and work in is a sprawling burg sitting between two rivers in the middle of the wide-open rolling plains. Go forty miles in any direction from the center of the city and you'll find yourself in the middle of wheat fields. This town, when it was young, was a town which helped open the West. River boats came steaming up from the Mississippi when there still was a West, bringing Russian, German, and Swedish immigrants out to the plains to build farms and new lives. When the Civil War broke out the state was split down the middle with their loyalties. There still are places in this town where bullet holes can be found gouged into the tough red brick of the exterior walls where one side fought it out with the other.

It's a big city, with well over a million in population, if you include the surrounding suburbs and attached smaller cities in the metropolitan area. A city filled with tough people. Smart and independent people. They all come from immigrant stock, meaning they're fierce in keeping their freedoms and their privacy, but generally accepting the need for legitimate law and order.

There are no subways, damned little public transportation, and more space to expand than they will ever need. It took us almost forty minutes to find Vanier and 112th street. The traffic was heavy, the streets were slick, and people were not in a good mood. When we found the right building, I wasn't surprised to find the uniformed officers in a cranky, tight-lipped facsimile of trying to act like human beings. You get that way, in this town, when the weather is about to take a turn for the worse. As we walked into the apartment building which held the Abbott body, large fan-shaped snowflakes were beginning to fall and the air had that calm, heavy feel which held a promise it was going to snow for a long, long time.

Abbott's body was in the bathroom, and specifically, in the bathtub. He had a massive bruise just behind his right eye, but no other mark, and no blood, to indicate foul play. He was sitting half submerged in a tub of water, and as I walked into the bathroom to get a first look, I noticed the bar of soap was almost completely melted as it sat on the dead man's stomach.

Clothes were strung out across the sink basin and toilet. In the man's trousers we found his wallet. It had about forty dollars in bills in it and had not been touched. Neither had the pocket change in a right front pocket. Our first look at the apartment indicated to us no one murdered Abbott with the intent of robbing him. It seemed rather plain to us that someone entered the apartment with the intent on murdering Abbott and only on murdering Abbott. Whomever that someone was, they used a key to get into the apartment. There were no jimmy marks on any of the windows or the front door. Someone who was familiar with Abbott, and had a key to his apartment, entered and killed him outright.

“Roommates?” I asked the apartment building's landlord. It was his discovery of the body, and a rapid telephone call to the police, which had us here.

“None to my knowledge. Seems to me he was a loner, detective. He didn't have too many people come over to visit him, and come to think of it, he didn't leave his apartment very much. I never had any trouble from him.”

The building's manager was a small man dressed in blue trousers, a T-shirt, and a pair of rubber bathing thongs. He had no hair, except for the thick white mustache underneath a wide, bulbous nose, as two narrow little dots for eyes stared up at me from behind a thick pair of glasses. In his left ear was a hearing aid and he had the aroma of a man who smoked a pipe several times a day. I could smell the sweet, almost sickly, odor of pipe tobacco coming off him and I noticed the small little round burn holes in his T-shirt. Pipe smokers tend to try and burn themselves often when packing their pipe bowls.

“How about girlfriends? Any women come to see him?”

“Yes … hmmm … he did seem to like women, come to think of it. I remember at least two women who seemed to come over here on a regular basis.”

“Oh?” I muttered, lifting an eyebrow in surprise and glancing at Frank.

“Is this one of them?” Frank asked, pulling a 5 x 7 black and white morgue shot of Rebecca Pickford out from an inside coat pocket and handing it to the little man.

“No … I don't remember her. Say, you know, she looks as if she's sick.”

“Yeah,” nodded Frank, not able to resist the urge, and grinning like a smiling devil as he answered. “She's past the point of being sick. Let's just say she won 't be needing medical insurance anymore.”

The little man blinked a couple of times behind his thick, heavy looking glasses, then turned visibly pale before turning his eyes in my direction.

“She was found dead night before last. We had some indication that Abbott might have been her killer.”

“Oh.”

“When did you last see him alive?”

“This morning. Around seven, I guess. I took the trash out and I saw him come running up the street like someone was chasing him. He ran past me like he didn't see me.”

“Was anyone chasing him?” Frank asked, replacing the photo back into his inside coat pocket and looking at the little man with interest.

“I didn’t see anyone. But I didn't have my glasses on, either.”

“How about the rest of the day?” I asked, frowning. “See any strangers come in? Hear any unusual noises?”

“I couldn't say. I go to work at 8:30 a.m. down at the bakery. I work only a few hours in the morning to help out on the bills. I didn't hear or see anything after I got home at around noon time.”

“Who lives on either side of Abbott?” Frank asked, pulling out a spiral notebook and a pen to take notes.

“In 13B is a retired librarian. She's limited to a wheelchair, so she doesn't go out much. Hard of hearing, too. Worse than I am. In 15B is a young couple who work crazy shifts. Sometimes the man is working days. Sometimes at night. I really don't know what he does, but they pay their bills and don't give me any trouble. The wife is a nurse, that I do know. She works crazy hours too.”

“Were they in their apartments this morning?”

“Mrs. Hatch, that's the librarian, would have been home. The Roberts, I dunno. Maybe.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said, handing him a card and smiling, “We might want to talk to you again. And if you think of anything, you can get us at that number on the card.”

He nodded, took the card, and disappeared behind his apartment door. We trudged back up the flight of stairs to Abbott's apartment and began systematically searching the place, while the lab boys dusted and took rolls of photos. The only thing of interest we found was in one lower drawer of a bedroom dresser. In it we found a woman's see-through nightgown, a couple pairs of see-through women's underwear, and a pull away bra. Holding the rather ample bra up with a pencil, Frank looked at me and grinned wickedly, then whistled softly in admiration.

“I have a whole new opinion about our friend, Abbott. His choice of women was, shall we say, catholic in tastes.”

“Whatever it was,” I went on, coming closer to the uplifted bra and looking at it, still frowning. “This doesn’t belong to Pickford. She didn't have enough to fill one cup, much less both.”

“Yeah, that makes it interesting,” nodded Frank, frowning and looking at the bra in front of him. “Wow, whoever this is, I want to meet her.”

“You probably will,” I nodded, rubbing my aching eyes with a hand, and trying not to yawn. “Why don't you go talk to the librarian and hear what she has to say, and I'll go see if the married couple are home.”

“Right.” Frank nodded, dropping the bra back into the drawer and closing it before disappearing out of the bedroom.

I started to follow him out, but the assistant coroner, a young kid by the name of Joe Weiser, came in chewing a big wad of bubble gum and looking over his notes scribbled on a green secretary's spiral note pad.

“Turn, I'd say the guy's been dead for no more than two hours. Someone with a lot of muscle popped him in the side of the head with something blunt. Took just one blow to do it. Crushed in his temple like it was tissue paper.”

“Blunt.” I repeated, thinking it over. “Heavy and blunt. Think a woman could have killed him?”

Joe stopped chewing his gum for a moment, looked at me for a few seconds thoughtfully, then glanced at his notes before shrugging and quickly blowing a bubble with his gum and popping it.

“Maybe. But she'd have to be built like an Amazon. And be damned strong. The guy in there is not a big guy. I'd say maybe one fifty, one sixty at most. I wouldn't classify him as being macho. He wasn’t an athlete. His muscles haven't had a good workout in years. Yes, maybe a woman could have written his ticket for him.”

I nodded and said thanks. Joe grinned, saluted me with the eraser of a pencil and left the bedroom. I wanted to look at the body again, check out the dead man's clothes, but my eyelids were getting to feel like lead weights, and I still had to interview the young married couple.

I got lucky. They left a small note on their front door saying they were on vacation. They left last week and were not due back until the end of the month.

Lucky for me, maybe stupid for them. Why leave a note on your front door advertising to everyone you were not at home? It seemed like an invitation to find your apartment stripped down to the bare walls when you came home. God, I wanted to sleep for the next ten hours. But there were too many dead bodies and not enough cops around to soothe the hurt and stop the mayhem.

Book Details

AUTHOR NAME: B.R. Stateham

BOOK TITLE: Murderous Passions (Turner Hahn And Frank Morales Crime Mysteries Book 1)

GENRE: Crime & Mystery

PAGE COUNT: 226

IN THE BLOG: Best Hard-Boiled Detective Novels