Act of God

burning somewhere. From the bathroom area came a deep female voice, “All right, Honey-bun, where’d you hide my panties, you little—” The husky woman who appeared in front of me was just throwing her head back to get the wet hair out of her eyes. She was naked except for the unbuttoned flannel shirt Wickmire had been wearing the first time I’d been there. The shirt seemed to fit her.
    The woman said, “Oh great, just great,” but made no attempt to cover herself.

    “So now you know.”
    “Traci, it doesn’t matter.”
    “Sure.”
    Wickmire was sitting on her writing chair, the computer closed down and on the desk, as though she hadn’t been using it for a while. She’d changed into the torn jeans and a blouse. Her friend, first name “ Myra ,” was in the bedroom, maybe getting dressed.
    I said, “The police will be here pretty quickly. You know anybody else who’d have a key to Teagle’s apartment?”
    A shrug. “We don’t have a super. The management company, maybe, but by the time they get here, won’t the cops have broken down his door?”
    “Probably.”
    “Are you going to tell them?”
    “Tell them?”
    “The cops. About... Myra and me.”
    “I’m going to have to tell them that you and Teagle knew each other. Or know each other, if he isn’t who’s dead down there. Then the police will want to know a lot about you, including your whereabouts for the last day or two and who, if anybody, was with you.”
    “It’s not like I’m ashamed or anything.”
    I thought back to her faked flirting with me the first time I’d seen her and the relative absence of it the second time, as though she’d forgotten to maintain the pose when we went through Proft’s ransacked apartment.
    Wickmire said, “It’s just I like my... privacy.”
    “I’m going to have to tell them what I saw and heard here today, Traci. They’ll draw their own conclusions, but my advice, if you want it, is that you tell them the truth right off, because they have a way of finding out later that’s usually not as pleasant.”
    She was about to say something else when her buzzer rang in three strident bursts.

    The patrol officers got there first, a single car followed by a sergeant/supervisor and a shotgun guard minus the shotgun. While the first cop and the guard secured the scene, meaning stood outside Teagle’s apartment, the sergeant burned up Wickmire’s phone wire with calls to every uniformed branch in creation. I suggested they just kick down the door, but the sergeant insisted on waiting for a fourteen-pound sledge from the Narcotics Unit, by which time Bonnie Cross and one of her two partners had arrived. The partner examined Teagle’s door, asking about outside windows, then reared back and kicked it in anyway. After that, the uniformed sergeant said he was going outside to assist in crowd control around all the official vehicles.
    You couldn’t blame him. As the door gave way it whipped inward, then hit its hinges and swung back, fanning a wicked volume of tainted air into our faces. Cross was ready with a hankie doused in air freshener, the rest of us making do with our hands. The younger of the two original uniforms said he had to leave, too.
    Cross said, “Cuddy, you stay outside the apartment.”
    “Fine with me.”
    She went in, stepping very carefully around the overturned everything on the floor. Pots and pans from the kitchenette, videos and their cassette boxes, but as with Proft’s Place, smaller items were untouched. The instrument cases had been unzipped and emptied, however, the guitar off its stand near the wood stove and Rush Teagle’s body.
    Cross said, “It’s cool enough in here, he could have been done a while ago.”
    Teagle lay on his right side, drawn slightly into a fetal position. His hands were crabbed, the rictus also pulling his lips away from his teeth in a ghastly, uneven grin. The left eye was open, and, from where I stood, the right eye was, too, but they weren’t working together anymore. You couldn’t miss the wound, hair matted and scalp tom and the left ear nearly ripped off. What I expected would prove to be the murder weapon was lying a few feet from him, and Cross moved toward it.
    She started to stoop, then caught herself. “Just what we needed.”
    Even from the doorway, you could see the hair and gore on the business end of the poker from Rush Teagle’s wood stove.

    I waited downstairs with Cross until the M.E. pronounced the body and the lab