Love Can Be Murder

Night

    a short mystery
    by
    Stephanie Bond

    Nothing good happens after midnight...

    Bump in the Night

    DON’T ASK ME WHY I let my ex-boyfriend in at 2:00 a.m. I knew better. But he woke me from a dead sleep pounding on my apartment door, yelling like Marlon Brando. With a groan I realized he’d used my code to get into the building. I guess I should’ve been glad he hadn’t used the key I’d given him a long time ago and simply walked in.
    Two of my neighbors—Mr. McFelty and Mrs. Bingham—had stuck their heads out in the hall bellowing for him to shut the bleep up. He had returned with a bleepity-bleep of his own. When the obscenities escalated to the point of insulting ancestry, I peeled my eye from the peephole that rendered Daniel Hale’s face bulbous (but still handsome, god bleep it) and unlocked the deadbolt.
    “Daniel, it’s late and I have to be at the office early,” I said through a crack. “What are you doing here?”
    My neighbors shouted parting expletives and slammed their doors.
    Daniel, looking lethal in a rumpled tuxedo, gave me one of those heart-bending smiles that used to make my underwear fly off. “I was missing you, Renni.”
    That’s me, Renni Greenfield, dressed in pajamas with penguins on them, my sexuality having been shelved for months. “Daniel, you need to go home.”
    “I’m drunk,” he slurred. “You don’t want me to kill myself or someone else driving home, do you?”
    “No.”
    “Then let me spend the night. I’ll crash on the couch and be gone before you wake up. Please?”
    I sighed, my resolve crumbling like the wall of a gingerbread house. I hated Daniel for cheating on me with Leora the legs-for-days paralegal in our office, but I truly didn’t want to see his Jag accordianed into a Peachtree Street telephone pole on the morning news while Atlanta commuters honked at the delay of extracting his body. And even though I wouldn’t have minded inheriting one or two of his big-money clients, I knew I couldn’t handle the extra workload I’d get if something happened to the cad.
    So…I let him in and diverted him from my bedroom, reminding him of the way to the couch. He pouted, but staggered toward my tiny living room, shedding clothes along the way. By the time I fetched linens from the bathroom, he was naked and sprawled on my sofa. Then he curled his hand around my wrist and before I knew it, I was naked, too.
    I reasoned he owed me an orgasm or three.
    Unlike most men, Daniel’s performance seemed to improve under the influence of alcohol, but afterward he was asleep instantly. It made for an awkward dismount, but I managed. He was too far gone to move, and curling up next to him in the five inches left on the couch was unappealing, so I simply went back to my bed and fell into an exhausted sleep, postponing regret until morning.
    When my alarm went off at 6:30 a.m., I hit the snooze button twice. I hadn’t heard Daniel leave, but then I was a notoriously sound sleeper. I dragged myself out of bed and headed toward the kitchen in pursuit of coffee. When I rounded the corner and saw Daniel’s arm hanging over the edge of the couch, I frowned—so much for his being gone by the time I woke up.
    Then I saw the bloody knife sticking out of his bare chest.
    It wasn’t the kind of “gone” I’d expected.

    ***

    FORGET LAW SCHOOL. I’d learned from TV trials that guilt or innocence was usually decided by the jury on the basis of the 911 call, which, of course, would be taped. So when I called, I spared no emotion—not a stretch because I was only a couple of short breaths away from full-blown hysteria. When the operator asked if the stabbed man on my couch was dead, I assured her he was. When she asked if I knew who’d stabbed him, I said no. When she asked whose residence it was, I said mine. When she asked if an intruder could still be there, I panicked.
    Why hadn’t I thought of that?
    “I don’t know. I didn’t look.” And at the moment I was riveted to my penguin P.J.’s lying in the floor next to the couch, spattered with Daniel’s blood in an arterial pattern. I glanced toward the front door, which was closed, the deadbolt locked. While my mind raced for an explanation, my gaze bounced around the apartment to places where a murderer might be hiding. Under the desk, in the pantry, in the shower.
    “I don’t see anyone,” I said into the phone.
    “Is there somewhere safe you can go until the police arrive? Maybe to a