He was just beginning to close his eyes to her muffled groans when light burst into the room.
"Abby baby, you purrin' like a ol' lioness ain't too tired…" The man coming out of the lighted bathroom caught a glimpse of the huge thick back bent over the woman he had just recently started calling his girlfriend and yelped "What the hell?…"
The speed of Eddie's left hand swapped its hold from the woman to the old man's throat before another syllable could be uttered. The man's eyes went big. Eddie's right palm remained on the pillow and the light from the doorway caught all three of them in an ugly instant of time.
Just as the old man started kicking Eddie tightened his grip, feeling the soft flesh and then crushing the bony windpipe under his thumb. He spread the fingers of his other hand and kept the pocket of his huge palm over the mouth of the other. And he silently held the pose, watching the man's face go from red to dusty blue in the light of the new master bathroom. Eddie was a patient man and did not move until he was sure that the lives in both of his hands were gone.
15
I was upriver on a rare morning paddle when the cell phone chirped from my bag in the bow of the canoe. I'd been up with the sun. Found it impossible to read and was actually pacing the wood floor of the shack when I decided to grind out a trip to the headwaters. The water had been high and the morning light spackled the ferns and pond apple leaves that crowded the edges. The river twisted and folded back in on itself and if you stopped moving, the deep quiet and moist greenness could sweep even an unimaginative mind back several millenniums. In the morning light I'd seen several glowing white moonflowers nestled in a small protected bog, and I knew that back in a thicket at the end of one offshoot stream were a half dozen undisturbed orchids. By luck no one had found them. But like a hundred years ago, when exploiters of the delicate flowers had plucked them from the dark hammocks of the Everglades until they were nearly extinct, there was little optimism that these few would remain hidden.
I'd spent more than an hour plowing up past Workman's Dam and on to the culvert where Everglades water from the L131 Canal poured into the river to give it an extra flow. I had pulled the canoe up onto the grass bank and was on top of the levee looking out over acre upon acre of brown-green sawgrass. The view extended to the horizon like unbroken fields of Kansas wheat. The only break was a dark clump far in the distance that looked like bush but was actually a hammock of sixty-foot-tall pine, and mahogany and crepe myrtle rooted in high ground in the river of grass.
The bleating of the cell phone in my canoe spoiled the quiet. I loped down the bank to answer it and Richards was on the line.
"Hey. Nice to hear your voice on such a great morning," I said, sounding too chipper.
The silence on the other end dampened my enthusiasm.
"I don't know how the hell you do it, Freeman," she said. "But you've got one special nose for trouble."
I was back in the world, outside another low-slung home on the northwest side. The address Richards gave me wasn't hard to find. Three patrol cars and a crime scene truck were still parked at haphazard angles in front. A black, unmarked Chevy Suburban was backed into the driveway.
The uniformed cops were on the front lawn keeping a small gathering of people back. A black officer with a bald, shiny scalp was bristled up in front of a group of three black men. All their voices, even the cop's, were ratcheted up to a high pitch.
"What you mean they investigatin'?" said one. "Shit, they ain't done no damn investigatin' the last time. Hell, they ain't investigated nothin' on this side of town, an' you know that's true."
The cop had his hands spread out in front of him, as though the paleness of his palms facing the group would settle them.
"I know. I know. I hear you," the cop was saying. "But you got to change some things from the inside, fellas. You know what I'm sayin'."
I asked one of the other officers for Richards and as I was led up to the front door the knot of men shut down their conversation and watched me. They were the same three I had seen at Ms. Greenwood's mother's home.
"Comin' through," someone in the doorway said, and I turned as a black vinyl body bag was taken out on a wheeled stretcher. The eyes of the crowd followed it to the back doors of the Suburban. I followed the cop into the house.
No one was in the living room. A sectional couch sat against a wall of frosted mirrors. An expensive looking crystal clock was in open sight on an end table. Crime scene techs were working in the kitchen, spinning small fat brushes dipped in fingerprint powder along the window casements. Outside on the patio Richards was sitting at a table across from an elderly black woman who was chastising the detective as if she were a dull schoolgirl.
"Young lady, I have toll you and seven more of you all, no. I did not struggle. I took me a gasp of breath when I heard George go to chokin' and spittin' and I laid myself still. I didn't even breathe until that pilla eased up on my face and then I still didn't move. I knowed what was comin'. I didn't just come in from the fields young lady. I know what these mens want."
The woman looked at me when I reluctantly stepped out of the house. Her eyes stopped me. She'd seen too many men in her house in the last few hours. Richards turned and nodded at me and I took a step back and waited.
"So you just laid still and fooled him?" Richards asked, turning back to the woman.
"I don't know about fooled," she said. "Only one been made a fool is me. I stayed still. Left that pilla on my face and prayed to the Lord. Then I felt him put George down next to me. He covered him up like he was layin' him to rest and I guess he was.
"I heard him leave and I still laid there, not movin' a muscle, a dead man next to me. But I knows when to keep my head down, young lady. An' when to get up and holler and that wasn't no time for hollerin'."
The woman turned her head and looked down at the empty tabletop. A single tear formed at the corner of her eye and then rolled down her cheek and disappeared into the wrinkles of her face. For some reason, it seemed out of place to see an old person cry. My own mother had always hidden that aspect of her sorrow.
This woman was unashamed.
"When I was truly sure he was gone, I called y'all on nine-one- one," she said, still not looking up. "And I waited right on the bed, watchin' after George."
Richards let it go, touched the back of the old woman's hand and got up quietly. Back in the house she crossed her arms in front of her. I put my hands in my pockets.
"The first guys on the scene had to take down the front door to get in," she said. "Luckily, it was an experienced patrolman who checked the other doors and windows first and eyeballed everything. The place was tight. No signs of forced entry."
She must have seen the frown on my face. "You saw the burglar bars on the windows?"
"And the deadbolt and chain on the front door," I said.
"The utility room door leading to the carport is the only other entry not covered. The bolt was tight. Even the chain was hooked. But the crime scene guys studied the shit out of it this time," she said, and I could see her eyes taking on the grayer cast that came with either anger or challenge.
"The clips on the jalousie panes, four of them, had recently been bent out, and then back."
"Which means he put them back?"
"Carefully. Took his time. Had to figure both of them were dead and he had time to cover."
"Jesus."
I thought about Gary Heidnik in North Philly. Heidnik was a self-styled minister who'd been abducting mentally handicapped women for years and keeping them chained in his basement. When police finally discovered his "house of horrors," they found one woman still alive and body parts of another in his freezer. Each day his neighbors saw him. Each day he carefully locked up his house to go out. Each day, careful and meticulous like a business.