But I was alone.
At least, I was alone until the police arrived just three or four minutes after I’d entered Melinda’s bedroom.
Jeffrey hadn’t shut off the silent alarm, the bastard.
“Officers, officers!” I shouted as they burst into the bedroom. “I was just about to call you!”
They pressed around me, their automatic weapons pointed at my face, and shouted for me to show my hands and to lay spread-eagled on the floor, which I did. My training in security prepared me for such treatment; they were only taking proper precautions.
Still, I tried to explain: “The killer may still be in the house!” I shouted. One of them wrenched my arm behind my back to apply the cuffs. They weren’t interested in what I had to say, though one of them recited my Miranda rights. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong, guys! I work for Jeffrey, I’m private security!”
Somebody hit me hard with his elbow in the back of my head. My face hit the floor and I tasted blood.
Then he hit me again.
The next thing I knew I was in the back of a patrol car.
“Just shut up!” the driver said every time I tried to explain.
It was not until an hour later in the police interrogation room that I realized how completely I’d been set up. Should I have seen it coming? Maybe, but I possess a trusting nature. And Jeffrey is a formidable enemy, particularly when you don’t know he’s your enemy. The interrogator told me that “poor, distraught” Jeffrey had managed to communicate through his tears that he’d had no contact with me whatsoever since the day he fired me from the park. No phone calls, no meeting at Carl’s Jr., no private investigation.
He’d lined it all up: The videotaped testimony from my hearing at the park suggested I had a history of “stalking”; my subsequent firing suggested I had motive to get revenge on Jeffrey (by taking away the love of his life, just as he’d taken away the park from me); my reporter’s notebook, confiscated at the time of my arrest, indicated I’d been following Melinda for weeks, noting her every move; my interviews with some of her neighbors and so forth reinforced the idea that my attentions had been “obsessive”; my being in the house at roughly the time of her murder, and the broken lock on the front door... well, that seemed to speak for itself. Not good, any of it.
Obviously, Jeffrey killed her. Surely, you can see that. My part, as patsy, just made it a “perfect crime.”
But nobody wanted to hear that.
The staff at the Carl’s Jr. did not recall Jeffrey and me ever having eaten there, but why would they as it had been almost a month previous? The calls from Jeffrey to my home phone, the most recent of which had occurred the night before the murder, proved to have been placed from my own lost cell phone, which Jeffrey must have stolen from my apartment before initiating his plan.
My attorney advised me to cop a plea.
I told him to go to hell.
When the DA started rooting around in my past, things got no better. I still don’t know how they thought they’d ever locate Mandy in Bangkok. She doesn’t exactly work a desk in an office — besides, she’s probably going by another name these days. That’s how it works there. Just because immigration has no record of her ever exiting the U.S.A. doesn’t mean she didn’t go back, for God’s sake. There are a million ways for girls to get around bureaucrats! I’d never have hurt Mandy, however much she hurt me. And who’d have guessed that the student I took such an interest in during my last year of teaching was shortly thereafter murdered? My sixth sense alerted me to her need for special protection. I was right! Do I get no credit for that? If the school district hadn’t gotten in my way all those years ago, she might be alive today. Any inference now of my having killed her is ridiculous. Look, whose past wouldn’t reveal unseemly coincidences if put under a microscope? Yours? I doubt it.
Maybe I’ll cop a plea after all.
But let me ask you this: after all my years working in park security (which is a branch of law enforcement, after all), do you think I’m fool enough to commit a murder and leave every clue pointing to me? Of course not! Any true detective of the Sherlock Holmes ilk would understand that the vast number of details that seem to incriminate me, actually exonerate me! Besides, if I did kill poor Melinda, then much of this report is a pure fiction. Talk about fantasy-land! And knowing what you know about me, do you honestly believe I’m capable of making something like this up?
Dark Matter
by Martin J. Smith
Balboa Island
I should have left the minute I gave it to him, should have just tossed the eviction notice across the doorstep and onto the cracked tiles of the old mansion’s foyer. A smarter man would have hoofed right back to the Sentra and caught the car ferry off Balboa Island. Me? I stood there like the wideeyed fan I once was, rooted to the front steps of his formerly grand palace at the island’s southern tip. I’d specifically asked for this delivery, just for the chance to meet somebody I once idolized. Now I was staring into the face of a faded nobody with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. When he answered my knock, he looked like someone peering up from the bottom of a well.
“Been ’specting you,” he said, slurring a bit.
“Wheels of justice don’t turn so fast, but now you’ve got the paperwork. Court order came down yesterday.”
I resisted the urge to apologize. I’d read everything ever written about him, including the entire bankruptcy file. He could only blame himself for this latest bit of unpleasantness. He’d never stopped living like the star he once was, even if the money ran out years ago. It showed. The fenders on the Porsche out front were rusted through and the canvas top was ripped in three places. The house was the choicest piece of real estate on this tony Newport Harbor refuge, but pretty run-down. His ex, the third, owned it now. The judge gave him twenty-four hours to vacate.
I looked at my watch. “Anyway, the sheriff’ll be here this time tomorrow morning.”
“Splendid.”
He cinched the belt of his robe, raised his highball glass, swirled the ice, and took a sip of something thick and amber — something completely wrong for 9:40 in the morning. His bony chest was unnaturally tan, almost orange, the hair on it white.
“Question for you, sir,” he said. “Know anythin ’bout dark matter?”
I’d seen my share of people in denial. I serve eviction notices for the Superior Court of Orange County, California. I am a $15.50-an-hour destroyer of worlds, the death messenger of the American Dream. Nothing surprises me — guys with guns, screeching women, unleashed dogs. It’s why I carry pepper spray in a little holster on my belt. But this, this was the worst of it. I’d just delivered a final curb stomp to somebody who’d once meant a lot to me, somebody who’d obviously given up. What was I thinking when I asked to handle this one?
“Dark. Matter,” he repeated, working hard to enunciate.
I knew all about his eccentricities. Guy was one of the kings of cock-rock when he was, like, nineteen. So big even a teen dork like me played his first album to death. He was white-hot after that first record, the swaggering lead singer of the ’70s band. Life was good. Spent millions on anything that moved — cars, horses, women. For years he kept exotic animals as house pets, and claimed some mystical connection to them — right up until Animal Control took them away after his panther killed a neighbor’s dog.