The Perfect Witness

 

The Perfect Witness

by Edward Newton

 

Mrs. Morrison had so much to do.

Almost eighty-five, her time was nearly up. Didn’t she feel those palpitations pinch now and then, right where her heart thudded weakly? Sometimes she swooned just shuffling from her living room to the porch. Lately, she could be crocheting in the morning and she would just fall asleep, wake up in the afternoon. Yes, her number was almost up.

However, Mrs. Morrison had one or two more tapestries to complete. She wasn’t done yet. There was a little more work to be done.

 

* * * *

 

Detective Clay Thorne arrived at 604 Parker Street a day after they found the body. Caution tape sealed off the front door of the modest two-story home. Someone had left flowers on the porch in memoriam—yellow, coordinating with the caution tape. The neighborhood police waited for him, their black-and-white cruiser parked in the driveway. The red and blue lights flashed even though any emergency had long since passed. Cops in the quiet parts of the city often took any opportunity to show off. Clay figured the two officers experienced rare occasionsto otherwise use the lights in this sleepy suburb. The old cop might’ve been on the force since the days this job was a calling rather than a career. His partner was a woman a third of his age. And less than half his weight.

“Officer Pudmack,” the female cop introduced as Clay approached the pair. 

Clay shook her hand. Pretty but forgettable, thin but shapeless, well-spoken with nothing important to say. 

“This is Office Lawrence,” she said, indicating the looming shape behind her. 

Lawrence was on the case. The Mystery of the Missing Doughnut.

Clay Thorne was a detective from the inner city. Murder in his district occurred as regularly as the setting sun. Out here in the little communities, something like this happened only once in a generation. People didn’t get shot down in their backyard in the burbs.

Officer Pudmack’s uniform was frayed and faded, evidence of a police district with little budget for law enforcement. Yet she kept the outfit pressed and clean, indicating the care of a professional who had pride in her job. Pudmack carried her sidearm prominently on her bony hip, jutting out in a leather holster. Clay bet she’d never drawn it. Her badge was polished and proudly displayed on her right breast. 

Clay wore a dark gray overcoat. His badge was in his wallet. His gun was strapped to his back. He might've been an insurance adjuster or a big city reporter. Clay Thorne was a big city cop. In the city, costumes and hats were fine if you worked as a security guard or you passed out speeding tickets. No self-respecting homicide detective showed up on the scene in a uniform.

“This way,” said Officer Pudmack. 

Clay followed her around a pale greenhouse. More caution tape strung out along the fence around a yard, some on the gate, ribbon tied around the lone tree in the back plot. The stuff was everywhere, garland for some macabre homicide holiday. Apparently, they were compelled to use it up given the uncommon advent of its necessity.

The cops had used fluorescent orange spray paint on the lawn to mark off where they found the body. A pool of red the size and shape of a manhole cover puddled around thefluorescent orange head like some morbid thought bubble in a disturbing comic strip.

“We think the shot came from across there,” the officer said, pointing at the house over the back fence.

“Who lives there?” Clay asked. 

The back facade of the other house was immaculate. Perfect flowers in a window box, granite sculptures polished to a shine, pruned bushes arranged in picaresque dioramas. 

“Gregory Abel. Retired schoolteacher. He’s in Florida visiting his sister,” Officer Pudmack reported. “Maggie Schatz from across the street stops by once a day to get the mail, check the house.” 

The cop watched Clay, waiting for a comment. As a student awaits the teacher to give her the answer to a tough problem. Clay offered her none.

Clay walked over to Gregory Abel’s yard. He found a perfect spot along the fence where a gunman could have shot the victim. Clay peered at the wooden rail of the fence, the trimmed lawn around the pole, examined the branches of the willow tree hanging down. 

“You processed the area?” Clay asked.

“Jonathan Creeks from the County Medical Examiner’s office was out yesterday before we bagged the body,” the officer explained. “Pictures. Samples.”

“This case won’t be cracked by physical evidence,” Clay advised. “It isn’t so much a jigsaw puzzle as it’s a tale with some pages missing. You need to reconstruct the story. The killerisn’t some stranger sneaking into a random backyard to kill a suburban nobody. No broken latches, no crushed foliage, no signs of a rampage. The crime was deliberate. It’s a local, I’llguarantee you. I could spend a week here interviewing neighbors, watching routines, trying to recognize connections . . . but I’m only here for the afternoon.”

The victim was Anthony Crispman. His yard was less tidy than his neighbor’s. A row of cages lined one wall of the house. Inside were water dishes, food trays, straw piled in the corners for bedding. There was still water in the dishes, fresh lettuce in the trays. 

“Rabbit cages,” Officer Lawrence pointed out in a higher voice than his age and girth had suggested. “They’re empty.”

Obviously. Clay glanced at the big policeman with a raised eyebrow. What next, would the cop examine water for wetness or declare the sun was hot?

“Yes, I see,” Clay said, giving Officer Lawrence a withering glare. “Where did they go?”

“Why, Barney Loomis took ‘em,” the officer answered, as if Clay knew everyone in the neighborhood.

“Then let’s go talk to Barney Loomis,” Clay, turning his back on the oafish cop.

Officer Pudmack led Clay around the house back to the street out front. 

The neighborhood was practically deserted mid-afternoon on a weekday. Few cars parked along the narrow street. Someone had been murdered yesterday, but the suburban citizens refused to let it ruin their day. So unaccustomed to unexpected violence, they didn’t know how to react. The lack of caution was concerning. They just continued with their day, refusing to alter the routine. A stay-at-home mother watered the lawn two houses down, a toddler dancing in the spray. A man in his forties worked under the hood of a van parked in the driveway. Across the street, an old woman sat on her porch in a rocking chair, stitching something in her lap. 

“Who’s that?” Clay asked, nodding toward the old woman.

“That’s Odette Morrison. She’s lived here since this part of town was just a bank and a church. She sits on her porch whenever the weather's favorable. Takes her pup for a walk every afternoon.”

“Did you talk to her?” Clay inquired.

“Mr. Crispman was shot late last night,” the officer answered. “She couldn’t have seen anything.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” Clay replied. 

They came to the path that led to Barney Loomis’s place. 

“Will he be home?” Clay asked.

Burned by her last incorrect answer, Officer Pudmack paused a beat before giving her a response. “He should be. He works out of his home. He’s a caretaker.” The officer didn’t want to get another answer wrong. “Of animals.” 

Obviously. The smell of wet animals and peculiar man accosted them when the front door opened. Barney Loomis had an appearance as alike a ferret as any human. His nose was as pointed as the tip of a party hat, eyes as black as oil, his head bobbing and darting like a curious varmint. He glanced at Clay first and then turned to Officer Pudmack. 

“You comin’ about Crispman’s rabbits?” he asked in a weaselly voice. “They’re safe enough right here. A rabbit knows when they’re amongst friends.”

Clay raised an eyebrow. He’d let Officer Pudmack handle this one. He was busy concentrating on breathing through his mouth. 

“Can we see the rabbits, Mister Loomis?” Pudmack asked. 

Clay shook his head. A cop on a murder investigation didn’t ask for anything. She shoulddemand to see the evidence.

The man squinted his dark vermin eyes. “You don’t trust me, Officer?” he sneered. “I’lltake better care of those rabbits than Tony Crispman ever did.”

“What does that mean?” Clay instantly shot. 

He hadn’t wanted to talk to the strange fellow, but he didn’t trust Officer Pudmack to ask the follow-up question. She made statements when she ought to be making inquiries, and asked questions when she should be declaring her intentions.

Barney Loomis swung his fidgety head Clay’s way. His lipped curled, as if he wanted to snarl but still had a tenuous enough grip on his humanity to stifle it. He moved his dark glare back to the officer. Barney would only talk to her. But he did answer Clay’s question. 

“Some folk are meant to be friends to the critters. Some folk aren’t,” Barney Loomis stated. “I am. Crispman weren’t.” 

His eyes darted to Clay and then settled back on Pudmack. His head twitched worse than a nervous parakeet. Barney Loomis stepped out of the house, leading the two investigators around the back of the house.

Barney Loomis had his own little zoo. Species of all sorts walked free in a large pen. A calf, an alpaca, a goat, a donkey, cats, chickens, rabbits, ferrets, a Saint Bernard big enough to break Barney in two, and a bird even bigger than the Bernard. Clucking, clattering, cawing chaos. Clay had been born and raised in the city and had never regretted it. Now, experiencing the irritating cacophony, he was glad for it.

Barney snarled this time as he opened the gate. “Don’t. Touch. Anyone.”

Did he just call all these animals “anyone”? 

“Is that an ostrich?” Clay asked. 

“It’s an emu, you jackass.” Barney seethed.

“I’m the jackass?” Clay asked. He pointed at the donkey. “Then what’s that?”

Barney stopped. He glared at the big city detective as if he thought he could intimidate Clay with his ferret eyes. He pointed at an acrylic container to his right that contained a whole family of bunnies. 

“I put Crispman’s rabbits in with the others. They enjoy it in there, all together,” Barney said. “But I can separate them if you need.”

Officer Pudmack checked with Clay. Clay just shrugged. He didn’t know what good taking a bunch of bunnies back with him to the big city would do. 

“Not today, Mr. Loomis. If things change, we’ll let you know,” said Pudmack.

They turned and headed back around the house. Clay was glad to get away without being attacked by an alpaca.

“Any ideas?” Officer Pudmack asked as they walked back to their cars. “We’ve got a file. We talked to some folk yesterday: neighbors, friends, relatives. I can show you the notes. Maybe you could stay the night nearby and go over some of it. Poke around. See if anything strikes your eye.”

Clay gazed sideways at her as he finally caught her drift. The small-town girl flirting with the big city boy. A tale as old as neighbor killing neighbor. Clay’s taste in women consisted of just one person: his wife. Officer Pudmack was barking up the wrong trunk. This tree already had a ring on it.

The old woman on the porch was still rocking in her chair. Odette Morrison’s hands worked at the crochet in her lap. She watched the two cops stroll down the walk, a knowing look in her wrinkled eyes. 

“Go on ahead,” he told Officer Pudmack. “I’ll meet you at the station.”

Clay crossed the street and went up the walkway to Odette Morrison’s house. 

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he said, stopping at the foot of the steps leading up to the grand front porch. “I’m Clay Thorne. I’m a detective from the city. Here to help out this afternoon.”

Odette Morrison never took her eyes off her project in her lap. 

“Those two need all the help they can get, Detective,” she opined.

She wore a plain dress, rocking on a drab porch, speaking in a monotone drawl. But the needles in her nimble fingers worked as diligently as a mother sparrow making a nest. Clay marveled at the mysterious magic in the hands of a creature who seemed so simple and plain. Her fingers were busy, busy, busy.

She knitted something with the practice of a master tradesman. Clay’s grandfather had been a carpenter, and he would oftentimes sit on the back stoop of his home outside the city, whittling away at some twig or block. He turned a shape out of them. Something from nothing. Odette Morrison’s fingers played across the material like a true artist, drawing beauty out of thin air. 

“Quite the talent,” he complimented.

“Quite the craft,” Mrs. Morrison corrected. “If it were just talent, I’d have been as good when I was twenty. I wasn’t.” She peered over the half-moon glasses perched at the end of her nose. “Are you going to come up here, then? You wouldn’t have an old lady shouting across half the neighborhood, would you?”

Clay nodded. He came up the steps. He didn’t wait for her to offer him a seat on the second chair. He sat down. There was a small table between them. She rocked back and forth, still stitching, not still at all. But there was grace to each movement, a fluidity just the opposite of Barney Loomis’s ferrety jerking.

Her porch overlooked most of the block, from farther down than the Loomis place to half a block up the street the other way. Clay could see Officer Pudmack leaning against her vehicle alongside Officer Lawrence in front of the Crispman house. The whole neighborhood was laid out from Odette Morrison’s perch on her porch.

“You can see a lot from here,” Clay observed. 

“Depends on what you’re looking for,” she answered, concentrating on her working hands, not paying much attention to Clay. Clay in turn watched the rest of the world instead of Odette. “What are you looking for, Detective? You looking for the what? Or the who?”

Clay shrugged. “I don’t know what’s what around here. And I don’t know Nick from Nora around these parts. This small suburb might as well be the middle of the Congo for all I understand of this world. I don’t understand the language or the customs. I don’t much care what, or who. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

Two houses down from Anthony Crispman’s house, a middle-aged woman started pruning the shrubs along her front walk.

Far down the way, a younger man crawled around on the top of a house in a uniform, surveying the roof for loose shingles.

A dog dragging a leash trotted from the west, jogging down the street along the gutter, passed where Clay and Odette sat not looking at each other, then disappeared into the east.

A teenage girl puttered down Parker Street in a rundown Subaru. She stopped at the house directly across from where Clay sat with the elderly woman. The home was a perfect canary yellow with a Rockwellian picket fence around the flowerbeds and a great oak tree standing sentry in the front yard. The teen was blonde and pretty, but it was the fleeting beauty of youth. She was the kind of girl who would end up with a backside the size of the Subaru’s trunk and a spare tire around her hips. She would become a young woman in a rundown body.

Odette stitched. Clay watched her for a while. Thread and needle working furiously at the tapestry in her lap. 

“May I?” he asked.

She didn’t gaze up at him, but she knew what he was talking about. There was only one thing he could be talking about. 

Obviously. 

“It isn’t done yet,” she told him. 

She held it up anyway. The scene was eerily familiar. A man laid out on a field of green. Red stitching pooled around his head. He was surrounded by white little figures. Bunnies, Clay realized. Odette Morrison had crocheted a memorial to Anthony Crispman.

“Coming along right quick,” Clay said. It was different from simply leaving yellow flowers at the doorstep to his house, but everyone dealt with unexpected tragedy in their way. “Did you know him well?”

“No more or less than anyone knows anyone in a neighborhood like this,” the old woman replied. “This is my way of paying respects. The old folks got to keep some sort of history in the fast world. The younger generations move on too quickly. New games, new television programs, new lovers, new jobs. New neighbors. You forget the old ones. The ones that were before. Don’t want folks to be forgotten, Detective.”

Like Clay said, he didn’t understand the language or the customs of a small town. “Noble enough,” he told her. 

And very strange, he wanted to add. Crocheted tombstones.

“Care for a cup of coffee, Detective?” Odette asked, changing the drift of the conversation.

“Love one,” Clay replied. 

This old woman who could see the whole neighborhood might know something important. She was the keeper of the record, the living memory of the neighborhood.

“Good, so would I,” retorted the old woman. “Go fetch us a cup. Should be half a pot on the kitchen counter.”

Clay grinned at the old lady. Wasn’t she something else? 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, getting to his feet. 

He went into the house. It smelled like cheap vanilla air freshener and medicated menthol. Clay walked down a short hall where a few pieces of her crochet work were framed and hanging on the lavender walls. He smiled at the typical scene of an old woman in the twilight of her life. Then the amount of red in the tapestries caught his eye. The same red in the piece she worked over out on the porch. The same red thread that made up the blood of Anthony Crispman.

There were three framed in all. The first was a driveway. Someone parked a car across the sidewalk. A pink tricycle was upended on the lawn to the side of the back right fender. A wash of red was under between the back wheels of the automobile, under the rear bumper. 

The second featured a bloated man hanging out the front window of a pale blue house. The man was bluer than the siding. His tongue lolled from his mouth, as red as the blood in the Anthony Crispman memorial tapestry. 

The last tapestry featured the house across the street from Odette Morrison’s place. It was a striking representation of the canary yellow house and the white picket fence and the great oak tree. The crochet-work featured a lad impaled on the picket fence. Red stitching was not spared painting the ground around the scene.

It was the wall of death, a montage of morbidity. The way the eccentric old lady displayed it in her house just accentuated the fact that Clay Thorne was a long way from home. Old White women back in the inner city were socialite bitches working 24/7 to wreak havoc on their rich husband’s ingénue mistresses. He preferred deplorable to disturbing any day. Clay quickly moved past the crochet pastiche and poured two half-cups of black coffee. He hurried just as briskly back to the porch.

“Here you are, ma’am,” Clay offered, with no pretense of being perturbed. 

She set her work on the little table between their chairs. It was three-quarters done. Clay was no expert, but he estimated she’d already put many hours into the work of art. Busy, busy, busy.

“You must work fast,” Clay observed. “Almost done.”

The old woman took a sip of the black coffee. “Not much else to do around these parts,” she said.

Clay took a long draw from the cup. He was ready to get away. The old woman wasn’t quite right. The product of living in a place where your neighbors could hear every whisper and smell every bad thing you ever did. 

“This kind of thing ever happen before?” Clay inquired.

Odette still didn’t turn Clay’s direction. She stared at the steam rising off the surface of her coffee. 

“No one has ever got shot in their backyard if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It isn’t,” Clay replied. “I’m talking about the other works you have in the house, down the hall. Are those more examples of paying respects? More neighbors that ought not to get forgotten?”

Odette did look at him. Finally. And in those eyes, Clay saw she knew things. In a social media world, people shared everything they did. Every meal or thought or inclination was posted somewhere, shared everywhere. Clay realized everything that was wrong with a world where everyone knew what you did from breakfast to bedtime, where you went on vacation, when you got home from the bar, who you came home with. The ravaged life of your business being everyone else’s. But Odette Morrison didn’t troll social media. She spied the old-fashioned way.

“Yes, they are. Neighbors gone. Acquaintances lost,” Odette confessed. “For most folks in this town, they are friends already forgotten.”

So Anthony Crispman was only the most recent death. 

“How long have you been making these?” Clay asked, studying at the representation of the homicide scene on the table beside him with morbid fascination.

“Two years now,” Odette answered. “That was when little Mary Finch was run over by Lou Drubker. Poor little sprite. She was only three years old. A terrible accident.”

“And the others? The guy hanging out his window? And the kid impaled on the picket fence?” 

Clay was afraid to be in the neighborhood, suddenly. This sleepy suburban street apparently had the highest mortality rate in the nation.

“I know what you’re thinking, Detective Thorne,” Odette scolded. “They weren’t murders, I can tell you. Sylvester Wainscot died of poison. A misunderstanding. And the Vreddies kid, he died directly across the street. He fell out of the great oak tree and landed right on a picket, stabbed through. Terrible turn of events.”

This was a bad luck neighborhood. Clay suddenly worried the roof of Odette Morrison’s porch would cave in on them or a meteorite could fall from the heavens and annihilate him where he sat. He drained the last drop of coffee. 

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said to the old woman. “But I guess I best be heading back into the city. These kinds of things happen daily back home. We’d need an army crocheting to keep up with the tragedies where I come from.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Odette Morrison said.

He didn’t know if she meant the idea of honoring those fallen to acts of violence in the inner city would be nice, or if it was that all that tragedy sounded just fine to her. Clay didn’t ask her to explain. He just nodded a good day and went on his way.

Officer Pudmack still waited. She hadn’t yet figured out that she had a better chance of spending the night with Odette Morrison than Clay Thorne. 

“Say,” he started generically. “What can you tell me about the death of Mary Finch?”

“So sad,” Pudmack said. “Every morning ‘round nine o’clock, Barbara Finch sent her little daughter out to play in the yard while she watched her soap opera. Mary had started tricycling a few months before and was a maniac about it, tearing the same route back and forth between her driveway and the Drubkers, back and forth, back and forth. By nine o’clock, you see, everyone on Parker Street was on the road, commuting into the city. But anyone who knows anything about Lou Drubker knows that the man is a sucker for politics. So one morning he gets a call from some polling place, asking him this and that question about where he stands on anything from abortion to the death tax. He sits on the phone for an hour answering questions. By the time the pollster thanks him, he’s way late to the office. So he tears out the driveway like a bat out of hell, not noticing little Mary Finch until it’s too late.”

Jesus, Clay thought. 

“And Sylvester Wainscot?” he asked, feeling sick to his stomach.

“Syl had some kind of affliction kinda like kleptomania. He swiped people’s garbage. Everyone sorta knew it but paid it no mind. Like you remembered when you had to throw out an old pair of panties that you maybe didn’t want to see hanging from his tree a day later. So you wouldn’t put it toward the top of the heap when you put out your trash. He wouldn’t dig through the bins top to bottom, but he would skim off the top if he saw a teapot that might have a use or a dishtowel that maybe had a few more launderings left in it. It so happens that Margaret Kilby had trouble with blackbirds poking at her pies last summer. Like they used to do in the olden days, she’d put them on the ledge to cool. They’re prize pies, and this is her secret technique, she says. So when the blackbirds discovered her pies, she did what she had to do. She started putting out pies laced with arsenic. The blackbirds caught on quickly after a few started dying. One day, they didn’t touch the pies at all anymore. She threw her last arsenic pie in the trash and was content to start baking the real thing again. She swears she buried that poison pie at the bottom of the barrel, but Sylvester Wainscot managed to come up with it. Fannie McBennet found him the next morning hanging out his front window, tongue swelled up like a sausage, dead as a doornail.”

Clay didn’t want to know more, but he was a detective. It was his job to ask the next question.

“What about the Vreddies kid?”

“Jake Vreddies was seeing Anabeth Mints. The Mints live across the street from Odette Morrison. Jake would climb the great oak tree in their yard late at night and sneak into Anabeth’s room. One night, the branch broke, Jake fell, and the white picket fence was under him. The tree had some sort of infestation, the whole thing dead and rotting. They were supposed to cut it down months ago, right after the accident, but Anabeth won’t let them. She’s a little screwy now. Terrible accident. The kid was only seventeen years old.”

Clay was quiet for a minute. “Any other trees have the same disease?”

He could see Officer Pudmack frowning out of the corner of his eye. “No,” she said, not understanding why he’d asked the question. Clay wasn’t sure himself. There was something... He just couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Bad luck town,” Clay declared.

“Every life has bad luck and good luck,” she said.

But Clay wondered if maybe it wasn’t luck at all.

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

Odette Morrison sat rocking on her porch. She worked on a new tapestry. She had finished the memorial to Anthony Crispman late last night. It had taken her two weeks to crochet the work, contrary to the detective from yesterday thinking it had been done in just a day. Art didn’t just fall off of your fingers, her father used to say. You had to craft it. Obviously. Foolish big city Sherlocks. Anthony Crispman’s memorial joined the others on her wall in the hallway.

The neighborhood was alive. Patrick Evanrud came back to Parker Street from work early today. His wife was still out of town visiting her mother for the afternoon. But Mr. Evanruddidn’t walk into his own house. He snuck around to the back door of the house next to his, the residence of the widow Wainscot.

Anabeth Mints smoked pot up in her room. Barney Loomis paced his backyard, acting nervous, making the wild residents of his petting zoo agitated. Donald Ackerdale watched amarathon of old black-and-white sitcoms. Barbara Finch stared at her living room wall, waiting for God or her own hand to take her to the afterlife to find her little lost baby girl.

Odette watched it all as she rocked. She observed every sin, every crime, every dark moment of the human nature of the people up and down the block. It was her role in this little suburb to bear witness, to bear perfect witness. And to judge them on their sin.

It was so easy. She smiled softly as she stitched. A phone call asking about politics. A cupful of tree bugs tossed on a great oak tree on an evening walk with her dog. Digging an arsenic pie out from the bottom to the top of Margaret Kilby’s trashcan. A little note to Barney Loomis, animal lover, tattling that Anthony Crispman raised his rabbits not for pets, but pelts. So easy to push the button when the buttons were easy to see. So obvious.

Odette kept stitching. Busy, busy, busy. She selected red thread. She watched Patrick Evanrud sneak out of the backdoor of his neighbor’s two hours later. He had had dessert before his dinner. Odette Morrison threaded the needle. She started stitching. The new memorial was coming along. It was coming along just fine.

So much to do.

 

The End

But not for Detective Clay Thorne...

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