Her husband looked up from shaking Fred’s paw. “Huh? Who’s moving?”
She ignored him and directed her answer to me. “Are you new to the neighborhood? I don’t think I’ve seen you before?” So much for being inconspicuous. Unless these two had a severe case of senility, they wouldn’t have any problem whatsoever picking us out of a police lineup.
“No. The wife wanted to browse one of those second-hand stores on Colfax, and Fred needed some exercise.”
“Well, be careful, young man. I’d hate to see that beautiful dog get hurt. The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. There was a time we didn’t even lock our doors and knew all our neighbors. Now they come and go so quickly, we don’t even know half their names.”
“Like those kids who got killed down the street,” Bill cut in. Obviously, his hearing was selective, like my father’s used to be when he would tune out my mother’s nagging.
I tried to act shocked. “Two kids on this block were killed?”
“On the next block, but it wasn’t here they were murdered. Up in the mountains somewhere,” said his wife, who evidently realized I wasn’t a purse snatcher by now, as she no longer held onto hers with both hands.
“Cops all over the place,” Bill said before his wife could finish. “They went door to door asking all kinds of strange questions.”
Oh, how I wanted to ask what kind of questions. Luckily, I didn’t have to. “Yeah, like had we noticed any suspicious activity,” Bill’s wife said.
“Any activity on this block is suspicious,” Bill added before his wife had time to speak again. Like my own parents, these two must have been married forever. Either that or they were Siamese twins at one time, because they answered each other’s questions like they were joined at the hip.
“Well, they were wasting their time, and that’s exactly what I told the detective,” the wife continued. “I told him it had to be somebody like that lady Mr. Renfield says did it because Shelia killed her daughter.”
“Now, June, we don’t know that. How could someone our age dump those kids in a mine?”
The wife, I now knew as June, gave her husband a look before continuing, the kind of look my sister used to give when she knew something I didn’t. “She had an accomplice, that’s how. Mary at the beauty parlor says she’s been hanging out with a younger man who must have helped her. And Mary should know. Her son is a Jeffco deputy.”
My eyes must have come close to popping out of their sockets. I prayed my blood pressure didn’t complete my exposé by making my face red, too.
“This young man doesn’t want to hear your beauty shop gossip.”
Oh, but I did. I almost said so when her cell phone went off. She pulled out an ancient phone from her purse and flipped it open. I bit my tongue, waved goodbye, and left before I said something to incriminate myself.
***
My blood pressure was back to normal once Fred and I were within sight of the kids’ house. I stopped to let Fred sniff a telephone pole between the street and sidewalk. I casually looked back up the street in time to see the couple turn the corner onto Colfax.
Fred spotted a stick on the grass and nearly pulled me off my feet when he jerked the leash to get the stick. That’s when my plan came together. All I had to do was let Fred off his leash and pretend to play fetch. I’d throw the stick up the kids’ driveway and follow Fred so I could check for oil leaks. It should look innocent enough to any nosy neighbors who might be watching as they’d think it was a badly aimed throw.
Unfortunately, my toss was way off. Instead of the stick landing in the driveway, it sailed over a short, chain-link fence, separating the drive from the backyard. Like the rest of the house, repairs were long overdue. The gate to the yard had been torn off and lying on the ground, so Fred ran past the spot I wanted to examine and into the yard when he went after the stick. He didn’t seem to care that he was trespassing.
Pretending to tie my shoe, I stopped short of the fence, and kneeled down. Sure enough, there was a puddle of fresh, red oil less than a foot ahead of the darker spots left by the engine.
“Come on Fred. Get out of there,” I called out, now that I found what we had come for. He ignored me and began rolling around on the ground.
“Get your butt over here right now!” This time I said it loud enough that the next door neighbor peeked out between her broken Venetian blinds.
Fred picked a great time to let his instincts take control. I knew there was either a dead animal or something that came out the rear of one. He could be totally disgusting when he wanted. I made a display of showing his leash, for the benefit of the neighbor, and went in the backyard to get him. That’s when I saw he wasn’t the creature I’d accused him of being. It wasn’t a dead animal or some by-product of one. Fred had the evidence Bonnie and I needed to avoid lethal injection.
He found a plastic garbage bag that had been torn open by a scavenger. The rotting garbage must have been irresistible to Fred. Rolling in foul-smelling feces might have been great to cover his ancestor’s scent when hunting, but the only animal Fred hunted was a squirrel he couldn’t catch, no matter how bad he smelled.
Instead of scolding him, I ended up giving him praise when I saw the green tee-shirt with a Marine Corp label and the name, Appleton, printed on it. It looked like it had been used to wipe up blood. I no sooner picked it up when Bonnie’s manicure kit fell out. It had been wrapped up in the bloody shirt. At least I assumed it was hers. I noticed the initials, BMJ, printed in gold cursive on the case when I opened it. Inside the case were a small pair of scissors, a couple nail clippers, a tweezer, and some other tools I didn’t recognize. It looked like everything a woman would need to trim her fingernails, except for a file.
***
Fred and I hadn’t gone a block on our way back to my Jeep when I saw the neighbor who had been watching us, leave her house and knock on Renfield’s door. It was time to start jogging. My mind screamed, run, but that would really make me look guilty, so I pretended I was giving my dog some exercise with a leisurely jog.
No one seemed to be following us, so when we got to Colfax I stopped jogging to catch my breath. Only then did I realize my charade had backfired when I saw several people waiting at a bus stop watching us. I realized no serious jogger in his right mind would be caught running in long Levis and hiking boots. The onlookers were probably wondering what I was running from. I prayed their bus would show up before the police did.
Fortunately, we only had another two blocks to go before we could get in our Jeep, and be out of there before Renfield or the police came looking for us. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. I spotted a Lakewood police car blocking my Jeep once we passed the bus stop. The officer was standing by my car saying something into his portable radio.
I turned up Pierce Street and kept walking past the parking lot. I couldn’t believe Renfield had called the cops already. How had he known what I was driving?
We stopped once we were out of sight behind the Dollar Store, hoping no one at the bus stop had seen me park the car half an hour ago. I wasn’t too worried about the street people. Most of them probably had warrants of their own and wouldn’t want anything to do with the police. Other than the bus people, my fear was that a customer, or staff member in one of the stores, would recognize me or Fred. They might deem it their civic duty to tell the cop they had just seen me walk by.
I waited a few minutes then peeked around the building. The cop was placing a ticket on the car next to my Jeep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I’ll bet you were ready to wet your pants, Jake.” Bonnie said when I told her about the Lakewood police officer the next morning. We were sitting on her deck drinking coffee, or I should say, I was drinking coffee. I had slept in and Bonnie already had her quota for the day, but insisted on making coffee, even though she didn’t want any more, and Fred preferred water.