Storymania - Murder Seen by Jody Collier

Murder Seen
Jody Collier

MURDER SEEN

Jim had a gift for murder and it was a perfect day for it.

Yesterday’s sun took its last lick after never having shown all day. The rain was all it left. It was that sour kind of rain that leaves an oily feel on the air. It makes you sure you can smell your grandma’s chicken yard, even if it's a hundred miles away.

Della Rios always smells like that. It's worse when it rains. Today, the rain had greased the red tile slates and there was gumbo where the dust should have been. We had to go down that gumbo road in the rain because the old Murdaugh woman had called and there was a murder to be solved.

Jim loaded up the old NOBA camera and called for Blue and me to get in the truck. Damn, I hated that old camera. Jim found the old Mexican crafted antique on one of our trips south of the border while he was still in grad school. He never went anywhere now without it. The thing must have weighed 150 lbs. Jim dearly loved it.

It was built just like him, a solid block of steel, a wooden box for a head and long, gangly, tripod legs. One of the earliest cameras ever, it had been used to make tintype miniatures way before the turn of the century. I'd never understand why Jim had to have that camera, only that camera, every time he went on a case. He said the camera gave him the gift of duende.

I guess I loved Jim more than I could hate anything, but I probably hated his job even more than that. Yeah, I hated his job. I chalked it up to the Mexican part of him. I resented that Mayan ancestor of his that slept in the bed between us, even in the good times. "The old ones know things," he'd say. He swore up and down the "old ones" came to him and told him secrets.

Forensic science they call it. Jim was a photofiler, The Photofiler, the one who saw. What did he think that degree he earned in forensic science from the University of New Mexico was good for, nothing? Jim had a reputation. He had something special. Well, Mayan spirits, beans or science, it all smelled like death to me.

People at the lab in Della Rios gave Jim a lot of credit. He always solved the unsolvable. The camera was a big part of Jim and his work. Personally, I was pretty sure Ole Blue was the real gumshoe. That old dog had been with me and Jim so long we didn't know where Blue’s job stopped and Jim's started.

I don't know how Jim knew what he knew or how he saw what he saw. Maybe it was Old Blue, maybe it was the camera, or even the ancient ones. Hell, it may have even been me that had the gifts. After all, you don't sleep with a Latino, all his ancient ancestors and an old blue tick hound for ten years without making some pretty intuitive connections between passion and reason.

It was always like that between Jim and me. Ever since he touched my white, Irish face with those long, almond brown fingers. He stopped my heart. It wouldn't beat again until he gave the orders. I never let Jim take my picture with that damn old camera though. I figured he had all of me. I wouldn't have anything left for my own ancestors to live through if he took any more of my "me" away.

The bells down at the Diego mission were ringing eight and I knew Jim was ready to go. Old blue was layin' in the back of the truck, under a tarp, lickin' a flea bite and lookin' like he was ready for a picnic lunch. I wasn't feelin' quite so nonchalant. The old lady we were going to go see knew something and we, or I should say Jim and the camera, had to suck it out of her.

"You bet she knows something!" Folks around Della Rios had been trying to solve the disappearance and suspected murder of Festus Murdaugh since 1938. The old man had worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) after the depression and everyone figured he got rich off the backs of the local poor folks. They say he was buried with a ton of money and too many tattles to talk about.

It had long been the pastime of the little peanut brown farmer kids. They'd scare each other with tales of old Festus comin' in the night. He would crawl out of wherever the hell he hid himself to make them wet the bed. Without a doubt, Festus had grown bigger, more gallant and twice as fierce as he had been before he died. Now, he sure was a terror in the telling.

It seems ole Festus had gone on a raid south of the border in a big, shiny Coupe D'Ville. According to the legend, he had kidnapped a pretty little senorita. There was more to the story but, so far, only God, the ancestors, and she, knew the rest of it. They say Festus and the girl had a history of some sort, sordid or otherwise. It would be hard to know the truth about what the deal was between the two of them.

Anyway, they say he had gone and snatched the girl. Then, he came north of the border, by way of the dusty back roads, just ahead of a thunderous, wild-eyed pack of her brothers. They chased them north, jumped the Rio Grande and followed the trail of the Cadillac back to the Murdaugh spread. When they came up on the Murdaugh mansion, they burned it flat to the ground.

After the glow was gone, all that was left standing was the stone brick hulk known as Old North Tower. All these 60 plus years after that night, nobody ever saw Festus Murdaugh again. His little senorita turned to an old bag of dirt and still lived, or at least was kept, up there, in that old North Tower.

Now, the old lady had called for Jim. "Come down here boy," the caretaker said, "she wants to have her picture took!" This would be the telling then, the telling of Festus Murdaugh's long buried secrets.

I listened to the slap of the wipers and tried to keep the condensate cleaned off Jim’s side of the windshield as we headed off down the section line road. The gumbo mud sucked at the tires as Jim jerked the stick shift down into third gear and opened her up. "If I can just get that picture…"

That's the way Jim talked about that camera. He figured nothing could hide from his camera or his duende. There was something there in that old tower and in that old woman. There was something dank, covered with skin and hair and lies and blood and it could spill out all logical and cold, if Jim and the camera could only just get a picture of it.

We pulled up in front of the Murdaugh place, or what was left of it, Old North Tower. It was six flights of stone stairs, iron bars on brick windows, and no mercy. Jim grabbed the NOBA camera and I grabbed the bag. "Stay with the truck Blue." God knows I'd rather have stayed with Blue.

"Do not touch the walls." Shit, too late! There was algae and mold growing on there that couldn't be recognized by anybody in Jim's forensic lab as anything known to modern science. The Murdaugh woman may be alive or she may be dead but I could tell she was probably heavily leaning toward the latter. Anything existing up here on this fetid, stygian pile of rock and brick had to be something left over from a Darwinian experiment gone wrong.

There she sat. If she didn't look like Norman Bate’s mother, she sure as hell looked just like his great aunt. It's a good thing it was dark in there. I would have, and should have run. She was all covered in black Spanish lace and looked as dusty and dry as a pile of corn shucks in a tortilla factory. You wouldn't know she had a face if it hadn't been for the spark in her eye. One flinty look out of those black eyes could have set more than souls on fire. She looked just like murder in a chair to me.

She didn't say a word as Jim started setting up the camera. Did she know we were there? What did she care? She knew all there was to know about them, the dead ones, those old bones with muscle and blood all rotted away. What could she care now if others knew. One thing for sure, she knew what happened on that awful night, and she knew where Festus Murdaugh, with all his secrets, and maybe his money was buried.

That's probably why she was willing to sit for Jim. She knew the camera would tell the secrets she had buried deep in herself. Maybe, after all those years, she was afraid she had forgotten something and the camera would show it. If she didn’t tell, the secrets would rot as she rotted. If she let Jim take the picture, the truth would ooze out, the terrible truth about Festus Murdaugh.

She didn't even move when the moaning started! The moans came up those stairs and crawled right up my back. I shot to the window and saw it was old Blue moanin’ and whailin’ as he sloshed through the rain and the puddles. He was headed for the woods.

Just then, the old lady breathed out something that sounded like “DUB YU P AEEE…” What did she say? "Jim, Oh God, Jim." I was scared shitless! Then, she said it again, "DUB YU P AEEE." Then, just as plain as day, she whispered low and clear, "your eyes will be your witness.”

I turned around just in time to see Jim headed down the stairs. I froze. A door slammed somewhere down below. Then, I half flew, half greased down those slimy, slick stairs and jumped into the truck. After I got my wits about me and realized I wasn’t being chased, I saw Jim crashing out of the woods, soakin’ wet and dragging Old Blue. Blue was drenched, muddy and panting and there was white spit all over his muzzle.

"Show me Blue!" Jim shoved Blue onto the seat between us and started up the truck. He was drivin' fast and crazy back into the woods and cutting shrubbery and breaking off limbs as he dodged a fence. After about a half a mile, Blue began the damnedest, awfullest whine you have ever heard. Then, he set up a yelp.

Jim slammed the truck to a stop and jumped out. He yelled at me to get a move on, as he grabbed a shovel and a flashlight out of the back. Blue and Jim started to run.

"Don't leave me here!" I pleaded with them and started off after them through the mud and the slop. "What the hell is going on?" AHAH! WHOMP! I saw stars and then all I could see was blood-red pain. I had twisted my ankle and probably worse. I couldn't tell where I was and was afraid to find out. It felt like a slab of concrete covered over with a layer of filthy wet cow-flop. "Hey, I'm down here!" I moaned.

Then, I felt the handles on the slab. "There is writing on this thing Jim! What the hell is it?” Blue came nosing over to see if I was OK and Jim helped me to my feet. Curiosity cured my ankle as we dug and poked around the slab. “Shine a beam of light down here Jim.” I wiped away the slop on the words with my sleeve. “W.P.A. 1938.”

Well, well! It sure looked like Ole Blue had found ole Festus Murdaugh right where he always had been, deep in the bowels of a Works Progress Administration project. "Yep, Blue, we didn't even need the camera for this one!" Jim patted Blue on the head and slipped a strong arm around my waist. "Come on little girl, let's go get those pictures."

As we headed back to Old North Tower for our camera, I leaned on Jim and waited for Blue to scrunch in between us. It had been a good day. Jim called the lab office in Della Rios from his cell phone in the truck as he reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. "The county boys will be out tomorrow with a bulldozer to see what they can find under that slab."

As Jim grinned down at me and as Blue snuggled close, I knew, I was the one who had the gifts after all.

THE END