Some Kind of Angel by Austin Roberts

Some Kind of Angel by Austin Roberts

The scene was bad. Male. 60’s. And the pavement had played piñata with his body when he landed.

It wasn’t my game anymore, the murder scene, but I’d worked for the jumper some years back – by obligation, not choice. It never hurts to check a pulse firsthand when you hear somebody’s reaching room temperature. Blackmail has a sell-by date in this city, and it usually expires with the corpse.

“What’s the verdict, John?” I asked, “Is the devil really dead?”

“Damn it, Derrick, don’t mess up my crime scene,” John said.

“Come on, John, when have I ever left a crime scene dirtier than I found it?” I asked.

John stretched to his full height.

“That was always the problem, Derrick,” John said. “Somehow they always ended up cleaner with you being there.”

Every town has different types of low life. The slim pickings no one cares about. The hoodlums you don’t dare to cross. And the terrors you don’t dare to name. The Besnick had fallen into the fourth tier. No one knew his name well enough to be scared to say it, because no one had lived long enough to cross him. He’d been a legitimate businessman on paper, but not every possession is listed in a person’s will. When you own things like the police, the mayor, and the whole damn town, lawyers tend to avoid putting it in writing.

“Was he holding that?” I asked.

John picks up a nine iron with a gloved hand.

“Too close to the body to think otherwise,” John said. “From what the bird in his room says, she was making herself comfortable, and when she came out, he was already flying.”

“Best news I got all week,” I told him, “I’m going to celebrate one less pocket to climb out of. You want to join me?”

But John was already back to documenting the scene. A lot of unsolved cases died with The Besnick, and John moved like he knew it.

The building The Besnick jumped from had a bar. What better place to celebrate his death than where it happened? And, I figured I might get a chance to congratulate his date on a job well done.

By the time I got inside, the police had moved the girl from the hotel room to the bar, hoping they’d have a chance to bring her home instead of taking her in. Deep red hair. Blood red lips. White shawl pulled over a too-small cocktail dress. High heels. Curves everywhere they should be. Exactly The Besnick’s type. Right down to the diamond-encrusted dog peeking out of her purse. She was the kind of girl guys buy expensive drinks for, and I’d put money on just how expensive she was. If she wasn’t a working girl, I’d eat my hat.

I could’ve walked out the door then and not thought twice, but how she shrank from the gorilla of a cop questioning her wouldn’t let me. She might be professional enough to convince a uniform to let her drink one for the road, but she was still amateur. That, and sometimes a girl looks too much like someone you should forget.

I signaled the bartender for a drink and saddled the stool beside her.

“Hey, buddy,” the gorilla said, “keep move’n, police business.”

“Yeah, and when did badges get paid to knock around little girls?” I asked, “cause if that’s the case, maybe I should go down to the dollar store and buy one myself.”

“What?” the gorilla asked, breathing through his mouth like he didn’t have a nose.

“I said it once,” I told him and dropped back into my drink.

The gorilla looked at the girl and the officers around her.

“Don’t let her walk out of here. She’s still got questions to answer,” he said and walked to the door on his cell phone.

“Little girl, am I?” Red asked, “what am I supposed to do now, run up to you and cry, ‘Mister, Mister, the bad men gonna hurt me’? Why does every no-good drunk think a woman needs saving all the time?”

“Cause everybody needs saving all the time,” I told her, “most of us are just too stupid to admit it.”

It took her a moment, but it takes everyone a moment to step back from a mistake.

“Aren’t you going to buy me one?” Red asked.

“Depends on what you do next,” I said.

“Yeah,” Red asked, dropping her voice low, purring the words, “and what do you want me to do next?”

“Something harder than you’ve ever done before,” I told her.

“That’s what they all say,” Red said.

“Tell the truth,” I said.

She recoiled like I’d slapped her, so I ordered a second drink.

“You’re a cop?” she asked.

“Not anymore,” I said, “but I could tell you a thing or two.”

“Yeah, so tell me,” she said.

“The gorilla on the phone out there, he’s got something good, and you’re the one he’s got it on. He’s letting you loosen yourself up for the question. Then he’s going to come back in here hard and charge you with murder,” I told her.

“But I didn’t—” she tried to interrupt, but I didn’t let her.

“You have a choice,” I told her. “You talk to me straight. Tell me the truth, and walk out of here with me, wearing that cute little jacket. Or don’t, and walk out of here with them in cuffs.”

“I don’t think my cute little jacket would fit you,” she said.

I’d set it up, she knocked it down.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Why’d he have a golf club?” I asked.

“It wasn’t for golf, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, “I think I’d be safer taking my chances with them.”

She downed her drink in one and waved to the gorilla.

“Get me out’a here, big man,” she said, “this knight in shining armor is boring the hell out of me.”

& & &

A few months later and the headlines had already changed from “Millionaire Commits Suicide” to “Fancy Dog Show Plagued by Fleas,” and nobody much cared unless they had an itch.

Halfway through writing ‘MacGuffin’ into four down in the Monday paper, my office door banged open.

“You were right,” Red said before the door closed behind her, “you would have looked better in my jacket than I did in those cuffs.”

She sat without asking. No hello. No nothing.

“Is that so?” I asked.

“Would I be here if it weren’t?” she asked.

“Then give it to me,” I told her.

So I put down the crossword and started to listen, and she laid it all out.

Paparazzi snapped a pic of her from the hotel to the car. And the pic found print. And from there, it found a following and started multiplying like all good paparazzi pics do. The attention she was getting was unwanted, but she was used to it and could deal with it…

“Until this,” she said, dropping her cell phone on my desk.

There was nothing unique about the photos displayed. Clearly amateur photography: A shadowy room; a bunch of shoes; an empty shower; and a poorly lit, badly framed photograph of Red’s sleeping face.

“They were sent from a burner phone,” Red told me. “Out of service already.”

“In your line of work, could someone have—” I said, she interrupted.

“Let me make it simple for you,” Red said. “No – nobody has the key. No – nobody has ever had the key. And, yes – I live alone. And in my line of work, nothing, I don’t do overnights.”

“Had to know,” I tell her, “but I’m not sure why you’re here. You should take this to the police.”

“You think I didn’t? You think they want to help a pro suspected of murder?” she asked.

“So you need something else,” I told her.

“Yeah, I need a knight in shining armor,” she said it silky, voice filled with all the promise in the world.

“Last time we talked, you told me that act was old, and I was boring the hell out of you with it. What changed?” I asked her.

“Cause everybody needs saving all the time, just most of us are too stupid to admit it,” she said. “Well, today’s my day, and I’m smart enough to scream ‘help!’ from the rooftops.”

She knew she had me. I knew it too.

“I’m going to need a few things before I start,” I told her.

And she pulled a thick manilla envelope out of her bag and set it on the desk.

“I need your phone and address. A list of friends. A key to your place so I can move as needed. Your schedule for the next two weeks. And $500 upfront to cover my time,” I told her.

She dumped the envelope out. It was all there, even the $500 wrapped neatly in banker’s tape.

“You thought of everything,” I told her.

“Except where to go when I’m going,” she said.

“Aint that the truth. I figure somewhere with a beach where girls like you feed me grapes and fan me cool in the hot sun,” I said.

“A shame,” she said, “I always preferred the mountains myself.”

& & &

It didn’t take long to learn she was just another small-town cliche. A girl from nowhere come to the big city to change her life, make something of herself, and forget about the past – and it worked. Nobody knew where she came from, not even her closest friends.

She was arm candy for the rich and powerful. Need a date to impress? You call Red. She’d read the classics, studied politics, and was just as comfortable at a family BBQ as at a corporate seminar. One girl, all occasions, no funny business, and she got paid well for it.

But a list of happy clients and poorly informed friends didn’t get me any closer to the photographer – the answer had to be in her daily grind, so I tailed her.

Over the next week, wherever Red showed up, an old beater followed. Puke green, rusted frame, deeply tinted windows, and a driverside door that had met one too many baseball bats. It was the kind of car that was so ugly it was hard to see – out of embarrassment, people pretended it wasn’t there.

There are many ways to deal with a tail. You can lose them with fancy driving, but they come back. You can call the police, but without evidence, they just let’m go. Or, you can confront them.

I didn’t look at the driver when I slammed open the passenger door, slid across the seat, and punched him in the side of the neck. It has to be fast. There can’t be any hesitation. Fast and clean. You have to scare them more than they’ve ever been scared in their life. And you have to do it hard.

As the driver clutched his neck, I punched him in his unprotected solar plexus, opened his glovebox, and took out the car registration.

“The games up,” I growled. “You’re gonna leave the girl alone.”

I waved the car registration in his face.

“I know where you live, asshole, and if you show up again, I will come for you—” I tried to tell him, but I didn’t finish.

“Yeah, the game is up, asshole,” the gorilla said. He flashed his badge at the exact moment his fist broke my face.

& & &

I woke up on a cold slab with the gorilla dumping a bucket of ice water on me.

“Come on, sleeping beauty, time to get up,” the gorilla said, dropping the empty bucket on my stomach.

“It’s a kiss,” I told him, “that wakes sleeping beauty.”

“Do I look like Prince-fucking-Charming to you?” the gorilla asked, but he smiled when he said it.

I sat up and promptly vomited as the world spun.

“A concussion,” the gorilla told me, “that and a broken nose.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No sweat. You didn’t do so bad yourself, twinkle toes,” the gorilla pulled me to my feet. “I mean, for a no good, sucker punching, backstabbing cheat.”

But he didn’t pull me up rough and braced me when I stood. Sometimes you make friends with nice conversations and shared interests. Sometimes you just have to punch a guy in the throat.

“Where we going?” I asked him.

“Someone wants to talk to you,” the gorilla said.

“Free performances aren’t in my contract,” I told him.

“Well, I can bring you back to the dressing room if you’d like, but I’d have to keep you there two to five for assaulting an officer,” the gorilla smiled.

I held my tongue and kept walking, surprised he knew that many words and could string’em together.

By the time we reached the conference room, the world had stopped spinning, and my nose had left a blood trail even Hansel and Grettle could follow home.

“You’ve got yourself in deep this time, Derrick,” John said. “Officer Evans just told us your part in his investigation.”

I looked around the room for Officer Evans and realized its the gorilla holding me up.

“I do what I can,” I told him.

The gorilla, Evans, dropped me in a chair.

“So what do you want?” I asked.

“For you to walk away,” John said, and he said it with a look I know, the kind that adds “or else” to the end of any sentence.

“What am I walking from?” I asked him, “All I got is one paying client with a creep problem.”

John started to talk, but Evans interrupted.

“Look, he doesn’t have to drop it cold, right?” he said, “Just keep your eyes open. OK?”

I should have known then something was off.

“I always keep my eyes open,” I told him.

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

The rest of the meeting went like that. Them saying things everyone knew, and me wondering why they were so touchy about it. Something was up, and I was the only one in the dark.

& & &

“What did you do!” she yelled as she burst into my office. The door slamming at the same speed her hand slapped across my face. “What did you do!”

Her anger turned to tears faster than a dame in a Cary Grant movie, and she fell on my chest sobbing.

I’ve done this job for years and have seen it all. I even keep tissues on the edge of my desk for just this occasion.

“Pull it together, Red,” I told her.

“Can’t be that bad,” I said.

The secret is to just wait it out. They all try this eventually. Try to make the detective soft with tears, ploy him with short skirts, or a hand on his thigh. Everyone always talks about old dogs learning new tricks. Well, there ain’t no new tricks in this business, and I’m as old of a dog as they come.

“You finished with your blathering yet?” I finally asked her and stepped away – leaving her to grapple the air.

She straightened herself and blotted her eyes.

“You really are a monster,” she told me, but knew when to quit.

She stopped the act when I sat down and pulled out my notepad.

“Wasn’t I good enough?” she asked.

“Oh,” I told her, “I figure you’re plenty good, better than most, but stick with dates ‘cause acting isn’t your cup of tea.”

“It was worth a try,” she said.

“Yeah, but you only get one,” I told her, ”and that was yours. Why are you here?”

And she dumped it on my desk.

It had probably been cute once. One of those fuzzy lap dogs old women share ice cream with, the kind childless parents push in strollers through the park – no one would put this in a stroller now.

“He skinned Poofy,” she said it matter of fact. 

“He skinned Poofy,” she said it again, “and left this.”

The note was soaked through in blood.

I thought you loved me. – Love, Me.

I put the note down on my already ruined desk to think. That’s when she finally saw me.

“What happened to you, cut yourself shaving?” she asked.

“Nah, tried to break a guy’s fist with my nose,” I told her and then ran through the case again.

Someone started following her after she got off on murder. The police are following her, at least Officer Evans is. They didn’t charge me when they could’ve had an easy collar. The photos. The dog. Something stinks here, and I finally knew what it was.

“I’m staying at your place tonight,” I told her and ran out the door to check the facts.

& & &

Red’s apartment was nice. A tasteful paint job, soft furniture, and a plentiful library.

“They’re using me as bait!” she yelled, throwing another book at me.

I dodged this one, too, but it knocked my hat and a picture frame into the trash.

“Look,” I told her, “there are only three possibilities here, and they all tie back to The Besnick. One, he committed suicide—”

“He did!” she interrupted.

“But there was evidence. Something happened in that room that nobodies talking about. So, either you killed him, or someone else did,” I said and prepared to dodge another book. It never came.

Her brow crinkled as she thought.

“So they’re watching me because either I am guilty and will give them something to work with,” she said.

“Or…?” I prodded.

“Or the killer killed him because of me,” she finished.

“Yeah, that’s about what I think,” I said, “the killer and the stalker are the same.”

“And I’m the bait.” She sat down hard.

“Yeah,” I told her, fishing my hat and the picture frame from the trash.

“So what now?” she asked.

“I go from spook to bodyguard. It will be more hours and cost more, but I’ll keep you safe until we catch him,” I told her as I fixed the frame on the table – Red in a bikini on the beach – “We track the creep down. Then your life goes back to normal.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. Just stared at the wall thinking hard, trying to picture it before it began. But it’s hard to imagine yourself out of trouble like this, so in the end, it all sank in.

“I have the money. Finish this fast, though. My apartment isn’t big enough for the two of us,” she told me.

& & &

I made sure Officer Evans was outside the apartment on stakeout before I left. I only needed a few things.

I stopped at the Beach Comber, a no-good bar college kids go to feel tough. Thankfully, Vinnie was in the back, and I didn’t have to walk through the front door.

“I thought you was out of this game,” Vinnie told me. He never asks questions, just says it as he sees it.

“Not like that this time,” I told him, “keeping someone safe.”

Vinnie shrugged. He doesn’t care. He gets paid no matter what the equipment is used for. Vinnie sells evidence guns. A guy shoots his wife, gets arrested, goes to trial, and the gun is destroyed afterward. Only they aren’t. A crook in the department sells them to Vinnie, and then Vinnie sells them to guys who murder their wives, and the cycle lives on.

He did me right this time. A .22 caliber Beretta Model 71 with a threaded barrel and an oil can suppressor; not a piece I’d use for long range or defense, but close up and personal one shot can scramble a brain box without the mess of an exit wound. That and it’s quiet as a mouse – sometimes you need a gun you can just throw away and pretend it isn’t yours.

And then I headed back.

I only needed a few things, and I had made sure Officer Evans was outside on stakeout before I left. 

Sometimes it just doesn’t matter.

& & &

I could smell it before I opened the door.

Blood.

Ceiling. Walls. Floor.

The average human body has a little more than a gallon of blood flowing through its veins, and whoever did this spilled the whole carton. Hand smudges told the story of Red’s fight. Blood smeared in finger streaks on any surface she could grab onto. Splatters across the walls where an artery was severed.

No one could survive that.

So I called the police and sat in the hallway to wait.

They came fast. Officer Evans first.

“Shit,” he said at the door. “Shit.”

He sat down next to me.

It took hours for forensics to go through the apartment. They only confirmed what I feared.

“No one could lose that much blood and survive,” they told me. “The window to the ally was broken, glass on the floor inside. That’s how he got in.”

There had been blood on the fire escape and drag marks down the ladder. Whoever killed her took her body.

I took the news as best I could and walked through the apartment when they were done.

The picture frame I’d straightened after our last fight had fallen behind the trash during Red’s struggle, sparing it a blood coating. I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket. Red wasn’t going to need it anymore.

& & &

It took a week to get back to my office. Some things you just can’t shrug off – a police investigation is one of them. I sat at my desk and tried to finish the crossword I had started weeks before, but I couldn’t get my mind off Red.

None of it added up. None of it.

The case. The suicide. The stalker. The picture. The murder. None of it. 

Not every crime has a reason, but too much had happened without one. As I looked at each event separately, each piece looked less like a puzzle and more like a lead rope. But towards what? And for whom?

The only thing to do was look at it all again, separate the actual facts from the intuited connections, and see where they fell. So, what did I know? A guy tried to fly, a stalker took pictures, a dog was skinned, and a woman was murdered.

But even that wasn’t true.

A guy tried to fly. Pictures were taken. A dog was skinned. A woman was missing.

Before my brain grabbed onto the facts, someone knocked on my door.

“Out for lunch,” I yelled.

“That makes us a pair,” Officer Evans said. He opened the door anyway. He squeezed his shoulders through the frame and dropped a paper bag in front of me.

“I figured you might want this. No one else seems to,” Evan’s said. 

He sank into the chair across from my desk. He didn’t get any smaller in plain clothes, but without the badge, his shoulders weren’t quite so straight.

“You off for the weekend?” I asked.

“Off for good,” Evan’s said, “Department would have kept me, but after a mistake like that… I couldn’t keep myself.”

I understood. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try; all that matters is how it ends. If a room painted with a girl’s blood doesn’t start a person soul searching, nothing will.

“Well,” I said, “if you’re ever looking for extra work, I can always find a stakeout at a zoo for you.”

Evans didn’t have it in him – sometimes broke is just broke.

“I’ll let you know. I’ve got some family on a farm up north. I might…” Evans kept talking. I stopped listening.

In the paper bag he’d brought was a photo album. Pictures of Red here and there with friends. Pictures of a town far from this dark city. Pictures of a time when she could still smile.

And there it was, as plain day.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“He got the tractor at auction—” Evans said.

“Not that damn tractor, the book. The album,” I interrupted.

“In a safe behind the bed. Built right into the wall.” Evans said. “Nothing nobody would find unless they tore the room apart.”

“Did anyone else see it?” I asked.

“Yeah, but nobody much cared,” Evans said.

“Good,” I said. “Now get out of here. I have work to do.”

Pictures started it all. They were going to end it, too.

I pulled out the photograph I’d grabbed from Red’s apartment, dusted off the glass, and threw away the frame. 

There she was. Red, on the beach wearing a bikini a decent seamstress couldn’t make an eyepatch out of, doing her best Vanna White to show off the sign of an expensive Bahama resort.

And the photograph unfolded. I pulled it apart gently, revealing the rest of the resort’s sign and another beautiful young woman in a matching bikini mirroring Red’s Vanna White. I knew the other woman. She’d come and gone in my life long before I met Red. She was the real reason all of this began.

What had I said that night Red and I first met? Sometimes a girl looks too much like someone you should forget – now I knew why.

And then it all made sense.

& & &

Sand and trench coats don’t go well together, so I don’t get out on vacation much. If I did, this would be the kind of place I’d go.

White beaches. Palm trees. Pretty girls with pretty drinks. The kind of place a guy like me pays good money to be fed grapes while laying in a hammock. But I wasn’t here on vacation; the grapes would have to wait.

A bartender at the hotel told me everything I needed to know, so now I walked down the beach looking for a brunette in a red one-piece with a cutesy dog. She was supposed to be surfing.

And she was. Far away from the crowd. Alone.

I sat on the beach and watched until the surf died, and she paddled the board to the sand.

“I thought you liked the mountains,” I said as she walked up with a smile.

“I do,” Red told me, “but my sister loved the beach.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I told her and handed her the picture.

“He killed her,” Red told me, “The Besnick. I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could have told me the truth. I asked you for it,” I said. “I would have helped you, but you played me the fool.”

Red stared off at the ocean. We had all the time in the world.

“It didn’t go down how I planned,” Red told me. “He realized who I was that night. I asked too many questions, so he told me the truth. Then picked up that damn golf club of his to finish me like he said he’d finished her.”

She didn’t pause when she said it, almost monotone. “I knew I was going to kill him from the beginning. I just wasn’t ready. He was drunk, swung, and stumbled. I pushed, and you know the rest.”

“Yeah, I know the rest,” I told her, and I did. She’d taken the picture of herself sleeping, then asked me to protect her. Faked a dog skinning. Then sprayed her room with blood, probably stolen from a clinic somewhere. Who knows.

“But why?” I asked her.

“There was no escape,” she told me. “If it went as planned, he’d have been dead for months with no one the wiser. But the moment the paparazzi took that photo, the moment it went to print, the moment people in a small town saw it…”

“The story would get out, people would know who you really were, and the gorilla would finally have his collar,” I finished the thought for her.

“And his family would come for revenge,” she said.

“The Besnicks always do,” I told her.

“You gonna take me in?” she asked but didn’t give me time to answer.

“Or,” she dropped her voice low, purring the words with promise, put her hand on my thigh, “are you going to lay on the beach in a hammock as I feed you grapes?”

“He didn’t kill her with the golf club,” I said.

“What?” she asked, her hand frozen on my thigh.

“Your sister. He didn’t kill her with the golf club. He always gave those jobs out,” I said. “Never got his own hands dirty; guys like that never do.”

I scrubbed my hands with sand.

“Because the blood never washes off,” I told her.

She understood a truth I could never say out loud, and then she came at me with everything she had.

Vinnie was good to his word. Between the breaking waves and the ocean breeze, nobody heard a sound.

I threw the piece into the ocean and tried to figure out what I would do now that I was out of The Besnick’s pocket for good. I couldn’t go back to the city just yet. Too much left to settle. Maybe I would make my way to another beach. Maybe I’d go to the mountains.

As I checked out, the bartender saw me.

“You find her?” He asked, “I hope so, ’cause she was some kind of angel, man.”

“No,” I told him. “I didn’t find her, but someone will. She’s some kind of angel indeed.”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Austin Roberts 2024