Crime Scene

By Rick R. Reed

Copyright 2010 by Rick R. Reed and Untreed Reads Publishing

Cover Copyright 2010 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright, and has granted permission to the publisher to enforce said copyright on their behalf.

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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Crime Scene

By Rick R. Reed

She wished she had never picked up the book in the first place. Wished she had never gone into the bookstore and lifted it from its shelf. But there was the morbid curiosity thing: that stopping to look at accidents on the highway compulsion from which we all suffer.

The book was a collection of crime scene photographs, with notes from a New York homicide detective, who was now retired. These actual scenes of death had no glamorous patina that some thriller movie would give them. The blood was real; the suicide victims with their heads blown off real; the burned bodies real; the executions real…clinical in black and white; sad demises recorded without one whit of sentimentality or sympathy. It made her realize that death was just as mundane, and ugly, as eating a piece of cabbage or taking a shit.

And then she came to the little girl. Oh God, she wondered, hand trembling, match’s flame wavering as she brought it to the tip of her cigarette. Oh God, why did I have to turn the page? Why did I have to see that photograph?

It was just one of many. There among the murders, the decapitations, the lovers’ quarrels that had ended in a way that ensured no one would ever love again. All of these were shocking, she could give them that much, but they were so outrageous, with all the blood, the grim display of brain and other interior matter, that they managed to keep her at a distance. She couldn’t get emotionally involved.

But then she came to that page.

That one photograph had burned itself indelibly into the soft pink tissue of her brain. A kind of branding…. As much as she would try, she knew she could never forget it. Almost of its own will, the photograph would rise up in memory, painstakingly detailed, as if she were doomed to open the book again and again to that same page, reliving the nausea for the rest of her life.

The little girl had been seven years old. She lay on a concrete floor: a women’s restroom near Coney Island. Her hair, looking light brown in the stark black-and-white forensic photograph, lay in ringlets. Her pale limbs, straight, thin, with no womanly development, were as white as marble, contrasted with the grimy floor. Cigarette butts and Kotex wrappers lay nearby. She was just another piece of garbage.

And her little outfit! It never failed to bring tears to her eyes to remember those clothes. She remembered wearing outfits like that herself as a little girl, circa 1965. Her outfit, she thought, biting her lip to hold back the sob/hiccup she had produced when she was first assaulted by the image…her little outfit evoked tenderness. It inspired her imagination, causing her to wonder about the mother’s hands who had dressed the little girl in it that morning.

“There, don’t you look pretty? Turn around for me.”

Polka dots. A summer outfit, made from cotton. Who knew the color? Everything had melded into the unsympathetic gray of a crime scene photo. A tiny ruffled skirt and matching sleeveless midriff top. The skirt had white polka dots, while the top contrasted, with polka dots the color of the solid part of the skirt, on a white background.

She wore white patent leather shoes. Anklet socks, rimmed in lace.

And she had been strangled.

The homicide detective’s notes said that the little girl had been strangled by her mother.

She stared at the photograph for longer than she should have. Maybe if she had flipped to another page, horror and sorrow making her recoil, she would not be a prisoner of this image. But she had stood in the air-conditioned chill of the bookstore, unable to tear her gaze away from the little girl lying on concrete, lips parted and eyes staring at nothing forever.

* * *

It was hot. One of those days where the box fan in their apartment window did nothing but blow the hot air around, wasting electricity and offering not even the smallest refuge from the heat and humidity. The sky was an overturned teacup of milky white, trapping the shimmering waves of heat near the concrete three stories below them, keeping every bit of moisture in the August air down low…mugginess so real it was palpable, like living inside a sponge.

And it was only nine o’clock in the morning. It had broken 100 degrees the past three days and, unless they had a storm, it would do so again today. She was listening to the radio, a Pall Mall burned down to the filter between her fingers. WNBR, out of Brooklyn. She had listened, with closed eyes, to Brenda Lee singing “I’m Sorry”; Roger Miller, “King of the Road”; and Burt Kaempfert, “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” Maybe she wouldn’t be such a blue lady if someone had given her red roses. But they would have only wilted in the heat. And the only one who would have ever given her red roses was gone. But thinking about him only made the pain behind her eyes greater, as if he had stuck around to throw a final punch. She had placed a tepid dishrag across her forehead, thinking it would help, but all it did was force her to breathe in the smells of wiped-up Maxwell House and burnt toast crumbs.

Her head pounded, throbbed. The music didn’t help. The dishrag didn’t help. The fan didn’t help. Her right eye felt swollen, the pain coming in waves.

There was nowhere to go to escape the pain and the heat.

“Mama…”

She shut her eyes tighter. Lucy. Lucy was awake and now the real fun would begin. She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and got up from the Formica-topped table, the back of her aluminum chair sliding with a shriek across the chipped linoleum floor.

“Mama…”

“I’m coming, honey.” She paused long enough to light a fresh Pall Mall and continued down the grimy hallway to her daughter’s bedroom. Outside, an ambulance or a fire truck wailed, an open fire hydrant hissed in protest to children’s voices screaming as they played in the water.

Lucy lay in bed, brown curls plastered to her forehead with sweat. The poor kid.

“Mama, I’m hot.”

“You and me both, honey.” She crossed to sit on the bed. Lucy was small, even for seven, but pretty, like a doll. Sandy hair that fell in ringlets to her shoulders, naturally. She never used rollers or even her fingers to make the tight sausage curls that sprouted from her daughter’s head: a wild riot of hair that set off the elfin features—the button nose and big brown eyes.

She ran her hand across Lucy’s mop of hair, already damp, almost soaking near her neck and forehead.

“Can we go to the beach today?”

“Aw honey, I don’t know.” She wondered from where the fare for the train would come. The task of packing up Thermos, blankets, radio, swimsuits, towels, and snacks daunting with the way her head ached, with how the heat made her languid, each movement real effort. She wanted to lie in a dark room, fan blowing on her, no sheet. She remembered how he used to run an ice cube down her body on other hot summer nights, the traffic below them as they lay on a mattress he had dragged on to the fire escape.