The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 2

  I was sure she was dead.

  Then she snored. The snore sounded better than anything I’d heard on the Top Ten recently.

  “Martina!” She didn’t respond. I shook her arm. “Martina!”

  This time her eyes flickered open. But they didn’t focus. They rolled around, each one independent of the other, like one of those games where you try to roll BBs into a clown’s eyes. Her expression was as goofy as the clown’s. She giggled.

  “Mike! She’s high as a kite!”

  He came in then—I wondered if he’d been waiting to make sure she wasn’t sitting on the pot—and knelt beside her. She did the eye-rolling bit again.

  “It’s as if she’s been sniffing gasoline,” he said. “We’ll have to get her out of here.”

  “And get ourselves out, too!” The fumes were awful. I was beginning to feel light-headed and giggly myself.

  Mike picked up Martina’s arm. It was as limp as the jacket she wore. She opened her eyes and rolled them in different directions again. Mike pulled her to a sitting position. Her head flopped back, and she giggled. One eye must have focused on Mike then, because she said his name. “Mike Svenson! Big, handsome cop!”

  “See if we can stand her up,” Mike said. He took one arm, I took the other, and we hoisted.

  Martina was no help at all. “Big, handsome cop,” she repeated. “Boo’ful couple. Both redheads. Screwing.” She pulled her arm away from me, and her knees collapsed. She nearly went back down flat on the couch.

  “Whoops!” she said. “Need boo-ty sleep.”

  “Damn right,” Mike said. “But you need to take it someplace else today.” We hoisted again. This time Mike got her left arm over his left shoulder. “Help me get her on my back,” he said. “I can lift her that way.”

  I caught on, finally. “Would that stool help?”

  I kicked a large footstool over, and Mike sat on it. We draped Martina over his back, with her armpits over his shoulders. Mike grasped her arms. He stood up, I boosted, and he had her aboard.

  Martina crowed with delight. “Piggy-back!” She sounded like a three-year-old. “Piggy-back!” She paddled her feet back and forth, kicking Mike in the back of the knees with her high-heeled shoes.

  “Quit kicking!” I said.

  I held the door open, noticing that Mike had shoved the red industrial rags aside and covered them with the cardboard box. The fumes were less potent already. Mike carried his awkward burden out of the lounge, along the yellow-edged pathway, toward the circular stairway and the entrance to the break room. I trotted alongside.

  Martina’s head bounced sideways, and she almost focused one eye on me. “Big, handsome cop. Fun guy.” She grimaced, and I realized she was trying to wink. “Going to make an honest man out of him?”

  I didn’t reply. Damn the woman! Even when she was out of her head she was poking in where she had no business.

  We reached the foot of the circular iron stairway, and Mike went over to a line of newsprint rolls, all resting on their ends. They were three-quarter rolls—five or six inches more than a yard high.

  I guided Martina’s fanny onto one of them, and Mike let go of her arms and turned to face her. She sagged limply, and we held her upright.

  “You go call an ambulance,” he said. “I’ll keep her from falling off these things.”

  I raced up the iron stairs toward the break room. I could hear Martina talking. “Now, Officer. She’s a nice girl, she really is. Good reporter. Never any troubles with the five w’s and h.” She went into gales of laughter. As I looked back, I saw her trying to take off her white linen jacket. “Don’t hold family against her.”

  I stopped dead on the top step and stared back at Martina. “Don’t hold family against her”? What was Martina talking about?

  Martina sagged against Mike’s shoulder, and he looked up at me with a pleading expression. I ran on into the break room, grabbed up the phone, and punched 9 for an outside line, then 911. I’d figure Martina out later.

  I told the dispatcher to send an ambulance to the Fifth Street loading dock, then called Ruth Borah, the city editor, to tell her what was going on. I stationed one of the pressroom guys on the dock to show the crew how to reach the basement by elevator.

  When the pressmen had heard me calling 911 and using the words “nearly asphyxiated,” several had gone downstairs. So when I went back down the stairs, Mike and Martina were no longer alone. Martina was lying down, curled across two rolls of newsprint, with her jacket tucked over her like a shawl and her knees pulled up under the skirt of her flowered dress. The pressroom guys were excitedly asking what had happened. When Mike told them about the chemical-soaked rags, the shortest one, a bulky man named Bob Johnson, rushed back toward the ladies’ lounge.

  I stood beside Martina and took her hand. She opened one eye and looked at me. “Fugitive,” she said.

  “What is she talking about?” I asked.

  “Apparently I need to run your name by the National Crime Information Center,” Mike said.

  “Not Nell!” Martina tried to sit up and nearly fell off the rolls of paper. Mike and I grabbed her. She clutched Mike’s shirt front in a death grip and pulled his face close to her. “Not Nell! Alan!” she said. Then she whispered. “A-L-A-N.”

  Her eyes rolled again, and Mike laid her down on the paper roll. She snored gently.

  Mike looked puzzled. “What was all that about?”

  I didn’t answer. I felt as if a dart had just hit my balloon. One minute I was a whole person. The next I was a hollow and formless piece of scrap rubber. And it was all Martina’s fault. I glared at her. If I’d had muscles like Mike’s, I’d have hoisted her up and taken her back to face the fumes.

  “Alan?” Mike said. “Who’s Alan?”

  I had to try twice before I could croak out an answer. Choke, gag, swallow. I cleared my throat and forced my voice to sound normal.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” I said. “It’s probably a coincidence.”

  Ruth Borah came running down the spiral steps then, so I couldn’t say any more. She would go to the hospital with Martina, she said. Jack Hardy, her assistant, would take over city desk.

  “You,” she said, pointing at me. “Nell, you’ll have to handle the copy desk by yourself for the rest of the evening. Jack will need help, too. But eat first.”

  Eat? Wasn’t my dinner hour over?

  The ambulance crew came then, and I stepped away from Martina and checked my watch. It had been only fifteen minutes since Mike and I left the newsroom. Only thirteen minutes since Ruth asked me to find Martina before I ate dinner. Only ten minutes since Mike and I had left our submarine sandwiches and chips on the table in the break room to make what we thought would be a quick run into the basement before we ate them.

  We went back up the circular stairs—going up didn’t seem to bother Mike—and found our food undisturbed, still in its sack in the middle of the Formica-topped table against the back wall.

  I looked at Mike. “Are you still hungry?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It takes more than asphyxiation to spoil my appetite. Adrenaline makes me hungry. Sit down, and I’ll buy you a Coke.”

  “I’m not sure salami will be good for the knot in my stomach.”

  “The Italian dressing on that sandwich will dissolve any knot known to medical science,” he said. Then he displayed his people-handling background. “Sit down and assimilate this experience for a few minutes.”

  “You’ve had too much psychology,” I said. But I knew he was right. I needed to think about Martina’s accident—and about her drugged maunderings—for a few minutes. And Mike couldn’t make me talk if I didn’t want to.

  And I knew I didn’t want to talk to Mike about one thing Martina had said. “Alan,” she’d said. “A-L-A-N.”

  A true copy editor. Even half-conscious, she’d spelled the name.

  But what did the name mean?

  Probably nothing, I thought. After all, A
lan is a common name. There were dozens, hundreds, thousands of Alans—spelled A-L-A-N—in the United States. It was unlikely that Martina was talking about the same one I had thought of.

  No, it couldn’t have been the same Alan. For one thing, Martina would have been sure to mention it earlier. Rub it in. I opened my corn chips and offered one to Mike. He gave me a potato chip in exchange. We ate silently. He moved so that his knee nudged mine. But he didn’t talk, and he didn’t seem to expect me to say anything.

  The members of the staff of the Grantham Gazette were not so considerate. People began to rush in, each of them exclaiming, “What happened?” Mike and I had a hard time taking more than one bite at a time.

  In about five minutes, Ed Brown came trotting up with his constant companion, his clipboard. Ed’s title is plant manager, and his job description covers a lot. He hires and supervises the two dozen people in the maintenance department—the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and janitors who keep the Gazette Building clean and repaired. He buys most routine supplies—from paper clips to those giant rolls of paper in the Hellhole—and sees that they are delivered, stored, and retrieved when needed. He sees that we have warehousemen on duty to move the rolls of paper around, that their forklifts beep properly when they back up, and that the company’s trucks and cars are maintained and fueled. He’s a busy guy.

  Ed looks much better from a distance than he does close up. He’s slim and has well-formed features, and from across a room he looks great. But closer to him, you can see the lines, the network of furrows that bracket his eyes and ridge his cheeks. Far off he looks thirty-five. Up close he looks seventy. It’s disconcerting, as if he aged forty years in ten feet.

  One of Ed’s jobs is dealing with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the dreaded OSHA. So I wasn’t too surprised to see him looking doleful as he approached us. Martina’s accident was going to mean he had to fill out a bunch of forms.

  He opened the conversation with a deep sigh. “I guess Martina Gilroy has already hired a lawyer,” he said.

  I tried to smile encouragingly. “Not that I know of, Mr. Brown. If the company gives her a couple of days off and makes sure our health insurance covers her hospital bill, maybe she won’t file a lawsuit.”

  Ed Brown shook his head. “I doubt it. Ms. Gilroy usually seems to enjoy making trouble.” He asked me to tell him my version of the incident, and I did.

  He frowned and sighed again. “There would be no reason to have a box of rags soaked in blanket wash back in that hallway,” he said.

  “Blanket wash? Is that what that chemical is?”

  “Yes. It’s a solvent. It’s used to clean the blankets—the parts of the press that actually print—and all the other parts that carry ink. There would be no reason to soak rags in blanket wash at all. The rags would normally be used one at a time. The used rags are placed in a metal drum with only a small opening. The rags are stuffed in there, and then the industrial laundry comes and takes them away, barrel and all, according to safety regulations. Used rags certainly wouldn’t be placed in a cardboard box.”

  “All I know is what we saw. And what we smelled.”

  “I almost hope Ms. Gilroy does sue,” Ed Brown said. “I’d rather fight her on the legal front than put up with the snide remarks she usually specializes in.”

  He nodded glumly and left.

  Mike frowned and gulped down a bite. I thought he was going to comment on Ed Brown, but our next visitor arrived before he could speak.

  J.J. Jones is a hybrid between an ad man and an editor. He edits special advertising sections—Christmas Gifts, Health Care, Summer Fun, Used Car Buying Guide, and a couple of dozen others the Gazette publishes every year. The supplements are put out by the ad department, but J.J. assigns a few local articles for each, then uses canned copy to fill up the rest. Since they look like news pages, J.J. writes and edits them on the newsroom computer system, but he’s an advertising employee.

  J.J. came to Grantham from Texas. He has bushy white Colonel Sanders hair, and his accent is more Southern than a big plate of grits and gravy. I’m not sure how much of his language is an act. I’m also not sure if he just likes bright sports jackets or if he thinks they go with the ad man’s image, but you can always see J.J. coming a block away. That night he had on a Kelly green blazer, a plaid shirt, and a yellow tie.

  “Hi, y’all,” he said, stopping beside our table. “Jes’ what happened to Miz Gilroy? The pressmen says it’s a-gonna make my section run a mite late.”

  Since I had just taken a big bite of my sub, Mike answered, giving a brief description of Martina’s accident.

  J.J. shook his head. “How bad off is she?”

  “We haven’t heard,” I said. “Ruth went to the hospital with her. I’m sure she’ll call as soon as they know something.”

  “Martina will probably be okay,” Mike said, “since she’s away from those fumes. But if it’s like sniffing gasoline, it may take a while for the effects to wear off.”

  “It’s plumb peculiar—” J.J. began.

  Right at that moment a noise came from the doorway which leads out onto the metal grille. J.J. looked around, then gave a little jump.

  “Oh, migawd,” he said. “Time’s passin’ faster than salts through a widder woman. That press is gonna be rollin’ before I can git down the stairs.” He swung around and sped off down the hall, toward the other end of the building and the east stairs to the pressroom.

  I watched him go. “He must be afraid of those iron stairs, too,” I said. “It’s quicker to get to the pressroom the way we came up, through that door.”

  The door to the metal grille and the Hellhole swung all the way open then, and Arnie Ashe came through it.

  Arnie was our new night-side police reporter. He was a thin man, maybe fifty years old, a little taller than average. He had sandy eyelashes and light brown brows, and he shaved his head. The effect was extremely bald. He looked like an extraterrestrial, but he wasn’t unattractive. He had a well-shaped skull, and his ears lay flat. He could get away with bald.

  “What’s been going on?” he asked. “I was over at the fire department, and I heard an ambulance call for the Gazette Building.”

  Once again I explained about Martina’s accident. “She’s gone to the hospital,” I concluded, “and Ruth went with her. So your copy’s at my mercy tonight.”

  “I’ll chance it.” Arnie shrugged. “This isn’t one of those papers where they’ll want a story about this sort of an accident, is it?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “We wouldn’t do one if it happened at the gas company. Somebody would have to be killed or the whole neighborhood evacuated to make an industrial accident newsworthy. But it’s up to Jack. He’s filling in for Ruth.”

  Arnie stopped two tables over, just inside the smoking section. He hung a gray suit jacket on a chair, then reached into the pocket of his white dress shirt and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a deck of cards.

  “Guess I’ll smoke before I go upstairs,” he said. “Will it bother you two?”

  “Not over there,” I said. “Arnie, you ought to meet Mike Svenson, anyway. You need to know every cop you can. Mike, this is Arnie Ashe, our new police reporter.”

  Mike waved a potato chip, and Arnie nodded, then sat down and lit a cigarette. He shook the cards out of their little box and began to shuffle them.

  “I’m new to the Gazette, but old in the newspaper business,” he said. “Another weird old news type like Martina.”

  “You’d have to go some to be as weird as she is,” I said.

  “Just what is so strange about Martina?” Mike asked. “All I’ve ever gotten out of you is that she’s nosy. Isn’t that a good quality in a newspaper editor? What’s wrong with her?”

  Arnie and I looked at each other.

  “Of course, copy editors and reporters are natural enemies,” I said.

  “But she takes it to extremes,” Arnie said. “We all want to get our copy ri
ght. We appreciate the copy editor finding errors. What we don’t appreciate is a copy editor who takes pleasure in finding errors.”

  “That’s it!” I said. “If she finds something wrong, she never assumes it’s a typo or a momentary lapse or being in a hurry—just an ordinary human error. She acts as if the reporter either didn’t care or was ignorant or was doing it wrong deliberately. And it delights her!”

  “She’s damn obnoxious,” Arnie said. He laughed shortly. “It’s the way she smirks and preens when she tells you how she saved the paper from having the word avenue spelled out when it should have been abbreviated. And she’s far from perfect herself. In one of my stories last night she got all bogged down in the right way to punctuate a series, then missed a mistake that libeled a defense attorney I’ve already figured out is Grantham’s most aggressive. Luckily, I reread the story and found the error myself.”

  “Plus,” I said, “she doesn’t have a life outside the office, so she takes a strong interest in everyone else’s. When Jack Hardy and his wife got a divorce—well, it’s a wonder Jack didn’t karate-chop her with his pica pole. She quizzed him for days. Where was he living? Was his ex-wife seeing anyone else? Was he seeing anyone else? All stuff that was none of her business.”

  “It’s hard to believe something bad happened to Martina by accident,” Arnie said. “So many people would love to do her in.”

  The smoke from his cigarette drifted into his eyes, and he squinted and threw his head back. He shuffled his cards one more time before he spoke again. “Mike, I hear you’re the chief hostage negotiator for Grantham P.D.”

  Mike nodded and kept chewing his sub.

  “Might be a good feature in that.”

  Mike shook his head, gulped, and reached for his can of Coke. “Whatever the PIO wants,” he said. “But I’d rather not. If I have to go up against some guy in a hostage situation, I’d just as soon he hadn’t read a lot about exactly what I do.”

  “That makes sense. But how about a backgrounder?”

  Mike’s eyes flickered at me, so I interpreted. “An interview for background only. General information Arnie would have, so he could understand what’s going on if the occasion ever arises.”