Once Bitten, Twice Dead Read online

  However, when Sidney was murdered by Ted Davis, Carla’s agent, Olive suspected that it was really Candace who had killed her father like Sidney always said she would. Feeling his soul should rest in peace, I had never told anyone about the email confession I had received from Ted, so the killing of Sidney Pramp had remained unsolved. Olive, anguished over Sidney’s death, had been the one who had shot Candace in the park.

  “The sins of the father. . .,” said David. “The circle just keeps widening.”

  The second echo from the past that hit me concerned Larabella Butcher, Ed’s wife. She also was shot to death, but in her home one hot summer night. At first to the police it looked like robbery: articles were scattered around, drawers pulled open, but not much actually seemed to be taken. A DVD player, a VCR, and a flat screen TV were the only items missing. It seemed beyond belief that a person would kill for those items, but people had killed for less.

  There were fingerprints left on the scene, and the police soon had a match—Manny Trieda, Ronny Butcher’s school friend, and member of the infamous, “Crusaders.” When the police came to his home with the fingerprint evidence, Manny told them the truth: Roddy’s mother was begging her son to quit the Crusaders, and Roddy being a good son, had agreed. Manny saw this as the final crumbling of the group that had given him a feeling of worth.

  Trieda had left school in the middle of the day and gone to Roddy’s house to face his mom. An argument broke out, and Larabella was shot twice in the heart. Manny then tried to make it look like a robbery, but he did a poor job. He even forgot to break a door lock or a window. It was then a “robbery,” where the thief just walked in, showing the police that Larabella knew the killer.

  In Manny’s statement to the police, David said, he expressed his anger with Mrs. Butcher: “She was trying to break us up. Roddy and I were blood brothers—we had to stick together. The Crusaders cannot die. She screamed at me that I was a child. I pulled a gun, and she rushed at me. The gun went off, and then I just shot her again. I was scared.”

  Manny was arrested on the spot, and held without bail.

  But then to increase the tragedy, Roddy visited Manny in jail carrying a crude knife that he had actually constructed in shop class. It must have been made from materials that the metal detector didn’t pick up. Three strikes with Roddy’s arm, and Manny’s life was over. As soon as Manny’s cell was cleaned up, Roddy was put in it.

  Roddy kept saying that Manny had also killed his dad, but I didn’t think so. There was nothing to tie Manny to Ed’s murder. As David told me about all this, I had mixed feelings. I wished I was still on those cases, but I was also glad I had let them go. As far as I was concerned the murders of Ed Butcher and Carla Strand would have to remain unsolved.

  But then a more personal tragedy overtook David and myself.

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  David and I were on our way up to Scranton to visit his parents for the holidays. Six inches of new snow had fallen that morning, and the traffic on the Northeast Extension of the Turnpike had backed up. So far we were about an hour behind schedule, and David had just cell-phoned his parents to tell them we’d be a little late.

  “That’s funny, Raven, no one answers. Maybe they went to the store for some last-minute snacks. My dad loves snacks when he watches the playoffs. I don’t know how they did it this year, but the Eagles are in it again. I did leave a message.”

  David and his dad were looking forward to an exciting evening trying to cheer the Eagles on to victory. I didn’t really care much about football—Florence had told me yesterday that she had gotten two “chick-flick” videos that we could watch on the upstairs TV: Mama Mia and Marley and Me. It was going to be a good time—as we crawled along the Turnpike, David and I didn’t know what was really awaiting us.

  David had a premonition of what was to come when the traffic got worse as we approached closer to Scranton, and he called again but still got no answer. “Something’s wrong, Raven.” Then he was sure of it as we drove up to Paul and Florence’s house, and the porch light was not on. “My mother always leaves it on—she never forgets. I don’t like this at all.”

  David tried to get out of the car so fast that he slipped and fell right on his behind. Before he had picked himself up, I was in the house, and I instantly wished I could leave.

  Paul Selby was sprawled half in the hallway and half in the living room. It looked like the top of his head was missing. I wanted to stop David from coming in, but at that moment I was too weak to stop anyone—my knees almost buckled.

  “Oh, my god—Dad!” While I stood there in shock, David rushed to his father and cradled him in his arms. A piece of something from his dad’s head fell on David’s sleeve. I didn’t want to speculate on what it was.

  David stared up at me. “Where’s my mother?” Like I had the answer to that question? He then seemed to come out of the fog he was in: “Call 911, Raven.” He gently laid his dad’s head on the rug and slowly made his way down the hall into the kitchen. I made the call and then very apprehensively followed him.

  There was Florence Selby with a bowl of cereal in front of her. She was looking right at us, but not seeing us. The hole in her forehead had prevented her from ever seeing anything again.

  David hugged his dead mom like she was still alive. He wouldn’t let go—I had to pull him away. “The police are on their way, David.”

  Twelve minutes later two cops came running into the house through the still open door. “Don’t touch anything,” they said, like we hadn’t already messed up the crime scene. I had interrogated quite a few people who had been close to a murder victim, never knowing until now how numb those people felt. Both David and I could hardly answer any of the questions that the cop in charge asked us. I felt like I was in second grade—my mind was blank.

  At one point during the questioning, David snapped at the cop: “Why don’t you get the hell out of here and let me be alone with my parents.”

  “We can’t leave you here, sir. It’s a crime scene.” Like David didn’t know what that was.

  The cops finally completed the interrogation. The questioning cop looked scornfully at us when we told him we were private detectives. I felt we had just told him we were terrorists.

  At this moment we were seventy miles away from the new home David and I had bought three months ago, right across from a horse farm. “We have to stay here, up in Scranton,” David said. I have to find who did this.” I was going to suggest that, anyway, at least to stay momentarily: the roads were probably still bad, and with the condition David was in I didn’t want him driving anywhere. About the only thing he was a control freak with me in was that he never wanted me to drive when we were together. I had to be very stern with him to even now allow me to drive to the motel.

  We checked into the Best Western, where the smiling clerk told us that being the hundredth customer that week entitled us to a free upgrade. “This is your lucky day,” the beaming boy gushed.

  “Yeah, our lucky day,” David said blankly.

  Once inside the room, David just sat on the bed staring at the phone, as if he wanted it to ring, and it would be his parents at the other end telling him to come over now and watch the game. A football playoff game now seemed so abysmally trivial that I couldn’t imagine why anyone could ever get excited over that.

  “Maybe we should get some sleep, David.”

  “What?”

  “Should we try to get some rest?”

  “Rest?”

  He was in a trance. “Why did that happen?” was all he kept saying. “Why did they have to die?”

  For the next week we stayed at that motel making the funeral arrangements and then going to the funeral itself. David’s parents were Catholic—I didn’t know what David was—so there was Mass at St Hubert’s in Scranton. At the service David tried to give the eulogy that his parents deserved, but he got only halfway through it. He was done, and had to sit down in tears.

  As we rode in the car to t
he cemetery, David said, “We’re going to stay here until we find the killer or killers.” I had never heard so much determination in his voice. It wasn’t a point up for discussion.

  Our detective agency had done well the first couple of months, so we wouldn’t be in any financial distress if we didn’t work there for awhile. Again, I could have always bailed us out with my inheritance, but that would have meant telling David about it. I still had never done that. However, there were no immediate clues or suspects, and by the fifth week of our stay in Scranton our finances were now running low, and I did finally have to tell David that I had enough money to keep us solvent for years.

  David looked at me like I had punched him in the stomach.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”

  “Really, David, I think it was because you had talked so much about how wealth corrupts.”

  “It does.”

  “So you think I’m corrupted?”

  “No. Yes—I mean, no, I’m just bothered because you didn’t tell me.”

  “So it’s no problem that I have lots of money?”

  David paused. My heart skipped a beat. “Well, yeah, it does—a little.”

  Maybe more than a little, because for the next two days David hardly spoke to me. I felt like I had some kind of plague. I wasn’t about to give up my inheritance. It was what was keeping us afloat at the moment, and besides, it would be like betraying my parents and their wishes. But also I didn’t want to give up David, so I didn’t try to further the argument. I just maintained my own silence, and waited.

  After another two days, David was back to speaking to me again, and all seemed forgotten. However, what wasn’t forgotten was Paul and Florence’s murder.

  The question of course that we had to start with was, what possible motive could someone have, to kill two fine people like David’s parents? They seemed to have no enemies. Even the students in their high school loved them. Our first few weeks of interviews had produced only positive comments about the two people. Could the killings have been totally random? Were we back in the Charles Manson days when people were sent out to kill ANYONE?

  Paul and Florence, two months ago, did have an addition put onto the back of their house, a kind of combination TV-recreation room. David and I checked with the construction people, but they all appeared to be as pure as the driven snow. They had done the work and gotten out.

  We found that sometimes Paul would stop after school at a local bar for a couple of drinks with other teachers before he came home. Once he had gotten into an altercation with another man in the bar over some silly scientific fact that no one now could precisely remember. We checked out that guy, but he had moved to Seattle three months earlier and had never been back.

  Both Paul and Florence seemed to have been eternally faithful to one another. We could find no illicit romances in their past to cause pain and conflict. Also they had no large investments—they were not in any financial trouble. After the renovation, they had $3400 in the bank at the time of their death.

  When David was told about the bank account, he said more harshly than I’d ever heard him speak to me: “If they ever had gotten into money troubles maybe you could have loaned them some. Or would they have had to beg for it?” Boy, the guy just doesn’t want to forget about my inheritance. I hoped this bitter attitude of his would go away because I didn’t want to go away from David.

  Our break in the case came because one day it rained for seven straight hours. By this time, to save money, we had moved into David’s parents’ house. We also had rented our house back in Philly by the month to give us additional cash. David constantly refused offers for me to use the money I had to help us. “We’ll survive on the money we make, not with money that was merely given to us. The word “given” was said with a most icy tone.

  The Selby’s house was solid—warm in the winter, and now breezy at the beginning of spring. It was a very comfortable place to live, but it did have one construction flaw: the basement leaked, and we didn’t know it until we went down there that rain day to get some additional canned goods. There was three inches of water covering the entire basement floor. We found an old Shop-Vac in the storeroom, and four hours later we had mopped up.

  “We can’t bail out this place every time it rains hard,” David said. “We’ll call those people who put in the recreation room.”

  The contractor told us that he had never worked on the Selby’s basement. “We don’t do that kind of work, but your parents were going to get a handyman in the area to do the work of plugging up the leak. Your dad had complained to me about it.”

  “Apparently that work was never done,” David replied, as he was looking through his dad’s box of bills for the last few months. “Ah, here’s a phone number with a notation next to it: ‘Basement--$290.’ And the name at the bottom, Jesse Springer.”

  David called that number, but it was out of service. There was another Springer in the phone book, but it turned out to be Jesse’s dad, who told us his son had moved away from the Scranton area just two months ago.

  “Where did he go?” David inquired.

  “Montreal.”

  “That’s far. Wasn’t he making a good living here?”

  “He was doing fine. I had taught Jesse many carpentry skills, and also he had gone to night school for plumbing certification. He had done well for the last five years, and was talking about buying a home around here.”

  “Why did he give up that idea?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he usually move around a lot, you know, a restless kind of a kid?”

  “Not at all. He grew up in this locale and never moved. This is the first time he ever left Scranton.”

  A sudden move, not too long after the Selbys were killed. It was suspicious.

  The next day David and I drove to Montreal, and it took us a few minutes after we got there to find the advertisement for “Jesse Springer—handyman” on line. Jesse himself was living in a motel. “We can relate to that,” David told him.

  Jesse appeared initially relaxed until David asked him about doing basement work for the Selbys. He pulled at his goatee nervously as he said, “Yeah, I gave them an estimate.”

  “$290—right?”

  “I guess that would be about right.”

  “Why didn’t you do the work? I’m sure the Selby’s didn’t want their basement to keep leaking,” David said, and then he kept up the pressure. “And not only didn’t you do the work, but a week after their death you moved out of town for the first time in your 32 years.”

  “You know a lot about me.”

  “Your dad also told me that you had two other jobs pending when you left. If you were going to leave town, why not do those jobs first so you’d have some extra money to tie you over in your new location? You seemed to want to get out of town in a big hurry. Why was that?”

  “I was just tired of Scranton.”

  “You weren’t tired for over thirty years, and then suddenly you got bored?”

  “Get off my case, man.”

  “All right, Jesse, we’re leaving. Nice talking with you.”

  “Yeah, right. The pleasure’s all mine.”

  When David stood up he bumped against the end table knocking over a lamp and what was left of Jesse’s soda.

  “You clumsy shit!” Jesse exclaimed.

  “My fault,” David said. “Here, let me help clean up. David whipped out his handkerchief to wipe the little table, and he also picked the mess up off the floor.

  “Now leave me alone,” Jesse said. I’ve got a job to do in an hour—fixing a roof—a lot of stuff leaks here in Montreal.”

  Once we got back to the car, I said to David, “What was that all about. It seemed like you bumped the table on purpose.”

  “I did do it on purpose. I now have Jesse’s paper cup with his DNA on it. My dad didn’t give up without a fight, and there was blood from the perp at the crime scene. But up to now the Scranton police haven’t
had anyone to match to that blood. Not until now. I think we have our killer.”

  And we did. It was a match. The Scranton police had Jesse Springer extradited from Montreal. His trial would begin in a month. His only words upon his arrest were, “I thought they were rich.”

  We could now leave Scranton and go back to Philly.

  As we were driving back, I asked David, “When you were sitting there with Springer, I think you knew he was the killer. That man killed your parents. How were you able to control yourself so that you didn’t strangle him right there?”

  “I had to get him for the crime without me doing something foolish and committing a crime myself. You asked me how I was able to control myself. That’s the secret to life, Raven, control—you’ll go far if you can master that.”

  David didn’t usually lecture me. I did resent it right then, but I was glad that David had gotten closure for his parents’ deaths. It wasn’t time for me to speak about my own irritations.

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  Speaking of CSI stuff like DNA and fingerprints, when I got back to Philly and checked the messages for our agency during the time I had been in Scranton the one I paid the most attention to was the one from Phil Petrosky.

  Yes, this was the same Petrosky who had mocked me for not solving my first cases, the same Petrosky that David had fought for my honor. I don’t know if Chief Brown had known what David and Phil had been arguing about that day, but if he did he accomplished some perfect justice: he eventually gave the mocker the very cases he was criticizing me for. It was as if Brown was saying, “All right big talker, you solve these cases.” As I had said earlier, the Procopius case was solved, so Petrosky was given the Ed Butcher and Carla Strand cases. Officially they were classified as cold cases, but Petrosky was supposed to keep an eye on them and do some digging whenever he could.

  Before I left the force, Petrosky had gotten friendlier toward me. Maybe he saw how difficult those two cases were, and the experience gave Phil some humility. For whatever reason, Phil had talked to me regularly before David and I left, and he said he would keep me posted about those two cases. I guess since those were the first cases I ever had there was still an element of frustration in my brain that I had never been able to find the killers in each.