Murder at Great Cedar

The abrupt upward motion caught Irma’s attention. Ta-DAH! The man in the ballcap stood with his right arm extended, frozen after the act, blade reflecting the stark light of the streetlamp. His cap, embroidered with a single letter representing some sports team, was angled to obscure all but his clean-shaven jaw and chin. His teeth, though. Irma doubted she would ever forget the grimace that showed all those grinding teeth, enough to challenge the shark in Jaws.

“NO!” Irma screamed, the force of her voice surprising her as much as the man below. She stared from the open kitchen window, not caring that she was fully illuminated against the darkness of nearby apartments. At this hour all her neighbors were either asleep or at work.

The other person in the scene below wore a green, floral-print jacket, prudent for a cool evening following another day of Indian summer. A foot shorter than her attacker, the young woman might be thirty, not young enough to be Irma’s daughter but maybe a younger sister. The woman clutched at her throat, desperate to staunch the flow of… all that…

It ran between her fingers in a steady torrent. The sound of Irma’s cry brought the other woman around, providing a clearer view even if they never made eye contact. Her green jacket was turning black from the top down.

The blind panic in those gaping eyes elicited another scream from Irma, which in turn refocused her attention back on the man in the ballcap, whom she realized had not moved except for a brief shudder after her first cry. He stood, arm raised, paralyzed by the fact that there had been a witness to his crime.

Next thing she knew, Irma was throwing open the door with no care to pull it shut behind her. Barefoot, her heels thudded against the rough all-weather carpet that had never been replaced in the dozen years she had lived at Great Cedar Apartments, where there were both two- and three-bedroom homes at reasonable prices that even you could afford, as long as you don’t want sinks that drain or toilets that flush. Across the landing she grabbed the rusted iron rail and wheeled herself onto the top step, barely registering the sticker of a Navy Tomcat—like the one Tom Cruise flew in Top Gun—that covered her neighbor Jack’s apartment number, which happened to be F-14. Her eyes strained to see around the corner, where the predator had stood next to his petite, green-jacketed victim.

Her hands were red from all of it! Irma thought, but what her mind's eye remained focused on was the green cloth staining black, the white flowers rose red.

Thirteen steps connected Irma and Jack’s landing to the ground. The number had always seemed macabre, but Irma did not consider herself a superstitious woman. All she cared about at the moment was that she had to cover just enough distance that the man in the cap could get away. If he had run left, she would have seen him as she started down the steps. But if he went right, or down the trail beyond the lamppost, then she would have no inkling of where he went. She could provide no information for the police other than his embroidered ballcap, his dark jacket, and the fact that he had been holding a knife.

No, she realized as she neared the bottom of the steps. Not a knife. It had been a straight razor. Like in that movie where Johnny Depp played a killer barber. Or the old TV movie about Jack the Ripper. It had been a straight razor, but—and this almost made Irma slow down as she thought it—who left home with a straight razor except someone who planned to kill with it?

The memory of the woman’s grasping fingers kept Irma moving. If the man in the ballcap had been spooked by Irma’s scream—and that whole-body shudder certainly implied he had been—then he’d probably taken off running the moment she disappeared from her window. There was a good chance the woman was still alive, but she needed help right away. Irma didn’t consider the possibility that he might be down there, waiting, until her momentum carried her around the corner at the bottom of the steps, and she stood staring at the empty sidewalk.

She gasped. The sound carried far in the autumn evening. This late in the year there were no crickets, no frogs by the pond among the trees, not even an owl. The unseasonal heat had not resurrected their nightly jamborees. There was only her gasp as she stumbled to a halt at the very spot where the dying woman had stood.

Irma spun about, suddenly terrified that the killer was behind her, but she found nothing there but the darkness of downstairs windows. Hillary in F-13 had two young children, and they never closed the curtains before going to bed. Irma turned again, slower this time, peering down the path and into the unlit expanse of trail beyond the lamppost.

She thought, The blood.

Horrified, she hopped back, toward the steps. She danced, herky-jerky, lifting first one foot, then the other. Both were darkened from running on the all-weather carpet, also from the sidewalk, but they were dry. In the circle of light below the sodium lamp, the sidewalk was clear everywhere she looked. The blades of grass that peeked through cracks where she had been standing were the vivid green of weeds defiant enough to pierce cement.

Irma shook her head. I know what I saw.

She reached for the phone in her back pocket and accidently slapped her own ass through the thin cloth of pajama bottoms.

“What?” she said aloud, staring at herself for a moment before she realized that she had changed for bed just before the attack. The only reason she had been in the kitchen was a late-night desire for a drink of water. She had walked into the kitchen, poured the water at the sink and looked outside while the glass was filling…

Is the water still running? she wondered. Lord, it took forever to drain, but she would have to deal with that later--even if it overflowed.

Briefly, Irma thought of the safety officer, the man her neighbor Jack called “the rent-a-cop” and Irma herself quietly identified as Paul Blart: Mall Cop, because he was morbidly obese and rarely left the office despite his responsibility to walk regular rounds. She glanced toward the office as she forsook the idea of running for help, and that put the man emerging from the trail into her peripheral vision.

Certainly not Paul Blart, this fellow was maybe twenty, dressed in a forest-green vest over a brown shirt, khakis, white sneakers. He was clean shaven. Irma nearly screamed again, but his own look of startlement arrested the scream in her throat.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

His apparent shock shifted to incredulity before she finished uttering the question. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the copse of cedar and prickly bushes. “I work at the Starbuck’s in the Plaza.” He didn’t speak the words, “crazy lady,” at the end of his statement, but his tone conveyed them well enough. Lowering his head, he made as if to leave.

“Wait!” Irma cried. The emotion in her voice, something she knew was kissing cousin to panic, made him stop, but it did nothing to soften his gaze when he looked at her again. There were dark circles under his eyes, almost bruises.

What kind of shoes was the man in the ballcap wearing? she wondered.

“Was there anybody else on the path just now? A man? A woman?”

He shook his head, not to say, No, but rather, Seriously, lady? I just want to go to bed. It’s been a long day.

“There was a murder!” Irma cried. As she spoke the words, tears spill down her cheeks that had been welling since before this unknown barista came out of the darkness.

“What?”

“There was,” Irma said. “It’s true! I live right up there,” she pointed to her window, the only beacon in a long row of unlit apartments. “I was at the window and I looked down—I looked right here—and there was a man with a razor and a woman in a green floral jacket, and he…he…”

The barista looked around now, concerned. He glanced first down the sidewalk where he had been headed, then behind him, down the forested trail that ran a few hundred yards to the Plaza and its well-lit stores that sold pizza and coffee and Chinese till midnight, sometimes later. He regarded the sidewalk. He passed through the light and studied the shrubs and grass at the mouth of the path.

Forensics would find it, Irma thought. At least a few drops, lost to the shadows, between the cracks in the sidewalk. It had to be there.

“He had a razor?” the barista asked. Irma heard the real question in his voice. It was the same one in her own mind. Where was the blood?

I know what I saw, she thought again.

“I don’t think he cut an artery,” she said, regulating her tone through extreme force of will. “It wasn’t like you see in the movies. The blood must have stayed on her, soaked into her clothes.”

Now the barista crouched beneath the light, surveying the concrete. He set his jaw and furrowed his brow.

“Do you have a phone?” Irma asked. “Mine is upstairs. I was so worried about the lady that I forgot it.”

He craned his neck to look at her. “You were so worried about the lady with the neck wound that you ran down here without your phone.”

It was not a question. He was a jury of one, and he had reached a verdict. He said no more, just shook his head and rose to his feet.

White tennis shoes, Irma thought. The killer had been wearing white tennis shoes. She felt sure of it.

“Don’t you move!” Irma shouted, and the man froze in mid-crouch. He shuddered when her tone changed, and Irma felt more certain than ever that this was her man. A place like Starbuck’s would not allow baristas to wear white tennis shoes to work; no coffee shop had a dress code that lax. And what about his teeth? When he crouched under the light, hadn't he worn that same, open-mouthed grimace she had seen from the window?

“Where’s your jacket?” she demanded. “What about the hat?”

“It was seventy degrees when I started work this afternoon,” he said. “It has been all week.”

Oh, my sweet Jesus, she thought. It’s him!

The realization struck Irma with palpable force. She leapt back. The prickle of grass against the soles of her feet reminded her of the fact that she wore nothing but pajamas. Her phone was thirteen steps up and across the landing from Jack’s door with the F-14 Tomcat. Like most of her neighbors, Jack worked nights. She could try pounding on Hillary’s door, but it would do no good once the razor returned.

Then Irma thought of the woman, who had to be lying in the bushes just a short distance down the path. Once again drawn to help a stranger, she circled around the man who had called himself a barista. Had he just been running out the clock? Trying to delay her until there was no chance to save his victim in her coat of blood-soaked flowers?

How did he know it was a neck wound? Irma thought. I said “artery.” Is that enough to assume it was a neck wound?

He had not moved since she raised her voice. His eyes followed her like a gunfighter’s, Lee Van Cleef waiting to draw on the Man with No Name, but as Irma hurried down the hard-packed earth of the path, the stranger raced in another direction, tennis shoes slapping on cracked cement.

“Hello?” Irma shouted into the darkness. “Can you hear me?”

She once again recalled blood flowing between the woman’s fingers. A torrent. For the first time, just for an instant, she questioned whether there had been so much blood. Could she have seen it from the window as clearly as she remembered? Hadn't the woman been facing away from her during the attack?

She crushed all doubt. Projecting as far as her voice could reach, she called, “If you can’t speak, make a noise! Just swing your arm or kick your feet. I’m listening!”

Irma forced herself to stand perfectly still. She held her breath, ignoring the fire ignited in her chest. She swiped at the trails of her tears, now sticky and cool in the breeze. The scent of the pond filled her nostrils, murky and desolate from the changing seasons. She could see nothing to the left or right, only the lamppost behind her and the aurora of the Plaza opposite.

She nearly rushed into the darkness, willingly accepting the scratches that would come as she cast about for the injured woman, but her rational mind kept her from making this mistake. If the woman could not respond, then she was in very bad condition, and Irma knew she could not offer the sort of care that would turn things around. Irma’s only hope was to get back upstairs, to her phone, and dial 9-1-1.

Farther down the path, illuminated only by moonlight, a figure came to a halt, little more than a silhouette. He cocked his head. Irma opened her mouth to call out, then thought better. The newcomer was wearing a ballcap.

It could be him.

The newcomer retreated towards the Plaza at a jog.

A rattling sound might have been an animal, or it might have been the woman in the floral jacket. And it might have come from anywhere. The bushes and trees refracted sound beyond the edges of the path as perfectly as they blocked moonlight. Irma shuddered, realizing how much time she had wasted. She was no help standing here, wringing her hands in desperation.

“I’ll be back!” Irma yelled, wishing at least one of her neighbors would wake up from all this damned screaming. Something took flight at the sound of her voice. The fluttering wings and shaking November leaves made her flinch but not leap away. Defiantly, she yelled again, “I’m calling the police!”

Then she was storming up the thirteen steps to the landing, past the jet fighter covering her neighbor’s apartment number, and across the landing to her door. She threw it open and raced inside, kicking it closed behind her as she dashed into the kitchen.

She slapped her palm against the counter next to the wireless charging pad.

“What?” she asked aloud.

It was the only place she ever left her phone, but it wasn’t here. She stepped back from the counter and rubbed her hands over her face, instilling enough calm to retrace her steps before this nightmare began. Where in hell could it be?

She had changed into pajamas, and the first step of that, every night, involved pulling her phone out of her pocket and placing it on the charger. Irma shook her head.

At least I didn’t leave the water running. It was an errant thought, more bitter than relieved. She had enough presence of mind to shut off the faucet before running to confront Jack the Ripper, but even now she couldn’t remember what she had done with her phone, even though she did the same thing every night, without exception. Maybe because of it.

Footsteps on the sidewalk. Irma lunged to the sink and peered out the window. The safety officer, whom she quite disrespectfully thought of as Paul Blart, stood beneath the lamppost with the beam of his sturdy flashlight cast down the path toward the Plaza. At the sight of him, Irma exhaled a breath that she had not realized she was holding. She bent forward over the sink, and one hand slipped into cool water.

Irma flinched. She stared at the basin as if she had touched a spider, too afraid to even shake the water from her hand. The sinks in every unit of Great Cedar Apartments drained slowly, so slowly that it sometimes seemed they had to be clogged. But she had ordered in for dinner, so the sink had been empty since yesterday. Now it was full to the brim. The plug rested next to the faucet.

Oh sweet Jesus, Irma thought.

She thought of the safety officer standing on the sidewalk below, armed only with a flashlight. She didn’t even know his real name. Jack always said, “He’s got to weigh three bills. If anything ever happens to us up here, he’s going to have to stand at the bottom of the steps and wait for the real help to come.”

Another certainty hit home with the gravity of a tolling iron bell.

I didn’t close the door, but it was shut when I got home.

Irma slowly turned her back to the open window, and though the sight of the man in her kitchen prickled her scalp and stippled her arms in a rash of gooseflesh, she felt no surprise.

After all these years, she thought, I’ve become a trope. She was now the woman who had run up the steps when she should have been running for help. She took in the sight of him, his Phillies ballcap and dark jacket. He had wiped the blade clean, of course, but Jack’s razor was always thirsty. He grimaced, revealing shark’s teeth. And his shoes, they were brown.