I opened the door and stepped out of the unmarked car. I stood behind the door and looked around. There was a cruiser in the driveway, parked next to a jacked-up, red Chevy Silverado. There were two more cruisers parked at the curb, with an ambulance and the coroner’s van behind them. Uniformed officers, EMTs, and the assistant coroner milled around the front yard smoking and drinking coffee. Every emergency vehicle had their strobes running; the red, white, and blue coming from the light bars was reflecting off of the surrounding houses and trees. It reminded me of watching a 4th of July fireworks show as a kid. In every window up and down the street you could see faces pressed against the glass, intermittently illuminated with patriotic colors.
A uniformed officer approached me, flashes of light reflected off of his shield and the aviator sunglasses clipped to his shirt pocket.
“Detective, we can’t arrest the suspect without violating the crime scene,” said the officer. “Hoskins said maybe you could convince her to… um. To get off of the victim.”
I gave him a questioning look and looked over his shoulder to see Hoskins waving to me from the front step, “Kinsey, get your ass in here and see if you can get this crazy bitch to come down off of her husband.” Hoskins’ permanently grouchy face seemed unhappier than usual and he scowled at me before turning back into the house.
I nodded to the uniformed officer, shut my car door, and started to make my way along the sidewalk. I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me and watched the shadows cast by the emergency lights shift like nervous fingers. When I got to the front step, I looked up from my shoes and straight into the grumpy face of Sergeant Hoskins.
“This is some crazy shit, right here,” Hoskins said with a scowl that nearly drew his eyebrows to meet above his bulbous nose. “She’s just sitting there smoking and drinking whiskey. She won’t talk and won’t even acknowledge that someone else is in the room.” Hoskins sniffed and turned to lead me through the house to the bedroom.
“Who made the call,” I asked as we walked.
We arrived at the end of a short hallway to a bedroom. Smoke and light spilled out of room into the dark hallway. I leaned against the door frame.
“She did! The psycho called 911 on her cell phone and said, ‘I just killed my husband.’ Then she tossed the phone on the chair over there,” Hoskins pointed to a puffy recliner half-covered with laundry where an iPhone had fallen into the cup of a discarded bra. “The first officer on the scene came in to hear the 911 operator yelling into the phone and to find our “suspect” here perched on top of the victim like some kind of demented schoolyard bully.” Hoskins used air quotes when he said the word suspect.
“Looks like an open and shut case,” I said.
“Yeah,” whipered Hoskins. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to screw up evidence and let this nut bar walk.”
I nodded and pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was 3:04am.
“She’s all yours,” said Hoskins and motioned to the bed like a restaurant host showing me to a table and then made his way back down the hall.
I took a couple steps into the bedroom, which smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and something else. A bluish-white cloud swirled around a slow-turning ceiling fan. All the lights in the room were turned on, but the room still felt gloomy. The presence of a dead body and his killer seemed to suck the light from the room.
The body in question laid on his back in the middle of the bed, arms at his sides. half of his naked body was covered by a blanket. His right leg stuck out of the covers and a Harley-Davidson tattoo was starkly visible on the white, bloodless skin of his calf. Some kind of fabric strap ran across his shins and another one crossed his forearms and chest. His face was covered by a large pillow.
His killer sat on top of the body’s chest. She had her feet on the bed by his right arm, one of them was sheathed in a pink Dearfoam slipper. Her forearms rested on her bent knees. She held a bottle of Wild Turkey in her left hand. Her right hand was open and a lit cigarette lazily rested between her first and middle finger. Her posture reminded me of a bum sitting on a curb, drinking the pain away and chasing it with a cigarette taken from the Post Office ash tray. Her head was tilted to her left in a way that made her gaze fall on the body’s right hand.
She didn’t look up when Hoskins led me to the room. Before I could think of what to say, she lifted the cigarette to her mouth and took a long pull, then blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. The smoke drifted up to join the whirling cloud around the fan.
“I thought you quit smoking,” I asked her.
“I did. These are his. I found them on the nightstand,” answered the killer and tipped her head up to take a swig of whiskey. She swallowed, winced, and then put her head down to look at the knuckles of the dead, pale hand which still grasped the bed sheets near her left foot.
“The whiskey too?”
“The whiskey too. He won’t drink it anymore. Would be a shame to let it go to waste,” she sniffed and wiped her nose on her right forearm before taking another drag off of the cigarette. “You remember what the last thing you said to me was?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
The last thing I said to her had been repeating in my head since the call from dispatch woke me up to tell me I was needed at a crime scene. The words started to ring through my thoughts as the dispatcher read off the familiar address. The words drifted slowly through my grey matter while I got dressed. The words began to reverberate faster when I drove my car to the house. The words were the only thoughts in my skull while I drove on autopilot to this house. The words ricocheted around my cranium like a bullet when I pulled up to see the house bathed in the flashing lights.
“You asked me, ‘Why do you stay?'”
“Oh yeah, that’s what I said. You never answered me,” I said while I pinched the bridge of my nose. I thought I might be able to scare away the headache I felt building, but deep down I knew it was no use.
The killer looked up from her victim’s fist to look at me with two bloodshot eyes full of tears and fury. One of those eyes was surrounded with an ugly purple bruise and little trickles of blood ran from her nostrils. “Yeah, that’s what you said,” she threw the words at me with disdain and flicked the now dead cigarette into a nearby garbage can.
“It seemed like the right thing to ask,” I said apologetically.
“I’ll tell you why I stayed. But it’s a long story,” She said and reached toward me with the hand holding the bottle of whiskey.
I took the bottle from her, turned toward the chair covered in laundry, and pushed the pile of clothes off of the cushion. Her iPhone tumbled across the floor and a uniform stuck his head in at the noise. I waved him away and sat down. I leaned back against more laundry and got comfortable. I took a sip of whiskey and coughed from the caustic burn in my throat.
“Okay, I’m all ears,” I said with a voice raspy from whiskey-burned vocal cords.
Why I Stayed by Joshua Kautzman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.