Fifth Saturday Fiction

Reaching Out
(a short story), Part 1

By Steve Glossin

William ‘Bill’ Green placed his left mocha-brown penny loafer on the pavement of the M&P Furniture Emporium parking lot, then his right, and slid out of his maroon ’73 VW Beetle. He made clucking sounds with his tongue as he glanced around the vacant parking lot, then shook his head in disgust. The small islands of trash scattered over the recently painted lot were not there when he closed the previous evening.
    Fast-food wrappers, empty soda and beer cans, cigarette butts…piles of cigarette butts. They looked like filtered weeds sprouting out of the asphalt. Bill made a mental note to call Taylor Short at the ARCO station and ask him to make a run with his street sweeper after the Emporium closed today. He thought about calling the sheriff and complaining again…but it wouldn’t do any good. The sheriff would cruise past the Emporium for a couple of nights and after a week the teenagers would be back to do whatever it was they did when they congregated at night. What had the sheriff said last time? “They’re just having a little fun, Bill. Hell, you were young once.” “Yeah, I was young once,” Bill had replied, “but I didn’t smoke or drink, and I still don’t. And if I did, I’d sure know what a waste receptacle’s made for.”
    Bill put his key in the Beetle’s door and locked it. He didn’t want his baby to tempt one of those teenagers. She was a classic and in tip-top shape for thirty years old. The new paint job gave her a touch of class…royal purple like a queen’s sable. She was his first car and he remembered the day his father had given her to him…eighteenth birthday and high school graduation present, rolled into one.
    Bill ran a hand through his thinning chestnut hair, flipping the long locks from the left side across his glistening pate to hang over his right ear like a horse’s mane. He glanced at his imitation gold Rolex and saw he had fifteen minutes to open the Emporium. Bill tried to take a step but something tugged at the bottom of a loafer. He raised and tilted his right foot and stared at a glob of green chewing gum stuck to the sole. Bill cursed under his breath, “They ought to outlaw this stuff.”
    Bill unlocked the front door and went in. He turned on the display lights and twisted the closed sign around to open. He took the sticky loafer off and held it away from his body. His narrow hips covered in skin-tight black leather pants swayed more than usual as he limped through the Emporium’s main aisle toward the back warehouse and his office. A thin-lipped smile spread across Bill’s pinched face as he glanced left then right at the living, dining, and bedroom suites on the display floor. When Mr. Treadway hired him five years ago to manage the place, the only items in the inventory were unfinished pine furniture.
    The previous year Treadway had retired to Cleveland and given Bill a free hand to run the Emporium as long as it showed a profit. Three months later Bill met a salesman who represented ‘European Classic Reproductions of Ohio,’ at a furniture convention in Denver. After two nights of putting the Josephine Bonaparte canopy bed to test with sweet Sal the salesman, Bill knew what he had to do. He sold the entire stock of Treadway’s ‘Luxury Pine Furniture’ at cost. Promoted as ‘Walton Mountain Modern,’ it was snatched up as bargains by the residents of Red Pine, Colorado, population 6,435. A week later the first shipment of classic reproductions arrived.
    Bill limped into the warehouse, a thirty by forty-foot room with just enough space to unpack deliveries, and entered the eight by ten-foot office built against the back wall. He switched on the light and set his gum-tainted loafer on a yellow notepad on his roll top desk…a carryover from the Walton Mountain days. He picked up the letter opener and was starting to poke at the gum when a cool draft of air tickled the back of his neck like flittering gnats. He glanced at the office window, but it was closed and locked. He turned slowly and was shocked to see the loading dock door standing ajar.
    Bill’s first thought was that Tim must have forgotten to close it after cleaning up. His second was that there must have been a break-in. Tim never fails to lock up. He slid the loafer onto his foot and inched his way out of the office and toward the door. Each time he lifted the gummy loafer off the floor it sounded like bubble wrap being kneaded. He nervously touched the sliding door with his right hand to push it closed, then pulled his hand back as though he’d touched a hot grill, his heart beating a drum roll. He waited ten seconds for the intruder to rush in and pummel him, and the time passed much too fast for Bill.
    He leaned his head to the edge of the opening, enough to take a peek out with his left eye…Still no confrontation. He edged his way around the door, his upper body frozen and his legs shaking. He shifted his hazel eyes left then right then back again, before the breath he had been holding whooshed out.
    Bill wasn’t a coward in the true sense of the word, but little things frightened him…unlighted alleys at night, little dogs who growled and pretty much anything on the other side of an open door that was supposed to be closed and locked.
    He almost fainted when he saw a crumpled body lying next to the large green dumpster. He started to hyperventilate as he ran toward the office and the telephone to call the sheriff.

Deputy Tom Fairgate was becoming agitated. “Bill, I want you to take a couple of deep breaths and calm down.” Tom was working the day shift and didn’t like the way it was starting out. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Bill, you need to quit blowing into that damn paper bag and tell me what’s happened.” What he heard didn’t make much sense. Green…the Emporium…Open door…body.
    When Tom heard Bill start to hyperventilate again, he glanced at his watch and saw that two minutes had passed. “Bill, I’ll be there as quick as I can and it sure as hell better not be another dead dog or cat. We ain’t the Humane Society.”
    Deputy Fairgate grabbed his green-felt Smokey off the coat rack and pushed it down firmly on his blonde crew cut. He stepped out the door and hurried his hundred and ninety pounds down the steps, two at a time. He jumped into the blue and white Chevy police cruiser, started the engine and headed east on Twelfth Street. He turned the cruiser right at the ARCO gas station onto Cedar, which would take him the five miles to the Emporium.
    Tom stepped through the front door and unhooked the leather strap that held his Colt .38 Police Special in its holster. You never know, he thought. Tom’s hand-tooled black leather cowboy boots made faint slapping sounds on the dark green linoleum as he inched toward the back. “Bill? Where are you, Bill?” He looked left then right at the floor displays in case someone was there, then picked up his pace when he didn’t get a reply. Shit, he thought, looks like the furniture I saw in a whorehouse down in Nogales. At the door to the warehouse he paused and unholstered the Colt.
    Tom found Bill lying on a black leather settee in the cramped office, pale as a ghost, breathing into a brown paper bag. Tom watched the bag expand and contract a couple of times. “What the hell’s going on, Bill?”
    Bill pointed to the open door.
    Tom recognized Tim Riley the moment he inched his way to the dumpster. The dirty white tennis shoes, blue jeans and red sweater that Ma Riley, Tim’s grandmother, had knitted were the same clothes he was wearing the previous morning, when Tom saw the seventeen-year-old boy waiting for the school bus.
    He knew Tim was dead before he holstered his Colt and dropped to one knee next to the body. The boy was lying on his stomach and the ashen color of his face told the deputy what he confirmed by placing two fingers on Tim’s pale neck. Tom leaned closer and saw a puddle of jelled blood, that had edged out a quarter inch from under the red sweater.
    Tom Placed both hands on Tim’s side, careful not to make contact with the blood and gently lifted him up. Tim’s left arm was extended away from the body, but his right hand was clutching a blood-soaked Rockies baseball cap against his chest. Tom slowly lowered Tim then stood up and walked quickly back into the office.
    His first call was to Doctor Howard Pointer, who did double duty as the town’s coroner. “Doc, I’ve got a cold one out behind the Furniture Emporium.”
    “You know who it is?”
    “Yeah, Tim Riley. Can you get out here to pick him up?”
    “Hold on a minute…The hearse from the Westbrook funeral parlor will meet me there in fifteen minutes.”
    Tom’s next call was to Hiram Wilkins, Minister of the Red Pine Methodist Church. Ma Riley would have to be notified.
    Doc Pointer closed the hearse’s back door and waved at Horace the driver. Horace waved back then put the hearse in gear and headed to the Red Pine Medical Center. After the black Cadillac disappeared around the corner of the Emporium, Doc turned around and watched Tom sweeping underneath the green dumpster with a broom.
    “Did you find anything?”
    “Couple of dead rats is all.” He picked one up by the tail and studied it like a high school biology student getting ready for a dissection.
    Doc Pointer inched up next to him. “Big one.” He took a plastic ballpoint pen out of his smock’s pocket and poked it into a bloody hole in the rat’s side. When he pulled it out a small gray lead pellet fell to the ground.
    Tom tossed the rat into the green dumpster then took a handkerchief out of his pocket and picked up the pellet. “Ain’t been dead more than a day, I’d say. Shot with an air rifle or pistol.”
    “That bullet in Timmy’s chest isn’t from a pellet gun, more like a small caliber pistol.” Doc Pointer tossed the bloodied pen after the rat. “I’ve got to get back to the medical center. I gave Billy a sedative and told him he ought to close for the day and go home.”
    Tom’s forehead was wrinkled in thought. “When can I expect the report?”
    “Barring a forest fire or an outbreak of bubonic plague, two days.”
    Tom waved as Doc Pointer headed his Chevy Blazer in the same direction as the hearse. He turned and walked back into the warehouse.
    “Is it gone?” Bill’s voice was meek and two octaves higher than normal.
    Tom looked down at Bill sprawled on the black settee…the same color as his leather trousers. “Is what gone?”
    “You know, Tim’s body.”
    “Yeah, they took Tim’s body to the medical center.” Tom didn’t care much for Bill’s use of it…“Does the store have a rat problem?”
    Bill sat up more quickly than a jack in the box. “Heavens no! I have the exterminators come by every six months. Did you see one?”
    “Forget it. Earlier you said Tim comes by in the evenings and takes the trash out and sweeps up.”
    The wrinkles around Bill’s hazel eyes became more pronounced. “Yes. Sometimes before I close up and sometimes later in the evening. Three days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Unless we have a big sale, then I might ask him to come in an extra day.”
    Tom held up a key he had removed from Tim’s pocket. “Is this the key you gave him?”
    Bill leaned forward to get a better look. “Yes, I put a dab of fingernail polish on all the keys, to make them easier to recognize. Brown is for the back door.”
    Tom glanced around the office and noticed the calendar, a young male model with a bare chest. “You say you never had a problem with Tim?”
    Bill saw Tom’s eyes pause on the calendar. “Don’t even go there. Tim was a good kid and he was helping his grandma pay the bills. I would never...”
    Tom cut him off before he could finish, “You’re not planning on going on vacation any time soon are you, Bill?”
    Bill stood up, his posture tense and his face having taken on a hardness few people in Red Pine had seen. “I take three weeks in December, when the snow gets bad. Six months from now, deputy.”
    Tom didn’t suspect Bill and knew he should have lightened up on him, but…“If I have any more questions, I’ll get in touch with you.” Tom walked out of the warehouse and through the display floor, his cowboy boots pounding out his departure on the green linoleum.

Deputy Fairgate was seated at his unvarnished pine desk. It had been purchased by the city, at cost, when Treadway ran the Emporium. He was going through a copy of the autopsy report, which Doc Pointer had dropped off five minutes earlier.
    “Can a man get a cup of coffee this time of the morning?” a gravely voice asked.
    Tom recognized Sheriff Marion Sloan’s voice and replied without lifting his head. “Only if he’s got a mess of fish to trade.” When Tom looked up he was surprised how a week’s growth of beard and time under the sun had changed the sheriff’s appearance. The skin tone he’d inherited from his grandmother was a darker shade of bronze. The growth of jet-black facial hair made his chin appear even fuller in relation to the high cheekbones on his narrow face. But there was no mistaking the full nose from the Ute side of his family. “When’d you get back, Marion?”
    Marion walked through the swinging gate that separated the public from the offices, his long casual stride taking him to a gray metal table holding a coffee pot, and sometimes donuts. “A few minutes ago, if it’s town you’re talking about...tomorrow if it’s work.”
    He poured a cup of coffee and took a slow sip then leaned back against the table and looked around the office. “I was kind of hoping you’d burned the jail down and I could go back to the cabin until the town built a new one.”
    Tom grinned. He knew Marion enjoyed running around the woods like his maternal grandmother’s family…fishing a little and bagging a deer every now and then while his wife Helen kept the home fires burning. “Does Helen know you’re back?”
    Marion laughed heartily. “You know how to ruin a man’s vacation memories. She expects me today and probably has a list of honey do’s that’ll keep me busy for a month of Sundays.”
    Tom paused and his voice took on a serious tone. “Better you hear it from me than someone on the street—”
    “Does it have anything to do with Doc Pointer stopping by? I saw him drive away when I pulled in.”
    “He dropped this off.” Tom waved a sheaf of papers. “It’s the autopsy report on Tim Riley.”
    Marion strode over to Tom’s desk and took the papers out of his hand. He glanced at it and asked. “Ma Riley’s Tim?”
    “Yeah, it happened three days ago.” Tom spent twenty minutes going over what he knew and had done then added, “Doc Pointer confirms the bullet in Tim’s chest was .22 caliber. He said the bullet had damaged the Pulmonary artery which led to the death. Doc used a lot of other medical terms I didn’t understand, but it should all be in there.”
    Marion dropped the report on Tom’s desk. “I better get home and let Helen know I’m back. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    Tom saw the pained look in Marion’s coal-black eyes. Tim’s death affected a lot of people that way. Tragedy was no stranger to the Riley family. Five years earlier Tim’s parents, Richard and Faye, had been killed in a freak accident with a logging truck. “Yeah, see you tomorrow,” he said to the sheriff’s receding back.

[Part 2 will appear on December 20.]

Copyright © 2014 by Steve Glossin