Naked Justice

Chapter 4

LATER THAT EVENING, HARVEY Sanders peered through the curtains of his upstairs window at the house next door and shook his head sadly. They were at it again.

Seemed like it was almost every day now. Rain or shine, come what may, he could count on his famous neighbors having some terrific row before the day was over. Harvey hated to think of those lovely little girls being subjected to this barrage of hatred. Must be hard trying to tell yourself that Mommy and Daddy love each other after you’ve witnessed something like this day after day. Those poor kids.

Harvey closed the curtains, turned off Little House on the Prairie, and walked downstairs to the kitchen. He took a beer out of the fridge and popped the lid into the sink. As he did, he passed an open window that overlooked an equally open window in the Barretts’ house. Man alive, they were really going at it now.

“Shut up, you stupid cow!”

Harvey couldn’t hear them any better if they were in the next room. Wally had one of those deep booming voices; it carried. There was some more shouting, some general clamor. Then he heard some crying. Damn. One of the girls. “Daddy! Daddy!”

The crying swelled till it was almost piercing, then it seemed to fade. The girl was moving away from the window.

The fight continued. “I know you care about them, or pretend to. What about me?”

There was some reply Harvey didn’t catch.

“You’re damn right! Me!”

The next sound startled Harvey so that he dropped his beer bottle on the linoleum. It was a sharp, quick sound, like the popping of a paper bag.

Or a slap across the face. Flesh against flesh.

There were several more exchanges he couldn’t understand. Then: “Don’t drag the children into this!”

“I don’t have any choice!”

There was another noise, loud enough to make Harvey flinch. A great, crashing noise—Harvey couldn’t even think of anything that would make a noise like that. Dishes? Furniture? Or worse?

Harvey strolled into his living room. Well, what would his excuse be this time? Perhaps a shard of Anasazi pottery? Or perhaps a toilet that needed attention? Either would do.

He’d give them a little cool-down time before he went over and interjected himself into the situation. He really wasn’t the nosy neighbor type, not some sitcom cliché, sneaking up to windows and holding a glass against the wall. He didn’t like to butt into other people’s business. But back where he came from (Dill City, Oklahoma, to be exact—population 632), people cared about each other, and tried to be there for each other, and didn’t get nervous about walking in and offering help when folks were needing it.

Here in the big city (Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be exact—population 503,000) he had learned to be more circumspect. He’d moved out here twelve years before, after his grandmother passed on and left him this great house in a ritzy neighborhood. In that time, he’d found that folks got a little nervous when you started asking personal questions. Back in Dill City, doors were never locked and people expected to be visited. No one thought twice about dropping in unannounced on a neighbor. Here, seemed like neighbors never called on each other unless they had made an appointment days in advance and had some super-special reason. So he had learned to have reasons.

Harvey had moved to Tulsa after he got out of college (University of Oklahoma, to be exact—Class of ’85). Harvey wanted to be an actor, but to tide himself over until fame and fortune called, he took a job at the world-famous Gilcrease Museum of Western Art. Twelve years later, he was an assistant curator, which was as high as he cared to rise on the totem pole. Why would he want to be curator? That was just a fund-raising position. Harvey didn’t want to have lunch at Southern Hills. He wanted to play with the toys.

And Gilcrease had the best toys. Western art, yes—Remingtons and Carys and Morans, sculptures and paintings. But what Harvey really loved were the artifacts. Artifacts of the Old West, artifacts of Native American cultures. Great stuff. The museum’s holdings were so vast they couldn’t all be displayed at once. The artifacts in deep storage had to be maintained. Harvey took care of that. He loved working with the goods, and it gave him a legitimate excuse to take some of them home occasionally, just for a day or two. Which in turn gave him a great excuse to take them over to the Barretts. Show-and-tell for grown-ups.

“Hey, Wally, look at this great kachina doll!” he’d say as he strolled in through the kitchen door. Actually, he wasn’t sure the mayor cared a bit about kachina dolls. He wasn’t sure he much cared for being called Wally, either. Didn’t matter. It got Harvey through the door, where he could keep an eye on things. That mattered.

And if museum curios couldn’t do the trick, there was always home repair. One ruse he could count on—there was always something in the Barrett home that needed to be fixed. Back in Dill City, he had learned how to take care of most home emergencies himself, including the plumbing, because there was usually no one else to do it. These were useful skills, and skills that Wally had never managed to acquire, thus leading to another easy entrance into the Barrett home.

“Harvey!” he remembered Caroline saying not too long ago, when he delivered himself to their kitchen, “what brings you over here?”

“Well, the kids were tellin’ me there was a leak in the …” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, the …”

“The shower?”

“That’s right. The shower.”

“You mean the shower drain.”

“Right, that’s what I meant. Well, I brought my tools.”

“So I see.”

“I’ll just get to work. So how’s everything going?”

Worked like a charm. Let him stay vigilant, maybe prevent a few knockdown-drag-outs, and maybe make Caroline’s life a little easier. Which was important.

The truth was, Harvey harbored a secret, one he admitted only to himself. Sure, he cared about the kids, and he worried when their parents fought like cocks in the henhouse. But that was only half the story.

Truth was, Harvey was in love with Caroline Barrett.

It was nothing tawdry or unseemly or disgusting. He didn’t lust after her from afar or take pictures of her to bed or anything. He just loved her, that was all.

Who wouldn’t? Caroline was a gorgeous woman, one of the most natural beauties God ever saw fit to put on the face of this earth. Tall, thin, well-dressed, with high cheekbones and long legs that went from here to forever. She was a knockout’s knockout. Why she’d want to get hitched up to some old jock-turned-politico he couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t resist the limelight, he supposed, such as it was. What could you say about a culture that made millionaires out of football players and paid museum curators twenty-two thousand a year?

It wasn’t so much the fighting that worried him. All couples quarrel, though most didn’t do it as often, or as mean, as those two. But he had noticed that in the last six months or so, Caroline had occasionally taken to wearing sunglasses when she went outside, and the sun just wasn’t that bright. One afternoon when he caught her out in the garden, she had a bruise on her cheek so discolored no amount of makeup could hide it. She told him some lame story about bumping into the shelves in the attic.

That worried him.

One afternoon not too long ago, he’d been at the neighborhood block party and the Barretts were there too, and there was some jerk who had just moved into the area and had drunk too much for his own good who was hanging around Caroline, smirking and winking and drooling and touching her arm and generally trying to cozy up in a none-too-subtle way. Wally saw what was going on, marched over, stepped between them (cutting the jerk off), and just stared at her. He didn’t say a word; he just stared. But man, his was a stare that could chill Death himself. It had given Harvey shivers all up and down his spine.

That worried him.

Harvey watched television for a while, but found he couldn’t concentrate on it. There was something odd about this business today, though Harvey couldn’t quite put his finger on what. He pushed off the sofa and returned to the kitchen. He stood by the window for a while, but didn’t hear a peep. That was it—that was what was odd. Earlier he’d heard such a terrific hullabaloo, and now he heard nothing. How long ago was it he heard the big noise? An hour? But now he heard nothing. Less than nothing, actually. It was absolutely silent over there. Deathly silent.

That should be good, shouldn’t it? That should mean the fight was over. So why was his skin crawling?

Harvey put the empty beer bottle in the trash and strolled out onto his front lawn. It was no different. No sign of activity at the house next door, or anywhere else, for that matter. He should’ve been relieved by that. This was supposed to be a nice, upper-class neighborhood, but lately, he’d noticed people he didn’t much like the looks of. Not that he sat around all night peering out the windows or anything, but still. Occasionally there were vagrants. The last several nights he’d seen what he called the Odd Couple: some grungy-looking man wearing fatigues and a young girl—mid to late teens, he’d guess—wearing a tank top and big hoop earrings and a blue headband. They walked up and down the street, real casually, looking the neighborhood over. Or casing it, he suspected. Let those druggies in and you might as well move out.

The eerie silence was shattered by a piercing, howling noise. What the hell? He eased across the lawn toward the Barretts’ house. Suddenly, as if in answer to his question, Harvey saw Wallace Barrett race out the front door.

“Wally!” Harvey shouted.

Barrett didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to hear, as far as Harvey could tell, even though they were less than twenty-five feet apart. Barrett was running at top speed, flexing those leg muscles that made him the best rushing quarterback OU had ever seen. His shirt seemed to be torn, and there was something bright smeared across one side of his face.

“Wally!”

No use. Barrett leaped into his Porsche parked on the curb—had that been there before?—and slid into the driver’s seat. In a few seconds the car was powered up and Barrett was halfway down the street.

Now that was very odd, Harvey thought. Odd, and worrisome.

I need to get in that house, he told himself. I need to know … what? He wasn’t sure. But the short hairs on the back of his neck told him something unusual was happening. Or had happened.

It was so quiet over there.

The window on the side of the Barrett home was still open. Maybe if he just sidled up to it casually …

No. What would he say, after all, if they saw him? He didn’t have his tools and he didn’t have a kachina doll. The place was probably a mess. The kids were probably upset. It would just be an embarrassment to everyone.

Well, he told himself, the police were supposed to handle this sort of thing, weren’t they? So let them. He could call in a domestic disturbance anonymously. The cops had to answer, even if they didn’t think there was anything to it; he’d read about that in the paper. They could check on Caroline and the kids, and no one need know he had called them in.

It was tempting just to go in now, to march in there and make sure everything was fine. That’s what he would’ve done back in Dill City.

Hmph. And these big-city types thought they were so much more sophisticated. Sometimes he thought they didn’t know anything at all, not about the things that were really important.

The doorknob was so close. He could just reach out … step inside …

But he didn’t. He turned around and walked back to his house.

If he had gone in, he would surely have been overcome by the sickly sweet smell of blood, so thick that it permeated the air in every room of the house. He would have noticed the swarming flies, drawn by the smell through the open window, circling the grisly remains. He might’ve called the police a lot sooner than he did, had he remained conscious afterward, which is doubtful.

Things like this never happened back in Dill City.