It was New Year's Eve, 2010, and the last thing I expected to find when I went down to the basement with a basket full of dirty undies was a dead body lying in the middle of the laundry room floor. But there he was, as big as life … well, perhaps that was a poor choice of words.
I live in one unit of a four-unit apartment building, and I knew all the other tenants by sight if not by association. The corpse was not one of them. There was only one male living in the building and it wasn’t the skinny, fiftyish, semi-balding man sprawled in front of me. I assumed, until persuaded otherwise, that this was a clear-cut case of foul play.
Now, I’m not a complete novice when it comes to murder, mayhem, and the tripping over of dead bodies in laundry rooms or other inconvenient places. I’ve read all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries … twice … and am almost a sister, by empathy, to Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone character. I know what to do when dead bodies interject themselves into what would otherwise be a tranquil, unassuming evening. So, I proceeded to scream bloody murder at the top of my lungs. No, really. I actually screamed the words "bloody murder" as loudly as I could. It seemed altogether appropriate at the time, and I've always wanted to do it, but the occasion to do so had simply never presented itself before. I felt it was my right, if not my obligation, to take full advantage of the opportunity, and I did so with a gusto that would have made Jamie Lee Curtis proud. Unfortunately, everybody had gone out for the evening, and there was nobody in the building to commend my exemplary performance.
The next thing I did was to assess the situation. I called the police, of course, but the guy was dead, and I didn't think he'd mind if I took advantage of the situation to bone up on my hands-on crime scene investigative skills which, at that point, consisted of none. My unmentionables, along with an opened can of soda that had been tucked down the side of the laundry basket, were scattered around in an untidy mess. I sure as heck didn't want the police eyeballing my pretties, so I quickly gathered them up and stuffed them back into the basket. The soda was another matter. I didn't want to be blamed for mucking up a possible crime scene, so I grabbed a roll of paper towels from a nearby shelf and wiped up the Pepsi I'd spilled on the floor next to the corpse. A little of the cola had splashed onto his face, so I mopped that off too, along with a dotting of some kind of pinkish goop dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Might as well make him presentable. Heck, if it was me, I'd hope someone would tidy me up a little before the camera guys got there.
He was lying flat on his stomach with his head turned to one side, and his legs were spread-eagled in an unbecoming fashion. His right knee was slightly bent. One arm was twisted under his torso and the other was positioned straight out from his side with the index finger on his clenched fist pointing toward the wall. If not for the fact that he clearly wasn't on his feet, I'd have thought he was trying to replicate a dance stance from the disco era. But he wasn't wearing a bell-bottomed white suit, and John Travolta was nowhere in the vicinity as far as I could tell, so I assumed that hadn't been his intent when he dropped dead.
I looked over to where his finger was aimed. I figured it wouldn't hurt to poke around a little to see if he was trying to identify something that would lead to the discovery of his murderer. I'd seen that done in a ton of movies – dying victims trying to point to clues that would eventually implicate the perpetrator – so it was probably true. The basement was dimly lit, so I grabbed a flashlight and headed for the wall. I didn't find much in the way of evidence unless the spiders, ladybugs, and dead mice decided to fess up to something. There was a lot of undisturbed dust on the floor except where an empty bottle of sloe gin had rolled through it and shattered against the bottom of the wall. What kind of a slob would break a bottle and not pick up the pieces? Somebody could get hurt on the sharp edges of the broken glass, for crying out loud! I found a dustpan and brush, cleaned up the mess, and then dumped it all into a trash can.
I heard a siren in the distance, and stepped outside the basement door to try to get a better ear as to how long it would take for the police to get here. No more than five minutes by my estimation. I reached inside the door and flicked on the outside floodlight. That's when I noticed I was standing in a small pool of red liquid that had not yet fully seeped into the cold, half-frozen ground. I lifted my foot and looked at the bottom of my shoe. A syrupy mess covered most of it, and it was slowly sliding down the sole and dripping back onto the gravel. Cripes! The cops and crime scene guys were going to track this stuff all over the basement if I didn't get rid of it. It would be one hell of a mess to clean off that concrete cellar floor. I went around to the side of the building, unraveled a hose, and dragged it back to the puddle. I hit the gooey mess full force with a spray of water that splashed it out onto the grassy areas of the yard. I kept pouring on the water in a back-and-forth motion until I was satisfied that the red gunk had been diluted away to nothing.
I'd just finished putting the hose away when a police car, an ambulance, and a van pulled up to the door. I know that sounds like the start of a bad joke, but I could tell by the looks on the faces of the guys getting out of the vehicles that they were in no mood for barroom fun and frivolity. On the other hand, that's probably where they'd been until my call interrupted the night's festivities – out on the town, celebrating New Year's Eve. No wonder they looked so pissed off. I just couldn't tell who they were more upset with – me or the dead guy.
A big, hefty, ugly cop with a scraggly beard, the last to haul himself out of the police car, yanked around on his pants belt for a bit to get things settled, and headed over my way. He stopped in front of me, gave me the once over, and stood there for a few seconds making an unappealing noise that sounded like he was trying to suck a piece of popcorn hull or something out from the back of his teeth. He must have succeeded in uprooting the little devil or maybe he finally just gave up. In any case, he was ready to speak. "You the one found the body?"
"Yeah, that'd be me," I said, trying to sound all cop-like and tough.
"Who are you and what are you doing here?"
"I live here. I'm a tenant in one of the apartments upstairs," I answered.
"You live here long?"
"Not too long."
"How long?"
"Going on about two years now I guess."
"Where've you been tonight? Anyone seen you around?"
I was starting to feel like I'd been Twilight-Zoned into one of those old Dragnet episodes when I was suddenly rescued by an impatient lady cop who blurted out a little too loudly, "You two gonna dance around out here all night? I'm freezing my ass off out here! I'm Trooper Smith and that there's Willis," she said, pointing to her beefy male counterpart. "Now, where's the freakin' body?"
"It's in here," I said, and headed for the basement door. The entourage followed.
"Doesn't look like anyone broke in," Trooper Smith said.
"No," I agreed. "The door's never locked. My apartment is the only one with access to the basement from the inside. Everybody else has to come in by this door from the outside. It's just too much trouble to lock it I guess."
"Uh huh" summed up her thoughts on the door.
One of the crime scene guys, probably a newbie judging by the eager, wide-eyed look on his face, inched his way to the body and stooped down to get a closer look. "There's a wet spot next to the body," he said. "Maybe he peed himself. I'll take a swab and have it analyzed."
I watched intently, and took a huge swig from what was left in my Pepsi can. Wow, I thought. This guy really knows his stuff.
The paramedics suggested that everyone stand back to let them have at the body just in case it still had a pulse or something. The crime scene guy took issue with their insinuation that he couldn't tell a dead body from a live one, and Trooper Willis leaned back against a wall, folded his arms, and started working vigorously on that popcorn hull again. That's when things really started to get ugly. An argument ensued between the crime scene guys and the paramedics that I was sure would lead to fisticuffs. Each team accused the other of not knowing what the hell they were doing, and a game of finger poking at various parts of the opponents' anatomies caused a flare-up that forced Willis to abandon his oral problem and dive into the hubbub. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to join the skirmish, he tripped over the corpse, flipping it onto its back, and staggered into the group, knocking all of the participants to the floor with the might of an eighteen-pound bowling bowl careening into a golden gate split.
I just stood there, looking stupid, with my mouth hanging open in sheer fascination.
I wish I could say that what happened next was that I sat straight up in bed, gasped for breath, and thanked the heavens above that everything that had just happened was merely a dream. But, that's not what happened. However, the corpse decided to do just that. Sit straight up, I mean. Almost everybody in the room clamored and clawed themselves away from the resurrection in a brief episode of mass hysteria that sent some scrambling to the outdoors, and others reeling in disbelief. I, on the other hand, was calm and dignified in my reaction. I didn't scream. I didn't run. I merely fainted.
Smelling salts have the most god-awful odor. I guess that's what brings people around so fast after they've fainted. I was tempted to ask the corpse, who was sitting next to me, how he was feeling, but I sort of figured that out all on my own from the strong smell of booze on his breath and his slurred rendition of Auld Lang Syne. I was a little surprised that nobody seemed angry anymore until I realized the dumb, sheepish grins on their faces translated to "If you don't say anything, I won't either."
From what they were able to piece together, the tipsy "corpse" wandered off from a neighboring party and got lost trying to find his way back. He found an open door and used it. After all, it was the middle of winter and it was damn cold outside. Once inside, he passed out in a drunken stupor.
I may have left out a few clues I should have told the cops when they got there that may have settled the matter pretty fast, but I just plain forgot to in all the excitement. I didn't tell the cops about the puddle of red syrup I'd washed away outside the basement door, along with a few other details. But I mentally reconstructed what probably happened. The "corpse," wrestling to work the latch on the door, must have accidentally dumped the contents of his bottle of sloe gin onto the ground where it started to thicken from the cold. After he was inside, the empty bottle rolled from his hand, across the floor, and smashed against the wall, breaking it into the shards I'd cleaned up earlier. I didn't tell anyone about that either. And the crime scene guys never heard it from me that the wet spot next to the body was Pepsi, not pee.
Everybody was in a big hurry to vacate the basement after the "crime scene" had been unsecured, and it didn't take them long to pack up their gear and hit the road. As for me … well, I decided to do what I started out to do: laundry. I turned on the water to fill the washing machine and dumped my dirty clothes into the tub. That's when I realized I'd forgotten to bring the laundry soap with me when I came down earlier. I ran upstairs for the soap, grabbed another cold Pepsi from the fridge, and quickly made a sandwich before I headed back downstairs.
The last thing I expected to find when I went down to the basement was a dead body lying in the middle of the laundry room floor.
But there she was, as big as life …
