* * *
Natoma Street was in the old part of the city, canopied with handsome old trees that lined streets, always keeping it cool and shady in summer. Cole always loved how the huge, old, ash trees loomed over the street, growing together and forming a massive green arch. Small houses set deep on the lots looked like little gingerbread houses. Ivy climbed and covered the chimneys. The lawns were all edged and mowed. Cole always wished he could have lived in a neighborhood just like the Montclare District.
As he turned up Natoma, a Community Service Officer flagged him down. “Sorry, sir, road’s closed.”
Cole showed the officer his press credentials and asked, “All this for a dead cat?”
“A bit more serious than that. Seems the old lady who owned the cat has taken the guy who killed it hostage. Says she’s got a shotgun. Nobody can get to her.”
“Where can I park?”
The officer pointed to the left side of the street behind an ambulance. “I guess that would be okay.”
“Hey, who’s in charge?” Cole yelled as he pulled away.
“Harris. Lieutenant Harris.”
The small street was crammed with fire engines, ambulances, six police cruisers, and three or four navy blue, unmarked, Crown Victorias doing their best to look inconspicuous. The picture-perfect landscapes were strung with yellow police tape and patrolmen. Neighbors from all over the district were pressing against the barricades, and chatting about how nothing like this ever happened here before. Cole approached a bored-looking patrolman who was leaning against the back of a black-and-white, smoking.
“Sage, with The Sentinel. What is going on? I heard some guy shocked a cat to death trying to get it out of a tree. What happened?”
“The lady who owned the cat came out with an old double-barrel shotgun while the paramedics were giving the guy who killed it the once-over. Started shouting about how he murdered her baby and how he had always hated her and this was his revenge. Seems she snapped.”
“Where’s Harris?”
“He’s at the yellow house with the hostage negotiator. Seems the old gal won’t answer the phone.” The patrolman motioned his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the direction of the house.
“Thanks.”
Cole made his way up the street with no regard for the barriers or tape. He always found that acting like you belong somewhere got you a lot further than asking questions.
In college, Cole heard Arlo Guthrie talking on the radio about a little-known verse of “This Land Is Your Land.” Arlo told the story of a time when his father, Woody, had been interviewed on the radio. The announcer asked about writing “This Land is Your Land,” and the usual bunch of shallow interview-type questions.
Woody had always told Arlo that this one special verse belonged to him and only he knew it. Woody would always sing it to Arlo when he felt down, or got in trouble at school. To Arlo’s shock, Woody sang it on the air! He felt hurt and betrayed, but then overjoyed when Woody told the whole wide world that “that last verse belongs to my son, Arlo.” As Cole walked along dodging barricades, and ducking under police tape, he hummed “This Land” and sang that special verse in his head: As I went walking I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’. That side was made for you and me. Now that verse belonged to both Cole and Arlo.
“Hey, Sage,” Harris said without expression, when Cole finally reached the house. “Lookin’ for blood?”
“No, actually a dead cat.”
“We’re a little beyond that now.”
“What’s the story on the old lady?”
“Isn’t any, really. Never had so much as a parking ticket. Just freaked when the guy killed her cat.” Harris motioned to the young man standing next to him. “Cole, this is Trevor Varney, negotiations specialist. Trev, this is Cole Sage of The Sentinel.”
“How’s it goin’?” Varney smiled.
“Any day above ground is a good day, I guess.” Cole replied.
Harris chuckled and turned to Varney. “Cole’s the eternal pessimist. He doesn’t even believe there’s a glass, if you know what I mean.”
“Don’t believe everything you read,” Cole smiled.
“Especially in The Sentinel,” Harris teased.
“Yeah, especially that.”
“So, Mr. Varney, what happens if she won’t pick up the phone?” Cole asked.
“I’m just getting ready to approach the front of the house. Tom, I think it would be a good idea if we backed everybody up. Just enough to be out of direct sight of the front windows.”
“It’s your show,” Harris said calmly. Turning to a veteran officer on the tape line, Harris waved his arm at the growing crowd. “Okay, Sergeant, I want everybody back. Move the barriers to about that second house. Yeah, the green one.” He nodded, confirming the sergeant’s indication of a green two-story Tudor.
“How old is this woman? Is there a history with the hostage?”
Cole had been the best of friends with Harris for going on twenty years now. Still, he felt like he sounded as if he were conducting an interview.
“According to the hostage’s wife, Mrs. Lemoore, her husband and Mrs. Clark have never got along. Clark’s cat used the Lemoore’s’ front flowerbed for a litter box. It’s been a bone of contention for a long time. Mrs. Lemoore said her husband just got caught up in all the excitement of the cat in the tree and offered their pool net. The other neighbors love the guy. He’s like the neighborhood fix-it man and barbeque king,” Harris added as he watched the officers move the crowd and first set of barricades back. “Hey, watch the bushes! I don’t want the city getting a bill to re-landscape these people’s yards!”
“Where’s the wife now?”
“That’s her over there in the white shorts.” Harris pointed towards a rather large woman standing on the lawn across the street from the Clark house.
“You know, Tom,” Cole began, “there was a time you would have called her ‘that fat broad.’ Your newfound political correctness is a real tribute to the department’s sensitivity training program.” Cole slapped Harris on the back as he started toward the woman standing across the street.
“Well, you just keep your fat ass out of the way!” Harris chided.
Mrs. Lemoore was in her mid-to-late 40s. She was round around the middle, and her clothes did little to hide the fact. As he neared, Cole could see her eyes were red and puffy from crying. Her arms were tightly crossed across her large bust, and she was chewing on the nail of her right thumb.
“Mrs. Lemoore?” Cole said softly. “I’m Cole Sage of The Sentinel.”
The woman turned her head and gave Cole a dazed glance, then went back to watching the house across the street. She didn’t respond.
“The police know how to handle this kind of thing. It’s going to be all right. What’s your husband’s first name?”
“Stan,” she said in a whisper.
“I hear Stan’s quite the man with a barbeque. Dry rub or sauce?”
“Dry rub. Won’t ever use sauce. That’s for the table.” She neither changed expression nor spoke with any inflection.
“Me too. Except chicken, of course.”
“Why don’t they do something!” She suddenly became animated and spread her arms out in the direction Harris was standing.
“They’re getting ready to have a negotiator talk to Mrs. Clark. I just met him. Seems like he knows what he’s doing.” Cole had no idea if Varney knew what he was doing or not, but he wanted to comfort this woman. For some reason, he felt a connection to her. He had been on the scene of hundreds of murders, wrecks, fires, and hostage stand-offs and seen and talked to parents, wives, husbands and bystanders-but this was somehow different.
“What will he do?”
“Well, it seems Mrs. Clark...”
“Annie,” she broke in.
“Annie...won’t answer the phone. So, he will approach the front of the house and try to
speak to her. He is unarmed and will use a bullhorn. He needs to get her talking. The more they can get her to do that, the better. It will help her calm down and see what she is doing is wrong and unnecessary. The guy’s a pro. She’s not a hardened criminal—just somebody who got too upset.”
“Hope so. I’m-I’m so scared.”
“How ‘bout I stay here with you ‘til Stan comes out, Mrs. Lemoore?”
“Paula.” Again she spoke very softly.
“What?”
“Paula, my name is Paula. ‘Mrs. Lemoore’ always makes me feel so old. Mrs. Lemoore is my mother-in-law.” She seemed to smile slightly.
“I love the name Paula,” Cole said to the woman standing by him.
“I don’t know what I would do without Stan. I said something this morning I didn’t mean. I just want to say I’m sorry.” She covered her face and sobbed.
“I bet Stan knows you didn’t mean it. He knows you love him. Let’s just sit down and wait this thing out.”
“Mrs. Clark,” the voice from the bullhorn seemed to bounce off every house on the block. “Mrs. Clark, I am Trevor Varney. Can I talk to you?” The young man with the bullhorn stood in the middle of the lawn and spread his arms at shoulder height and slowly turned around. “I’m unarmed. I just want to talk.” He put the bullhorn at his side and stood perfectly still.
In what seemed like a slow motion scene from a Sam Peckinpah western, the front windows of the Clark house blew out. The head of Trevor Varney was blown open. Pieces of pink mass, blood, and hair rolled through the air and scattered across the lawn. Cole instinctively pushed Paula Lemoore to the ground shouting, “Stay down, stay down!” as she tried to struggle to her feet.
In the same moment, the body of a gray-haired woman in a blue flowered housedress flew out of the window and sprawled across the flowerbed below. A man in green shorts and a gray T-shirt appeared at the window, then jumped out and grabbed the shotgun the old woman was still clutching in her arms. He took the end of the barrel, spun around and threw the gun across the lawn, sending it sliding and scraping its way across the street, to bang against the curb on the other side.
“Stanley!” Paula Lemoore screamed. She ran across the street and into the arms of her husband running toward her.
The old woman lay motionless in the juniper bushes. From all directions, police ran into the yard. A half-circle of men in blue blocked Cole’s view of Annie Clark. An ambulance pulled up in front of the Clark house. Two paramedics hopped out, opened the back doors, and removed a gurney. Stan Lemoore, his arm around his wife’s shoulders, walked across the street to the curb in front of his house and sat down.
Cole crossed the street. The paramedics stood over the body of Trevor Varney, and the police got Annie Clark up and on her feet. The blast of the shotgun hit Varney just above the jaw line; his handsome face was gone. The sight of the jagged flesh and shattered bone made Cole feel lightheaded.
“God, I never,” one of the paramedics began, then finished the thought to himself.
Cole approached the group of police officers. Annie Clark now faced one of the officers who was reading her rights to her. The other officers seemed to have lost interest in her and were turning their attention to the body on the lawn.
“Do you understand what I have just read to you, ma’am?” The officer, a tall red-haired policeman whose name tag read “McClaron”, paused. “Do you understand what you have done?”
“Yes, but he shouldn’t have been on my lawn. Alex never let the children cut across our lawn, ever.”
The old woman who moments before, so brutally and violently, ended the life of Trevor Varney, now stood small and frail. Her hair and the bun she wore on the back of her head had come undone. The rayon housedress that hung on her small frame was torn and exposed the yellowed fabric of her undergarments. Her shoulders were bowed, and the curving of osteoporosis gave her neck a strained, pulled look as she gazed up at the policeman. McClaron was in violation of department procedure, but didn’t have the heart to handcuff the old woman.
“Is there someone we can call for you, Mrs. Clark?” the officer asked gently.
“My Alex is gone, and Stanley Lemoore has killed Mr. Pip.”
“Mr. Pip, ma’am?”
“My Persian.”
“I see. But is there anyone, your children or other relatives, we can call for you?”
“No, we never could have any children. Alex, you know, meningitis in the Army, couldn’t...you know...”
“Mrs. Clark, do you know what you have done here?” McClaron spoke as if he were talking to a young child.
“I was scolding Stanley from across the street for killing Mr. Pip, and he pushed me out of the window! Pushed me! I turned to see what the loud noise was and he pushed me right out the window! I want him arrested and in jail. Why is he gone? He pushed me. He attacked me in my own home.”
“What about the gun, ma’am? What about shooting the gun?”
“Oh dear, I don’t like guns. Alex always kept that nasty shotgun in the closet. But I never would touch it. He kept it loaded, you know,” she said in almost a whisper. “Now that he’s gone, I don’t know what to do with it. Would you like to have it? I have no use for it.”
McClaron acknowledged Cole’s presence for the first time. In a stern expression, he shook his head, as if to say “stay back.” But in his eyes, there was a deep sadness. He turned to Annie Clark once again. “Mrs. Clark, we are going to have to take you down to the police station.”
“By all means, I want to file a complaint. Imagine being pushed through a window. I am an old woman. I could have been hurt badly, maybe even killed, why of all the nerve. And now all this!” Turning to the police and paramedics gathered around Varney’s body, she shouted in a high crackling voice, “You there, get off my lawn! Alex might come back soon, and he will be furious!”
“Can I get a female officer over here?” McClaron said into the microphone clipped to his shoulder epaulette.
“Officer, I want those people off my lawn.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Olson is on her way,” the radio scratched.
“Let’s wait over here, ma’am.”
“Oh, I need to lock up and get my things. Oh! I must look a fright. I’ll just go in and change.”
“No, I’m afraid we don’t have time for that. See, Officer Olson is here to give you a ride.” McClaron pointed to the black-and-white that had just pulled into the driveway.
“I must leave a note. Alex will be worried if he returns and I’m gone.”
“I’ll stay to make sure he knows.” Cole thought McClaron’s voice seemed to crack.
“This her?” a raspy voice female officer asked.
“This is Mrs. Clark. Please transport her downtown.” McClaron turned to Officer Olson and said something Cole couldn’t hear. Then McClaron turned his attention back to the old woman. “Okay, Mrs. Clark, this is Officer Olson. She will take you downtown.”
“A lady policeman? I never heard of such a thing! No wonder people think they can kill your cat and trample your lawn.”
“Please come with me, ma’am,” Olson barked.
“Remember what I said, Olson. Nice,” McClaron snapped.
Officer Olson guided Mrs. Clark to the patrol car. Cole approached McClaron.
“I’m Cole Sage with The Sentinel.”
“Harris’s friend, right?”
“Right.”
“I got nothin’ to say,” McClaron growled.
“What, you have a problem with Harris?”
“No, I got a problem with you. I hate newspaper people. They always get it wrong.”
“You ever read my stuff?” Cole asked.
“Nope, why should I? It’s all the same. Liberal blather.” McClaron turned and walked away.
Cole chuckled and turned to cross back to where the Lemoores were sitting. The paramedics covered Varney’s body with a white cloth, and the police taped off the area six feet in all di
rections around the body. Two detectives were watching as a police photographer took pictures of the shotgun laying in the gutter. About 10 feet away, Paula and Stan Lemoore sat side by side on the curb, holding hands.
“How you doin’, Stan?” Cole said, reaching out to shake the man’s hand.
“Fine, I guess,” Stan said, reciprocating the shake.
“This gentleman stayed with me while you were...” Paula stopped and looked at Stan.
“My name is Cole Sage. I’m with The Sentinel. Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“Man, I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m flat on my back, the next I’m looking down the barrels of a double-barrel twelve gauge. Annie said I killed Mr. Pip and she was going to show me how it feels. She made me go in the house and sit on the couch. I kept saying, ‘Annie, put the gun down, you’re just excited.’ She said that Alex was going to be very angry when he got back. Alex died about five years ago. So I said, ‘Annie, Alex is gone.’ She started talking about all this stuff I did to her. It didn’t make any sense. Hell, I mow her lawn for God’s sake. This is crazy.”
“What made her shoot?”
“She just kept talking about Alex this, and Alex that, and how he didn’t like people on the lawn. She was talking about how Mr. Pip was her only friend and I had taken him from her. About then, the guy started talking on the megaphone thing. That really set her off. She started yelling. Then she just whirled around and fired...” Stan’s voice trailed off.
“And after that?” Cole prompted softly.
“She had her back to me, and the window was mostly gone, you know, so I just rushed her and gave her a real hard push. I had no idea she had shot the policeman until after I was outside.”
Stan put his head down between his knees and started to wretch. Paula gently rubbed his back. “You’ll be okay, honey, you’re okay, breathe deep.”
“Do you want the paramedics? Maybe they can give you something.”
Paula looked up at Cole and smiled. “We’ll be fine, thanks. Maybe you should go. Thanks for stickin’ with me, you’re a nice man, but we need to be alone now, okay?”
“Of course. You take care,” Cole looked down at her and smiled back. He stepped down into the street and started back to the police barrier.
“Hey,” Stan called to Cole, “don’t make Annie out to be crazy or anything. She’s a nice lady, just old and confused. I don’t think she knows what she did. All right?”
“I’ll do my best.”
The fire trucks were pulling out and the ambulances started their engines. Many of the police cars were already gone. Natoma Street almost looked back to normal. A young cop removed the yellow tape he’d strung up the hour before. Harris was on the police radio. Cole waved as he walked past him.
“Got a story?” Harris shouted.
“Think so. See you later.” Cole waved, but didn’t slow his pace.
THREE