~ Candlelight and Shadows ~

by

Billie A. Williams

Mona Labella stormed into Sandy’s office, slamming the open door into the wall like a hurricane unleashed. "What the hell you bothering my friends for? You got a problem with me, you come stick your nose in my face and tell me."

She was yelling at the top of her raspy male voice. Sandy looked up and tried to imagine what possessed her to come charging into his office like a bull in a china shop. She slammed her fist down on the desk, uttering a few well chosen expletives. A couple of detectives from the outer office came rushing in as she ranted. Sandy held up his hand to them to hold off.

"Excuse me, Ms. Labella, is it?" Sandy asked, getting up from his desk. "Was there something I could help you with?"

"You know damn well what I’m talking about. Horn told me you came throwing your weight around his place this morning, making the neighbors think there was a major drug bust going on over there. What’s up with that--you want me, here I am, what the fuck you want?"

Sandy waved the extra men out of his office and shut the door. "I wanted to ask you some questions about your whereabouts for the past week or so." Sandy said, motioning for her to sit in the chair across from his desk.

"I ain’t sitting ‘cause I ain’t staying. Are you arresting me?"

"No, merely asking if you would be so kind as to answer a few questions for me. If you sit for a few minutes maybe we can clear some of this up. Could I get you coffee, a soda, anything?"

"Can I smoke in here? ‘Cause if I can’t I’m outta here."

"I’ll get you an ashtray. Anything else?" Sandy said, reaching into a file drawer and pulling out an ashtray.

"Yeah, coffee if you don’t mind."

Sandy noticed her tone mellowed considerably. He left and brought her back a steaming mug of coffee. "Forgot to ask if you wanted anything in it," he said as he handed it to her.

"Not unless you got a bottle of Jack Daniels in your desk there," she said, grinning. When she smiled Sandy noticed she had a mouth full of beautiful teeth and she was quite attractive.

"Do you know Danielle Ord?" Sandy asked, watching her closely to see her reaction to the question.

"Hell, yeah. Poor kid, her husband was murdered--that was Ruth Ord’s brother."

"And Ruth Ord, you know her, too?

"I worked for the woman for nearly a year. That woman was a real go-getter. Too bad her family didn’t give her the respect she deserved. Too bad that crazy-assed brother of hers had to steal all her rightful heirship."

She took a long drag on her cigarette and Sandy saw her face slump back into the angry scowl that she’d been wearing when she came in. The word heirship hung in the back of his mind. She made an effort to sound sophisticated with that word and it only made her sound comical, but he didn’t dare laugh at it. She was dead serious.

"Do you know anyone who would want to hurt Danielle or her son?"

"That little boy? Who would hurt him? With his precious mop of brown hair he looks a lot like his daddy. Or maybe more like Ruth--she had really nice brown hair and the truest blue eyes I ever saw."

Sandy listened with interest. When had she seen David? How would she know the color of his eyes? He was becoming more leery of this woman every minute. "Where were you Monday morning?"

"Monday? Well since I work every day of the week, I’d have to say I must have been at work." She said, stamping her cigarette out in the ashtray and grinding on it like she was erasing a stubborn stain on something.

"Where do you work now?" he asked. He didn’t dare ask her if she had any witnesses, though he wanted to.

"Over at Brady foundry in the village," she said. "I’m a gofer because they figure a woman can’t do a job as good as a man. I bet I could set up those machines with the best of them tight-assed males." She spat the words out like so much tobacco juice in a spittoon.

"What shift do you work?" Sandy asked being cautious trying not to provoke her anger again.

"There’s only two shifts there--nights and days. They rotate you, one month it’s days next month it’s nights."

"Which shift were you on last week?"

"Nights, eleven p.m. to seven a.m."

"How many days a week do you work?"

"How damn many days are there in a week? They don’t care if you got a life outside of work or not. They expect you to work seven days a week, eight hours a day. No excuses."

"I thought there were laws you couldn’t work more than thirteen days in a row without a day off."

"Better tell that one to OSHA, ‘cause I doubt Brady knows about it. No siree bub, with those guys, it’s seven days a week, every week until you die or quit."

"You were working there last Monday evening, correct?"

"Ain’t that what I told you? You hard of hearing or something?"

She was becoming more and more defensive. Sandy figured he could check her work records rather than make her suspicious. He didn’t have enough to hold her, but he managed to get her fingerprints, thanks to the coffee cup he had brought her. He would see if the prints were a match.

"Sorry, I forgot I had already asked you that question," he said trying to appear flustered and a little dull.

"That all you wanted?" she asked, standing up.

"That will do for now. But, I wonder if you would mind leaving me a phone number or address where I could reach you in case something comes up."

"I don’t got a place right now. I’m crashing with Horn and his old lady. I guess if you need me you’ll have to get to them and they can relay a message to me."

Sandy walked to the door and opened it for her. "Thanks for coming in. If I need anymore information I will get in touch with you," he said.

He watched her wind her way through the maze of desks scattered about in the outer office. She had a swagger like some old cowboy. He figured she was only in her thirties, but life had left some deep scars on her. She walked with a stoop shouldered, left limp kind of gait, eyes on the floor and one arm clutching her purse as though it contained all her life and livelihood.

He snapped off the tape recorder that he had switched on under his desk when Mona Labella blew in through his door. Yeah, illegal as hell, he thought, but when a crazy flies into your office you need evidence--you need a record. Besides, Beatrice Ord may be able to identify her voice from the tape, if so and if the fingerprints match, we can wrap up this case finally. Sandy carefully picked up the coffee cup from his desk where she had set it and took it downstairs to the fingerprint lab.

"Hi, Mr. March. Jerry left an envelope for you--said he searched all the databases, couldn’t come up with a match on those prints. Said to tell you he was sorry."

"Just so happens I have a mug here that may have fingerprints that match those. Want to take a look for me?" he asked the blonde woman working at the microscope on a slide covered in a powdery glaze.

She carefully took the cup from him with a gloved hand. "Give me a minute to dust it and transfer the prints to a slide. You realize as swamped as we are, I shouldn’t be taking the time to do this."

"I do, I really do. If it wasn’t so important I wouldn’t dream of interrupting what you were doing. I will be forever in your debt if you can take a look for me."

"How does lunch sound as a means of erasing that debt?" she said giving him a smile that was meant to curl his toes, or at least raise some other part of his anatomy.

"I think that can be arranged," he said, knowing she had more than lunch on her mind for him. But he needed her help and if it would get this case cleared up, he was willing to play along with her for a while.

Sandy sat in one of the chairs and leaned the back of his head against the cool wall. He hoped he would finally get a break in this case. Somehow the small angry woman in his office seemed disjointed enough that she would think killing someone was justification for a perceived wrong. He doubted she would think twice about murder.

~ * ~

"Sorry about that, March," the blonde lab tech said as she handed Sandy the report; No conclusive match found--in bold letters across the top. "If the ones on the mug hadn’t been so smeared I probably could have done better. I can’t get you anything that would hold up in court from these, that’s for sure."

"How would they have gotten so smudged?" he wondered aloud.

"All she had to do was rub the cup as she was holding it. Then we would have smudges instead of real prints."

Sandy tried to picture Mona Labella sitting across from him holding the cup in her hands. He smacked his head with the palm of his hand. "She did rub it--she jerked at one point and splattered a few drops of coffee and she wiped the cup afterwards."

"Of course, she wouldn’t need to know we don’t have any usable prints if you want to use that to eke some information from her, it might work," she said.

He thanked the lab attendant and told her he would call her to set up a lunch date when things settled down with this case. She said she would hold him to that.