CHAPTER SEVEN
“Maude, thank God it’s you!”
Natasha’s voice was frantic. And for good reason. Two police officers pulled up beside her Mercedes, triple-parking, and jumped out of that patrol car and began running behind her.
“Natasha, what’s wrong?” Maude asked her.
“Here.” Natasha pulled a sheet of paper from her purse. “Take this. Take it!”
When Maude just stood there unable to even register what was happening, Natasha reached into Maude’s unzipped shoulder bag and began stuffing the sheet of paper inside her already overfilled bag.
“There’s a list of names on this sheet. Contact the people on this sheet and tell them I need their help.
One of them has to help me. They have to! ”
She looked at Maude as if she understood her. “They’re out to get me just like they got you. But only it’s going to be even worse for me. Much worse.” Her wrinkled face was cracking. “They want to silence me too. They’ll kill me if they don’t help me. They have to!”
Then the cops were getting closer.
“Don’t let them see it,” she whispered to Maude. “My brother is on that list too. He’s my ace in the hole. Go to him only if you have to. Say my name and he’ll let you in. But don’t let them see that list!”
Then her urgency looked more like desperation to Maude. “I’m depending on you, Maude,” she said just as the cops arrived and grabbed her.
She was frantically resisting them until they had to wrestle her to the ground. A second car, an unmarked Ford sedan, drove up. Detective Fry, whom Maude knew well, hopped out and ran across the sidewalk too.
As he was rushing over, Maude sat her box down and put her hand inside her purse.
She stuffed that list Natasha gave her all the way beneath everything else in that shoulder bag, which already held a lot of papers.
But she knew where the one paper she had planned to use later that day was located inside her purse.
She knew it was behind her wallet compartment because it was her grocery list and she hated fumbling for anything once she was inside a store.
“She gave her a paper,” one of the cops said to the detective while the cop was cuffing Natasha. “I saw when she gave her some kind of paper.”
“Hand it over,” the detective said to Maude, his long fingers wagging.
“Hand what over?” Maude acted as if she had no clue what that detective was talking about.
But the detective wasn’t buying what she was selling. “What did she give you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What did she give you, Maude? Don’t make me take that bag and toss it on this sidewalk. Now hand it over.”
She knew Fry could be nasty when he wanted to be. She had to create a red herring. “She’s crazy. Why should you care what she gave to me?”
“Maude!”
“Alright already!” Maude pulled out her grocery list and handed it to him. “I told you she was crazy. It’s a grocery list. That woman’s crazy. That’s why The Post fired her three years ago.”
But as the detective checked out the list as if it could mean more than the toilet tissue and frozen veggies and chicken wings listed on it, she decided to go with it too. “Or maybe it’s in code,” she said. Then she looked at him. She could tell it worked because his eyes seemed to flicker.
Keeping the charade going, she attempted to remove the sheet from the detective’s hand knowing that if he thought she thought it was valuable, he’d buy the premise that it was indeed the sheet Natasha had handed her.
When he jerked it out of her reach, Maude inwardly smiled. “She gave it to me, not you,” she said to keep the pretense going.
The detective looked at her. “So now that you figure it’s in code it suddenly matters to you? I thought you said she was crazy.”
“She is crazy. And yes, it matters to me. Because it’s mine. She gave it to me.”
“It’s evidence now,” said the detective. “It goes with me.” He put it inside his coat pocket and then glanced at her box. Then he looked back at her. And he was grinning. “Going somewhere?”
Apparently he had heard the news too. Dillon wasn’t a big town. Word traveled like wildfire when it wanted to. But as usual, she was the last to know.
“Maybe now,” he said in his usual jerkish way, “you’ve got that extra time to go to dinner with me.”
“Get lost, creep,” Maude said angrily, and he laughed.
Because he knew she was down and he was happy to kick her while she was down.
And then he left with the patrolmen and Natasha.
Natasha continually looked back as if she wanted to telepathically relay to Maude just how serious a matter it truly was.
But Maude had her own life issues. That was why, when they all had gotten in their vehicles and sped away, she picked up her box of work junk and began heading toward her own car.
But that was when she realized a tow truck was backed up to her Camry and was attempting to clamp it in.
Her heart dropped. Are you kidding me? Not her car too! She began running. “Hey wait!” She held the box and her shoulder bag with one hand while she waved with the other hand as she ran down that sidewalk. “That’s my car. You can’t take my car!”
But by the time she got there, the driver had already clamped the car to the tow truck. “Catch up your car note,” he said, “and you’ll get it back.”
“But I was going to catch it up Friday. When I got paid. They knew that!”
“Too bad so sad,” he said and then smiled. Then he got in his truck and began pulling her automobile away.
She leaned her head back. This had to be one of the worse days of her entire life. No job. No car. No man. And her apartment, thanks to all those budget cuts where she kept having to borrow from A to pay B, would undoubtedly be next.
Damn. damn. Damn!
But instead of falling apart out in the open for all the world to see, she walked to the diner that was two blocks further up, sat in one of the booths, ordered a coke, and exhaled. She had to realign herself. She had to figure this out. She had to stop herself from panicking.
After several minutes of still trying to not break down and cry, and still trying to pull herself together, she then grabbed the coke the waitress had put on her table, paid for it, and then went outside to get some fresh air.
She sat at one of the diner’s outside tables and pulled out her vape pen. She knew that wasn’t good for her either, and it was a bad habit by now, but she had to relieve her stress somehow. And that puffing did seem to help.
When she got tired of trying to figure out what in the world was she going to do next, she thought about Natasha and pulled out the actual sheet she had handed to her.
She looked at it. It was a list of ten people, with their names, phone numbers, and home addresses on them.
Nine of the addresses were in Dillon. One, apparently her brother, was in Baltimore, Maryland.
Then she pulled out her phone and called her contact at the police station. “Was Natasha Keating arrested today?”
“Hello Maude. How are you doing, Maude?”
“Hello, Willie. How are you doing, Willie?”
“I’m surprisingly fit. Thanks for asking.”
“Now will you answer my question? Did they arrest her?”
“They arrested her, yes.”
Maude pulled out her pad and pen. “What’s the charge?”
“Murder in the first degree.”
Maude stopped mid-puff. Then removed her vape pen from her mouth altogether. “Murder? Did you say murder?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Who did she kill?”
“Ross Hampton’s wife.”
Now Maude was dumbstruck. “Natasha Keating killed Hamp’s wife? Are you kidding me?”
“I kid you not. She’ll be arraigned tomorrow morning is what I’m hearing. Talk about trouble. She’s in a world of it now. Oops, the boss is back. Gotta go.” And he ended the call.
Maude, still so stunned she could hardly process what she’d heard, sat her phone on the table. Because right away, as soon as she heard Ross Hampton’s name, she knew Natasha Keating, her former boss, was being framed for a murder she did not commit. And she had to do something about it.