The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery by David Bishop Read Free Book Online Page B

no-speak-um.’ I don’t want to talk to her so I never tell her. Doctor Knight, he knows I speak English. It is our little secret.”
    “Tell us what you saw.”
    “One week my Thursday customer have a party. That lady say, ‘Come Friday.’ Doctor Knight, he refer me to her, so he say I can do his home that week on Thursday. I guess he no tell her . When I walk in, the señora and Rex make so much noise they not hear me. From the hall I see into the exercise room. Señor Bronson ees lying on the exercise bench. Señora Knight sit him like a vaquero, her feet hooked behind the bench legs. I see her boobies flopping and hear her yelling, ‘gitty up.’”
    Marta blushed, then continued. “I tiptoe out and come back in an hour. When I come back Señora Knight angry I come Thursday. I play no-speak-um and do my work. She never know I see her riding Rex.” Marta blushed again, and then giggled. “I tell no one, till you. Every Thursday, the trainer’s van ees in the Knight’s driveway when I go to my regular Thursday house around the corner.”
    Abigail Knight’s weekly affair with her trainer could explain why she opted not to go to La Jolla with her husband. Did Abigail Knight have more, “other men” in her life?
    “The señora drops clothes all over,” Marta said, bringing Maddie back from her thoughts. “Leaves dirty dishes and glasses everywhere. When she ees mad, she swear, how you say … I hear once in a movie … like a sailor. No, like a drunk sailor. I do all the washing and almost no panties. In my country, we call her a puta. Señor Knight, he crazy for her, but she twist him around her finger. He a fool. A good fool. I would like my daughter, Rosa, to meet such a man. She would know how to treat him.”
    “Did Señora Knight wear nightgowns?” Jed asked.
    “Si. I wash six or seven each week.”
    Maddie described the red babydoll she had seen folded on the vanity at the crime scene.
    “Si, I wash it many times.”
    “Did you often find their thermostat set at a really low temperature?” Maddie asked.
    “No. Always at seventy.”
    “Always?”
    “Si.”
    The low temperature that night must have been set by her killer. It was also low at the Stowe scene; at least it was until the building super changed the setting.
    Maddie tried a presumptive question. “What did the Knights fight about?”
    “The señor ees never home when I clean, but I hear her once on the phone telling somebody the señor very mad because the señora she get fixed to not have child. I hear her laugh. She say she not going to ruin her body just to be saddled with a brat. That is what she call a baby. A brat.”
    Marta shook her head in disgust before adding a few words in Spanish; Maddie didn’t need a literal translation.
    Jed asked, “Marta, have you ever heard the name Folami Stowe?”
    Maddie didn’t expect she had, but as the fictional, inscrutable Charlie Chan might say: “Unexpected question sometimes get unexpected answer.”
    “I see this name in the newspaper, I think,” Marta said, “or maybe on the TV.”
    ***
    Late that night, Maddie crawled into bed and turned on her little bedside television. The picture quickly lost her attention as her mind went back over the interview of Marta the maid, and the images of a butchered Abigail Knight. Maddie had been given the point on a major case. Just what she needed while her ex-husband was trying to destroy her life.
    On both fronts, the worst was yet to come.

Chapter 9
     
    The odor of sun-ripened vomit rose from the weedy patch along the side street when Maddie and Jed got out of the car to visit Folami Stowe’s director of marketing, Clarence Clark Johnson. According to the vice department, the pimp ran his take from his girls through BB’s Tavern on Broadway which occupied the center spot in a commercial triplex, sandwiched between a 24/7 coin-operated laundry and a tattoo parlor. Clarence Johnson’s girls and customers called him BB; the city’s head