Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score
13
9:31 a.m., Friday, August 14
Titus Strubinger’s house was squished between two other homes of the same approximate size and shape. His was painted an avocado green and had metal awnings over every window. Apparently natural light had been considered a bad thing in 1970s architecture.
Kellen raised his hand to knock, but Riley grabbed his arm. “Wait, what are we going to say? ‘We’re sorry, but we think your son was connected to a murder victim’?”
“I was thinking something more like ‘We have a few questions about your son.’”
“Oh. Okay. That’s probably better,” she agreed.
Nervously, she patted her hair. She’d done her best to scrape it back into some semblance of a ponytail in Weber’s car. But she couldn’t do anything about the rest of her rumpled, sweaty self.
Kellen’s knock sounded official and made her anxious.
It took almost a full minute before the front door creaked open, and they found themselves looking down. Way down. The woman peering at them through round tinted lenses didn’t even clock in at five feet tall. She was wearing a velvet smoking jacket, distressed jeans, and white sneakers. Her gray hair was wrapped tightly in curlers.
“Mrs. Strubinger? I’m Detective Kellen Weber with the Harrisburg Police. I have a few questions regarding your son.”
“Some detective. My son’s dead,” she announced gruffly.
“I’m aware of that,” Kellen said.
Mrs. Strubinger gave Riley a suspicious once over. “She with you?”
Kellen turned up the charm. “She’s a civilian consultant.”
“Looks like trouble.” The woman leaned forward and sniffed. “Smells like it too.”
“I had a busy morning,” Riley said defensively.
“Might as well come in as long as you don’t stay long. I need to get to bed.”
“Thank you,” Kellen said.
They followed the woman inside. The house was small but tidy. The small living room was taken up almost completely by a drum kit.
“Was your son a musician?” Kellen asked, eyeing the drums.
Mrs. Strubinger snorted. “That lump of misery wouldn’t know a back beat from a click track. I’m the drummer. The gig last night went late. I just got home.”
Riley was impressed.
“Mrs. Strubinger,” Kellen began again.
“Call me Sticks.”
“Okay. Sticks, we were wondering if your son knew this woman.” Kellen produced a picture of a—thankfully—alive Bianca Hornberger.
Sticks slid her glasses off the top of her head and squinted through them at the photo and then snorted. “If you think she looks like the kind of person my son would know, you must not be very good at your job.”
“He gets that a lot,” Riley quipped.
The detective shot her a “har har” look.
“You’d take one look at his bedroom and know those two never had anything in common,” Sticks boasted. “What’s this about? Did Plastic Petula there say my son was an ass to her? Because she wouldn’t be the first. Guess now she might be the last.”
“Did your son have problems with many people?” Riley asked.
“Titus hated everyone,” Sticks said, fishing a vape pen out of the pocket of her robe. “He was about to get fired from the Game Emporium. You know how much of an ass you have to be to get fired by those special-brownie-eating gamers?”
Riley guessed a really big one.
“Would you mind if we looked at his room?” Riley asked.
The woman shrugged. “What do I care? Help yourself. But know this: That misogynistic idiot lived like a pig in a sty, expecting me to clean up after him. He wasn’t raised that way, but every nest has a bad egg, if you get what I’m sayin’.”
She led the way into the kitchen with yellow linoleum floors and cabinets painted robin’s egg blue.
“Titus lived down there,” Sticks said, gesturing at a battered door next to the refrigerator. “Haven’t touched a thing since they carted his lard ass out on a gurney through the Bilco doors. I took no responsibility for his mess when he was alive. Don’t much feel like dealing with it now that he keeled over from that heart attack.”
Kellen reached into the dingy stairwell and flicked on the light switch. A bare bulb cast a yellow glow down the narrow wooden steps.
“Ladies first?” he offered.
Riley shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
Kellen took the lead, and she followed, closing the door behind them. The stairs were rickety and stained from years of foot traffic.
“I don’t know. This isn’t looking good, Miss Cleo,” he said.
“Do not let my grandmother hear you say that.”
Riley was no longer the worst smelling thing in the house.
Titus’s “room” smelled like a decade of stale farts. Her sister’s psychic snoot would have a field day in it.
It was a standard basement with block walls, a concrete floor, low ceilings, and a whole lot of junk.
Come on, spirit guides. Mama needs a win.
“Well, I guess you got one thing right,” Kellen noted, pulling a small flashlight out of his pocket. He trained it into the darkness.
Everything glittered.
Everything.
The floor, the walls, every moldy basement object sparkled like a certain Disney fairy had exploded.
“This place looks like a strip club that gives out staph infections,” she said.
In the corner was a worn couch that sagged in the middle from excessive amounts of well-proportioned ass. It faced a large TV on a crappy faux wood console. The doors were open, revealing a tangled mess of wires, a few remotes, and loose batteries but nothing else of consequence.
Next to it was a rumpled twin bed. Posters of greased-up women in bikinis sitting on sports cars adorned the walls.
There was a phone charger plugged into an extension cord next to a twin mattress covered with rumpled, sparkly sheets. Small mountains of dirty laundry landscaped the concrete floor between similar mounds of trash. Riley counted fourteen shipping boxes in just one corner.
It all sparkled.
“This doesn’t look like the room of a guy who likes to craft,” she said, taking the gloves Kellen handed her.
“What do your spirit guides think a moldy basement bombed with glitter has to do with our DB across the river?” the detective wondered.
Bombed with glitter.
The cotton candy clouds lit up like Times Square, and Riley thought she heard the sound of slot machines spitting out their bounty.
“Holy shit. I think I’ve got something,” she said.
“What? A tetanus infection?” Kellen asked.
She jogged to the stairs and took them two at a time, her legs screaming from that morning’s aerobic torture. By the time she made it to the main floor, she was out of breath and barely able to stand.
She found Mrs. Strubinger in the kitchen pouring whiskey into a large mug of coffee and eating a piece of cold pizza.
“Sticks, did your son get glitter bombed?”
Sticks rolled her eyes heavenward. “It came in the mail, and the idiot opened it, thinking it was something he drunk ordered. I told him to clean it up. Every stupid sparkle. It looked like a craft store and a nudie bar exploded. But no, Titus just left it like that. He’d been leaving a trail of sparkly crap everywhere he went for two weeks like a middle-aged, cross-dressing Disney fairy with diabetes.”
Kellen joined them in the kitchen.
“Titus got a glitter bomb in the mail two weeks ago,” Riley explained.
“A glitter bomb?” He frowned.
“There were a few flakes of glitter in Bianca Hornberger’s closet.”
He shot her a look that said she was reaching. But she pointed at him. “Call Bianca’s husband and ask him if she got a similar package.”
With a shrug, Kellen excused himself.
“What’s all this about?” Sticks asked over the rim of her mug.
“Is there a possibility that your son didn’t die of a heart attack?” Riley asked.
The woman shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I’m no doctor. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, uncontrolled diabetes, and a bad fucking attitude. Between you and me, he hated anyone who wasn’t a middle-aged white guy that felt wronged by the world.”
“That’s a lot of people to hate,” Riley observed.
“Titus was an opinionated asshole. Someone always had it better or easier than him. Or someone was trying to take what was rightfully his. Got that from his father,” she said. “I mean, who hates shortbread cookies and Tom Hanks?”
Monsters.
“Titus. That’s who,” Sticks barreled on. “If there was an opinion to be had on something, he had a loud, unpopular one. If he saw a news story about a color-blind kid seeing color for the first time, he’d bitch about society supporting the weak. When the neighbors put up a Black Lives Matter sign, he pissed on their grass and parked his pickup in front of their house with a Confederate flag flying from the tailgate before the whole thing got repossessed. If he thinks I’m paying for a funeral that no one’s going to come to, he’s a dumbass. He can rot at the morgue for all I care.”
Titus Strubinger sounded like a real dick.
Kellen reappeared in the doorway and waved her over.
“Well?” she asked.
“Our East Shore DB got a glitter bomb in the mail two weeks before her death. She opened it in the bedroom. Husband said it took the cleaning crew two days to get it all cleaned up. I’ve got a team headed over there now to bag and tag every speck of glitter they can find. Another one will be here soon to go through the crime scene.”
“Looks like your civilian consultant really pulled through,” Riley gloated.
“Yeah, yeah. You get a gold star. Guess what else?” he said.
“What?”
“Unless our pal Sticks went downstairs and collected them, our guy Titus is also missing some electronics. His phone and gaming consoles weren’t down there.”
“That doesn’t smell like a coincidence to me,” Riley prodded.
“Yeah, yeah. Good job,” he said with a grin. “We need that body.”
“Good news for you. Titus is still lying on a slab because Sticks didn’t claim his body.”
“Lucky for us.”
“We don’t have to, like, go pick him up ourselves, do we?” Riley asked.
“Yes, Cleo. We drive down to the morgue and just throw him in the back seat.”
“I think you’re being sarcastic right now, but I’m not totally sure. This is my first civilian consultant gig.”
“We’re not responsible for body transpo,” he promised.
“Thank God.”
Kellen turned his attention to the drummer drinking whiskey out of a coffee mug. “Sticks, do you know if your son kept the package from that glitter bomb?”
