The Rattlesnake Vote

By Christina Glendenning

The Rattlesnake Vote is an inner-city mystery. My characters are drawn from the people I live among and work with—complete with their strengths and prejudices. An old woman is murdered for no apparent reason until Reese & Bjork discover a porn stash in the family Bible. Who are the man and girl in those pictures? Is she being coerced? Is he being blackmailed? The pieces begin to form a picture of political corruptness that carry the detectives into the world of the rich and privileged—until Bjork struggles to emotionally survive an assassination attempt and Reese is drawn into the activist politics of the LBGT community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781492723561

Book preview

The Rattlesnake Vote

First in the God’s Mop Mystery Series

Christina Glendenning

While people might recognize many of the Twin City landmarks and streets mentioned in these pages, this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and events is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or part, in any format.

Cover Design: Alan Pranke

Manufactured in the United States of America Available as an e-book and in paperback.

ISBN: 978-1-49272-356-1

Dedication

For David & Sadira, my family.

Lucky, lucky me

About the author …

I continue to work in inner-city education where—lucky me—students have taught my author-self everything she knows about life in the twenty-first century. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I currently live with my family in Minnesota.

Visit me at my website: ChristinaGlendenning.com

Other Titles by Christina Glendenning

Looking for Gods Who Deserve Us:

A saga of lesbian love & marriage

Searching for Gods that Deserve Us is breathtaking. Glendenning seamlessly weaves together a love story expressed from amazingly different viewpoints and brings it into a tale that takes a man from the depths of despair to a tentative understanding of his homosexual son. She deftly encapsulates and challenges who and what God is to three people with intensely different backgrounds and experiences. This would be a perfect gift for someone struggling to understand a confession of same sex love and all the baggage that can go along with it. Glendenning absolutely nails it. 

Jessie Chandler

Award-winning author of the Shay O’Hanlon Caper Series

Acknowledgments

The Twin Cities is a rich area for writers learning their craft. Not only have I benefited from The Loft Literary Center, but from individuals who have taken time away from their own writing careers to share their expertise. I especially want to thank Ellen Hart, author, and Ian Graham Leask, literary consultant, for their excellent and patient instruction.

We writers value our literary groups that keep our work and our sanity on an even keel. Jeanne Shields, Maureen Fischer, and Kari Westby have labored with me from the beginning. Thanks, too, for the critiques of David Richard Helgerson, Mary Scott Headington, Susan Hall, and Arlene Tutt.

Sisters in Crime has been an invaluable resource. I’m indebted to the generosity of its members, national and local. A warm thank you to authors Erin Hart and Mickie Turk for the countless hours they’ve spent working for the benefit of other mystery writers.

And to the memory of Carol Bly, author and teacher. Years ago, I’d stop by her house for a writing critique before dashing away to pick up my young daughter. Carol would make me a fried egg sandwich and a cup of tea for the road. She never let me forget that what people thought and what people wrote mattered.

Thank you Alan Pranke, Amp 13, for your highly intuitive blend of art and technology. And thank you Joan M. Laux, proofreader extraordinaire, for knowing where all commas go.

Cast of Characters

(Samuel) D’Aries Reese – Minneapolis homicide detective

Dani Reese – D’Aries’ young daughter

Jeanette Reese – D’Aries’ mother, executive board member of Women Electing Women

Bertram Reese – D’Aries’ father

Paul Reese – D’Aries’ brother

Lynette Reese – D’Aries’ ex-wife

LaShay Jeffers – Mother of D’Aries’daughter

Rashaun & Calvin Jeffers – LaShay’s young sons

Arnette Jeffers – LaShay’s mother

Signe Bjork – Minneapolis homicide, D’Aries’ partner

T.J. Donnelly – Signe’s husband

Erin Donnelly – Signe’s older daughter

Elise Donnelly – Signe’s younger daughter

Eriks Zernis – Signe’s Latvian neighbor

Jesse Kleiser – a Black Rattler

John (Derrick) Eglitis – a Black Rattler, group manager

Leon Jara – Concierge, New Lisbon Inn; Signe’s childhood friend

Representative Timothy Weir – blackmail victim

Bebe Prideux – Weir’s wife

Roland Prideux – Bebe’s father, trade commission member

Andre Zhang – Chinese trade emissary

DaiYu Wan – Andre’s wife

Yolanda Kills Plenty – principal of All Tribes Charter School

Malcolm Olivier – D’Aries’ friend and mentor

Sugar Pie Olivier – Malcolm’s wife

Chick Rausch – veteran police officer

Beth Ireland – Minneapolis homicide detective

Patricia Perry – murder victim

Darius Flowers – drug dealer and blackmailer

Daisy Hough – rookie police officer

Rose Absolom – politician backed by Women Electing Women

1

The situation becomes clear to her despite the fear, despite the pain. Or perhaps because of these sensations. She is going to die. He’s already struck her hard, his fist to her stomach, to show he means business. She carries no memories of mistreatment or the skills to handle it. No one has ever struck her before. Not by her parents’ hand, certainly not by her husband’s. The stranger’s willingness to violate her catapults her into shock. But with the shock of it comes calm.

She clutches at her stomach and fights for breath as her knees buckle. His hand, oddly small, almost delicate, wraps itself around her throat and holds her upright. As he slowly lifts his arm, she feels her body rise in the air and her feet leave the bedroom carpet. The muscles of her stomach stretch uncomfortably and force pain into organs always hidden but never felt. This growing calm she feels makes her flex her toes and search for the floor beneath. Suddenly, she can’t breathe at all.

Where are they?

He enunciates each word as though she’s senile and slow to understand.

Point to where they are.

She points to the bedroom closet behind them. Her entire arm trembles.

The man pushes her onto the bed and her hip lands hard on the corner of her suitcase. She sucks in air while she rubs the bones. Old bones. She sees that he’s rummaged through her suitcase, her undergarments. Her purse lies on its side. She is going to die today, and she marvels that she’s in the position of knowing this beforehand.

Patricia Perry stretches, rubs out the kinks as best she can. How many people get this chance? To determine the way they face the last few minutes of their given time on earth?

He’s reaching up to the wooden shelf above the clothes hangers where there are several boxes of her husband’s old clothing. Slowly, she shifts her weight to her legs. They feel trustworthy, hopefully able to hold her weight despite the weakness seeping into her body. The bathroom separates the two bedrooms in the hallway. If she can make it that far, the bathroom door locks from the inside. There’s a window that opens.

The man swears as each box yields only flannel shirts, socks, worn sweaters. Things the living could be wearing, but she doesn’t have the heart to give away. She angles her hips in preparation to run and slides them to the edge of the coverlet. Still crouching, she straightens her legs and plants them firmly on the floor. She feels adrenaline wake her muscles and limbs.

Patricia Perry runs. For her life.

She hears him come after her as though he’s been expecting her to try to escape. Her fingers stretch to the bathroom doorknob ahead, so close she feels the cold rising from the metal. Then she feels a forceful push to her back. She stumbles down the short hallway and falls into the doorway of her sons’ old bedroom. The man is calling her terrible names. Cunt. Filthy whore. Words so vile they belie he’s ever known his grandmother. A pen lies on the boys’ carpet. He’s searched this room too. Her files and papers are scattered all over the floor. She clutches the pen to her.

He pulls her up by the front of her dress and presses her against the hallway wall. She hears herself whimpering and sees a smile form on his thin lips. She smells her own urine and feels a thin stream run warm down her legs. He’s showing her a hunting knife by pressing it flat against her nose. It feels cold and, with eyes crossed, she sees the curved tip of the blade. Forged to gut efficiently.

He keeps demanding, threatening. Now the blade tip is slowly being dragged down her face. The metal hooks inside her lip with a pinch of pain. He pulls it slowly past the lips and across her chin and stops it at her neck. She grasps that he is preoccupied with her fear as he drags the tip from ear to ear. Even if she tells him where they are, her life is over. So why tell? Why betray the young? That’s not the way to leave this earth.  He’ll kill her if for nothing but the pleasure of doing so.

He’s breaking her skin with the blade. She feels it split as she clicks open the pen. Her arm has free range of motion. As she thrusts her closed hand against his neck, she thinks about her family for a final time so she can die with grace. She knows she is dying for something, to protect someone, and this eases her fear. Something warm hits her cheek. His blood. She smiles. Then burning in her head. Then nothing.

2

Minneapolis Homicide Detective S. D’Aries Reese chose carefully. Johnny Coltrane, Boney James, and, of course, Miles; music ripe with the flavor of raw buckwheat honey. Earthy and dark. He loaded the CDs and modulated the sound quality – optimal harmony for optimal inspiration. Sitting on his ergonomically correct chair, he mixed his rosemaling palette and contemplated both Coltrane’s legacy and, through the patio door, an albino squirrel feasting on a busted white pumpkin. Once upon a life ago, he would have grabbed his watercolors and rushed out the door to capture the unique essence of such a scene. But that was his mother’s vision of his talent and no longer his.

This day, his fortieth birthday, conspired to be perfect. The quality of light, his baby girl changed, fed and now back asleep in her playpen not five feet away, no one calling yet, his day. This makeshift studio, the laundry room actually, often felt too small for his large self. The washer and dryer had been moved months ago to the furnace area because natural light graced this area. Light was sparse throughout his small house but exulted in his basement after he’d replaced the two egress windows with patio doors for maximum light. The tiny patio outside, surrounded by a wrought iron fence, had become a fair weather extension of his workroom. His pride of place.

The wardrobe door lay on sturdy wooden saw horses. He ran his long, slender fingers over the dried paint. Two coats of Red Iron Oxide. Satin smooth. Of all the traditional background colors in Norwegian rosemaling, Reese preferred red. Odd, his now ex-wife had commented. Not dismissively, but just perplexed because homicide detectives saw so much blood. Perhaps, he told her, his art could be seen as his personal redemption of red. His wife had indulged his projects, his mother gritted her teeth and admired his folk art but never with the critical eye she’d bestowed upon his watercolors.

Of her three gifted children, Reese was the most versatile in his talents, and she never let him forget that he could have been a world-class hockey player or watercolorist. World class assumed. The day had arrived, she taught her children, for all black people to become world class. World class or the effort didn’t count had been the message received.

He reached for his palette knife and considered the proportion of Prussian blue to Titanium white. The wardrobe itself was upstairs in position between the fireplace and the front door. His parents, both architects, had helped him gut the walls that once divided his floor plan into tiny rooms. The living room closet had been sacrificed as part of a new dining nook now littered with homeless coats and umbrellas. He’d found the old wardrobe at the same architectural salvage shop as his woodwork. His house, a foreclosed rental property, had been stripped to the walls before landing in receivership.

Sanded smooth and stained ebony, the wardrobe had three panels on each door, shapes and lengths differing, each painted Red Iron Oxide to be adorned with scrolls and flowers. Reese had laid down his proposed pattern in pencil after Thursday’s arrest of a murder suspect.

The man, realizing Reese had him cornered, mouthed fucking black Sambo, and, for a perplexing moment, Reese wasn’t sure he’d confronted a KKK’er or a children’s librarian gone bad. Reese stood big; big raw bones, big head, and mottled skin full of scars. His scars were a combination of vicious acne and hockey fights at Breck, his preparatory school. He enjoyed intimidating people and fucking with their heads, especially when those heads were racist. He towered above the suspect and brought him to his knees.

Once the man was in cuffs, Reese began mentally planning the top panels. Four symmetrical scrolls, two turned up, two down, and, rising up from the center, a tulip flower painted in the cabbage rose technique. Had there been more racial epithets hurled his way, Reese remained oblivious.

Kiss and Hershey, his two rescue labs, began a friendly racket in the backyard. He heard his father’s business shoes heavy on the stairs above. Both of his parents were mixed race, and each had a distinct way of being a person of color in the world although each denied such a personality split. Today his father’s footfalls sounded determined and purposeful. Sounds Reese had come to associate with the man’s allegiance to the white world.

Happy birthday, Samuel. I see you’re already at it. I’m here to pick up our girl. Bertram Reese filled the doorway, a newspaper and a thin manila envelope in his hand.

Catchin’ the early light. Always Samuel, never D’Aries. He let the slight go and motioned to the newspaper with a tube of oil paint. Any news worth repeating?

Same old, same old, Son. The economy’s still tanking if you ask me, despite what those fellows in Washington are saying. He shook the manila envelope. Speaking of money, have you gone over that IPO information your brother sent?

Reese’s younger brother Paul was a successful stock jockey and financial planner with a local investment firm. His parents’ golden boy. Paul also had a coke habit that his parents still referred to as a part of his youthful rebellion. Paul was thirty-five. But now that Reese was a father himself, he understood and indulged their selective blindness.

Yeah, but isn’t this more than a little illegal?

Not really. No, not at all. We buy Jenco fairly low, it goes public and we sell.  Paul swears it will trade at nine to eleven dollars a share. That should put your remodeling fund well ahead of schedule.

Hand me the Windsor & Newton 6, Dad. Narrow brown handle. Reese shook his head and shaded a leaf with burnt umber in four deft strokes. It’s still insider trading regardless of how you blur the lines.

Look, Son, you’re going to need a new furnace. His father pulled the brush from a jar and handed it to Reese. And your brother is very conservative, you know that. Does his homework.

Jenco, Dad, hires part-time help, over sixty percent black and Latino folks, specifically to avoid paying benefits. A factory built in some backwater Mississippi town where no one’s got any prospects. And the state treats the damn place like some tax-exempt church. 

Bertram pursed his full lips, giving him a Muppet look. That’s what happens when we minorities wait for the damn government to give us a hand. Sleeping through school? Why, go right ahead ‘cause the welfare check is in the mail. Unethical people, and there’s never a lack of those folks, exploit the lazy and uneducated.

He looked at his father who was flushed with a political ire equal to his own. I’ve done my homework, too, Dad. I’m not interested in rewarding the exploiters of the world.

Okay. You don’t need me to tell you your responsibilities. His father sighed and laid the manila envelope on a chair before waking Dani. Don’t forget dinner at four.

The two men got Dani into her snowsuit. She lay in her grandfather’s arms and was back to sleep before Bertram pulled out of the driveway. 

And so the early morning passed, gliding into full sunrise like a sable brush tipped with Ombre rose. Reese broke stride long enough to grab some breakfast and set up Ella and Count Basey to keep the vibe going. When his cell emitted a familiar ring tone, he cursed the interruption.

You awake? his partner, Lieutenant Signe Bjork, inquired.

Do I have to be? Dang, here goes his day. We’re not on rotation this weekend, or doesn’t that matter?

Afraid not. The baddies were very busy Halloween night, so we’re it. I’m about two miles from you in the Phillip’s area. Homicide. The technicians are finishing up their preliminaries.

He looked at his nearly full palette and brushes. I gotta clean up my paints first. He clenched his teeth. But, I’m on my way.

You’ve said it yourself, Reese. You are but God’s mop.

The crime scene was a small one-story stucco home in a deteriorating neighborhood. A pocket change section of Minneapolis hit hard by foreclosures and unemployment. The homes lining the uneven sidewalks surrendered little to the junkies, gangs, and small-time criminals that cased them. Maybe some jewelry and a few electronic items. So the question seemed valid: why was a forty-inch flat screen still sitting on the entertainment console?

Reese examined the family Christmas picture framed by green-painted Popsicle sticks and propped against the TV. The flat screen was obviously last year’s gift from the smiling group of five. Probably the same people who had reported the victim missing. Looking closely at the contents of the living and dining rooms, there was little else of value — family-weathered furniture at least thirty years old, memorabilia only meaningful to the occupants. He went to check the bedrooms. White butcher paper had been laid over the immediate crime scene and made a crinkling sound beneath his shoes.

A thirty-inch-wide hallway ran the length of the bedroom portion of the house. The woman had fallen between the front door and the archway opening up to the hallway. Her back still pressed against the living room wall as though she’d slumped down to take a nap. Bjork squatted by the woman’s ruined head, her white-blond hair tucked into a severe bun underneath her head cover.

She must have been pretty once, she said matter-of-factly. 

How the hell can you get any aesthetic sense through all that bloat? Half of the woman’s skull had been battered in, a jellied paste of bone and blood obscuring the decomposed face.

Because I’ve started to really look at victims, look past all this insult, and see what’s left of the person.

Since her brother fell in Afghanistan, a lot had changed with Bjork. Reese no longer questioned her new quirks, just went with them. Lord knows but she had stood by him through all his shit. If she needed to commune with the dead, so be it.

He walked through the archway and into the hall. He steadied himself, gloved hands on the wall. Under his fingers, feathery spines of ostrich plumes cascaded over each other in a repeating pattern. He fancied wallpaper and traced the neat seam with his finger. An old-timey motif, faded but perfectly hung. A calendar print of Benoir’s Shepherdess in Repose in a plastic frame hung centered, he’d bet to the quarter inch, on the opposite wall. Reese, who’d grown up with a Picasso lithograph hung over the staircase landing, felt a wash of sadness at the woman’s humble attempts at decorating. Blood spatter had arched into an explanation point over the picture. Red, angry, linear.

He burrowed his nose into the tweed folds of his jacket. The stench released by a decomposing corpse should no longer bother him. But because his macho nature precluded coating his nostrils with a barrier aid, his stomach threatened to empty out.

Please go puke in the yard.

I’m good. Just want to check out the bedrooms. How much time do we have?

Busy Saturday night on the Northside. Who knows when the medical examiner will get here?

She’s pretty ripe.

Both detectives were too seasoned to question why someone would bludgeon an old woman to death. They’d stood for too long in the human shadow. But because they were human, the question hovered as it always did, teasingly, in the air. Who? Who does such things? 

A small suitcase lay open on the bed. The few contents were in a tangle. Patricia Perry’s purse sat in plain sight next to her suitcase. Reese went through the contents. Two hundred dollars and some change. Checkbook. Visa debit. All left behind. The contents of her drawers and her closet were strewn across the floor. An old tube TV sat on the dresser angled toward the window. Reese looked through the curtains. The woman slept on the window side of the bed to see and hear what entered the backyard. The chain link fence had a gate visible from her bed. Like most seniors living alone, she was wary. Careful.

Reese walked past the bathroom to the second bedroom, a guestroom of sorts with a writing desk positioned under the window. Silk flowers in a vase, a small filing cabinet, and a box for CDs. Whole files had been pulled out and tossed on the floor. Under a dust cover, the shape of a computer monitor. He lifted the blue fabric. A newer model Dell. She used this room as her home office. She had skills. Why had the killer needed to look through files? This fact elevated the nature of the crime. But elevated it to what?

Bjork joined him and busied herself looking through the closet. If it started off as a robbery, did Mrs. Perry surprise her attacker? Why didn’t she run? This is a snatch and grab neighborhood. What were they looking for to create such a mess?

It would take a hardened person to kill a petite woman in her seventies rather than simply subdue her. Besides, a thief would have taken the purse and the flat screen at the very least. All these files point us in another direction.

Then this is either a planned murder or a selective robbery. Tiny and slender, Bjork parted the row of coat hangers and stepped easily inside the closet. What did she have that he was looking for?

Reese carefully turned the pages of the victim’s desk calendar. All doctor appointment entries. A selective robbery? Naw, what could she have had?

True. Her son said both he and his brother help her out since their father died. No real savings, no investments. Just a modest pension. Maybe she owned an heirloom of some kind?

He set down the calendar and thought more carefully about Bjork’s last comment.

But if you’re right, Signe, then she would have known where the item or items were. Why didn’t she give them up when he hit her the first time? What was worth dying for?

Something of extreme value to her. Or maybe he had the wrong house, maybe she had nothing and he was a meth head? You find an address book?

Not yet. Not in her bedroom, not in her purse.

I keep mine in the kitchen.

The detectives returned to the living room and studied the position of Patricia Perry’s body. 

No signs of a struggle, Reese. That speaks to the surprise element. And the blood is pooled here. Spatter contained to the bedroom hallway. A slash to the temporal artery, then she staggered or was dragged out here.

Unless, of course, the killer tidied up. But this is wallpaper. Was she fleeing to her bathroom? Reese returned to the hallway and pulled open the painted wooden door until he could insert his hand. Which can be locked from the inside. The killer might have blocked access to the bathroom when he cut her, and she staggered toward the front door.

Bjork stared at the front door. No blood. She dropped before she made it.

So she surprised her attacker in her bedroom and tried to escape. He battered her head, cut her, and she turned away from him toward the living room. But her injuries were too severe and she succumbed.

That would be my call, Reese. Neither the front door nor the back door have been forced. If she didn’t let the killer into her house, then she either forgot to lock the kitchen door or the intruder had a key.

The kitchen door was unlocked, according to Michaelson.

The rookie officer from the third precinct and his partner had discovered the victim when they responded to a welfare call, her son’s plea for someone to check on his mother. They’d cordoned off the house and were now canvassing the neighbors.

A stranger-intruder or someone she knew well enough to fear. Reese looked at what was left of Mrs. Perry’s face. Who’d she know well enough to fear?

I doubt a stranger would have beat her to death. If he was searching her bedroom for jewelry and she surprised him, or them, she would have been shoved out of the way so they could escape. Robbing this house is a young person’s game. Some kid that mowed the lawn or made a delivery and saw the TV. She knew this person, I bet.

Bjork’s supposition now became the central question. They surveyed the living room. Carefully stepping around turned-over furniture, they worked their way through the dining room to the kitchen.

Bjork had begun pulling open cupboards and drawers when Officer Michaelson tapped on the kitchen door. Reese stepped out onto the small back porch, leaving the door ajar so Signe could hear. A Native woman in too-tight jeans leaned heavily on the chain link fence that separated Perry’s house from her own. Her face was shrunken in on itself like an apple doll. Heavy-lidded eyes like dried olives peered out. Unreadable. The eyes of a heavy drinker.

I talked with the neighbor woman, Detective. Dolores Red Bird. He tipped his thick neck in the woman’s direction. 

Red Bird work evenings?

Took early social security in September after her unemployment ran out. Home all the time, Detective.

Reese nodded in Red Bird’s direction. She continued to stare past him.

Said she and her grandson helped the victim carry her patio furniture into the garage about noon Wednesday. Perry planned to take a nap then drive up to Ely to stay with her oldest son until after Christmas. Everything was quiet, her lights were on timers, and so Red Bird assumed everything was okay. Mr. Perry passed three years ago and they help her out.

I want to know who Red Bird’s grandson is and who he hangs with.

Bjork joined them on the porch and consulted her small notebook. It’s more complicated. Perry’s son didn’t report her missing until yesterday. According to him, she was supposed to arrive at his place yesterday, not Wednesday. In time for the family Halloween party. He notified the local authorities when she didn’t show.

Today was Sunday. Five days to rot. Wednesday to Saturday, a three-day discrepancy. If she was leaving that afternoon, where was she going for those three days? 

Reese pointed to Red Bird’s retreating back. Requestion her just to make sure she’s remembering the days correctly. He then had an afterthought. Did the technicians dust the front and back doors for prints?

Yeah, they did.

Michaelson trotted after Red Bird. They now had two major questions to consider.  Who did Perry know well enough to fear, and why the detour? And, most importantly, were those two questions related? 

Damn. My head is cold.

It’s hat weather, Reese. What we humans wear when we don’t have five pounds of hair for insulation.

I guess.

It’d already been four months since Reese cut his trademark ‘fro. Now there was only a neat eighth-inch of hair between him and winter. Between him and others, there lay the real vulnerability, as Bjork was fond of reminding him. 

He paused at the back door and pressed on the buzzer. It worked. He followed his partner down the steep basement steps. The laundry room announced itself with the chemical smells of dryer sheets and bleach. Besides the furnace room, the basement contained the remnants of an old rumpus room probably used by the Perry sons while they lived at home. The dryer door was open and a partial load of whites waited by the laundry basket. Half a dozen neatly folded items lay in the basket.

This meticulous woman would not leave a mess of unfolded clothes and go away for a couple of months, Reese. Not the keeper of this house. Despite the mess, there’s no dust, the floors and counters are spotless. The cupboards tidy.

True that. Then why the rumpled clothes in the suitcase? The intruder had rummaged through its contents. That’s when she had discovered him.

Bjork looked through the laundry basket and the clothing still in the dryer. "Underthings, towels, dishcloths. So she was in the middle of her last chore of getting fresh laundry to pack. Either she hears the doorbell or hears someone upstairs, maybe the killer entered through the