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Wrapped in a robe she opened her blinds and didn’t see him at first. She opened the bottom windowpane for some air and heard him.
A thin morning fog lay on the sidewalks, Kate heard heavy footsteps, looked down the street, and like magic he appeared out of the fog – tall, African-black, and walking fast – Charlie, a street person who haunted the west Philadelphia neighborhood outside her dorm window in the evenings and at night.
But Kate never saw Charlie out in the morning.
He stopped, leaned up against the old Neo-Gothic church across the street, leaning at the front of an alley behind the church, taking up a position as if waiting.
Kate opened her windowpane some more, settled in her chair, and watched:
Charlie and the alley were directly below her.
Charlie was a bully and Kate was well acquainted with his antics. In the evenings and nights he intimidated money out of people by running up to them screaming, waving his hands wildly about until someone coughed up some change, or better yet, a dollar bill. Money clicked Charles’s crazy antics off.
Twenty minutes later the early morning fog was gone giving Kate a clear view of the entrance to the alley. Charlie was still there, leaning against the church, but now he seemed to be talking to himself. Kate eased the bottom pane of her window open all the way and knelt down so she could hear better – someone inside the old church was talking to Charlie through an open pane in a stained glass window.
Kate heard the low mumble of a voice from the church but the sound of distant traffic drowned most of it out. She couldn’t hear what Charlie heard but heard a voice. Charlie was intent, his head at an angle, leaning back towards the stained glass window behind him.
Then Charlie nodded his head, looked up and down the street, and walked to the end of the alleyway to a set of double green doors. Kate heard the rattle of chains from inside the church, behind the doors, and then the doors rocked back and forth, stuck.
Charlie said, “Come on, man.” Pulled a newspaper out from inside his well-worn army jacket and began to slap the newspaper onto his other hand. Anxious. Irritated. And he kept looking at the entrance to the alley.
Then, one of the double green doors opened, Charlie turned, froze, looking at something behind the door out of Kate’s view. He took a step back, raising the newspaper in front of him as if to shield him, his eyes fixed, terrified.
Then Kate saw what Charlie saw: a hand wrapped in a towel came out from behind the door and Charlie said, “But who --”
And they were the last words of his life.
Out from the towel snapped three shots. Each shot went in a straight line through Charlie’s chest, pulling a spurt of blood out from his back and the shot ended in a small puff of cement dust on the alley wall behind him: one, two, three -- the shots, the spurts of blood, and the puffs of dust. The shots echoed loud in the alleyway. The towel was a bad silencer.
Charlie stepped back, fell against the wall behind him, opened his mouth as if trying to speak, slid down the wall, and landed on his side with heavy thud. The end of the towel was now blackened, with a small flame on it, and it disappeared behind the green door, then a slim, lithe figure dressed all in black, wearing a black knit cap pulled low over his face, came out of the doorway, moved along the wall, still holding the towel-wrapped pistol and inched past Charlie. Charlie was still alive, moving just slightly, trying to pick up the newspaper.
His killer looked at the entrance to the alleyway and began to reach for the newspaper also, ignoring Charlie’s weak movements to grab it. The newspaper was a few inches from Charlie’s hand, but just as the killer was about to pick it up, dorm widows started to slap open, and the whole side of the dorm came to life.
“Did you hear shots?”
“Yea, I just called security.”
“There’s the guard.”
“Where’d they come from?” Said an elderly campus officer as he trotted out of the dorm, and looked up at the students.
Kate recognized the guard from the dorm’s front desk. The figure in the alley went flat against the wall, not moving -- a long black bump in the wall. Then it started slow to reach again for the newspaper and on instinct and Kate thrust her arm out her open window pane, pointed to the black-clad figure in the alley, and yelled.
“There he is! The killer! He’s still in the alley behind the church!”
The figure in black pulled back against the wall, looked up at Kate, paused, looked closer, and then ran back into the church.
Kate heard the click of the deadbolt and then silence from the door. A few seconds later the elderly guard reached the front of the alley, bent over Charlie, looked around, confused, and said, “I’ll go call for help, you hold on.”
Kate was a medical school student and now very confused: three shots through his chest and Charlie was still alive? But he was. He managed to get his hand on the newspaper but as he did he took one, last, deep breath and lay still in a large pool of his own blood. He bleed to death, thought Kate, but no bullet hit the heart or the death would have been instantaneous. And the way the bullets went straight through his chest – full metal jackets? She thought-- hard, high-density metal bullets that could bore a path through bone, make a straight line hole through Charlie’s chest, three of them?
But why? Why use that ammo?
Kate Svienson was a tall, husky woman, raised on a farm, and she knew guns and ammunition. So right at the beginning, before a police officer arrived, she started asking questions about this odd murder that was none of her business. But … she couldn’t help the questions.
It was rare to see a bullet go straight through an animal in the bony area of the anatomy like the torso but she saw three, in a straight line, go right through Charlie’s chest. Why? Was the killer an amateur and the odd wounds were just an accident? Or a pro trying to send a message? Was Charlie purposely mortally wounded, purposively given a few minutes to suffer?
Kate sat back and thought, ‘And what about the newspaper?’ Why did the killer want it? And why did Charlie, in the last seconds of his life, reach for it? Was it the key clue to this bizarre murder?
Somehow she had to get a look at it. A few students were already outside a few feet from Charlie – it was a dorm of amateur sleuths.
Kate just wanted a peak at the newspaper.
