Its Own Reward

The reward was just icing on the cake. I would have done it for nothing. What kind of person would not turn in a murderer?

Of course I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I attribute my courage to all those episodes of “Dateline” my hubby Mel and I watch on Friday nights.

You can believe the CrimeStoppers website when they say a tip can be submitted absolutely anonymously, no questions asked. It’s true. I even collected my $20,000 reward (crazy, right?) at the bank, in cash, incognito. It was totally legit. That’s their protocol for giving out rewards for anonymous tips. Look it up.

It started a few months ago when I saw movers toting furniture into the only other house on our cul-de-sac. I was relieved. It’d been empty for almost a year, and, frankly, it was going to seed and bringing down our property value. I decided to pull out my old tater tot hotdish recipe and do some undercover surveillance.

I was crossing the porch next door with the warm aluminum pan in my hands and a Rubbermaid Take-Along filled with snickerdoodles when the door opened before I got there. It was a young woman with long black hair and striking eyes. She looked terrified.

“Hi, I’m Kate from next door,” I whispered like I was soothing a startled child. “I wanted to welcome you to –” and that’s all I got out before an old guy with greasy, white hair in a ponytail pushed in front of her. He said something to her in a language I didn’t recognize, and she turned and left the room.

“Please, forgive. My daughter doesn’t speak English,” he said, and grabbed the pan from me. “Thank you. Many thanks.”

“You can keep that pan and the cookie thing –” I tried to say as the door closed.

Geez Louise, I thought, as I crossed the lawn back home. Just tryin’ to be Minnesota nice. It was too early to tell if I should give up on making friends with them. What kind of person would I be if I didn’t at least try to be neighborly?

Well, within weeks, I started noticing strange goings-on over at the place. Cars coming and going at all hours. Men tromping up the cul-de-sac, flattening our grass. Guys knocking on the back door, glancing around furtively (in my opinion, anyway). Comings and goings, comings and goings.

I started to hang out on the west end of my house where I could get the best view of their back porch. That’s where the action was. I could make myself comfy on my bed and surveil through the blinds.

I say “my bed” because since I put on a few pounds in recent years, Mel said I started to snore (yeah, he snores too). Thus, he insisted on separate bedrooms before he died of sleep deprivation. He kept the big bedroom on the east end, and I settled for the little one on the other end that’s always hot.

“I’m pretty sure they’re selling drugs over there,” I said to Mel one day. “I know you think I’m nuts, but there’s definitely something going on over there.”

“Maybe it’s time to start looking for work again,” he said without looking up from his phone. “Give you something to do.”

Now, he knows that’s a button he ought not to push, but he does it all the time anyway. I was diagnosed three years ago with fibromyalgia, had to quit my job at the newspaper. I’m on disability. I suffer greatly. But he thinks it’s all in my head. When he brings out those big guns, it’s time for me to leave the room, grab a book and take some breaths.

Speaking of books, it was actually the ladies at book club who opened the door wider on my next-door neighbor mystery. Four of us meet every Thursday night at Lynnette’s to live vicariously through literature. We like to say we “wine and whine from 7 to 9.”

After I gave them the scoop, Barb said, “That sounds like sex trafficking to me.”

“They don’t have that around here.”

“It’s all over,” she said, and wrote down a website for me to check out.

I thought Barb couldn’t be right, but the next day I opened the junk drawer and pulled out a black Moleskine journal I’d bought with the intention of chronicling my fascinating life and writing a book, but nothing ever happens to me, and it sat empty in the drawer.

But on this day I began recording all the details of the comings and goings – license plate numbers, arrival and departure times, descriptions of men. It was mostly men. Occasionally, a couple young ladies would arrive and stay for hours. I actually saw the regulars lift up a flowerpot on the back porch and pick up a key to sneak in. The patterns I saw made me sick in the gut.

Speaking of sick, one Thursday I was almost to Lynnette’s place when she callemy cell and told me not to come. Her youngest boy was puking, and she didn’t want us gals to get whatever he had. When I got back home and changed into pjs to relax with a novel, I realized even though Mel’s pickup was in the driveway, he was nowhere to be found.

Half an hour later I saw him walk across the grass from the neighbor’s place.

“Wow, hi,” he said. “Why are you home?”

“Why were you at the neighbor’s?”

“They had a drain situation,” he said, heading to the bathroom.

“How did they know you’re a plumber?” I yelled through the door.

“Beats me,” he yelled back. “I don’t know anything about those people.”

And that was that.

I occasionally saw my striking-eyed friend leave with the old man, but I never saw her leave alone. I never saw her step out for a walk, have a cigarette on the back porch as I’d seen many men do. I wanted to talk to her, find out if the worst was true.

I started leaving care packages for her in Cub grocery bags on the back porch. That first time I knocked and hid by my rose bushes. She picked it up, looked around, and I waved. For a second I know I saw a smile, but she shut it down quick.

It made me feel good to leave stuff I thought she’d like – cute t-shirts, Snickers bars, fruity hand lotion. I even slipped a Post-It into a fluffy sock with the web address Barb had told me about.

Then one morning I woke up to three squad cars in the cul-de-sac and yellow tape across the neighbors’ front and back porches. I watched the officers going in and out all morning until one stepped over and knocked on my door.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I’ll need to ask you some questions about your whereabouts last night.”

“Of course,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t say much, but the man who lives next door was shot to death last night –”

“Where’s the girl?” I interrupted.

“She’s safe. She’s not a suspect at this time,” he said. “It appears she’s a victim in all this.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, grabbing the little black journal from the drawer and showing him, page by page, the sordid details I had chronicled with care – now all possible murder suspects. He shook his head in disbelief, took the book and thanked me profusely.

“Sorry, ma’am, before I go,” he said, “I just need to get some alibi information from you.”

I told him Mel and I had spent Friday night watching TV at home. Then, embarrassed, felt I should add that I’d felt uncharacteristically frisky – it couldn’t have been the “Dateline” episode we watched – but we “did it” in Mel’s room, and then I snuck on back to my own room at 10:35. I didn’t hear a thing until I woke up to the police lights. He thanked me again for the black book and left.

Things moved fast and got crazy after that. A couple weeks later police officers banged on our door with a search warrant. They asked Mel if he owned a 9 mm handgun. He stuttered and said yes, but it’s locked up and had been for months. He retrieved it, and they confiscated the Sig-Sauer P229, a gift from his brother.

One officer babysat us in the squad car while others searched the house. Nobody would tell us anything. Of course my face showed my astonishment when an officer walked out of our home carrying a pair of Mel’s slippers.

“This appears to be blood,” he said as he held them out for us to see. “Is there anything you want to tell us, Mel?”

“This is ridiculous,” he sputtered. “I haven’t used that gun in months. I don’t know anything about those people next door.”

They handcuffed Mel and took him away in one squad while I rode to the police station in another. They interrogated us for hours in separate rooms, and they told me that Mel claimed his innocence over and over. He wouldn’t back down. They wanted me to squeal on him, I assumed, but I told them I knew Mel could never do something like this.

Mel stayed locked up until the trial, in which he staunchly denied his guilt all the way through testimony from many witnesses, including two women who said they’d “spent time with” him at the house on many Thursday nights, usually between 7 and 9 p.m.

Even with that bombshell, the prosecutor’s allegation of sexual jealousy as a motive felt wobbly at best. The man’s “daughter” testified she’d heard nothing, often medicating herself with narcotics to induce sleep.

I testified for the defense about our alibi – how I remembered the night particularly because we had made sweet love after many months of a dry spell. The cross-examination got brutal when the prosecution forced me to admit I couldn’t know whether Mel had crept out in the night because he slept in the east bedroom and I in the west – toppling my testimony.

I cried over and over again that I knew he could not do this. I knew him. He would not, could not, do this. But the prosecutor sneered as he said the ballistics evidence matching the bullet to Ed’s gun and his slippers bloody with the victim’s DNA challenged my wifely assertions.

Mel was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In the aftermath of the verdict, amid the gasps and tears, I looked for him and caught his eye before they led him away – and I knew that he knew. He finally saw it in my face in that instant.

I had made the anonymous tip to CrimeStoppers that brought the police to our door – even though I knew Mel could never kill a man. He could never search out a gun in the 3 a.m. quiet, slip on a pair of Playtex gloves and step into his spouse’s slippers to creep across the dew-covered lawn on a moonless night. He wouldn’t know there was a key hidden under a flowerpot that would open the back door into that hellhole of darkness. He could never shoot a man in the back of the head while he slept and watch his blood pool off the edge of the bed and drip to the floor, then lift a finger to his lips to quiet the girl in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

Of course I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. The reward was just icing on the cake. I would have done it for nothing.