Dead on Arrival

A Shandra Covington Mystery

Jeffrey Savage

Chapter 1

“Someone’s trying to kill me.”

The small, white-haired man in the too-big suit appeared at the side of my desk late on a Friday afternoon. I was busy writing an article on the problem of incontinent geese spoiling city baseball diamonds. Not exactly Pulitzer material, but I was hoping I could spice it up with the headline, “Fowls befoul foul lines.” As usual, I was behind schedule and trying to combine a late lunch with work. Typing with one hand and holding a sandwich in the other, I looked up, thinking I must have misheard him.

“Miss Covington?” he asked, thinking perhaps he’d wandered into the wrong cubicle.

He’d caught me with a mouth full of lettuce, tomato, pork chow mein, and bread. I know, I know, it sounds disgusting—and it doesn’t taste much better. But it was the day before payday, and except for a slice of gray American cheese that had rolled itself into a tube, it was all I had left in the refrigerator. So what are you gonna do?

“Glumph,” I responded gamely, trying to offset my stimulating dialog with an intelligent expression.

Apparently I failed, because he squinted at the nameplate on my desk and gave me a dubious glare. “You are Miss Covington?”

“Glurp, glurp.” Chewing vigorously, I smiled to show him that I’d be able to speak at any minute. He wasn’t impressed.

“The reporter who wrote the article about the murders at Echo Lake?”

Why is it the important things in life always seem to happen to me when I’m eating or thinking about eating? Maybe it’s a comfort thing—spaghetti and meatballs never forgets to call after “a really great date”—or maybe I just like food. I eat more than anyone I know, but at five-one—if I stretch and puff up my blonde hair—I still can’t get the scale to break one hundred even with bricks in my pockets. My doctor says I have a fast metabolism and that one day it’ll catch up with me. In the meantime I should enjoy it while I can.

With an effort akin to Monstro the whale swallowing Geppetto, his ship, his cat, and his goldfish, I managed to force the bite of sandwich down my throat.

“Yes, I’m Shandra.” I could feel the gluey lump trying to lodge itself in my esophagus, and I vowed never again to put cold Chinese food between slices of bread—at least not without mayo. I held out my hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, he shook it.

“Pinky Templeton.” His hands had the soft feel of someone who regularly lotions—a feat I’ve never managed to accomplish. His fingernails were cut short and well manicured. I pegged him as either an IRS auditor or a small-claims attorney—neither of which I was excited to see. After releasing his grip, he rubbed his palms briskly together—perhaps fearing I’d transferred some of my sandwich to his fingers—and pushed his hands deep into his pants pockets.

“Pinky. That’s an unusual name.”

I waited for him to reply, but he simply stood in place, tapping the sole of one polished black shoe on the carpet. He was a strange-looking little man. He couldn’t have been more than two inches taller than I am, and his narrow shoulders hunched beneath a dark suit that hung loosely from his frame as though he’d recently dropped quite a bit a weight. Despite the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, his face had a child-like quality. A gray fedora that looked straight out of the ’50s, complete with a plucky little gold feather protruding from the hatband, was pulled low over his thick white hair, shading his eyes.

“Did you say something about someone trying to kill you?” I asked when it became clear he didn’t intend to offer any further information on his own.

He swallowed. “I’m, um, not sure.”

I glanced toward my computer screen. Most of the time I enjoy my job as a reporter for the Deseret Morning News, Utah’s second largest daily paper, but at the moment I could feel my stress level rising uncomfortably. If I didn’t have the story done by four, Chad, my editor, would throw a fit.

“Tell you what.” I fished a business card from the top drawer of my desk and held it out to him. “You take my number, and when you decide whether or not you’re in mortal peril, give me a call. In the meantime, I’ve got a story to finish.”

For the past couple of minutes Pinky had been shooting nervous glances down the hallway and at the other cubicles. Now he leaned across my desk. Cupping his open palm beside his mouth, he looked over his shoulder one more time. I couldn’t keep from smiling at his dramatics. He reminded me of the guy on Sesame Street who’d stand in the alley wearing a long overcoat, whispering, “Hey, buddy, you wanna buy a vowel?”

He didn’t offer me a vowel. Instead, he looked me in the eyes, his face only inches from mine. I realized that while he might look comical, the expression on his face was unmistakably real. The man was terribly frightened.

In a voice so quiet it barely carried past his cupped hand, he whispered, “She’s going to murder me.”


Chapter 2

As a reporter, I hear lots of strange things. People come to me because they think I can help their plight, publicize their cause, or grant them fifteen minutes of fame. Everyone has an angle. My job is to listen to both sides of the story, check the facts, determine if it’s newsworthy, and provide as unbiased an account as possible.

Then there are the people who tell me they were sucked into a vortex of spinning light where Amelia Earhart and Elvis Presley explained the true meaning of the book of Revelation. They know when the end of the world is. They’ve discovered that George Bush Sr. is really a doppelganger intent on the destruction of the world as we know it. The milk in the bottom of their cereal bowls has healing powers.

With these people, I nod and smile, suggest that another publication might provide a better forum for their story, and move on as quickly as possible. I try not to make any judgments. If they really did meet Amelia Earhart, I’m jealous. I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask her myself.

With Pinky, I wasn’t sure what to think. For one thing, if someone was trying to kill him, why didn’t he go straight to the police? For another thing, there was something strange about his looks—something beyond the obvious weirdness of the baggy suit and old hat.

Still, he seemed sane enough. His breath didn’t smell like the inside of a cheap wine bottle, his shave was immaculate, and he appeared to have bathed fairly recently. And obviously, something had him scared. Maybe it was because it was a Friday, or maybe his story just seemed more exciting than soiled baseball diamonds, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—at least for the moment.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

He shook his head, took a brand-new pencil from the jar on my desk, and began chewing on the end of it. I hate it when people do that.

using a pen and pad from my top drawer, I wrote down his name, and settled back into my chair.

“Have you gone to the police?”

He closed his eyes, chewing tiny crescents around the outside of my pencil like a hungry beaver—chit-chit, chit-chit, chit-chit. Just when I’d decided he wasn’t going to answer, his eyes opened.

“They, um, wouldn’t believe me. At least I don’t think they would. But maybe if you talked to them.”

This was straying suspiciously toward la-la land. And yet I found myself wanting to hear the rest of it anyway. My curiosity has always been the bane of my existence.

“Who’s trying to kill you?”

He frowned. “I’m not exactly sure. That is—I think I know, but I don’t know how to explain to you so you’d believe me.”

Definitely la-la land. “Let me guess. Aliens? Talking animals? Hobbits, maybe?” I should have stuck to the geese.

“Heavens no!” He smiled—almost laughed—and it made a world of difference in his appearance.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “that I’m some kind of kook. I’m not. It just that . . . the person who I think is trying to kill me . . . is . . . my wife.”

“Your wife?” Okay, I’ll admit it. I felt a little let down. I mean, in for a dime in for a dollar, right? We’d come far enough down this road that I was expecting something a little more tabloid-ish.  

He rubbed his cheek, glanced around again, and shuddered. “She’s terrible.”

Seeing the way his face paled and seemed to pull in on itself, I pictured a hulking woman with a cleaver, sneaking from cubicle to cubicle even as we spoke. All at once his story didn’t seem quite so humorous. “She’s not around here, is she?”

He grimaced, and his teeth bit almost completely through the pencil. “I hope not. But I can’t be entirely sure.” Again he leaned close, cupping his hand to his lips. I’d come so near to believing him, so convinced by his very real fear, that for a moment I couldn’t comprehend his next words.

“She’s . . . you see, she’s . . . dead.”


Chapter 3

“Dead?” I stared at him for a minute, sure that somehow I’d misunderstood.

He nodded.

“Rest in peace, dearly departed. That kind of dead?”

Again with the chewing. “I know it sounds a little crazy.”

Why is it that the nicest people always turn out to be psychos? Of course I had only myself to blame. After all, I’d encouraged him. I was the one who’d set aside my real work to listen to his story. And any minute now, Chad would come storming out of his office to remind me of that fact.

“Crazy? No, not all.” I set my pen and paper on the edge of my desk and sighed. “Now if you’d told me your wife was from another galaxy, that would have been crazy. But your wife—the one who’s trying to kill you—isn’t from another galaxy? She’s just . . . dead?”

“That’s right.” He smiled weakly.

“Is it one of those Alfred Hitchcock kind of revenge things? She’s coming back to get you because you killed her?”

His watery gray eyes widened, narrow eyebrows rising. “No! At least I don’t think I killed her. Of course, I’m not really positive either way.”

“Of course not.” I could hear Chad’s door opening down the hall and found that I didn’t really care.

I placed my chin in my hands, resting my elbows on my desk. It would have been too much to expect my week to end on a positive note. “I guess that’s why the police wouldn’t believe you—your wife being dead and all?”

“Oh. Do you think?” he asked, as though that possibility had never occurred to him. The pencil he’d been chewing was beginning to fall apart. He glanced at it, shrugged, and stuck it into his coat pocket.

I raised my hands palms up. Chad was stamping down the hall, his oaths clearly audible. “Is there some other reason the police wouldn’t believe you?”

“Well . . .” Pinky scratched his chin, as though carefully considering my question. “I was more concerned with how they’d react when I told them that I’m dead too.”