I Witnessed a Murder

                                        I Witnessed a Murder




Many years ago when Paul and I were first married we moved into a cheap apartment. 
Like most newly marries we didn’t have a lot of cash.  We had gotten married after the really cute little house we were living in was sold to the State for freeway improvements.
The house was a one bedroom, one bath with a garage.  In the alleyway were blackberry vines and I made some really good pies off of them.  When the house was sold the owner got his payment and we got $2500.00, enough to get married and have a week long honeymoon at The Inn at Spanish Head on the coast.  We got married in November and got to watch a storm come in and thrash against the shoreline, it was really beautiful.  We’d walk the streets of the small town buying what we felt like: coastal jewelry, clothes and things.  The hotel was so empty then that we lived on room service, and the maids got me an iron and an ironing board to hem Paul’s pants.  This was in the early seventies and we even had a little money left over for some good pot.  I am pretty sure we didn’t spend a lot on expensive things because we had money left over to look for an apartment and to buy some cheap furnishings.

We had a 1967 Pontiac LaMans that was so much like a Firebird they could have mislabeled it.  Hearst five-speed on the floor with a six cylinder overhead cam; perfect interior and not one dent, I loved that car.  In fact when I would go the 60 miles to see my parents my Dad would change the oil on this drive on ramp at the end of our dead end street and then take off in my car for 3 hours!  He really loved that car.  So Paul and I found a dinky apartment in a “U” shape that really looked like a motel on the same side of Portland as where I was working at a small Oil Heating business.  When you are young you can live anywhere because you are still living on love.  In the daylight the apartment didn’t look all that bad but in the dark when we finally had everything moved in that Saturday night things changed. 

We were both worn out from moving our things in when the walls started closing in on me.  Then I saw splashes of blood like someone was cutting me with a knife.  In every room of that small one bedroom; kitchen, bath, short hallway and living room it was the same.  Downward knife slash and blood splashing on the walls.  I ran from room to room and it just would not stop!!  I was screaming and frightened out of my wits!  Blood everywhere and it wouldn’t stop.  Paul tried to calm me down but it wasn’t working until he finally hit me in the face and I got a black eye with the burse running down my check a little bit.  Not a lot of pain but I slammed the bedroom door in his face and told him to go sleep on the couch. 

The next morning I quietly walked out the door so he wouldn’t wake up and got into my car.  I drove down to Salem to spend the day with Heather, a War Bride like my mom.  All the time I was growing up I would call her when things really got out of hand at home.  She was my confidant and I knew I could talk to her.  But when I got there I could only him and hah about how I got the black eye, I was just working up the nerve to tell her.  There were other people that day at her house; her son, Ian and his wife and their little boy who had just started to walk, and LuCinda, Heather’s daughter. Who we always called Cindy, was waiting for her friend to come down from Portland.  So I really could not just sit down and talk to Heather. 

Cindy kept pacing and tried to call her friend’s phone number in Portland, but there was no answer.  Ian and his family left, and then the phone rang and it was Cindy friend’s Mom.  Angie had been murdered by her husband and Angie’s mom was on the way to the morgue.  This was my exit call and I told everyone goodbye and got into my car.

I never thought about this a lot, I tried to push it back into my memory so I wouldn’t have to think about it.  Paul and I moved that very day into an apartment just off of 82nd Avenue and when Paul and his friend finished unloading the car they left it parked on 82nd  Avenue.  I told him to move it around to the small parking spaces in front of the six unit apartment complex but he said it would be just fine their overnight.  Along about 3 am we both were wakened from a sound sleep to the sounds of a car crash.  We went to the back door, which faced 82nd Avenue and saw our car smashed in on the trunk.  We both got dressed and he went out to talk to the police when they arrived.  We hadn’t even had out phone installed so luckily the lady working the front desk on the Motel across the street had seen it all happen and the driver of the car smash all of his beer bottles in the shrubs  and she had called the police.  The guy never tried to leave, when Paul went out and got his insurance information.  He kept apologizing to Paul about our car and you could tell he was very drunk.  The Police arrived in less then 10 minutes, lucky for us, and made sure that the guy had given us all the information we needed to contact our insurance and promised to send a copy of the police report as soon as it was finished.  The drunk was placed in back of the police car and driven away.  Of course that was the end of our sleep and we just stayed up talking. That apartment was very hard to live in after that, plus I had to take taxi’s to work.  The drunk’s insurance company refused to pay me what my car was worth, new engine and all, and they insisted on repairing it.  The shop ended up putting a Pontiac Tempest rear end on it, sewing up the back seat because the Tempest was a smaller model, and the leather going over the passenger door had cigarette burns all over it.  It never drove the same after that.  I hated that hodgepodge of a car that was returned to me.

I had mostly forgotten the whole thing about Cindy’s friend until last week-end.  It had been almost 20 years since all of this happened and we were just sitting at her house listening to CD’s and talking when I asked her if she remembered the time I had shown up at her house long ago with a black eye.  She said sort of since she had, of course, she had a lot more things to think about than me at the time.  I proceeded to tell her what had brought me there that day and her eyes kept getting bigger and bigger.  That was when I found out the whole story.

Angie and her husband had gone to a party that night and he’d gotten quite drunk.  She told him she wanted a divorce and that was when the horror began.  He had slashed her just the way I had seen, blood on the wall and everything.  He had then took her body and buried it in a field on the land that his parents had an Orchard.  Then he had gone and picked up his 9 year old little brother and took him to where he had buried Angie.  After he told his little brother that he had killed her he had taken the gun and raised it up and shot himself in the head.  I guess the screams of the little brother had been heard and the Police could close the case.  I feel sorry for that child having to have seen that.  To my knowledge their apartment looked exactly as I had described.

Word Count:  1,407

Post Script:  This story is dedicated to Angie and to all the women who have died at the hands of the men they once loved.