Two Bare Arms

by Blake Banner

  Bob leaned forward, frowning. “But?”

  Mrs. Luff looked at him and nodded, like that’s what she was going to ask.

  “But he had already told me that he had been twelve years without killing. It was as though he had defeated the cops back then and had nowhere left to go. But when I turned up, nosing around, it fired him up again.

  “The thing was, he had not killed for twelve years. So how could he become overconfident? He started out meticulous, and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he became careless. And every act of carelessness pointed—just as the photograph pointed clearly and obviously at the wrong victim—every act of carelessness pointed at the wrong suspect.”

  I paused. There was absolute silence in the room, and five pairs of eyes fixed on me.

  “We were meant to get it wrong with David, and we were meant to realize we had got it wrong with David, so that we could then be sure we had got it right with Peter.”

  Peter screwed up his face like his brain hurt, and Jennifer began to sob. Bob and Mrs. Luff were goggling, with eyes and mouths like six perfect zeroes. Peter exploded, “What the hell are you saying, Stone? It was David after all?”

  I laughed. “Oh, we could have! We could have gone around the mulberry bush again! But the chances of David having a female accomplice were slim, to say the least. No, I realized I needed to back up and look at who was creating this picture. Who was the artist, the painter, or photographer, who did not appear in the picture?”

  “What does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “Well, the first thing, and this actually saved Detective Dehan’s life, was Schrödinger’s cat.”

  Bob looked surprised. “Schrödinger’s cat?”

  “Yes, you actually drew my attention to it on the first day, when we were visiting you. Schrödinger’s cat was a thought experiment, intended to illustrate that the Copenhagen interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was wrong. In this thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box with a device that at some unknown point will release a poison. If we follow the Copenhagen interpretation, until the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead. Once we open it and we know, then the cat is either alive or dead. And you said to me on that day, Bob, that the lockup with the arms in it reminded you of Schrödinger’s cat.” I paused, staring at him. “And it was when I remembered that, that I realized Dehan was in one of the lockups, with a timed device. And of course, I was right.”

  There was total silence in the dull gray of the morning light. Bob suddenly said, “I am so glad I was able to help.”

  “So am I. Because I have to confess, I have been behaving in a rather bizarre manner recently. Peter will attest to that, won’t you, Peter? I have actually been going around smelling people’s shoes. For example, Bob, I notice that you wear rather exquisite, handmade Spanish shoes.”

  Bob and Mrs. Luff both stared down at his feet. He gave a small laugh. “Yes, it was actually Peter who introduced me to them. I have always admired Peter’s unfailing good taste and his relentless determination always to have the best.”

  I smiled. “Even when he doesn’t deserve or appreciate it. He acquires these things, doesn’t he, Bob? And then he doesn’t value them.” Bob looked blank and I held out my hand. “Call me crazy, but I do love the smell of good Spanish leather. There is nothing like it. May I, Bob?”

  “May you what?”

  “Smell your shoes.”

  “You want to smell my shoes?”

  “Please.”

  Everybody was staring like they were following a tennis match. After a moment, he took off his shoes and handed them to me. He looked really uncomfortable. “Really, Detective, I don’t know what you hope to…”

  “Humor me, Bob, it is just a small demonstration.” I briefly sniffed the soles and carried on talking. “You see, when I stopped looking at the pictures that the killer was feeding me, I started looking further afield, and I began to discover interesting things like, for example, the fact that you do not work. You live on a pension paid to you by your ex-employer after an accident at work incapacitated you. You worked, back then, as a master butcher at the Manly’s chain of superstores.”

  “That’s true, but…”

  “It is a comfortable income, but not a handsome one. I discovered that you had originally bid for a house with a lockup. But the bank would not extend you that much credit. You were the odd one out. You had no lockup.

  “And the more I thought of my killer as the person making the picture, the more I kept remembering this window here, staring straight out at Peter’s house. Peter with the attractive wife whom he always left alone, Peter with the well-paid job, Peter with the house which was just a little bit bigger and better than yours. Peter, with the very lockup that you wanted to buy. Peter, whom you have detested and resented since the very day he moved in here, and you fell in love with his wife.”

  “What absolute rubbish!”

  “Really? I think when we start questioning Jennifer, another picture may emerge, about how you have hounded her for the last fifteen years, how every time her husband was away you would be there…”

  Jennifer spoke suddenly, and her voice was twisted with grief, frustration, and relief.

  “Both of them! Him and his damned wife!” She turned to her husband. “I tried to tell you! How many times did I try to warn you? And all you could say was, we must keep the peace with the damned neighbors.” She pointed a trembling hand at Bob and his wife. “They are crazy! But you won’t listen! Because you always know best!”

  I nodded. “Make a note, Peter, listen to your wife. Because having terrorized her into compliance, they repeatedly went to your house when you were out, stole your cell phone, stole your prints, probably using liquid silicon, planted Dehan’s pendant in your drawer, and planted your prints on the duct tape and the pendant.” I paused. “A jury might have bought it. But it was just a little too obvious, having been so careful, to suddenly leave two, perfect thumbprints on such perfect exhibits.”

  I turned to Bob and held up the shoes. “You wanted his lockup, you wanted his house, you wanted his wife… Your obsession extended as far as buying the same shoes online.”

  Bob was laughing. “It is true that I am fond of Jennifer, we both are!” He gestured at his wife, who was smiling comfortably. “And I will not deny that Mrs. L. and I have often sat here and discussed how—forgive me, Peter—how wasteful Peter has been. He has been granted all the opportunities I never had, and frankly, he has thrown them away. And as I said, I—we—have always admired Peter’s good taste. But I am afraid it is a quantum leap from there to inferring that I am a serial killer who gets his amusement from framing my neighbor for murder! Please!” He laughed.

  I nodded. “I agree. And that is why I bought liquid iron.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was expecting another one of your notes. You’d already visited me once, and I thought it was at least even chances that you’d be back. So I spilled Floradix liquid iron all over my porch. It was cold and damp enough that it would not evaporate. I planned to keep doing it all week if I had to, but as it was, at five a.m. you showed up to leave me your note. Liquid iron not only stinks, it shows up with Luminol. Detective Dehan, have you got…?”

  She reached in her pocket and tossed me a small plastic spray bottle. She then got up, closed the drapes, and went to stand by the door. I sprayed the Luminol over a patch of the sole. The room was dark enough to see the bright blue glow as it mixed with the oxidizing agent in the liquid iron residue. I held it up to show her. Then showed it to Bob.

  Mrs. Luff turned to him and took his arm in both of hers. “Oh, Bob!” She gave him a cuddle and a squeeze. “I told you not to take it up again.” He smiled ruefully at her, and she grinned. “But it was fun, though, wasn’t it?”

  He gave her a kiss. “Yes it was, Mrs. L. Worth every minute.” He wheezed a laugh, screwing up his eyes. “Especially when you thumped her with your fist! What a punch! You should be i
n the ring, Mrs. L!”

  Dehan was calling for backup, and I went to unlock Peter’s cuffs.

  EPILOGUE

  I placed the sizzling leg of spring lamb on the table, removed the lid from the roast potatoes, and poured her a glass of rather fine Rioja. Then I began to carve.

  “Okay, Stone, admit it, this one had you foxed.”

  I nodded. “It did. I knew who it wasn’t right from the start. I knew in my bones it was none of our three suspects, but what threw me was that there didn’t seem to be any other option.

  “Of course, with David and Peter, the red herrings were deliberate. But with Zak, it was just bad synchronicity. He came looking for me, not you, at just the time when Bob snatched you.”

  “So when did you start to think it was Bob?”

  I loaded up my own plate, poured my wine, and sat.

  “It’s hard to say, because while I was beginning to suspect Bob, I was also coming around more to the view that it could, after all, be Peter. I have to admit that Bob was clever. Very damn clever.” I raised my glass. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

  “Amen to that.”

  We sipped. “I guess when I realized that the photograph was not of Nancy Pierce, but of you, all the pieces started to fall into place and I began to get the feeling that the killer was outside the picture, creating a picture for us to look at. And then I remembered that impression I’d had the first day when we stepped into Bob’s place. And that made me remember Bob talking about Schrödinger’s cat. That pretty much clinched it. But I needed to be sure.”

  “That was clever, the Floradix liquid iron thing. That was smart.”

  “Hey, I’m a smart guy.”

  “Whatever. He confessed to six murders.”

  “And one attempted.” I ate in silence for a moment, then said, “That did surprise me, them working together, like the Wests, and Brady and Hindley. She was the one who gathered the information about Peter, and then about Hank and David. And he put it all together and made the plans. They traveled together to San Diego and L.A., at the same time as Peter and David. Who would suspect a married couple? But they were too good. The investigation died, and the sport lost its appeal.” I shook my head and sipped. “She is pleading not guilty. She says she was just helping her husband, like any good wife should. And in the end, it was she who stopped him killing.”

  “Talk about the fucking cuckoo’s nest.”

  We ate in silence for a bit. Then, I said, “Did I tell you Peter telephoned?” She glanced at me. “He wanted to apologize for having been unsupportive. He wanted to tell me he and his wife are seeing a marriage counselor, after they come back from a six-month cruise. He said this case has taught him a valuable lesson, that he should appreciate the good things he has in life.”

  “Wow.” She sighed and set down her knife and fork. She picked up her glass and said, “Maybe he’s right about that. You don’t know how valuable the good things in your life are until you are about to lose them.”

  We held each other’s eye for just a second. We touched glasses, and I said, “I’ll drink to that.”

  And we did.

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  EXCERPT OF BOOK THREE...

  ONE

  For reasons I couldn’t really put my finger on, it was somehow appropriate. Out the window, April was coaxing the first, tender green leaves from bare branches and withered twigs after a dark, cold winter. This seemed like a suitable counterpoint. I tossed the file onto the desk, narrowly missing my feet, and said, “This one looks interesting.”

  Dehan picked it up, leafed through it, and read the abstract on page one.

  “John Doe,” she smiled at me in a way that said she wasn’t really smiling at me, “good start.” She carried on, “Aged about thirty, found in a dumpster at the corner of Lafayette and Bryant, in the Bronx. No papers, no ID. Clothes suggest a vagrant. Cause of death, a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, possibly a .38. No slug recovered and no blood found in the vicinity.” She looked at me. “What makes this interesting?”

  I frowned at her and spoke with some severity. “The fact that a young man got murdered.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “No. That is why we should investigate it. That doesn’t make it interesting. So far it looks like a guy nobody cares about got whacked by another guy nobody cares about. You said it was interesting, why?”

  “Look at the photographs.”

  She leafed through till she came to the photographs, three six by eights. She spread them on the desk and spent a couple of minutes staring at them. They showed a man of about thirty, in old, filthy clothes, lying face down in a dumpster full of rubble and builder’s trash. She shook her head. “Help me out. I’m not seeing it.”

  I gave a small smirk as I handed her my magnifying glass. “Have a look at his hands.”

  She stared at the glass a moment and then at me before taking it, then she looked at John Doe’s hands. She sat back. “Okay, they appear to be manicured. You are observant, Sensei.”

  “And the hair. That is definitely a hundred dollar haircut.”

  She leaned forward again and studied the photographs. She nodded. “So,” she said and handed back the glass. “How do we figure this? He’s in the neighborhood of Lafayette, maybe looking for a whore, he gets mugged…”

  Even as she was saying it, she was seeing the flaws. I said, “Let’s suppose he had a thousand dollar suit that, by some fluke, happened to be the right size for our killer. So he kills him, takes his suit, his shoes and his watch, plus his wallet. Why then go to the trouble of dressing him as a homeless person and dumping him in a dumpster?”

  She looked back at the file.

  “Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution style.” She shrugged. “These days any kid who wants to be in a gang is likely to shoot you in the back of the head just so he can boast he killed you ‘execution style’.”

  “True enough.” I stood. “But if you look at the ME’s report…” She leafed through to the report and read while I spoke. “You’ll see that entry was at the base of the skull, and the exit wound was where the two clavicles meet above the sternum. Which means the shot was at about a ten to twenty degree angle. Like so.” I demonstrated. “John Doe was kneeling, the killer was standing behind him.”

  “Execution style.”

  I nodded. “You haven’t got a lot of dark back alleys around there. It’s all mainly big, broad streets and open spaces. Plus we know they searched the area and found no blood, no slug. There was no bleeding inside the dumpster.”

  Dehan was watching me and nodding. “So it’s clear he was killed somewhere else and then thrown in the dumpster.”

  “Right, so the killer gets him on his knees. Shoots him in the back of the head. He has either already made him strip, or he now strips off his clothes, and he dresses him as a vagrant. Then, presumably in the small hours of the morning, he takes him and dumps him. What benefit does the killer get from doing that?”

  Dehan arched her eyebrows and spread her hands. “The benefit he act
ually got was that the case went cold almost immediately, and if you hadn’t pissed off Captain Jennifer Cuevas it would probably have stayed cold.”

  “Hidden in plain sight,” I nodded, “a guy nobody cares about murdered by another guy nobody cares about. So there is probably a missing persons report that relates to this guy, but nobody ever made the connection with our victim, because they assumed he was a vagrant. Let’s find out who he is.”

  “Something else.” She tapped the photographs. “Why that particular dumpster? Is it because it was close? Did they own it and they were planning a more thorough disposal, but it went wrong? Maybe it was just random, but I think it’s worth looking into.”

  “Good, I agree.”

  The next couple of hours were drudgery fuelled by coffee. The dumpster belonged to a company called Hagan’s Dumpsters, which was a spawn from a parent company called Hagan Construction, which in turn belonged to Conor Hagan, a guy known to be the head of a clan in the Irish Mob. Hagan’s head office was on East 116th Street, one block from the Supreme Criminal Court. You’ve got to love the Irish and their sense of humor.

  I was about to tell Dehan when she stretched out in her chair and sighed. “A lot of people went missing in New York in 2005. But when you filter out the women, guys over thirty-five and under twenty-seven, and people with a criminal record, you wind up with two, and one of them was a car mechanic.”

  I could hear the printer churning out a photograph. She stood and walked away, coming back a few seconds later with a photograph and a sheet of printed paper. She dropped the photograph in front of me and sat. This was our guy. She read from the printed sheet.

  “Sean O’Conor, thirty years old at the time of his disappearance, an attorney specializing in human rights, junior partner at Stanley and Cohen, in Brooklyn. Also worked on a pro bono basis at the Drop In Center, on Sheridan Avenue, a free representation unit funded by charities, which he helped to set up. There was him, David Foster, and Arnav Singh. The office closed down shortly after Sean disappeared.