by Nic Saint
“Maybe you’re right,” said Emily. “I’m probably seeing things.”
“Of course you are. If I were you I’d tell Jan’s sister to leave this matter to the police. She can’t possibly expect you to put your life on hold just to poke around looking for a killer. Not to mention the danger you’re putting yourself in.”
Exactly what Mom had warned her about. Looking for a killer could be dangerous.
“Just imagine that by an amazing stroke of luck you find out who the killer is,” said Judyta as she stopped to inspect an oyster. She turned to Emily. “Do you really think the killer is going to allow you to point your finger in his or her direction? You’re playing with fire, my dear Emily. And unlike the police you’re not trained to handle the consequences.”
That evening, she and Ansel sat at the kitchen counter, munching down the fried calamari rings she’d bought and discussing the state of their investigation. It was fair to say they weren’t getting anywhere. At least not in their own minds.
“So what if we do find out who did it?” asked Emily, Judyta’s words of warning still ringing in her ear. “What then?”
“Then we go to this Detective Shakespeare of yours and tell him what we discovered,” said Ansel with a shrug as he popped a fry into his mouth. He frowned at the container of calamari. “Not bad, but I prefer your mother’s cooking. Those chocolate cookies yesterday were to die for.”
“What if he tells us to take a hike? I mean, it’s not as if he’s going to believe me just because I tell him something.”
“That’s why we need to present him with a little something called evidence.”
“What evidence? Where do we find this evidence?”
“First things first. Let’s find out, through a process of careful deliberation, who murdered Jan Skrzypczak, and then we’ll worry about finding the evidence we need.”
Emily slumped a bit at the table. This was a lot harder than she’d thought. Why, oh, why had she ever accepted Taryn’s assignment so lightheartedly? This wasn’t a game. Judyta was right. This was dangerous stuff. No killer would simply allow him or herself to be caught.
“Don’t you think it’s odd that this Judyta person practically threatened you?” asked Ansel. “I mean—what she said boils down to: don’t you dare come after me or I’ll cut you.”
“No, it doesn’t. She was just speaking in general terms.”
“She’s on our list of suspects, though, isn’t she?”
Emily had to admit she was. The list was growing longer by the day, in fact, with no way of knowing who vied for top billing.
“Do you think Lynn Moray’s mother is involved?”
“She definitely had motive.”
“Ah!” said Ansel, waving a fry before dipping it into a glob of ketchup. “But did she also have opportunity? That’s the question.”
Emily thought about this. “I guess we should probably ask the school’s janitor who had access to the building that night. Apart from the people in the class, I mean.”
“You think Mrs. Moray could have been hiding somewhere, crossbow in hand, and fired her shot so fast that no one saw her?”
Emily shook her head. “No way. If she’d been in that class we would have seen her.”
“Unless she was hiding.”
“The police would have found her.”
“Not if she was quicker than the eye can see.”
“Oh, please, Ansel. She works at a fish market. She’s not Wonder Woman.”
“Right,” said Ansel, his excitement diminished.
“You know? I would like to take another look at that dummy. Maybe take a few pictures and give them to Detective Shakespeare. See what he thinks.”
“You still believe Jan’s killer used that dummy for fire practice, do you?”
“It’s a possibility, isn’t it? And it would give us some indication how the killer pulled this off.”
She jerked up when Ansel slammed the table with his fist, causing the empty food containers to jump up and off the table. “Let’s do this, Em. You and me.”
“Let’s do what?”
“Go down to the school tonight and snoop around. Not only do I want to see that famous dummy, but I also want to have a look at the classroom where it all happened.”
She’d forgotten that Ansel had never actually seen the ‘crime scene.’ “You won’t be able to see much. The police have locked the door and declared the room off limits.”
“I still want to get a feel for the place.” He thrust out his chest and sniffed the air like a war horse awaiting the sound of the bugle. “The ace detective needs to use all his senses if he’s to make sense of this heinous act of villainy.”
“Okay, Sherlock. You’re in luck. It’s a weeknight, so the school is open.”
Ansel rubbed his hands. “You know? I’m starting to think the janitor may have done it. Who else had access to that classroom the way he did? Or time to do the deed. And from what you told me he’s some kind of creepy loner.”
“But why, Ansel? Why would he kill Jan? He didn’t even know him.”
Ansel tapped his nose. “Oh, there will be a reason. I just know it. Let me have a crack at the creepy crawler. I’ll sniff out his dark secrets soon enough.”
Emily slid off her high chair and started clearing the table. “He’s just an old man. Nothing creepy about him.” Then, remembering the way the janitor had stared holes into her back the night before, she amended her statement. “Besides, not all creeps are killers.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Ansel, tapping his nose again. “A good detective knows, Em. He simply knows.”
Chapter 25
That evening, Ansel and Emily went for a stroll, which just so happened to bring them in the vicinity of the Community Arts School, where they just so happened to find the front door unlocked, and so Ansel held it open while Emily slipped inside.
“I’m starting to feel right at home here,” she said as she dropped her voice. “This is the third night in a row that I’m in here.”
“The place gives me the creeps,” said Ansel with a shiver.
It was pretty dark in the entrance hall, the school always finding ways to save money on electricity by dousing all the lights except the ones that were strictly necessary. The stone floor was rutted from the thousands of feet that had passed through these halls over the years, and the lime-green paint on the walls was peeling. A glass display case to their immediate left held a collection of trophies students had won, and a door on the right announced that here housed the school secretary—‘disturb only in case of emergency!!!’
Voices faintly echoed through the hallway, and the sound of someone very unsubtly pounding their way through Czerny’s piano exercises while someone else seemed intent on sawing their way through a violin.
“So lead me to the crime scene, will you?” Ansel said. “I want to see… and feel.”
Emily led her roommate along a corridor that forked off the main thoroughfare and down the maze that constituted the school. Most of the rooms were limited to the daytime classes, only a handful equipped to cater to the adult classes, with some fulfilling a dual purpose, like the music rooms and the room that was Judyta Kenworthy’s domain.
When they reached their destination, and Emily tried the handle, she discovered that nothing had changed since the night before: the door was still locked, and a sign was still tacked to the door explaining that on the authority of the NYPD, access to the classroom was momentarily restricted to police personnel only.
Ansel fired up the flashlight app on his phone and shone it through the door’s glass panes. “Not much to see. Just a collection of junk.” He squinted. “Is that the stage where Jan was killed?”
“Yes, it is,” she said, peering into the room. “They left everything exactly the way it was.”
“So that’s the table he was lying on, huh?”
“Mh-mh.” She noticed now for the first time that there was a second table, parked against the
far wall, which looked exactly like the one mounted on top of the small stage.
“And?” she asked finally. “What do you ‘feel,’ detective Petrov?”
“Not much, to be honest,” said Ansel. “This door is hampering me. Can’t we ask the janitor to let us in and sniff around?”
“I doubt it,” she said.
He withdrew his face from the glass pane and flicked off his phone. “Let’s move to the next item on the agenda. The horribly disfigured dummy.”
And so they did. Emily quickly found the staircase and the classroom located right next to it where she’d come upon Judyta last night. She tried the door and found it unlocked, which would definitely have infuriated the janitor. She immediately dropped her eyes to the spot where she’d last seen the dummy and found… that it was no longer there!
“It was right here!” she said, flicking on the lights.
“Nice room,” said Ansel appreciatively. Several sculptured pieces stood drying on plastic-covered tables in the center, with a large picture of Madonna dressed in her Jean-Paul Gaultier-designed pointy bra placed on an easel in front of the class. The would-be sculptors had, with variable degrees of success, tried to immortalize the famous singer’s features onto big chunks of clay.
“These look terrible,” commented Ansel. “If I were Madonna I’d sue.”
“Maybe they moved it,” murmured Emily, searching around. But wherever she looked, the dummy proved impossible to find. “Do you think the killer took it?” she finally asked.
Ansel, who seemed more interested in the various attempts at art on display, looked up. “Mh?”
“The dummy, dummy. Do you think the killer took it to hide his or her trail?”
“Or maybe the teacher of this particular art class removed it because it had served its purpose,” Ansel suggested. “It was just an old dummy, right?”
“With its eyes gouged out.”
“As a prank, according to your own art teacher.”
Ansel was right. There was no way of knowing whether the dummy was connected to Jan’s murder.
“You could always come back here in the daytime—talk to the teacher in charge of this class,” Ansel suggested. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple explanation, though.”
Emily nodded. Like Judyta had warned, she was starting to see things. An affliction that was not uncommon amongst amateur sleuths, or so Clara had told her when she’d mentioned the dummy conundrum to her.
“Let’s get out of here,” she finally said. “I don’t want the janitor to catch us snooping around.”
“What’s down there?” asked Ansel, pointing to the staircase located next to the classroom.
“Pottery class.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Ansel, who was really getting into the swing of things.
“Let’s not,” she said, wanting to get out of there.
But Ansel was descending the stairs, having fired up his flashlight app again.
“Ansel!” she hissed, but judging from the dancing light he was already at the bottom step. Reluctantly, she hurried after him, her feet slapping gently on the worn-out steps.
“I’ll bet they’ve got one of those creepy boiler rooms,” said Ansel.
“And I’ll bet we’re not supposed to be down here,” she returned.
Ansel shone his light around, and it bounced from room to room. There were more classrooms down here than she’d thought, and they all had name tags attached to the doors. Pottery class, trombone class, printmaking, weaving and textile, ceramics… On and on it went. Finally they’d reached the end of the corridor, and Ansel halted in front of the last door on the left. The sign read, ‘Janitor’ and Ansel’s eyes gleamed as they met Emily’s.
“No,” she said. “No way.”
“Just a peek,” he said.
“If he finds us—”
“He won’t, because you’ll be here keeping an eye out.”
Before she could stop him, he’d pressed down on the handle and had moved inside Adelric Lidd’s sanctum.
She heard him rummaging around in there and chewed her lip nervously. She liked being Judyta’s assistant. It kept her in touch with her chosen vocation. But if Adelric caught them sneaking around down here, he would tell the school principal, and she’d be out.
Suddenly the rummaging sounds halted, and a soft whistle came from inside the room.
“What?” she whispered.
“Holy cow,” Ansel muttered.
“What is it?”
“Talk about a dark horse.”
She couldn’t curb her curiosity and stepped inside. The space was cluttered with bits and bobs related to a caretaker’s responsibilities: a broken window had been placed on a workbench, and a rack held several items of cleaning tools and supplies. Plastic buckets and brooms occupied one corner, a cleaning trolley the other. Ansel was leaning over a small desk, flipping through a stack of pictures.
“What have you got?” asked Emily.
He handed her the pictures. When she saw the first one she almost dropped them.
“Holy cow,” she said.
“That’s what I said.”
The pictures were all of men and women lying on a low table, posing in the nude for the very art class Emily was assisting. They were shot from an angle near the floor, as far as Emily could see, and presumably taken with a hidden camera.
Chapter 26
“So you see. He must have done it!” Emily exclaimed. She and Ansel were seated in front of Detective Shakespeare’s desk, the pictures they’d taken from the janitor’s office spread out between them with the detective checking them with a distinct look of distaste on his face.
“And you found these—where exactly?” he asked.
“They were tucked in the bottom drawer of Adelric Lidd’s desk, Detective,” said Ansel eagerly. “The drawer on the left. They were inside a metal box of Danish Delights.”
“Danish Delights,” grunted the detective as he picked out one picture from the heap. He gave Ansel a withering look. “And may I ask what you were doing in there, son?”
“Um… looking for clues?” said Ansel tentatively.
“Clues, eh. Doing some private snooping?”
“Well…”
“Let me tell you that the NYPD takes a dim view of civilians sticking their noses where they don’t belong,” grunted the police officer. He fingered his mustache as he kept up the glower. “Who told you to look into Mr. Skrzypczak’s murder? Or did you decide to do some digging on your own?”
Emily cleared her throat uneasily. “Well, actually Miss Skrzypczak asked me—”
“Oh, so you’ve been hired by the family, have you?”
“Not hired so much as asked to look into the thing from the perspective of a friend and colleague of the late Jan Skrzypczak.”
The detective narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you have a license, Miss Stone?”
She swallowed down a lump. “A… license?”
The detective raised his eyes heavenward. “All private investigators in the state of New York need a license from the Department of State Division of Licensing Services. So let me guess. You don’t have a license, and you don’t have the first clue what the hell you’re doing. How old are you, Miss Stone—and you, Mr. Petrov?”
“Twenty-five,” they both said simultaneously.
“At least you’re the right age,” he said with a sigh. “But I’m guessing you don’t have the three years experience as a licensed private investigator or the twenty years experience as a police officer to make you eligible. And neither did you take the written exam offered by the state or submit the three years worth of earnings along with your application?”
“We’re not private investigators, Detective Shakespeare,” said Emily when she managed to get a word in edgewise. “We’re simply concerned citizens doing our civic duty.”
“Oh, is that what you call this,” he said, indicating the pile of pictures on his desk. He mused for a while, while he homed i
n on the picture of Jan Skrzypczak posing in the buff.
“He must be the killer, Detective Shakespeare,” said Ansel, picking up Emily’s initial theme. “He must have hidden a camera somewhere in the wall below the window and then replaced it with a remote-controlled crossbow on the night of the murder.”
“There’s a big flaw in your reasoning, Mr. Petrov,” said the detective glumly, as if Ansel had personally insulted him. “The bolt we removed from Mr. Skrzypczak’s body was at an angle that indicates it must have been fired through the window. These pictures were all taken from a much lower angle. As you say, below that same window.”
“But… the window wasn’t broken,” said Emily. “That bolt can’t have been fired through it.”
The detective looked up. “As you say, it was an impossible shot. Nevertheless we still inspected the buildings located at the back of the school building.”
“And?” said Emily, happy the detective was finally opening up about the investigation.
Shakespeare shook his head. “Nothing. Which was to be expected, as the window was intact, so no object could feasibly have been fired through it at that particular angle.” He tapped the pictures on his desk. “I will, however, have a word with this janitor of yours.” He then gave them a stern look. “Please be advised that what you’re doing is not only illegal but also extremely dangerous. This is not a game, people. A man was killed in a most brutal and cunning fashion. And if the killer even suspects you’re sniffing around his or her heels, they might be tempted to add another murder to their repertoire.”
“We—I also found a dummy,” said Emily now, feeling a bit silly about the whole dummy thing but adamant to put it all out there.
“A dummy,” said the detective wearily. “Please tell me all, Miss Stone. Don’t hold back on my account.”
She explained to the policeman about the dummy’s eyes, which had clearly been gouged out. And how the dummy had gone missing from where she found it previously.
“So you’re telling me the killer did a few practice runs on a dummy before he graduated to the real thing.”