The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  "The finger?" he asked. "He'd'a had to bite it off in the presence of witnesses."

  "Maybe he didn't. He had dogs."

  "And what, he picked it up like it was a sausage?"

  "Was there bread around him, a bun maybe?" I was wondering how far I could yank him.

  Apparently not that far. Weisburg winced. "You're disgusting, Spence."

  "I'm just looking for logic."

  "In all the wrong places," he said and stood. After grabbing his own water, he too left me alone.

  For all my talk of logic, the conversation with Hawkins left me unnerved. Maybe there was something that we were missing, some tie, some reason that things had gotten so strange. Or maybe the ancients were right, and life revolves around the phases of the moon. I know my ex-wife's did. Why shouldn't a city be the same?

  That morning's Times had some scholar saying things like this happen before every millennium. Some twerp in the Daily News was saying that New York had entered its own alternate timeline, a timeline parallel to the one in which Berlin had found itself more than ten years before when the Wall suddenly came down. And the guy on the street corner outside my building was yelling that we were all victims of some secret government experiment in behavior control.

  Those ideas were as plausible as Weisburg's, certainly more plausible than Hawkins's, and I didn't buy any of them. We had just hit a statistical anomaly, that was all. The odds that no murders would take place couldn't be calculated accurately by looking at the entire city. Each murder was its own event, with its own probability. Or, if you wanted to look at it another way, each country had its own murder rate, and just because no one was dying by a human being's hands in New York, didn't mean it wasn't happening in L.A. or New Orleans or D.C. In fact, at that moment, I would have laid money on the idea that the national murder rate was the same as it had ever been. The murders just weren't happening here.

  I didn't want to think about it. The Silence made me nervous enough as it was. Thinking about its causes made it worse.

  I took a sip of that delicious cool water that Hawkins had tried to bribe us with, and then I realized what I had missed earlier. I picked up the phone and called the super for Glisando's building.

  "You said that Glisando paid her rent up to last month," I reminded the super, "but that she was never in the building. Where'd the money come from?"

  "I dunno where my tenants work," the super said.

  "No," I said, clarifying. "Where did she send the checks from?"

  "Upstate," the super said. "Her parents' farm."

  * * *

  Normally, I don't like to leave the city, but in that August's record heat wave, I was glad to leave the island of smog and tall buildings for the fresher and somewhat cooler air upstate.

  Glisando's parents had what might once have been a working farm, but what was now called a farm only out of tradition. The house had been restored by some Architectural Digest wannabe, and the barn had been remade into a guesthouse more beautifully apportioned than most of Manhattan's hotels. I pulled up in the clearly regraveled driveway, probably kept that way for "authenticity," and headed straight for the barn, which was where some folks in the nearby town had told me I'd find Glisando.

  They weren't lying. She came to the door barefoot, her hair gone and her face so skeletal and covered with melanoma that it was clear she was dying. Mom and Dad, apparently, had decided to take her in and give her what little comfort they could in her last year of life.

  "I'm sorry," I said, after I'd introduced myself. "If I'd known I wouldn't have bothered you with this."

  Glisando shrugged a bony shoulder as if to say that questions like mine no longer mattered. She motioned me into the coolness of the barn and its lovely central air, and led me into the living room. The chairs were leather, obviously part of the decor, but someone had put in a ratty fabric sofa, on which was an Amish quilt. Dolls decorated all the surfaces. The television was still playing directly in front of the sofa, and as we went into the room, Glisando grabbed the remote and shut the set off.

  "No one's ever talked to me about Joel," she said as she sat on the couch and wrapped the quilt around herself. "At least, not officially."

  "According to your super and your employer, you disappeared right after the killing."

  Glisando laughed. It had the empty quality of a once-hearty chuckle; she didn't seem to have the energy to go full strength. "I hadn't disappeared at all. My doctor's in the city, and I kept using the apartment off and on until last month. I just stopped going to work. I couldn't. Not after Joel died."

  "You were evicted, did you know that?" I asked. "Your landlord sold all your things."

  "Joel's things," Glisando said, and she didn't sound sad. "I hadn't the strength to move them."

  "Why didn't your parents help you move?"

  Her smile was small. "They didn't even know where I was until I showed up here in March. I didn't want them to see how I'd been living."

  "So Joel had AIDS."

  Glisando shook her head. "He was one of the lucky ones. He never got infected, no matter how many times he was exposed. He was a carrier only. A researcher was going to use him as a test subject and then—" Her lower lip trembled and she stopped, swallowing hard.

  "It must have been hard to lose his things."

  Glisando looked at the dolls, then back at me. "Do you ever feel watched, Detective?"

  "No," I said.

  "I do. These are Joel's. It's like they see right through me." She coughed, then pulled the blanket tighter.

  "What do they see?" I asked.

  "I was so angry at him."

  I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise.

  "He didn't get sick and I did, and when we found out, I thought it wasn't fair. Why did he get to live and I didn't?"

  I waited. I threaded my fingers together, wondering in this time of strangeness if something even stranger would happen: a confession.

  "And then we had that cold spell, remember? So cold that the air felt brittle."

  I did remember. It had been a memorable weather year.

  "He didn't come home. They said on the news there had been a rash of killings that night. Like a full moon. Everyone had gone berserk."

  I nodded. Most were easily solved. Husbands killing wives, wives killing husbands. A video-store clerk shooting a client who looked like he was pulling a gun from his jacket when actually he had been trying to return a tape.

  "My father—" Glisando shivered slightly when she mentioned her father— "he's into weather. He said that those kinds of killings usually happen only in hot weather. But now the papers say there's been no killing at all."

  A response felt appropriate here. I tried to keep it short. "We have had a reprieve."

  "So you can investigate old cases."

  "Yes."

  She closed her eyes, leaned back. "I don't remember that night. God's truth. I woke up unable to remember going to bed."

  I waited.

  She swallowed. "But positioning the dolls." She opened her eyes. "It was something he used to do for me after I got sick. Only they didn't make me better."

  There was fear in her eyes, fear I didn't dare assuage. She said nothing more. Finally, I said, as carefully as I could, "You know that makes you a suspect."

  "To everyone," she said. "Including myself."

  * * *

  In the end, I didn't take her in. I thought about it, but I needed to back up my suspicions with physical evidence, and I wasn't sure I was up to the task. Not in this case. Because once I'd seen Glisando, I realized that whatever I did wouldn't really matter. She would die a horrible death. I'd find another case to pursue, something easier, something that would convince the captain that the task force still had it, that we could still solve the old cases. It wasn't time to disband us yet.

  I thought about all that on the drive back to the city. The light over Manhattan was hazy and thick, and as I drove into it, I felt as if I were driving into soup. I we
nt to the precinct, thinking that I would type up my notes and then double-check forensics in the morning.

  When I got in, I discovered Weisburg at his desk, hands in his hair. Bob was packing up, heading home for the evening. Hawkins, apparently, hadn't returned. Evelyn was following a lead.

  I didn't say much to Bob or Weisburg. I started typing my notes, unable to shake the uncomfortable feeling in my stomach.

  Here's what I know: I know that anyone can kill, given the right circumstances. I know that we all have it in us; it's bred into the genetic code. We do it when we're threatened, when we need to survive, when we need food. There are sick people whose genes are malfunctioning, guys like Speck and Dahmer, who like to kill for the hell of it. And some folks, well, the civility gets trained out of them, and they become soldiers for hire, assassins, or worse. And then there's the folks who will kill accidentally at least the first time: They're beating their wife or their boyfriend, and the whole thing gets out of hand. The death wasn't planned. It was, literally, a crime of passion.

  Killers. They all have a look, and you learn to recognize it when you've been in the business as long as I have. Folks who've killed to survive never think of it again. Or, if they have a finely tuned conscience, they spend lots of money on therapy or booze, but at first glance, you can't tell them from you or me.

  Then there's the sick ones so clearly abnormal that you can feel it when you come into a room. I was never sure how they lured their victims. Maybe those folks had poor survival skills or were good at denial or simply didn't have the time to defend themselves. I always bet on the latter, that twisting feeling in the stomach when you realize you've made a mistake and there's no way out.

  And then, finally, there's the crime-of-passion folks. Most of them don't meet your eyes. Most of them, they carry this little thread of guilt in them, and if you look hard enough, you see it: in their posture, in their gestures, in the way they look away at the very last moment, the deep moment, when you can really see inside someone's soul.

  Glisando wasn't a Speck or a Dahmer, and she didn't look like a person who had killed to survive. In fact, it was hard to believe that, even a few months before, she'd had the strength to kill anyone. Oh, she said the right things; that comment about the dolls was close, but it was what she said later, about suspecting herself. No guilty person would ever give that much, dying or not. She had the guilt, but it was the guilt of a person who'd thought of killing another and then that other died. It wasn't the guilt of someone who'd actually committed the act. Glisando really and truly didn't remember, and it tore her up.

  It was bothering me, too. It just didn't fit, somehow.

  Nothing did. Nothing seemed to work the way I understood it at all anymore.

  * * *

  The next morning I arrived at the House late, deciding to treat myself to coffee at an expensive restaurant just so that I could cool down. As I walked upstairs, I heard raucous laughter accompanied by someone pounding on a desk.

  I came in to see Evelyn playing the desk like a tom-tom and laughing as she did so. The others were crowded around her.

  When she saw me, she stood up and grinned. "Pay up," she said.

  "You solved it?"

  She nodded. "Kid named Jack Davis was the shooter, and he came clean the moment I found him. He was hired by the husband to kill the wife. Which he did. The problem was, the family dog attacked in the middle of the shooting, so he had to shoot the dog too. Tore the kid up. Seems he likes dogs. But being the little psycho that he is, he blamed the husband for making him shoot the dog. And he knew better than to shoot the husband too, so he started leaving clues all over the city. First thing he said when I brought him in was, 'Shit, bitch, I was beginning to think I needed a friggin' neon sign.' "

  I laughed like I was supposed to, but it made me uncomfortable. "Contract killers usually don't advertise," I said.

  "The kid's a flake," she said. "But even he admitted his behavior was a bit strange, although he attributed it to something else. He said he never missed. He shoulda been able to shoot the wife and leave the damn dog alone."

  I turned to Hawkins. "I thought you were going to be first."

  "Arm matched," he snapped. "Hand was missing."

  "Does this mean the rest of us give our cases to Evelyn?" Bob asked.

  Weisburg shook his head. "We said a week."

  "You guys at least owe me a round," she said.

  "Seems like a round is small payoff for solving that one," Bob said.

  "We didn't agree to a round," Hawkins said. He stood. "I'm near closing too. I got one more lead to follow."

  He hurried out the door. Evelyn's grin widened. "Touchy, touchy."

  "He hates to lose," Weisburg said.

  "He should be used to it by now," I said.

  "Hell, I think that's the problem. He's always losing," Bob said. "At least on the things that count."

  "Excuse me." The voice came from the stairs. A middle-aged couple stood there. The wife had artificially blond hair that didn't match her sun-wrinkled face, and the husband had his arm around her protectively. "We're here to see Detective Gray."

  "That's me," I said. The group silenced behind me and went to their desks. "How can I help you?"

  The man looked at the woman. He cleared his throat. "I'm Nic Glisando, and this is my wife Anne."

  I didn't let the surprise I felt show on my face. "Let's go somewhere private," I said.

  I took them to one of the interview rooms and closed the door. They remained standing, as if the place were disgusting to them, and it probably was. Glisando's polo shirt had a designer label and his wife's hands were covered in jewelry worth more than I'd earn in the next fifteen years.

  "We're Melanie's parents," Mrs. Glisando said, as if I hadn't already put that together. "She told us you'd been to see her."

  "Yes," I said, not sure how this related to me. I hadn't taken Glisando into custody, and I wasn't planning to. But the parents were clearly frightened.

  "When I heard that, I told my husband Nic that he had to talk to you." She turned to him. "Nicky. Please."

  Glisando wiped his hands on his trousers, then glanced at the tape recorder in the center of the table. "That's not on, is it?"

  "No," I said. My heart was pounding. I didn't know what I had stumbled into.

  "What I have to tell you is in the strictest confidence. I could get fired for revealing this to anyone."

  This was good. I pointed to the chairs. The wife sat, and then her husband. I sat too. "I'm not really in the business of keeping confidences."

  "If I tell you something, and I give you documentation, will you promise me you won't say where it came from?"

  "Why would you do this?" I asked.

  "So that you don't charge my girl. She's dying as it is." Glisando said that as if he'd had practice, but his wife looked down. They traded strengths in this family.

  I sat still for a moment, thinking. Then what Glisando said registered with me. The parents thought that my charging Melanie with Dudich's murder was a foregone conclusion.

  I sighed. I had already made up my mind about Glisando. She wouldn't be killing anyone else, not in her condition, and what she had already done would soon be taken up between her and her maker. I didn't have to tell these folks that, of course, but I didn't have to leave them hang either.

  "Tell you what," I said. "If I think the information you have is compelling, I won't charge your daughter."

  "And you won't tell anyone where you got this?"

  "No."

  Glisando nodded and then handed me a computer disk.

  I took it and slapped it against my palm. "You want to tell me what's on it?"

  His eyes met mine. They were a pale blue, almost clear, and the whites around them were lined with red. "I used to work at Columbia. Meteorology. Then I got hired by—"

  "Nic," his wife said warningly. He nodded to her.

  "—I got hired by a private company that has a defense contract.
We've been working on this project for years, but we've been doing field work since January."

  I waited. I didn't see how this fit in.

  "Experimenting. In Manhattan." He stopped then, as if I should understand. I didn't.

  "How does this relate to Melanie?" I asked.

  "No one's been murdered in the city in three weeks."

  "Yes," I said.

  "It's the heat."

  "Beg pardon," I said, "usually heat causes people to go crazy, not to stop going crazy."