Backlash

by Paula Gosling

  ‘Yes, well – that’s another thing. People who fall in love because they’ve endured some horrible experience together don’t always last together. In the clear light of day . . .’

  ‘It’s a clear day, today,’ he pointed out as he sat up. ‘Last night, together, we endured a ghastly pair of speeches and some quite execrable cuisine. Do you still love me?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ She felt herself flushing. ‘You’re only behaving like this because the conference is so boring.’

  He sighed. ‘God, it is, isn’t it?’ He glanced at the programme that had been folded in his pocket. ‘This evening we can choose between “Shakespeare the Feudalist – the Socio-Economic Structure of Elizabethan Drama”, or “Shakespeare’s Virgins – A Marxist Feminist Critique”.’ He peered over it. ‘Did you know there is a town not very far from here called Broadway, and in that town there is a hotel with a dining room that will take you back to England as we like to think it used to be but probably never was. How about it?’

  Kate shrugged and looked away toward the river. ‘I don’t think so, Richard. Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Denying your own pleasures – that’s a good sign. You feel guilty, and you wouldn’t feel guilty if you weren’t tempted, would you?’

  ‘A very Jesuitical argument. And I don’t feel in the least guilty.’

  He went into reverse mode, shrugging his shoulders negligently. ‘Please yourself, young Kate. Personally, I have no scruples where a rare baron of beef is concerned. If you don’t come, I shall go alone and thoroughly enjoy the crisp roast potatoes, the exquisite Yorkshire pudding dripping with onion gravy, tiny buttered carrots, tender young asparagus, and afterward a cream-laden brandy trifle that—’

  ‘Oh, all right, all right,’ Kate laughed. The food at the hotel was truly awful, and she was starving.

  ‘You can always tell a real woman by her appetite,’ Richard gloated. ‘We’ll give our regards to Broadway. And then—’

  ‘And then we will come straight back here and attend an evening lecture,’ Kate said, firmly.

  He stood up, caught her hands and drew her up and to him. He looked down into her face. ‘Maybe we will – maybe we won’t,’ he said. ‘You haven’t decided yet.’

  EIGHT

  ‘A cap?’ Tos asked in dismay. ‘You talk to this guy for two hours and all you get is a cap?’ They were sitting in Stryker’s office, waiting for him to return from the john.

  ‘That’s all there was to get, Tos,’ Pinsky said. ‘We’re lucky Richmond remembered that. He’s a shattered man, he doesn’t want to remember. Your partner gets blown away – there’s more to it than just another goddamn murder, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Tos agreed, morosely. ‘But a cap.’ He separated the toes of his shoes, which were resting on his desk, and peered at Pinsky through the gap. ‘What kind of cap?’

  ‘A cap cap.’

  ‘Baseball cap? Gold cap? Jockey’s cap? What?’

  ‘Flat, with a short peak – like those tweed things Englishmen wear,’ Neilson said. ‘Gentleman’s country cap.’

  ‘This is no gentleman,’ Tos said.

  ‘So it was a disguise,’ Neilson said. ‘Normally he wears a flowered straw with a veil, and this time he thought he’d fool us. What a clever guy.’

  Tos didn’t even bother to tell him to shut up. He just sighed, and gazed up at the ceiling, his hands folded across his belt. ‘Well, while you were talking to Richmond, we were over at Santosa’s precinct trying to get a line on him. We didn’t get that much, ourselves,’ he conceded. ‘We interviewed some of the people who worked with Santosa. Just another rookie, they said. A little timid, maybe. That’s why they put him out in the boonies – he got reprimanded for failing to pursue a suspect on a bust. He froze, apparently, just stood there and let the guy get away over a wall. So his captain figured a few months being bored but safe might give him some guts, you know?’

  ‘Works, sometimes,’ Neilson conceded. ‘Walk around feeling big and being nice to old ladies and kids, lets you settle in.’

  ‘And he gets shot,’ Pinsky said, bitterly. ‘Great move.’

  ‘Well, hell – how were they to know? That’s a fancy neighbourhood out there,’ Tos said. ‘Nobody on the street at the time, everybody inside minding their own business, just sitting around being rich, so there were no eye witnesses, nothing. They heard the shot, came out, there he was, bleeding all over their nice, clean sidewalk.’

  ‘Nice neighbourhood – where a uniform sticks out like a sore thumb,’ Pinsky pointed out. ‘He was the first one who got it, remember. Maybe that was it – he was high profile.’

  ‘You think order has something to do with it?’ Tos asked.

  Pinsky shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been trying to think of anything I can. I even got to thinking about initials, you know? Like the ABC murders. Santosa, Trask, Randolph, Yentall – S, T, R, Y – I was waiting for the next one to be K and then maybe finding out it was Jack writing his name in blood or something, right?’

  ‘I never heard of the ABC murders,’ Neilson said, in some confusion. ‘Was that an old-time case, or what?’

  ‘Agatha Christie,’ Pinsky said, dismissively. ‘So then I thought time of service, right? First, we got a rookie, then a woman with two years’ experience, then a black with three, then a detective with sixteen. It’s a progression of a kind.’

  ‘You’re forgetting Hawthorne,’ Stryker said, coming in and dropping into the chair behind his desk. ‘Hawthorne was not in uniform, not near a station house.’

  ‘That makes it even worse,’ Neilson said to Pinsky, grabbing a pencil and paper and making notes. ‘Now you got an H to put in there. SHTRY? STRYH? HSTRY? How about HISTORY? Maybe there’s an I missing, somewhere, maybe some dead Ichabod or Inchworm that you and Agatha overlooked . . .’

  ‘Forget it,’ Pinsky said, going a little pink.

  ‘Who’s Agatha?’ Stryker asked. ‘Do I want to know about this line of reasoning?’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Pinsky said. ‘Really.’

  Stryker looked at Tos, and Tos grinned and shook his head.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Stryker asked, all innocence.

  ‘Sure,’ Tos said, with a repressive look at Neilson, who was ready to outline the whole thing.

  ‘We don’t know much about the woman yet – Merrilee Trask,’ Pinsky went on, quickly. ‘And what about Yentall? Here’s a guy, good cop—’

  ‘Sloppy cop, they said. Sloppy reports, sloppy casework,’ Neilson put in, balling up the paper on which he had been jotting initials and lobbing it into Stryker’s wastebasket. ‘Neilson scores! The crowd goes wild!’

  Tos shrugged. ‘We all make mistakes, Neilson, even you.’

  ‘Never,’ Neilson said, with a wry grin. ‘Me, I’m perfect.’ He looked back into the outer office. ‘Where’s the little red sexpot? Did somebody steal her in French Street, or what?’

  ‘I’ve sent Agent Marchant back to Washington to pick up on everything Hawthorne was into, so we can find what brought him here in the first place. While she’s doing that, we can work on local connections.’ He explained about the Abiding Light Association.

  Neilson grinned. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ he chuckled. ‘Or wherever.’

  Stryker looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Neilson shrugged and grinned. ‘She is some woman – kind of takes a guy’s eye off the ball. If you know what I mean.’ He looked around at the others and gave a conspiratorial wink.

  ‘No, I damn well don’t, Neilson. Like to explain?’ Stryker flared.

  ‘Hey, hey, sorry I spoke,’ Neilson said. ‘Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.’

  ‘Harvey, someday you’re going to get into real trouble,’ Tos said, swinging his legs down from the desk and flexing his ankles.

  ‘What did I do?’ Neilson a
sked, all innocence.

  ‘You pushed,’ Tos said, and kicked the leg of his chair so Neilson lost his balance and had to grab the desk to stop himself going down.

  ‘Now, listen—’ he began, angrily.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Stryker said, quickly. ‘Let’s leave Hawthorne for the moment. We haven’t come up with anything new on our cops, have we? Computer find any common arrests, stake-outs, operations?’

  Pinsky shook his head, averting his gaze from his partner’s angry glare across the desk at Toscarelli. He wondered how long it was going to take Neilson to grow up. It had been obvious to him and to Tos that Stryker was attracted to Dana Marchant and it had made Jack irritable and edgy. The fact that you could see it a mile off didn’t mean you had to say anything about it. Stryker had been quite a tomcat before he met Kate, and old habits die hard, even when you find what you’ve been looking for. As far as that goes, his own eye had wandered a few times since he married Nell, so what? Your feet don’t necessarily follow where your glance goes, and anyway, it was none of Neilson’s business. Jealousy is what it was, what it came down to, in the end. Neilson had the hots for the red-head, and he knew that if Stryker chose to cut him off and move in on the girl, he could do it with no trouble, because the girl was interested, too. That, also, was visible a mile off. That’s what got Neilson. That’s what really got him. Neilson admired Stryker, and wanted to be like him, so there was always an element of competition in his actions. As if he wanted to prove something to Stryker, or to himself.

  Pinsky answered Stryker’s question in a neutral voice. ‘So far, we’ve come up with nothing that they had in common. Absolutely zip.’

  ‘Damn,’ Stryker said. ‘Okay – let’s look again. They were all killed while on duty, except Yentall who had just come off. They were all honest cops, and they all had clean records.’

  ‘Santosa had a reprimand,’ Neilson reminded him, rather sulkily.

  ‘Right – but aside from that, clean records, yes?’

  They all nodded.

  Stryker stood up and began to walk around. ‘Okay, okay – what else? Any other angle we got on them?’

  ‘Pinsky thought term of service,’ Tos said, before Neilson could get his mouth around ABC. ‘There’s a progression there – so it might be history, common history. Something during training?’

  ‘Told you it might be history,’ Neilson hissed in Pinsky’s ear. Pinsky brushed him away as if he were a persistent mosquito.

  Stryker nodded. ‘Maybe. Has anyone given their profiles to the shrink?’ He looked around. ‘Do that. And talk to the Administrator of Training, look at their marks, position in graduating class, all that crap.’ He stood in front of the window, looking down at the street, his hands shoved in his pockets. Suddenly, he pulled one out and made a mock swipe at the window, as if intending to put his fist through it, then turned back to them. ‘What about someone inside the Department?’ he asked, quietly. ‘What about another cop?’

  ‘Jesus, what an idea,’ Pinsky breathed.

  ‘But why?’ Tos asked.

  ‘Grudge?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Pinsky said. ‘Santosa had only been working a couple of months, to start with. What kind of a grudge could anyone have against some rookie, for pete’s sake?’

  ‘Maybe it was mistaken identity. Are there any other Santosas in the Department?’

  ‘Nine,’ Neilson said. ‘We checked them out. No relation, and no connection that we could discover.’

  ‘Well – the victims were on calls, some of them, weren’t they? How about somebody in Central Despatch? Sending Trask to an abandoned car, and Randolph and Richmond to some amateur arson job . . . ?’

  ‘Which the guy in Despatch had run out and set during his coffee break?’ Pinsky asked. ‘Come on, Jack, you’re scrabbling, here. They didn’t know each other, they never served together . . .’

  ‘But someone could have served with all of them in turn,’ Stryker said. ‘We could check that out.’

  ‘Hell, yes,’ Neilson said, waving his arms in the air. ‘Excuse me while I take a week off just to work out the question for the computer, much less get the answer. Have you any idea what kind of a check-up that would take?’

  ‘It should be done,’ Stryker said, stubbornly. ‘Tell somebody to do it, Harvey.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll tell someone to do it,’ Neilson conceded in the face of Stryker’s determination to find a lead, any lead, going anywhere.

  Stryker kept walking around the room, head down like a bull at a gate, angry and angrier. Suddenly he exploded, kicking the desk so hard it skidded a foot across the linoleum, leaving a gouge under each leg.

  ‘The only thing they have in common is the son of a bitch who offed them, dammit! Who is it?’

  There was silence.

  Nobody said anything, until Stryker had moved the desk back and then thrown himself into the chair behind it, glowering at the paperwork which had been dislodged into new and more confused heaps.

  ‘He wears a cap,’ Tos said.

  ‘You what?’ Stryker asked, wearily. His outburst had exhausted his anger, and he felt foolish. They explained. They fell all over themselves explaining, but the whole thing fell on dulled ears. ‘A cap?’ he asked, slowly, when they had finished. ‘You mean you talked to an eyewitness for two hours—’

  ‘I did that number,’ Tos interrupted.

  ‘And it wasn’t a uniform cap,’ Pinsky said.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Stryker said, in a tired voice. ‘Tomorrow we’ll start checking out all the shops in town that sell caps.’

  Nobody believed he meant it.

  The moment had passed. Stryker’s anger, the day wasted in fruitless interviews, the lack of inspiration, all conspired to bring them to a state of complete frustration. They discussed the cap angle for a while, but had to let it go. Once you’d said it, you’d said it. Cap.

  ‘Well, this is great,’ Stryker said, bitterly. ‘Looks like we’ll have to put guards on all the cops in the city, wait for the bastard to kill again, and jump him in the act.’

  Nobody liked that idea, either.

  ‘Hey – maybe Dana will come up with something,’ Neilson said, trying to cheer everyone up. ‘Well, it could happen, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Put on your parachute, Harvey,’ Tos said. ‘If she does, it will be the day that pigs can fly.’

  NINE

  Dana leaned back against the seat and looked at her own reflection in the tiny window beside her. Well, here we are again, you and I, she told herself. Racing with the moon to get back to Grantham, carrying your little treasure in your hand and hoping for a word of approval from the goddamn King of Detectives. My God, you are a fool. You’ll have to wait until morning, anyway, so why did you rush to catch the six o’clock shuttle? You tell me, she mouthed to herself. Except you already know, don’t you?

  There had been nothing in Hawthorne’s files that gave any indication of why he had suddenly decamped to Grantham. She had searched his office thoroughly, with no result. Then she had talked with his secretary – and again, no result.

  Gabe Hawthorne had always been a close-mouthed bastard, gathering information, putting a case together, waiting until he had the whole caboodle before theatrically springing it on an unsuspecting and dazzled audience.

  It was how he had gotten results. And it was how he had gotten all the credit for those results.

  Finally, she had gone through his desk. A hastily scribbled note, balled up and tossed into a drawer was all she came up with. On it, the following:

  Grantham

  French Street

  Officer Higley

  Immediately she had rung the Grantham Police Department, and asked them to locate Officer Higley for her. The answer had come back quickly enough – there was no Officer Higley employed by the Grantham Police Department. She then turned to th
eir own computer and learned the only Officer Higley working in any police department anywhere in the country was a fifty-nine-year-old deputy sheriff in New Mexico who was due for retirement in six months. When she had phoned him, he said he didn’t know anybody named Gabriel Hawthorne, but he had known a Maudi Hawthorne back in Virginia when he was a boy, but she’d be over a hundred years old now, was that any good?

  Dana said it wasn’t, but thanks anyway.

  She had, as a last resort, pulled Gabe’s confidential Personnel file – and there it had been.

  Gabe Hawthorne had been born in Grantham. He had grown up there, gone to school there. And had joined the police department there. He had, however, only served one month on the force, when his father’s company had transferred to Chicago, and he had taken the rest of the family with him. Gabe had only been nineteen, and still living at home. He’d taken an apartment, but two months later he’d resigned and followed his family to Chicago. His reason for leaving had been an argument with another officer named Higley, who also left the Department at that time. Reading between the lines, Dana sensed that they had been allowed to leave rather than be kicked out. Gabe had gone to college in Chicago and gotten a law degree, and from there he had progressed into the Justice Department.

  Now, after all those years, Gabe Hawthorne had gone back to Grantham. And had died there. Why? Why?

  ‘Coffee, miss?’

  Dana was startled out of her reverie. ‘What? Oh, sorry – no thanks, no coffee.’

  ‘Tea? A cold drink?’

  ‘Nothing, thank you.’

  The stewardess moved on, pushing her trolley up the narrow aisle. Dana moved on, too, with thoughts of Jack Stryker.

  She closed her eyes and tried to summon up his image. Compactly built, broad forehead and level blue eyes, a face startlingly young and alive under that prematurely white hair, long straight nose and a firm but sensitive mouth. He had always seemed angry with her, but she was certain he had a capacity for laughter as well as tenderness.

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright.