(Un) Sound Mind

by Richard Amico

  “You mean she cut him off,” said the first officer.

  “Yeah, maybe that too,” said the second officer, and all three laughed.

  ***

  By noon, Lieutenant Peirce and Sergeant Holloway were on their way to revisit what now was believed to be the murder scene of Sylvia Radcliffe.

  Holloway drove through the gated entrance to the Silicon Springs Golf Course and pulled the car to the curb of the house. A large yellow X of official police crime-scene tape crisscrossed the front door and the garage side door.

  Lieutenant Peirce ran his hand along the yellow tape to see if it was loose. It did not appear to have been removed or replaced since its installation. He then inspected the repair made on the door lock that had been damaged in the burglary. Sam twisted the doorknob and gave the door a gentle pull to test its strength. Everything seemed in order, but he had this feeling—call it intuition, call it a hunch—that something wasn’t right. He turned and started walking toward the back of the house.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, aren’t we going in?” asked Holloway.

  Lieutenant Peirce placed his finger in front of his lips and whispered, “Watch the front. I’m going to check the back.”

  As Lieutenant Peirce walked to the back of the house, he noticed footprints from a man’s gym shoes in the soft earth of the flowerbeds near a first-floor window. There had been no information about footprints near the windows in the forensic report. Peirce tried to push up on the window; it was closed and locked. He continued around to the back of the house. Soon he found what he was looking for: a basement window had been pried open. He thought about squeezing into the basement through the window but decided against it. The element of surprise was probably gone because of their noisy arrival; getting stuck halfway through a basement window at the mercy of the burglar—or murderer—would be a dumb move. He would call for backup and watch the house until a patrol car arrived.

  There was a loud crash, and splinters of glass rained down on him from a dormer window set back along the roofline as a chair smashed its way through. Lieutenant Peirce covered his head with his arms to deflect some of the falling glass and sidestepped just in time to avoid being struck by the heavy chair. By the time he’d brushed off most of the glass shards and was able to look up, a man had emerged from the window and was running along the garage roof. When he reached the end of the building, he leaped from the roof over a stockade fence at the perimeter of the property and into the yard of the neighboring house. He was agile and quick, tucking and rolling as he hit the ground and immediately springing to his feet. Peirce called out to Holloway, who had heard the crash and was already running toward him.

  “Next door,” Peirce shouted, pointing in the direction that the man had run. Holloway turned without saying a word and ran back to the front of the house. Peirce climbed on top of a garbage can enclosure that afforded a view of the neighboring yard. From this vantage point, he could see a tall man in a blue shirt with a nylon stocking pulled over his head. The man leaped over hedges and other obstacles in the yard and then bounded over the far fence onto the next property. Peirce jumped from his perch and fell to his knees as he hit the ground hard. He struggled to his feet, his trousers covered with grass stains, and ran in the direction that Holloway had gone. When he traversed the corner of the house, he was steamrolled, knocked off his feet, the breath forced from his lungs, in a collision with the suspect. Peirce lay on the ground, dazed. As his eyes began to focus, he could see the man in the stocking mask standing over him. He turned and ran down the street. Peirce lay stunned for a moment, then collected himself and climbed to his feet. He drew his gun and yelled for the man to stop, but it was too late. Peirce couldn’t risk firing his weapon in a residential neighborhood, and within seconds the intruder had turned the corner and was gone.

  Peirce walked back toward the home. “Holloway, where the hell are you? You’re supposed to stop the criminal, not let him pass. Holloway?”

  Peirce ran to the front of the house and stopped. Holloway was lying on the ground. His head was bleeding just above his right eye. Peirce cradled his head in his arms. “What did the bastard hit you with?” he asked. “I’ll call for a bus.”

  “No, I’m OK, Lieutenant, no ambulance. Actually, I ran into that lamppost chasing the guy. Everybody at the precinct will have a field day with this one when I turn in the report.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to write it exactly that way,” Lieutenant Peirce said.

  ***

  “He’s coming any minute, Mort. You better get out of here,” said Emily Radcliffe. “He almost caught you the last time he was here.”

  “Don’t worry, Em; I can stay upstairs. He can’t go up there without a search warrant, and he has no reason to bring one.” Mortimer Banks stood at the kitchen table, wiping chicken gravy from his chin with a white paper napkin.

  “He’s here! Go before he sees you,” Emily said in a harsh whisper.

  “Go ahead, Mort, I’ll handle this,” Henrietta Radcliffe said, peeking at the dark-blue unmarked car through the pinstriped kitchen curtains. “It’s the same cop who was here the other day.”

  Mort dropped his napkin into the plate of chicken bones in front of him, took a long pull from his bottle of beer, belched, and walked across the checkerboard-pattern linoleum to the hall stairs.

  “Emily,” said Henrietta, “go upstairs and change out of that yellow blouse. We’re supposed to be in mourning, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You think he’s going to notice?” Emily asked.

  “Go!” said her mother, and Emily ran off, following Mort.

  After looking to see that her boyfriend and daughter were safely out of sight, Henrietta took Mort’s plate and beer bottle from the table. She dumped the chicken bones and the bottle in the small garbage pail next to the side door and placed the dish in the sink. Henrietta then went to the door, removed the chain lock, and opened the door before Lieutenant Peirce was halfway up the walk.

  “Nice to see you again, Officer,” she said, standing in the open doorway.

  “Nice to see you again too,” said Peirce. “And it’s Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. You said on the telephone that you wanted to talk to my daughter Emily. She’s upstairs. Have a seat, and she’ll be down in a minute.”

  “That’s OK. I’ll stand, if you don’t mind.” As he spoke, Lieutenant Peirce walked toward the kitchen doorway. “I didn’t interrupt your dinner, did I?”

  “No. Emily and I finished eating a while ago. You know, we still don’t have much of an appetite with Sylvia being, you know, gone.” She took a tissue from her housecoat pocket and made a show of dabbing at her eyes.

  “Again, I’m sorry for your loss,” Peirce said, surprised by her emotional display. On his last visit she only seemed interested in getting into Sylvia’s house.

  “Do you think I could get into my daughter’s house soon? I’m sure there’s a lot to be done, with the furniture and the property and all.”

  Now that’s the Henrietta Radcliffe I know, he thought. “It’s still an ongoing investigation, Mrs. Radcliffe. The house will be sealed off until further notice.”

  A noise at the top of the hall stairs attracted Lieutenant Peirce’s attention. Emily Radcliffe was bounding down the steps wearing a black skirt and a black top with a black ribbon in her hair.

  She must have been out of sackcloth and ashes, he surmised. As he watched her descend, he thought he caught a fleeting glimpse of a shadow at the top of the stairs, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “I just stopped by,” he said, “to pay my respects and to ask if either of you remembered anything that might help us catch Sylvia’s killer. Anyone she may have had trouble with, maybe had money problems?”

  “No, like I told you last time, we didn’t see Sylvia that often. We don’t know much about her life,” said Henrietta, placing her arm around her daughter.

  “Emily, do you have anything to add?” asked Peirce.

  �
�Sylvia didn’t want to have much to do with us,” she said. “She was rich, and she kept—ow!”

  “Now, Emily, let’s speak kindly of the dead,” said Henrietta, squeezing Emily’s shoulder somewhat harder than an affectionate caress.

  Lieutenant Peirce offered another business card and, after saying his farewells, walked down the peeling gray painted porch steps, past the weed-infested dirt plot that served as a front lawn, and returned to his car. He thought about the contrast between the elegant home and manicured property that had belonged to Sylvia in comparison to the impoverished haunt of her family. That could be the reason for the animosity, and maybe a motive for murder.

  Mort returned to the kitchen, walking to the window where Henrietta bent to look through the curtains at Lieutenant Peirce’s retreat. He patted her on the hip and said, “That’s the cop I knocked on his ass this afternoon.”

  “He didn’t see you, did he?” she asked, turning quickly.

  “No, I had a stocking on my head. I knocked him down and ran. He could never catch me, and he has no idea I have anything to do with you.”

  They both watched the unmarked police car drive off.

  Sam Peirce continued to drive a few blocks away, then turned, drove back, and positioned his car so that he was out of view of the windows of the house but could still see if anyone entered or left.

  He called into the station using his cell phone. Sam hated using the police radio and avoided it as much as possible.

  “Homicide, Sergeant Holloway.”

  “Holloway, what are you doing there? You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”

  “They checked me out, Lieutenant. It’s just a bump on the head; I’ve had worse. How are your knees doing?”

  “Now that the pleasantries are over,” Peirce said, “I could use some help. I’m a block from Henrietta Radcliffe’s house. She swears no one other than her daughter Emily lives with her, but I suspect that she’s not telling the truth. The last time I was there I heard voices in the living room before I entered, and this time I saw a shadow at the top of the stairs. In the kitchen there were only two place settings at the table, but there were gravy stains and some food scraps on the floor where a third person would sit. I think someone else is in the house now, and I need to know who it is.”

  “OK, Lieutenant,” said Holloway. “I’ll have two teams of detectives there in twenty minutes to stake out the house. Whoever is in there will have to come out sometime.”

  ***

  The sun was just beginning to set. Sam Peirce adjusted the visor above his windshield to block the glare from interfering with his view of the house. Where are those detectives? He reached around into the backseat of his car and retrieved the brown paper bag that Alicia Goodman had packed for him that morning. Inside he found a plastic bag filled with strips of assorted vegetables. There were carrots, peppers, celery, and very small round tomatoes. He smiled, tossed the bag back over the seat, and reached into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. He fished around in his pocket and found instead a note from Alicia that simply said, “Liar.” He would have some explaining to do later when he met her for dinner.

  Where are those guys? Sam picked up his cell phone from the passenger seat and was about to call Holloway for an update when he saw a tall man wearing a blue shirt, baggy pants, and gym shoes step out of the front door of Henrietta Radcliffe’s house. The man had broad shoulders and walked with a quickness in his step that denoted good physical conditioning. Peirce watched, slumped down in his seat, while the man opened the door of a yellow two-door coupe with flashy mag wheels and a black racing stripe down the center of its hood. It was parked just a short way from the Radcliffe house. Sam started his car and waited for the man to pull out before following at a discreet distance.

  “I need info on a yellow Ford coupe, license plate LP-752-Q.” Sam waited to hear the owner’s name as he followed along local streets. Within seconds the police dispatcher returned to the phone. The car was registered to Emily Radcliffe.

  “Well, that didn’t help,” he said out loud, “but you do have a nice ride, Emily.” Peirce knew that he had no legitimate reason to detain or even stop the man, but he needed to know who he was and how he might be involved in this case. Peirce felt that this certainly could be the man who had run into him while fleeing the crime scene at Silicon Springs this morning, but the man had worn a mask, and there was no evidence to prove this was the same person. Up ahead, the sporty yellow coupe almost, but not quite, made a full stop at a stop sign. “I’ve got you now,” Sam said. He pulled his portable police dome light from the floor, turned it on, and stretched his arm out the window to stick the magnetic light onto the roof of his car. Then Lieutenant Peirce increased his speed to catch up with the coupe. With his dome light flashing, Sam followed close behind the yellow car until the man saw the police beacon, pulled to the curb, and stopped.

  Sam Peirce quickly walked to the open window of the coupe. He held up his badge for the man to see and said, “License and registration, please.” The man looked at Peirce, first with a questioning expression on his face and then with a look of alarm as he recognized him.

  Without turning his head, his eyes still locked on Sam’s face, Mortimer Banks made a costly mistake. He slipped the gear shift lever of the coupe into first gear, pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and released the clutch. The little yellow coupe bolted forward, engine screaming and smoke and dust rising from its tires. Sam jumped back to ensure that his feet weren’t under the car and shielded his eyes from the gray cloud of burning rubber and debris.

  Mortimer Banks accelerated to high speed as he roared down the narrow street. Sam Peirce ran back to his car, and as he fitted his key into the ignition, he could hear the sound of the coupe’s engine growing faint in the distance. He had to hurry, or all was lost. Sam raced forward, determined not to let this man escape. He may no longer be in shape for a protracted chase on foot, but he could drive. When Sam attended the police academy, admittedly a long time ago, he was the best in his class in pursuit driving. He always felt that much of his driving skill had been developed during his reckless youth. As a teenager, he earned extra money modifying and drag racing cars on the boulevard in a town just like this one. He recalled many nights when he’d had to outrun the police to keep from losing his driver’s license. He always believed that the experience he’d gained in those not-so-legal pursuits helped prepare him for days just like today.

  Up ahead he could see his quarry slide into a right turn and sideswipe a car parked near the corner. There was the screech of metal scraping against metal and shards of glass from the side windows exploding into the air. Droplets of perspiration formed on Sam’s upper lip, but there was no time to wipe it. He knew his car wasn’t as fast as the yellow sports car and the only way he could possibly catch him was to outdrive him. Sam Peirce was focused and determined. He reached the corner and put his car into a controlled skid to negotiate the turn without further redecorating any of the parked vehicles. His tires squealed, and a wheel cover flew off his front wheel and flashed across the pavement like a buzz-saw blade. He accelerated out of the turn, sure that he had made up some time, when suddenly, half a block ahead, he saw a car blocking his path. The car was a blue sedan, and it was sitting diagonally across the road, obstructing both lanes. Its front right fender and wheel were badly crushed, and steam was rising from the hood. Sam had no choice but to slam on his brakes and skid to a stop within feet of the stalled car.

  “No, no,” he shouted. “Get that car out of my way!” The driver of the blue sedan appeared dazed, blood running from his forehead. He looked to be seriously hurt. Lieutenant Peirce knew no matter how much he wanted to catch this man, he would have to break off his pursuit and offer assistance. He pounded his steering wheel with his fists several times before accepting defeat. He called police dispatch on the car’s police radio and asked for an ambulance, his cell phone now lost somewhere under the front seat.

  He stepped from his
car to walk across the street to the injured man. As he did, he heard a commotion and saw a crowd gathering at the other end of the block. Not one hundred feet away, the yellow coupe, after ricocheting off the blue sedan, had mounted the curb and come to a very sudden stop against a telephone pole. The coupe had struck the pole with such a strong impact that it had driven the pole almost to the center of the car, crushing Mort Banks where he sat.

  17

  “Dr. Klein, it’s eight o’clock in the morning. I’ve never seen you here this early,” said Hyrum Green as he unlocked the door to his dental office. “Would you like to join me for coffee? I’m buying.”

  Ruth held up her large caramel cream double espresso macchiato light as she rushed by. “Some other time, Dr. Green, I have a busy day ahead.”

  Hyrum frowned and stood watching her walk down the hall, her open coat flowing like a cape behind her, rhythmically hinting at the movement of her hips with each step. He closed his eyes. The corridor resonated with the click of her heels on the hard tile floor. He stayed until she disappeared into her office and the early morning corridor was again silent.

  Ruth still had not fully recovered from her narrow escape in the pitch-black basement the other night, and although she had no real reason to suspect Dr. Green of any wrongdoing, she would feel uncomfortable being alone with him, even if she did have enough time.

  The telephone call she’d received from Franklin Jameson last night sounded desperate. There was talk of sleepless nights, hearing voices, doing something he was sorry for, and even a threat of suicide. After an hour-long conversation, during which Ruth listened and comforted him, he seemed stable enough to get through the night on his own. Ruth tried to discover if he had a family member or a close friend with whom he could share his concerns, but he denied having anyone in his life that he trusted with his innermost fears—no one other than her. Although Ruth was pleased that he had begun to trust her and that he seemed to have faith in their therapy sessions, she still wished he had someone who could provide support outside her office, a social support group, or even one friend to help him through a crisis. After Franklin reassured her several times that he would not do anything rash before morning, she offered to open her office early and see him at 9:00 a.m.