Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  “I’m done with you.” Susan Qualen started down the staircase.

  “Hold it.” Mallory blocked her way. “Where did you get the—”

  “My lawyer says I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No,” said Mallory. “That’s what people say when they haven’t talked to a lawyer. Your sister’s murder is still an open case, and you will talk to us.”

  Riker climbed a step closer to the woman. His voice was more reasonable and friendly. “We turned up some inconsistencies in Natalie’s murder. We think her son might be able to straighten it out. So where’s the kid now?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” said Susan Qualen.

  “I read a follow-up interview with the boy’s stepmother,” said Mallory. “She claims you took the boy after his father died.”

  And Riker added, “That would’ve been a year after Natalie’s murder.” His tone of voice said, Hey, just trying to be helpful.

  “But we had a problem with that.” The threat in Mallory’s voice was impossible to miss.

  “You see,” said Riker, dialing back the tension, “the little boy never went to school after his mother died. When summer vacation was over—”

  “So the family moved out of the school district.”

  “No, Miss Qualen,” said Mallory. “The stepmother still lives at the same address.” Mallory edged closer. “She told a cop named Geldorf that you had the boy. Why would she lie? And when that same cop called you, why didn’t you set him straight?”

  There was confusion in Qualen’s eyes. Civilians were amateurs at deception, unable to remember the details of lies told in the distant past, and they were all so easily rattled. Riker smiled at the woman, as if they were old friends discussing weather and books they had read. “It would help if you could tell us what happened to Natalie’s son.”

  “And where he is now.” Mallory made the short step from accusation to attack. “Talk to me! What did you do with him?”

  Susan Qualen lost her hard-case composure and made a mad sprint down the staircase, slamming into both detectives in her haste to get away. Mallory hit the sidewalk at a dead run, and Riker lunged to catch her arm, yelling, “Whoa! First, let’s interview the stepmother. Then we can nail Qualen for obstruction. We’ll toss her in the lockup cage for a while. It’ll be scary but legal.”

  Mallory watched the woman’s hands flailing as she ran down the sidewalk, escaping. Passersby must believe that they had drawn guns on her. Even now, the distance could be so easily closed, and when Mallory caught up to Susan Qualen, the woman would be vulnerable, breathless and frightened.

  “Trust me,” said Riker. “It’ll be more fun my way.”

  Not likely.

  William Heart cringed at the noise. The recluse was not good with human interaction and did what he could to avoid it. Worst was the knock at the door, the sound of a trap closing. He stood very still, hardly breathing, but his visitors would not go away, and now he heard the voice of the landlord saying, “I know he’s in there. Takes him all damn day to open the door. Bang harder.”

  However, the stranger was more polite, only lightly rapping, as he said, “Thank you,” to the dwindling footsteps of the landlord. And now the visitor spoke to the locked and bolted door. “Hello? Mr. Heart? Your gallery gave me your address.”

  The cultured voice was reassuring and carried the lure of a potential sale. William opened the door to see a fairy-tale bag of metaphors. This tall man had the body, the clothes and patrician air of a prince, but eyes like a frog and the beak of Captain Hook. The broad shoulders were threatening, magically enlarging in every passing second.

  When William stepped back a pace, his visitor took this for an invitation. The man walked past him and paused by the couch, a threadbare affair of lumpy cushions and barely contained stuffing. It was the only piece of furniture that might accommodate his large frame. The chairs were made of flimsy wooden sticks.

  “May I?”

  William nodded, and the frog prince sat down.

  “My name is Charles Butler.” The man’s grin was so foolish, William smiled against his will as Mr. Butler handed over a business card. “Your gallery dealer tells me you do crime-scene photography.”

  “No, that was a long time ago. I don’t do it anymore.”

  Butler was staring at a radio on the coffee table, and William wondered if he recognized it as a police scanner. He cleared his throat. “I mean—I don’t work for the police anymore. I do car wrecks, that kind of thing.”

  “Yes, I know. Your work is almost tabloid genre, wouldn’t you say? High contrast, hard light, black shadow. And some cruelty in every image.”

  The photographer vacillated between flight and a faint. Charles Butler was obviously an art collector and well heeled, but several of the degrees on his business card related to psychology. William distrusted head shrinkers.

  “I’d like to see your earlier work,” said Butler. “The crime-scene photos. I’m particularly interested in Natalie Homer. Perhaps the name’s not familiar. It was twenty years ago. The newspapers called it a suicide by hanging.”

  “I didn’t keep—” William shook his head and began again. “I couldn’t do the job. My camera was broken.” Even as these words trailed off, he realized that he was not believed. Charles Butler’s face expressed every thought and doubt. William could actually see himself being measured and evaluated in the other man’s eyes. He even saw a hint of pity there.

  “It’s not a picture most people would want in their heads.” This was a true thing. Only a specific type of ghoul sought that kind of image, and Butler did not seem to fit that category.

  “So you did take at least one shot.” The man was not posing a question but stating fact.

  William clenched his sweating hands, then looked down at the leather checkbook that had suddenly appeared on the coffee table beside an old-fashioned fountain pen. And now he relaxed again, for this was merely a money transaction, a simple purchase.

  “That’s one photograph I’d be very interested in.” Butler opened the checkbook. “Very interested.” He glanced up at William and broadened his smile, killing all trace of alarm and increasing the comfort level in the room—then delivered his bomb. “You knew Natalie, didn’t you?”

  William could not have spoken had he wanted to.

  Mr. Butler continued, “It’s a reasonable assumption. Your landlord tells me you’ve lived here all your life. I understand you inherited the lease from your mother. And this building is only a block from where Natalie died. Must’ve been difficult to photograph the body of someone you knew.”

  “I didn’t—know her.” William wrapped himself in his own arms to quell the panic. He could see that, once again, he was not believed. In that tone of voice reserved for the confessional, he said, “She only lived in this neighborhood for a little while. I never spoke to her.” Losing control of his nerves and his mouth, he continued in a chattering stammer, “But I used to see her on the street sometimes. She was so pretty. She didn’t belong here. Anybody could see that. God, she was beautiful.”

  He had never lusted after her as the other watchers did, for her smile had reminded him of the painted madonnas and statuettes that had adorned this apartment while his mother was alive. Pretty Natalie in her long summer dresses.

  William studied Charles Butler’s tell-all face, checking for signs that he had given away too much. “It wasn’t just me who watched her, you know. She turned heads everywhere she went. All those men, they just had to look.”

  “And after she died, you took her photograph,” said the visiting mind reader. “Nausea doesn’t come on in an instant. I’m guessing you had time to get off one shot before you vomited. You’re such a fine photographer. It would’ve been a natural reflex action—taking that picture.”

  So he knew about the vomiting too.

  “All right. I’ll give it to you.” William was actually relieved, though this certainly meant that Butler was a ghoul, the kind of customer w
ho paid the rent, but a twisted type he had never wanted to confront outside of an art gallery. So this was really all the freak wanted, a grisly crime-scene souvenir.

  Upon entering the bedroom, William locked and bolted the door behind him. When he emerged again, a print of the old photograph was in his hand.

  After the man had departed with his purchase, William noticed that the amount entered on the check was more generous than the quoted price. He looked around at the evidence of his poverty, and he was frightened anew, for he suspected Charles Butler of being a compassionate man and not a freak after all.

  William Heart returned to his bedroom. Again, he carefully locked the door and drew the bolt, though his landlord had no keys to this apartment. He lay down on the bed and stared at the opposite wall. Every night, before switching off the lamp, this was what he saw, a wall of a hundred pictures, all the same—the same face, the rope, the massing insects. This photograph was the best work he had ever done. The flies had been so thick and fast that the camera could only capture them as a black cloud surrounding the Madonna of the Maggots and Roaches.

  12

  Erik Homer’s second wife, now his widow, lived in a large apartment on East Ninety-first Street. “It’s rent control,” she said. “Two-eighty a month. Can you beat that? This used to be such a crummy area. But look at it now.”

  Detective Riker guessed that this woman’s view of her neighborhood was limited to what she could see from the nearby window. He nursed a cup of strong coffee and longed for a cigarette, a little smoke to kill the stench of a sickroom.

  Jane Homer was a mountain of sallow flesh, and he could roughly guess when she had become housebound, unable to fit her girth through a standard doorway. Her hair was a long tangle of mouse brown. Only the ends had the brassy highlights of a bleach blonde. Vanity had died years ago.

  On the bureau, there were dozens of photographs of her younger self posed with her late husband. Jane had once been as slender as the first Mrs. Homer. There were no portraits of her stepson.

  A visiting nurse bustled about in the next room, chattering at Mallory while cleaning up the debris of a meal.

  Mrs. Homer’s handicap worked in Riker’s favor. Like most shut-ins, she was eager to gossip, and now she was saying, “I saw the TV coverage the other night. Natalie’s hanging was never on TV.”

  Riker smiled. “Yeah, the murders are a lot alike, aren’t they?”

  The woman nodded absently, and this gave him hope. He waited until he heard the door close behind the departing health-care worker. “Did your husband ever talk about the murder?”

  “Oh, yes. Erik and Natalie’s sister—what was her name? Susan something. No matter. They talked on the telephone for hours. Erik made the funeral arrangements—paid for it, too. He didn’t have to do that, you know.”

  Riker thought otherwise. Taking possession of his ex-wife’s body fit the pathology of a control freak. Even in death, Natalie never escaped Erik Homer. “What about the little boy? How did you get along with your stepson? I mean—after his mother died.”

  There was a touch of surprise in her eyes, or maybe guilt. “Junior was no trouble.”

  “No trouble? I’ll bet.” Mallory had quietly entered the room. She held a silver picture frame in her hands as she glared at the woman on the bed, saying, accusing, “You palmed him off on a relative after your husband died.”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “That was in your last statement to the police. You said you gave the boy away.”

  “Well, Erik’s life insurance wasn’t exactly a fortune.” Jane Homer’s eyes were fixed on the picture frame in Mallory’s hand. It was something she prized or something she feared. “And I had all these medical problems that year. My thyroid gland and all. Junior loved his grandparents.” The woman stared at Riker, then Mallory, perhaps realizing that she had made some mistake. She filled their silence with a rush of words. “I couldn’t take care of him. You can see that, can’t you?”

  Mallory stepped closer to the bed. “You told a detective the boy went to Natalie’s sister in Brooklyn.”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Homer, trying to appease Mallory with a feeble smile. “I remember now. My father-in-law had Alzheimer’s. Well, his wife probably couldn’t cope with that and a little boy too. So, after a while, Junior went to live with Natalie’s sister. That’s what I meant.”

  Mallory reached out across the body of Jane Homer to hand the silver frame to Riker. He turned it over to see a picture with the familiar backdrop of the Bronx Zoo. There were light creases through the image of a man and a woman, as if someone had crumpled it into a ball before it was framed. Had Jane Homer rescued this picture from a wastebasket? Yes, that was exactly what had happened. This one flattered her more than the others. The girl in the photograph was not yet wearing a wedding band, and she had been happy that day. A third person had been cut from the photograph. All that remained of the unwanted figure were the fingers of a small child caught up in the much larger hand of his smiling father.

  “Was the boy having problems?” asked Riker.

  Mallory leaned down very close to the other woman’s face. “How did Junior adjust to his mother’s death?”

  “Natalie died in August,” said Riker. “And we know your husband didn’t send Junior to school in September.”

  “Tell me what you did with that little boy,” said Mallory.

  Jane Homer’s eyes widened with the realization that she was caught in the middle of a police crossfire. “His grandparents—”

  “No!” Riker scraped the legs of his chair across the floor, edging closer to the bed. “No, Jane, I don’t think so.”

  Mallory leaned close to the woman’s ear. “I know how Erik Homer treated his first wife. He never gave her any money—never let her out of the house. Is that—”

  “Erik did the shopping. I didn’t need to go out. I didn’t—”

  “Your first police interview was right after your marriage,” said Riker. “The cops thought you were afraid of your husband.”

  “When did the beatings start?” Mallory raised her voice. “On your honeymoon? Was that the first time he knocked you around?”

  “You have lots of photographs.” Riker nodded toward the cluster of frames on her bureau. “I see you and your husband, but not the little boy. You never lived with Junior, did you?” He caught the sudden fear in the woman’s eyes. “What did you do to Natalie’s son? Is he alive?”

  Jane Homer shook her head from side to side.

  “Is that a no?” Mallory asked. “The boy’s dead?”

  The woman trembled, and her bosom heaved with sobs. Speech was impossible. Her mouth formed the words, I don’t know.

  Mallory moved closer. “How could you not know?”

  Riker leaned toward her. “Did you think your husband went off on the kid, maybe killed his own son?”

  The woman’s head moved from side to side, splitting her halting words between the two detectives, anxious to please them both. “The night they found Natalie—Erik got back—very late. I asked him where the boy was. Erik—hit me—hard.” One hand drifted to her mouth. “He broke my tooth—then he—got rid of Junior’s things—toys, clothes. And the pictures—he tore them to pieces.”

  Jane Homer stared at the photograph that Riker held, the image of her husband and her smiling self in better days. In a small act of defiance, she grabbed the silver frame from Riker and held it to her breast, covering it with both hands, protecting the happy times. Huge tears rolled down her face, and they could do no more with her—or to her.

  Outside the SoHo police station, young actresses were ganging on the sidewalk, posing for the cameras of reporters and tourists. Uniformed officers grinned with their good luck—they had gone to cop heaven. They worked the crowd, tipping hats to brunettes and sending them on their way, then filling out forms for all the blondes, taking down names and telephone numbers, as women filed past them and through the front door to interviews with Special Crimes detectives.<
br />
  Mallory’s car pulled to the curb. She left the motor running after Riker opened the passenger door. He had one foot on the pavement. “You’re not coming in?”

  “No, I’m going over to Natalie’s apartment building.” Then she added, with no enthusiasm at all, “Come if you like.”

  “Naw, I did a drive-by. Too much renovation. The new owner probably rearranged half the walls.” He kept her awhile longer with one foot on the floor mat of her car, acting as if a sidewalk choked with pretty women were an everyday thing with him. “I’m sicking a couple of uniforms on Susan Qualen. You’re gonna miss all the fun when they drag her in.” After a few seconds of dead silence, Riker realized that she was not even tempted. He stepped out onto the sidewalk, closed the door and waved her off, then disappeared into a blond sea of actresses.

  Mallory drove across town and through the East Village, heading for the twenty-year-old crime scene and blaming Jack Coffey for another fatal mistake. He had pulled men off their independent lines of investigation to work on the actress interviews, as if they could find the next victim that way.

  Another woman was going to die.

  She turned the wheel on First Avenue and rolled along the side street toward Avenue A. Once, this area had provided cheap housing for the poorest of the poor. Now, none of the former residents could afford to live here.

  Mallory parked her car in front of the building where Natalie Homer had lived and died. Only the architectural bones would match Lars Geldorf’s old photograph. Peeling gray paint had been sandblasted to expose the red brick. The windows were modern, and the wrought-iron rails of Juliet balconies had been restored. According to Geldorf’s personal notes, the previous owner had died, and all the old tenants had departed before the renovation.

  Riker was right. This was a waste of precious time.

  And a woman was going to die.

  Yet she left her car and walked up the stairs to ring the bell for the landlord’s apartment. The front door was opened by a softly rounded woman with a warm smile for a stranger. The new owner was obviously not a native New Yorker, but a transplant from some smaller, less paranoid town.