Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  “She is rather good,” said Mrs. Harmon Heath-Ellis. “This one doesn’t blink.” Well, certainly the girl must blink, but not until the rope twisted her face away from the window. The model was quite pretty in a low-rent way. Her hair had not been styled by any reputable salon. The short spikes standing out on the scalp were so passé. Longer strands of blond hair trailed from the model’s open mouth, and what sort of statement was that?

  The window had been arranged with small kitchen appliances and utensils to create an interesting contrast with high fashion. Though somewhat nearsighted, the socialite recognized the designer by the cut of the light blue suit—quite respectable. Ah, but the rest—such tedious violence, no blood, no real drama.

  An enormous woman in a muumuu—obviously an out-of-towner and an obvious Kmart shopper—was whimpering, saying, “Oh, God, she’s dead!” A man joined in this opinion. “Hey, somebody call a cop!”

  Mrs. Harmon Heath-Ellis smiled benignly in the spirit of giving first aid to the ignorant and unwashed, the tourists. But now a man pointed to the glass, his mouth working in astonished dumb show. The socialite stepped closer to the display window to see what she might have missed.

  Her superior smile was frozen, and she was deaf to the oncoming screams of police sirens. Beneath the hanged model was a jar of dead flies encircled by flaming red candles. The woman looked up, and now she could not look away. What she had mistaken for a mole, a beauty mark, was a black fly crawling across the model’s face and moving toward one wide blue eye.

  The socialite was trembling, interior screams outshouting the sirens. She jumped at the screech of brakes and spinning red lights. Police cars disgorged men in uniforms and men in suits. There was one woman among them, but this tall blonde was hardly a civil servant. She wore a linen blazer of all too marvelous cut and line, a thing to die for. And now this young paragon of fashion pulled an enormous revolver from a shoulder holster and beat on the plate glass with the butt end of the gun.

  Of course, the glass was holding up well. It was made to withstand such vandalism, and Mrs. Heath-Ellis was about to tell her as much, for she was privy to every detail of her favorite—

  “Hey, Mallory!” Near the far corner of the block-long store, a policeman called out, “This door’s open!”

  Either young Mallory did not hear this man, or she did not care, so enraged was she, quite mad actually, beating, hammering the glass, electric green eyes full of rage. With one last mighty swing of the gun, the glass wall shattered, and the young blonde was climbing past the shards, tearing her fabulous threads to get at the twisting figure on the end of the rope.

  The policewoman was slender, and yet she was able to lift the dead weight as if it were nothing. She cradled the other woman’s limp body like a babe in arms, then lifted it high until the rope slackened. She was fiercely concentrated on the model’s still white face. And every watcher knew she was willing the hanged woman to live.

  There was a hinged panel at the rear of the display window, but rather than simply open this door, the entire back wall was ripped from its moorings by a large man. Oh, and that face—brutality incarnate.

  “Good job, Janos,” said another man, a less imposing figure with a bad suit, who climbed up to the raised floor, then quickly untied the thick knot of the noose. The rope fell away, and Mallory laid her burden down. The largest policeman, the brutal one called Janos, leaned over the prone body to remove the gag of human hair. With surprising delicacy, he pinched the model’s nostrils closed and covered her mouth with his own. The young woman’s body shuddered back to life in convulsions. Her hands rolled into fists that punched the air, batting at some phantom from an interrupted nightmare, and her mouth opened wide in a shrill scream. The large policeman gently gathered her into his arms and rocked her slowly. His voice was incongruously soft as he said, “Hush now, Stella, it’s all over.”

  The small crowd of watchers went wild, screaming, cheering, whistling. The socialite was surprised by her own helpless laughter as she was engulfed in a hug from the heavyset woman in the muumuu. Her head fell upon this stranger’s generous breast, and she began to cry.

  19

  Mallory looked less like a crime victim after removing the blazer torn by broken glass. The garment was neatly folded over one arm to hide her bandaged wound. And now her holstered revolver was on public display in a window on Fifth Avenue. She stood in full view of a sidewalk audience and watched the watchers. One of them picked up a small piece of glass from the litter on the pavement, and he slipped it into his pocket. Perhaps he prized this one above the other souvenir shards because of the small red stain. He was stealing a drop of her blood.

  She turned to Ronald Deluthe. “Take another look. You’re sure he’s not out there?”

  The rookie detective shook his head. “I don’t see him.”

  She pointed to three uniformed officers standing off to one side. “What about them?”

  This startled him. “You think the scarecrow is a cop?”

  “When I say look at everyone, that means cops too.”

  “No, he’s not there.” And now, sensing that she had no further use for him, Deluthe climbed out of the display window, giving the forensic expert more room to work.

  Heller pulled down the rope that dangled from an exposed pipe in the chopped-away ceiling. “Crude job for such a tidy killer.”

  “And he’s taking more chances,” said Mallory. “Heller, you said this woman fought back?”

  “Better than that. Dr. Slope found blood and skin under her fingernails.”

  Good for you, Stella Small.

  “What about store security?”

  “They got everything,” said Heller. “Cameras, alarms, even guard dogs. But none of it was working, and the animals were locked in a utility closet.”

  Mallory lowered her sunglasses. “This store doesn’t have a night watchman?”

  “Yeah, they got one.” Riker climbed up on the raised floor of the display window. “The watchman’s a retired cop, sixty-four years old. Maybe he slept through the whole thing.”

  Mallory turned back to the crowd of ghouls on the sidewalk. “And maybe the old man’s dead.”

  “Well, that theory’s my personal favorite.” Riker knelt down beside Heller. “His basement office was wrecked. Broken glass everywhere, and there’s blood on the floor. I didn’t see any broken skin on Stella, so it might be the watchman’s blood.”

  Without a word or even a nod to Riker, Heller closed his tool kit and climbed down from the display window. For the past hour, these two men had not traded one insult, and she wondered about this sudden rift in an old routine.

  “Stella marked the perp with her fingernails,” said Mallory.

  “That’s my girl.” Riker stared at the bits of hair on the floor. “Not a very neat scalping this time, and you should see that basement office. The perp’s not so fussy about cleaning up his messes anymore.”

  Mallory nodded. The scarecrow was coming undone.

  A crime-scene tape cordoned off ten feet of space in front of the basement office. John Winetrob, the personnel director, was not permitted any closer to the broken glass wall. This aftermath of violence was beyond his comprehension. He froze when a policeman passed by carrying a bloody shard in a plastic bag.

  Detective Arthur Wang gestured toward a cardboard carton the height of a chair. “Sir? Why don’t you sit down?”

  Before you fall down.

  The man’s shakes were easy for Wang to account for, but not only because of the crime-scene blood. The police were also making him nervous. The unshaven personnel director wore a suit but no tie, and his socks were mismatched. Dressing would have been difficult at this early hour while a uniformed police officer, six feet tall and armed with a gun, had waited at his front door.

  For the past ten minutes, Mr. Winetrob had been talking nonstop, mostly inane chatter. Now he fell silent as the detective completed a cell-phone call.

  “No answer.” Arthur Wang
dropped the phone back into his pocket. “The watchman isn’t home, but I didn’t think he would be. And he hasn’t turned up in any local hospitals.”

  “Thank you for trying,” said Winetrob. “You don’t really believe he could be dead, do you?”

  Yes, that was exactly what Detective Wang believed. “We’re still looking for him, sir. We’ve got twenty men doing a sweep, floor by floor. If he’s here—if he’s hurt—”

  “What if he didn’t come to work last night? Now there’s a thought.” The personnel director glanced at the broken glass wall of the night watchman’s office, then looked away. “Maybe it’s not his blood in there. You know, an old man like that, he could be at home right now, lying in his own bed, maybe—Oh, God. He could be having a heart attack. Can you send somebody over to his apartment? We must cover all the bases.” He raked one hand through his sparse hair. “Yes—all the bases.”

  “Of course,” said Wang. “I’ll send a cop to check it out—real soon.” Or maybe never. This errand would hit the bottom of police priorities this morning. The more important business was a look at the store’s files. All the employees had been photographed, and this was the only helpful information Winetrob had given him so far—or so he believed.

  Gently, Detective Wang helped the civilian to his feet and led him to an elevator that would carry them up to the personnel office. Later, Arthur Wang would wish that he had prioritized in a different fashion and paid closer attention to Winetrob’s wacky ramblings, his hopes and fears.

  When Deluthe had finished Janos’s chore in the payroll department, he had been loaned out to Arthur Wang. Now he was posted at a secretary’s desk outside the office of the personnel director. He had made short work of the first fifty photographs in the stack of employee files, and the man from Kennedy Harper’s crime scene was not among them. More busywork. He glanced toward the open door. The senior detective was inside, drinking coffee and making notes on his conversation with Mr. Winetrob. Wang noticed him and called out, “Find anything?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.” Deluthe closed another folder.

  Arthur Wang walked to the door and tossed a file on the secretary’s desk. “That one goes in your stack. Put it back in alphabetical order, okay? When you’re done, report to Riker.”

  Deluthe opened the file of the night watchman and stared at the photograph. His eyes drifted down to the name, that vital clue to the man’s place in the file cabinet. The line below it was a familiar East Village address. And now, with utter disregard for the alphabet, the young detective jammed the folder into the center of the large stack and left his job unfinished.

  He had more important things to do.

  In the back office of Butler and Company, Mallory was on the phone, terrorizing a clerk at the Odeon, Nebraska, Police Department. “So what if your computer is down? What does that . . . Look, all I need is a photograph. . . . Yeah, right. . . . I told you that an hour ago. . . . So pull it out of the hardcopy . . . Then fax it! Now!”

  Fortunately, there had been no computer problems at the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles. Charles was looking at a monitor and their only likeness of the scarecrow. The image was not very good, but most license photographs were less than professional quality.

  After relocating in Nebraska, Susan Qualen’s cousins had changed their family name, and the boy they had harbored was called John Ryan. No doubt the cousins had called the boy by his initials, J.R. for Junior, the only name he was accustomed to.

  Mallory sat down at the workstation. “It’ll probably take them an hour to figure out how a file drawer works.”

  “Bad luck,” said Charles. “How do you suppose ordinary people like the Qualens became so adept at changing identities?”

  “Nothing to it. Idiots get away with it all the time.” She stared at her monitor screen. “The scarecrow must’ve picked up another alias when he came east. He’s not in any local databases. You know what that means?”

  “He’s been planning this killing spree for three years?”

  “No, I think he only planned one murder.”

  “The man who killed his mother?”

  Mallory nodded. “In Nebraska, Junior was a small-town cop in uniform. Probably never got near a major investigation. So he comes to the big city. Figures he can find his mother’s killer in a day—and without any help from us.”

  Charles agreed. And when the boy failed, his last resort was forcing NYPD to do the job for him.

  “The scarecrow hates police,” she said. “He’s very clear about that. So tell me, why would he become a cop?”

  “Perhaps he had control issues.” Charles suspected that this was why Mallory had joined NYPD, but he could not complete this twinning image of her and the scarecrow. “It’s an interesting choice, isn’t it? His emotional problems must have been very tightly contained while he was a police officer. The deterioration probably started after he moved to New York.”

  He looked up to see Lars Geldorf standing just inside the door. Some tenant must have buzzed him into the building. Charles was unprepared for the change in him. The old man had aged another decade in a day.

  Ignoring the unwelcome visitor, Mallory looked down at her keyboard. The retired detective walked a few steps into the room, then seemed at the point of falling down. Charles picked up a chair and rushed toward him, but the man waved him away and remained standing.

  Lars Geldorf’s eyes were fixed on Mallory. “I heard about that poor woman—Stella Small. You think the copycat hangings are my fault, don’t you? If I’d done my job right twenty years ago—” His shoulders sagged, and he braced himself with one hand pressed flat on the cork wall, then turned his defeated eyes to Charles. “I think I will take that chair.” He sat down and waited out Mallory’s silence. It was clear that the old man would not leave without a word from her.

  She continued her typing, occasionally looking his way, annoyed that he was still there. Her eyes trained on the keyboard, she said, “I can’t discuss details of an active case. You know that.”

  “Yes,” said Geldorf. “I know.”

  She could have killed the old man with only a few words, but she kept silent, and Charles saw this as the potential for kindness. Growing up in Special Crimes, she would have seen many of these old men coming and going, haunting police stations as confused ghosts, unable to come to terms with the end of things.

  Mallory was done with Geldorf now, and he could make no mistake about that. The conversation was over, and yet he continued his vigil. After a time, his presence began to wear on her. She pushed her chair back from the workstation and swiveled round to face him. “So you want me to tell you what you got wrong? Is that it?”

  Yes, that was what he had come for. He had to know.

  She strolled to the cork wall and what remained of the old murder case, then ripped down a sheet of paper. “This is your report on the hanging rope and the duct tape. It’s real short. ‘Common items. Untraceable.’ Wrong. The rope belonged to the building handyman. I got that information from the landlady’s granddaughter.”

  “The handyman was out of town when—”

  “On a family emergency. I know. That’s why he left his toolbox in the hall. The landlady promised to take care of it for him. But before she could drag it back to her apartment, the killer found it and stole the rope and the tape. If you’d talked to the handyman, you might’ve gotten a print from the toolbox.”

  Geldorf had no comeback for this, but he would not look away from her.

  She ripped two more sheets of paper from the wall. “And then there’s the locked door. Locked when the landlady called the police. Open when the first cop showed up on the scene.”

  “I caught that,” said Geldorf. The light was back in his eyes, and he rose to a stand as he defended himself. “That door was never locked. It was stuck. The landlady was old, pushing eighty. Tiny woman, no muscle. It was a hot night in August—and muggy. Wood swells in the damp and the heat. The door was stuck, not locked. And she
admitted that when I—”

  “Admitted what? That she was old? That you confused her? She never recanted her statement, and you didn’t make any notes on that conversation. And what about Natalie’s son? You never talked to him.”

  “What the hell for? What good would it do to torture a little boy? He’d just lost his mother. When you’ve been on the job a little longer—”

  “Natalie came to you for help, and you just strung her along, you and your buddies. After she died, you built your case around the easiest target, an innocent man.”

  “I was right about the ex-husband!”

  “No, you botched that too.” She paused a moment, waiting for him to challenge her, but he said nothing. “And twenty years later, here we are, cleaning up the mess.”

  Geldorf shrank down to his chair. His gaze lowered to the floor at her feet. She had won. He was finished.

  Mallory hunkered down beside his chair and looked up at his face. If she had been a cat, Charles might have seen this pose as a prelude to a lunge, but he hoped for something better from her. For a moment, he believed that she planned to soften her words with some comfort for a vulnerable old man.

  How foolish was that?

  “Listen to me.” She gripped Geldorf’s arm to shake him from his stupor of pity. He stared at her red nails, startled, as if she had just extended claws.

  Mallory’s half smile said, I’m done playing with you. “Here’s the best part, old man. This killer might be a cop.

  So go home and lock yourself in. If the police come knocking, don’t open that door. It might be one of your mistakes coming back on you. Scary, huh?”

  Arthur Wang finished telling the Forensic expert about his conversation with Winetrob. He had intended it as a humorous story to break the tension in the night watchman’s basement office.

  “Sorry Arty. Winetrob was right.” Heller pointed to the red smears on the cement floor. “That’s not the watchman’s blood. I called the hospital to check for broken skin on the victim. When they removed Stella’s shoes, they found cuts on her soles and glass fragments in the wounds. I got a partial footprint off one of the shards—real small, a woman’s print. This is her blood.”