Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  “Well, that explains the early animosity,” said Charles. “Why she never called him anything but Markowitz.”

  “Yeah, she blamed him for turning Sparrow against her. He spent years paying for that. So did I. That brat never forgets, never forgives.” Riker pushed his glass to the edge of the bar. “So now we’re headin’ for Brooklyn. I’m in the back seat, and the kid’s up front with Lou.” He recalled every detail of that drive, the smell of rain-washed air, the suburban lawns littered with bicycles and tricycles. The car radio was cranked up all the way, breaking the peace in a rock ’n’ roll celebration. Dogs barked to the high notes, and the lights of fireflies winked in sync with the beat of a golden oldie by Buddy Holly.

  And a feral child was manacled to the dashboard. Kathy was a hellmouth of obscenities, a small storm of energy fighting against her chains, though she must have known she could never break them.

  “Now it gets a little spooky.” And the music had changed to the Rolling Stones. “But it helps if you know that Lou’s wife could hear lost children crying on other planets.” The old green sedan pulled up to the curb in front of the house, where Helen Markowitz was framed in a square of yellow light—waiting. Suddenly, she was drawn away from the window and moving toward the front door with a sense of great urgency.

  The car and the music should have reassured her that nothing was wrong. Bad news was so seldom announced by loud rock ’n’ roll. And Lou’s wife could not have seen the baby thief in the dark of the car nor heard one small angry voice above a chorus of wailing rockers, steel guitars and drums. Yet Helen was clearly on a mission when she burst through the front door, flew down the porch steps and ran across the wet grass.

  The little girl was screaming death threats at the top of her tiny lungs while Lou Markowitz grinned broadly and foolishly. His life was complete. His wife was busy ripping the passenger door off its hinges, and Kathy was almost home.

  25

  The long summer fever was over. The heat was dying off in cool wet gusts of air and rain. The two men stepped out onto the sidewalk and stood beneath the awning.

  “Louis must have told Mallory about the murder charge,” said Charles. “When she joined the police department, he would’ve—”

  “Yeah.” Riker was on the lookout for a cab to carry him home. “He told her that much. Now she thinks it was Sparrow who pinned the murder on her. Lou couldn’t set her straight. She would’ve wondered why he didn’t make a case against the whore.”

  Charles kept silent for a moment and listened to the steady rain. “Mallory will never have any peace.”

  “Neither will you. . . . Me either.”

  Disregarding Riker’s plans to take a cab, Charles opened the door of his Mercedes and guided him into the passenger seat, then politely looked the other way while the man wrestled with a drunk’s problem of fastening a safety belt.

  Charles started the engine, then pulled into traffic. “Did Sparrow tell you she was defending Kathy when she got stabbed?”

  “No, we couldn’t ask her anything about that night. Guilty knowledge. If you know about a murder, then you’re part of the crime. But it wasn’t hard to work out. Frankie Delight was outmatched, a real flyweight. But good as Sparrow was in a street fight, she was never the aggressor. She would’ve kicked off her high heels and run when that knife came out. But she’s got the kid with her, and little legs can’t run as fast as a barefoot whore. So we figured Frankie stabbed her while she was shielding Kathy. I know he made the first cut, ’cause the whore was on her knees when she put her shiv in his leg.”

  Charles vividly recalled the photograph of Sparrow’s scar. He could see it now—not a slit, but a gaping hole dug into her side. Yet she had found the strength to drive a knife through a man’s clothing and muscle.

  Riker read his mind and said, “Sparrow’s knife was razor sharp, and she got damn lucky when she hit that artery.”

  Charles nodded absently, listening to the rain on the roof. “Mallory’s at the hospital now, isn’t she? That’s why you didn’t go. She wouldn’t allow it.”

  His friend wore a look of surprise, perhaps wondering what he might have said to give that away. One hand on the armrest, he tapped his fingers to the beat of the windshield wipers.

  “So,” said Charles, “you’re planning to let her bludgeon a dying woman? Oh, not with her fists—but you know what’s going on in that hospital room. You know.”

  “I can’t tell her the truth. And neither can you. I had to pick a memory she could believe in. I’m gonna let her hold on to Lou.”

  So she would never discover that Louis had ripped out her ten-year-old heart with a conspiracy of lies. “And she goes on hating Sparrow until it’s too late?”

  “It won’t be long now.” Riker rolled down the window and sent his cigarette flying into the rain.

  Charles sensed a door closing here, and he picked up the thread of the previous conversation. “Lucky the wound was in Frankie’s thigh. I suppose that made it easy to blame a child.”

  “You make it sound like we framed the kid.” Riker almost smiled. “It wasn’t even our case. Two other detectives closed out the paperwork. The death was self-defense but connected to felony arson. Sparrow would’ve gone to prison.”

  “So you kept silent, and Kathy took the blame.”

  “Well, the kid was guilty on the arson charge. Kathy decided to get rid of all the evidence. She soaked the body with kerosene. Very thorough. All the medical examiner had to work with was some charcoaled meat and bone. So a nameless, dead kid took the blame for everything.” Riker yawned. “Case closed.” And then his eyes closed.

  Twenty minutes passed in silence before Charles pulled up to the curb at Riker’s address. Rather than disturb his sleep, Charles gathered the man into his arms, then carried him through the door and up the stairs to the apartment. He laid the detective down on an unmade bed, then removed the revolver and put it away in a drawer. After slipping the shoes from Riker’s feet, Charles followed the last of Mallory’s instructions. He entered the bathroom and flicked on the switch for a plastic Jesus night-light.

  On the lonely ride home, he thought about Riker’s version of events and then the way it had really happened. On one point, he and the detective agreed. The drug dealer had made the first strike before his artery became a fountain of spraying blood. Sparrow’s wound had come first—but not while shielding a child. That woman had been laughing when Frankie Delight put his knife in her side—Mallory’s own words, the testimony of an eyewitness.

  Caught by surprise, Sparrow had fallen to her knees, crippled with blood loss and shock, then a sudden drop in blood pressure and the resulting lightness in head and chest—the weakness of limbs. He could see her hands trying to plug that hideous hole. Perhaps there had been time to pull a weapon, but no strength to drive it home. And the dealer would have been on his guard against reprisal.

  There were two chips in the thigh bone of Frankie Delight, an act of violence powered by rage and fear. Only a ten-year-old girl could have taken him down by stealth and surprise. Charles could see the small thief stealing the knife from the hand of the fallen prostitute, then driving it into a man’s thigh once—twice—getting even. How surprised the child must have been to see Frankie Delight fall and die, wondering then, How could such a wound be mortal?

  The little girl had killed a man for Sparrow’s sake, then risked her life in trial by fire, and Kathy’s reward was not the ongoing love she needed so badly, but betrayal and desertion. That was the only scenario to fit every fact and explain why the prostitute remained unforgiven.

  Charles knew what was happening in Sparrow’s hospital room. The dying woman, though deep in coma dreams, had been defeating the death sentences of her doctors for days. And this will to live suggested the stuff of her dreams, unfinished business. All this time, Sparrow had been waiting for Mallory.

  His car rolled to a stop, and he closed his eyes in pain, not wanting to imagine this reunion, a chanted lita
ny of hateful acts and trespasses, music to die by.

  And so he turned his mind to the last riddle, expecting to make short work of it: How had Kathy escaped the fire?

  Logic could not carry him everywhere, but damned close. He liked Sparrow’s theory best. The child must have been thrown clear in the explosion. He envisioned Kathy surrounded by fire and running past the corpse of Frankie Delight as it burned brightly head to toe. Kathy’s feet barely touched ground, all but flying to gain that staircase before the flames could eat her. Behind her, the boards were awash in roiling liquid fire. He could hear her scream the only prayer a child knows to ask for pity and mercy, “Mama!” Or had she called out for Sparrow? The flames raced up the stairs with her, singeing hair as she climbed higher and higher. Bombs were going off on the floors below.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Kathy pushed through the rooftop door and saw the sky and—then what? No fire escape, no way out. She raised her arms like thin white wings. And what happened next? The whole world exploded under her feet. She must have been thrown clear, but how to account for her lack of injuries? How far could one throw a child without harming her? Given the probable force of the blast, the speed of propulsion, and the sudden impact—the child lay dead or badly broken in every logical scenario all night long.

  Over the ensuing years, Charles would come to understand the persistence of whores, their book salon and the maddening quest for the end of a story. The problem of the escape would never be solved—unless one counted the last words he would write in his journal toward the end of a very long life. Because he had never betrayed his role as a keeper of secrets, an eater of sins, his children and grand-children would be forever confounded by his homage to Sparrow’s faith in comic-book heroes, a single line at the center of the page, “Kathy, can you fly?”

  Epilogue

  Detective Mallory shuddered so slightly that the doctor beside her failed to notice. She dug her fingernails into her palms to bring on the pain—to stay awake and focused, to see this thing through.

  Payback.

  Rain drummed on the window of Sparrow’s hospital room. The lights were low, and Father Rose hovered over the sickbed, armed with his magical rosary beads. Mallory watched him don his surplice to perform the sacrament of last rites—a waste of precious time.

  The young intern affirmed this idea, saying, “I don’t think she knows what’s going on.”

  Mallory stared at the woman on the bed, eyes rolling, mouth drooling. Sparrow seemed smaller now, as houses do when children revisit them later in life. “How can you tell if she’s awake?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Does it matter? There’s a big difference between awake and aware. She only has a few hours, I’m sure of that much. Her organs are shutting down.”

  And the physician did not want to be here at the end. Why linger over his failure? He left the room quickly—escaping. Mallory listened to his footsteps hurrying down the corridor, outrunning death. Only a priest would be attracted to Sparrow now.

  “Do you heartily repent your sins?”

  “Father, that would take years. She’s a whore.” Mallory opened the door as an invitation for the man to leave, and soon. The priest stared at her in surprise, as though her hint might have been too subtle. “Speed it up,” she said. “I haven’t got all night—and neither does Sparrow.”

  Father Rose bent over his parishioner. “Can you give me a sign of contrition?”

  “She’s sorry,” said Mallory. “I saw her eyes move.”

  “You’re heartless.”

  “I know that.”

  “She’s dying. Why can’t you leave her in peace?” The rest of his words to Sparrow were close to mime, inaudible and ending with the sign of the cross.

  “You’re done. Good.” Mallory walked across the room and stood very close to the man. “Father, leave now.” She held up her gold shield to remind him that she was the law. “I’ve got official business here. I’m not giving you a choice.”

  She would have liked him better if he had put up a fight, but he turned his eyes to Sparrow’s, and every thought in his head was there to read when he shrugged. The priest was already writing off the whore as a corpse. What more damage could be done to her now? What comfort could his presence bring? None.

  He left the room quietly, and Mallory shut the door behind him, then jammed a straight-back chair beneath the knob to keep it closed. There would be no more visitors tonight.

  She walked back to her old enemy on the hospital bed, the woman who had betrayed her and, worse, abandoned her. Now the whore was the one who was utterly helpless, unable to lift one hand in defense. Her skin was as pale as the sheets.

  “Sparrow? It’s me!”

  There was no response beyond ragged breathing and the endless demented motion of blue eyes that saw nothing. Could Sparrow hear? Could she understand the words? There was no way to tell. The only certainty in this room was death; it was coming.

  The young detective leaned over the woman, bending low enough for her lips to lightly brush a tuft of hair near Sparrow’s ear, then whispered, “It’s Kathy.”

  And I’m lost.

  Mallory settled into a chair beside the bed, then opened an old paperback book—the last western. Her head was bowed, eyes fixed on the page. “I’m going to read you a story,” she said, as one blind hand reached out for the comfort of Sparrow’s.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  DEAD FAMOUS

  Coming soon from G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Prologue

  Johanna could hear cat paws madly thudding on the bathroom door, and the animal was crying in a human way—so frightened. Or was he merely hungry? She had fed the poor beast, but how long ago? No matter. The cat’s cries receded, as though her front room had decamped from the hotel suite, floating up and away with utter disregard for gravity.

  And time? What was that to her?

  The whole day long, Johanna had not moved from her perch at the edge of a wooden chair. She sat there, wrapped in a bathrobe, as the sun moved behind the window glass, as shadows crawled about the room with a slow progress that only a paranoid eye could follow. One of the shadows belonged to herself, and the dark silhouette of her body was dragged across the wallpaper, inch by inch, extending her deformity to a cruel extreme.

  Inside her brain was the refrain of a rock ’n’ roll song from another era. “Gimme shelter,” the Rolling Stones sang to her, and she resisted this mantra as she always did, for there were no safe places.

  Perhaps another hour had passed, maybe three. She could not say when night had fallen. Johanna unclenched her hands and looked down at a crumpled letter, as if, in absolute darkness, she could read the words of a postscript: Only a monster can play this game.

  1

  The black van had no helpful lettering on the side to tell the neighbors what business it was about on this November afternoon. Here and there, along the street of tall brown-stones, drapes had parted and curious eyes were locked upon the vehicle’s driver. Even by New York City standards, she was an odd one.

  Johanna Apollo’s skin was very fair, the gift of Swedes on her mother’s side. And yet, from any distance, she might be taken for a large dark spider clad in denim as she climbed out of the van, then dropped to the pavement in a crouch. Dark brown was the color of her leather gloves, her work boots, and the long strands of hair spread back across the unnatural curve of her spine. Her torso was bent forward, her body forever fused into a subtle question mark as her face angled toward the ground, hidden from the watchers at their windows. They never saw the great dark eyes—the beauty of the beast. And now the neighbors’ heads turned in unison, following her progress down the street.

  Dry yellow leaves cartwheeled and crackled alongside as she walked with a delicacy of slender spider-long legs. Such deep grace for one so misshapen—that was how the neighbors would recall this moment later in the day. It was almost a dance, they would say.

  And none of them noticed the smal
l tan car gliding into Eighty-fourth Street, quiet as a swimming shark. It stopped near the corner, where another vehicle had just taken the last available parking space.

  The young driver of the tan sedan left her engine idling as she stepped out in the middle of the street. Nothing about her said civil servant; the custom-tailored lines of her designer jeans and long, black leather coat said money. And the wildly expensive running shoes allowed her to move in silence as she padded toward a station wagon. She leaned down and rapped on the driver’s window. The pudgy man behind the wheel gave her the grin of a lottery winner, for she was that lovely, that ilk of tall blondes who would never go out with him in a million years, and he hurried to roll down the window.

  Oh, happy day.

  “I want your parking place,” she said, all business, no smile of hello—nothing.

  The wagon driver’s grin wobbled a bit. Was this a joke? No man would give up a parking space on any street in Manhattan, not ever, not even for a naked woman. Was she nuts? He summoned up his New Yorker attitude, saying, “Yeah, lady—over my dead body.” And she raised one eyebrow to indicate that this might be an option. The long slants of her eyes were unnaturally green—unnaturally cold. A milk-white hand rested on the door of his car, long red fingernails tapping, tapping, ticking like a bomb, and it occurred to him that those nails might be dangerous.

  Oh, shit!

  One hand had gone to her hip, opening the blazer for just a tease, a peek at what she had hidden in her shoulder holster, a damn cannon that passed for a gun.

  “Move,” she said, and move he did.

  Kathy Mallory had a detective’s gold shield, but she rarely used the badge to motivate civilians. Listening to angry tirades on abuse of police power was time-consuming; fear was more efficient. And now she drove her tan car into the hastily vacated parking space. After killing the engine, she never even glanced at the black van.