Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Police from the West Side precinct had gone, and so had Charles Butler. After Bitty Smyth had been shepherded off to the dining room, only the CSU technicians and their boss remained at the crime scene with Mallory and the dead man.

  The young detective looked past the foyer to the open door. The assistant medical examiner stood on the front steps smoking a cigarette. He looked her way, then tapped his watch to remind her that his people were still waiting to collect the corpse. She turned her back on him to make it clear that this was her dead body, not his.

  And now, not hurrying any, she strolled over to the foot of the stairs and slowly paced out the movements of Nedda Winter and her victim, guided by the old woman’s statement. Mallory ended her pantomime of a killing by hunkering down at the dead man’s side and running her fingers through his hair. She waved to a technician standing by the foyer entrance. “Kill the lights!”

  He did, and now, in the etiquette of sudden darkness, no one moved or spoke. Streetlights glowed dully behind the drapes, only silhouetting the technician standing before them. All else was pitch black. She could not even see the face of the man nearest her, the dead man on the floor.

  Mallory smiled.

  Heller’s voice boomed across the void. “I know what you’re thinking, kid. She couldn’t have done it in the dark.”

  “Yes, she could—and she did. It was dark when she stabbed him the first time, but not the second time.”

  “But he was only stabbed one time.” Dr. Morgan, the medical examiner, had come stealing back into the house, and there was exasperation in every word. “There’s only one entry wound, one—”

  “Stabbed twice,” she said. And now they had a game. “Lights!” yelled Mallory. And there was light.

  Heller entered the kitchen carrying a fingerprint kit and settled his massive bulk into a chair beside Nedda Winter. After introducing himself, he smiled as he held out one hand for hers, asking, almost courtly, “May I?”

  Who knew that Heller was secretly a ladies’ man?

  She smiled, placing her veined and wrinkled hand in his, then watched absently as the head of Forensics did the grunt work of inking her index finger. Rolling it back and forth on a small white card, he said. “Sorry about the mess. Comes off easy enough. Taking prints is routine in a case like this.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, contradicting him without any trace of rancor.

  “Okay, call it a formality.” Heller gently continued to make the black impressions on his fingerprint cards. “Nothing to worry about, ma’am.”

  “Unless you’ve got a record.” Riker smiled to let her know that he was not serious. And she smiled, not buying into that for one minute. He exhaled a blue cloud of cigarette smoke and stared at the window. He might have been innocently inquiring about the weather outside when he asked, “You never murdered anyone, did you, Nedda?”

  “Oh, don’t get me started, Detective. We’ll be here all night.”

  He liked sparring with this woman, and he was gradually losing his awe of her, though he had never been so close to a legend. If his father only knew who he was sitting with right now. And Granddad—how he wished that beloved old man had lived long enough to see this night.

  “We always fingerprint the householders,” said Heller, as if she had never called this a lie and called it right. “You see, this is the way we eliminate—”

  “No,” she said, still smiling. “There’s no need for elimination prints. You don’t care what he touched or we touched, not in a burglary with a dead suspect.” She turned to Riker. “Sorry. I’ve watched entirely too much television.”

  Resignation was in her face when she turned his way. She knew why the cops had come to her door and why they had stayed so long.

  “Okay, you got us,” said Riker. “We lied about the prints. But you can see why. We got problems here.” He lit another cigarette and watched the smoke curl, wondering if he could turn her suspicions around. “Civilians have TV ideas about how this works, when a good taxpayer, like yourself, kills a criminal type—like our friend on the floor out there.” Riker nodded in the direction of the crime scene down the hall. “You think the cops just show up as a courtesy. They take the dead body off your hands, maybe even clean up the mess for you. Then they write you an excuse note for a homicide.”

  He waved this idea away with one hand. “Naw. When we find a body with a pair of shears stuck in the chest, we call it unnatural death. Doesn’t matter if the victim is scum—and, believe me, this guy would have to do some social climbing before we could call him anything as grand as scum. But he still gets a full homicide investigation. Now first we had to figure out which cophouse owns the crime scene. If the perp came to rob you, then the case goes to Robbery Homicide Division. If not, then it could go to the West Side cops. They showed up first, and it’s their turf. And then there’s me and Mallory. We’re from Special Crimes Unit. We might get the case ’cause we had a prior interest in the dead man.”

  “So how many detectives are fighting over the body?”

  “Only one left standing out there.” Heller turned his eyes to the hallway. “The body belongs to Riker’s partner, Mallory.”

  “And I predicted that.” Riker turned his face to Nedda’s. “She was the catching detective on your dead man’s three murders. Too bad we can’t turn up your ice pick.” He watched Nedda Winter’s body relax as she slid back into a comfort zone, believing that she was merely suspected of homicide.

  “Yes, I see the problem,” she said. “You have to be sure the pick belonged to him before you can close out the case. As I said, I’ve never had any use for an ice pick.”

  “Well, it’s a big house,” said Riker. “You got a maid or a housekeeper?”

  “There was a live-in housekeeper. My niece, Bitty, tried to save her soul, and she ran away from home. Now my sister, Cleo, deals with an agency. They send different people every week.”

  Done with the fingerprinting, Heller gently wiped the ink from her hands, then filed his print cards away in an envelope. He was working on the identifying labels when he and Riker looked up to see Bitty Smyth hovering in the doorway, asking with her eyes if she might enter.

  “Come in, dear,” said Nedda. “This is Mr. Heller, and you’ve met Detective Riker.”

  For a moment, Riker believed that Bitty might curtsy, but instead, she held out her Bible as an offering, voting him the most likely soul to be in need of religion. “It’s a gift,” she said, when he failed to take it from her. “You are a Christian, are you not?”

  “My church is Finnegan’s.” And Riker’s religion revolved around sacramental bourbon and beer. Finnegan’s was the cop bar beneath his Greenwich Village apartment. Free drinks, courtesy of his new landlord and bar-keep, made it a religious experience every night.

  The tiny woman patted his head in the manner of rewarding a dog.

  “Bitty,” said her aunt, “do you know where the ice pick is?”

  “It’s on the floor beside the body.”

  “No, dear. Where is our ice pick?”

  The younger woman shook her head, uncomprehending. Suddenly, one pointing finger rose in the air as a divining rod, and she walked in a straight line to a drawer beside the sink. She pulled out an ice pick, then placed it on the table in front of Nedda and left the room. Heller followed after her, fingerprint kit in hand and calling out, “Ma’am? Miss Smyth? A minute, please?”

  Nedda Winter studied the plain ice pick on the table. Its wooden handle was cracked and worn. “Doesn’t quite go with the silver ice bucket, does it?”

  “No, ma’am, it doesn’t.” And he had already found this one during an earlier search of the kitchen. Riker’s eyes were on the hallway when Mallory paused just outside the door, standing there in low conversation with the police photographer. She moved on down the hall, no doubt wanting pictures of a sewing room with no scissors. He turned back to face Nedda. “We’ll keep looking till we find the other ice pick—the good one.”

&nb
sp; If she took this as a threat—and it was—she showed no outward sign. Leaning toward Riker, speaking in her dry way, she said, “Our Bitty is a soldier in the army of the Lord—in case that escaped your notice. She’s also very delicate. I hope you don’t see her as a woman who fancies dangerous men, maybe lures them home so she can murder them.”

  “I like your sense of humor, Nedda.” He had already surmised that if Bitty, the Christian soldier, were hanging nose to nose with a fruit fly, the fly would beat the living crap out of her.

  A shriek came from the front room, and now Bitty Smyth was screaming, “No fingerprints! No, you can’t do this!”

  Riker watched Kathy Mallory passing the kitchen doorway again, advancing on the front room with grim resolve. He was already feeling sorry for the smaller, weaker woman; the little soldier was indeed delicate in mind and body.

  Oh, yes, there would be fingerprints, and right now.

  Mallory’s end of the conversation was not intelligible at this distance, but Riker could imagine the scene in the other room: his partner’s attitude conjuring up a faint aroma from the sulfurs of hell and maybe a little smoke; Bitty’s eyes growing wide and wild.

  “No!” Bitty Smyth yelled. “I want a lawyer!”

  Bitty Smyth flitted about the room, staring into every face, silently begging for relief. She avoided looking at Mallory, whose eyes were green neon signs with the words no mercy.

  Nedda Winter entered the room, followed by a more languid Riker, who hardly ever moved quite so fast as an old lady, though Mallory knew that her partner would not call this white-haired woman old; the little lost girl of the nineteen-forties would only be fifteen years his senior.

  Deserting her niece, Miss Winter hurried past Mallory and disappeared into a small powder room in the foyer. Every pair of eyes was on that closing door. Dazed by this abandonment, even Bitty Smyth was quietly keeping watch.

  When the old woman emerged, she held a glass of water in her hand and moved toward her niece, smiling, extending the glass, then holding it to Bitty’s lips and urging her to drink. “Big gulps, dear. Everything is all right.”

  Bitty Smyth stole a glance at Mallory, then shook her head slowly from side to side to say that this could not be true.

  “I’ve already given them my fingerprints.” Nedda Winter settled her niece on the sofa. “There’s no harm in letting them take yours.”

  Heller pulled up a chair alongside the couch and gently took the tiny woman’s hand and kissed it.

  Well, this was new. The only one more startled than Bitty was Mallory.

  The head of Forensics was not only doing the work of underlings tonight but he was also in rare diplomatic form, and Mallory disapproved. She preferred her interview subjects unhinged and easier to intimidate—less work. Before Heller had inked the third finger, Bitty Smyth’s head lolled back on the upholstery and her eyes closed. Mallory turned on the older woman. “What did you put in that water?”

  “A sedative.” Miss Winter opened her hand to show the label on the bottle. “This house almost qualifies as a pharmacy. These belong to my sister, Cleo.”

  This civilian was surprisingly unruffled. Mallory decided to work on that.

  While Heller finished the fingerprinting process, one of the medical examiner’s underlings returned to remind the detectives that the meat wagon was still waiting for the corpse. Mallory shot him a look to tell him that he should get out of here—now.

  Nedda Winter searched the remaining faces, then turned to Riker. “Mr. Butler is gone?”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “It didn’t take him long to check out the pictures in Bitty’s room.”

  “Is he going to make any trouble for my niece?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Mallory glanced at the small woman asleep on the sofa. “By law, we had to warn him. We’re really scrupulous about that when we find the stalker at a crime scene with a dead body.”

  “My niece is harmless.”

  “You really believe that?” Mallory opened her blazer, pausing a beat to display a very large gun and her authority in this room. “I’m surprised.” Her hand passed over the weapon to dip into an inside breast pocket. She produced a wrinkled sheet of paper. “I found this in your bedroom wastebasket. It’s the same line written over and over again. ‘Crazy people make sane people crazy.’ ” Mallory glanced at the small sleeper on the couch. “Was Bitty getting on your nerves?”

  The older woman looked as if she had just been slapped.

  Mallory edged closer. “Need to take a pill, Miss Winter? I saw all that medication in your room.”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Sit down,” said Mallory, indicating a chair close to the corpse.

  Nedda Winter shook her head, defying a direct order and electing to stand. “I’ve been sitting for too long.” With a slight lift of one shoulder, she said, “You know—old bones.” And so her dignity remained intact—for the moment.

  “Really?” Mallory made a wide circle around Miss Winter, forcing the woman to revolve. “The medical examiner says you’re in very good shape for your age. Good hearing and coordination. No confusion at all. Now Dr. Morgan thought that was strange . . . considering all of your meds. He said the high doses should’ve created massive confusion bordering on dementia, but you’re pretty sharp.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once more Mallory looked down at the sleeping niece. “Does Bitty know that you flush all those pills every day?”

  She noted just the barest inclination of Nedda Winter’s head, a small gesture of congratulation. And now this old woman must understand that Riker’s interrogation had been merely a friendly little warm-up.

  Showtime.

  “And your color surprised Dr. Morgan, too. According to your niece, your skin turned yellow in the end stage of cancer. But now you look entirely too healthy.” Mallory stopped circling her interview subject. They stood toe-to-toe. “Can you explain that?”

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality,” said the old woman. “The state of my health isn’t open to police scrutiny.”

  “Wrong.” Mallory turned her back on the older woman. “I can ask you anything I want.” And that was true. She could legally ask. “And now we’ll go over the holes in your statement until I hear something believable. You might want to sit down now. This could take all night.”

  And with this more polite invitation, this consideration for her comfort—yeah, right—Nedda Winter did sit down. But this was not the advantage that Mallory sought; she had wanted subservience, and all she got was tolerance. Miss Winter’s head was level and regal; she would not strain by one bare inch to look up at her adversary.

  The detective moved behind the woman, leaning down close to her ear and saying, “I like money motives.” Mallory rounded the chair in time to catch the trace of a smile.

  “I never touched the man’s wallet,” said Nedda Winter.

  “I did. He had a lot of cash. But you told the responding officer there was none missing from the wall safe. You were positive about that.” She signaled Riker to bring in the patrolman waiting outside on the steps. After sitting down in an armchair on the other side of the corpse, she proceeded to ignore the old woman, turning all her attention to the pages of a small notebook.

  The young officer entered the front room. He smiled at Miss Winter, and one finger tapped the visor of his hat in a mock salute. Mallory caught his eye, and, with a look that promised something nasty, she put an end to all that friendliness. He stood at attention, all properly lined up on the side of Mallory and the law.

  The detective turned back to her notes, saying, “You remember Officer Brill, don’t you? He shows up for all of your break-ins.”

  “Yes, I remember him. But that first one was only an attempted burglary.”

  Mallory kept her eyes on the notebook. “According to Officer Brill, your relatives were out of town for that one, too. What a coincidence.” She looked up at the staircase and the small device well concea
led in the woodwork. “Oh, and the tape cassette is missing from your security camera. Another coincidence? Don’t look at Officer Brill. He’s not a friend of the family. He’s with us.”

  But not for much longer. With only a nod, she sent the man back to his post outside the front door. Nedda followed the young officer with her eyes, clearly sorry to see him go.

  “We’ll start over.” Mallory accepted a yellow pad from Riker, then pulled out a pen and clicked it absently. “You said you stabbed the burglar with the scissors.”

  Click, click.

  “Yes.” Miss Winter pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her robe. “This makes the fourth confession of the evening. I stabbed him with the scissors.”

  “But his weapon,” said Mallory, “the ice pick—that’s yours. Don’t waste my time making me prove it.”

  Click, click, click, click.

  “I never said it wasn’t mine.” She shook a cigarette loose from the pack. “I only said I couldn’t identify it.” And now she searched her pockets for a light. “Maybe he found it here in the house.”

  “In the dark? According to your statement, the lights were off. You didn’t turn the lights on until it was all over. How could he find that ice pick in a strange house in the dark?”

  Click, click, click, click, click.

  “I believe I saw a small flashlight on the floor by the—”

  “Yeah, a penlight.” Riker stepped forward with a lit match for her cigarette. “That was his. We found his fingerprints on the case and the batteries—the dead batteries.”

  Mallory leaned forward. “While you’re changing your statement, some advice—don’t fool with the lights, okay? If the lights had been on, he would’ve pulled his knife, and you’d be the dead body on the floor tonight.” She leaned down to raise one pants leg of the corpse and exposed the long hunting knife in a leather holster strapped to his leg. Now the old woman was taken by surprise, but it passed quickly.

  “You see the problem, Miss Winter? Too many weapons. If he had a knife, why would he waste time hunting for a—”