Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  How long had they kept company – and why?

  Mallory’s early history on the streets was not linear, but called up in shattering events remembered out of order. And now her memories were so distant, they could be twisted any way she liked. She decided that, at best, Sparrow had been merely a bad copy of a dead mother.

  A whore and nothing more.

  She had not recognized the prostitute’s new face at the crime scene. On the way to the hospital, Riker had broken the news, and he had done it so gently, as if the victim were a family member -and not the dangerous debris of the past. But soon enough, Sparrow would be dead, and only Riker would know the story, but he could never tell it.

  Mallory’s hand closed over the comb. It had not been dropped through the tear in the couch cushion, but buried there. So Sparrow had had some time to hide it, but when? While the hangman was knocking at the door? Perhaps he was already inside when she pushed her precious comb deep into the upholstery so it could not be stolen. Had there been time for conversation? Had Sparrow tried to talk him out of killing her?

  She stared at the bedsheet covering the broken glass. Why had the man risked burning the window shade before he made his escape?

  You wanted a big audience for your work – not just the cops – civilians too. Fame? That’s what you want? Yes, he had even left an autograph, a signature of dead flies.

  The door opened. Mallory rose to a stand, then whirled around to face Gary Zappata. The rookie fireman stood on the threshold. His sleeveless T-shirt and chinos were a size too small, the better to show offhis gym-sculpted torso. His dark hair was slicked back, still wet from a shower, and he stank of cologne.

  ‘This is a crime scene, Zappata. Did you forget the rules?’ She nodded toward the door in lieu of saying, Get the hell out.

  ‘Hey, I’m here to help.’ He shut the door, then sauntered into the room. There was arrogance in his smile and his every move. ‘So, Detective – ’ One hand waved about, feigning frustration, as if her name might be difficult to remember. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’m working here. What do you want?’

  He hooked both thumbs in his belt loops and strolled over to the couch. ‘Just tying up loose ends.’

  ‘Zappata, don’t waste my time. If you’ve got something – let’s hear it.’

  That made him petulant, but he forced a smile. She was forgiven. ‘I can help you, babe. I know things about that fire. For instance, the candles had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Great tip. Thanks for stopping by.’ Mallory turned her back on him to study the blackened wall of the burn area. After a moment, she glanced over one shoulder with a look that asked, Still here?

  The fireman ignored this blatant dismissal and flopped down on the couch. ‘The guy’s not a pro.’ He draped one leg over the upholstered arm – just to let her know that he planned to stay awhile. ‘A real arsonist would’ve made a fuse to the door. You know, when a blaze gets hot enough, the air can ignite.’

  ‘Did you learn that in fire school?’

  He disliked this reminder that he was new at his trade. Even when he had been a cop, his police career had not lasted long enough to lose the rookie status. ‘Listen, Mallory.’ This was an order. ‘The guy’s an amateur at homicide too. These freaks always stick with what worked in the past. So this is definitely our perp’s first try at murder. ‘Cause of the botched fire.’

  Our perp?

  Mallory looked up to the window, attracted by the silhouette of a man pacing across the makeshift curtain. His hat had the crown of a uniformed officer. Riker must have requested a guard for the crime scene. Bad move. This unapproved use of manpower would not sit well with Lieutenant Coffey.

  Zappata left the couch to hover over the wet pile of flashy silks and rayon. He picked up the sparkling costume that Riker had so admired. ‘I wonder what the hooker looked like in this.’

  ‘Drop it!’ Mallory strode across the room, aiming herself at the man, planning to walk over him or through him. He backstepped to the door, clutching the costume to his breast in a lame attempt to hide behind a swatch of sequins and fairy wings.

  ‘Don’t touch her things!' She ripped the garment away from him. ‘Get out!'

  His hand was on the knob when he noticed the guard’s shadow rushing across the bedsheet curtain. And now there were footfalls on the cement steps leading down to the basement door.

  The fireman was as nervous as a schoolgirl afraid of losing her reputation. He puffed out his chest and summoned up a bit of bravado.

  The cop outside was coming closer.

  Zappata opened the door, yelling, ‘I’m done here, you bitch!' He stomped out of the apartment, as if this were his own idea.

  Mallory wondered if the fire department knew that their rookie was a physical coward. But he was forgotten when she looked down at the ivory comb in her hand.

  Sparrow, how did the hangman get in? Did he bring you presents, too?

  Sergeant Riker could smell the apartment-house odors of meals cooked and eaten hours ago. His stomach rumbled as he stepped off the elevator.

  The landlord’s floor was divided in two. On one side was Charles Butler’s apartment, and across the hall was a consulting firm of elite headhunters. And here Kathy Mallory broke the law in her off-duty hours, investigating the deluded, the grifters and other poseurs to weed them from a clientele of wildly gifted and generally unstable job candidates for think tanks. Riker called them Martians.

  Lieutenant Coffey had given her a direct order to dissolve this business partnership, and tonight, Riker had his first glimpse of Mallory’s response, an elegant solution. She had nailed a new brass plaque on the old familiar door. Once, this had been the entrance to Butler and Mallory, Ltd. Now it was called Butler and Company. She had become a silent partner.

  Attracted by the aroma of a recent meal, the detective strolled across the hall to the private residence. His nose for fast food told him it was Chinese take-out. Before he could knock, the door opened, and he was looking up – and up – at Charles Butler.

  The man was at least a head taller than most of the world, and his nose was also above average, a wonderful hook that could perch a pigeon. His heavy-lidded eyes bulged, and the small blue irises were surrounded by vast areas of white, giving Charles a startled look that he shared with frogs and frightened horses. From the neck down, Mother Nature had gotten it right – better than that in Riker’s estimation, for the body was well made, aiming for the angels in form and power.

  ‘Riker, hello!' When Charles Butler smiled, he took on the aspect of a lunatic, but such a charming loon. Over the past forty years of his life, he had learned to be self-conscious about this idiosyncrasy. The line of his mouth waffled with embarrassment, apologizing for every happy expression.

  ‘Hey, how are ya?’ Riker noted his friend’s rare departure from Savile Row suits. The denim shirt screamed of money; nothing off the rack could fit so well. And apparently Mallory had introduced Charles to a tailor shop that customized her own blue jeans. The two of them were still struggling with the concept of casual dress.

  ‘I hear you’re on summer vacation.’

  ‘Yes, Mallory’s idea.’ Charles pushed a curling strand of light brown hair away from his eyes. He was always forgetting appointments with his barber. ‘No more clients until the fall.’ And now the man looked worried. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she? You didn’t come by to – ’

  ‘Oh, no. She’s fine. I should’ve called. Sorry.’ And Riker’s regret was genuine, for Charles must have thought that he was here to break the news of Mallory’s premature death. ‘It’s late. I should leave.’

  ‘Nonsense, I’m glad you stopped by.’ Charles stood back and ushered his guest inside. ‘I was only worried because we had dinner reservations, but she wasn’t home when I – ’

  ‘She never called to cancel? I’ll rag her about it.’ And that neatly explained the reek of Chinese take-out in the home of a gourmet cook. Riker passed through the foyer,
then paused a few steps into the front room. ‘She rewired your stereo, didn’t she?’

  ‘How did you – ’

  ‘I’m a detective.’ Perfection was Mallory’s signature, and it was writ in what could not be seen. She had made the machinery, its wires and speakers invisible. And the sound was remarkably well balanced, creating the illusion of an orchestra at the center of Riker’s brain. The concerto was bright and hopeful, a portrait of Charles Butler in strings and flutes.

  There were never any CDs lying about in Mallory’s personal car, and he sometimes wondered if she ever listened to music, perhaps something metallic with New Age clicks and whirrs.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a beer.’ Riker sprawled on the sofa while Charles crossed the formal dining room, heading for the kitchen.

  Though the detective had been in this apartment many times, he scrutinized the room of paneled walls and antiques. Books and journals were piled on all the tables and chairs, the sign of a man with too much free time. Riker found what he had been looking for – food, a bowl of cashews partially hidden under a newspaper, and he had devoured them all before Charles returned with two beers foaming in frosted glass. Any man who kept his beer steins in the freezer was Riker’s friend for life.

  ‘I have to tell you – ’ As the detective accepted his beer, he spied a fortune cookie on a small table next to the sofa. ‘This isn’t exactly a social call.’ He grabbed the cookie, then remembered his manners and asked, ‘You mind?’

  ‘It’s yours.’ Charles settled into an armchair. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Riker unbuttoned his suit jacket and pulled out the stolen waterlogged paperback. ‘Can you fix this?’

  Charles stared at the soggy cover illustration of cowboys and blazing six-guns – so far removed from his own taste in literature. His face expressed some polite equivalent of Oh, shit, as he attempted a lame smile. ‘I think so. It might take me a while.’

  ‘I got time.’ Riker cracked his cookie open. His printed fortune fell out. He watched this sliver of paper drop to the floor and let it lie there, for he was that rare individual who ate the cookies for their own sake. And now he looked around for another.

  Charles excused himself for a few minutes, then came back with a sandwich wrapped in a napkin, and Riker happily traded his wet book for the roast beef on rye. A moment later, his happiness was destroyed. The paperback lay open in the other man’s hands, and the detective could see a piece of paper stuck to the back cover. If he had not been so tired and hungry, he would have thought to leaf through the book before handing it over. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A receipt.’ Charles gently peeled up the paper. ‘From Warwick’s Used Books. Odd. I thought I knew every bookshop in Manhattan.’ He closed the old novel and stared at the lurid cover. ‘So this is rather important to you.’ He was too well bred to ask why in God’s name this might be true.

  ‘Yeah, you can’t get ‘em anymore. That western went out of print forty years ago. It’s the last novel Jake Swain ever wrote.’ Riker wolfed down his sandwich, then drained the beer stein, stalling for time, for the right words. Sheriff Peety rides again. What was the other character’s name? He had blocked it out of his mind long ago and hoped it would remain forgotten.

  ‘I’ll have to get started before this dries out.’ Charles rose to his feet, and Riker followed him into the next room. The library walls were fifteen-feet high and covered with a mosaic of leather bindings. A narrow door set into one bookcase opened on to a small boxy room. Glue pots and rolls of tape, brushes, tweezers and spools of thread lay on a long work table where the bibliophile repaired the spines and pages of his collection. Charles swept aside volumes with gold-leaf decoration to make room for a paperback that had cost fifty cents in the year it was published.

  ‘You can’t tell Mallory about this,’ said Riker. ‘Promise? I don’t want her to know I wrecked it.’ Stole it, robbed it from a crime scene.

  But his partner would never know about that if Charles believed -

  ‘It’s hers!’ Charles should never be allowed near a poker game; his face expressed every feeling, every thought. And just now, he was thinking that Riker had lied to him. The office across the hall contained all the books that Mallory owned. Most dealt with computers; none were fiction. And, before leaving college to join NYPD, she had received two years of an elite education at Barnard. No way could he believe that this book was her property. Yet he nodded and said, ‘Understood.’ Charles reached up to a shelf above the work space and pulled down a bundle of blotting papers. ‘You were never here. We never had this conversation.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’ Riker imagined that he could hear the man’s beautiful brain kicking into high gear and making connections at light’s speed.

  Charles teased the block of pages away from its paper spine, then noticed his guest’s anxiety and mistook paranoia for concern. ‘Don’t worry. I can put it back together.’ After setting the cover to one side, he peeled away a top sheet of advertising and stared at the underlying page. ‘Oh.’ His face conveyed that everything had suddenly been made clear. ‘Well, I can’t blot this one. I’d lose most of the ink. I can save the inscription, but Louis’s signature is gone.’

  Calmly, the detective asked, ‘What?’ And inside his head, he screamed, What?

  ‘This is Louis Markowitz’s handwriting, isn’t it? I imagine there’ll be trouble when Mallory sees the damage.’

  Startled, Riker looked down at the inscribed page. An old friend’s quirky penmanship trailed off in a wash of blue ink. ‘No, it’s okay. She hasn’t seen it yet. I was gonna give it to her later – a present.’

  Charles read the inscription. ‘So it’s a gift from Louis to Mallory. Almost poetry. I gather he wanted her to have it after his demise. A posthumous goodbye?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’ Untrue. On the only day when that note could have been written, Louis Markowitz had not been anticipating his own death; he still had many years ahead of him, time enough to raise Kathy Mallory. The old man must have forgotten that the book existed, and so had Riker – until it floated past him in Sparrow’s apartment.

  ‘Louis’s funeral was some time ago.’ Charles used clamps and cotton batting to fix the page to a board, then picked up a palm-size heater and switched it on. ‘You’re delivering this a bit late, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Riker was slowly coming to terms with shock. A dead man had corroborated his lie – fifteen years before it was told.

  An hour later, every surface in the room was covered with a book leaf pressed between blotting papers. Only the inscription page was exposed. The detective stared at the scrawl of blue ink, the words of a man who had loved a homeless child. The lines suggested that the book had been inscribed after the old man had seen convincing proof that the ten-year-old was dead and gone. Yet that grieving cop had obviously clung to the insane idea that Kathy might come back.

  Riker bowed his head over the page to read the passage again.

  ‘Once there was a little girl. No, scratch that, kid. You were always more than that, bigger than life. I could have set you to music – the damn Star Spangled Banner – because you prevailed through all the long scary nights. You were my hero.’

  After Charles had bid Riker good night at the elevator, he saw a crack of light under the door to Butler and Company. Mallory? He had not seen her face since early June. And now he forced himself to walk, not run, as he entered the office and passed through the lighted reception area, then moved quickly down a narrow hall, pulled along by the dim glow from Mallory’s room – where the machines lived.

  He paused at the open doorway, staring at the back of his business partner. She sat before a computer workstation, one of three. Most of her personal office was lost in shadow, a sharp contrast to the halo, a silhouette of burnished gold made by lamplight threading through her hair.

  What could he say to her? He doubted that she would regret or even recall their m
issed dinner date, for she was in holy communion with her machines and oblivious to human disappointment.

  Years ago, he had written a rather poetic monograph on her gifted applications of computer science. Over the course of his career, he had evaluated many wizards who could force electronics to do remarkable things. But she was a creature apart, employing an artist’s sensibility similar to a composer of music. She merged with the technology, fashioning effect by thought, blending the psyches of musician and mathematician to write original notes for electronic bells and whistles.

  During his study of her, Charles had indulged in a fanciful, albeit unpublishable, notion that Nature had planned ahead for this new century, that some long-sleeping gene had awakened when she was made. Later, after learning more about her childhood, his vision had altered and darkened, for Mallory had been hammered into what she was – the perfect receptacle for something cold and alien. And her intimacy with machinery chilled him.

  Once, he had been ambivalent about computers. Now he saw them as perverted soldiers that blurred the demarcation line between her fingertips and the keyboards. He had sought to dilute their influence with offerings of fine art and the soft edges of antiquarian objects. Mallory had fought back, encroaching on the office kitchen with ugly technology that he could not abide. Then she had invaded his personal residence, staging a surprise attack to reconfigure his stereo system. Stunned, he had been assaulted from all sides by musical perfection via enemy components that removed the necessity of human hands for turning the knobs and fine-tuning the song. The sheer beauty of it had seduced him for a time. But now, seeing her like this, he was back in combat mode, dreaming new schemes to disconnect her computers, to unplug them all – and Mallory too.

  It was a good fight.

  She never looked up as Charles approached. He stood beside her chair and stared at the monitor. Her only task tonight was the harmless typing of text. All that angst for nothing. Bracketed question marks pocked the glowing screen. A battered notebook lay on the metal surface of her workstation. It was open to a page of faded coffee stains and lines of blue ink from an old-fashioned fountain pen. Charles could even describe that pen; Louis Markowitz had willed it to him. For the second time in one night, he was staring at a sample of an old friend’s handwriting. Mallory was deciphering her foster father’s shorthand scribbles between the clearly written words, duct tape and rope.