Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘Go on,’ said Riker. ‘You’re not boring us.’

  ‘Well, the landlady made one more try at opening the door -right before she called the police. Now the first officer on the scene made a very detailed report – but no mention of kicking down a door or breaking a lock. He just entered the apartment. So, obviously, some third party opened that door before – ’

  ‘And Geldorf didn’t catch this?’ Riker refilled his wine glass. ‘Naw, I don’t see him missing a thing like that. There should be paperwork for repairs on a busted lock. It travels with the Cold Case file.’

  ‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I read every word of that file. Between the landlady’s call and the police response, there was a four-hour interval. I gather a bad smell wasn’t a high priority. So, during that four hours, somebody opened the door with a key.’

  ‘The perp must’ve had Natalie’s key,’ said Riker. ‘He’d be the one who locked up after the murder. So he forgot something and went back to – ’

  ‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘He wouldn’t risk it – not that day.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Charles. ‘Between the heat and the insects, that body was badly decomposed. The stench was incredible – that’s in the officer’s report. The killer would’ve realized the police were on the way. Also, this was a Sunday evening. Most of the tenants would’ve been at home. More risk of – ’

  ‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s say the intruder wasn’t the killer.’

  ‘But someone with his own key,’ said Charles. ‘Maybe a lover. If he saw the crime scene – it was horrific – that might’ve left him unhinged. Now he’s not the man who murdered Natalie Homer – ’

  ‘So he’s the one who did the copycat hangings.’ Mallory turned to Riker. ‘It fits with the anniversary kill, a woman with Natalie’s long blond hair. Then Sparrow – ’

  ‘Poor Sparrow.’ Riker poured the last drops of wine into his glass. ‘Nothing personal, the freak just needed another blonde.’

  On toward midnight, Mallory circled the block once more, then cut the car’s engine and turned off her headlights as she coasted silently to the curb. Her eyes were fixed on a third-floor window dimly lit by the screen of Riker’s television set. She knew what he was doing up there. He was chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping bourbon – medicine for missing his ex-wife. Every glass in the apartment might be dirty, yet she knew he would not be drinking from the mouth of a bottle.

  Riker’s rules – only winos did that.

  Mallory covertly kept him company for a while, sitting in the dark of her car, keeping watch on his window. It was the kind of thing one partner did for another – as if she could fly that high when his gun went off.

  A year had passed since the last time his ex-wife had inspired a day-long binge. Mallory had helped him stagger up all those stairs, then rolled him on to an unmade bed, where he had slept in his clothes, but not his shoes. And she had also removed his gun that night and taken the bullets away.

  He was a sorry alcoholic; that would never change. And Mallory was also constant.

  The light in the window went out.

  ‘Night, Riker.

  She started up her car and headed home.

  He would not kill himself in the dark; it would be too difficult for a blind and trembling drunk to thread his finger into the trigger. And she could not foresee him dying in the bathroom by the glow of his plastic Jesus night-light.

  CHAPTER 8

  The rear office was flooded with morning light. Charles thought the room temperature had chilled by a few degrees since he had last looked in, but little else had changed. Mallory was still averting her eyes from the paper storm on her cork wall, an anathema to someone who straightened paintings in other people’s houses. She sat at a metal workstation, but no longer communed with her network of computers. The three machines hummed amongst themselves while she leafed through Louis Markowitz’s old notebook. The only human sound was the tap of Lars Geldorf s pacing shoes.

  Impatient to begin the day, the retired detective removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, but this clue was lost on her. Occasionally, she looked up from her reading to watch his travels about the room – her room – as he inspected metal shelves stocked with electronics. Geldorf wore a brave pretender’s smile and nodded in a knowing way, though he had no idea what her machines could do. They were new, and he was old.

  She rose from her chair and approached the cork wall to stand before a haphazard arrangement of crime-scene photographs. Charles observed tension in her face, a small war going on at the core of her as she struggled with the urge to place every bit of paper at perfect right angles to the next.

  Lars Geldorf hurried across the room to join her. And now Charles understood what the last fifteen minutes of silence had been about. Mallory was teaching the old man to follow her lead. There should never be any doubt about the hierarchy in this room, and Geldorf should not call her honey one more time. Charles decided that she must like the old man, for this was the mildest and most drawn-out show of contempt in her repertoire.

  She lifted the edge of a grainy photograph to expose a small square one pinned beneath it. Then she looked under the other eight-by-ten formats in this group, each one covering a picture from an instant camera. ‘All you’ve got are Polaroids and blowups.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Geldorf. ‘So?’

  ‘Where are the originals?’

  ‘That’s all of’em, kid.’

  ‘Mallory,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Suppose I call you Kathy?’

  ‘Don’t.’ And that was a threat. ‘So there was no police photographer on the scene?’

  ‘Yeah, we had one, a civilian. But he didn’t last three minutes.’ Geldorf waved one hand to include all the images of a hanged woman, two days dead in the heat of August, an incubator of maggots. ‘The photographer got sick and dropped his camera. We couldn’t get it to work after that. So we borrowed one from a neighbor.’

  Mallory stared at a shot of the hanging rope draped over a light fixture. ‘What’s that brown smear on the ceiling?’

  ‘Bugs on their way to a meal,’ said Geldorf. ‘Cockroaches love their grease. And here.’ One bony finger pointed to another photograph depicting a large brown glob on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Roaches swarming over a frying pan.’ He squinted. ‘You see those little logs on the floor? Those are sausages and more bugs. The ceiling light was coming loose and cracking the plaster. Must’ve been a nest of’em up there. I had more blow-ups made.’

  Geldorf edged a few steps down the wall, where the medical examiner’s materials were grouped together. He perused the pictures of flies hanging with their spawn. ‘Charles? What did you do with my best cockroaches?’

  ‘They’re pinned up under the maggot pictures. Seemed like the only logical place for them.’

  ‘What?’ Mallory stared at him, clearly wondering where logic entered into this.

  Geldorf answered for him. ‘Flies are the only useful bugs at a crime scene. Roaches can’t tell you nothin’.’

  ‘Right,’ said Charles. ‘So I pinned them up under the more useful – ’ There was not much point in finishing his thought, for Mallory had tuned him out. She was staring at her nails. Perhaps she had found a flaw in her manicure that would take precedence over an insect monologue.

  She looked up. ‘Done? Good. Let’s get the roaches up front.’

  When Charles had removed the covering pictures of flies and their larvae, Mallory appraised the giant cockroaches pouring out of the ceiling and making their way down the rope to the corpse. The photo that caught her attention was a shot of the victim’s apron and a rectangular stain spotted with brown insects.

  Geldorf stepped close to the wall. ‘Looks like she dropped her frying pan in the scuffle and splattered the grease. There was a utility blackout at dusk, so – ’

  ‘No.’ Mallory looked down at the baseboard where the actual skillet leaned against the wall. She tapped the picture of the apron stain. ‘That’
s not a grease spatter.’

  Charles knew she was paraphrasing a line in Louis Markowitz’s old notebook, the words, No splash – a smear. Louis had found that observation worthy of an underscore but it was never explained until now. The two long edges of the rectangle were fairly well defined. This was not a splatter pattern.

  Mallory turned to the retired detective. ‘Natalie was cooking a meal, maybe expecting company. You interviewed her friends?’

  ‘She didn’t have any,’ said Geldorf. ‘When she was married, her husband wouldn’t let her get a job. Never gave her any money. She hardly ever left the apartment. After the divorce, I guess she forgot how to make new friends.’ He stared at the close-up of the sausages on the floor. ‘It was probably a meal for one.’

  Charles noted Mallory’s skepticism, then counted up the sausages. During a summer of utility blackouts that made refrigeration unreliable, Natalie Homer would not have purchased more food than she could eat at one sitting, and such a slender woman could not eat so many sausages – not by herself. Who was the dinner guest? He inclined his head toward the smaller man. ‘Natalie was also alienated from her family, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Geldorf. ‘A year after she got married, her sister stopped talking to her. But that wasn’t in the statements. How’d you know?’

  ‘It fits a pattern of spousal abuse. Forced dependence, isolation.’ Charles turned to Mallory. ‘Her husband may have knocked her around a bit during the marriage.’

  ‘Right again,’ said Geldorf. ‘That’s what Natalie told me.’

  Mallory’s voice was all suspicion now. ‘You talked to her?’

  ‘Yeah, of course I did. Twice, sometimes three times a week.’

  ‘I think I mentioned the stalking last night.’ Charles walked toward the center of the wall and a cluster of papers. ‘These are samples of her complaints.’ He unpinned the paperwork and handed her five stalker reports.

  ‘The trouble started right after her divorce.’ Geldorf leaned down to pick up an envelope propped against the baseboard. ‘This is the rest of’em.’

  ‘And after she died?’ Mallory stared at the thick envelope. ‘All those complaints – no leads on the stalker?’

  ‘She never saw the guy’s face,’ said Geldorf. ‘The first time she came in, we thought she was just paranoid. I mean, sure, men were gonna follow her around.’

  ‘Because she was pretty,’ said Mallory, though not one image on the wall could have told her that. In death, Natalie was grotesque.

  ‘She was beautiful.’ Geldorf bent down to the carton he had brought in that morning. He pulled out a brown paper bag and removed a packet of photographs. ‘I didn’t think these belonged with the evidence.’ He held up one smiling portrait of a young woman with blond hair falling past her shoulders. Natalie’s eyes were large and blue.

  Mallory folded the envelope of complaints under one arm, then carried the pictures to a clear section of wall and pinned them up with machinelike precision, each border exactly the same distance from the next. ‘A pro took these shots.’

  Charles agreed. The lighting was perfect, and the subject’s pose was not candid, but artful.

  ‘The photographer was another dead end,’ said Geldorf. ‘That woman was older than I am now.’

  Mallory had yet to open the envelope of complaints. She merely hefted its weight in one hand. ‘Natalie spent a lot of time in your station house. A lot of time. When you figured out that she wasn’t paranoid – what then?’

  ‘We went after the ex-husband and told him to stay away from her. He was a cool one. Never owned up to nothin’.’

  ‘And after the murder?’

  ‘We hauled him in for questioning. But he had an alibi for the time of death. He was in Atlantic City all weekend. That’s where

  he was gettin’ married to the next Mrs Homer. Jane was her name. They never left the hotel room all weekend. That’s what the staff said. But how much would it cost to buy an alibi from a maid and a bellboy? And the statement from the second wife, Jane – that was worthless. Two days married, and that bastard had her cowed.’

  Mallory was not listening anymore. She had discovered one of the stalker’s notes in a clear plastic evidence bag. She took it down from the wall and stared at a brief message penciled on thin airmail paper. The letters were painstakingly drawn in varying sizes and scripts.

  ‘All seven of’em say the same thing,’ said Geldorf. ‘We figured they were traced from magazines. No newsprint smudges on the paper. Natalie found ‘em under her door at night when she got home from work. Be careful,’ said Geldorf, as she pulled them out of the bag. ‘That paper’s really fragile, and you don’t wanna smudge the pencil.’

  Charles expected Mallory to be annoyed with this lecture on the handling of evidence, but she only stared at the paper, transfixed by the words, I touched you today.

  Geldorf never noticed her reaction. Hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, he stared at the photographs of the murder scene. ‘That kid photographer who dropped his camera – he wasn’t the only one who got sick that night. There was this young cop – the uniform who found the body – I can’t remember if it was Parris or Loman.’

  Mallory looked up from her reading. He had her undivided attention now.

  Geldorf continued, ‘We couldn’t get him back inside the apartment again. An hour later, he’s at the station house, still batting off flies and stomping his feet to shake roaches out of his pantlegs. Well, there weren’t any bugs on him – not one – not then, but he could still feel them. Oh, and the stink. You can’t take a picture of that. But you know what I remember best? I could hear it outside in the hall when I was walkin’ toward that apartment. When I opened the door – it was so loud, so many of ‘em. Scared the hell out of me.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I can hear it now. The roar of flies – thousands of flies.’

  Sergeant Riker entered the office, arms laden with the bags of a delicatessen breakfast. ‘Did I miss anything?’

  Riker lured Geldorf down the hall to the office kitchen with promises of coffee and food. After settling the deli bags on the table, he fumbled with the wrappings, hunting for a bacon-and-egg on white toast dripping with heart-attack grease. He spread the packages on a red-checked tablecloth, the only bit of charm to survive the ruthless takeover of Mallory’s machine decor.

  After writing down the delicatessen’s phone number, he handed it to Geldorf. ‘Lose this and you’ll starve.’ While he and Mallory covertly worked on Sparrow’s case, Geldorf would have to fend for himself. Charles would be no help in foraging for food around the office; on principle, the man ignored all kitchen appliances with control panels more complex than the dashboard of his Mercedes.

  ‘Deluthe should’ve made the deli run. What good is a slave if he doesn’t do errands?’

  Geldorf grinned. ‘Mallory’s got him chasing down personnel files for all the cops from my crime scene.’

  ‘Well, that should keep him occupied.’ A whiteshield in training pants would have to stand in line all day long at One Police Plaza. But Duck Boy’s report would reinforce the fiction that they were working on Natalie Homer’s murder. He handed a paper coffee cup to the retired detective. ‘I hear you’ve been working cold cases for six years. You missed the job, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, I like to keep – ’ Geldorf was facing the kitchen door when he stiffened slightly, then sat up very straight. This was Riker’s clue that Mallory was standing behind his own chair. Obviously, she had been training the help again. Every time she entered a room, Duck Boy had this same conditioned response.

  She laid a stack of paperwork beside his coffee cup. Riker leafed through the familiar forms of citizen complaints. Natalie Homer had been a frequent visitor to her local police station. This was a replay of Lieutenant Loman’s squad making a station house pet of Kennedy Harper.

  ‘There’s a big gap in the dates for these complaints,’ she said.

  Geldorf nodded. ‘The pervert gave her a breather. Two weeks later,
he was stalking her again, and he was escalating. That’s when he started leaving those notes under her door. And phone calls – no conversation, and no heavy breathing either. I think he only wanted to hear her voice.’

  Riker fished through his pockets for matches and cigarettes. ‘Was the ex-husband in town during those two weeks?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. The guy never missed a day of work at the post office. But I knew he was guilty.’

  After emptying the cigarettes from his crumpled pack, Riker hunted for one that was not broken. ‘So you never developed other suspects.’

  ‘What for? Erik Homer did it,’ said Geldorf. ‘If only the bastard hadn’t up and died on me. He had a heart attack a year after the murder.’

  Mallory laid down another sheet of paper. ‘This is the ex-husband’s statement. There’s just one line about Natalie’s son. How old was the boy when his mother died?’

  ‘Oh, six or seven. The kid’s father had sole custody. After the divorce, she never saw her son again.’

  Mallory’s eyes locked with Riker’s. He nodded, holding the same thought: Natalie’s son would be twenty-six years old today, a prime age group for serial killers. He lit a cigarette, then exhaled and watched the smoke spiral up to the ceiling. ‘You know where that kid is now?’

  Geldorf shook his head. ‘After his father died, the stepmother told me she gave the boy to Natalie’s sister – a cop hater. Zero cooperation.’

  ‘So she’s holding a grudge.’ Riker looked back at the kitchen counter, seeking something to pass for an ashtray. ‘All this time and no leads on her sister’s murder. I can’t blame her.’

  ‘Me either,’ said Geldorf. ‘But Natalie’s sister didn’t have the boy. That’s all she’d say. I figure she fobbed him off on another relative. A few months after I checked out the Cold Case file, I asked her to tell the kid that I never gave up on his mom. Then I left her alone.’

  Riker stole a glance at Mallory. Was she also wondering if Lars Geldorf had triggered a murder spree?