Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  Jack Coffey was smiling at Mallory – always a bad sign. ‘So why didn’t Sparrow bone the perp like a fish? No answer? I’ll tell you why. He rushed her in the dark. The lightbulb over her door was unscrewed.’

  Riker stared at his shoes. He knew what was coming. He had forgotten to tell her -

  ‘One more thing,’ said Coffey. ‘And you can thank your partner for this. He called CSU back to the scene to dust that bulb, and they found Zappata’s prints.’

  Riker glanced at Mallory. To the extent that she was capable of pity, that would best describe her smile and the slow shake of her head. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You found a fireman’s prints – at the scene of a fire.’

  Damn fine shot. Elegant, simple. All that remained was to have her name engraved on the winner’s cup. But Riker could see that Jack Coffey was not about to concede. The boss was smiling when he said, ‘All right, here’s my best deal. We keep the motive open -the suspect list too. But you and Riker stay on the Cold Case file.’ He splayed his hands to say, See? I’m a fair man.

  The actress hangings, old and new, would remain with their assigned primaries and their separate lines of investigation. Riker knew that was not going to change. But Mallory had poisoned the lieutenant. All day long, it would worry Jack Coffey that she might be right, that the next kill would happen on his watch.

  While Mommy drank paper-cup tea with another mother, the child had been drawn away from her and toward the sound of flies round the other side of a garbage drum. He was quite impressed by the sight of them, a living, swarming blanket over something small yet wonderfully stinky at the center of a piece of wax paper. The grass of Tompkins Square tickled his bare knees as he knelt before the frenzy of insects and wondered what they were attacking. Might their prey still be alive and twitching? Hopeful, he prodded the fetid meat, using a common stick of the sort that is issued to all boys at their birth. He found the underlying flesh to be squishy but definitely dead, impervious to pokes. Somewhat disappointed, he continued to watch the writhing mass of legs and wings and fat black bodies. The loud buzzing was really evil, quite delightful.

  The boy’s interest waned and wandered to a nearby bench and a man clad in jeans and a baseball cap. This figure was as rigid as any beast in a long parade of dead hamsters, songbirds and goldfish. He was as lifeless as the flesh beneath the flies, though not one winged thing dared approach him. The child solved this mystery as he drew closer to the bench and caught a whiff of insecticide on the man’s clothes. An open gray bag on the ground held a canister of the stuff Mommy used when she chased down lone bugs flying through the rooms of their apartment. The bag also contained a large glass jar half filled with dead dry flies and a few that were still alive.

  A collector.

  Well, now the world made sense again as the boy connected the man to the foul-smelling meat and the swarm. An excellent solution – no need to chase the flies down.

  The man took no notice of the little boy, and this was odd behavior to a child who knew himself to be the center of the universe. The man never blinked, never moved. The boy’s eyes rounded as he watched intently for some sign of life. At the end of his attention span, perhaps half a minute, he pronounced his subject dead as a dead hamster. But just to be sure, and only in the spirit of scientific enquiry, he poked the dead man’s leg with his stick.

  The corpse turned its head, and the child screamed.

  Fast mother steps came up behind him, fleshy arms wound round his small body, lifted him and bore him away. As the boy bounced with his mother’s running gait, he looked over her soft shoulder to see the dead man don a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Now the man approached the mass of buzzing flies with his insecticide can and rained down clouds of aerosol poison on the swarm.

  The young actress had won a seat on the subway by beating another straphanger to a crack between two passengers on the plastic bench. She carved a wider niche with her squirming backside and settled in for the long ride home to the East Village. After inspecting her suit jacket for battle scars, she removed one long blond hair from the lapel. The pale blue linen matched her eyes, and it was the most expensive outfit she had ever owned. Perversely, she regarded the suit as her lucky charm, though it had failed her in one audition after another.

  In dire need of distraction from the sweaty press of flesh, she balanced a new packet of postcards on her knee and penned her weekly lies to the Abandoned Stellas. She borrowed a phrase from the rack of advertisements posted above the car’s windows, New York is a summer festival.

  A canvas bag hit her in the side of the head.

  ‘Hey!’ she yelled, just like a real New Yorker. ‘Watch it!’ She looked up to see the crotch of a man’s faded blue jeans a few inches from her face. He reeked of insecticide. She lowered her eyes to the postcard and wrote the words, I love this town.

  She wanted to go back home to Ohio.

  Last year, as the family’s first college graduate, she had qualified for the traditional entry-level job of all theater majors – serving fast food to the public. And this had come as a bitter surprise to the Abandoned Stellas, two generations of tired truck-stop waitresses, impregnated and deserted before the age of seventeen.

  Grandma, the original Stella, had cashed a savings bond to send the aspiring actress to New York City, a place with no roadside diners, and more money had followed every month. The second Stella, also known as Mom, still waited on tables and sent all the tips to her daughter, the only Stella ever to leave Ohio.

  The train’s air-conditioner was not working, and Stella Small resented everyone around her for using up precious oxygen. She singled out the woman seated next to her for The Glare, a practiced stare that said, Die. The other woman, beyond intimidation, happily chomped a meaty sandwich that was still alive and moving of its own accord. Rings of onion and dollops of mayonnaise slithered from the greasy slices of bread and added a new odor to the stink of sweat and bug spray. Stella slipped the finished postcard into her purse and began to spin a new lie, this one for her agent. How would she explain losing a role to an idiot with no acting experience?

  The train was one stop away from Astor Place and home. The smelly sandwich eater got up, leaving a residue of tomato slices on the plastic seat. This prevented other passengers from sitting down, but Stella could not stand up against the press of new passengers, nor could she edge away from the scratching man seated next to her. Had she already contracted body lice? The flesh of her upper arm felt crawly, itchy. Her hand moved to her sleeve to scratch it, then touched something alive and twitching.

  Oh, shit!

  A fat black fly. And now a rain of flies fell down on her head in the numbers of a biblical plague. Incredibly, most of them were dead. Others still twitched, only sick and sluggish, crawling slowly across her lap – down her legs.

  Up her skirt! No!

  She jumped up from the bench, wildly slapping her hair and her clothes. Insects dropped to the floor around her shoes and crawled in all directions. Stella screamed and set off a chain reaction of squeals from other riders. People were trampling one another to get to the other end of the car. Dry fly carcasses crunched underfoot as she jumped up and down, trying to shake loose the bugs that were still alive and crawling up her pantyhose. Other riders joined the hysteria dance, feet stomping, hands waving, fingers flicking. One passenger accidentally dislodged a note taped to Stella’s back; it drifted to the floor as the train lurched to a stop, and all the doors opened. The small piece of paper and its message ran away stuck to the bottom of another woman’s shoe.

  CHAPTER 9

  Charles Butler stood at the center of the Special Crimes incident room, only glancing at the flanking walls, each one devoted to a hanged woman. Now the rear wall – that was fascinating. The halo of dead flies around the scarecrow’s baseball cap was definite proof of creativity. He turned to the detective beside him. ‘Seriously? Ronald Deluthe did this?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Riker diddled the controls of a small cassette p
layer. ‘I may wind up liking that kid.’

  Pssst.

  ‘Then why not stop treating him like a half-bright child?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll buy him a beer. That’s the highest honor I’m allowed to confer on a lame trainee.’ Riker raised the volume of the cassette to play a few words spoken in an empty monotone. This was the voice of the scarecrow alone in a gray landscape, a monotonous plain with no rise of emotion, no depth of despair. The only relief in this flatline existence was the ambient sound.

  Pssst.

  Charles stared at the other walls papered with handwritten notes and typed reports, fax sheets and photographs. He could perceive no order in this work of many hands and minds. ‘Can we take the paperwork back to – ’

  ‘No,’ said Riker. ‘We can’t remove anything from this room. Can’t copy it either. Coffey’s orders. So just read everything.’

  And now that Charles understood his role as a human Xerox machine, he walked along the south wall, committing the paperwork of Kennedy Harper’s murder to eidetic memory. Obviously all the autopsy information had been pinned up by Mallory. It was a small oasis of perfect alignment on an otherwise sloppy wall where neighboring papers hung straight only by accident.

  The detective walked alongside him, working the volume of the cassette player as they crossed over to the opposite wall. ‘Listen to this one more time.’

  Pssst.

  ‘Regular intervals,’ said Riker. ‘We know it’s automated. Our techs think it might be a plant mister in a florist shop or a commercial greenhouse.’

  ‘I’d rule out a workplace,’ said Charles. ‘If the scarecrow was worried about being interrupted, you’d hear that in his voice. But it’s level, isn’t it? Utterly flat.’ He listened to another sentence fragment, then – Pssst. ‘There – a breath pause. The rhythm of his speech works around the ambient sound. It’s like punctuation. I’d say he’s been living with that noise for a very long time. It might come from a machine related to health issues.’ While Charles was speaking to Riker, in another compartment of his mind, he was absorbing the text of Edward Slope’s autopsy report on a living woman. ‘Doesn’t this coma patient have a last name?’

  ‘Sparrow,’ said Riker. ‘That’s it.’

  Mallory was in the room, but Charles could not say just when she had arrived. Cats made more racket with soft padding paws. He sometimes wondered if this was her idea of fun, watching startled people jump – as Riker did when he noticed her strolling along the wall behind them. She showed little interest in the photo array of Sparrow’s nude body. Only one picture at the edge of the group attracted her, a close-up of a vicious wound on the victim’s side. The scar was an old one, a gross knot of flesh grown over a hole. Mallory closed her eyes, a small but telling gesture, and he read much into it. She had more in common with Sparrow than a paperback western retrieved from a crime scene.

  Mallory looked up to catch Charles staring at her. ‘What?’

  Pssst.

  ‘There’s something I’m curious about.’ He stepped back to the group of photographs taken at the hospital. Edward Slope’s signature appeared on the last page of notes in Mallory’s rigid handwriting. He pointed to the picture of Sparrow’s scar framed by the gloved hands of the medical examiner. ‘Evidently, Edward spent some time exploring this wound, but you didn’t mention it in any of your notes.’

  ‘It’s old history,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with this case.’

  ‘So you know how it happened.’

  Pssst.

  Riker was suddenly leaving them with uncommon speed, moving to the other side of the room, and that was the only warning that Charles had trodden on some personal landmine.

  ‘It’s an old knife wound. Very old. A waste of time.’ She ripped the photograph from the wall. ‘It shouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘But you told Coffey this woman was good with a knife.’

  ‘None better.’ She crumpled the photograph in one hand, and Charles could see the bright work going on behind her intelligent eyes.

  Because he was handicapped with a face that could not run a bluff in a poker game, most people wrongly assumed that he could not tell when he was being lied to. Mallory never made that mistake. He guessed that she was simply wondering what half-truth might be most misleading.

  ‘It wasn’t a fight,’ she said. ‘Sparrow never saw the knife coming.’

  ‘So she had a blind side?’

  ‘No!’ She wadded the photograph into a ball, then rolled it between her palms, making it smaller and smaller. ‘Yes.’ And now her voice was smaller too. ‘You could say she was blindsided by a joke.’ The little ball of paper disappeared into her closed fist. ‘Sparrow was laughing when he did it to her.’ And while Charles was watching this little magic show, her other hand flashed toward him, and he was lightly stabbed in the chest by one red fingernail.

  ‘And now you can forget the scar,’ she said to him, ordered him. ‘We’re clear on that?’

  Oh, yes, the threat was very clear. Mallory crossed the room with long strides. She could not leave him fast enough. Charles wished she had slammed the door on her way out; that would have told him that she was merely angry, that he had simply annoyed her. But that was not the case; he had damaged her somehow. There would be no more mention of Sparrow’s scar, not ever, for he sensed that it was also Mallory’s scar. However, the photograph was locked in his memory. He could not let go of it, and now it began to grow, attracting other bits of paper, a fifteen-year-old receipt from Warwick’s Used Books, an inscription to a child on the title page of a western. When had Mallory witnessed that piece of violence?

  If one truly wanted to maim a human being for life, it was best to start when the victim was very young – ten years old?

  Now that the field was clear of explosives, Riker was strolling back to him, folding a cell phone and saying, ‘Okay, Charles, you got your wish. I gave Duck Boy a real job. He’s taking the old man on a field trip – an interview with the cop who found Natalie Homer’s body. Are you happy now?’ Hardly.

  At the top of the page, Ronald Deluthe had identified the interview subject as the first police officer to enter Natalie Homer’s crime scene. During a testy silence, he wrote down a careful description of Alan Parris’s apartment, noting worn upholstery, cracked plaster and all the dust and grime of a man who had hit bottom before the age of forty-two.

  Parris’s personnel file had listed only the dry statistics of a short career with NYPD, but the garbage pail overflowing with beer cans indicated a serious drinking problem. The sink in the galley kitchen was piled high with dirty dishes and one cracked teacup with a delicate design, perhaps something the man’s ex-wife had left behind when the marriage ended twenty years ago – only a few months before Natalie Homer’s death.

  Alan Parris’s T-shirt was stained; his boxer shorts were torn; and dirty toenails showed through the holes in his black socks. The man was so underwhelmed by the interview style of Lars Geldorf that he appeared to be nodding off.

  No, Alan Parris was drunk.

  ‘You’re lying!' Geldorf paced the floor and raised his voice to rouse the man from lethargy. ‘I know one of you bastards leaked the details. It was you or your partner. Now give it up!’ The old man leaned down, bringing his face within inches of Parris’s. ‘Don’t piss me off, son. You won’t like me when I get mad.’

  All the incredulity that Parris could muster was a small puff of air escaping from pursed lips, a lame guffaw. He kept his silence, showing remarkable patience with the retired detective and his ludicrous threats.

  Lars Geldorf s promised anger was unleashed, and Deluthe took faithful shorthand, recording every obscenity. The old man finally succeeded in triggering Parris’s temper. And now the four-letter words were flying both ways as Deluthe’s pencil sped across the page of his notebook, not resting until Geldorf stomped out of the apartment.

  This was Deluthe’s cue to pull out his list of prepared questions. The script Geldorf had outlined for h
im was reminiscent of days in uniform and visits to elementary schools in the role of Officer Friendly. ‘Just a few more questions, sir.’ He gave Parris a lame smile, and the man rolled his eyes just as the schoolchildren had done. Another tough audience.

  Screw Geldorf.

  Deluthe dropped his smile, then folded the paper and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘What about neighbors? Do you remember anyone in the hall near the crime scene? Maybe there was a – ’

  ‘It was a long time ago, kid.’ Parris leaned down and moved a newspaper to one side, exposing a beer can crushed and discarded after some previous binge. He upended it over his open mouth to catch the last drops of flat warm liquid.

  Though the ex-cop showed no sign of anxiety, soon he would be eager to get to a liquor store and replenish his supply of booze.

  ‘Take your time,’ said Deluthe. ‘I’ve got all damn day for this.’ Now he had the man’s attention. ‘I saw the photographs of the crime scene. If it was me, I couldn’t have forgotten anything about that night.’

  ‘You got that right, kid. But I never talked about the murder. The leak didn’t come from me.’ Parris stared at the front door left ajar, then raised his voice, correctly sensing that Geldorf hovered on the other side. ‘And you can tell that old bastard – it wasn’t me he posted outside in the hall. It was my partner] Maybe somebody got by him.’ His voice dropped to a mumble. ‘But I couldn’t say for sure. Harvey never talked about that night, either – not even with me. We worked together for years, and we never talked about it.’

  ‘If your partner was posted at the door, then you were inside the apartment the whole time.’

  ‘No – only a few seconds. I’m the one who found the body. God, the smell. It was enough to knock a man down. When I went home that night, it was still in my clothes, my hair. I can smell it now. I can still feel the cockroaches crawling up my legs. And the flies – a million of ‘em. Jesus’

  ‘So you closed the door and waited for the detectives and Crime Scene Unit?’