Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘Naw. The way that woman was hanging, I couldn’t see the tape on her wrists. Me and Harvey figured it for a suicide. Like I said, I was only in there a few seconds. Suicides don’t rate a visit from CSU. The dispatcher only sent detectives.’

  Deluthe flipped back to notes of yesterday. ‘Wasn’t there someone else on that scene?’

  ‘The photographer? Yeah, he came with the dicks – just a kid. Younger than me, and I was only twenty-two. He got sick and dropped his camera – broke the damn thing. So I borrowed another one from a neighbor. Then the dicks sent me out to buy more film. I think I made two runs to the store that night.’

  ‘Did your partner mention any civilians around the crime scene while you were gone? Harvey – ’ Deluthe checked his notes, as if his own lieutenant’s name might be easy to forget. On Riker’s orders, no one would be apprised of the case connection to a command officer. He put his finger to a blank page. ‘Loman, right? Harvey Loman? Was he outside the door the whole time?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, no. When I got back from the store, he was down the hall settling a beef with some old lady.’ Parris paused for a moment, then covered his eyes with one hand. ‘Awe, what the hell.’

  Deluthe’s pencil hovered over his notebook. ‘What?’

  ‘There were two kids right outside the door – real young, a boy and a girl. Harvey – he never saw them. Well, the door was open ‘cause of the smell, and those kids got an eyeful before I chased them away. That always bothered me. Probably gave them nightmares. I felt bad about it, sure, but I had no – ’

  ‘So your partner lost control of the crime scene. He screwed up. And you didn’t want him to get in trouble, right?’

  Parris’s head lolled on his chest, as if he could no longer support the weight. ‘Geldorf, bad as he is now – he was worse in those days. He would’ve nailed Harvey’s hide to the wall for letting those kids get past him. That old prick still thinks he’s God. I hate detectives. No offense, kid.’

  ‘Did the kids see the hair in the victim’s mouth?’

  ‘Yeah, they saw everything. The body hadn’t been cut down yet. The dicks were still shooting pictures.’

  Neither of them had heard the door open, but now Lars Geldorf was standing on the threshold. The old man was smiling, and Deluthe could guess why. The retired detective was relieved that another cop had lost control of the crime-scene details. And now no one could ever say that this major screwup was his fault.

  Pssst.

  Charles Butler studied the stalker’s notes to Kennedy Harper. By comparison, the old ones left for Natalie Homer were almost poetry. He turned to Riker. ‘Did you tell Deluthe to ask if Natalie’s door was locked when the police arrived?’

  ‘No, Deluthe can’t ask about that, and I’m hoping Alan Parris won’t volunteer anything.’ Riker turned off his cassette player. ‘We have the old statement from Natalie’s landlady, and she says that door was locked.’

  ‘I’m sure it was when she called the police. But when they arrived – ’

  The detective put one hand on Charles’s shoulder. ‘If the door wasn’t locked when the first cop showed up, then eight million New Yorkers had access to the crime scene. That makes it hard to narrow it down to a boyfriend with his own key. The district attorney won’t like that if the case goes to trial. You see the problem?’

  Charles nodded absently. He was still preoccupied by the difference in the notes. ‘The man who killed Natalie Homer loved her obsessively. He crushed her windpipe with his bare hands – an act of passion. I rather doubt that he made a habit of it. Emotionally, the scarecrow is his polar opposite.’ He tapped the autopsy report on Kennedy Harper. ‘And the date – an anniversary murder suggests long-term planning. The man who did this was only obsessed with the act itself. A hanged woman, a few dozen candles, ajar of flies – all props. The scarecrow decorates his stage and goes away. It’s that cold. Oh, and he’s quite insane.’

  ‘Suppose we bypass a jury trial?’

  ‘Wise decision.’

  ‘What are the odds of getting the scarecrow to confess?’

  ‘Nothing easier. All you have to do is catch him. He’ll tell you everything he knows. In fact, he’s doing that right now, but no one is listening.’ Charles unpinned the plastic bag containing a bloodstained note. It was disconcerting to see that the scarecrow’s rigid printing so closely resembled Mallory’s.

  ‘You analyze handwriting?’ asked Riker.

  ‘No, sorry, I don’t do voodoo.’ Charles turned the bag over and showed Riker the deep grooves on the back of the paper. ‘If his pen had pressed down any harder, he would’ve torn the paper. I suppose you could read frustration or anger into that.’

  ‘He staked that note to a woman’s neck with a hatpin – a live woman. Yeah, I’d say he was angry.’

  ‘Oh, the rage is limited to his penmanship. It wasn’t directed at Kennedy Harper. I don’t think he expected her to feel any pain from the hatpin. She was an object – a bulletin board. But I think he definitely has issues with your people. He had to know she’d head for the nearest police station. This note was meant for you.’ Charles crossed over to Sparrow’s wall and stood before the photographs of the coma victim. ‘A recent razor slash on Sparrow’s arm – I’m guessing that’s an escalation because the police clearly were not getting his message. Incidentally, why didn’t she report that assault?’

  ‘Because she had a whore’s rapsheet. Sparrow didn’t think the cops would care. And she was right about that.’

  Riker handed a cup of coffee to Charles, who must be uncomfortable at the small table built for people of normal size. But the man had wanted privacy, and there was no more secure room than the one that housed the lock-up cage. ‘We can finish this up at your place if you like.’

  ‘No, I’m fine, really.’ The man sipped from his cup and pretended to find the brew passable. ‘Just one more question.’

  ‘Shoot.’ The detective turned a chair around and straddled it, bracing his arms on the wooden back. ‘Anything you want.’

  ‘I gather Louis took an interest in Kathy some time before the night he brought her home. When exactly was that?’

  Riker’s blood pressure soared, but he had to smile. Brilliant, Charles. A police station was the perfect location for stressful questions. But this time the truth was harmless. ‘This is just between us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Late one night, a social worker turns up in the squad room. Now Lou owes the woman a favor, so she begs him to find this kid – a very special kid. I guess Kathy was nine, almost ten. She used subway tunnels to get around town, but she didn’t always ride the trains. Earlier this same night, the kid played a game of chicken with an engineer in the tunnel. She stood on the track till the train was almost on top of her. At the last possible second, she jumped out of the way.’ Riker’s own private theory was that the child had wanted to die that night.

  ‘She almost gave this poor bastard a heart attack. So now the engineer’s afraid she’ll electrocute herself on the third rail. He calls out the Transit cops, and they block off the tunnel. Six of those clowns couldn’t catch one little girl. She laughed at them. So now the social worker arrives. This woman walks into the tunnel and rounds up the kid in two minutes flat. You know how she did that? Kathy walked right up to her, this tall blonde – ’

  ‘Like your friend Sparrow.’

  ‘Yeah, and the kid was real happy to go anywhere with this woman. Kathy even held the social worker’s hand while they were filling out paperwork at Juvie Hall. So the kid’s in custody. She’s been cleaned up and fed, all settled in for the night. But now the social worker goes home and leaves her alone in that place. Well, no tall blonde – no Kathy. The kid left five minutes later, and the guards never figured out how she got away. She was their only escapee – ever.’

  ‘Sounds like she picked up bad habits from the Wichita Kid.’

  Riker froze. How long had the door been open? How long?

  Jack Coffey stood
on the threshold, saying to him, ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

  And then, as if Charles Butler knew how dangerous the westerns were, he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  When Riker returned to his desk in the squad room, an old friend was waiting for him. There was nothing in Heller’s expression to say that he had good news or bad, for he was the king of deadpan. He held up a business card. ‘You know this guy, right?’

  Riker took the card and read the name aloud, ‘Warwick’s Used Books’. His stomach knotted as he eased into the chair behind the desk, and his mouth was suddenly dry. ‘Yeah, I interviewed him.’

  Heller slowly swiveled his chair, turning away to look out the window. ‘John Warwick came in while I was here, and Janos palmed him off on me. So this little guy’s all excited. He waves a newspaper in my face. Then he goes into a ramble about some paperback book. He doesn’t ask – he tells me I found it in Sparrow’s apartment. Says he knows I found it – and he wants it back. Seems the hooker stole it from his store an hour before she was hung.’ He turned back to face the desk and the sorry-looking detective. ‘Warwick says you’ll vouch for that ‘cause you took his statement.’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’ Riker tapped the side of his head, a gesture to say that the bookseller was not quite sane. ‘The paperback probably went into the fire, but I didn’t tell that to Warwick.’

  ‘I told him,’ said Heller. ‘And you’re right – he is nuts. The little guy broke down and cried. I guess that book was pretty important to him – and Sparrow.’

  ‘I guess.’ Riker was recalling his suit jacket all buttoned up – very fancy for a sweltering crime scene. And Heller, a man who could do a postmortem on a dead fly, would have noticed the damp spot on the breast of that jacket – and every other detail of that night in Sparrow’s apartment.

  Heller looked down at an open notebook in his hand. ‘Warwick says the title is Homecoming, by Jake Swain.’ He looked up. ‘But I figure you already knew that.’

  This man had run cops off the force for stealing trinkets from crime scenes. If Heller developed a case for tampering with evidence, he would prosecute in a New York heartbeat, no exceptions for friendships that spanned twenty years. They stared at one another, and the silence went on for too long.

  ‘After Warwick left,’ said Heller, ‘I went back to the lab and sifted through ashes and fragments. Some of the magazines were intact, but no sign of a paperback. Now that’s strange – even with the age of the book, the brittle paper. You’d think the core would’ve survived, a good chunk of pressed pages. There are tests I could run. You want me to keep on looking?’

  Riker slowly shook his head, and this must have passed for a confession.

  Heller nodded, then ripped the sheet from his notebook and dropped it into a wastebasket. ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of it.’ With no goodbye, he rose from his chair and crossed the squad room to the stairwell door.

  Riker knew he would keep his badge for lack of physical evidence to hang him – but this man was no longer his friend. And that was what Heller had dropped by to tell him.

  Cafe Regio on MacDougal Street was filled with the metropolitan babble of foreign languages. Charles Butler looked around the large single dining area crammed with people, paintings and eclectic furnishings. He spied an acquaintance at a corner table.

  Anthony Herman was a child’s idea of a pixie, not quite five feet tall, with a small bulbous nose and pancake ears sticking out at right angles. His light brown hair was swept back to display a pronounced widow’s peak, a sure sign of witchcraft, though his true profession would seem rather boring to most. The little man nervously adjusted a red bow tie while doing his best to hide behind a menu, though it was long past the dinner hour.

  When Charles sat down at the table, the antiquarian book dealer handed him a package wrapped in brown paper and said, ‘That’s the whole set. Don’t open it here.’

  A very generous check crossed the table and found its way into Herman’s pocket. The little man looked around, as if the other late night diners might be watching this exchange and making notes or taking blackmail photographs. His toes just barely reached the floor to tap it, and his fingers rapped the table. ‘If you ever tell anyone I was tracing those – ’

  ‘I know,’ said Charles. ‘You’ll hunt me down and kill me. Your reputation is safe.’ He set the package of books on the table. ‘How did you find them so fast?’

  ‘There’s a collector,’ said Herman. ‘Well, hardly that – not at all discriminating, but the man’s a repository of every western ever written. I had to go to Colorado. That’s why the bill is so high. The books didn’t cost a dime. I won them shooting pool with a rancher who thinks that crap is high art.’

  While Charles was grappling with the odd idea of Anthony Herman as a pool hustler, the man added, ‘The rancher also has first editions from the penny-dreadful era. If you want them, you go shoot pool with the old bastard.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you read any of these novels?’ Charles watched Herman’s eyes grow a tad fearful. ‘You did read them, didn’t you?’

  ‘I might’ve glanced at one on the plane.’ The little man’s mouth dipped down at the corners, silently intoning, What a question, making it clear that he was hardly the type to read this sort of trash, and his client should know better.

  Charles opened the package, despite the book detective’s sudden violent shaking of the head, begging that he not do this in public. After leafing through a chapter of the first volume, he smiled at Herman, another great speed reader, for this was a talent that went along with the trade of manuscript comparisons. ‘Light stuff, isn’t it? Lots of white space. How long was the plane trip? Three or four hours?’

  ‘All right.’ Herman bowed his head. ‘I read them. All twelve.’

  ‘I’m sure you had other reading material with – ’

  ‘It’s your fault, Charles. I just had to know why you wanted them so badly. Then I got caught up in the whole thing.’

  ‘They’re not very good, are they?’

  ‘No. The writing is awful, the plots are thin. Very bad – very – all of them.’

  ‘But you read the entire series.’

  ‘Don’t do this to me.’

  ‘So what did you think of the resolution to the ambush?’

  ‘Oh, that was the best.’ Herman’s sarcasm was surprisingly light, and his face had gone suddenly sly. ‘No, wait. The best one starts in The Cabin at the Edge of the World. In the previous book, the Wichita Kid was bitten by a mad wolf. The animal was frothing at the mouth, the whole nine yards.’

  ‘But there was no rabies vaccine in Wichita’s century.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Herman, no dilettante in the field of history. ‘Rabies was a death sentence in that period.’

  ‘So he’s cured with a folk remedy,’ said Charles. ‘Something like that?’

  The little man’s smile was coy. ‘No, that’s not it.’

  ‘Well, I know he’s alive in the last book, so he can’t possibly die of – ’ Charles leaned back in his chair and smiled, for he had just exposed himself as another victim of Jake Swain. ‘Touche.’

  And now – a turnabout.

  He spread the books over the table for all to see, then studied the lurid covers of smoke and guns and rearing horses, much to the discomfort of Anthony Herman. ‘I know someone who thought the world of these novels. She read them over and over. Now that you’ve had a chance to evaluate the lot of them – any helpful insight?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Herman seemed honestly mystified. ‘The only reason for reading any of them is to find out what happens next. I assure you there’s no reason to read them more than once.’

  ‘There has to be more to it than that.’ Charles gathered the westerns into a stack, then looked up at the book detective. ‘So what’s it all about?’

  ‘Ultimately,’ said Herman, ‘it’s about the redemption of the Wichita Kid.’

  Riker had finished his first drink by the time he came to th
e end of the written interview. The detail was fanatical, right down to Alan Parris’s dirty toenails. ‘And all this conversation – this is word for word?’

  ‘I take shorthand.’ Deluthe sipped his beer, then tried to make his voice sound casual when he asked, ‘So what’re my chances for getting a permanent assignment to Special Crimes Unit?’

  ‘Today? Slim and none. You got no experience, kid.’ Only a handful of detectives were ever promoted to first-grade, and ten of them were in Special Crimes Unit. ‘We don’t take whiteshields. And you’re what – twenty-five, twenty-six? Most of the guys are in their thirties and forties. We only got one cop your age.’

  ‘And coincidentally Mallory is the daughter of the former commander of – ’

  ‘You’re out of line, Deluthe. She grew up in Special Crimes Unit. When she was still in grammar school, she logged more time on the job than you’ve got.’

  ‘He’s right.’ Their bartender had been introduced to Deluthe as Riker’s former partner from younger days. Peg Baily leaned into the conversation to replace Riker’s empty glass with a fresh bourbon and water. ‘That kid was our only technical support. In those days, we had crappy secondhand computers. Didn’t work half the time. The kid got the whole system up and running when she was thirteen years old.’ Peg set down a beer for Deluthe. ‘But you’re wondering how Mallory got the rank of detective first-grade. She chased down the perp who murdered her old man. Highest-priority case in New York City. That’s getting ahead the hard way.’

  Peg Baily wandered down the bar to fill another glass, and Riker completed the trainee’s education, giving equal weight to every word, ‘Nobody ever questioned Mallory’s right to a place in Special Crimes.’ As he leaned toward the younger man, his face relaxed into a smile. ‘Now, as the son-in-law of a deputy commissioner, you’ve got a lot more to overcome.’

  ‘Suppose I divorce my wife?’

  ‘It’s a start.’ Riker pulled a wad of papers from the pocket of his suit jacket and slapped it on the bar. ‘This is your background check on the cops at Natalie’s crime scene. We already had this information. Mallory pulled it off the computer. Took her two minutes.’