Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘So that assignment was just busywork.’

  Riker ignored this statement of fact and spread the sheets flat on the bar. ‘This is only worthless because you took a computer spit-out, something a clerk gave you over the counter. Now a look at the original files – that might’ve turned up some dirt. But you can still learn a lot from the official fairy tale. I’ll teach you how to read the disappearing ink.’ He put the first sheet aside, saying, ‘There were five cops on the scene, three dicks, two uniforms. Four of them left the precinct in a group. That’s a stand-out fact.’

  ‘I saw that,’ said Deluthe, defensive now. ‘But it had nothing to do with the murder. That was six years later.’

  ‘But all in the same four-week period. That tells you Internal Affairs was all over that copshop.’

  ‘There are no charges on their records, nothing to say – ’

  ‘Deluthe, I told you this was a fairy tale. Now do you want your bedtime story, or do we call it a night?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Just drink – quietly.’ Riker’s finger moved across the lines of text. ‘So, one of the uniforms, Alan Parris, was fired for insubordination. Now that’s bogus. You’d have to shoot a sergeant to get fired on a charge like that.’ Riker turned to the next page and the next man. ‘The week before that, his partner, your boss Harvey Loman – he gets reassigned to another precinct. That tells you Loman rolled over on his partner to cut a deal with Internal Affairs.’

  He moved on to another sheet. ‘Here we got one detective who resigned to take a job in the private sector. The real story? They forced him out. Not enough proof to hang him. This guy’s next job was cleaning out toilets. He drank himself to death years ago.’

  Now the final sheet. ‘And here we have one more dead detective, a suicide. So, dead or alive, four out of five men leave the department at the same time. The man who shot himself was probably looking at jail time. That means he was the last one to give it up, but there was nobody left to rat on. If he hadn’t died, he would’ve been the sacrifice, the cop who went to prison.’

  Of course, Riker was cheating. The nest of shakedown artists in that stationhouse had been the worst-kept secret in NYPD. ‘Your interview with Alan Parris only looks good on paper. The two witnesses – the little kids in the hall? Parris gave you a lot of convincing details, but nothing to help you find them. That story could be smoke. So Parris goes on the short list.’

  ‘But the FBI profiles for serial killers – ’

  ‘And that’s another fairy tale,’ said Riker.

  The remainder of Stella Small’s night was a self-imposed blur. She was using rum concoctions to drown the image of a subway full of dead and dying flies and stampeding passengers. Another hour had ended in yet another crowd. On the next bar stool was a tourist in a T-shirt emblazoned with the city motto, ‘I love New York’.

  New York sucks.

  The young actress’s sinuses were clogged with cigarette smoke, and she fancied that she could still smell the insecticide from the

  subway fiasco. Her head was swimming in rum, and the world swirled around her. Perhaps it had been a mistake to order drinks decorated with paper parasols. But she was not up for the humiliation of tears in a room full of out-of-towners, and the booze, so much tastier than Valium, kept her eyes dry.

  One of the customers slammed into her back as he moved toward the men’s room. Stella turned to yell at him, but he was lost among a gathering of drinkers.

  Damn tourist.

  Another patron took advantage of her distraction to cop a feel of one breast. Stunned for a moment, she spun her stool around too late. The man who had sat beside her was gone, lost in the crowd. Stella laid her head down on the bar and knocked it twice against the wood.

  I will not cry, I will not cry.

  And she did not. She gathered up her house keys and left the bar. Haifa block down the street, she noticed a man who was definitely on a mission, marching in the perfect parade-time of a soldier. No – more like a toy soldier, so mechanical, all springs and levers. Mimicry was her art, and she employed it now, stiffening her limbs to follow the marching man.

  When he arrived at the broad avenue, he turned left, then stopped, and so did Stella. By the better light of a street lamp, she could see the gray gym bag in his hand. This was the bastard who had cupped her breast in the bar.

  The mechanical man turned sharply on his heel, suddenly changing his direction. Stella saw the spinning red light before she reached the avenue where two police officers were padding down a teenager pressed to the hood of their car. She turned to look for the wind-up man and found him escaping, marching off in double time, afraid that she would report him as a deviant. Well, that was a small victory, but one to savor.

  A few minutes later, she was fitting her key into the door lock, though she had no memory of having climbed the stairs to her apartment. Her blue linen blazer was neatly folded over one arm. Miraculously, the material was unmarked despite the subway panic, the rain of flies and the assault of the mechanical pervert. It had come through the day-long odyssey stain-free and hardly wrinkled – certain proof that the suit was magical.

  Stella opened her front door and walked into a muggy wall of heat at least ten degrees higher than the outside air. Her one-room apartment had the decor of student housing with mismatched furniture dragged off the street one step ahead of the garbage truck. And all the houseplants had succumbed to neglect, even the artificial varieties. Never once dusted, her plastic ivy had taken on the gray color of authentic death.

  She stepped out of her skirt, then clipped it on to a hanger with her blazer. When her lucky suit was in the closet and out of danger, she switched on the air-conditioner and stood in the cool breeze as she stripped off her blouse. Before she could toss it on the couch, which was also her bed, she noticed the black ink stain on the white material, a large X made with a thick marking pen.

  Weary beyond belief, the actress whispered somewhat insincerely, ‘I love this town.’ What was she doing here? She stared at the family photograph on the wall, and the Abandoned Stellas smiled back at her. Gram and Mom were so hopeful for her prospects far from the roadside diner and the randy, fertile truck drivers, the fathers of them all.

  Stella held up the blouse, shaking her head in deep denial, as if this might make the big black X fade away. She sank down on the couch, then cradled her head in both hands and cried, finally releasing the day in tears.

  Had a fellow thespian done this to her during the morning cattle call? The blouse had been fully exposed when the actors were herded into the waiting area. She had put on the blazer just before walking onstage to deliver her lines to a casting director.

  No, most likely the vandal had been in that crowded subway car. Was he the same freak who had unleashed the downpour of dead and near-dead insects? Maybe he had been one of the local barflies in the last crowd. Yes, the tourist who had slammed into her back to distract her while he mutilated her only good white blouse.

  ‘Creep.’ Her other suspect was the pervert who had cupped her breast. ‘Creep number two.’

  She wadded up the shirt and dumped it in a wastebasket lined with a plastic bag. And now, since it was trash night, she picked up all the stray bits of debris around her one-room apartment. She held her nose before braving the door of the refrigerator, knowing the smell of rancid milk would make her vomit. And there were other horrors growing on the wire shelves, unidentified critters with coats of furry fungus, abandoned bits of fruit which had crawled off to die in the back of the box. But she never attempted the door to the freezer, for there an arctic winter had settled in to seal half a package of peas in a block of ice, preserving it for future generations.

  All the rest was swept into the trash bag, a major job and an important step in making a fresh start. There was another audition tomorrow, and her lucky blue suit had come through the day unscathed.

  A good omen.

  The X on the discarded blouse was now covered with rotted
garbage, solidified milk, bottle caps, candy wrappers and deli containers. Stella never saw the folded note in the garment’s small breast pocket; it was lost in the clutter of her life. And so she never read the words, I can touch you any time I want.

  CHAPTER 10

  The early morning temperature was eighty-two degrees, and the East Villagers were already showing some wear as they moved down First Avenue in the rush-hour traffic of wheels and feet.

  The tour guide stood at the front of the bus beside the driver. Microphone in hand, she pointed out the more colorful examples of New Yorkers in the wild. However, most of the Finnish tourists were fixated upon one specimen; though this man was clad in the common uniform of T-shirt and jeans, he stood out from all the rest. His torso and head appeared to be made of one rigid piece of wood, and his hands swung by his sides to the beat of a metronome – tick, tick, tick. He carried a gray canvas bag, but its weight never hampered the synchronous movement of both arms, and every step was of equal length and speed, never slowing to avoid other people on the sidewalk, never deviating from a straight line.

  For the past hour of gridlock, the bus passengers had been bored out of their minds. Their translator had taken sick this morning, and the American tour guide had not yet grasped that they neither spoke nor understood English, except for the word tourist and a few helpful obscenities. Now they crowded together on one side of the vehicle, their sense of expectation heightened as they watched the strange man moving down the sidewalk.

  Something was about to happen.

  The traffic was beginning to move again, and the bus kept pace with the wooden man, following him as he turned a corner and marched down a side street. Most of the other pedestrians moved out of his way, but two smaller people collided with him. Their bodies yielded to the impact – his did not. Crossing Avenue B in advance of the bus, the man kicked a dog, but not in anger. The spaniel was simply in the way of his foot. The animal’s owner yelled at him, and he passed this woman by, blind to her raised fist and every living thing in his path.

  He pivoted neatly to march in front of the bus, and the driver slammed on the brakes. The riders smiled in unison. Finally, something of interest – a near-death experience.

  The Finns moved to the windows on the other side of the bus, and every pair of eyes followed the man’s progress to the opposite sidewalk, where he took a baseball cap from his gray bag and pulled it low to shield his face. Then he reached into his pocket for the giant I-Love-New-York button and pinned it to his T-shirt. He moved through a crowd of people, pushing them out of his way without raising a hand, walking into their bodies, never seeing or hearing them, and they fell off to the side with angry shouts and obscene gestures.

  The Finnish tourists heard a loud bang, and some of them ducked, for they had seen entirely too many movies about New York and its heavily armed residents.

  The man stopped, and so did the bus. It knelt down on one blown-out tire as the driver muttered a word for defecation and frustration. The tour guide cautioned her disembarking passengers not to wander off before the replacement bus arrived. Even if the Finns had understood what she was saying, her warning would have been unnecessary, for they had no intention of going anywhere.

  They formed an audience on the sidewalk, and, behind the safety of their sunglasses, they watched the wooden man. He stood near the door of an apartment house. A fence of bars protected a tiny courtyard and a bed of daisies gamely growing in the heat. The man moved closer to the iron gate. He opened his canvas bag and pulled out a camera, then stared at his wristwatch.

  The Finns understood that he was also waiting for something to happen. They waited with him, watching him between the bodies of pedestrians marching toward the subway. Except for the large souvenir button on his T-shirt, many of the commuters were dressed in the same casual clothes, but the wooden man could not quite blend in with real life.

  He glanced at his watch again, and the tourists nodded to one another. It would not be long now.

  The man turned his entire body to face the door in the courtyard fence, and twenty pairs of Finnish eyes were looking over his shoulder.

  Beyond the iron bars, a red door flew open. A slender blonde crossed the small courtyard with a fast click of white high heels. Her blouse was also white, and the pale blue skirt matched the garment slung over her arm. The young woman opened the iron gate and hurried to the curb, one hand raking through her long hair, combing it on the run. She lifted a waving arm to fish a cab from the stream of traffic.

  The Finns stared at this attractive woman, wondering if they should recognize her from television or the cinema. They wanted her to be an actress, for they had not seen one celebrity in the past two days.

  After donning sunglasses, the man moved toward the pretty blonde as a tight group of pedestrians passed between them. The sun glinted off a piece of metal when the man lurched forward through the press of bodies and collided with the young woman.

  She yelled, ‘Damn tourist!’ And the twenty Finns were startled, but took no offense.

  The man pointed his camera at her. Some reflex made the woman toss her hair and pose for him with a smile. A cab stopped, the blonde stepped in and rode off, never noticing what the wooden man had done to her.

  The show was over. The man moved on. And the Finnish tourists looked the other way. In the best tradition of New York City, they had elected not to get involved.

  The cab was trapped in midtown traffic, and Stella Small’s anxiety was climbing with every dime on the meter. She banged on the bulletproof glass that separated her from the driver. Of course, he would not turn around. What was the point? He spoke no English, and Stella knew that when she yelled, ‘There won’t be any ransom! I’m dead broke!’

  The turbanned cabby nodded to assure her that they would be moving soon. He was very polite, more proof that he was not a native New Yorker.

  She looked down at her watch for the third time in as many minutes, and she was still late.

  ‘Okay, you win!’ She waved money so the man could see it in his rearview mirror. After paying him, she stepped out of the cab two blocks from the hotel. Her pale blue blazer was carefully folded over one arm to protect it from soot and the droppings of low-flying pigeons.

  She was swept up in the crowd of pedestrians and moving along the sidewalk at a fast clip. Two women walking toward her were actually slowing down, completely misunderstanding the concept of rush hour. And now they were breaking the prime law of survival in New York City, going beyond dangerous eye contact to overt staring. Stella wondered if they had recognized her from a recent walk-on part in a television soap opera.

  Dream on, babe.

  An old man stopped to gawk at her, and Stella smiled for him.

  Yes, it’s me, the famous actress with no speaking roles.

  She was attracting hard looks from everyone she passed. A middle-aged couple stopped to point at her, their mouths working in silence, obviously starstruck. The daytime soaps must be more popular than she had supposed.

  Don’t you people have regular jobs?

  The actress pushed through the hotel door and walked into an icy wall of machine-made air. Near the entrance, a bored young man never even glanced her way. He plucked a sheet of paper from his stack and waved it in her general direction. A woman near the closed doors to the ballroom was calling out the names that began with R. Stella Small sighed – saved by her rank in the alphabet.

  She donned her suit jacket and joined the other actresses in an area roped off for the cattle call. None of these women paid any attention to her. Each pair of heavily made-up eyes was glued to a line of script on the hand-out sheet. Stella looked down at her own sheet. One line, six words. How much study did that require?

  She stood near the wall behind a potted fern, away from the press of other bodies, determined that no one would wrinkle her lucky suit or stain it. When her name was called, she entered the ballroom beyond the great doors and stood before a long dais decked with bottles and
glassware, paperwork and food trays. On the other side of the linen tablecloth, the casting director and producer were seated in the company of assistants. Before Stella could even say her line, these men and women were all agog, eyes popping. She flashed them with her best smile. They were dazzled, riveted, stunned – though still awaiting her first word.

  The actress felt a slick of something wet on her hand and looked down at a long thick line of blood seeping through the sleeve of her blazer. Inside the casing of linen, more blood was rolling down the skin of her arm and dripping off the tips of her fingers.

  ‘I hate it when this happens.’ Line delivered, though it was the wrong line, Stella Small closed her eyes in a dead faint, and the back of her head met the hardwood floor.

  Green curtains formed three walls of the emergency-room cubicle, a thin layer of privacy for the young couple. Stella Small’s legs swung from the edge of the metal examination table, and the physician’s smile was shy as he treated her wounded arm.

  The doctor’s head snapped to one side, suddenly distracted by a shadow looming close to the flimsy curtain. Though the silhouette was all wrong, Stella instantly recognized this scene from the movie Psycho. One shadow hand was on the rise, reaching higher, higher, and then – the green curtain was violently ripped to one side. And now the startled young doctor was staring at a stout woman with a pyramid of dark hair and a long black dress that flowed like a nun’s habit.

  Stella had always suspected that her agent could smell fresh blood from great distances. Martha Sutton was a formidable woman, a drama queen extraordinaire and scarier than real nuns.

  ‘Nice entrance.’

  ‘Oh, Stella, Stella.’ The woman’s gleaming eyes appraised the lacerated arm and the bright red stains on her client’s clothing. ‘You look marvelous!' In agentspeak, this meant publicity worthy.

  The young doctor turned back to his chore of irrigating a long thin wound. ‘I think we can get away without stitches.’ He applied a few small bandages shaped like butterflies. ‘It’s a clean cut – very shallow. But I don’t see how a camera could’ve done this. Even if a piece of broken metal was – ’