Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  ‘Oh, that’s the sublet, all right,’ said Mrs White. ‘You never see him without that bag of his.’

  Mallory turned her eyes to the ceiling, as if she could see through all the floors of the building. ‘Is there a back exit?’

  ‘We have a door to the backyard.’

  ‘That’s it? No fire escape?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So if he wanted to get out, he’d have to – ’

  ‘You’d see him out there in the hall,’ said John White, who now finished sentences for the detective as well as his wife.

  ‘Give me your keys.’ Mallory held out her hand. ‘Now!’ Later, she would not remember screaming at this man to make him move faster. ‘Keys!’

  When Deluthe regained consciousness, his hands were bound. He tried to lift his head. A rope was pulling tight around his neck, and his body bucked against the heavy weight of the man on top of him.

  No breath. Eyes bulging, heart hammering.

  Panic was magnified to monster-size primal fear. His legs kicked out, then thudded on the floor. His struggles ceased. His prone body was lighter now. Head swimmy, muscles relaxing, fear gave way to euphoria, and he closed his eyes. The heavy weight that had straddled him was suddenly lifted, and gravity ceased to hold his body down. He floated up into an ether of midnight black.

  All sensation ceased.

  The door closed. The room was dead quiet.

  Riker yelled, ‘Yes, you can go faster! You’re with a damn cop!’ Charles pushed the gas pedal to the floor and never flinched at the near miss of a cab and now a truck coming out of a side street. The detour was a long one, twisting round the gridlock traffic of a broken water main on Houston. They were driving ten miles of bad traffic to travel one as the crow flies.

  CHAPTER 21

  The landlord had disobeyed a direct order to remain downstairs with his wife. He had silently followed Mallory to the top-floor apartment, and now it was too late to threaten the man – and unnecessary. John White quickly backed down to the lower landing when she drew her.357 Smith and Wesson, a cannon among revolvers. She favored it above all others for its drop-dead stopping power.

  Pssst.

  The door was ajar by the crack of a bare inch. She kicked it dead center, and it flew back with a bang and the sound of plaster crumbling where the knob had crashed into a wall. Fresh wet blood was splattered across the rug, and some of it stained a baseball bat. Mallory only glanced at the body on the floor. Ronald Deluthe had a rope knotted around his neck. She entered the apartment, aiming her gun at every piece of furniture that might give cover to the scarecrow. The bathroom was empty. She kicked open another door – no one there.

  Upon returning to the front room, she found John White crouching on the floor and holding the wrist of the fallen detective.

  Deluthe’s left arm was twisted in an unnatural attitude. His nose was smashed to one side and still gushing blood, the only sure sign of a beating heart and life.

  ‘I’ve got a pulse,’ said White, ‘but it’s thready.’

  Mallory knelt beside the unconscious man, then put one finger between the rope and his neck. It was a tight fit. His oxygen had been completely cut off, but his lips were not yet blue. The scarecrow could only be a minute away.

  John White was also working at the rope, but to a different purpose; he was trying to clear the man’s air passage, saying, ‘I was a volunteer paramedic back in Wisconsin.’

  Mallory was not listening, nor did she watch as White performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She stared at the open closet and its contents for a moment, then reached down and ripped back the lapel of Deluthe’s suit jacket. His shoulder holster was empty.

  The scarecrow has a gun.

  She was rising, moving quickly toward the door and the inconvenient obstacle of Alice White. Mallory pushed the woman aside, shouting, ‘Call 911!’

  ‘I did. You told me – ’

  ‘Call again). Tell them an officer’s down!’

  The last staircase at the end of the hall would lead her to the roof, and Mallory was running toward it. She had climbed to the door at the top of the stairs when she heard a scream from the apartment below. Apparently, Alice had noticed the moldy corpse on the floor of the closet.

  Riker spoke into his cell phone, ‘Repeat that. An officer down?’

  Charles was pulling over to allow an emergency vehicle to pass, when the detective yelled, ‘Follow that ambulance!’

  *

  Mallory’s revolver preceded her through the door of a small rooftop shed. Her eyes had not yet adjusted to brilliant sunlight when she took aim at the sound of footsteps. And now, in perfect focus, the profile of a young girl’s head was lined up with the muzzle of the gun. The teenager had not yet seen the detective or the weapon, but she was shaking, and her face was a study in dumb surprise as she bolted for the rooftop door.

  Mallory rounded the shed to see the back of a man’s bloodstained shirt and jeans. He used Deluthe’s gun to shade his eyes from the overhead sun. There were scratches on his face, the work of Stella Small. The scarecrow’s right arm hung useless at his side, and she guessed that Deluthe had also done some damage before he was taken down.

  Only steps away, a smaller man with carrot-red hair was huddled on the tarpaper ground amid a wash of white linen pulled down from a clothes line, perhaps in the belief that wet sheets could protect him from bullets. On the other side of a low brick wall that separated one roof from the next, an elderly woman tended a coop of carrier pigeons. She was deaf to the whimpers of the little man in the sheets and blind to the one with the gun.

  At the sound of a nervous giggle, Mallory glanced back over one shoulder to see the children standing behind her, three boys in staggered sizes, and these television babies showed no fear of either weapon.

  The scarecrow was facing her now, dazed and weaving. Blood dripped into one eye from a gash in his brow.

  A massive head injury – a bonus.

  She could hear the children creeping forward to watch the show. None of them had the sense of sheep to get out of harm’s way. Mallory left her back vulnerable when she whirled around and yelled, ‘Get inside!’ Her gun produced no effect on the boys, but her eyes were promising something nasty if they did not move and right now.

  They shrank back behind the shelter of a door made of wood, not fire-code metal. Bullets would rip right through it. The smallest child had been left behind. He was walking between the guns.

  Thou shalt not get the sheep killed.

  That had been Louis Markowitz’s prime rule and Mallory’s hardest lesson, for it tied into a bizarre concept: when she pinned on the badge, she agreed, if need be, to die for the sheep. This had been a difficult pitch to a child of the streets, who possessed an ungodly instinct for survival.

  But a deal was a deal.

  The scarecrow’s gun hand extended slowly. Mallory’s finger touched lightly on the trigger. She could drop him any time she liked, but fast as she was, he might get off one round. His every movement told her he was not left-handed. The shot would go wild.

  One dead sheep.

  All the children were targets, the one in the open and the two behind the door. Or he might blow away the pigeon lady, or the little man under the sheets. Mallory lowered her revolver to end the threat that would make him fire.

  His gun slowly drifted toward the shed where the children were hidden but not protected. In sidelong vision, Mallory caught the motion of a wind-whipped flowery dress before she saw a terrified woman creeping toward the lone boy in the line of fire. Mother courage. The woman gathered the little boy into her arms, and the scarecrow paid no attention to her running backward with the child. His eyes were fixed on Mallory. His gun hand was on the rise.

  She was faster. In a stunning flash, the muzzle of her revolver pointed at his eyes. ‘You really want this bullet, don’t you?’

  The threat was meaningless to him. This was not the cornered animal she had anticipated, but something even more dan
gerous. Perversely, she raised her revolver high to aim at the noonday sun, and then, pushing perversity to the nth degree, she taunted him, saying, ‘I know more about your mother’s death than you do.’

  Magic words.

  His gun was lowering, buying her time to reassess his injuries. The right arm was certainly broken. All his weight listed to the right leg, and she knew the left was about to fold. One eye was clotted with blood, and one eye was attentive as he awaited the rest of her story.

  Just like the old days -just like a whore.

  ‘And I even know what you did that night.’

  The scarecrow’s one clear eye flickered with surprise. His left leg buckled, but he remained standing. He seemed unaware that he was aiming at the shivering pile of wet laundry. The little man in the sheets ceased to cry and laid his head down in a faint.

  And the scarecrow was still waiting for his story.

  ‘You found one of the stalker notes,’ said Mallory. ‘You found it on the floor the night she died.’ She had guessed right. He was nodding. ‘And you had a lot of time to read it – two days and two nights. Flies in your hair, roaches crawling in your clothes. The stove burner was on. The heat was suffocating.’

  His gun was getting heavier, and his aim was drifting again. The old woman was his accidental target. He was tired in every part of his body and tired of his very life. Yet Mallory held his attention. ‘You were in the bathroom when he came to kill your mother.’

  The pigeon lady was oblivious to the weapon, but her birds were restless, sensing tension in the air as a threatening storm. Their wings batted against the wire doors of the cage, and a shower of downy white feathers drifted from the coop in an eerie August snowfall.

  Mallory walked toward him, slow stepping. ‘You heard something.’ She circled around him, drawing his body and his gun away from the old woman. ‘You opened the bathroom door – just a crack. The man was bending over your mother.’ Now she was positive that he had not seen his mother strangled to death. The six-year-old child had believed that his mother was still alive while he watched a man mutilate her and hang her. If a fireman and a doctor could not tell the living from the dead, what chance did a little boy have?

  The pigeon lady was on the move again. Mallory kept track of her in peripheral vision. The old woman crossed the roof, walking into the line of fire to pick up a heavy bag of birdseed.

  Mallory backed off softly, slowly.

  Easy now.

  A hand tremor made his gun shake. He was sliding into profound shock and aiming from the hip.

  ‘You watched him hang her – without a sound, no screams. She never – ’

  His head was shaking in denial.

  Impossible. Mallory knew she could not be wrong about this part. Yes, she was right. She had simply not pushed this idea far enough. ‘You never made a sound. You -just – watched.’’

  The man’s head tilted to one side, as though some supporting string had been cut. His face contorted into a soundless scream, and the blood-clotted eye cried red tears. He was bleeding inside and out.

  The birds were screaming, wings in a racket, beating the wire of the coop, frantic to get away.

  ‘You watched that bastard kill your mother! You let him do it to her!’ Of course he did – only six years old, traumatized and paralyzed, and now she played to the guilt of the innocent child. ‘You never called for help. You never even tried to stop him.’

  The doors of the pigeon coop flew open and dozens of birds escaped before the wide eyes of their keeper. In tight formation, they flew across the roof in a roar of wings and cries, diving close to the scarecrow, then veering upward. His eyes were wild, following the flight of birds into the sun.

  ‘You couldn’t reach her up there on the rope.’ Mallory could see him as a small, shivering boy, crying to his mother, no clue that she was dead. ‘How could you leave her – if she was still alive?’

  He dropped his gun and never noticed its loss. On the next roof, the pigeon lady stared at the sky, arms fluttering in her own attempt at flight.

  ‘After two days – the bugs and the heat – you couldn’t take any more. You left your mother all alone in the dark. You knew what the insects were doing to her when you closed that door and walked away.’

  His bad leg buckled, and he folded to the ground like a piece of collapsible lawn furniture. And there he made a stand of sorts, on his knees, as though his legs had been cut to stumps. Mallory stepped closer to kick his gun, sending it flying to the far side of the roof.

  He was helpless. Both eyes were open now and looking in on some interior hell. She knelt down before him, facing him in the position of prayer. He raised his head a bare inch. Later, she would remember his eyes with an imagined film of dust, as though he had already been dead for some time – for years and years. It would have been a kindness to put a bullet in his skull – an act of mercy.

  Resurrection time.

  In the absence of kindness and mercy, she planned to rebuild him as her only witness to the murder of Natalie Homer. ‘I know it was a cop who killed your mother. And you’re going to help me nail that bastard. It’s revenge you want, and I can get that for you.’

  No, that was not what he wanted, never what he wanted. Mallory could see her error now, a very bad mistake.

  Natalie’s son was waiting for his bullet, staring at the revolver with a great hunger. He had foreseen this moment long ago as a little boy in the heat of August, waiting so patiently to be punished. And he had laid this out so clearly in the mad restaging of a crime that he believed was his alone. Three hangings, one endless shriek, Catch me! Kill me! He had even warned his victims and sent them into the arms of the police as his messengers, extensions of a scream.

  Mallory could see all the way to the bottom of his madness, the rest of the damage done to a small child. ‘You thought your father sent you away – because he blamed you.’

  No response. The scarecrow was shutting down what remained of his mind. Mallory tried to touch him, and he shrank back, a reflex that she understood too well. Her hand froze, suspended in the forbidden act of reaching out. She was always clutching air – touching no one. Yet she tried again, gently grazing his battered face with the tips of her fingers.

  A shadow blocked the sun. She heard the sick sound of the bat cracking his skull, breaking it open. There was time to catch him in her arms, and they fell together.

  Ronald Deluthe stood over them, listing to one side. The baseball bat dangled from his right hand as he sank to the ground, where he sat bolt upright, legs splayed out, his eyes slowly closing.

  The scarecrow’s weight was on top of Mallory. His blood was on her face and in her hair. As she lay beneath the corpse, only her eyes were moving, slowly turning to Ronald Deluthe. She watched as his upper body pitched forward and his head hit the dusty tarpaper between his spread legs.

  Mallory had lost her weapon. Her gun hand absently stroked the scarecrow’s hair, then came away with bits of red bone and flesh. But how could this be? She had yet to tell him how his mother had really died – that there was nothing he could have done to save her.

  *

  Charles Butler’s Mercedes pulled up in front of the apartment building and double-parked alongside a row of police units and their spinning red lights. An ambulance was at the curb, where two men in hospital whites stood beside an empty gurney.

  Riker was the first one out of the car, yelling, ‘What happened? Where’s the wounded cop?’

  ‘It’s my fault!’ An unnerved civilian rushed up to him, arms waving, as if this might help to gather his thoughts. ‘I’m sorry. I thought he was unconscious. I just took my eyes off the poor man for a minute. My wife was feeling a bit queasy, and I thought she was going to faint. You see, she saw the body in the closet. And when I looked back – well, the man was gone.’

  Riker barreled through the shed door, gun drawn, eyes going everywhere. He saw the little redheaded man rolling in wet sheets and moaning. On the neighboring roof,
a confused old woman was staring up at the sky where her lost birds had gone.

  He found Deluthe beside the shed, slumped over and holding a baseball bat in a one-handed death grip. Mallory lay a few feet away – underneath a corpse.

  More sirens were coming, and she listened to them, as if from a great distance of miles and miles. The scarecrow’s flesh was deceptively warm, and so was his blood. It dripped from the broken skull to soak her and stain her.

  Riker rolled the heavy weight off her body and met with some resistance, for Mallory’s hands were pressed to the dead man’s face – still trying to make human contact.

  CHAPTER 22

  Civilian conversations blended with the static of radio calls from police units, and yellow tape cordoned off the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. An ambulance and a meat wagon were parked at the curb, side by side, doors hanging open, awaiting the living and the dead. The man from the medical examiner’s office zipped up the body bag on his gurney. A cigarette dangled from his mouth as he accepted a light from the homicide detective. ‘Dr Slope’s standing by to crack the old man open. So what’s the story on the other corpse?’

  ‘There’s only one dead body,’ Riker corrected him. ‘This one.’ He looked down at the remains of George Neederland, the missing department-store watchman.

  The ME’s man looked up to the sky and a departing police helicopter. ‘Your guys just took another body off the roof. What’s the – ’

  ‘Repeat after me, pal. There’s only one dead body at this crime scene.’ Riker turned to see another reporter approaching the police barricade. Nearby, a news van was unloading pole lights and camera equipment. He turned back to face down the meat-wagon man. ‘One body. If the press hears a different story, Dr Slope’s gonna fire your ass. I’ll make sure he does.’

  In a less threatening mode, Riker turned to thank Alice White for the wet washcloth she pressed into his hand. He grabbed Mallory by the arm and forced her to stand still while he cleaned the red smears from her face. Then he stepped back to appraise the rest of her stains. ‘Damn, you look worse than Deluthe. You’re sure none of that blood belongs to you?’