‘You didn’t expect Natalie to be home that night,’ said Mallory. ‘She was always at work when you stopped by with your love letters. She caught you leaving that last one under her door. That’s why the boy didn’t hear any conversation before you killed his mother.
How could you explain a thing like that?’
Riker was on his way through the door, saying, ‘I’ll tell the boss it’s a wrap.’
And Mallory continued, ‘He said his mother reached for the frying pan and dropped it. Then she tripped and fell. That’s when she hit her head on the stove. She was out cold, but you thought she was shamming. You pulled her through a puddle of grease, and then you rolled her on her back.’
Were Geldorf s eyes a little wider? Yes.
‘She was coming to,’ said Mallory. ‘Were you afraid she’d scream? Is that why you wrapped your hands around her throat and crushed the life out of her?’
Jack Coffey was standing in the doorway. ‘Is that when you panicked, old man?’ He walked into the room and tossed a pad of paper to Mallory. ‘That’s Loman’s statement.’
Geldorf craned his neck to read the upside-down lines of longhand on the top sheet. ‘Loman? The other – ’
‘Alan Parris’s ex-partner.’ Riker strolled into the room, smiling. ‘He rolled over on you, Lars. He claims you tried to bury this case, concealing evidence and – ’
‘I was protecting my evidence!’
‘Well, it’s your word against his.’ Mallory looked up from her reading. ‘And he’s a lieutenant.’ Though Loman’s statement was worthless, only repeating Geldorf s own story of misleading reporters, she said, ‘And that’s it. We’re done.’
Coffey cleared the evidence from the desk, sweeping it into the carton, packing up the debris of the day. The lieutenant paused to hand her a slip of paper. ‘I don’t recognize this witness.’
‘That’s the landlady’s granddaughter, Alice White. She saw a man steal the rope and duct tape out of the handyman’s tool chest.’ Another lie, another nail. ‘She’s on the way in for a photo ID.’ Mallory picked up the photograph of Geldorf and casually dropped it into the box. ‘She’ll testify that Natalie’s son was in that apartment for two days. Just his dead mother for company – and the flies, the roaches. No wonder that little boy went psycho.’ In an echo of Susan Qualen, she said, ‘Who do you call when a cop kills your mother? The cops?’ She turned to Geldorf ‘He told us the buzz of the flies was deafening, but he was only six years old. I guess the noise got louder as he got older.’
‘You have the right to remain silent,’ said Riker, pulling out his Miranda card, preparing for the last formality that would allow their suspect to call for a lawyer.
They were cutting the timing very fine.
Mallory snatched the card away from her partner and handed it to Geldorf. ‘Look, it’s been a long night. You know all the words. Just sign the damn thing, okay?’ She held out the pen, and Geldorf accepted it like thousands of felons before him. So natural to take an object when it’s offered. But now he only stared at the card.
Planning to lawyer up, old man?
In a preemptive strike, she slapped the desk. ‘Sign the card! Bring on the lawyers!’
They were coming to the closing shots – almost done, for Geldorf must realize that no deal was in the offering, and this was the sign of a case with abundant evidence. He began to shrink, shoulders slumping, hunching. His hands were rising, as if to beg. ‘I loved that woman. I grieved for her. Natalie was – ’ He had lost his train of thought, his reason; he had lost everything. The old man bowed his head, and Mallory strained to catch the mumbled words, ‘I was a good cop once. That’s worth – something.’
She stared at him, incredulous. ‘You were expecting a deal?’
‘I don’t care if he was a cop.’ Jack Coffey lifted the carton and feigned impatience. ‘We’re not gonna offer him any – ’
‘It’s my case.’ Mallory turned to Geldorf. ‘I know what you’re thinking, old man. All that embarrassment to the department. And saving the city the cost of a trial – that should be worth something, too, right?’
Geldorf nodded.
Jack Coffey dumped the carton on the floor, saying, ‘Keep it simple, Mallory. I’m not giving him the moon.’
She leaned forward, eyes trained on Geldorf. ‘This is the best deal – the only deal you get. The state won’t request the death penalty. No cameras, no media circus, and the real story never leaves this room. If you waive a trial, we can probably get the DA to push your arraignment through night court – quietly.’ In fact, the arrangements had already been approved. Sentencing would follow in the morning. ‘All the standard perks for an ex-cop, and you’ll do fifteen years in prison.’ A life sentence for a man of seventy-five.
She pushed a yellow pad across the desk. ‘Make up any version you like. Call it a crime of passion. Say you once loved a woman to death. You’ve got six seconds, old man. Take it or leave it.’
‘Time’s up!’ Jack Coffey’s fist came down on the desk, and Geldorf jumped. ‘Now we book him. Right now!’
Lars Geldorf picked up the pad of paper, and his hand trembled as he began to write out his confession.
Mallory followed her partner across the squad room, not willing to let him out of her sight, not yet. He was one of few people who mattered to her, but that did not mean she trusted him. Riker sat down at his desk far from the pool of fluorescent light. The ember of his cigarette glowed in the dark as he dropped his match in a dish of paperclips.
‘How’s Sparrow?’ This was a test. According to her paid informant, a nurse, Riker called for updates every hour. ‘It’s almost over,’ he said, ‘just a matter of hours.’ Mallory bit back a comment that he would not like, and they sat in uneasy silence for a while, watching his smoke twist and curl. ‘You wanted Sparrow’s case so bad,’ she said. ‘Just keeping faith with a snitch? Or maybe you thought Frankie Delight’s murder would come back to bite you.’ She wanted it to be one of these two things, something cold, less personal.
Riker shrugged. ‘There was more to it, but that’s between me and Sparrow.’ He rose from the chair and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I’m heading back to the hospital. I wanna be there when – ’
‘No you don’t,’ said Mallory. ‘I know she’s out of the coma. You weren’t planning to tell me that, were you?’ Mallory stared at him until he met her eyes. ‘It’s my turn at Sparrow.’
What a kick in the head, huh, Riker?
After all he had gone through on that whore’s account, now he must stand back, virtually handing a helpless woman over to her worst enemy. And yet he could not raise a challenge. Her claim on the dying prostitute was so much stronger than his.
He nodded, and their deal was done.
Mallory watched from the window on the street until Riker emerged from the building. Reporters converged on him with cameras and microphones – star treatment. Sergeant Bell came running out the front door to rescue him with a press release of lies, waving the paper as bait. After the mob had deserted Riker for fresh meat, he stepped into the street and let two cabs go by unhailed, for he was a man with nowhere to go from here.
A lamp switched on at the back of the squad room. The chief of Forensics sat in a small patch of light, hands folded, waiting.
Spying, Heller?
The criminalist stared at her across the span of five desks. How much had he overheard? As Mallory strolled toward him, she could see that his eyes were red and sore from lost sleep.
‘Warwick’s Used Books.’ He simply put these words out in the air between them, then solemnly awaited her reaction. Mallory was stunned and feeling threatened. He misunderstood her expression. ‘So Warwick was a suspect. I knew it.’
Mallory settled into a chair beside the desk. Dancing with this man was a tricky business, but she would not admit that she was mystified. ‘I can’t give up any information on him.’ Always best to mix lies in equal parts with the truth. ‘The scarecrow wasn’t Warwick.
Does that help?’
Heller’s face lifted and brightened, flesh deepening in the folds of a wide grin. ‘Well, I guess you won’t need this.’ He handed her a sheet of paper. ‘Too bad. I called in a lot of favors to get it.’
She scanned the brief synopsis of a psychiatric history: As a child, John Warwick had stood accused of murdering his twin sister. An eyewitness had cleared the boy, but not before the police had spent six hours wrenching a false confession from a terrified eight-year-old grieving for his twin and crying for his mother. Gangs of reporters had stalked the family, increasing the trauma of a guiltless child. And John Warwick had spent the rest of his childhood in a mental institution, clinging to the fictions of cops and newspaper headlines, irretrievably lost in deep pain and unable to believe in his own innocence.
She dropped the bio sheet on the desk, unenlightened and unimpressed. From what she remembered of the bookseller, he was not capable of killing even one of the thousand flies left at each crime scene. This connection of Heller’s was so pathetic. Something had clearly gone awry in his good brain. And this foray into Warwick’s past was outside the scope of Forensics.
Mallory smiled, for she was always happiest in the attack mode. ‘You shouldn’t have messed in our business, Heller. If Warwick had been a solid suspect, you could’ve queered everything.’
‘I had to know,’ he said. ‘That bastard Riker couldn’t trust me to keep the book quiet. It should’ve been recorded on my evidence log.’ There was no animosity in Heller’s voice – far from it. He was one happy man.
The book.
Mallory was making linkages at the speed of a computer. Her machine logic flickered and faltered, for the paperback western had shown no trace of damage from the fire or the hose. Yet this book must be what Riker had snatched from the watery floor of Sparrow’s apartment. And his other gift to her was the innocent deniability of a crime. He had risked everything to hide a dangerous connection between a whore and Markowitz’s daughter.
‘Homecoming,’’ she said, ‘by Jake Swain.’
When Heller nodded, Mallory knew this man had solid proof against Riker, and no machine logic could have guided her to the next conclusion: her partner was Sheriff Peety in a bad suit.
Riker commanded such deep respect that no one could believe him guilty of a corrupt act, not even when guilt was proven beyond doubt. And Heller, of all people, had been unable to believe his own evidence, for how could Riker steal anything? The criminalist had denied his own religion of all-holy fact. He had stepped a hundred miles out of character to doggedly hunt down proof of Riker’s innocence where none existed. And Heller had actually found something that looked the same, that shined like truth -though it was only faith.
Without another word between them, they left the stationhouse and parted company on the sidewalk. And there the young detective continued her silence as she endured a civilian’s tight embrace and oft-repeated thanks. Mallory stepped back and stared at the smiling face of the next and final victim of the man who killed Natalie Homer. Susan Qualen had believed the press reports that her sister’s only child was still alive.
And so the damage of a twenty-year-old murder would not end tonight. It would drag on well into the morning hours. Following Lars Geldorf s rushed arraignment and sentencing, Natalie’s sister would be quietly told that the police had killed her nephew after all – with a baseball bat.
‘So sorry, ma’am,’ Jack Coffey would say.
CHAPTER 24
When Charles closed his tired eyes, he saw a tiny thief who ran with whores and lived by guile, surviving on animal instinct to get through the night – an altogether admirable child. Louis Markowitz’s hero.
‘Charles?’
His heavy lids flickered open, and Kathy grew up before his eyes. She was so lovely, and he wanted to tell her that, for how else would she know? The tragedy of Kathy Mallory was some malady that had no name but was akin to an aspect of vampirism. This sad insight had come to him by simple observation. She did not look for herself in mirrors, nor in the reflections of shop windows, never expecting to find herself there. He turned to the antique looking glass above his mantelpiece. Literally a magic mirror once used in a stage act of the last century, it was full of wavy lines and smeared realities.
‘Charles!’
‘Yes,’ he said, without turning round.
‘I want you to keep an eye on Riker tonight.’ Mallory walked back and forth across his front room, impatient with a cell-phone caller who had put her on hold. ‘You’ll find him in that cop bar down the street.’ She was still in motion as she resumed her phone conversation. Red designs in the weave of the mirrored carpet seemed to track the floor behind her.
Charles stared at the ancient glass, his gigantic nose, her wonderful eyes. He was fascinated by her form elongating and twisting, her legs bending back to form the hocks of a padding cat. Beast and Beauty were trading places. The reversal went far beyond their positions in the backward space of the mirror room, where she continued to walk to and fro. Her human face was gone, distorted and stripped down to the bestial aspect of Mallory in the panther cage, badly wounded by her life, elegant paws bleeding as she paced. She bore the scars, he felt the pain. How insane -
‘Charles?’
The SoHo saloon was crowded with cops and one civilian. Charles Butler had lost his jacket and tie somewhere between one death and another. His white shirt was wrinkled, sleeves rolled back, and his face was showing the wear of long days broken by catnaps.
Riker stared at his own tired image in the mirror behind the bar, then quickly looked away, saying, ‘Thanks anyway, but I’m taking a cab tonight. So pull up a glass. I hate to drink alone.’ Of course, this was a polite lie, for the detective did his best binge-drinking all by himself.
Charles obliged him and ordered two rounds of Chivas Regal. ‘So Sparrow is dying. And you’re not going to the hospital?’
‘No.’ He prayed that Sparrow would be long dead before an old enemy turned up.
Awe, Mallory, what a gift you have for payback.
It made her the ultimate cop. She was the paladin everyone wanted, a perfect instrument of vengeance. In Riker’s view, people should be more careful about what they wished for. Absent all humanity, its bias and fragility, the law was a sociopath.
Their drinks had appeared on the bar in front of them, and Charles had been left hanging again, awaiting some explanation for this failure to visit the deathbed of a whore. Riker cut the man off before he could ask one more time. ‘So tell me, how did Sheriff Peety outdraw the Wichita Kid?’
‘The usual way. The other man drew his gun too late.’
‘Impossible,’ said Riker. ‘Drunk or sober – even with the damn sun in his eyes – that gunslinger was the best man.’
‘Yes, if you mean faster. And that day – ’ Charles’s eyes were in soft focus now, and Riker knew he was projecting book pages on his cocktail napkin and quoting verbatim when he said, ‘ „That day, the gunslinger was a young god, walking out of the whirlwind of dust, growing larger, step by step. His birthright was dominion over all other men.“‘ He shuddered, then tipped back his shot glass, as if to kill a bad taste. ‘Terrible prose. You’re right – Wichita was fast with a gun, but Sheriff Peety was bigger.’
‘What?’ And now Riker was left to dangle while his barstool companion sipped his drink, taking his sweet time. Charles’s expression worried him. It was almost a Mallory smile.
‘A hero bigger than life. Your words, Riker. Well, he was Wichita’s hero, too – always had been. The boy loved the man. So you might wonder – did Wichita deliberately draw too slow? Or did he lose that gunfight in his own mind before he drew his weapon? Perhaps, at the end, he still believed that Sheriff Peety was a great man, the better man. Maybe that’s how the sheriff won… Or maybe it was a suicide.’
‘Thanks, Charles. That might drive me nuts for another fifteen years.’
‘Happy to return the favor.’
Riker recogniz
ed his own twisted signature in this exchange, and he smiled with the grace of a good loser. ‘Okay, you get one free question. Anything you want. Shoot.’
‘You said Kathy was posthumously charged with arson and murder.’
‘Right.’
‘Though she didn’t die, and she didn’t kill anybody. But I’ve still got a corpse and a fire. Does this have anything to do with why Mallory hates Sparrow?’
‘Yeah.’
Charles waited for the rest of the explanation. And he waited. Now the two men engaged in a contest to see who could outcreep whom with the most insipid smile.
Riker broke down first. ‘Okay, this is the deal. It took me a long time to piece this story together. You can’t repeat it to anyone. And when I’m done, you’ll wish I never started. Kathy Mallory’s death is gonna drive you crazy till the day you die.’
‘Word of honor, I’ll never tell.’
‘Charles, are you sure you understand? When you know the truth, you have to eat it.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Some of it’s guesswork.’ Only two people knew the real story. One was a gifted liar, and the other was a dying whore with a scrambled brain. ‘Fifteen years ago, Sparrow did a drug deal with a really scurvy character. She was trading stolen VCRs for heroin.’
‘The VCRs that Kathy stole?’
‘Yeah. So the hookers told you about the great truck robbery? Well, I’m guessing the drug dealer picked the location for the meet, a place with boarded-up windows and no back door. No neighbors either. The buildings on both sides were torn down, and this one was due for a midnight demolition.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The owner was planning to torch the place for the insurance money. He had accelerants stashed on every floor, kerosene, paint thinner. But that came out later – after the fire.’
‘The fire that killed Kathy?’
‘That’s the one. I figure this dealer – ’
Crime School Page 36