False Negative (Hard Case Crime)

by Joseph Koenig

  “The Barrens are a million acres of wilderness smack in the middle of New Jersey that might as well be West Virginia. The locals have been cut off since colonial times. You’ve heard about the Jukes and Kallikaks the scientists studied for the effects of inbreeding?”

  “What have they got to do with murder?” Pelfrey said.

  “I’m giving you local color.”

  “The hell with color,” Pelfrey said. “Who’s dead?”

  “A cranberry grower, name of A.B. Tyler. He lived in a shack his great-grandfather had put up on stilts by his bog. When berries weren’t in season he got by as a trapper and a hunter.

  “Tyler was thirty-seven when he married,” Jordan went on. “His bride was fifteen. A.B. was content with his berries and his trap lines. When Mrs. Tyler complained, told him she wanted to step out, he took to clouting her. At least that’s what the lawyer says.”

  “You haven’t told me about the killing yet, and I know who did it.”

  “I can have the cops scratching their head before they get onto her,” Jordan said.

  “Mrs. Tyler anything to look at?”

  “I’d go without pictures of the suspect,” Jordan said.

  “Strike two.”

  “Let me finish,” Jordan said. “Mrs. Tyler had a young man on the side in Wading River. When she began shirking her matrimonial responsibilities, A.B. slapped her around more than usual. They were all alone in the woods, no cops, nearest neighbors miles away. Mrs. Tyler decided the prudent thing was to kill A.B., and make it look like something else.”

  “What something else? An accident?”

  “Act of God.”

  “Keep religion out of your stories,” Pelfrey said, “unless one of the principals is of the cloth.”

  “October’s harvest time,” Jordan said. “The growers flood the bogs to loose the berries from the bushes. Then they rake them up and pack them off to the Ocean Spray co-op. It’s back-breaking work, leaves them bone-tired.

  “A.B. came home from the bog one night and threw himself down on the bed. When Mrs. Tyler heard snoring, she cracked his head with a skillet, and looped a clothesline around his throat till he quit breathing. Mrs. Tyler is not a large woman. She couldn’t carry her husband out of the shack to bury him in the woods, couldn’t even move him out of bed. What she did, she built a fire under him, made it look like he’d been smoking in bed. She figured the flames would burn up the cabin, and destroy any evidence of murder, and she’d be in Wading River when news of her husband’s unfortunate death caught up to her.”

  Pelfrey said, “But?”

  “Did I mention that A.B. had flooded his bog? He must have had a seepage problem, because some of the water ran off into a depression under the shack, and collected there.

  “When Mrs. Tyler saw the place going up in smoke, she cleared out without looking back. What she didn’t take into account,” Jordan said, “was the fire burning through the floor. Cops found the bed in the water under the shack with A.B. toasted on one side, and with rope marks around his neck and his brains out the top of his head. The widow’s staring down a life sentence.”

  “Twenty years tops,” Pelfrey said. “New Jersey’s a progressive state. She’s still a kid.”

  “Getting around the fact that Mrs. A.B. Tyler is not a handsome woman, what I have in mind is a compelling love triangle story. Are you interested?”

  “You’ll need pictures of the cabin, the victim, and some cops,” Pelfrey said. “Don’t bother about the suspect, if she’s the dog you say she is. Describe her as being unconventionally beautiful.”

  “I’d be lying.”

  “You’d be exercising good judgment. The readers trust that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—namely ours. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have what to fill our books. Ever get to New York, Jordan?”

  “When Billie Holiday’s on Fifty-second Street, or Bird—Charlie Parker is.”

  “I like your work. Next time you’re in town, come by the office. Lunch on you. Meanwhile, stop wasting time on the phone. I’m dying for copy.”

  Jordan called Pix Pixley, told him to get the shots.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the prison movies that were Morris Wing’s favorites before he went away the gates swung shut with a resounding clang whenever a convict was let out of stir. For sixteen-and-two-thirds years Wing had been waiting for that sound at his back. But after breakfast on his release date he was brought through the administration building to an exit as inauspicious as a crap-house door. What he heard were hinges that needed oil. The warden was not there to remind him to keep his nose clean. Not a single guard shouted See you soon.

  Beyond the shadow of the walls the river ran clear and blue. There was never a time, glimpsing the Hudson through the bars, that Wing hadn’t dreamed of crashing out. How he would make good on his escape was not detailed. He saw himself in the water, swept along in the current. Wing’s dreams were short on specifics until he was in New York with a knife in his pocket.

  The old bus was one of the few things on the street that looked the same. The sleek cars without running boards and headlight cowlings were designed for the people in sharp clothes going around with a spring in their step, a far cry from the Great Depression, when Wing was sent up. He was nineteen then. Nearly middle-aged now, he felt old. Little in this new world seemed as it should be, least of all himself. The only thing that hadn’t changed was his hatred for the man who’d ruined his life.

  Two cons from Wing’s block sat at window seats and pressed their face against the glass. Wing shut his eyes. He didn’t want to be distracted by new things. The way he figured it, the bus ride was the first leg on a round trip. The new things would create appetites that would frustrate him when he was on the inside again.

  Wing was first off the bus at the terminal near Times Square. The newsstands were crammed with girlie magazines in full color. Flipping through one, he was surprised by how much skin they showed. A redhead with huge jugs was on the cover, and when you unfolded her picture in the center you even got a look at her nipples. Wing replaced the magazine in the rack. Big jugs were something he’d struggled to forget about in prison. No sense in stoking an appetite for them either.

  Real Detective had gone modern, too. Painted covers of jewel thieves in evening attire had given way to photos of molls in tight sweaters. The pictures looked like news shots, but Wing was doubtful. Sweater girls didn’t need guns to make a killing. He opened a copy to the contents page. Although the editorial offices had moved uptown, the name at the top was still Ed Pelfrey.

  “This ain’t the library, mac,” someone said. “Buy it, or give it a rest.”

  Wing looked up at a newsdealer in a Long Island Star-Journal apron, gave him a slit-eyed stare fashioned after the old movies and distilled on the yard. The man turned away in a hurry to take five pennies from a sailor who needed Clorets.

  Times Square had become more of what it was before. In a store with French decks and loaded dice and handcuffs and braided whips and stilettos in the window Wing asked to see a switchblade knife. The mechanism wasn’t smooth; Made in Japan was stamped on the handle. He tried a gravity blade, flicking the steel till he found one with a nice feel. Then he put his release money, a hundred dollar bill, on the counter.

  “Knife’s $2.98,” the clerk said. “You don’t have nothing smaller?”

  Wing snapped his wrist, and the blade locked into place with a soft click. “How’d you like to be smaller?” he said.

  Pelfrey had been blue-penciling stories since 8:30, and his head hurt. Few of his writers were writers in any real sense, and he had to re-work each sentence between the double-spaced lines of copy. Pelfrey did not take coffee breaks, or leave the office for lunch. Nights, holidays, and on weekends he brought home articles to edit. Real Detective had cost him his marriage and most chances at happiness, but he was too busy to think about it. A minute away from work had to be made up another time, and he didn’t have a moment to spare.

 
Several times a year, when he was hurting for copy, Pelfrey named a cop as Real Detective’s police officer of the month. The award—a cheap plaque from a Hell’s Kitchen trophy shop—was useful in getting tight-lipped detectives to open up about cases that stymied his reporters. Lieutenant Tom Podgorny of the Poughkeepsie, New York police was due in the office at noon. Pelfrey would have to write Podgorny’s story under deadline, which was making his headache worse.

  “Hi there,” Pelfrey said when he noticed a stranger standing over his desk. “It’s a privilege to meet you.”

  “So now it’s a privilege?” Morris Wing said.

  Pelfrey rarely met a cop with a sense of humor, but the man watching him work struck him as funny. His deadpan was better even than George S. Kaufman’s, which was cracking up everyone who owned a TV.

  “It’s not every day a hero comes to visit us.”

  “So I’m a hero, too?”

  Not that funny after you heard him twice, and the lack of expression was creepy. Podgorny had been asked to wear his uniform so a photographer could get some shots. Instead he had on a chalk-stripe suit with broad lapels twenty years out of style, a dingy shirt, no tie, and cracked leather shoes. Either he was working a plainclothes detail on skid row, or he was headed there on his own.

  “The readers say you are. You took a vicious killer off the streets.”

  It wasn’t just the ugly clothes and poker face. The man was wrong for a cop, gray and sullen in a job that demanded personality.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Pelfrey said.

  “Morris Wing.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Wing shut the door.

  “Leave it open, if you don’t mind,” Pelfrey said.

  Wing kicked the doorstop under the door. “You told the world everything about me, and you didn’t know one damn thing.”

  “When was that?”

  “Six thousand, a hundred and ninety-one days ago.”

  Pelfrey knew what Morris Wing was. Murderers he’d covered when he started on the magazine in the 1930s were being paroled in bunches. Wing wasn’t the first to show up at Real Detective holding a twenty-year grudge.

  “I don’t remember you. Six thousand days is a long time.”

  “You’re telling me?” Wing said. “I’ll refresh your memory. I killed Becky Smart.”

  Pelfrey had written the story himself, a case that stood alone for the brutality directed at a child. Rebecca Smart was twelve, the daughter of one of the last commercial fishermen in the Bronx, when her body was found in a derelict tugboat in the mudflats off City Island. She had been stabbed, strangled, raped, subjected to an encyclopedic compendium of sexual tortures. The jury came back eleven to one for the chair. The holdout, a nun, insisted that the youthful defendant should be spared so that he would know God’s love. Pelfrey had chided her for being a bleeding heart. Morris Wing was not interested in God’s love and had not been sent to a place where it would find him.

  “What do you want?” Pelfrey said.

  “Those six thousand, one hundred ninety-one days I spent in hell, I want them back.”

  “Get out,” Pelfrey said, “or your parole officer’s going to hear you’re harassing me.”

  “I did the whole beef,” Wing said. “If I’m returned for another six thousand days, or sixty thousand, I can do the time.”

  Wing flicked the blade out of his knife, and pushed it back inside the handle, flicked it out, pushed it back. Pelfrey didn’t believe Wing was going to hurt him. Morris Wing wanted to make him sweat, to hear the unscrupulous editor beg forgiveness from the simple child-murderer he’d slandered. Watching him play with the knife, Pelfrey wondered if he would be rid of Wing sooner if he peed in his pants. It wouldn’t be hard to do.

  He got up from his chair, and Wing pushed him down. The first he realized he’d been cut was when he felt blood running down his neck. The knife shot out again. Pain in his cheek was immediate. Pelfrey raised his hand as Wing swiped at him, and the blade pierced the flesh under his thumb. The next jab sliced through his sleeve. As blood erupted from his arm he shoved the desk at Wing, who danced around it and slashed his other cheek.

  The Smart case came back to Pelfrey as precise in its details as if he’d written it the other day. The coroner had compared the killing to the Chinese death of a hundred cuts. When defense counsel pointed out that the Chinese had disposed of their enemies with ten times as many small wounds the coroner had testified that Becky Smart’s killer was neither patient nor light-handed, inflicting ninety-five serious punctures before severing the carotid artery.

  Pelfrey heard shouting, the different voices not coming from the same place. What got his attention were the loudest shouts, which were his. On the other side of the door the editorial assistant, Mary Glenny, demanded to know what was going on. The door rattled, and several thumps might have been Mary throwing her shoulder against the wood. It was hard to sort out the sounds, impossible to see with his blood in his eyes.

  Pelfrey had a good idea that he was dying, and was concerned that Real Detective would screw up the story. How he would play it was with a first person account by a staffer under Mary Glenny’s byline, and a cover line above the title. He’d begin with Wing turning up unannounced at the office demanding to talk, then flash back to his trial and the years in prison, suggest an enigmatic character, somewhat sympathetic, before revealing the gruesome facts about the killing of Becky Smart, and tying up things with Wing having his revenge.

  The thumping got louder. The door inched away from the jamb and skidded open. It wasn’t Mary Glenny who stumbled inside but a stranger taking in the scene with wild eyes that made Morris Wing seem tranquil in comparison. There was a gun in his hand, and he was looking to use it. As the situation became clear he turned the gun around, and hammered Wing’s head with the butt, hit him three or four times before the knife dropped and Wing went down. Stepping over Wing, he clamped his hand around Pelfrey’s throat.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “It makes the blood pump faster.”

  “Who are you?” Mary Glenny said.

  Pelfrey held still as the stranger compressed his neck wound. He didn’t have the strength for anything else. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he heard the man tell Mary, “Tom Podgorny.”

  “Who?” Mary said.

  “Your hero for the month.”

  “You don’t look bad,” Lou Segar said. “If it weren’t for the IV, and that tube in your nose, and all the stitches, no one would know anything was wrong. How do you feel?”

  Pelfrey reached for the control on the railing of the bed, and raised himself into a semi-upright position. “Dead.”

  “What I’m telling you,” Segar said, “is that you’re not.”

  Segar was Real Detective’s managing editor, number two on the four-man staff. If Pelfrey did die, Segar would take over the editor’s chair with a large increase in salary. Pelfrey was moved by Segar’s feelings for him, but answered with a grunt. Real Detective staffers dealt with too much tragedy to admit being moved by it, even when it was their own.

  “You left most of your blood in the office,” Segar said. “The doctors were surprised you had any left when you got here.”

  “Change the subject, Lou.”

  Segar dropped a large envelope on the bed. “Here’s the stuff you asked for.”

  Pelfrey shook out a few manuscripts and a smaller envelope containing flimsies torn from the wires by his stringer at the Herald-Tribune.

  “If I were you, I’d stay flat on my back,” Segar said. “No one expects you to do anything but get your health. The magazine is doing fine without you.”

  “I really will die if I don’t work,” Pelfrey said. “I can’t wait to get back to the office.”

  “You’re sicker than you let on. Wing wasn’t the first Sing Sing alum looking to have a piece of you. Tom Podgorny won’t be around for the next one.”

  “If
I quit, my replacement becomes a target,” Pelfrey said. “Ever think about that?”

  “All the time.”

  “And still you’re angling for the job?”

  “I’ve been cooling my heels for ten years waiting to have your office, and your salary, and my name where yours is on the masthead,” Segar said. “Not any more, it’s too dangerous. We’re paper-pushers, not sandhogs, or test pilots. But life expectancy on the dick books is about the same as theirs, these days. When you’re back on your feet, you can start interviewing for a new managing editor.”

  “You’re quitting?”

  “Going into hiding,” Lou Segar said.

  Pelfrey was up past ten fixing the story of a cop-killing in Gary, Indiana. He was ready to start on another right away, but the nurses would give him hell. In order to get well, he needed to sleep. He shut off his light, turned it on again, and read flimsies.

  In Savannah, an 18-month-old had been strangled by a pervert. Pelfrey crumpled the flimsy, and tossed it away. Real Detective had stopped covering cases in which the victim was less than four. The readers loved stories of twisted sex, the sicker the better. But not when the victim was a baby. Baby-killings turned the readers against murder.

  A Reno pump jockey was shot by a motorist who drove off without paying for $3.40 of ethyl. Service station holdups also had no place in the magazine. Aside from the names the stories were interchangeable. Readers hated them because there was never a new wrinkle. Pelfrey gave his readers only the killings they wanted.

  Shirley Faber, a 27-year-old mother of four, had been stabbed to death by an intruder who entered her bedroom in Yardley, Pennsylvania, while her husband, a family doctor, was out on a call. It didn’t take a genius to know the police soon would announce the arrest of Dr. Faber for murder. Pelfrey thanked God that not many Real Detective readers were geniuses. The doctor would have a girlfriend, probably a nurse. He would have money problems that made it impossible to finance a divorce without cutting back on a costly romance. Mrs. Faber would be suffering from depression causing her to lose interest in sex shortly before her husband insured her life for a large sum. Pelfrey would bet a year’s salary that this was how the facts played out. In a population of 150,000,000 there were 9,000 murders in the United States each year. Only a few big city police departments got to investigate more than one or two. Pelfrey, with killings coming out of his ears, could give lessons to most detectives.