by Noel Hynd
He missed the main target, but did enough damage to flee through a closed gas station and a department store parking lot. No outside phones in New Hampshire. They'd all either freeze or get vandalized. So Frealy found a phone in a bar and called the cops. The locals were home in bed, so the Staties responded. By the time everyone got back to the burger joint, the heist team was gone and so were twenty-eight of the seventy-six cases of booze.
Frealy told everything to the cops. And he had some great details.
The driver of the getaway truck, the guy whose jewels Frealy had tried to wreck, was bald, also. His hat had dislodged in the struggle. Frealy had seen half a bare scalp. He was as bald as his accomplice.
The driver, who wore glasses, had also had something wrong with his eyes. One eye was a floater. It wouldn't focus on whatever the other was watching, which-if anyone gave it much thought-made him a strange choice as a driver and guard.
O'Hara looked up at Captain Mallinson. Thoughtfully, he flipped the file shut.
“Cute, huh?” Mallinson grunted. “Got any insight?”
“Don't know,” O'Hara answered. “Who's investigating?”
Mallinson named a team of state police Grand Larceny dicks from Cheshire county: Ed Schwine and Herbert Dreher. O'Hara knew them. A couple of quasi-incompetents who would have done better being assigned to school guard crossings.
“So why don't you just toss this directly into the Old 8c Open case file?” O'Hara asked. “Schwine and Dreher never close anything.”
“What the hell, O'Hara,” Mallinson growled. “This ain't what you'd call hi-pro. The bald mutts only got two dozen cases of booze, it's covered by out-of-state insurance, and Frealy didn't even take medical after being popped in the snout.”
O'Hara made a noise that conveyed he couldn't have cared less.
“So what are you here for?” Mallinson finally asked.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions on the Gary Ledbetter case,” O'Hara announced at last, finding a chair.
“Sheesh. This again?”
“If you don't mind.”
“I don't know why you keep asking me. You made the frigging arrest.”
“But you handled the political end. Dealing with the press. The attorney general. And you helped wrap Ledbetter up so that he could be shipped South.”
Mallinson shrugged, irritated. He opened the top drawer of his desk and fished for something to smoke.
“Do I take credit or blame on that, Frank?” he asked. “And by the way, it was many years ago, so what's your point?”
“What went on in that case? Was everything on the level with evidence?”
“Why wouldn't it have been?”
“Damned if I know,” said O'Hara.
Mallinson grimaced. “Frank, Gary Ledbetter was as guilty as Judas Iscariot. Florida had no difficulty convicting Ledbetter.”
“That's not what I'm asking.”
“What are you asking?” Mallinson snapped back. “You had witnesses,” Mallinson reminded him. “People who made identifications of Ledbetter. Right?”
“I want to know if any monkey business went on. Was it different than any other case?”
“It was more high-profile. We had newspapers and citizens barking at us from the word go.”
“That's still not what I'm asking.”
Mallinson shrouded himself in smoke from a cheroot. His eyes looked tired. “Frank, what's this all about?” Mallinson asked.
“Every time I take a step forward on this case it looks like Gary Ledbetter has killed two more women. Logically, you and I both know that can't be. But by another field of logic, it's the only answer.”
“Frank,” Mallinson said dismissively, a pained expression crossing his face. He shook his head. “‘Field of logic' . . . 'Gary Ledbetter' . . .Ah, come off it. You're telling me that Gary Ledbetter, as in the late Gary Ledbetter who was executed by Florida, is your chief suspect?”
O'Hara silently replied, And it's even worse than that. I've seen him. But instead, O'Hara struggled with words and answered, “Look, every time I examine this case-”
“What am I hearing from you? We got an evil spirit loose?”
“Was the evidence rigged in Ledbetter's arrest?” O'Hara demanded.
“How can you ask that?”
“I just did. What's the answer?”
“The answer is, No! Of course not!”
“Now tell me that you're telling me the truth. Why, for example, were there a couple of deputy inspectors in Peterborough circulating Gary's picture before I got there? That strikes me as real odd, Captain.”
“Where'd you learn about that?”
“Detectives have their sources, Captain.”
For a moment there was fury in Mallinson's eyes. But then he eased slightly.
“Bullshit, Frank,” Mallinson said. “You been listening to your moody-assed Sinatra tapes too long. Your brain's turned into cream cheese.”
“Would you answer my question?”
For a moment, war remained imminent. But then Mallinson's tired face softened. He looked at the younger man with a mixture of impatience and understanding.
“You're going nuts, aren't you, Frank?” Mallinson asked. “Pressure, pressure, pressure. One final big murder case, and a hacker of ladies, at that. One more big investigation, and it's breaking your balls. That's what's going on, isn't it? That, combined with some guilt for a guy you arrested going to the hot seat. Think I can't tell when a man is cracking up?”
“There's nothing wrong with me,” said O'Hara. “I'm following a case the best I can.”
“Yeah. And I'm the Queen of Sheba.”
Mallinson took a long cancerous pull on his tobacco and eyed O'Hara. O'Hara was about to respond, the same tired defensive litany about being fully in control of his faculties and trying to solve a sicko murder case.
But Mallinson kept talking.
“Working as a state cop in this state is a killer, Frank. There's ten months of winter and two months of bad skiing. The state animal is the skunk, the state bird is the black fly, the state citizen is the deadbeat, and the state sport is petty larceny. That's going to drive any sane man nuts. And know what? Us here in the cop department get it even worse than everyone else. Some days, the only people we see are other cops who've already gone crazy and Looney Tune people with criminal records.”
Outside the building there was the screech of a car skidding on the ice. This was followed by the sound of impact. Crunching metal. Agitated voices ensued. Mallinson never glanced out his window. O'Hara, who could assess such things without looking after all these years, figured some jerk had taken the corner too fast and had taken out a parking meter.
Mallinson marched forward.
“Eventually, everybody looks like they should be run in for armed robbery, Frank. You do too much, you see too much, and you think too much. You try to make sense out of this job and you can't because human behavior doesn't make any sense. And you go a little crazier every day. Don't you, Frank?”
Mallinson was touching a nerve, and O'Hara wouldn't admit it.
“There are pressures, yeah. But-”
“Frank! Stop it! Some of us are getting damned worried about you. If you keep chasing a frigging ghost, I swear I'm going to put you on psychiatric sick leave. Do you understand me?”
A long pause. Then, “Yeah, I understand.”
“Do you want sick leave?”
“All I want is a killer. There's a guy out there who chops women.”
“Then find him in this world. Not in another one,” Mallinson said. “Okay? For all of us? Cut out this Gary Ledbetter shit and find us a flesh and blood chopper. Okay?”
“Who was 'S. Clay'?” O'Hara asked.
“I give up. What's this 'S. Clay'?”
“‘S. Clay' was the name on Ledbetter's storage unit. There was material missing from Gary's file at Central Records. I was wondering if. . . .”
“To all intents and purposes, Frank,” Mallinson answered, thoroughly pe
eved but equally in control, “‘S. Clay' was Gary Ledbetter. One and the same. You think a psycho killer is going to use his real name where he stores his tools of war? Come on, Frank. Wake up. Stop seeing things that aren't there.”
Several moments passed while neither man moved. O'Hara waited for Gary's voice to interject. He realized that he was almost hoping to hear from Gary right there. But, naturally, nothing. No messages bouncing through time and space.
O'Hara sighed, then looked at his commander. Through a veil of smoke, Mallinson bore a distant, unflattering resemblance to an old children's woodcut that O'Hara had seen years ago: the centipede on the toadstool smoking a hookah, all one hundred legs of him below an indulgent porcine face.
A nutty disoriented impulse was upon O'Hara: At the end of the captain's lecture, O'Hara felt like laughing. He even had to fight off a weird smile.
“Frank,” Mallinson finally concluded, “Gary Ledbetter may not have been treated perfectly in this state. But he was treated fairly. He was a homicidal maniac. Does that register? Florida gave him what he deserved and which we couldn't have served up. Isn't that enough?”
“Not really. But I suppose it will have to do. Won't it?”
“It will, Frank. That's all,” Mallinson said. He leaned back from the desk, dismissing O'Hara. He hacked a cough. “Thank you, Frank. I appreciate your coming by.”
*
Several hours later, Frank O'Hara sat at the desk in his office, watching the day die outside his window. The bitter afternoon had faded into a glacial evening. It wasn't five o'clock yet and already it was dark outside.
It was a moody, quiet hour in police headquarters, the type of time when a man's imagination can seduce him. And darker than the advancing night were O'Hara's thoughts.
No one would believe him: But there was something terribly wrong about this case. The murder of Abigail Negri. And the murder of Stacey Dissette. O'Hara had reviewed his notes on the interview with Wilhelm Negri and had covered every known angle in the Dissette case. He had spent the afternoon in a further review of all the material he had accumulated on the killing of Karen Stoner in 198'7.
He had even gone through old telephone directories that afternoon, looking for an S. Clay, or any Clay whom he could link to the Ledbetter case. He continued to come up empty.
He began making some initial phone calls to reassemble old evidence from the Ledbetter case: the name of the waitress at the doughnut shop in New Hampshire, the woman who had identified Gary from a photograph. He wondered if anyone would still be around from the storage unit who could recall anything about the case. What about video store clerks who might have given Gary an alibi, but didn't?
He was unable to be optimistic. People drifted from one low-end job like this to another. They drifted and disappeared.
Like ghosts? Yeah, Frank. Exactly.
Yet this was exactly the material which he needed. And it was among the material that was missing from the Ledbetter file. It was almost as if-no, it was exactly as if-someone, somewhere, with access to the files wanted to make sure that this path of evidence was never travelled again.
He wondered where his own logbook was from the case. With a sinking feeling, he realized that this, too, would have gone to Central Records, in accordance with official procedure.
And every time he asked himself a question, he failed to find a satisfying answer. And each unsatisfying answer posed a couple more insoluble questions.
What had the relationship really been between Wilhelm Negri and his wife? Was there a motive for murder there? Or was what O'Hara had seen simply the messy aftermath of a failed marriage, one that touched on murder by coincidence?
And yet what connection could the Negri murder have to the Stacey Dissette slaying? Was there a link between victims? A similarity? Or had they been victims of opportunity, unlucky women who crossed the path of a killer at the wrong time?
Then there was the biggest question of all? Where did it all hook back to Gary Ledbetter? How? And why?
And who was S. Clay?
If one believed the autopsy reports, the cases had to have a link. But if Gary Ledbetter had murdered Karen Stoner, and if he had acted alone, the homicides could not possibly have been related.
There was almost a whisper in the room. Not guilty, man. I didn't kill no girls.
O'Hara sat up quickly. “Then who did, Gary?” O'Hara demanded aloud. “Who? Tell me who!”
O'Hara's fatigued eyes searched the lonely office. No sign of anything.
“Was it 'S. Clay'?” O'Hara questioned. “Tell me, Gary! Was it?”
But there was no answer. A key issue like this . . . and no answer. This time, he concluded that he had imagined Gary's voice.
But the thoughts of Gary kept recurring, as did the images that had been upon him three nights earlier when the red crab crawled down his throat.
O'Hara had seen his former partner. He had seen Gary. The dead had stood before him. Conversing with him. Right there and-in Gary's case-able to be reached and touched in all his icy mortality.
Or could it be called, immortality?
It had all seemed too real. Dr. Julie Steinberg be damned. O'Hara was not fully convinced that the most memorable events of that evening-with the exception of the red crab hadn’t really happened. And yet Dr. Julie insisted that as long as he clung to the thought that Carl Reissman and Gary Ledbetter might actually have been there, he wasn't fully in control of his faculties.
Dr. Steinberg: “The dead do not walk among us.”
“Maybe they do sometimes, Doctor,” he said aloud.
Dr. Steinberg again: “Never in the history of humanity has it ever been proven that someone living interacted with someone dead.”
“And the opposite hasn't been disproved, either,” O'Hara now said aloud in his office. “Inexplicable events happen all the time. Like the ones that have happened to me. It's just that they defy proof of a traditional sort.”
Before him, in the well controlled eye of his mind, was Dr. Steinberg, a patient but reproachful smile across her face, shaking her head.
Or was she right there in his office with him? The vision was very, very clear.
“No, Frank,” she said. “Listen to what you're saying. Listen to logic. It simply doesn't make sense. What you're saying simply is not rational. “
“‘Logic' . . . 'doesn't make sense' . . . 'not rational' . . .” O'Hara repeated aloud.
Logic? Nothing made much sense these days. Nothing was rational any more.
Julie Steinberg disappeared in a snap. O'Hara blinked. Had she been there?
A ripple of goose bumps overtook him. The sound of his own voice, as it echoed in his office, had had a funny ring to it.
Ghostly.
Yes, that was the adjective. Why had it popped into his head above all others. Another thought tiptoed upon him. These thoughts, these feelings that kept coming over him. . . . Was that what a haunting was all about?
Hello, Frankie.
Who was speaking to him?
“Anyone there?” he asked.
He waited several seconds for an answer, feeling his pulse starting to pump faster. No answer. Not a sound in the room.
Was Gary playing games? Another weird sequence of thoughts: O'Hara wondered if he, O'Hara, was alive. Could anyone see him? Did he know for sure? Maybe he had died that afternoon and didn't know it yet.
Maybe that's what death was like.
O'Hara rose from his desk and walked to the door to his office. He stood in it, looking down the corridor in each direction. A melange of impressions: Stale cigarette smoke. Peeling green paint. A ragged stretch of carpeting. A sense of isolation.
His last thought repeated on him: Maybe that's what death was like. If so, was it as awful as everyone thought? Well, if I'm dead, he reasoned, all I have to do is find the two dead women and ask them who their killer was. How tough could that be?
“Sweet Lord,” he muttered to himself. “Got to get a grip. I'm going nuts.”
O'Hara turned and went back to his desk. Somewhere down the hall another cop walked from one office to another. Heavy foot-fall, deep off-key basso profundo voice making an unintentional mockery of the old Elvis ditty.
“Blue Hawaii.”
Yeah, sure, O'Hara thought, distracted for the moment. Blue Hawaii while they're all shin-splint deep in fresh white snow and the fresh corpses that normally accompany it. Blue fucking Hawaii and I've got a couple of women out there who have been decapitated, then their hands hacked off for sport, and I, Frank O'Hara, don't know where the killer will hit next or even from what world the killer is coming from.
Blue fucking Hawaii, indeed. Hey, Elvis? After you died, you jowly old hog, which place did you wake up in? I can't see you in wings, man, so I'm betting on the hot one.
There was a pencil in O'Hara's hand. On a piece of notepaper, the point found a surface. Almost like a Ouija board, where a hand is supposedly guided by an unseen force, O'Hara began to write.
“A ghost?” he wrote. “A real ghost? Gary?”
He was surprised that he had actually written it down. Sure he was thinking about it. Yeah, Mallinson had given voice to the thought. But to accept this as reality?
How could he?
Never mind the old Bowery Boys film routines with guys in sheets over their heads jumping out of closets. O'Hara began to examine what he had seen from a new stone-cold sober perspective. He wondered if what he was undergoing with Gary Ledbetter was, in fact, a spiritual haunting. Some sort of mental thing that was happening with a restless, troubled spirit.