Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

  “I know, sir. I appreciate that.”

  “You haven’t shown it. You’re supposed to work with my department, not against it.”

  Fowler swallowed. He was trying to get a hold of himself. “With all due respect, sir, I haven’t been working against your—look, when I took control of the scene, I had to run some people off—yourself included. That pissed a lot of people off.”

  “Okay.” Weathers’s voice had dropped a few decibels.

  “That’s why they’re out to get me.”

  “How about this girl?”

  “I met her last night in the diner after I put the preliminary on your desk.”

  Weathers stopped pacing, staring right at Fowler.

  “Didn’t you know she was a reporter?”

  “Within about a minute.”

  “So why the hell did you tell her anything about—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I told her nothing.”

  “Then how the fuck did she—”

  “It was leaked, Captain.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Someone inside got to it. I didn’t tell her a thing. Not a word.”

  Weathers turned toward the window. “Some heads are going to roll. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let some half-ass newspaper girl run my life.”

  “I shouldn’t have laid it on your desk.”

  “Next time, Lieutenant, lock it up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Weathers grabbed his coat off one of the single beds. He looked down at the floor, thinking. “I’d like to kick your ass all the way back to Lake Erie, but I have to stick by my decision, or we’ll both look like shit.”

  Fowler stood up. His voice was quiet, but full of emotion. “Thank you, sir.”

  The gray crew cut got in close. “But don’t fuck up.” Weathers took a step toward the door. “As far as the dancing business goes, it was good police work—I commend you . . . but, I don’t want to see another goddamned word about it in the paper, you understand? It makes us look like assholes.” He paused and looked Fowler in the eye. “Unofficially—keep pursuing it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now I want a full report on this kid. Keeping him under wraps is withholding evidence.”

  “There’s a reason for it.”

  Weathers looked over at Bill Rodney who by now was beaming. “What are you smiling at, you old coot?” he demanded, his meaty red hand on the doorknob.

  Bill Rodney lit a cigarette, turning to Fowler. “I got a couple new things on the kid, Nick. Cap’n, you might want to hear this.”

  Weathers looked impatiently over at him, waiting. “Well?” Fowler turned.

  Rodney savored the moment and blew a smoke ring that sailed out into the middle of the room and hung there, slowly getting larger in the silence.

  “Let’s have it,” Weathers said.

  Rodney leaned against one of the desks. “Last night around four-thirty in the morning, Marty found the kid crawling all over him, in a sweat, screaming about some face in his window.”

  “Where’s Marty now?”

  “’Cross the quad”—Rodney stood up, craning his neck—“You can see the infirmary from here.”

  “And?”

  “The lab called this morning. Seems they put the prints from that tie around the deceased’s neck next to those of the Ballard kid, and the band began to play.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  Bill Rodney glanced uneasily at Fowler. “No, sir. I just got the call.”

  “Get that kid in here right now.”

  Nick Fowler turned, looking out the window.

  “Okay,” Rodney said, picking up the phone. He dialed an extension, waited an instant; there was a click followed by a voice on the other end. “Ms. Ross?” he said.

  Her scratchy voice could be heard across the room. “Yes?”

  “This is Detective Rodney over in Ardsley Hall. Could you have Sergeant Orloff bring the Ballard boy over now?”

  “Now?”

  “That’s correct.”

  There was a long pause on the other end. “He wasn’t sick when he came in here,” she said, “but now he looks terrible and you want him running around in the cold—”

  “Ms. Ross, it’s important.”

  There was a pause on the other end. “You know that—what’s his name—Lieutenant, uh . . .”

  “Fowler?”

  “Yeah, there’s a letter for him here—looks like it was slid under the door this morning.”

  “Send that over with the sergeant too, if you will.”

  “It smells kind of funny.”

  15

  CARY BALLARD WAS sitting on a straight-back chair in the middle of the room. He was facing the window, where he could see some trees twisting in the wind. He half expected to see the covered face again. He finished telling the men what he had seen the night before.

  An old man with a battered face was blowing smoke out from underneath a hat.

  The little cop was sitting on the bed staring at his feet.

  A burly man with short gray hair was firing questions.

  Interrupting occasionally was the lieutenant who, while taking notes, explained to the big man some detail that Cary couldn’t understand, then the questions would start coming again.

  Finally they asked Marty to take the boy outside. In the hallway Cary was once again surrounded by a yellow police tape, facing the massive windows near where Crawford had been killed.

  Inside the room, Weathers was pacing again.

  The purple envelope was lying on one of the desks. No one had touched it, but it blazed with a smell of perfume. At the back of Fowler’s mind—a thought kept tugging at him—he had smelled this perfume before. Bill Rodney’s eyes kept falling on the letter, then darted glances at Fowler, who refused to openly acknowledge its existence. Never even looked at it.

  The captain was staring at Fowler. “What do you think?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “I think someone is trying to frame the kid.”

  Weathers frowned.

  Rodney crushed out his cigarette. “What about Marty’s report, Nick?”

  “That’s true,” Fowler said, picking up a supplemental report from the desk. “It says here several kids knew that the Crawford boy and Cary Ballard had a fight the day before the murder—and that there was enmity between them.”

  Weathers’s color was rising again like a thermometer. “I want a full, and I mean full, in-depth follow-up report, Lieutenant. This kid is a suspect. How much proof do you need? He might have been in the room near where Crawford was hanged.”

  “When I interrogated him, he said he went up on the roof and down the fire escape to the graveyard to see some girl. He also could have been out sleepwalking.”

  Weathers was shaking his head. “Fowler, don’t start with me—”

  “We found traces of tar on his bedroom slippers. It matched the tar on the roof of this building.”

  Rodney lit up again, listening intently. Weathers raised his eyebrows, then furrowed them. “Can you prove the kid sleepwalks?”

  “A history of sleepwalking and dissociation was mentioned in his medical records. I’m sure this Dr. Clarence knows. We could put a wire on the kid, let him go into his session, and—”

  “The kid’s not ready for that, Fowler, come on. He was shittin’ in his socks just now.” Weathers stood up, rubbing his brow. “When I spoke to the headmaster, he indicated the kid was half crazy. Says he sees things. Came from a troubled home.”

  “I’ll run that down,” Fowler said, thrusting his hands in his pockets. “But I know he’s being set up.”

  “I hope, for your sake, you’re not shielding him.”

  “Give me a little credit.”

  Weathers leaned in. “Right now he’s nowhere in your report, Lieutenant, and we have at least five pieces of hard evidence against him.” He too
k a step closer. “How the fuck can I justify his absence in the initial disposition when the data is already established?”

  Nick Fowler looked hard at Allen Weathers. They seemed to be shadowing each other’s thoughts in the silence. “Do you think he did it, Captain?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Then I want to let him go, and put a twenty-four-hour tail on him.”

  Weathers looked over at Bill Rodney, rolled his eyes, and looked like a man being led to the gallows. “Jesus fucking H. Christ. They are going to kill me if you screw this up.”

  Fowler tapped his chest. “They’ll kill me first.”

  Weathers’s eyes instantly bounced off the purple envelope on the table. “I thought she already did.”

  Rodney was again smiling. His old, gnarled hand hovered over the envelope as he grinned at Fowler. He reached down and picked it up. “Why don’t you read it to us, Nick?”

  Fowler sniffed. “Sure.” He walked over, ripped open the side of the letter, and unfolded a large piece of purple stationery. Then his face sunk.

  The letter was written with a childlike scrawl in ink, then signed in lipstick. Fowler laid it on the desk, smelled quickly for lye or other poisons. He would fluoroscope it later. He decided to read the letter aloud. It said:

  Dear Traveler,

  How did you know I was dancing? At first, I thought you were inside my brain. I hope someday you will explain it to me in person.

  When I kill you.

  Unless there is something inside holding you back, some guiding principle that will keep you away from me.

  Thinking of you,

  Arthur Murray

  P.S. Next: another enemy will prove Jesus could swing. You miss me by a hair.

  There was a hollow silence in the room. Nick Fowler pointed a finger at the postscript. He turned to Weathers. “A clue to the next murder.”

  Weathers’s stony expression did not change.

  “This is a deadly game we’ve got here, Captain. That boy’s the only card I can play. You going to let me follow him, or not?”

  Weathers was staring down at the lipstick-scrawled signature on the paper. He swallowed hard.

  “You got it.”

  16

  THE NEXT DAY the Associated Press had picked up on the “Arthur Murray” story. Several national newspapers excerpted the entire article, and some, like the New York Post, splashed the story on the cover. One of the morning shows mentioned it in a news brief.

  Now the killer had a name.

  When Fowler read the morning papers, he got angry. He felt they had instantly made his job that much harder. He feared the attention would fuel the killer’s ego, driving him to kill again.

  What was he going to do with the baffling clues in the letter?—much less the strange intimacy he and the killer had established. He talked into the phone, glaring down at the Post headline on his desk.

  “So what are you saying to me?” Fowler noticed the irritation in his voice. He was on the phone with a police handwriting examiner named Orin. The man reported that he had spent the better part of yesterday analyzing the purple stationery.

  “I’m saying . . .” Orin’s voice rose slightly. “Without known standards of comparison, I can’t tell you nothin’.”

  “I haven’t collected standards yet, Orin. Before I do, I want to get a sense of what you think. Come on, give me something.”

  “Look, Nick.” Orin sounded edgy. “Every person’s handwriting has a range of variations. It might depend upon the conditions under which the writing was executed, the type of writing instrument, the surface—”

  Fowler cut him off. “For God’s sake, just give me a qualified opinion, will you? I won’t hold you to it. It’ll be confidential.”

  There was another pause on the line during which Nick listened to the examiner’s breathing through static.

  Now he pleaded. “I need something, Orin, anything to hang on to here. Come on, do me a job.”

  More static, then the voice came through. “I can’t prove it . . . but it’s possible the letter was written with a nondominant hand.”

  Fowler’s mind started racing. “That would account for the childlike scratch.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else?”

  “It might also be an intentional disguise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you collect standards, you might find—I mean, it’s possible—the person who wrote this letter may have been trying to make it look like someone else.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, in tracing or copying another’s signature, for instance, people tend to exclude their own writing habits and adopt those of the other person. So, in effect, they are drawing, not writing. This letter has trace—or at least draw—all over it.”

  “You’re beautiful, Orin.”

  “This is just an inconclusive—”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Nick hung up the phone and glanced out the window at the back lawns.

  Bill Rodney clicked down the other phone. He had been on the line for several hours himself. He reached over, cracked another window an inch to let some air in, then lit a cigarette. He watched Fowler pacing.

  “Of the three hundred and fifty-eight lipsticks available from fifteen different manufacturers that the beauty suppliers we checked carried . . . Nick?”

  “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  “The lab determined it was a L’Oréal shade called Sunset, a dark pink.”

  Fowler stopped in the middle of the room, thinking. “That’s why Crawford’s lips had been wiped clean with alcohol—I’ll bet you ten bucks.”

  Rodney inhaled. “The purple envelope had been doused in a perfume called Shalimar. I asked the druggist in town if he had sold the fragrance to anyone; he recalled a woman buying a bottle recently.”

  “Did you get a description?”

  “I tried—nothing.”

  Nick was racking his brain. His interview with Ms. Coates suddenly came blazing back. “Bill, I just remembered where I smelled that perfume.”

  “Where?”

  “Ms. Coates. During her interrogation.”

  “Mmm. I’d like to tail that one personally.”

  “You may have your chance.”

  “The lab called again, saying there were no latent fingerprints, no prints anywhere on the stationery—except of course, yours and Sergeant Orloff’s. One breakthrough: The lipstick on the stationery is the same brand, same shade as that recovered from the victim’s lips.”

  “Great.” Fowler smiled. “Get Marty in here. Today he starts following the Ballard kid. And check on purchases at stationery and drugstores within a fifty-mile radius.”

  He grabbed his jacket and walked out into the hallway. He stood there, Ms. Coates’s interview filtering through his thoughts. How would he approach her? He wanted to slap her with a warrant right now.

  The implication in Arthur Murray’s letter that there was something “holding him back” was eating at him—he was getting psyched out—he knew it. He stood in the same hall where the bloodstains on the walls and floor seemed to bring screams of carnage, lust, and betrayal.

  He listened now. He walked to the other side of the hall, knowing his own footsteps would bring him back to himself. He heard the screams again, but knew they were not the murdered boy’s screams; the voice he heard was older, hoarse—from beyond the grave. A man, a father, a lost soul.

  THE LITTLE MAN who showed up had a greasy complexion and wore thick black glasses. His body was so thin his dark suit looked like a sheath over exposed wires. The suitcase in his hand seemed too large for him.

  Fowler had arranged to meet Ballard in his room with an operator from a private security firm to give the boy a lie detector test. Fowler had chosen not to use a police examiner, in case he didn’t like the results. He was trying to free the boy from suspicion, but he wanted to control the information.

  The little man stood in the s
mall dormitory room, looking around as Fowler explained that the test was a way to clear Cary. By the time the man had opened his black suitcase, though, the boy was visibly nervous. Nick talked to Cary, calming him down. They waited a while, then decided to go ahead.

  Cary was staring down at the four-channel polygraph machine as Nick walked over to the other side of the room. He stood by Cary’s desk, staring at something as the little man unwrapped the wires. Skin-colored pads were placed on Cary’s wrists. Nick stared at the boy’s desk, wrapped with police tape marked “Ravenstown PD.” He began reading the top page of a stack of papers the boy had turned in during his first month. He leafed through the stack. Everywhere was the soft scrawl of a boy’s handwriting. He instantly grabbed the stack up in his hands.

  “Cary, mind if I borrow these papers for a day or two?”

  The boy looked up at him. “No.”

  Fowler stepped to the door and left. Outside the door, he heard the dark little man begin asking questions. He walked down the hall, put Cary’s assignments in a glycine pouch, ziplocked it, and called Orin down at the station to tell him he was sending him “standards” to compare with the handwriting in the letter.

  When he hung up the phone, Fowler thought back to the last time he himself had administered a polygraph test. He tried to concentrate; remembered that from simple questions designed to reveal patterns of truth and deception, the Psychological Stress Evaluator measures audible and inaudible voice modulations, and then displays them on a graph.

  By the time the test was over, Marty was back in the office. Fowler stationed him outside Cary’s door, told the boy to rest, and ushered the small man from the security company into his office. “How did it go?”

  The man took off his glasses, cleaned them methodically, put them back on his face, and looked at Fowler. He reached in his black case and took out the graph from Ballard’s test. His knobby finger pointed to the tracings. “Normally there’s some kind of fluctuation, Lieutenant, but look at this . . . for long stretches . . . nothing.”

  Fowler looked at the relatively straight line on the graph. “How do you account for that?”

  “It’s hard to say. Tranquilizers can affect the GSR measurement of a lie detector test.”

  “Okay. What else could it be?”