The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  Out of habit, his gaze swept the street as he started to move out and cross diagonally to intercept her. His reluctant journey toward a face-to-face confrontation with her suddenly became a charge. He saw the slender figure of a tall, crouching man resolve from the alleyway darkness and slip up behind her. Unreal and dream-like, the shadow seemed to fold about her as the mugger crooked an arm about her neck and snatched her purse.

  “Hold it!” Shapiro shouted the order savagely.

  The man threw Miss Nettie to the sidewalk and lunged into the well of darkness alongside the grocery.

  Miss Nettie scrambled to her feet, rearing in Shapiro’s path.

  “Mr. Shapiro!”

  She grabbed his arm and fell against him. Her weight, even as slight as it was, and his momentum threw him off balance. He twisted and almost fell, banging his shoulder against the corner of the building.

  “You’re not hurt, obviously,” he said, short-breathed. “Just sit tight. That rat won’t find a hole big enough to hold him.”

  She hung onto him. “I didn’t know you there, Mr. Shapiro.” Her thin hands were talons, clutching his clothing.

  He tried to brush them away. “For heaven’s sake, Miss Cooksey, let go! That guy’s getting away.”

  “Don’t risk yourself for me, Mr. Shapiro. He may be armed.”

  “My worry,” he bit out, “if you’ll let me do my job.”

  He grabbed her wrist, discovering a surprising strength. The ever-lurking hunting instinct was aware that the fleeing feet had departed the farther end of the alley.

  “Miss Nettie!” he snarled in exasperation. He let his hands apply enough pressure to break her grip and shove him free. She stumbled backward and collapsed with a small outcry. Shapiro threw a despairing look down the empty alley as he dropped to one knee beside her.

  Her face was a pale, soft etching in white.

  “Miss Nettie, I didn’t mean…”

  He slipped a hand behind her shoulder to help her up.

  “I know you didn’t, Mr. Shapiro.” She got up with but little assistance, brushed a wispy spill of white hair from her forehead with her fingertips. “Don’t blame yourself. Really, I tripped over my own feet, but I’m quite all right.”

  “Did you get a look at the mugger?”

  Her eyes glinted, blue candles in the faintest haze of street glow. “Not clearly—but enough. He was young, tall, skinny, with the telltale W-shaped scar on his cheek.”

  Shapiro dropped his hand from her shoulder, muttering an ungentlemanly word under his breath. “Well,” he sighed bitterly, “the bird seems to have flown the coop. The best I can do now is put him on the air and hope for a pickup.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “I doubt it. He’s managed to hole up pretty well so far.”

  She dropped her eyes, making Shapiro think of a chastised child. “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt, Mr. Shapiro.”

  “You took care of that, Miss Cooksey, delaying me as you did.”

  She sighed softly. “Please don’t be angry with me. Even if you had caught him at the risk of your life, would it have done any good? The court decisions nowadays, the parole system—wouldn’t he have been back on the streets in a few years?”

  “Maybe so,” Shapiro admitted, “but he would have been off of them for a few, too.”

  Her eyes inched back to his. “Yes, I guess you have to think of it that way, or your lifework would be for nothing.”

  The words were a gentle mirror held up to him. She had sized up the policeman’s one excuse for being with uncomfortable accuracy. By the time he was ready to sign out at midnight, he had a case of heartburn, bloodshot eyes, and a headache that would do for the whole department.

  He had showered (without relieving his symptoms) and dressed, and was slamming his locker door when Browne from Communications called his name from the doorway.

  “Yeah?” Shapiro growled, glancing briefly across his shoulder.

  “Bounced down hoping I’d catch you,” Browne, robust and dark and an enviable twenty-seven, said. “The call just came in. I think we’ve turned up your mugger-killer. Young, skinny—with the cheek scar.

  Shapiro whirled toward Browne, his headache dissolving. “Where?”

  “Fleabag rooming house. One-one-four River Street. His girlfriend, a late-working waitress, breezed in for an after-work date and came out squalling. She found lover boy on the floor. Dead.”

  A uniformed patrolman had cleared the curious from the scabby, odorous hall and stairway. Adams and McJunkin had arrived to take charge of the investigation. The lab men and photographer had taken their pictures and samples, and Doc Jefferson, the medical examiner, was snapping his black bag closed when Shapiro’s rough-hewn and iron-gray presence loomed in the doorway.

  Shapiro nodded at the departing lab men, said hello to his fellow detectives, and crossed the dreary, stifling room to the figure sprawled beside the grimy, swaybacked bed.

  “Who is he?” Shapiro looked down at the bony face with its scar and bonnet of wild, long, brownish hair.

  “One Pete Farlow,” Adams said. “Or maybe it’s an alias.”

  “Whoever, he must be our boy,” McJunkin added. He was a stocky, freckled redhead, ambling toward Shapiro’s side. “That scar is just too unique. Odds are a million to one against its duplicate in a city this size.”

  “Drifter?” Shapiro suggested.

  “I wouldn’t bet against you,” McJunkin said, “the way he showed up and took the room, according to the building super. Same old pattern. He works a town until it gets too hot and then drifts on to another room, girl, way of life just like the one he left behind him.”

  “He seems to be the solution—in addition to the murder of Lettie Cooksey—to a string of muggings, drunk-rollings, and strong-arm robberies we’ve had,” Adams said. He was the tallest man in the room, dark and ramrod straight. He motioned with his hand toward the narrow closet, where the door stood open. “He’s stashed enough purses and wallets in there to open a counter in a secondhand store.”

  “Maybe in his private moments,” Doc Jefferson said, “he liked to look in on them, touch them, sort of relive the big-man moment when he had taken this one or that one.” Doc shook a fine head of silver hair. “You never know about these guys.”

  Shapiro drifted to the closet. Which was hers? He tried to remember; a flash of white when the mugger had grabbed it there at the steel-shuttered grocery, but not all white; not large, either—relatively small handbag, black or brown, trimmed in white.

  On top of the jumble at his feet, just a little to the left of the doorjamb, lay a woman’s purse with its dark blue relieved by a diagonal band of white; a rather old-fashioned purse.

  Shapiro hunkered and picked it up. Its clasp was broken. He pulled it open, and stopped breathing for a second. In one corner was a tissue-wrapped ball of candy. As if fearfully, his forefinger inched and pushed the tissue aside to expose the tempting creaminess of a coconut bonbon.

  “Doc,” Shapiro said in a far-off voice, his broad, bent back toward the room, “what did our killer pigeon die of?”

  “I won’t have a complete report until after the autopsy,” Jefferson said.

  “But you could give me a very educated guess right now.”

  “You birds always want your forensic medicine instant,” Doc said. “Okay, for what it’s worth, I’ll wager McJunkin’s freckles against Adams’ eyeteeth that the autopsy will back up the symptoms. Our vulture died of poisoning. Arsenic, I’d say. He gulped a walloping dose of arsenic.”

  “The lab boys found little tissues scattered all over the floor,” McJunkin said, “the kind they used to use in the old-fashioned candy stores.”

  Shapiro mumbled to himself. McJunkin said, “What’d you say, Shappy?”

  “I said,” Shapiro bit out angrily, “that I’m never surprised at anything the lab boys find.”

  * * * *

  Wearing a flannel robe, felt slippers, and a net about he
r soft white hair, Miss Nettie ushered Shapiro into her parlor.

  “I’m very sorry to rouse you at this hour,” Shapiro said, “but it was necessary.”

  “I’m sure it must have been, for you to have done so. Would you like some tea?”

  Shapiro gave her a stare and sigh. “Not this go-round. Sit down, please.”

  She sank to the edge of an over-stuffed chair and clasped her hands quietly in her lap.

  Shapiro faced her with his hands cocked on his hips. “Was your purse a dark blue, with a white band across it?”

  “Yes it was, Mr. Shapiro. And I assume from your question that you have found it.”

  “In the room of a dead man. A young, skinny dead man with a W-shaped scar on his cheek.”

  He thought he saw the faintest of smiles on her soft lips.

  His hands came loose from his sides. He banged a fist into a palm. “Miss Cooksey, blast you, you’ve made a total fool of me!”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Shapiro! I’m much too fond of you to do anything like that.”

  Shapiro snorted, kicked a table leg, spun on her again with the mien of a grizzly. “You made bait of yourself, Miss Cooksey. I had told you about the previous muggings he’d pulled around here. You saw a pattern. You hoped he’d return—and take the bait.”

  “Mr. Shapiro—”

  He silenced her with a stern finger waggling in her face. “Don’t you open your gentle little peep to me one more time until I’m finished. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. Shapiro.”

  “You took those nightly walks, waiting for him to return, wanting him to, hoping he would strike again. And when he struck, you threw a veritable body-block at me so he could get away with your purse and everything it contained—maybe a little cash, and a batch of bonbons loaded with arsenic!”

  “Where would I get—”

  “Don’t play innocent with me!” Shapiro almost popped a vein across his forehead. “You have a yardman. Your sister grew roses. Anybody can get arsenic, in plant sprays, insecticides.” His teeth made a sound like fingernails scraping across sandpaper. “You pegged him to a T, Miss Cooksey. He gulped the arsenic-loaded candy. Almost all of it.”

  “Almost, Mr. Shapiro?”

  He reached in his side pocket and brought out the tissue-wrapped bonbon he had taken from the rooming house closet.

  With exaggerated care, he peeled back the tissue and extended his palm. “It’s the one that stuck in the corner of the purse when he dumped it on his bed or dresser. It’s the one he didn’t eat. Do you deny making it?”

  She rose slowly. “It’s a lovely bonbon, Mr. Shapiro, although a bit squashed from so much handling.”

  She peered, lifted a dainty forefinger to touch the candy. She picked it up. Then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed before Shapiro had the first inkling of what she was up to.

  Flat-footed and with a dumb look on his face, Shapiro received her soft smile.

  “Mr. Shapiro, would I eat poisoned candy?”

  He shook off a faintly trance-like state. “Yes,” he said. “Faced with a situation of sufficient urgency, I’m beginning to believe you’d have the courage to do anything, Miss Cooksey. I think your question is rhetorical. I think you have already, just now, eaten a piece of poisoned candy. I’m also certain that the amount contained in a single piece is not enough to kill you.” He shook his head hopelessly. “Whatever am I going to do with you, Miss Nettie?”

  “Arrest me for destroying evidence?” she suggested.

  “I doubt that I could make it—or any other charge—stick,” Shapiro said. “Even if we could prove you made some poisoned candy, you didn’t offer it to anyone. The only shred of evidence we have that involves you, come to think of it, is the purse—evidence of a crime against you.”

  She strolled with him to the front door. “Will you come some afternoon for tea, Mr. Shapiro?”

  He studied her a moment. “No, Miss Nettie—I think I never want to see you again.”

  She nodded and patted his hand with a touch of gentle understanding. Then she turned a little in the dark front doorway, looking from his face to a point far along the sidewalk.

  “Given the chance,” she said almost in a whisper, “I’d have been the first to warn the young man to mend his ways in time—and never to take candy from strangers.”

  THE WAY OUT

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1969.

  Stanley didn’t bother to stir on his bunk when he heard the guard rattling keys in the cell door.

  “Mr. Graves,” the bulky guard said in a polite tone that even a civilian review board would have approved, “you have a visitor. Fellow wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell him to see my secretary for an appointment,” Stanley grunted, his eyes remaining closed.

  “That’s pretty good, Mr. Graves,” the guard chuckled courteously. “But this fellow is a lawyer. He wants to take up your case. He arranged his appointment through the judge.”

  Stanley lifted the long, thin arm draped across his face. He cracked one eye against the bands of sunlight streaming through the cell window.

  Pushing past the uniformed guard was a plump, earnest young man in a gray suit cut in the latest Madison Avenue fashion. He brought into the antisepsis of the cell a hint of good cologne. His necktie, shirt, and shoes were carefully coordinated. His face was round and pink, the kind that men ignore when replaying a golf match at the nineteenth hole. Behind heavy, square-rimmed glasses, his china blue eyes beamed at Stanley with a consciously summoned vitality, optimism, and determination.

  The gray-suited figure cleared its throat in a good imitation of a masculine rumble. “Tough spot, eh, Graves? Convicted of a capital crime, gas chamber the next stop, cards all stacked against you. One lone man against the massive Establishment.” The rosebud mouth curled in the best Mittyish mimicry of a John Wayne grin. “But the ball game isn’t over, even in the ninth inning. Right Stanley? We’re not licked yet. We’ll find a way out.”

  Stanley raised his head a few inches from the lumpy pillow to study the stranger. Even with the prison haircut, Stanley managed a hippie look. His sprawled body suggested ennui. His gaunt hungry-looking face hung in lines of self-sorrow. His large brown eyes, in the shadows of cavernous sockets, were depthless pools of soul. “Go away,” he muttered. “I didn’t smoke any signals. I got no bread to fee a lawyer.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said generously. “You’re in trouble. Forty-three days from today the state is going to gas the life out of you for the crime of murder. Nothing else counts.”

  “You’re telling me?” Stanley said. He fell back and stared at the ceiling light in its wire-mesh cage. “Why come in here and rake up old leaves, Mr. Whoever-you-are? What is your name, anyway?”

  “Cottrell,” the plump young man said. “Leonard Cottrell. Of the SPCD.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The guard coughed politely. “Take all the time you need with your client, Mr. Cottrell.” The turnkey eased from the cell, locking the door.

  Leonard Cottrell frowned at Stanley’s indolent form. “We’re quite well known, Stanley. Society for the Protection of Civil Dissent Nonprofit organization. Funded with a trust set up by an old lady who lived alone with three cats.”

  Stanley shifted on the thin mattress, facing the bleak stone wall a few inches away.

  Leonard studied Stanley’s curled spine and bony shoulders. He shook his head slowly. “Monstrous—the way a heartless society can break a man’s spirit. But cast off this despair, my friend. Yours is exactly the type of case that interests us most. Come on, Stanley, where is the old pepper?”

  “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” Stanley muttered. “Get a load of this guy.”

  Leonard looked about for a place to sit down. The only seat was a wooden stool of questionable size for his ample bottom. He eased onto it, still looking at Stanley’s back.

  “We’ve reviewed your case, Stanley, but
a legal record skims the essence of man. Right? It would help if I knew everything there is to know about you as an individual, a man, a suffering human being.” Stanley said nothing. Leonard waited, gradually pursing his lips. “Hmmmm. Just as I suspected. This job has many facets. They’ve really crushed your personality, haven’t they, Stanley?”

  “Mr. Cottrell,” Stanley said to the wall, “why don’t you just split? It wouldn’t be like you were copping out. You don’t owe me anything.”

  Leonard’s brows escalated. “That’s where you’re wrong, Stanley. ‘Think not for whom the bell tolls…’ If for thee, then also for me.”

  “Yeah,” Stanley said. “I know.”

  Leonard reached out to pat the knifeblades of Stanley’s shoulders. “Buck up, old man. You’ll feel better as we talk. Believe me, we have a Sunday punch, a way out.”

  Stanley inched his head to look at Leonard over his shoulder. “Ah, ha!” Leonard grinned. “I thought that would bring a reaction.”

  Stanley’s head dropped back. Again, he was staring at the wall.

  “I see,” Leonard murmured. “They’ve so desecrated the inner man that he no longer believes in Sunday punches.”

  “Okay,” Stanley sighed. “What’s the Sunday punch?”

  “Not so fast.” Leonard waggled a breakfast-sausage finger. “Let’s start at the top. I’m sure your parents are much to blame for your present plight.”

  “Yeah,” Stanley said. “They gave me birth.”

  “And they were so grossly involved in material things they never had time for you.”

  “Nope,” Stanley told the wall. “My mother kept house and darned my socks, and my old man took me fishing and to ball games.”

  “Yes…well…” Leonard was wordless for a moment, growing a silent frown. Then he brightened. “Then they spoiled you, smothered you with attention, never gave you a chance to develop in your own way.”