Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  “Ken Matthews, Beverly PD.”

  They all shook as Spader and Dunbar introduced themselves. Spader could tell that Matthews recognized him, as too many people did, and looked for a hint of judgment in the man’s face or demeanor. He saw none, which certainly wasn’t always the case. Spader had made headlines not that long ago, first lauding him, then vilifying him. But Matthews showed no sign of disapproval. He merely looked solid, in every sense of the word—solidly built, yet he also exuded an aura of confidence and capability.

  “Got the call ninety minutes ago,” Matthews said. “Soon as I realized he was your boy at it again, I called the state police.”

  “How’d you know this was our guy’s work?” Spader asked.

  “How many yellow aliens are running around cutting people up? You seen the victims yet?”

  “Not yet,” Spader said. “Why don’t we back up, start from the top?”

  Matthews pulled out his own notebook, flipped it open, and started reciting facts, though Spader got the feeling that he had every fact committed to memory and the notebook was little more than a prop, something to keep his hands busy while he talked.

  “Nine-one-one call came in almost two and a half hours ago,” he said. “First officers on the scene arrived and the victim’s mother—” he glanced quickly at his notes, simply from habit, by the look of it “—Louise Pendleton, answered the door. She’s sixty-one, has worked as a nurse at Mass General in Boston for over thirty years.”

  They planned to interview the woman themselves, of course, but Spader would take down what she had told Matthews anyway. Apparently, sometime a little after midnight an intruder entered the house, probably through the door leading from the backyard into the kitchen, a door the occupants rarely locked. No security system. He went first to the mother’s room. She heard a noise and opened her eyes in time to see a dark figure looming over her bed. She was about to scream when he pressed something against her neck—turned out to be a stun gun—and she was incapacitated for a while. She sustained minor burns on her neck. Then he left. When he came back a few minutes later, muscle control was beginning to return to her, so he chloroformed her and stuck her in a closet, jamming a chair under the doorknob.

  “Jesus,” Dunbar said. “He used a stun gun on sixty-one-year-old lady?”

  “He could have killed her,” Spader said.

  “That’s what I’m saying. Jesus.”

  “No, I meant that if he’d wanted to he could easily have killed her. She’s lucky. Detective Matthews, how’d she get out of the closet to answer the door for your people?”

  “The doorknob on the closet’s apparently been loose for years,” Matthews said. “It’s one of those knobs that doesn’t actually turn. You just pull on it to open the door. Anyway, one of the two screws has been missing for a long time—looks like the knob was held on the door by paint as much as anything—so when Mrs. Pendleton banged enough times, the knob came off and she was able to push the door open.”

  “Who made the nine-one-one call?” Spader asked, though he knew the answer.

  “Apparently the perp did,” Matthews answered, “because the mother says she didn’t do it. She would have, but the phone in here was off the hook when she came in, and when she picked it up there was a nine-one-one dispatcher on the line trying to get someone to talk to her.”

  Just like the others, Spader thought. “There a father?”

  “Warren Pendleton. He was fifty-one when he died of lung cancer thirteen years ago.”

  “Okay, so what about the son?”

  Matthews glanced at his notes again. “Stanley Pendleton, twenty-nine. Been in a wheelchair for twenty-one years. The mother found him duct-taped to a chair in his room. The perp apparently brought it in from the kitchen. There was blood running down his face and neck and his right ear was missing.”

  “Why not just put him in his wheelchair?” Spader asked. “It was right there by the bed, right?”

  “When you catch the guy, ask him.”

  “Is Pendleton on painkillers right now?”

  Matthews nodded. “Yeah, but nothing that should affect his recall.”

  “If his wheelchair’s in here, what’s he sitting in?”

  “When he heard we wanted to keep that chair right where it is until the evidence team got here, he asked our officers to carry him to the kitchen. He’s in a regular chair in there until your evidence folks finish with his wheels.”

  Spader nodded and Matthews continued his narrative. It seemed that after hitting the mother with the stun gun, the perp came down to the son’s bedroom and chloroformed him while he was sleeping. The guy woke up taped to the chair.

  Again, Spader didn’t need the detective to tell him what Pendleton saw when he woke—he’d be interviewing the victim himself—but he let Matthews tell it his own way. Matthews said, “So the guy wakes up and sees that yellow cartoon alien all the kids are so nuts about.”

  “Galaxo,” Dunbar said.

  “Right, Galaxo. The perp’s wearing a Galaxo mask and when he talks the voice is just like the cartoon, you know?”

  “Voice-changing technology,” Spader added.

  “Right. I knew right away this was your guy. Or maybe a copycat, I guess. Either way, it’s your case. Anyway, the guy wakes up from his chloroform nap taped to a chair, and there’s Galaxo standing in front of him.”

  They listened to Matthews tell Pendleton’s story. Spader was glad to hear it, because Galaxo’s two prior victims had been able to provide only the sketchiest details before they each died, one from heart failure resulting from the trauma he experienced, the other directly from the wounds Galaxo inflicted. But Pendleton was different. He’d survived and, apparently, could tell his whole story. That was a break for the good guys.

  Matthews finished his recitation of the facts. An evidence-team officer entered the room, said something to a fellow CSS officer, and headed for the door again. Spader stopped him. “You know if we found any footprints outside?”

  “We found a partial by a front window,” the officer said, “but it doesn’t look promising. Not much of it there.”

  Dunbar asked, “You find any evidence outside that he was watching the house for a while from somewhere nearby? Cigarette butt on the street or under a lamppost, something like that?”

  “I don’t think so yet, but we’re still looking.” The officer paused, waiting for another question, and when none came he left the room.

  Matthews looked at Spader and Dunbar. “I realize this is your case, but I assume I’ll be staying on board, liaising with your office, things like that.”

  “That’s the way I usually like to work it,” Spader said. “You’ll know the area a lot better than we do, and if anyone local becomes a suspect, you may have a file on him or even know him.”

  Matthews nodded. “I’ve worked with the state police on a few cases. You guys have done okay by me. I’ll do whatever I can to help. Somebody does this kind of thing in my town, I want him caught. I don’t care who gets the collar.”

  Spader nodded.

  “That said,” Matthews continued, “this is your scene now, but you mind if I stay awhile, look around a bit more, maybe see if the evidence team finds anything?”

  “Happy to have you. Let me know if anything strikes you. Just so you know, I’ll be putting together a task force on this right away, which, as liaison on this case, I hope you’ll join.” Matthews nodded, so Spader added, “I’ll be leaving messages for people on my way home tonight, in fact. I’d like to meet early in the morning, maybe nine thirty.”

  “Your place?”

  “Ten Federal Street in Salem.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “One more thing. The uniforms out front going to be here for a while?”

  “If you want ’em to.”

  Spader nodded and Matthews left the room. Spader and Dunbar walked around the room for a few minutes, making notes, discussing what they saw, then went back up the hall, past the bat
hroom, and into what was obviously the mother’s bedroom. Matthews was kneeling in front of the closet, looking closely at the door. Spader nodded to a CSS officer running a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner over the bed, the sheets of which were in disarray. A straight-backed chair with a needlepoint seat lay on its side on the floor, near the closet. A few feet from the chair, with a little numbered flag on a stand sitting next to it, was the doorknob, which had come off the door, as Matthews said. Not much else to see in there, so Spader and Dunbar checked out the rest of the house, leaving the kitchen for last. Now and then they spoke with one of the various CSS officers working the scene, making sure every angle was covered. Once they’d seen what they wanted to see of the rest of the house, they finally went into the kitchen, where a third uniformed cop, a woman with a round face and big eyes, was sitting at the table with what were obviously the two victims. The cop, clearly knowing who Spader and Dunbar must be, stood up from her chair and took up a position by the door leading back into the hallway.

  The mother was thin, with a wig of poor quality looking uncomfortable on her head, the brown hair far too dark for a woman her age. A young man sat beside her at the table, looking as uncomfortable in a kitchen chair as his mother’s wig did sitting on her head. Stanley Pendleton looked pretty much as he did in the more recent photographs in the hall. Spader introduced Dunbar, then himself. When Pendleton saw Spader, his face showed recognition.

  According to Matthews, Pendleton was twenty-nine years old. He looked ten years older. The photographs Spader had seen in the hall had prepared him for the scars on the man’s face, but in person they looked worse. One actually passed close enough to the left eye to pull the corner down toward it, making the left side of that eye droop a little. There was a thick gauze pad on the side of his head, where his right ear used to be, secured by white gauze bandages. Spader also now saw what he couldn’t see in the photos, that the right side of the man’s face was unmarked, left untouched by whatever had caused the scarring on the left side. Remembering that Pendleton had posed in nearly every photo he saw with the damaged side of his face toward the camera, Spader couldn’t help but admire the man’s spirit. He didn’t try to hide what bad luck had done to him.

  Spader tried not to look at the man’s scars or his slightly deformed left eye, and he tried not to be obvious about either. “I see you recognize me, Mr. Pendleton,” he said. “You’ve seen my face in the papers?”

  Pendleton dropped his gaze, seemingly embarrassed. He nodded. “And on the news. Sorry if I looked surprised. You’re the Jack of Spades, right?”

  “Well, I go by Detective Spader, actually.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Easy for Spader to say…not so easy for him to do himself, though. His appearance in the papers and on the local news was a part of his life he’d rather forget. But moments like this made that difficult. He thought he knew, though, what Pendleton had thought the moment he looked up and saw him: Is this cop gonna blow it again? Shit. And the “Jack of Spades” thing didn’t help. He had no idea how Jack ever developed into a nickname for people named John, but some joker he attended the police academy with put that together with his last name, which he altered slightly, and started calling him the Jack of Spades for all the world to hear. Unfortunately, other cadets followed suit, using the damn nickname, and it just stuck. Once Spader joined the state police, he thought he’d put the stupid nickname behind him. Then, when everyone thought he was a big hero for a while two years ago, the idiot from the academy saw his face on the news, got himself interviewed, and called him the Jack of Spades. And, of course, the press ate that up, made the Jack of Spades famous, called him a hero…until things fell apart and the news people turned on him, leading the public to turn on him as well. A lot of people had forgotten him by now, but for Spader, too many remembered.

  Spader looked at the woman. He noticed again how thin she was—perhaps that’s where her son got his slender frame—but somehow she didn’t look frail. A small white bandage was taped to the left side of her neck, where the stun gun had hit her.

  “Are you all right to talk for a little while, Mrs. Pendleton?” he asked. “You’ve been through a lot tonight, and it’s late, but if you feel up to it, we’re really better off talking while tonight’s events are still fresh in your mind.” He figured he had to give her the option of talking the following day, given the circumstances, but he really hoped she wouldn’t feel the need to wait.

  “I told everything I could to the black fellow.” Her voice was smoky, but had none of the sexiness of Lauren Bacall’s smoky voice.

  “I know you gave your statement to Detective Matthews, and probably answered a lot of questions for him, but we’ll need you to go through it again, and the sooner the better. If not tonight, then tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Mom,” Pendleton said, “would you rather wait—”

  “No, no, I’m all right,” she said. “Really. If it might help catch the man who did this to you, I’ll talk all night if I have to.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Pendleton,” Spader said.

  “I only wish that when you catch him, I could get five minutes alone in a room with him.”

  “Mom!” Pendleton said. “The man’s dangerous. He could—”

  “Hush, Stanley. I meant that he should be handcuffed or something, so I could get at him but he couldn’t get at me. I’m not crazy, you know.”

  The cop in the front hall was right. Tough lady. “Okay, then, Mrs. Pendleton, my partner, Detective Dunbar here, would like you to show him your room, where you were assaulted. And he’ll ask you his questions in there, if that’s all right.”

  Dunbar and Spader weren’t partners in the truest sense of the word. State police detectives typically were not assigned regular partners, not like the police detectives in TV shows or FBI agents in the movies usually seemed to be. Rather, they tended to work alone or partner with a local police officer in a discrete investigation in that cop’s jurisdiction. But Spader and Dunbar had occasion to work a few cases together over the years, and Spader respected his friend’s skills and work ethic. So when the detective captain assigned this case to Spader, he’d known it could turn into a high-profile one, and told Spader to choose a partner to work it with. Spader chose Dunbar.

  “Like I said,” Mrs. Pendleton said, “whatever we can do to help put this crazy person behind bars.”

  Dunbar followed the woman out of the room. Spader and Dunbar had separated the witnesses primarily so they couldn’t create a joint account of what they’d experienced. In this case, the mother had experienced certain things and the son other things, and some of what they’d gone through might overlap, but it was better to have them tell their stories in isolation so one wouldn’t influence the other, even subconsciously. He assumed Detective Matthews had done the same thing earlier.

  When they were gone, Spader turned to Pendleton and said, “Before we begin, you mind my asking…?”

  “My legs? Accident as a kid. I used to play in the woods a lot, climbing trees, hiking, that kind of stuff.” He spoke quietly, like a man who didn’t like to call attention to himself. “When I was eight years old, I was just walking through the woods with a friend and I fell down a steep hill. I broke some bones in my back, busted a bunch of ribs, tore my face up on some rocks.”

  Spader’s own wife—well, his ex-wife—sported her own woods-related injury, a five-inch scar on her shin she got as a memento of a trip and fall of her own during a trek through the woods when she was a teenager, so Spader was able to say with complete sincerity, “The woods can be dangerous.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I don’t do much hiking these days,” Pendleton said in his quiet voice. Spader couldn’t help but smile. “It’s all right, though. That was a long time ago.” He looked openly at Spader, as if waiting for more questions about his disability. He was probably used to them.

  Spader flipped open his notebook. He asked basic questions at first
, writing down the information he learned—about Pendleton’s background, his age, the fact that he had a very small and not terribly profitable business designing websites from his home computer, that he volunteered three days a week at the local public library.

  “Okay,” Spader finally said, “let’s talk about tonight. Tell me what happened as best you can remember. Be as thorough as you can, because you never know what small detail will make a big difference in a case. Okay?”

  Pendleton nodded and took a deep breath. “Well, I was sound asleep. The next thing I know there’s a cloth pressed to my face and a strange smell coming from it. I see a shadow above me, then everything goes black. That was the chloroform, they tell me.” Spader nodded. “I wake up a while later, I don’t know how long, and I’m tied to a chair and this…this nut in a kid’s mask is standing there. It was that cartoon alien all the kids watch, Galaxo Something or Other.”

  Starboy Avenger!, Spader said in his head. “Other than the mask,” he said aloud, “what did he look like?”

  “Oh, well, he was dressed all in black.”

  “Black jeans and a black sweater? Or a black sweat suit? What do you remember?”

  Pendleton thought for a moment. “I’m just not sure.” He sounded apologetic. “I was focused on his face, you know? I mean, his mask. Plus I was scared, I guess.” He looked embarrassed by this admission.

  “Who wouldn’t be?” Spader said. “You notice anything about him at all other than the mask? How about his hands?”

  Pendleton thought for a second. Spader noticed that blood had started to seep through his bandages. “He wore black gloves, I think. Maybe leather, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.”

  “How about his build?”

  “Stocky guy. Regular height, I guess. It’s hard for me to estimate very well, seeing as I look up to everyone.” He smiled slightly. “But I’d guess he was around your height.”

  “I’m six feet even.”

  “Sounds about right, give or take an inch. And like I said, he was stocky, thick.” He stared off into a corner of the room for half a minute, then said, “That’s it, I think. I can’t remember anything else about the way he looked.”