Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  He spent an hour poking through the well-picked bones of his Galaxo case file but found nothing worth a second chew, so he closed the file, dropped himself onto the couch, and reached for the remote with his left hand. His right hand was empty, and it felt extraordinarily so without a beer in it. Another indication that he’d been drinking too much. He had Budweisers in the fridge but wasn’t even all that tempted to get one.

  He’d turned on the television around midnight, usually a good time to find John Wayne defending the Alamo or barking orders in a foxhole in Germany. A quick flip through all the channels produced no movies of the Duke’s, but a Jimmy Stewart western was on, which went a long way toward quelling Spader’s disappointment.

  He must have fallen asleep, because when the phone woke him, he immediately looked at the TV and saw that Jimmy Stewart’s Technicolor face had been replaced by Montgomery Clift’s in glorious black and white. The phone rang again and Spader knew, he just knew, that Galaxo had struck again. He didn’t know how that could have happened, not with Pendleton being watched tonight, and he didn’t even want to think just then about what that meant for his investigation. The phone rang for the third time, maybe the fourth, and he reached for it.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Detective Captain Struthers wanted to see him, so Spader was standing outside Sally’s office, waiting for him to get off the phone. Spader could hear a little through Struthers’s door—mostly the captain’s tone of voice, but a few words came through now and then, and the worst one was “governor,” and Spader knew Struthers was getting chewed out, probably by DA Rawlings. But he heard Struthers say, “Still the best detective I’ve got,” and “Yes, I absolutely stand by my choice.” Spader almost smiled. From the sound of things, though, the chewing-out wasn’t going to end any time soon, so Spader let his mind return to the case.

  When the call came in the night before, Spader was told that Galaxo had struck again, but the victim had survived and would be undergoing surgery to reattach a partially severed hand. The husband had interrupted Galaxo’s work and had actually fought with Galaxo before Galaxo zapped him with a stun gun and escaped. Spader was dying to talk to both of them, but was told the victim would be in surgery and the husband would be at the hospital, too, first receiving treatment for his own injuries, then waiting for her to come out of surgery. So even though Spader wanted to speak with them as soon as possible, for now he settled for the initial reports they gave to the first cops to arrive on the scene and went instead to their home to check out the crime scene. There wasn’t much to see, and what was there was typical of Galaxo’s crime scenes—no DNA or trace evidence left behind, no sign of forced entry, nothing but a chair in the kitchen where the victim had been taped, blood covering one arm of the chair and part of the seat, and a pool of it on the floor by the front right leg. Several torn strips of tape that had secured the victim lay strewn about, torn off Madeleine by her husband. Otherwise, the place was as annoyingly evidence-free as Galaxo’s other crime scenes. The Crime Scene Services folks did what they could, took pictures and measurements, looked for fingerprints and other evidence inside and for footprints and tire marks outside, but they came up empty, as expected.

  By the time Spader was finished there, it was nearly five in the morning. The victims would either be in surgery or asleep, as each required, so Spader knew he’d have to wait until today to speak with them. He’d called the hospital several times already but was told that there had been complications in reattaching Madeleine Wollner’s hand, necessitating additional surgery, so Madeleine didn’t make it to the intensive care unit until nearly nine a.m. Spader had called a few more times, the last time at four this afternoon, and learned that Mrs. Wollner had been transferred to a patient room and was still sleeping. And Mr. Wollner, who was recovering from a concussion and slightly fractured skull, was apparently doing the same in the bed next to hers.

  Struthers barked from the other side of his office door. Spader took this to mean he’d been invited into the office, so he opened the door, closed it behind him, sat down in the chair in front of Struthers’s desk, and braced himself.

  Struthers sighed. He ran a hand through his hair, which had already been thinning as of a few weeks ago, but which looked to Spader to be a touch grayer. “So Galaxo struck again last night,” he finally said.

  “Yes, sir. Fortunately, the victim survived.”

  “Lost a hand, though?”

  “Only temporarily.”

  “Husband was hurt, too?”

  “Concussion. Mild skull fracture.”

  “You talk to them yet?”

  “She was in surgery most of the morning. She’s been asleep since she’s been out of the OR.”

  “The wife is blind, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But the husband actually saw Galaxo? Fought with him?”

  “Yes, sir, until Galaxo knocked him out with a stun gun. I’m going to give them a little while longer, then I’m going to talk to them.”

  Struthers nodded. “He’s after women now, too.”

  “They certainly don’t seem to be off-limits for him.”

  Struthers nodded again. “What’s it been since the last attack, the one where he beat the hell out of that guy and took out his eyes?”

  “Six days.”

  “Jesus. This guy works fast. You watch the news this morning?”

  “I try to avoid that these days, Cap.”

  “Wish I could do that.” Spader expected Struthers to talk a little about how far up his ass the DA had gotten—maybe he’d reached the small intestine by now—but Struthers simply said, “I heard the officer conducting surveillance on your boy Pendleton says the guy never left his house.”

  “I heard the same thing.”

  “I heard he saw the guy rolling across his living room in his wheelchair less than fifteen minutes before last night’s attack began.”

  “Yeah,” Spader said. “I heard that, too.”

  Struthers nodded, then rolled his head from side to side on his neck. Spader heard a few vertebrae pop. “It probably doesn’t surprise you that I called the Beverly PD and thanked them for their assistance, but said that we no longer needed their help watching Pendleton’s house.”

  Spader nodded. “No, it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Now,” Struthers said, “with Pendleton no longer a viable suspect, please tell me you have something else cooking? Please tell me you’ve been pursuing more than one angle and have a lead or two to go on.”

  Spader didn’t know how to respond. Struthers was looking at him with hope in his tired-looking eyes, hope that Spader had something up his sleeve. But he didn’t. They’d worked every angle they could, and to Spader’s eye, everything had pointed toward Pendleton—once he got past the paraplegia problem. Now he didn’t know what to think at the moment. And he certainly didn’t know what to tell Struthers. The captain frowned.

  “John,” he said, “I have to call in the FBI. I don’t have a choice. You can expect them to be here tomorrow afternoon, the following morning at the latest. And when they arrive, I know you’ll cooperate fully, take their help, give them yours, work closely with them to wrap this guy up.”

  Spader didn’t bother to hide the frustration on his face, but he said, “Of course, Captain. And until the cavalry rides in?”

  Struthers ignored his tone. “Just keep working it. I want this asshole to be done and I don’t care who finishes him. No more victims. No more body parts. No more headlines.”

  Spader nodded and left.

  When Spader returned to his desk he found a voice message from Olivia waiting on his office line. She reported that David had been out all night again, then strolled in after breakfast this morning sporting a fresh bruise under one eye and a newly chipped tooth. He wouldn’t say how he’d been hurt, where he’d been all night, what he’d been doing, or with whom he’d been doing it. Spader sighed. Olivia assured him in the message that David was okay, not too badly
hurt, but that they all needed to have another family meeting, this time to finally put an end to this behavior. This was all Spader needed. In the middle of a high-profile investigation, one for which he was crucified daily in the media, his son was acting up, staying out all night, getting into fights. Spader wondered where the boy had gone wrong. From respectable student to disrespectful punk. Or perhaps it was Spader and Olivia who had gone wrong, failed to provide something their son had needed. A firmer hand? A looser one? Advice? A sympathetic ear? David had started on this path during the last school year, and things had only gotten worse. They were coming to a head now, with David now getting into scrapes around town. Olivia was right. It was time to bring an end to all that.

  Dunbar, who was sitting behind his desk writing up a report, looked up.

  “How’d things go with Sally?”

  “He’s bringing in the feebs.”

  “Shit. When?”

  “Tomorrow, next morning at the latest.”

  “Shit.”

  “Until then we keep going from here. Where’s here, by the way?”

  Dunbar shrugged. “Nowhere, I guess. Amanda Cassel took a couple of cops out to the Wollners’ neighborhood today, knocked on doors. Nobody saw anything.”

  “Didn’t Galaxo walk out the back door while the house’s security alarm was screaming?”

  “Yeah, but the neighbors back there figured it was a malfunction and went back to sleep.”

  “Great world we live in, eh? Anything else?”

  “Wilkins finished the list of colleges a few days ago. The team’s been prioritizing the names, as we talked about, with those fitting the FBI profile the best getting a closer look. They’ve checked out maybe two dozen potentials, but all have come up clean so far, either with alibis or with something else that excludes them from further suspicion. There are still more names on the list and they’ll be running them down, too.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet, but maybe soon. I got to thinking about Marilyn Easterbrook, the old lady who used to be at Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Well, I thought about Andrew Yasovich keeping those letters from his kid and I got to thinking that maybe old lady Easterbrook kept some mementos, too, something that might have campers’ names. Letters they wrote her or pictures they took with her or something.”

  “Good thinking. Any luck?”

  “Well, I called her daughter this morning, the one who lives in her house now, and asked her. And she said she thinks she might remember seeing photos of her mother’s, from camp, sort of like class pictures, all the kids lined up in rows. She thinks they might have taken them every year and hung them up around the tents and mess halls at the camp.”

  “She thinks her mother might have kept them?”

  “Maybe. She’s gonna look for them.”

  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed then,” Spader said. “We could really use some luck on this case.”

  He closed his eyes and used his fingertips to massage them through his eyelids. After a moment Dunbar said, “You know, for the record, you were starting to sell me on Pendleton being Galaxo, despite the overwhelming evidence indicating the impossibility of that.”

  “Looks like I was wrong, though.”

  Dunbar looked up from his report. He must have heard something in Spader’s voice. “You don’t think you were wrong, do you?”

  Spader shrugged.

  “Come on, John. While Galaxo was cutting off Madeleine Wollner’s hand in her house in Springfield, Pendleton was two hours away in his house in Beverly, sitting in his wheelchair.” Spader shrugged again. “You have to give it up, buddy. Pendleton’s not our guy.”

  Spader decided to change the subject. “Well, anyway, maybe we got our breakthrough in this case. Madeleine Wollner survived Galaxo’s attack. Maybe she’ll give us new insight. And the husband actually fought with Galaxo. He might be able to tell us something new.”

  “Yeah, and maybe we’ll break the case just in time for the feds to step in and take the credit.”

  “Whatever. I just want him stopped.” Spader stood and shrugged into his sport coat. “I’m heading out to the hospital in Springfield to talk to them. I’ll call you if there’s anything worth calling about.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Are you there yet?” Spader asked into his cell phone.

  “I’m parked right across the street, one house down. You know, this is kind of backwards.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you read crime novels, it’s the private investigator who goes to a cop friend and asks for a favor, not the other way around.”

  When Struthers pulled the plug on the surveillance on Pendleton a couple of hours earlier, Spader only had to think about it for two minutes before he decided to call Artie Small, a guy who used to be a fairly good cop, but who took a bullet on the job, left the force with full disability pay, and turned into a fairly good PI. Spader had never had the need for his services before, but he’d known Small for more than ten years and word got around about the skills of people in his line of work. He saw him from time to time in the Green Hills, and if he was half as good as he claimed to be, he’d be the best private detective in New England, perhaps on the East Coast. The only thing that really gave Spader pause was Small’s almost fanatical appreciation for the music of Barry Manilow. He was always whistling or humming one of Manilow’s tunes, which Spader figured might have been the main reason that Small had very few friends.

  “You bring the equipment I told you to bring with you?” Spader asked. He thought he might have heard “Could It Be Magic” playing softly from car speakers in the background.

  “Got my parabolic microphone, my digital camcorder, and my digital camera with telephoto lens. I don’t have to tell you, of course, that anything I hear from inside with the microphone, or anything I record if that’s what you want, wouldn’t be admissible in court.”

  “I realize that.”

  “In fact, it’s illegal for us to be doing it. And remember, I can only hear what’s going on in the rooms with windows, on the front of the house that I can see.”

  “They spend most of their time in the TV room, I think, which is toward the back of the house.”

  “I noticed.”

  Spader had asked Small to take along a listening device that could pick up sounds from inside the house even from across the street. Everything Small had said was right, of course. But no one would ever find out they’d listened, and Spader didn’t plan to use any information they learned that way in any official way; rather, he just wanted to know if Pendleton did or said anything suspicious, anything to link him to Galaxo, or anything demonstrating that he wasn’t the paraplegic the world thought him to be. Once he had confirmation of that, he’d go after Pendleton hard until he found proof that would, in fact, be admissible in court.

  “Listen, Artie, thanks for the lesson on eavesdropping. I just want to know what you hear. I want to know if he says anything incriminating. Most of all, I want to know if this guy’s walking around in there.”

  “The news reports have been pretty clear that the guy’s disabled, John.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been hearing the same thing. I’m just not ready to buy it. By the way, how much are you charging me? I forgot to ask.”

  “My standard rate, less forty percent.”

  “Forty? That’s generous.”

  “You know what a nice guy I am.”

  “Uh-huh. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you know you might need a favor from a cop someday?”

  “Ouch. That hurts, John. That really does.”

  “Artie, you know what I’m after with this guy. Let me know if you hear or see anything that you think I need to know about. And if this guy leaves his house—alone, with his mother, with a friend—I want to know about it right away, you got it?”

  “I’m all over this, John. I’m setting up my microp
hone as we speak. I’ll be able to tell you if the guy farts in there. And if he even reaches out his door to grab the paper he forgot to bring in off his front step earlier, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks.”

  When Spader reached Baystate Medical Center, a perky volunteer at the information desk directed him to the Wollners’ room, where he flashed his badge to a stern-faced RN at the nurse’s station and was told that Madeleine had been taken for tests of some kind, or some X-rays—she wasn’t sure which—and would be back in a while. Spader went down to her room anyway, looking for her husband. He introduced himself to the uniformed Springfield cop sitting in a brown plastic chair outside her door, standing guard in case Galaxo went against everything they’d learned about him and came after Madeleine here. He wondered briefly how the cop chose which Wollner to guard while one was in the room and the other was undergoing tests elsewhere, then decided that the patient alone in the room was more in need of protection than the one surrounded by medical personnel in a lab or X-ray room.

  Spader poked his head into the room. One bed was empty. In the other lay a man with a white bandage wrapped around his head. He appeared to be sleeping. Spader gave a little cough and when Wollner didn’t stir, Spader backed out of the room and told the cop he’d return in a little while.

  He went down to sit in the cafeteria and kill a little time, but when he started getting hungry, he left the hospital to grab an early dinner. He could have eaten in the cafeteria, of course, but why subject himself to that?

  He returned a little after seven and took the elevator back up to Madeleine’s floor. The same unsmiling nurse told him that Madeleine had returned a little while ago. Spader walked down the hall to her room and nodded to the cop at the door. The door was open, but a curtain inside had been pulled across it to provide some measure of privacy in a place where patients essentially had to check their privacy concerns at the door. Spader flashed back to images of each of his parents in their short, backless gowns. He shook off those thoughts and rapped his knuckles on the doorjamb. A man’s voice invited him inside and he pushed past the curtain.