The Last Nightingale

by Anthony Flacco

  She watched Sergeant Blackburn pause, probably for dramatic effect, before he added, "And your fingerprints are all over the gun we retrieved from Miss Pairo's apartment.”

  All of the fine hairs on Elsie's body stood up. She knew better than to speak. A nervous mouth will betray you every time, she could hear her mother's voice saying, giving her valuable lessons in how to lie to boys. Keep quiet and let them wonder what you're thinking.

  She took another look at Sergeant Blackburn. He really was quite handsome, with a lovely, strong voice. She briefly wondered if she could still seduce a man like him, but immediately felt foolish for thinking about it. She forced the thought out of her mind and tried to reclaim confidence where suddenly there was none.

  “I'm curious," Blackburn went on, "did you actually meet Miss Pairo just as she was coming out of the house, or did you have to wait around to catch her?”

  She didn't reply. Several awkward moments went by. The two of them were alone there, after all. No windows. The door was made of solid wood. No one could see.

  She knelt down in front of him and started to undo his pants.

  Blackburn slipped both of his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. He was almost gentle, but not quite. "Use the writing tablet, there," he told her in a voice that did not invite a response. "Mrs. Sullivan, you need to write out a full confession. Put all of it down, and don't leave anything out." He regarded her for a moment, then added, "I promise you, it's for the best.”

  “Do you mean that?" she asked in the voice of a timid little girl, one she had always found to be tremendously effective in the bedroom. It compelled a man to show her that he wasn't angry with her.

  “Mrs. Sullivan, you're under arrest for murder, now. You won't be leaving this place for a while. That's why it doesn't matter whether you are well dressed today or not.”

  “I can afford to post a very high bond.”

  “Not for murder. There is no bail." He went on to explain that as soon as she finished her confession, she was going to be redressed in the muslin coveralls of a jailhouse inmate.

  As much as his words frightened her, Elsie felt sure that she caught a flash of reassurance in Sergeant Blackburn's eyes. It puzzled her for just a moment, then she realized that yes—he seemed to be saying that he could help her, if only she did as she was told. She sensed that her charms were working on him as well as ever, even in her degraded condition.

  Feeling better now, she sat down to the writing tablet and picked up a pencil. When she looked up at Sergeant Blackburn and smiled, she caught him almost smiling right back, plain as anything. She began to write, then, in her studied and elegant hand, determined to please him enough to gain every possible advantage over him.

  She wrote out everything: how the captain tormented her so cruelly and for so long. She emphasized that Marietta Pairo was not the subject of her malice. Bather, the younger woman was simply the natural scapegoat. The captain, of course, was the problem—a man who was simply too nasty to live. The deservedly late captain. Elsie did not doubt that she could make any reasonable person see that.

  Mind over matter, the way she had always done it. So she ignored her current state of appearance and projected the idea of herself as a woman in distress. Within moments, she was transformed. While her physical appearance remained deplorable, she could tell that her presence itself became as sweet as blueberry pie. She knew that no man would do anything to harm her, when she was like this.

  She concentrated on writing out her confession just as instructed, making sure to use her best penmanship. The things she was committing to the page were too scary to think about. Somehow the fears tightened her muscles and twisted at her stomach. So she kept them at bay by focusing on the challenge of writing with perfectly even letters. This served to show the policeman that she obeyed the rules, while her handwriting was still decorated with enough feminine swirls to be sexy.

  Elsie Sullivan trusted that she would soon have this Sergeant Randall Blackburn curled up in the palm of her hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THAT EVENING

  BLACKBURN WAS THE HERO of the hour, since the Sullivan widow was in the city jail, huddled with her attorney and sending out scores of frantic missives to her highly connected friends. Lieutenant Moses rewarded him by allowing him to nap in an empty cell until it was time for his night beat. After four hours of near-death slumber and half a pot of tar-like coffee, Blackburn was ready to pull one more full shift before he would finally be allowed to go back to his new apartment and get a full night's sleep.

  However, once he stepped outside into the darkness and cool night air, his energy doubled. What he really wanted to do was to ignore the Barbary Coast altogether and do a little investigative work instead. The very idea picked up his pulse. Hunting down a good mystery was far more compelling than the thought of spending the night hunting down street thugs. So in silent retaliation for the brutal treatment by his supervisor, he decided to give the thugs a few hours off and pursue the mystery instead.

  He turned away from City Hall's temporary station. The single advantage to walking the Barbary Coast beat was that his supervisors seldom found cause to risk themselves by going down there to check on him. Instead he headed in the opposite direction and took a walk toward the Mission Dolores, several long blocks away.

  The day before, when a boy walked into the station bearing "an urgent note for Sergeant Blackburn," the desk sergeant on duty refused to accept it unless the boy provided a return address. For some reason, the boy refused to leave his name, but did say that he was living at the Mission Delores, and claimed that he worked there, guarding the place from looters at night. If he really was at the Mission, he would be easy enough to identify. The desk sergeant had commented that the boy had a pronounced stutter.

  Blackburn still felt a pleasant buzz of surprise that the ruse about fingerprints had actually worked on Mrs. Sullivan. With the science being so new, she had not realized that nobody had taken fingerprint samples from her. Most new inventions seem to be half miracle; maybe she just thought there was some magic to it that she did not comprehend. By the time her lawyer arrived and she began to feel buyer's remorse, she had a long, detailed confession written down and signed in front of several witnesses.

  It would never work to back away from her confession. The current state of criminal law in San Francisco was to lean toward the harsh side. The beleaguered population was in no mood for sob stories; every one of them had a few of their own.

  Blackburn had gone into the case knowing that the city needed to take a close look at the wife, even if they did not have enough to justify charging her. The rush to nail Marietta Pairo felt wrong to him as well. His failure was all but guaranteed on the assigned task. So when the strange note arrived, he had taken it at face value and thrown it against the wall, where amazingly, it stuck like fresh horse flop. The easy power of it nearly took his breath away. Pure bluff and nothing else. Even in this grim atmosphere, miracles still happened. And as far as Mrs. Sullivan's vow of putting out appeals to high-powered friends went, well, those same people were also the friends of Captain Harlan Sullivan—shot through the head while he was defenseless. Mrs. Sullivan was going to have to get used to prison food.

  The kid with the note, though: He was more interesting than some pitiful self-made widow. What was his connection to this woman, that he could be so eerily intuitive about her? How was it that he could be dead right about all of it?

  Blackburn could feel that this mystery somehow fit into the strange aura hovering over the city. It had been there ever since disaster struck. With that first shock wave, everything about the physical world came under an unstoppable destructive force. So had the more ethereal things, such as one's view of the way the world functions. In the aftermath, the strangeness of a magical clue being delivered by some ragged and anonymous boy somehow fit into the post-quake picture, right along with the ubiquitous piles of rubble. The land down near the bay shore had turned t
o quicksand from the sheer intensity of the great vibrations. Now everybody in the area lived in a world in which the ground itself could not be trusted to hold still, or even remain solid. So why not a boy with a magic note?

  It was a fairly short walk but he made slow time, stepping among the makeshift shelters that now served as homes and businesses for the die-hard populace. Block after block, pale stalks of smoke twisted up from countless cooking fires. He cringed at the thought of another conflagration. Meanwhile, grim and determined faces peered out at him from swaths of stained blankets and ragged clothing. The city was surviving, but the eyes of its people were universally dark and hollow.

  Everyone in the region shared the same invisible wound. Blackburn kept his own shoved far down, but he imagined that others could see the effects on his face as clearly as he saw it in theirs. The worst of the shaking had taken place inside of the people. It left them with the question: How far back inside of yourself do you have to retreat, to find a bit of stable ground?

  Blackburn was stuck with that challenge as much as anybody else, and he felt moved to stand up for these people. This part of town was mostly a stalwart population, immigrant pioneers of hardy stock. He could see in their behavior that they remained honorable and clung to their families. No one was lying around drunk or en- gaging in gambling. Everybody in sight was either doing some sort of business or tending to their makeshift homes, with all but the smallest of children occupied in one handy task or another.

  In spite of his admiration, he moved among them as an audience member, seldom a player. While walking his beat he was still only an observer, unless action was necessary. The act of constant observation commanded a certain distance that was grimly effective insulation against human warmth, so that walking past these tightly knit families filled him with a lonely ache. If he were off duty, it would be a perfect moment for a whiskey or two. Instead he left the hunger hanging and moved on.

  When a rat the size of a house cat darted in front of him, he kicked at it without coming close. The rat disappeared in a flash of matted fur. It was finally becoming more rare to see them. The swarms that roamed the streets with impunity right after the earthquake were fading back into the broken sewer lines and scattered rubble piles. Since confrontations with humans frequently ended in death, the rats were discovering that it was easier to hide in daylight and forage in darkness. He wondered if any of them really carried the plague. If there were any victims, it seemed strange that he had heard nothing about it.

  He reached the Mission Dolores well after midnight, so he bypassed the church and went straight to where the little graveyard fronted onto the road. The place was dark, with silhouettes of the larger tombstones and funerary statues defined by faint moonlight. At first the whole cemetery appeared deserted. But he stood for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the thicker darkness under wide boughs of the older trees. Smudges began to take sharper form.

  There, in the very back, was the outline of a toolshed. A bright lantern was burning inside. He silently entered the graveyard and made his way back toward the shed. Once he got within a few yards, he could see a rectangle of light projected onto the ground outside the shed's door. A boy's skinny and distorted shadow passed back and forth in front of it, and a faint muttering sound drifted up from the shed. The boy seemed to be reciting or chanting, but Blackburn couldn't hear the words.

  He glided forward a few more feet until he could get a good look. The kid was lanky, nearly skin and bone, but did not appear to be sickly. Twelve or thirteen years old, probably. Not shaving yet. His thick, tousled hair looked like he cut it himself and his work clothes were cut for someone else. His shoes and socks looked right for his size but the leather was worn through, enough to notice at this distance. All in all, he gave the impression of being a coiled spring wrapped in skin and hair.

  He was reading aloud by the light of the single oil lamp. He paced back and forth holding a newspaper open in front of him. His voice was soft but clear, and he seldom stumbled over the bigger words or odd pronunciations. Blackburn was struck by the sight. He knew that in this time and place, illiteracy was as common as the fog. Yet somebody had seen to it that this scrappy kid thoroughly learned his ABCs.

  At that point Blackburn finally realized what he was hearing— for some reason, the boy was reading from the newspaper's society pages, those fluffy stories telling all about the parties and celebrations and glittering lives of the town's noted citizens. The boy read carefully, pronouncing each word as if they were all equally important. He was so caught up in his pursuit that Blackburn got within a few feet of him without being detected.

  The fog outside of Shane's toolshed was growing thick enough to slip through the open door in low wisps, but he was too engrossed in his reading to notice the cold. When he read out loud, he was somehow able to send the words straight from the page through his mouth, undisturbed. More than that, he spoke with confidence. His goal was almost fingertip close, now: to burn the sensation of speaking deeply enough into his brain that he could speak just as well when there were no pages.

  The voice outside his door startled him. "Is that how you heard about the case? Reading the paper out loud?”

  Shane dropped the newspaper. A gust of wind swept it away from his feet and out into the darkness. He whirled to face the speaker and saw that it was the police sergeant, Randall Rlackburn, the one Shane left the note for.

  And, he now realized, the last one, besides Shane, to see the Nightingale women killed where they lay.

  He caught himself staring at the ground, so he forced his eyes to look up and meet Rlackburn's gaze. Rut his mouth wouldn't move. The best he could do was to offer a wan smile and nod. It took the big sergeant a moment to catch on, then he realized that this was all the response he would get. He smiled and also nodded. And then Sergeant Rlackburn just stood there, sizing Shane up with an unreadable expression. Shane thought that the sergeant seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but what?

  He stepped over to an upturned flowerpot and sat on it. Sergeant Rlackburn seemed to smile a bit. He reached into the shed and pulled a large pot out of his own through the doorway. He stopped outside the door, leaving the interior for Shane. Shane was taken aback; the gesture almost felt polite. Or was the cop just guarding the doorway? Rlackburn flipped the big pot over and sat where they could see each other. Shane knew that the thick ceramic planter weighed more than he did, and yet the sergeant handled it like a tin washtub. It made him feel like he was made of paper himself.

  It was that sense of fragility that left Shane hanging halfway in the moment and halfway back in the pantry at the Nightingale house. That was the last place that he had felt so much physical power emanating from a single person. In the Nightingale house, the madman also radiated a presence that left no doubt that you were in the company of chaos and doom. Shane's instincts told him that the cop had the strength to easily kill him, but he was just as sure that there was no such danger.

  The sergeant seemed to decide something. He shook his head, then spoke up. "Well, I already know it was you who left me the note, and ordinarily I wouldn't bother you about it, except that you solved a case. Not just solved it, actually. You stopped it cold in its tracks when it was running away from me. So you can see how I might be curious." He smiled.

  Was it a real smile or a trick? Shane tried to breathe slowly. Don't think about the house. Don't even picture it.

  “All right, then. Always start with the basics. My name is Randall Rlackburn. Sergeant, SFPD." He waited a moment. ". . . And you are?”

  “Shane Nightingale," he answered, except that it came out "Shh-Sha-Sha-Shhane Ni-Ni-Night-Nighting-ga-ga-gale.”

  “Shane Nightingale, you say?”

  Shane nodded.

  “All right then, Shane. Now ordinarily you could address me as Sergeant Rlackburn and that would be that. I'm thinking that the practical thing to do is stick with something easy. It's going to be a mouthful to use my rank, so let's just drop
that and assume that you know how wildly important I am. That leaves either Randall or Rlackburn. I'm thinking that Rlack-burn is not a good combination of sounds for you. So what about Randall? Can you just sort of slide into that one? Randall?”

  Shane tried. "Raaand-Rand-Raaa . . .”

  “All right. Rack up a bit. Let's try Sergeant, after all. What do you say?”

  “Se-Ser-Ser-Se-Ssss-Serg . . .”

  “You know, I might have been too hasty discarding Rlackburn. You should at least try it once or twice.”

  “R-R-R-lack-Rlack-Rlackie-Rlackie . . . Rlackie.”

  The big cop laughed out loud. "Rlackie? Surely not!”

  “N-n-no! No. I meant R-R-Rlack-Rlackie . . ." He sighed in frustration.

  “There you go! Winner by default! So you're Shane and I'm

  Blackie." He laughed again. "It's still Blackburn when you can manage it, but we'll settle for Blackie to save time, fair enough? And the reason I'm here right now, Shane, is because your note, well, it was a powerful thing today. Once you explained Mrs. Sullivan's way of thinking, I was able to go in and trick her with a phony story about a new science called fingerprinting. She caved in and confessed it all.”

  Shane's heartbeat refused to slow down. At any instant, the other shoe was sure to drop.

  “So you see," Blackburn went on, "you broke the case.”

  There it was! Shane felt panic rolling through him. Shane had broken the case. Blackburn's case was broken and it was all Shane's fault. That's why he was here. Now there would be trouble. He was an idiot to write that note.

  Blackburn seemed to catch his concern. "Breaking a case is a good thing, you see." He grinned. "Beally you can do it all you want.”

  He paused for a few more heartbeats, then went on. "But you see, that leaves me with a mystery. How does a young fellow like you, working over here at night in the cemetery at the Mission Dolores, figure out what's going on inside the mind of a grown woman you've never met who lives on the other side of town? And yet I don't see any flying broomsticks around here, or a crystal ball. Did you find out by magic? Did a little bird tell you? Did an angel light upon your shoulder and—”