Winter House

by Carol O’Connell

  He picked up a bottle of pills, the vitamin prescription of a veterinarian. He had nearly guessed the bird’s name – Rags. A second bottle of tablets carried the prescription of a doctor who catered to humans, and this one was filled with sleeping pills. He read the pharmacist’s date, then shook the bottle out in his hand and counted the tablets.

  All there.

  For the past month, Bitty Smyth had not required a sleep aid. Or had she been afraid to sleep?

  The bolt on the bedroom door was a great sturdy thing, thick as a steel cigar, and it had the shiny look of a recent installation. The woman was certainly afraid of something or someone.

  Detective Riker wondered if Miss Winter knew how many mistakes she had made tonight. He decided that a few of those errors must have occurred to her, for their suspicion was mutual as they stared at one another across the kitchen table.

  He smiled. And she smiled.

  „Well, ma’am – “

  „Call me Nedda.“

  „Unusual name.“ And unforgettable to Riker. His younger brother was called Ned. But Nedda was not the name that most people would know this woman by, not even those old enough to remember the lurid tabloid stories. Though given names were often passed down through generations of a family, he was certain of her identity now, and he planned to bludgeon her with it later on.

  „Maybe we can straighten out some of these loose ends,“ said Riker. „Then we’ll just pack up and get out of your life.“

  Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.

  He flipped through the pages of a small notebook, as if he might need this reminder. „You had a break-in last week. And, tonight, we find a body in your house – after another break-in. Now the ice pick next to the body – looks like he brought it with him.“

  „But I shouldn’t jump to that conclusion?“

  More pages flipped by. „Lucky guess.“ He looked up at her smiling face. „Did I mention that the guy on your rug was charged with three counts of murder? Now what are the odds that we wrap up three homicides and a break-in with minimal paperwork? You see, we almost never get this kind of happy ending. But we ‘d be willing to buy it if the guy brought that ice pick into your house. Now here’s the problem. It looks expensive. The trim is real silver.“

  „Doesn’t really go with his ensemble, does it? The torn, sweaty T-shirt and all.“

  „Where’s your ice pick, Nedda? We checked the wet bar in the front room. No luck. Maybe you keep it in the kitchen?“

  „No idea, Detective. I rarely drink hard liquor.“

  „So you wouldn’t know if that was his ice pick or yours?“

  „It’s a mystery.“ She placed an ashtray on the table as an invitation for Riker to pull out the pack of cigarettes that he had been longing for all night.

  Remembering his manners, he first offered the pack to the lady. „You smoke?“

  She surprised him by accepting one, then bending down to his match flame. In answer to his question, she inhaled deeply and blew a perfect smoke ring. Riker found her entirely too cool for a woman with a houseful of police and a dead body on her living-room floor. He finished his iced tea, then casually perused the written statement that Nedda Winter had signed for the West Side detectives. „Ma’am? Does anybody else live in this house? I don’t see anything here about – “

  „Yes. There’s my sister. Her name is Cleo Winter-Smyth.“

  Riker’s pen hovered over his open notebook. „Is she one of those hyphenated people?“

  „I’m afraid so. My brother, Lionel, lives here, too. But tonight they’re both at the summer house in the Hamptons.“

  „Why don’t we give ‘em a call and ask where the ice pick is?“

  „You could leave a message on their machine. They never pick up the phone out there. They have privacy issues.“

  Riker turned toward the sound of heavy footsteps from the hallway. He was surprised to see the head of Forensics making a personal appearance. Heller, a great bear of a man, hovered in the doorway. A baby-faced technician stood by his side, and this was a new face. A trainee? The chief crime-scene investigator had always taken great pride in the hands-on training of his crews. This might explain his presence here tonight. The man owed none of the detectives any favors that would warrant turning out for a penny-ante burglary gone wrong.

  Heller remained in the hall as his new recruit entered the kitchen with a fingerprint kit. The younger man was shaking his head and muttering, „Why elimination prints? The perp’s dead.“

  „Just do it, kid.“ Heller’s tone conveyed that he would deal with the youngster’s attitude problem later. He turned his back and ambled away down the hall.

  The rookie opened his kit on the table, then laid out his white cards, an ink pad and a roller. When he picked up Miss Winter’s right hand, he treated it as an inanimate object. Without a word spoken, no May I? or Excuse me, ma ‘am, he bent over his work, inking her thumb, then rolling it across a small square on the card.

  Nedda Winter looked up at the young man’s face, but the technician clearly did not see her. She bowed her head in resignation, understanding that she was invisible to him, all but the fingers of her captive hand. It was a revealing moment and not the response that Riker would have predicted, not at this posh address. Ensconced in a mansion, this grande dame was accustomed to indifferent manhandling by minions. And so he needed no psychiatrist to tell him that she had spent some time in an institution – a long time.

  Prison? Or the nuthouse?

  As her hand was being manipulated by the technician, so carelessly, impersonally, the sleeve of her robe slipped down her right arm, exposing a long and jagged welt of old scar tissue that told a story of a body torn to the bone.

  Riker rose quickly, knocking over his chair as he turned on the crime-scene technician. „Let her alone! Tell Heller I want someone else to do it.“ When the younger man only gawked at him, the detective yelled, „Get outl“

  Bitty Smyth sat alone in the dining room, waiting for someone, anyone, to give her life direction, or that was Charles Buder’s impression when he sat down on the other side of the table. If he could caption the look on her face, her unspoken words would be – at last – as if she had been expecting him for all of the thirty years that had passed since his tenth birthday party, waiting in absolute faith that he would come.

  „I’m sorry,“ she said. „The police dragging you here so late and all. It was because of the pictures in my room, wasn’t it?“

  His one and only stalker seemed not at all embarrassed about the shrine in her bedroom, and he wondered if this was a first warning sign. He gravitated toward the possibility of a harmless, almost magical fixation that would not interfere with the everyday function of her life. He preferred this to the darker diagnosis of an obsessive psychotic. For a moment, he was lost in her eyes, so large, so dark, the antithesis of his own small blue irises. Physically pulling away from her, he sat well back in his chair.

  It was his everyday job to observe people and pass judgments upon their mental well-being before marrying them to the proper think tanks, but there was something at work here that was quite beyond him for the present.

  Her face was heart shaped. He would not call it pretty, and yet he was charmed by it and leaning toward her once more without understanding why. Perhaps magical thinking worked both ways tonight, for he was reverting to his earlier impression of a pointed-eared elf.

  „I can’t imagine,“ she said, „what the police must have thought of my little gallery of photographs.“

  „Yes, the pictures,“ he said. „I’m sure they assumed I was a friend of the family.“ He handed her a business card for Butler and Company. An earlier version of the card had born the name Mallory and Buder, but NYPD had ordered her to dissolve the business partnership. In Mallory’s version of compliance, she had removed her name from the stationery.

  Bitty Smyth never glanced at the card. „I was at your birthday party in Gramercy Park.“

  „I know,�
�� said Charles, though he still had no memory of her. Granted, she would be inclined to remember him, the tallest boy, the one with the beak of an eagle, the eyes of a frog. But he had been blessed with eidetic memory, and he wondered how he could have forgotten her. She would have been unusually small, given her camera’s low point of view when she had taken the party photograph. All the other children had been normal size – at least a head smaller than himself. Gradually, he formed a portrait of a little person who did her best to blend into every wall she leaned against. And now he imagined her as a little girl watching from behind the foliage of Gramercy Park, hiding out – the shy child and perhaps the only one not to take part in the incident of the unfortunate frog.

  She leaned toward him. „Wasn’t it your uncle who did the magic show?“

  „No, he was my cousin, Max Candle. Old enough to be my uncle, though. So… how’s Paul? Forgive me if I don’t recall the relationship. Was Paul your – “

  „My brother,“ said Bitty, „half brother. We have the same father.“

  „So now you look after your aunt, is that right?“ He wondered if she had forgotten to breathe for a moment. Why should her aunt’s health be a touchy subject? „I’m told there’s a lot of medication in Miss Winter’s room. I assumed you were – “

  „Yes, you must have been talking to the medical examiner. He wanted to give me a sedative, but I can’t swallow pills. Now what was I – Oh, Aunt Nedda. Yes. Endstage cancer.“

  „But she appeared to be in rather good health.“

  Bitty lowered her eyes with a modest smile, as if taking this as a personal compliment. „You should have seen her six months ago. Her skin was all yellow.“

  „So she had a successful surgery, something like that?“

  „No.“

  And now he noticed something new in her eyes: the pupils were dilating. This was the unconscious tactic of a small child anxious to curry favor with an adult, and it usually worked, enhancing the unwitting adult’s concern and affection. It was a child’s act of self-preservation carried into adulthood. He wondered what other tactics she might have, both instinctive and deliberate ones for negotiating her way through a forest of taller beings.

  „How do you account for your aunt’s recovery? A miracle? Or the wrong diagnosis?“ This was a trick question, a trap, and he wondered if she had guessed that.

  She was staring at her Bible, reaching toward it and its pious explanations for all things miraculous, but then she pushed it away, electing not to play the Bible-thumping zealot, not with him.

  It occurred to him, in that moment, that the Bible and the journals were props for an illusion, rather like the trick of the eyes. More survival tactics? This intuition posed an ethical dilemma: either this woman was more vulnerable than anyone imagined, or she was a worthy adversary for Mallory. He decided to keep his silence. If he guessed wrong, Mallory might shred this woman into pieces.

  Ah, but what if he was right about Bitty? Well, in that event, Mallory would certainly shred her.

  Police from the West Side precinct had gone, and so had Charles Butler. After Bitty Smyth had been shepherded off to the dining room, only the CSU technicians and their boss remained at the crime scene with Mallory and the dead man.

  The young detective looked past the foyer to the open door. The assistant medical examiner stood on the front steps smoking a cigarette. He looked her way, then tapped his watch to remind her that his people were still waiting to collect the corpse. She turned her back on him to make it clear that this was her dead body, not his.

  And now, not hurrying any, she strolled over to the foot of the stairs and slowly paced out the movements of Nedda Winter and her victim, guided by the old woman’s statement. Mallory ended her pantomime of a killing by hunkering down at the dead man’s side and running her fingers through his hair. She waved to a technician standing by the foyer entrance. „Kill the lights!“

  He did, and now, in the etiquette of sudden darkness, no one moved or spoke. Streetlights glowed dully behind the drapes, only silhouetting the technician standing before them. All else was pitch black. She could not even see the face of the man nearest her, the dead man on the floor.

  Mallory smiled.

  Heller’s voice boomed across the void. „I know what you’re thinking, kid. She couldn’t have done it in the dark.“

  „Yes, she could – and she did. It was dark when she stabbed him the first time, but not the second time.“

  „But he was only stabbed one time.“ Dr. Morgan, the medical examiner, had come stealing back into the house, and there was exasperation in every word. „There’s only one entry wound, one – “

  „Stabbed twice,“ she said. And now they had a game. „Lights!“ yelled Mallory. And there was light.

  Heller entered the kitchen carrying a fingerprint kit and settled his massive bulk into a chair beside Nedda Winter. After introducing himself, he smiled as he held out one hand for hers, asking, almost courtly, „May I?“

  Who knew that Heller was secretly a ladies’ man?

  She smiled, placing her veined and wrinkled hand in his, then watched absently as the head of Forensics did the grunt work of inking her index finger. Rolling it back and forth on a small white card, he said. „Sorry about the mess. Comes off easy enough. Taking prints is routine in a case like this.“

  „No, it isn’t,“ she said, contradicting him without any trace of rancor.

  „Okay, call it a formality.“ Heller gently continued to make the black impressions on his fingerprint cards. „Nothing to worry about, ma’am.“

  „Unless you’ve got a record.“ Riker smiled to let her know that he was not serious. And she smiled, not buying into that for one minute. He exhaled a blue cloud of cigarette smoke and stared at the window. He might have been innocently inquiring about the weather outside when he asked, „You never murdered anyone, did you, Nedda?“

  „Oh, don’t get me started, Detective. We’ll be here all night.“

  He liked sparring with this woman, and he was gradually losing his awe of her, though he had never been so close to a legend. If his father only knew who he was sitting with right now. And Granddad – how he wished that beloved old man had lived long enough to see this night.

  „We always fingerprint the householders,“ said Heller, as if she had never called this a lie and called it right. „You see, this is the way we eliminate – “

  „No,“ she said, still smiling. „There’s no need for elimination prints. You don’t care what he touched or we touched, not in a burglary with a dead suspect.“ She turned to Riker. „Sorry. I’ve watched entirely too much television.“

  Resignation was in her face when she turned his way. She knew why the cops had come to her door and why they had stayed so long.

  „Okay, you got us,“ said Riker. „We lied about the prints. But you can see why. We got problems here.“ He lit another cigarette and watched the smoke curl, wondering if he could turn her suspicions around. „Civilians have TV ideas about how this works, when a good taxpayer, like yourself, kills a criminal type – like our friend on the floor out there.“ Riker nodded in the direction of the crime scene down the hall, „You think the cops just show up as a courtesy. They take the dead body off your hands, maybe even clean up the mess for you. Then they write you an excuse note for a homicide.“

  He waved this idea away with one hand. „Naw. When we find a body with a pair of shears stuck in the chest, we call it unnatural death. Doesn’t matter if the victim is scum – and, believe me, this guy would have to do some social climbing before we could call him anything as grand as scum. But he still gets a full homicide investigation. Now first we had to figure out which cophouse owns the crime scene. If the perp came to rob you, then the case goes to Robbery Homicide Division. If not, then it could go to the West Side cops. They showed up first, and it’s their turf. And then there’s me and Mallory. We ‘re from Special Crimes Unit. We might get the case ‘cause we had a prior interest in the dead man.�
�

  „So how many detectives are fighting over the body?“

  „Only one left standing out there.“ Heller turned his eyes to the hallway. „The body belongs to Riker’s partner, Mallory.“

  „And I predicted that.“ Riker turned his face to Nedda’s. „She was the catching detective on your dead man’s three murders. Too bad we can’t turn up your ice pick.“ He watched Nedda Winter’s body relax as she slid back into a comfort zone, believing that she was merely suspected of homicide.

  „Yes, I see the problem,“ she said. „You have to be sure the pick belonged to him before you can close out the case. As I said, I’ve never had any use for an ice pick.“

  „Well, it’s a big house,“ said Riker. „You got a maid or a housekeeper?“

  „There was a live-in housekeeper. My niece, Bitty, tried to save her soul, and she ran away from home. Now my sister, Cleo, deals with an agency. They send different people every week.“

  Done with the fingerprinting, Heller gently wiped the ink from her hands, then filed his print cards away in an envelope. He was working on the identifying labels when he and Riker looked up to see Bitty Smyth hovering in the doorway, asking with her eyes if she might enter.

  „Come in, dear,“ said Nedda. „This is Mr. Heller, and you’ve met Detective Riker.“

  For a moment, Riker believed that Bitty might curtsy, but instead, she held out her Bible as an offering, voting him the most likely soul to be in need of religion. „It’s a gift,“ she said, when he failed to take it from her. „You are a Christian, are you not?“

  „My church is Finnegan’s.“ And Riker’s religion revolved around sacramental bourbon and beer. Finnegan’s was the cop bar beneath his Greenwich Village apartment. Free drinks, courtesy of his new landlord and barkeep, made it a religious experience every night.

  The tiny woman patted his head in the manner of rewarding a dog.

  „Bitty,“ said her aunt, „do you know where the ice pick is?“