Winter House

by Carol O’Connell

  Mallory glanced at Riker, who nodded, saying, „I think he got this part right.“

  And the author droned on, saying, „The police made a very thorough search of this area. They spent days questioning all the residents on this block. And then it was the fortuneteller’s turn.“ He pointed to a narrow building across the street. „The woman’s storefront was right there.“

  The tour group turned in unison to stare at a bodega with neon signs for beer and smokes. A drunk stood before its front window vomiting on his shoes. Yet this view held special charms for the sidewalk audience.

  „The police took great interest in the fortuneteller,“ said Pinwitty. „She was the only one they brought in for questioning at the police station. And there she died. According to the obituary, it was a cerebral hemorrhage.“

  „That’s wrong,“ said Riker, speaking low so as not to interfere with the dry static of the ongoing monologue. „It was way more interesting than that.“

  „So what’s the real story?“

  „This is secondhand. I was only a kid when I heard it, and this was more than twenty years after it happened. The detectives left the fortuneteller sitting on a bench for maybe five minutes while they freed up an interview room. When they came back for the old lady, the cop on guard duty was bending over her dead body. The uniform tells the detectives she was sitting up one minute, dead the next, and there was nobody near her when she keeled over. Well, they’re hunting for an ice-pick killer, right? And thanks to a slew of exhumed corpses in the early forties, they’re hip to the ice pick in the eardrum. It simulates a stroke. Well, sure enough, they shine a light in the woman’s ear and find blood from the pick. Now they interrogate the shit out of that cop.“

  „The cop was dirty?“

  „That’s what the detectives figured. Maybe the uniform took a few bucks to look the other way. Or maybe he did in the old lady himself. But no. According to the other witnesses, the cop just wasn’t paying attention when somebody stopped to talk with his prisoner. The old lady’s visitor was only there long enough to say hello and good-bye. A few seconds later, the old woman slumps forward. The cop jostles her shoulder and asks if she’s okay. That’s when she falls to the floor, stone dead. The killer walked right into a police station and killed this woman right under their noses. A real pro.“

  „And the detectives covered it up.“

  „You bet they did. This happened maybe ten or twelve days after the Winter House massacre. The newspapers would’ve crucified the whole department. So an ice-pick murder was passed off as a stroke and buried on the obituary page. Oh yeah,“ he said as an afterthought, „and that old lady was no crystal-ball gypsy. She only read tarot cards.“

  „And she had a solid connection to the hitman.“

  Riker nodded in Pinwitty’s direction. „He’s getting to that part now.“

  The author pointed upward to a window on the second floor. „After the fortuneteller was taken away, that very night, in fact, that apartment was searched by detectives. On previous calls, the tenant had never been at home. That night they didn’t even bother to knock. Sadly, the tenant was gone and so were his things. No one was able to give the police a name or description. In fact, no one in the neighborhood could recall ever having seen the mysterious tenant even once, though he’d held the lease for years.“

  Mallory nudged Riker. „So the fortuneteller’s storefront was a drop site for money, and the old lady brokered the hitman’s murders?“

  „Yeah. Two different fortunetellers used the same location. They were both murdered, but Pinwitty doesn’t know that.“ Riker looked on as the author lost his audience. One by one, the escapees peeled off from the tour group. „But he did get a few things right.“ He looked up to the second-floor window. „When the detectives broke down the door, that apartment was clean, and I mean spotless. No prints anywhere. Ballsy, huh? Cops breathing down his neck, and he takes the time to wipe down the walls and the furniture.“

  „And now we ‘ve got Nedda Winter with tarot cards at the dinner party,“ said Mallory. „You think Stick Man would kidnap a twelve-year-old girl to replace his old fortuneteller?“

  „It’s a stretch. Remember, the girl disappeared from Winter House twelve days before the fortuneteller died.“

  „If Stick Man thought the cops were closing in on his drop point, maybe he planned to break in the girl as his next tarot card reader – before he killed the old woman. Nedda was tall for twelve. She could’ve passed for a teenager.“

  „Could be.“ In fact, Riker had already thought of this. But why would a hitman believe that a little girl might go along with that idea?

  The spooky brat beside him read his mind. „Maybe,“ she said, „Nedda wasn’t all that broken up about the murders. Maybe she knew what was going to happen to her family before Stick Man showed up at the door.“

  Riker gave this idea half a nod. „It’s possible.“ There were too many possibilities and they might all be wrong.

  Mallory turned back to the author and his few remaining tourists. He had moved on down the street to the scene of another crime. She listened to the fading banter for another moment. „You said his research is an ongoing thing?“

  At the bottom of the stairs, Lionel was waiting for them. Bitty shrank back, thinking of something better to do on the upper floor, and she retreated.

  Sensible.

  After last night, Bitty would not want a confrontation with her uncle.

  Nedda accepted a cup of coffee from her brother’s hand. She was so absurdly grateful for this small gesture and hoping for something more, but he looked at her with such wariness. And hate? It was difficult to read Lionel’s thoughts anymore. As a child he had never been cold to her. There had been a bond between them once, the two eldest children against the confusing and sometimes violent world of their parents’ making.

  When brother and sister were seated in the dining room, Nedda turned her gaze to the glass-paned doors that opened onto the back garden. It looked so mournful now, pruned back to a few shrubs and a single tree. Once, there had been a swing attached to the lowest bough. Her brother had preferred the higher climbs, the branches closer to the sky. He had been a beautiful, nimble boy with a sunbrowned face and perpetually skinned knees.

  „And now,“ said Lionel, „you’re wondering about Baby Sally.“ Nedda shook her head. No, she had been hunting out of doors for some old memory to share with him, a common ground. She wanted only a bit of conversation and his company – nothing more.

  „Cleo and I were away at school when Sally… when she left. I’ve given a lot of thought to that day. It was nothing that we did. We were – “

  „Old history.“ Nedda dismissed the rest of his words with a wave. And now she wanted so much to reach across the table, to take his hand in hers and tell him how good it was to be home. However, in this moment, she was more the coward than Bitty. She anticipated Lionel shrinking away from her touch, withdrawing his hand and turning to ice.

  Her own hands remained folded in her lap.

  Martin Pinwitty was beside himself with happiness. Two genuine homicide detectives were visitors in his humble home – underscore the word humble. There was only one room, unless one counted the closet that housed a toilet, and Mallory did not. The bathtub, concealed by a broad wooden board, did double duty as a table, and the hide-a-bed sofa had been hastily folded away, one more sign of an impoverished make-do life.

  Mallory could guess how much of this man’s meager income was daily sacrificed for stamps. Correspondence was piled on every surface that was not cluttered with page-marked books. The postmarks on his mail were wide-ranging, and a few envelopes had the return addresses of police departments in other states.

  On the way to his apartment, Pinwitty had insisted on stopping at a bodega so that he might treat them to doughnuts on this special occasion, believing, as all civilians did, that this was a staple of every cop’s diet. And now both detectives, stuffed with Charles Butler’s croissants and
crepes, ate their sugar doughnuts, while feigning gratitude and swilling tea that was unspeakably bad.

  Riker shoveled more sugar into his cup. „So the reporter who died in the Village – that was the last ice-pick job?“

  „For a professional assassin? Yes, I believe it was,“ said the author. „I have sources everywhere. If there’s an old unsolved murder with an ice pick, I hear about it. The pick was going out of vogue years before that man was murdered.“

  After scanning one of Pinwitty’s files, a lengthy list of muggings and murders, Mallory set it aside, agreeing with Riker that this was an amateur investigation. „What about the freak who killed the Winter family? You think he retired after the massacre?“

  „Oh, definitely,“ said Pinwitty. „That or he died. You know, once, I actually thought Red Winter had killed him. A man was stabbed with an ice pick in the state of Maine.“ He stood up and walked to a bookshelf crammed with texts, papers and manila envelopes. „I have a separate file for that one. Nothing ever came of it.“ He pulled out a folder and smiled. „I even went up to Maine for a few days to check it out.“

  This piqued Mallory’s interest, for that little junket would’ve represented a lot of money for this impoverished little man.

  Pinwitty settled into a chair and opened the folder on his lap. „I’ll tell you what made this incident so interesting. The victim of the stabbing was a man named Humboldt.“

  Riker’s teacup was suspended in midair, all attention suddenly riveted to the author, and Mallory had to wonder what that was about.

  Pinwitty continued. „Humboldt once shared a cell with a murder suspect in New Orleans. The cellmate was charged with the ice-pick murder of a politician.“

  Riker’s cup clattered back to its saucer.

  „Now this suspect – “ The author paused to bring the page a bit closer to his nearsighted eyes. „Oh, I don’t have a name for this one, but I know it began with an H. Well, no matter. Turned out the man was innocent. There’d been another murder while he was in custody. However, it occurred to me that Red Winter didn’t know that, and she might have mistaken Humboldt for the suspected ice-pick killer. Maybe she heard a confused report of the New Orleans murder. You see, the first time I heard this story – more like a rumor, actually – Humboldt was killed by a girl with red hair. I postulated that Red Winter might’ve hunted down the wrong man and killed the cellmate by mistake, believing that Humboldt was the one who murdered her parents.“

  Mallory smiled. Ah, the penalties of bad scholarship – death. „And this happened when?“

  „Two years after the massacre. I was originally led to believe that it happened much later than that. In any case, it wasn’t Red Winter who killed Humboldt. She would’ve been a fourteen-year-old child at that time. When I went up to Maine, I discovered that he was killed by a full-grown local woman.“

  At the time of this ice-pick homicide, Red Winter would have been tall enough to pass for someone older. Mallory glanced at Riker, who nodded to say that this was also his thought.

  Unmindful of their silent conversation, Pinwitty continued his thought, saying, „The stabbing wasn’t premeditated either. So that was another indication that my theory wouldn’t work. The police put it down to self-defense. It seems that the man broke into this woman’s bedroom and attacked her. However, I should mention that I got this information many years after the fact. Originally, I only had one source for the story, a very old man who later died in a nursing home. There was no police report on file.“

  Mallory and Riker were both paying edge-of-the-chair attention.

  „Oh, I know what you’re thinking,“ said the author. „I also thought it was odd. But this was a small town, more like a truck stop. And I couldn’t interview the residents because there weren’t any. A new highway project wiped out all the houses and public buildings. The records of births, deaths and taxes were relocated, but police records simply didn’t exist. You see, the town had a police force of one. That was Chief Walter McReedy. I thought he might have taken the records with him when he retired. So I hunted down his daughter, Susan. She was rather young at the time of this incident. Barely remembers it. Now the woman who stabbed Humboldt was a redhead, and Chief McReedy’s daughter agreed with that much, but after she had a minute or two to think it over, she couldn’t swear that red was the woman’s natural hair color. In fact, a minute later, she thought otherwise. She did recall that the woman was a local, but couldn’t remember her name. Susan McReedy thought the redhead might’ve been middle-aged, but then everyone seems old to a child of seven. At any rate, it was a wasted trip for me.“

  Mallory held up her copy of The Winter House Massacre. „So there’s nothing in your book about Humboldt?“

  „Well, no. What would be the point? He was only the cellmate of a man wrongly accused of an ice-pick murder. That doesn’t confer even a peripheral significance.“

  But the author had failed to see the significance of Humboldt’s death by ice pick; he had tripped over this large messy fact and not seen it. Mallory was undecided: either Martin Pinwitty was more inclined to believe in coincidence than the average cop – or he had not told them everything. There was something not right about this little man. And she could say the same for her own partner.

  After warding off more stale doughnuts and bad tea, the detectives escaped from the author’s apartment with the borrowed file on the incident in Maine. Riker paused on the stoop outside the building, as if unable to go on.

  „Nedda killed Stick Man,“ said Mallory.

  He hanged himself with a slow nod. Riker was definitely holding out on her, just as the daughter of the cop from Maine had held out on Martin Pinwitty.

  On the drive back to SoHo, she waited for her partner to save himself, to explain how he had recognized Humboldt’s name, a name he had never read in any book.

  And he said nothing.

  Cleo appeared in the dining room with a coffee cup in hand, nodding in Nedda’s general direction as she sat down on Lionel’s side of the dining room table. The line of demarcation was always drawn this way – two united against one.

  „Did you sleep well, Nedda?“

  Her sister’s tone of voice might better fit the question Why aren’t you dead yet? After all, Nedda had unwittingly reneged on the prognosis, the virtual promise, of an early demise.

  Cleo’s eyes narrowed. „Bitty’s not joining us this morning?“

  „She had an early breakfast,“ said Nedda.

  „She’s hiding, isn’t she?“ Not waiting for a response, Cleo rose from her chair and quit the room, followed by Lionel.

  Nedda was left alone and lonely. The fantasy of her homecoming was in ashes. She pulled the tarot deck from her pocket and bowed her head as she spread the cards on the table, looking there for hope and finding the burning tower in every arrangement of painted images. An old woman had given this deck to a very young Nedda, tapping the box illustration of the hanged man and saying, „Memento mod, a reminder of your mortality.“ It had been a warning then, but the child had failed to recognize it as such.

  Charles Butler politely ended his long-distance telephone call to Susan McReedy in the state of Maine, then replaced the receiver in its antique cradle and shrugged his apologies to the two homicide detectives seated on the other side of his desk. „Sorry. Miss McReedy wasn’t very helpful.“

  „What do you think?“ asked Riker. „Is the lady holding out?“

  „Oh, definitely,“ said Charles. „The fact that she was suspicious and guarded would indicate as much. And she had a few questions of her own. Where did I meet the redheaded woman? What name did she go by now? And how did I know the dead man was called Humboldt? She wasn’t very happy when I didn’t give her any answers.“

  „You’re a shrink,“ said Riker. „Can’t you give us more than that?“

  „Based on a telephone conversation?“ Charles sighed. He hated the word shrink, and it would not apply to him. Although he had the proper credentials and a speci
al interest in abnormal bents of mind, he had never had a private practice and never treated a single patient.

  Mallory leaned forward. „McReedy lied to Pinwitty, didn’t she?“ It was a mistake to encourage her idea that he was a human lie detector. Her belief was founded on the fact that he could always tell when she was lying. However, this time she was correct. Ten years ago, Miss McReedy had lied in her interview with the author. The proof was all here in the folder that lay open on his desk. Pinwitty had been a word-for-word recorder of conversations.

  „Well, if we begin by assuming this woman wanted to mislead Pinwitty -“

  „She did,“ said Mallory.

  „Fine. Then the redhead who killed Humboldt was young, not middle-aged. I’d say the mystery woman’s hair was naturally red, not dyed. Otherwise Susan McReedy wouldn’t have made a point of mentioning that small detail – while pretending to forget the woman’s name or what had become of her. Rather difficult to misplace a local murderess in a small town described as a truck stop. And her defensive posturing on the phone might suggest a protective relationship with the missing redhead.“ He shrugged to say that was all he had. „So you’ll be going up to Maine to interview her?“

  „No,“ said Mallory. „She ‘11 call you back. And when she does, you’ll get more out of her than we would.“

  „And you know this how?“

  „She didn’t brush you off,“ said Riker. „She asked a lot of questions. That means you’ve got something she wants.“

  „And she’s wanted it for a long time,“ said Mallory.

  „Good logic.“ Charles turned to the window, looking up to a blue October sky and wondering where his own logic had flown. How could he have been so far off the mark in his initial assessment of Nedda Winter? „I nearly forgot. I gave Miss McReedy a date for the stabbing. I was off by two days, and she corrected me. I think that was a slip on her part. What’s her profession? A teacher, something like that?“

  „A librarian,“ said Mallory. „Retired.“