Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  The door with the yellow tape was down at the end of the hall. There were three doors on each side, painted the same shade of green as the entry hallway, and a run of patterned blue carpet down the center. Decals were used to number the apartments, and the lettering was comically crooked, as if put on by a drunk. The yellowed wallpaper of mismatched patterns seemed appropriate for the place. There was a small window that hadn’t seen a washrag and a spritz of glass cleaner in years at the end of the hallway, but it wasn’t open. The overhead lighting consisted of two bare bulbs. The heat was stifling, a physical thing that crawled up her body. She closed her eyes and tried to pick up the bad odor reported by the tenant, but the ammonia overrode everything else, even the smell of the ashtray at her feet, crammed with butts. Evidently a smoker in 3A was exiled from the living quarters and used the hall as a smoking lounge.

  It could be worse, she thought. If the toilets aren’t working, tenants in these places go out in the hall rather than foul their own nests.

  There was an officer planted in the center of the hallway, controlling access to the apartment. The young woman looked as if she had been dipped in starch and blow-dried. Every hair was in place, her uniform was neat, and not a drop of sweat was in sight. PJ shook her head. It was criminal to look that competent before seven in the morning. The only concession to humanity was the fact that she had edged her way down the hall, presumably to escape the source of the odor—the end apartment, where the door was standing open. The officer’s eyes were locked onto PJ and narrowed in disapproval.

  It must have been the orange-and-red flowered blouse.

  PJ strode purposefully down the hall and identified herself again. Officer Erica Schaffer informed her that there had been cyanide gas in the end apartment which had condensed, evaporated, and left a film of acid. The HazMat team had washed down everything with an ammonia mixture and then sucked up the liquid with powerful vacuums. A few minutes ago, the place had been declared safe for entry, and the tenants would be let back into the building soon. It was obvious, though, that none of the curious stood a chance of getting past Officer Schaffer.

  At the sound of their voices, Dave Whitmore’s head popped around the corner of the doorway. He came out, wiping his brow, pushing back the shock of brown hair that spent more time blocking the vision of his left eye than staying neatly in place. One look at his face and she knew that he was seriously upset. Dave had a reputation for squeamishness, but what he was feeling must have been far beyond that. It set off alarms in every part of PJ’s body. She was close enough so that the smell of decay from the end apartment slammed into her, floating out on top of the ammonia like roadkill layered on hot asphalt. She felt her legs grow weak, as if she were trying to stand on columns of water rather than muscle and bone.

  “What is it?”

  “Boss, the victim is…” Dave said. “My God, it’s Schultz’s son.”

  PJ exhaled, and tried to draw shallow breaths instead of gulping the foul air. “Can’t be. He’s in prison.”

  “He was released last Wednesday. The Assistant ME says the decomposition is accelerated because of the heat, but she estimates the body’s been there four days or more. Probably won’t be able to be more precise than that, but the general time frame fits.”

  “How do you know it’s him?”

  “He had the release papers in his pocket, along with some letters addressed to Rick Schultz. His clothing was searched by the HazMat team before they bagged it. You might find a dead guy with somebody else’s wallet, but not his prison release, for God’s sake. He looks bad, real bad. He was tied up and gassed. There’s no positive ID yet. That’ll come later. But it’s him, all right.”

  She could read the certainty in his voice, and a numbness settled over her like a cold fog descending from somewhere much chillier than the ceiling of the hallway.

  “Schultz is on his way here,” she said flatly.

  “Go on back down and see if you can intercept him. He shouldn’t be up here.”

  PJ pivoted and headed for the stairs. She hoped to catch Schultz outside the building, but she was too late. She heard his booming voice in the front hall, stepped up her pace, and met him on the second-floor landing. She put her arms out, her hands touching the walls on each side, forming a barrier to block his way. He towered over her five-foot-three height, and was still a powerful man although the years and poor habits had taken their toll. He could easily charge right past her. He stopped and melodramatically shielded his eyes.

  “Christ, Doc, you ought to hand out sunglasses when you wear a blouse like that.”

  “Schultz…”

  He came up close to her and dipped his eyes toward her neckline.

  “Nice view, though.”

  He swiveled his head around, and when he was sure there was no one else in sight he kissed her lightly on the forehead. She remembered doing the same with her own living, vibrant son, not thirty minutes ago, and she trembled at the thought of what waited for Schultz in the apartment on the third floor.

  “Leo, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  He nodded his head toward the stairs. “Let’s go on up, and we’ll talk. You have some ideas already? This place smells like the world’s biggest cat litter box.”

  She was silent. He studied her face and took a step back.

  “Tell.”

  There was no way to sugarcoat it, and Schultz wouldn’t want that, anyway. She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling the warm skin beneath his light shirt. There was a slight dampness under her fingers. The Pacer he’d driven over in didn’t have air-conditioning.

  “The victim is Rick.”

  His eyes went wide. “He’s in—”

  “No, he’s not. He was released last Wednesday.”

  “The asshole didn’t call me.”

  PJ wasn’t sure if Schultz was referring to his son or to some prison official. She knew that Schultz had used his law enforcement connections to keep an eye on his son in prison.

  His body slumped, and he leaned against the wall. She watched his face carefully, and saw waves of emotion pass over it like an earthquake and its aftershocks.

  “I’ve got to see him,” he said. “Move, Doc.”

  “Dave thinks it would be better if you weren’t involved right now,” she said. Her words sounded hollow. “So do I.”

  “Shit,” he shouted. He shoved her aside roughly, and she banged her shoulder into the wall. “Get out of my fucking way!”

  He barreled up the stairs and disappeared into the hallway. PJ turned and went after him, her heart leaping out to him in his pain. She wished she hadn’t been the one to give him the news.

  Schultz had taken a lightning bolt through the heart. Looking at PJ, hearing her words, he was transfixed. Then everything seemed to come loose inside him, whirling out as though chunks of his body were flying away into space. His knees gave way, and he sagged against the wall. He couldn’t seem to find the center of himself, and his vision faded around the edges.

  The victim is Rick.

  He pushed PJ aside angrily. Why would she try to keep him from his son? He had to see his boy, no matter what. At the top of the steps, he saw an officer in the hallway. She put her arms out toward him, then backed off as he showed no sign of stopping. Toward the end of the hall he was met by the unmistakable smell of death, ripened by heat.

  Christ, that stink has nothing to do with Rick. Nothing.

  He blundered into someone at the doorway, and pulled together enough focus in his eyes and mind to recognize Dave.

  “Tell me what happened,” Schultz said hoarsely. It seemed as though he hadn’t used his voice in a long time. “It’s not Rick, is it?”

  Schultz held Dave’s gaze and saw his own agony reflected there.

  “Boss, you should wait downstairs. You don’t want to remember Rick like this.”

  Schultz lowered his head and lunged forward. Catching Dave off guard, he rammed his junior detective in the center of the chest, sendi
ng him staggering backward. Dave was a big bear of a man, tall and broad, but Schultz had desperation on his side.

  There was a photographer in the room snapping away, and the Assistant ME was off to one side. They looked over in surprise at the commotion at the door and assessed the situation rapidly. Deciding they were suddenly needed out in the hall, the two nearly tripped over themselves, and then over the recovering Dave, trying to get out in a hurry.

  Schultz took a few steps toward the center of the room. There was a chair, an old wooden one that had been painted green at one time.

  A man’s body was fastened in a sitting position in the chair with leather straps at the wrists, ankles, and around the chest. He was naked. Someone had draped an opaque piece of plastic sheet across his groin as a modesty cloth. Not approved investigative practice, but they had probably guessed Schultz was on his way. It was a small kindness, and he was grateful for it.

  The tissues of the man’s body were swollen, and the bands of leather dug in so tightly they were practically buried. His mouth was taped, and there was crusty dried blood on his chin that had dribbled out from underneath the tape. His eyes were open, and there were so many broken blood vessels in them that the whites looked red. Patches of skin had begun to slide off, as the skin of a ripe tomato can be neatly removed after immersing it in hot water.

  Schultz noted objectively that there were no maggots, and that meant the place had been tightly closed off indeed.

  Rick Schultz had been slowly suffocated from the inside, his flesh and heart and brain starving, as hemoglobin carried the cyanide through his blood vessels in place of oxygen.

  In a gas chamber, it could take ten minutes to squeeze the life from a convict. In the uncontrolled amateur horror show in apartment 3F, there was no telling how long it had taken for his son to die.

  After the initial viewing, Schultz’s eyes could only take in a little at a time. His gaze rested on a foot, then flitted to the window, then to a shoulder, then to the peeling paint on the leg of the chair. Schultz wondered if it was lead paint.

  Hazardous. Have to warn somebody about that.

  He couldn’t draw breath, and his heart felt as though it had split apart in his chest. His roving eyes landed on the right hand. There was a silver ring deeply embedded in the flesh—a ring that Schultz recognized. It had been given to Rick by his mother. There were initials RWS on the face of the ring, and on the inner band, Schultz knew, was the inscription Love from Mom and Dad.

  Schultz was struck down by the sight of the ring, like a giant redwood felled by a saw. He dropped to his knees, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.

  Three

  PJ CAME UP BEHIND Schultz, placed her hands on his shoulders as he knelt, and let her tears flow hotly down her cheeks. After sharing Mike Wolf’s grief for his wife just hours earlier, she didn’t think she had any tears left, but she proved herself wrong.

  She hadn’t known Rick personally, but she knew with utmost certainty that Schultz was facing what no parent should ever have to see.

  His sobbing subsided as abruptly as it had begun, like a storm over the Sahara. She put an arm under his elbow as he clumsily got to his feet. His arthritic knees must have been screaming while he was kneeling, but sensory information connected with things other than what was in front of him just wasn’t being processed.

  PJ found her voice. It came out strong and sure, and she was glad of that.

  “Leo, come with me. Let the others work in here now. We’ll wait downstairs.”

  She got him as far as the second floor, but he couldn’t seem to go any farther, as if he were tethered to his son’s body and the cord only allowed him to travel that far. Folding chairs materialized, brought by a considerate officer from outside the building. Schultz sat, his large hands on his thighs and his eyes focused on the stairs. She waited next to him, one of her hands resting on his, refusing to let her thoughts stray into the dangerous territory of imagining what she would do in his place, if Thomas had been the one in the chair.

  The thing in the chair.

  The Assistant ME, Dr. Georgia Morton, came down the stairs, and Schultz stood to meet her.

  “Tattoo?” he said. He had no room for civility, for extra words.

  “An apple with a worm, and the word ‘rotten,’ in blue letters, I think, on the left buttock,” she said. “It’s hard to tell the color.” Her voice was low and sympathetic, and didn’t carry beyond the three of them.

  Some time later, the body was brought down on a gurney, impersonal in its zippered black bag.

  Schultz sighed as the gurney was maneuvered down the stairs, past the two of them on the landing, and out the front door.

  “We can go now,” he said.

  Out on the sidewalk, PJ winced at the sun and heat. At ten in the morning on the third of August, the humid air sat on St. Louis like an unwelcome crowd of houseguests who refused to get off the couch and leave. Already the sidewalk felt warm under her soles, and the sunshine was an oppressive weight on her shoulders.

  Schultz seemed oblivious to the heat. His eyes followed the van bearing his son’s body as it made its way down the street.

  “Let’s go to Millie’s,” PJ said. “We can get some breakfast and figure out what to do next. We’ll both do better if we get a little distance.”

  She knew neither of them would ever forget those images in the hot building, but she was offering comfort and companionship, holding them out like a menu, for him to pick and choose whatever would do him the most good.

  His head turned toward her, and she saw something frightening in his eyes, something primitive that evoked rending and bloody revenge—justice of a wild and very personal kind. He blinked, and it was gone. “Okay,” he said. “You buy.”

  Four

  THE EXPANSIVE WINDOWS OF Millie’s Diner were fogged over. Millie hated the heat, and she must have had the air-conditioner dialed down to sixty-eight degrees. The hot air outside pressed against the window glass like a dog at a butcher shop. PJ could practically hear it panting to get in.

  Inside, she let the cool air, the familiar sounds, and the forthright sanity of the diner envelop her. The aromas of coffee, bacon, and even greasy hamburgers were welcome, and pushed away the odors of ammonia and death that hung around her face, in her hair and clothing. Ignoring the half-dozen empty tables, PJ and Schultz seated themselves at their usual stools at the end of the counter, leaving one place between them. Millie didn’t mind them taking up three places, because the middle stool was the one that wobbled, and all the regulars avoided it anyway.

  The utensils were cold to the touch, and the steam rising from other customers’ coffee cups actually looked appealing.

  The news had preceded them, probably in the form of a phone call from Dave, because Millie didn’t approach right away for her usual banter. Schultz had been coming to Millie’s Diner for more years than either he or the proprietress cared to remember, and the two of them had an established routine of insults.

  Millie eyed them from the safety of the kitchen, peering around the edge of the food pass-through, her halo of frizzy gray hair visible even though she thought she was hiding. When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she brought out a cup of coffee for each of them.

  “Nice blouse,” Millie said.

  PJ mumbled her thanks.

  “I’m real sorry about what happened,” Millie said, finally making eye contact with Schultz. “He was a real pain in the ass, but he was family.”

  PJ held her breath. She wasn’t sure how Schultz would react to that description of his son, no matter how closely it sliced to the bone of truth. Rick had been serving time for selling marijuana to school kids, which was not exactly the occupation that a cop would choose for his only offspring. PJ knew that there had been arguments over behavior, money, getting a job, petty thievery, and minor vandalism. It was an escalating pattern. Rick had been sliding into career criminal status, and Schultz had been belatedly trying to apply the brakes and
slow his descent—belatedly, because he hadn’t been much of a presence in his son’s life until his wife, Julia, abruptly washed her hands of him. Schultz’s tough stance and his refusal to get his son off easy on a drug peddling charge had led to a physical confrontation between father and son.

  Nevertheless, he was Schultz’s son, and she knew that Schultz hadn’t given up on the young man. In fact, Schultz had been planning to work with Rick to turn the situation around after he’d served his time.

  “You really know how to cheer a guy up, you old bat,” Schultz said. “You ought to work for a greeting card company.”

  Millie started to get her hackles up. PJ could see her forcing herself to be nice.

  “I’m not going to mess with that,” Millie said. “I figure we have a truce, at least for a while. It’s early for lunch. You still want your usual?”

  “Hell, why not? My bowels can use a load of grease.”

  She pinched her lips together, but kept her silence.

  “I’ll have a biscuit to go with my coffee, please,” PJ said. “Or a roll. Whatever you have today.”

  “Coming up,” Millie said. She headed for the kitchen. “Someone could learn a few things about being polite,” she said, just loud enough for the two of them to hear.

  So much for the truce, PJ thought.

  PJ’s sweet roll, a huge creation that could have filled a generous soup bowl, arrived in just a couple of minutes. She held her hand over it for a moment, enjoying the warmth. It was freshly baked. She sliced it in half, unwrapped two foil-covered pats of butter, and started one pat melting on each half. Her dad used to enjoy a sweet roll that way nearly every morning, and her mom teased him about adding butter to an already fat-laden item. “Like sprinkling sugar on Frosted Flakes,” she’d complain. PJ tried to lose herself in the sensations, the routine motions, and the memory as a way of avoiding what came next.