Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  The apartment had a formal dining room, but Charles preferred the casual warmth of the kitchen, where a Bach concerto played at the low volume of background music. He turned down the gas flame under a bubbling pan of red sauce for Sergeant Riker’s favorite meal. His dinner guests had not waited on ceremony. Riker and Mallory sat at the table demolishing salads of olives and purple onions, red lettuce and fettuccine, as if they had not eaten in days and days.

  Charles poured out a sample of cabernet sauvignon, then set the bottle on the table. “You’re going to love this.” It was an old vintage, deep red and fine. He swirled the glass, and the bouquet summoned up the warm sun of France, country air, and the scent of rich earth among the ripe grapes. He tasted it. Potent magic, a rare wine to stimulate the intellect and turn a stammering fool into a poet. He owned first editions of Blake that had cost him less, but this was truly a work of art that one could swallow.

  And Riker did. He slopped it into a glass and slugged it back in one long thirsty gulp, neatly bypassing every taste bud.

  After a time, Charles closed his mouth and opened his eyes again. “Anyway,” he said, turning back to the stove, “it was the best I could get on short notice.”

  “It’s wonderful,” said Riker. Food had greatly improved the man’s mood, perhaps with a little help from the wine.

  “I’m glad you’re taking an interest in Lars Geldorf’s case.” Charles opened the oven and released the aroma of warm garlic bread. “He thought you were only humoring him.” After setting the bread basket on the table, he watched them empty it by half before he could ladle spaghetti and meatballs into their bowls, and it was a race to pour the sauce before they picked up their forks. Now he worked between the movements of silverware to add the grated cheese. “Riker, what do you call that detective, the one with the yellow hair? He was here and gone so fast.”

  “The son-in-law of the deputy commissioner. That’s the kid’s full name.”

  “Ronald Deluthe,” said Mallory.

  “Alias Duck Boy.” Riker inhaled his spaghetti, then smiled at his host. “So Charles, how was your day? Did the old guy give you any trouble?”

  “Not at all.” He sat down at the table and salvaged what he could of the bread and the wine. “I like his stories.” He turned to Mallory. “Did you know that your father visited Natalie Homer’s crime scene?”

  “I know.” Mallory opened a small notebook to a page of Louis Markowitz’s handwriting, then pushed it toward him. “Take a look.”

  Charles recognized a few of the lines she had transcribed last night on her computer. He found it easy to break the simple shorthand code. “So Louis was in the room for only a few minutes.”

  Riker nodded. “That was after Geldorf removed the hair from the woman’s mouth. Lou didn’t know about that.”

  Charles read on for a few more lines. “He thought Natalie Homer was gagged with tape—not hair—but he doesn’t say why.” And now he turned the pages faster, easily deciphering chains of sentence fragments. Apparently it was typical of Louis Markowitz to write down only the last words in a long passage of thoughts. “Lipstick.” He turned to Mallory. “Maybe he saw a piece of tape with her lipstick on it? Of course that word is miles from the part about the gag.”

  “Cryptic bastard.” Riker reached for a slice of garlic bread and dipped it into his spaghetti sauce. “He wrote in code so the lawyers couldn’t subpoena his personal notes. What about Geldorf’s stuff? Have you seen all the photos—the reports?”

  “Not yet. Lars is bringing in another carton tomorrow.”

  Mallory’s fork hung in midair. “He was holding out on us?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” said Charles. “He has a few things that didn’t qualify as evidence. Said he didn’t want to confuse the larger picture with minutia.” Or, in Geldorf’s words, the small shit. “He has a few more photographs and notes.”

  “A carton of ’em,” said Riker.

  Charles looked from one detective to the other, then realized that the short answer should have been, yes, Geldorf had been holding out on them. “Well, he probably didn’t think you’d care. But when he found out you were planning to work on the case—”

  “Never mind.” Mallory pushed her bowl aside. “What’ve you got so far? Anything unusual?”

  “A few discrepancies—one major problem.”

  Riker helped himself to a second bowl of spaghetti. “Did you point that out to Geldorf?”

  “No, I thought it might be rude.”

  “Good,” said Riker. “Whatever you come up with, bring it to us, not him. Geldorf’s not a cop anymore. He’s just visiting.”

  Mallory rested one hand on Charles’s arm, and it had the effect of a warm current of electricity. She so rarely touched anyone. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  Well, there was a flock of butterflies crashing about inside his chest cavity. That was a problem. And he was wondering how long this contact with her would last if he sat very, very still, if he never moved the arm beneath her hand, not by so much as a hair.

  Mallory leaned toward him—so close. “Charles, are you breathing?”

  “What?”

  She lifted her hand from his arm, realizing that he was not choking on his supper, and the man with total recall forgot the threads to their conversation. Heat was rising in his face, the prelude to a blush. Riker gave him the kindest of smiles, the one that said, You poor bastard.

  “The problem?” said Mallory, impatient with him now.

  Oh, the lock on Natalie Homer’s door. “Sorry.” Damned sorry. “According to the landlady’s statement, the odor in the hall was overwhelming, and she was desperate to get into Natalie’s apartment. The old woman had the key, but it wouldn’t open the door. You see, the lock had been changed or another one added—that part’s not clear.”

  The detectives exchanged long glances.

  “Natalie had security issues.” Charles paused again as both of them turned to stare at him. “She was being stalked. Perhaps this is something you already know? I don’t want to—”

  “Go on,” said Riker. “You’re not boring us.”

  “Well, the landlady made one more try at opening the door—right before she called the police. Now the first officer on the scene made a very detailed report—but no mention of kicking down a door or breaking a lock. He just entered the apartment. So, obviously, some third party opened that door before—”

  “And Geldorf didn’t catch this?” Riker refilled his wine glass. “Naw, I don’t see him missing a thing like that. There should be paperwork for repairs on a busted lock. It travels with the Cold Case file.”

  “No,” said Charles. “I read every word of that file. Between the landlady’s call and the police response, there was a four-hour interval. I gather a bad smell wasn’t a high priority. So, during that four hours, somebody opened the door with a key.”

  “The perp must’ve had Natalie’s key,” said Riker. “He’d be the one who locked up after the murder. So he forgot something and went back to—”

  “No,” said Mallory. “He wouldn’t risk it—not that day.”

  “I agree,” said Charles. “Between the heat and the insects, that body was badly decomposed. The stench was incredible—that’s in the officer’s report. The killer would’ve realized the police were on the way. Also, this was a Sunday evening. Most of the tenants would’ve been at home. More risk of—”

  “Okay,” said Riker. “Let’s say the intruder wasn’t the killer.”

  “But someone with his own key,” said Charles. “Maybe a lover. If he saw the crime scene—it was horrific—that might’ve left him unhinged. Now he’s not the man who murdered Natalie Homer—”

  “So he’s the one who did the copycat hangings.” Mallory turned to Riker. “It fits with the anniversary kill, a woman with Natalie’s long blond hair. Then Sparrow—”

  “Poor Sparrow.” Riker poured the last drops of wine into his glass. “Nothing personal, the freak just n
eeded another blonde.”

  On toward midnight, Mallory circled the block once more, then cut the car’s engine and turned off her headlights as she coasted silently to the curb. Her eyes were fixed on a third-floor window dimly lit by the screen of Riker’s television set. She knew what he was doing up there. He was chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping bourbon—medicine for missing his ex-wife. Every glass in the apartment might be dirty, yet she knew he would not be drinking from the mouth of a bottle.

  Riker’s rules—only winos did that.

  Mallory covertly kept him company for a while, sitting in the dark of her car, keeping watch on his window. It was the kind of thing one partner did for another—as if she could fly that high when his gun went off.

  A year had passed since the last time his ex-wife had inspired a day-long binge. Mallory had helped him stagger up all those stairs, then rolled him onto an unmade bed, where he had slept in his clothes, but not his shoes. And she had also removed his gun that night and taken the bullets away.

  He was a sorry alcoholic; that would never change. And Mallory was also constant.

  The light in the window went out.

  ’Night, Riker.

  She started up her car and headed home.

  He would not kill himself in the dark; it would be too difficult for a blind and trembling drunk to thread his finger into the trigger. And she could not foresee him dying in the bathroom by the glow of his plastic Jesus night-light.

  8

  The rear office was flooded with morning light. Charles thought the room temperature had chilled by a few degrees since he had last looked in, but little else had changed. Mallory was still averting her eyes from the paper storm on her cork wall, an anathema to someone who straightened paintings in other people’s houses. She sat at a metal workstation but no longer communed with her network of computers. The three machines hummed among themselves while she leafed through Louis Markowitz’s old notebook. The only human sound was the tap of Lars Geldorf’s pacing shoes.

  Impatient to begin the day, the retired detective removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, but this clue was lost on her. Occasionally, she looked up from her reading to watch his travels about the room—her room—as he inspected metal shelves stocked with electronics. Geldorf wore a brave pretender’s smile and nodded in a knowing way, though he had no idea what her machines could do. They were new, and he was old.

  She rose from her chair and approached the cork wall to stand before a haphazard arrangement of crime-scene photographs. Charles observed tension in her face, a small war going on at the core of her as she struggled with the urge to place every bit of paper at perfect right angles to the next.

  Lars Geldorf hurried across the room to join her. And now Charles understood what the last fifteen minutes of silence had been about. Mallory was teaching the old man to follow her lead. There should never be any doubt about the hierarchy in this room, and Geldorf should not call her honey one more time. Charles decided that she must like the old man, for this was the mildest and most drawn-out show of contempt in her repertoire.

  She lifted the edge of a grainy photograph to expose a small square one pinned beneath it. Then she looked under the other eight-by-ten formats in this group, each one covering a picture from an instant camera. “All you’ve got are Polaroids and blowups.”

  “Yeah,” said Geldorf. “So?”

  “Where are the originals?”

  “That’s all of ’em, kid.”

  “Mallory,” she corrected him.

  “Suppose I call you Kathy?”

  “Don’t.” And that was a threat. “So there was no police photographer on the scene?”

  “Yeah, we had one, a civilian. But he didn’t last three minutes.” Geldorf waved one hand to include all the images of a hanged woman, two days dead in the heat of August, an incubator of maggots. “The photographer got sick and dropped his camera. We couldn’t get it to work after that. So we borrowed one from a neighbor.”

  Mallory stared at a shot of the hanging rope draped over a light fixture. “What’s that brown smear on the ceiling?”

  “Bugs on their way to a meal,” said Geldorf. “Cockroaches love their grease. And here.” One bony finger pointed to another photograph depicting a large brown glob on the kitchen floor. “Roaches swarming over a frying pan.” He squinted. “You see those little logs on the floor? Those are sausages and more bugs. The ceiling light was coming loose and cracking the plaster. Must’ve been a nest of ’em up there. I had more blowups made.”

  Geldorf edged a few steps down the wall, where the medical examiner’s materials were grouped together. He perused the pictures of flies hanging with their spawn. “Charles? What did you do with my best cockroaches?”

  “They’re pinned up under the maggot pictures. Seemed like the only logical place for them.”

  “What?” Mallory stared at him, clearly wondering where logic entered into this.

  Geldorf answered for him. “Flies are the only useful bugs at a crime scene. Roaches can’t tell you nothin’.”

  “Right,” said Charles. “So I pinned them up under the more useful—” There was not much point in finishing his thought, for Mallory had tuned him out. She was staring at her nails. Perhaps she had found a flaw in her manicure that would take precedence over an insect monologue.

  She looked up. “Done? Good. Let’s get the roaches up front.”

  When Charles had removed the covering pictures of flies and their larvae, Mallory appraised the giant cockroaches pouring out of the ceiling and making their way down the rope to the corpse. The photo that caught her attention was a shot of the victim’s apron and a rectangular stain spotted with brown insects.

  Geldorf stepped close to the wall. “Looks like she dropped her frying pan in the scuffle and splattered the grease. There was a utility blackout at dusk, so—”

  “No.” Mallory looked down at the baseboard where the actual skillet leaned against the wall. She tapped the picture of the apron stain. “That’s not a grease spatter.”

  Charles knew she was paraphrasing a line in Louis Markowitz’s old notebook, the words, No splash—a smear. Louis had found that observation worthy of an underscore, but it was never explained until now. The two long edges of the rectangle were fairly well defined. This was not a splatter pattern.

  Mallory turned to the retired detective. “Natalie was cooking a meal, maybe expecting company. You interviewed her friends?”

  “She didn’t have any,” said Geldorf. “When she was married, her husband wouldn’t let her get a job. Never gave her any money. She hardly ever left the apartment. After the divorce, I guess she forgot how to make new friends.” He stared at the close-up of the sausages on the floor. “It was probably a meal for one.”

  Charles noted Mallory’s skepticism, then counted up the sausages. During a summer of utility blackouts that made refrigeration unreliable, Natalie Homer would not have purchased more food than she could eat at one sitting, and such a slender woman could not eat so many sausages—not by herself. Who was the dinner guest? He inclined his head toward the smaller man. “Natalie was also alienated from her family, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Geldorf. “A year after she got married, her sister stopped talking to her. But that wasn’t in the statements. How’d you know?”

  “It fits a pattern of spousal abuse. Forced dependence, isolation.” Charles turned to Mallory. “Her husband may have knocked her around a bit during the marriage.”

  “Right again,” said Geldorf. “That’s what Natalie told me.”

  Mallory’s voice was all suspicion now. “You talked to her?”

  “Yeah, of course I did. Twice, sometimes three times a week.”

  “I think I mentioned the stalking last night.” Charles walked toward the center of the wall and a cluster of papers. “These are samples of her complaints.” He unpinned the paperwork and handed her five stalker reports.

  “The trouble started right after her divorce.” G
eldorf leaned down to pick up an envelope propped against the baseboard. “This is the rest of ’em.”

  “And after she died?” Mallory stared at the thick envelope. “All those complaints—no leads on the stalker?”

  “She never saw the guy’s face,” said Geldorf. “The first time she came in, we thought she was just paranoid. I mean, sure, men were gonna follow her around.”

  “Because she was pretty,” said Mallory, though not one image on the wall could have told her that. In death, Natalie was grotesque.

  “She was beautiful.” Geldorf bent down to the carton he had brought in that morning. He pulled out a brown paper bag and removed a packet of photographs. “I didn’t think these belonged with the evidence.” He held up one smiling portrait of a young woman with blond hair falling past her shoulders. Natalie’s eyes were large and blue.

  Mallory folded the envelope of complaints under one arm, then carried the pictures to a clear section of wall and pinned them up with machinelike precision, each border exactly the same distance from the next. “A pro took these shots.”

  Charles agreed. The lighting was perfect, and the subject’s pose was not candid but artful.

  “The photographer was another dead end,” said Geldorf. “That woman was older than I am now.”

  Mallory had yet to open the envelope of complaints. She merely hefted its weight in one hand. “Natalie spent a lot of time in your station house. A lot of time. When you figured out that she wasn’t paranoid—what then?”

  “We went after the ex-husband and told him to stay away from her. He was a cool one. Never owned up to nothin’.”

  “And after the murder?”

  “We hauled him in for questioning. But he had an alibi for the time of death. He was in Atlantic City all weekend. That’s where he was gettin’ married to the next Mrs. Homer. Jane was her name. They never left the hotel room all weekend. That’s what the staff said. But how much would it cost to buy an alibi from a maid and a bellboy? And the statement from the second wife, Jane—that was worthless. Two days married, and that bastard had her cowed.”