Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  A very generous check crossed the table and found its way into Herman’s pocket. The little man looked around, as if the other late-night diners might be watching this exchange and making notes or taking blackmail photographs. His toes just barely reached the floor to tap it, and his fingers rapped the table. “If you ever tell anyone I was tracing those—”

  “I know,” said Charles. “You’ll hunt me down and kill me. Your reputation is safe.” He set the package of books on the table. “How did you find them so fast?”

  “There’s a collector,” said Herman. “Well hardly that—not at all discriminating, but the man’s a repository of every western ever written. I had to go to Colorado. That’s why the bill is so high. The books didn’t cost a dime. I won them shooting pool with a rancher who thinks that crap is high art.”

  While Charles was grappling with the odd idea of Anthony Herman as a pool hustler, the man added, “The rancher also has first editions from the penny-dreadful era. If you want them, you go shoot pool with the old bastard.”

  “I don’t suppose you read any of these novels?” Charles watched Herman’s eyes grow a tad fearful. “You did read them, didn’t you?”

  “I might’ve glanced at one on the plane.” The little man’s mouth dipped down at the corners, silently intoning, What a question, making it clear that he was hardly the type to read this sort of trash, and his client should know better.

  Charles opened the package, despite the book detective’s sudden violent shaking of the head, begging that he not do this in public. After leafing through a chapter of the first volume, he smiled at Herman, another great speed-reader, for this was a talent that went along with the trade of manuscript comparisons. “Light stuff, isn’t it? Lots of white space. How long was the plane trip? Three or four hours?”

  “All right.” Herman bowed his head. “I read them. All twelve.”

  “I’m sure you had other reading material with—”

  “It’s your fault, Charles. I just had to know why you wanted them so badly. Then I got caught up in the whole thing.”

  “They’re not very good, are they?”

  “No. The writing is awful, the plots are thin. Very bad—very—all of them.”

  “But you read the entire series.”

  “Don’t do this to me.”

  “So what did you think of the resolution to the ambush?”

  “Oh, that was the best.” Herman’s sarcasm was surprisingly light, and his face had gone suddenly sly. “No, wait. The best one starts in The Cabin at the Edge of the World. In the previous book, the Wichita Kid was bitten by a mad wolf. The animal was frothing at the mouth, the whole nine yards.”

  “But there was no rabies vaccine in Wichita’s century.”

  “I know that,” said Herman, no dilettante in the field of history. “Rabies was a death sentence in that period.”

  “So he’s cured with a folk remedy,” said Charles. “Something like that?”

  The little man’s smile was coy. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Well, I know he’s alive in the last book, so he can’t possibly die of—” Charles leaned back in his chair and smiled, for he had just exposed himself as another victim of Jake Swain. “Touché.”

  And now—a turnabout.

  He spread the books over the table for all to see, then studied the lurid covers of smoke and guns and rearing horses, much to the discomfort of Anthony Herman. “I know someone who thought the world of these novels. She read them over and over. Now that you’ve had a chance to evaluate the lot of them—any helpful insight?”

  “Well, no.” Herman seemed honestly mystified. “The only reason for reading any of them is to find out what happens next. I assure you there’s no reason to read them more than once.”

  “There has to be more to it than that.” Charles gathered the westerns into a stack, then looked up at the book detective. “So what’s it all about?”

  “Ultimately,” said Herman, “it’s about the redemption of the Wichita Kid.”

  Riker had finished his first drink by the time he came to the end of the written interview. The detail was fanatical, right down to Alan Parris’s dirty toenails. “And all this conversation—this is word for word?”

  “I take shorthand.” Deluthe sipped his beer, then tried to make his voice sound casual when he asked, “So what’re my chances for getting a permanent assignment to Special Crimes Unit?”

  “Today? Slim and none. You got no experience, kid.” Only a handful of detectives were ever promoted to first-grade, and ten of them were in Special Crimes Unit. “We don’t take whiteshields. And you’re what—twenty-five, twenty-six? Most of the guys are in their thirties and forties. We only got one cop your age.”

  “And coincidentally Mallory is the daughter of the former commander of—”

  “You’re out of line, Deluthe. She grew up in Special Crimes Unit. When she was still in grammar school, she logged more time on the job than you’ve got.”

  “He’s right.” Their bartender had been introduced to Deluthe as Riker’s former partner from younger days. Peg Baily leaned into the conversation to replace Riker’s empty glass with a fresh bourbon and water. “That kid was our only technical support. In those days, we had crappy secondhand computers. Didn’t work half the time. The kid got the whole system up and running when she was thirteen years old.” Peg set down a beer for Deluthe. “But you’re wondering how Mallory got the rank of detective, first-grade. She chased down the perp who murdered her old man. Highest-priority case in New York City. That’s getting ahead the hard way.”

  Peg Baily wandered down the bar to fill another glass, and Riker completed the trainee’s education, giving equal weight to every word. “Nobody ever questioned Mallory’s right to a place in Special Crimes.” As he leaned toward the younger man, his face relaxed into a smile. “Now, as the son-in-law of a deputy commissioner, you’ve got a lot more to overcome.”

  “Suppose I divorce my wife?”

  “It’s a start.” Riker pulled a wad of papers from the pocket of his suit jacket and slapped it on the bar. “This is your background check on the cops at Natalie’s crime scene. We already had this information. Mallory pulled it off the computer. Took her two minutes.”

  “So that assignment was just busywork.”

  Riker ignored this statement of fact and spread the sheets flat on the bar. “This is only worthless because you took a computer spit-out, something a clerk gave you over the counter. Now a look at the original files—that might’ve turned up some dirt. But you can still learn a lot from the official fairy tale. I’ll teach you how to read the disappearing ink.” He put the first sheet aside, saying, “There were five cops on the scene, three dicks, two uniforms. Four of them left the precinct in a group. That’s a standout fact.”

  “I saw that,” said Deluthe, defensive now. “But it had nothing to do with the murder. That was six years later.”

  “But all in the same four-week period. That tells you Internal Affairs was all over that copshop.”

  “There are no charges on their records, nothing to say—”

  “Deluthe, I told you this was a fairy tale. Now do you want your bedtime story, or do we call it a night?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just drink—quietly.” Riker’s finger moved across the lines of text. “So, one of the uniforms, Alan Parris, was fired for insubordination. Now that’s bogus. You’d have to shoot a sergeant to get fired on a charge like that.” Riker turned to the next page and the next man. “The week before that, his partner, your boss Harvey Loman—he gets reassigned to another precinct. That tells you Loman rolled over on his partner to cut a deal with Internal Affairs.”

  He moved on to another sheet. “Here we got one detective who resigned to take a job in the private sector. The real story? They forced him out. Not enough proof to hang him. This guy’s next job was cleaning out toilets. He drank himself to death years ago.”

  Now the final sheet. “And here we h
ave one more dead detective, a suicide. So, dead or alive, four out of five men leave the department at the same time. The man who shot himself was probably looking at jail time. That means he was the last one to give it up, but there was nobody left to rat on. If he hadn’t died, he would’ve been the sacrifice, the cop who went to prison.”

  Of course, Riker was cheating. The nest of shakedown artists in that station house had been the worst-kept secret in NYPD. “Your interview with Alan Parris only looks good on paper. The two witnesses—the little kids in the hall? Parris gave you a lot of convincing details, but nothing to help you find them. That story could be smoke. So Parris goes on the shortlist.”

  “But the FBI profiles for serial killers—”

  “And that’s another fairy tale,” said Riker.

  The remainder of Stella Small’s night was a self-imposed blur. She was using rum concoctions to drown the image of a subway full of dead and dying flies and stampeding passengers. Another hour had ended in yet another crowd. On the next bar stool was a tourist in a T-shirt emblazoned with the city motto, “I love New York.”

  New York sucks.

  The young actress’s sinuses were clogged with cigarette smoke, and she fancied that she could still smell the insecticide from the subway fiasco. Her head was swimming in rum, and the world swirled around her. Perhaps it had been a mistake to order drinks decorated with paper parasols. But she was not up for the humiliation of tears in a room full of out-of-towners, and the booze, so much tastier than Valium, kept her eyes dry.

  One of the customers slammed into her back as he moved toward the men’s room. Stella turned to yell at him, but he was lost among a gathering of drinkers.

  Damn tourist.

  Another patron took advantage of her distraction to cop a feel of one breast. Stunned for a moment, she spun her stool around too late. The man who had sat beside her was gone, lost in the crowd. Stella laid her head down on the bar and knocked it twice against the wood.

  I will not cry, I will not cry.

  And she did not. She gathered up her house keys and left the bar. Half a block down the street, she noticed a man who was definitely on a mission, marching in the perfect parade-time of a soldier. No—more like a toy soldier, so mechanical, all springs and levers. Mimicry was her art, and she employed it now, stiffening her limbs to follow the marching man.

  When he arrived at the broad avenue, he turned left, then stopped, and so did Stella. By the better light of a street lamp, she could see the gray gym bag in his hand. This was the bastard who had cupped her breast in the bar.

  The mechanical man turned sharply on his heel, suddenly changing his direction. Stella saw the spinning red light before she reached the avenue where two police officers were patting down a teenager pressed to the hood of their car. She turned to look for the windup man and found him escaping, marching off in double time, afraid that she would report him as a deviant. Well, that was a small victory, but one to savor.

  A few minutes later, she was fitting her key into the door lock, though she had no memory of having climbed the stairs to her apartment. Her blue linen blazer was neatly folded over one arm. Miraculously, the material was unmarked despite the subway panic, the rain of flies, and the assault of the mechanical pervert. It had come through the day-long odyssey stain-free and hardly wrinkled—certain proof that the suit was magical.

  Stella opened her front door and walked into a muggy wall of heat at least ten degrees higher than the outside air. Her one-room apartment had the decor of student housing with mismatched furniture dragged off the street one step ahead of the garbage truck. And all the houseplants had succumbed to neglect, even the artificial varieties. Never once dusted, her plastic ivy had taken on the gray color of authentic death.

  She stepped out of her skirt, then clipped it on to a hanger with her blazer. When her lucky suit was in the closet and out of danger, she switched on the air conditioner and stood in the cool breeze as she stripped off her blouse. Before she could toss it on the couch, which was also her bed, she noticed the black ink stain on the white material, a large X made with a thick marking pen.

  Weary beyond belief, the actress whispered somewhat insincerely, “I love this town.” What was she doing here? She stared at the family photograph on the wall, and the Abandoned Stellas smiled back at her. Gram and Mom were so hopeful for her prospects far from the roadside diner and the randy, fertile truck drivers, the fathers of them all.

  Stella held up the blouse, shaking her head in deep denial, as if this might make the big black X fade away. She sank down on the couch, then cradled her head in both hands and cried, finally releasing the day in tears.

  Had a fellow thespian done this to her during the morning cattle call? The blouse had been fully exposed when the actors were herded into the waiting area. She had put on the blazer just before walking onstage to deliver her lines to a casting director.

  No, most likely the vandal had been in that crowded subway car. Was he the same freak who had unleashed the downpour of dead and near-dead insects? Maybe he had been one of the local barflies in the last crowd. Yes, the tourist who had slammed into her back to distract her while he mutilated her only good white blouse.

  “Creep.” Her other suspect was the pervert who had cupped her breast. “Creep number two.”

  She wadded up the shirt and dumped it in a wastebasket lined with a plastic bag. And now, since it was trash night, she picked up all the stray bits of debris around her one-room apartment. She held her nose before braving the door of the refrigerator, knowing the smell of rancid milk would make her vomit. And there were other horrors growing on the wire shelves, unidentified critters with coats of furry fungus, abandoned bits of fruit which had crawled off to die in the back of the box. But she never attempted the door to the freezer, for there an arctic winter had settled in to seal half a package of peas in a block of ice, preserving it for future generations.

  All the rest was swept into the trash bag, a major job and an important step in making a fresh start. There was another audition tomorrow, and her lucky blue suit had come through the day unscathed.

  A good omen.

  The X on the discarded blouse was now covered with rotted garbage, solidified milk, bottle caps, candy wrappers, and deli containers. Stella never saw the folded note in the garment’s small breast pocket; it was lost in the clutter of her life. And so she never read the words, I can touch you any time I want.

  10

  The early morning temperature was eighty-two degrees, and the East Villagers were already showing some wear as they moved down First Avenue in the rush-hour traffic of wheels and feet.

  The tour guide stood at the front of the bus beside the driver. Microphone in hand, she pointed out the more colorful examples of New Yorkers in the wild. However, most of the Finnish tourists were fixated upon one specimen; though this man was clad in the common uniform of T-shirt and jeans, he stood out from all the rest. His torso and head appeared to be made of one rigid piece of wood, and his hands swung by his sides to the beat of a metronome—tick, tick, tick. He carried a gray canvas bag, but its weight never hampered the synchronous movement of both arms, and every step was of equal length and speed, never slowing to avoid other people on the sidewalk, never deviating from a straight line.

  For the past hour of gridlock, the bus passengers had been bored out of their minds. Their translator had taken sick this morning, and the American tour guide had not yet grasped that they neither spoke nor understood English, except for the word tourist and a few helpful obscenities. Now they crowded together on one side of the vehicle, their sense of expectation heightened as they watched the strange man moving down the sidewalk.

  Something was about to happen.

  The traffic was beginning to move again, and the bus kept pace with the wooden man, following him as he turned a corner and marched down a side street. Most of the other pedestrians moved out of his way, but two smaller people collided with him. Their bodies yielded to the
impact—his did not. Crossing Avenue B in advance of the bus, the man kicked a dog, but not in anger. The spaniel was simply in the way of his foot. The animal’s owner yelled at him, and he passed this woman by, blind to her raised fist and every living thing in his path.

  He pivoted neatly to march in front of the bus, and the driver slammed on the brakes. The riders smiled in unison. Finally—something of interest—a near-death experience.

  The Finns moved to the windows on the other side of the bus, and every pair of eyes followed the man’s progress to the opposite sidewalk, where he took a baseball cap from his gray bag and pulled it low to shield his face. Then he reached into his pocket for the giant I LOVE NEW YORK button and pinned it to his T-shirt. He moved through a crowd of people, pushing them out of his way without raising a hand, walking into their bodies, never seeing or hearing them, and they fell off to the side with angry shouts and obscene gestures.

  The Finnish tourists heard a loud bang, and some of them ducked, for they had seen entirely too many movies about New York and its heavily armed residents.

  The man stopped, and so did the bus. It knelt down on one blown-out tire as the driver muttered a word for defecation and frustration. The tour guide cautioned her disembarking passengers not to wander off before the replacement bus arrived. Even if the Finns had understood what she was saying, her warning would have been unnecessary, for they had no intention of going anywhere.

  They formed an audience on the sidewalk, and, behind the safety of their sunglasses, they watched the wooden man. He stood near the door of an apartment house. A fence of bars protected a tiny courtyard and a bed of daisies gamely growing in the heat. The man moved closer to the iron gate. He opened his canvas bag and pulled out a camera, then stared at his wristwatch.

  The Finns understood that he was also waiting for something to happen. They waited with him, watching him between the bodies of pedestrians marching toward the subway. Except for the large souvenir button on his T-shirt, many of the commuters were dressed in the same casual clothes, but the wooden man could not quite blend in with real life.