Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  The detective politely raised one eyebrow, though he seemed to have lost interest. After a few moments of silence, Charles said, “You’ve had news from the hospital. Your friend—”

  “Yeah.” Riker turned his face to the passenger window and its view of the open sky over the water. “Her one good kidney is failing.”

  And even Jake Swain could not have written an escape for Sparrow. However, pressed by deep concern for a friend, Charles now came up with the next best thing—an emergency epiphany. “There was an eyewitness to Natalie Homer’s murder. Does that cheer you up?” The car came to a standstill in heavy traffic halfway across the bridge. Riker turned around to face him with a look of surprise, successfully distracted from pain.

  Charles changed gears as the traffic moved forward again. “My theory works nicely with the problem of the locked door.”

  The detective turned back to face the passenger window, his way of saying, Oh, that again.

  “Bear with me. Previously, I assumed that someone used a key to open Natalie’s door before the police arrived.

  But my witness wouldn’t need a key—not if he opened the door from the inside.”

  “And here’s the flaw,” said Riker. “That would mean your witness was in the apartment for two days—watching a woman’s body rot.”

  “Yes. Now back up a bit. The night she died, Natalie was cooking a meal for two. She had no friends, and she was on bad terms with her sister. So the dinner guest was her son.”

  “Interesting,” said Riker, which was his polite way of saying that it was not at all interesting. “So, before Erik Homer goes on his honeymoon, he leaves the kid with his ex-wife? No, Charles. This guy was a control freak. After the divorce, he never let Natalie see that kid, not once. This can’t work.”

  “Why not? Erik Homer was getting married again. He had a new woman to control. And this babysitting arrangement would be for his convenience. That’s what makes it work. And no one ever interviewed the boy. We don’t know where Junior was for two days in August or any time after that.” Charles could see that Riker was not buying any of this. “Only a small child would have stayed in that room with the body. The boy wouldn’t want to leave his mother. Dead or alive, she was his whole world.”

  “Let’s see if I understand this.” Riker’s voice was strained in an effort to quell the sound of condescension. “It was a studio apartment. No place to hide a kid, even a small one. But Junior managed to—”

  “Riker, all over the world, mothers tell their children to wash up for dinner. It’s a universal thing. The boy was in the bathroom the whole time that man was killing his mother.”

  “It was August,” said the detective. “No air conditioner in Natalie’s place. Rolling blackouts. The lights were off half the time. The stove burner was left on. More heat when—”

  “Yes, and after two days, the little boy’s survival instinct overcame trauma, and he left the apartment. This explains the unlocked door. Also, it very neatly explains your contrary reports of the boy’s whereabouts. The father sent him away. Erik Homer didn’t want the killer to find out that his son was a witness.”

  Charles and Riker were still at odds when they entered the back office of Butler and Company.

  Mallory never acknowledged them. She was deep in conversation with her machines, speaking to them with keyboard commands. They responded with screens of data and papers pouring from the mouths of three printers. She sat with her back to the discordant men and the mess on her cork wall. Her vision was thus narrowed to a sterile field that hummed with perfect harmony.

  Charles rounded the computer workstation and saw the cold machine lights reflected in her eyes. He looked down at the thick cable that fed her electronics through a dedicated line of electricity, and he played with the idea of accidentally kicking the plug from its socket and disconnecting her that way.

  Riker rapped on the top of the monitor, and when this failed to get her attention, he said, “Charles thinks he’s got an eyewitness to the murder of Natalie Homer.”

  “Hmm. Natalie’s son.” Mallory never lifted her eyes from the glowing screen. “He’s the one who unlocked the door to the crime scene. But I don’t know what name Junior’s using these days, so we’ll just stick with the scarecrow.” She smiled at her computer, as if it had just said something to amuse her. “And now we’ve got a game.”

  13

  Charles said a silent good-bye to Louis Markowitz. His old friend’s personality was being erased from the cork wall by layers of lopsided pictures and papers.

  Mallory walked along the cork wall, ripping down reports and sending tacks flying through the air. Photographs of fat black flies hit the floor where they mingled with enlarged cockroaches and smiling portraits from Natalie Homer’s actress portfolio. Given that Mallory was a pathologically tidy creature, Charles thought this might qualify as a loss of control, a display of temper, though she never raised her voice when she said, “So Natalie’s sister got away.”

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “I put the dogs on her. We might get lucky before she ditches the car for a plane or a bus. Maybe Susan’s more afraid of her nephew than us.”

  “She should be,” said Charles. “If Natalie’s son is the scarecrow—”

  “He is.” The soft plof of papers and pings of pushpins followed Mallory to the end of the wall, where she tacked up the print bought from William Heart. “It all fits.” She pointed to the open bathroom door in the background of this photograph. “Charles is right. The boy was probably in there while his mother was being murdered. Two days later, he was found wandering in the hall with a suitcase and all the symptoms of shock. And that was before the first cop opened the crime scene.”

  “Okay,” said Riker. “Say the scarecrow is Natalie’s kid all grown up and not too shy about cold-blooded murder. If he knew who killed his mother, he’d just off the bastard.”

  “No,” she said. “The boy was hiding, watching through a keyhole or a crack in the door. Maybe he never saw the killer’s face.”

  “Or even the actual murder,” said Charles. “The scarecrow doesn’t imitate his mother’s death by strangulation—only the postmortem hanging.” And now he noticed the dead quiet in the offices of Butler and Company. “So where’s Lars Geldorf?”

  “I had Deluthe take him home. The old man is out of the loop. We’re consolidating all the hangings. From now on, he doesn’t get past the front door.” She turned her eyes on Charles. “You’ve got a problem with that?”

  “Well, he has so much invested in Natalie’s murder.” And now, judging by the hand gravitating to her hip, Charles realized that the correct response would have been, Oh, hell no. But he rather liked the old man, and so he persisted. “Lars could still contribute to the—”

  “Wrong.” She turned her back on him. “All Geldorf ever had was a stalker pattern and an ex-husband, every cop’s favorite suspect. He spent all his time trying to break Erik Homer’s alibi.” A more linear personality was taking shape on the cork wall as Mallory finished pinning up a straight line of text and pictures. One red fingernail tapped the statement of Susan Qualen. “Natalie’s sister hated her brother-in-law. Every other word on this paper is bastard. But later the same night, she was talking to Erik Homer for hours, and they weren’t discussing funeral arrangements.”

  Charles nodded. “You think they conspired to hide the boy.”

  “Right,” said Mallory. “They didn’t want the killer to know there was an eyewitness. That’s why no one could find Junior. He was shipped off to relatives out of state.”

  A computer beeped to call for Mallory’s attention, and she sat down at a workstation to watch the text scrolling down her screen. “An hour ago, I found rap sheets for Rolf and Lisa Qualen, a husband and wife in Wisconsin. They were arrested for kidnapping a little boy, but the age doesn’t match Natalie’s son.” Mallory scrolled down the single-spaced text. “One hell of a lot of material.” She watched bundles of paper pouring into all the printer beds. “
I’ve got a time problem here.”

  Laden with Mallory’s printouts, Charles had retreated to the comfort of his own private office, a soft leather chair and a wooden desk from a less technical age. When he had finished speed-reading the last of the court documents, a trial transcript, and attendant reports from social workers and police, he looked up at his audience. The weary detectives were pressed deep into a plush sofa. They were raiding delicatessen bags and awaiting his synopsis on the arrest and trial of Rolf and Lisa Qualen.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Qualen had a son named John, who drowned shortly before his eighth birthday, and that was a year before Natalie Homer’s murder. Two days after Natalie’s body was found, the Qualens abandoned their house in Racine, Wisconsin, and resettled in a small town a hundred miles away. That’s where they enrolled their dead son, John, in grammar school.”

  “Freaking amateurs,” said Riker.

  “Hmm.” Mallory finished her bagel. “Bad match for Natalie’s son. The dead boy’s birth certificate was off by two years.”

  “The school principal noticed that, too,” said Charles. “He was told that the boy’s scholastic records were lost in a fire. Eventually, he located those records in Racine—along with a death certificate for the real John Qualen.”

  “So that’s when the cops were called in?” This was Riker’s polite way of moving the story along, for it was not his habit to state the obvious. And now he glanced at his watch in yet another attempt at being subtle.

  “Yes,” said Charles. “The police suspected kidnapping, but the Qualens wouldn’t cooperate with the investigation and neither would the little boy.”

  “Junior was scared,” said Mallory.

  “That was the case detective’s opinion,” said Charles. “The police had no idea where the boy came from. He didn’t match any reports on missing children. So they put him in foster care, and the Qualens went to trial. The kidnap charge was never proved, but they were found guilty of falsifying records, and that got them a stiff fine. The foster-care records were sealed, and the boy disappeared into the bureaucracy.”

  Riker pulled out his notebook and pen. “What’ve you got in the way of case numbers?”

  “For the boy? There’s nothing attached to the court documents. Sorry.” He held up a sheaf of papers. “This is a brief filed by the Qualens’ attorney. They tried to adopt the boy, but they weren’t even successful in getting visitation rights.”

  “That’s why I can’t find him,” said Mallory. “Social Services saw the Qualens as a threat. So they changed Junior’s name again and gave him a new case number. We don’t even know what age they settled on.”

  “With what we got so far,” said Riker, “we’ll never get a court order to open sealed juvenile records. And he’s probably out there right now stringing up another woman.”

  “Then we’ll know soon enough,” said Mallory. “He escalated with Sparrow. This time, he’ll put on a bigger show.”

  Riker’s kitchen was wrecked, drawers pulled out, cupboards rifled, and a slice of pizza was glued upside down to the linoleum where he had dropped it the previous night—or perhaps the night before. And he had not yet found the playground tape. Years ago, he had put it away for fear of breaking it after running it so many times.

  He glanced back at the living room. Charles Butler sat down on the sofa, and a dusty cloud rose up around him. At the man’s feet, cardboard take-out containers and months of newspapers were loosely piled, as if set apart for recycling, a practice Riker had only heard about, and all the ashtrays were overflowing with stale butts. However, Charles was so polite, so well bred that no one would have guessed he was not accustomed to squalor.

  At last the detective found the videotape and fed it into the VCR in the living room. He handed his guest the last clean glass (Riker’s own version of good breeding) filled with bourbon and a splash of water, then made his own drink a bit stronger and settled into a leather armchair.

  “A friend of mine confiscated the tape from a pedophile. The freak was cruising Central Park for victims.” He turned to Charles and noted the sudden rigid set to the man’s jaw. “Relax. He never got near the kid. He could only catch her on film.” Riker hit the PLAY button on his remote control. “This is what really got Lou’s attention. The film was a few years old when we saw it for the first time.” In the absence of children of his own, the pedophile’s video was Riker’s substitute for home movies.

  The screen brightened to a clear summer day, and the show began with the close-up shot of a small blond girl in a dirty T-shirt that fitted her like a tent. Riker pressed the PAUSE button. “Kathy’s probably eight years old on this tape, but you can see she’s been out on the street too long.”

  He pressed the PLAY button, but the little girl remained frozen on the grass at the edge of a playground. She tilted her head to one side, not yet committed to going or staying.

  The homeless child must have known that she belonged here with kids her own age. Perhaps she recognized a normalcy that had been ripped away from her. So here she was—looking to fill a need.

  Doing the best you can.

  Kathy came to play.

  Charles Butler leaned toward the screen, spellbound by the beautiful little girl, a miniature Mallory. All around her the world swirled with action and sound, small feet running in packs and tiny screams of outrage and joy.

  The solitary child hesitated another moment. Then, light stepping, cautious as a cat, she padded toward a row of swings, gray boards dangling from long metal chains. She took her seat among the rest, looking right and left with grave suspicion, and she began to swing in a small tentative arc. Now Kathy leaned far back to steepen the pitch and made a soft giggling sound at the wonder of flight. On the upswing, she soared above a line of cruel spikes atop an iron fence. An illusion of the camera made these spears seem close enough to impale her.

  Fearing nothing from the hard ground below, she leaned farther back to make the swing fly higher. Reckless and grinning, she soared up and over the heads of wild-eyed women, mothers and nannies, their waving hands and their screams of Come down!

  Riker turned to Charles. The man’s mouth was working in a silent prayer, Don’t fall.

  Toes pointed toward the sun, she rushed up to the sky, laughing—laughing.

  All the joy died when Kathy looked into the camera lens. Her eyes were suddenly adult and cold. Her hands let go of the chains, and she took flight; literally airborne, she flew out of the camera frame, and the screen went black.

  Though Riker had watched this film a hundred times, his hand tensed around the bourbon glass. For him, the child was still flying and always would be—a tossed coin that could never land.

  Charles slept soundly on his office couch, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Only Mallory was awake to watch the sun come up. She had returned to the offices of Butler and Company with a stack of morning newspapers, and now she sat in an armchair, sipping coffee and hunting for a police press release. It had not made any of the front pages. The scarecrow’s crimes were old and stale, last week’s news.

  The dog days of August marked the close of tourist-hunting season in Central Park, the scene of another daylight stabbing, but today’s headline victim was a man decapitated by a flying manhole cover described as the blown cork of a broken water main. The next runner-up was a woman killed by a stone gargoyle that had fallen from a crumbling building facade on Broadway. All the signs of a town out of control were here in black and white, decay and corruption from the sewers to the skyline.

  And then there was Riker.

  Yesterday, his sallow skin had been stippled with the small wounds of a shaving razor. His hands always trembled the morning after a binge. Booze poisoning was running its course and killing him slowly. With most cops on the decline, integrity was the first thing to go. Riker had clung to his long after everything else had been lost. He had always commanded great respect, even while crawling out of a bar on his hands and knees.

  Why would he ris
k his job to rob Sparrow’s crime scene?

  It was a common form of larceny for cops and firemen, stealing cash and baubles from the dead. But she had believed that all the manhole covers would blow up and the town would fall down before Riker would steal anything. And she still believed that, for now she suspected him of a worse crime—holding out on his partner, secreting evidence and working it on the side.

  Mallory turned another page in search of the official press release, a warning to every blond actress in New York City. She found the story at the bottom of page three. Lieutenant Coffey had come through on his promise to give the next victim a sporting chance, but the scarecrow had also warned his prey; he had all but pushed the women into the arms of the police. Why?

  She blamed her lack of sleep for seeking logic in a madman’s plan.

  The young actress had grown up wearing the discards of the Abandoned Stellas, twice and thrice handed-down clothes bought from second-hand stores. Only the fabulous blue suit had never been worn by anyone else, and now it was ruined New York style—with blood—and she had lost her armor. Every passerby could see the genes of a third-generation bastard, the highway debris of traveling men.

  This morning, Stella Small stood in front of an uptown cash machine and stared at her bank card. She never balanced her checkbook, for that sucked the last bit of charm out of life, and it also frightened her. She could roughly guess her account balance, enough for underwear, but she was hoping for more. A brochure was clutched in her other hand, and she paused to pray over it, God bless junk mail. Designer suits were featured on the second page of sale items. The fashion outlet store was only one block away, and she had an hour to spare before the next open audition. Stella had gambled a subway token on her belief in synchronicity, and now she fed her bank card into the magic slot.