Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  The whore gave no sign of remembering the detective. All cops and customers must look alike to this aging parody of a dead actress. Marilyn’s red mouth was drawn well outside the lines of her thin lips, but her voice was breathy and sexy, so close to the real thing.

  “Sure I remember,” said Marilyn. “It was maybe fourteen, fifteen years ago. I brought Sparrow’s stuff to the hospital. That was the day after she got stabbed.”

  “Her stuff. You brought her heroin?”

  “Oh, just a taste, a snort. Not enough to mess her up. I had a personal interest in Sparrow’s health. She owed me money. God, she was strung out. What I gave her didn’t help much.”

  Riker leaned over to light the woman’s cigarette. “Did the little girl ever visit her?”

  “Uh-huh. When I came in, she was sittin’ on the edge of the bed. Sparrow was feeding her off the hospital tray. The kid was eating an apple one minute, and then she was dead asleep. Her eyes closed, and the apple just rolled out of her little hand. Ain’t it funny—the things that stay with you for years?”

  “What else happened that day?”

  “Sparrow shook the kid till she woke up. Reminded her she had something to do—and fast. I never found out what that was about. So the kid climbs down from the bed. So tired. Poor baby. She was weavin’ on her way out the door. And that was the last time I ever saw that child alive.”

  Mallory leaned forward, straining to catch the details of her hospital visit. That was the day Sparrow had sent her back to the deserted crackhouse—the day of the fire. This was a memory she did not want to relive, but images broke into her conscious mind against her will—the rats were eating the dead man, and she could hear the sucking sound that Sparrow’s knife made when it was pulled from the body.

  “No, babe,” said Crystal. “Sparrow ain’t worked the tunnel in a while. Last time I saw that whore, she was planning to get her nose fixed. Later, I heard she was working uptown hotels. I’m telling you, that must’ve been one hell of a nose job. I wouldn’t last six seconds in one of those hotels before they threw my ass out the door. So what’s the rest of the story?”

  “First, tell me something,” said Charles. “Why do you care about these books?”

  Crystal gave this some careful thought, then smiled with her broken mouth. “It’s like you’re always waiting for the other shoe to fall. You know that saying? You do? Good. Well, babe, I’ve been waiting for fifteen years. Now give me the rest of my damn story.”

  “All right. Remember the first cowboy Wichita ever killed?”

  Exasperated, she said, “Of course I do. All the girls know that story. That was the only one we got paid for.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That first story—the kid paid for it. Well, she paid for the first hour. She’d give a whore something she stole, something real fine. I gotta say, the girl had good taste. Then, after that first time, all her stories were free. All she had to do was say, ‘Read me a story,’ and some whore would take her home.”

  “And you all read to her—because you had to know how the books ended?”

  “Now you got it. But it was never the same book twice in a row. You’d wind up an hour into a completely different story—and no end. Or maybe you’d get the end, but you wouldn’t know how it started.”

  “Well, in Homecoming, you discover that the first dead cowboy was a murderer. He was part of a gang that killed Wichita’s father and stole his cattle.”

  “So that’s how the Kid’s mother wound up as a dance-hall girl. I always wondered about that. She was the only churchgoing slut in Franktown.”

  “Right,” said Charles. “It was either work in a saloon or starve, and she had a child to support. Well, in this book, Wichita’s almost done. He’s tracked down the last gang member, a man hiding out in Franktown. And he kills him in a gunfight.”

  “Does the sheriff arrest the Kid?”

  “No.”

  “So the Kid just left town, right? He got away again?”

  “Well, not in this one.” Now Charles realized that this woman was unaware that Homecoming was the end of the series.

  “You don’t mean Wichita gave himself up?” She read a worse fate in Charles’s giveaway face. “No,” she said. “Don’t tell me he died! Don’t you dare tell me that!” She shouted, “How can the Kid be dead?”

  All around the room, conversations stopped abruptly as ten hookers went into mourning for the Wichita Kid.

  Mallory sat in darkness, eyes closed, slowly moving her head from side to side. She could not remember a book called Homecoming.

  Riker waited out the silence. Finally, the whores rallied, for they had other unresolved issues.

  “So tell me what happened to the horse,” said Minnie. “Ol’ Blaze rolled off a cliff at the end of one book. At least tell me the horse didn’t die.”

  “Well,” said Riker, “I know it looked like old Blaze was goin’ sour, but the horse came back in the next book. Now this Indian girl—”

  “Gray Bird? The one who loved the Wichita Kid? He talks about her in most of the stories.”

  “That’s the one, yeah. She nursed the horse back to health with magic and herbs. The girl died, but the horse was good as new.”

  “Ain’t that romantic?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mallory left the building and walked past her car, heading for the next block and her office at Butler and Company. It was trash collection night, and the street was rimmed with garbage and a rancid stink. As she passed each metal can, something slithered away in the dark. Eyes shut tight, she pressed her hands over her ears, trying to kill the sound of rats’ feet scrabbling across a rotted wood floor, racing one another to the fallen, bleeding Sparrow. She could not lose the smell of kerosene, smoke, and burning skin.

  Stopping by a pay phone, she fed coins into the slot. Mallory dialed three random numbers and then the four she knew by heart, though she had not performed this ritual since childhood. The phone was ringing, and she felt the same excited anticipation. But why? Was it comfort she expected at the other end of the line?

  A woman answered, “Hello?” One more stranger out of a thousand calls from the street said, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Mallory had not forgotten the ritual. She knew what came next, the words, It’s Kathy, I’m lost, but she could not say them anymore.

  “Hello?” The stranger’s voice was climbing into the high notes of alarm.

  Oh, lady, can you hear the rats on the telephone line?

  Charles abandoned his previous theories. The child had neither believed in heroes nor had she relied on fictional people for friends. Far from it. She had once ruled a stable of prostitutes bound to her by stories. It was an ancient lure dating back to the cave, the need to know what happens next.

  Brilliant child.

  He pulled another chair into his cubicle for Gloria and Maxine. The women were not related but resembled each other and even dressed in twin red halter tops and shorts. They were younger than the rest. Their makeup was low-key, and they were not battered where it showed. The two prostitutes had insisted on being interviewed together.

  “We do everything together.” Gloria’s smile was very friendly. “Everything, hon.”

  On request, Charles was about to finish a story begun in The Cabin at the Edge of the World.

  “And don’t tell us that preacher made it rain,” said Gloria.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. When Wichita comes out of the fever, the cabin is still in flames. Now if you recall the cliff-hanger in the previous book—”

  “Like we’d forget that,” said Gloria. “The farmers think the old woman’s a witch and she caused the drought. They move burning bushes in front of all the windows and the doors. Every wall is on fire, and Wichita’s dying. That’s what the old woman thinks. So she gets down on her knees and screams to God for mercy.”

  “Right,” said Charles, recalling the final sentence:“‘A scream that shivered the stars in the firmament.’ Wel
l, in the next book, Wichita wakes up and soaks the old woman with a bucket of water. He slings her over one shoulder, then leaves by the front door. Walks right through a wall of fire.” And now he thrilled the prostitutes with another quotation from the page,“‘—stripped to the waist, his long golden hair flying in the wind and burning with sparks, his skin steaming with the burnt sweat of his fever.’ It’s an imposing sight on the heels of a very loud prayer from the old woman. Now the fake preacher gets religion. He falls down on bended knee and declares the outlaw is an angel. Well, as you can imagine, that gives a few of the farmers pause. Then the Wichita Kid draws his six-gun, and the rest of them have second thoughts about this business of witch burning.”

  The prostitutes were enthralled. “The Kid walked through fire.”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “But then, toward the end of the book, he guns down another man.”

  “Oh, he always does that,” said Gloria. Apparently, this credential of a serial killer was a character flaw she could live with. “So the Wichita Kid walked through fire.”

  “Now,” said Charles, “I believe you mentioned running into Sparrow recently.”

  “Last week,” said Gloria. “Maxine and me, we were cruising for johns at the computer convention in Columbus Circle. Sparrow was there. Wasn’t she, Maxine?”

  “She was.” Maxine resumed chewing her gum.

  “She was workin’ the crowd, same as us,” said Gloria. “But nothin’ obvious—no flash. She didn’t look like a whore no more. She looked real nice, didn’t she, Maxine?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Excuse me,” said Charles. “Did you ladies notice anything odd that day? Something out of the—”

  “You mean Sparrow’s new nose job? Or the guy who slashed her arm with a razor?”

  Deluthe sat at a squad-room desk, very close to Maxine, as the woman concentrated on the computer monitor. They were attempting to create their own monster with photographic slices of other people’s faces, eyes and noses, ears and mouths, assisted by FBI software.

  A few desks away, a sketch artist was working with Gloria and using an old-fashioned pencil. “Can you describe him a little better?”

  “Yeah, he was a cold one,” said Gloria.

  “Well, that doesn’t—” The exasperated sketch artist saw Riker’s hand signal to keep his mouth shut, and the man fell silent.

  “The color of his hair,” said Riker. “Was it light or dark?”

  “Blond,” said Gloria, raising her voice to be heard across the room. “His hair was blond, wasn’t it Maxine?”

  “No,” her friend called back. “It was brown, average old brown.”

  “Maxine, you’re nuts. He was blond, I tell ya. But real natural.” The prostitute glanced at Ronald Deluthe’s head. “Not a bleach job.”

  Hoping to strike a compromise, Riker said, “Maybe it was blond hair that went dark when he grew up.”

  “Yeah,” said Maxine. “That’s it. His hair looked like Gloria’s roots.” She turned to Deluthe. “Make it brown.”

  The sketch artist’s version was in gray charcoal pencil. “No, this isn’t working,” said Gloria. “Start over. Make it a profile picture—like a mug shot, ’cause that’s all I saw of him. Maxine saw his whole face.” She called out to her friend. “Didn’t you, Maxine?”

  “I did.”

  Gloria went on with her story of the encounter for Riker’s benefit. “Well, I was gonna say hi to her when this stiff-lookin’ jerk comes up behind her. So I just stand there. Didn’t wanna say nothin’ to queer it for Sparrow. But the john, he don’t say nothin’, either. Sparrow hasn’t even noticed him yet. Then this freak pulls a box cutter out of his gym bag.”

  Gloria looked up at Charles, who wore the expensive clothes of a man unfamiliar with box cutters. “It’s a big metal grip with a razor.” She turned back to Riker. “He cut her arm. I couldn’t believe it. All them people around, and he cut her right there. Cold as you please. Then he walks away, real calm, like he does this kind of thing every day. He stuck the box cutter back in his bag before Sparrow even knew she’d been slashed. She didn’t know till I told her. I said something like—Hey, you’re bleedin’. Isn’t that what I said, Maxine?”

  “That’s close.” Maxine was no longer listening to her friend. She was staring at Deluthe’s monitor. The computer-generated image was taking shape faster than Gloria’s drawing. Deluthe had picked up on the other woman’s cue of a cold stare. A pair of vacant eyes slipped into place on the screen.

  “It’s better,” said Maxine. “But it still needs work.”

  Charles crossed the room with a photograph retrieved from the cork wall of Butler and Company. He handed Maxine a wedding portrait of Erik Homer, the scarecrow’s father.

  “The eyes aren’t the same.” She turned to Deluthe. “The mouth is, but don’t make him smile like that.”

  Riker handed Gloria a roast beef on rye. “Do you remember anything about the bag he was carrying?”

  “Nothin’ special. Right, Maxine? His bag wasn’t special.”

  Maxine shook her head. “It looks just like my gym bag. Got it on sale at Kmart. Paid almost nothin’ for it.”

  Riker moved to Maxine’s chair and handed her the container of soup she had ordered from the deli. “What did the bag look like?”

  “It was gray with one stripe.”

  Deluthe stopped work. “A red stripe?”

  “Yeah, just like mine.”

  The young cop stared at the image on his screen, then crossed the room to look at the sketch artist’s pad. “I’ve seen this guy. He was in the crowd outside the last crime scene. I remember his bag. I’ve got one just like it. But his had a red stripe. That was the only difference.”

  “Kmart?” asked Maxine. “Nylon, right?”

  “No, L.L. Bean.” Deluthe turned to Riker. “My bag is canvas, and so was his.”

  Riker turned to Charles. “Keep the ladies company.” He grabbed Deluthe by the arm and propelled him down the hall to the incident room. They walked to the wall where exterior crime-scene photos were pinned up alongside autopsy pictures of Kennedy Harper.

  “Which one?” Riker pointed to the pictures of the crowd gathered outside Kennedy Harper’s building. “Which face?”

  The younger cop turned to point at the rear wall and the photograph between the scarecrow’s T-shirt and the baseball cap. It was the picture of a man whose face was turned away from the camera. “He’s that one. . . . Sorry.”

  A breeze swept papers and cigarette packs down the narrow SoHo street, and a car alarm went off with a high-pitched incessant squeal. An irate tenant on an upper floor leaned far out his window and hurled a dark missile to the pavement, but the bronze baby shoe fell short of the offending vehicle and narrowly missed the two walking men.

  Riker glanced up at the civilian and yelled, “Lousy shot!” In a lower voice, he said to Charles Butler, “But it could’ve been worse. It’s scary how many of these people have guns.”

  Another man emerged from a building just up ahead. He held a baseball bat. When he spotted Riker and Charles, he thought better of leaving the shadows of his doorway. As the two men came abreast of him, the bat disappeared behind the man’s back.

  “Now that guy means business,” said Riker, when they were well past the car with the screaming alarm. “He’ll get the job done.”

  They turned the corner at the sound of breaking glass and the bangs of wood on metal—followed by blessed silence.

  They were heading toward Charles’s building on the next block. Mallory would be at work in the back office at Butler and Company, and there might not be another opportunity to speak privately with Riker. “When you said the little girl was dead—well, obviously, you didn’t mean Kathy had actually died. So presumably—”

  “I’ve seen her death certificate. It was backed up by sworn statements from two fire marshals. And neither one of those guys owed any favors to me or Lou.”

  “You’re not going to expla
in that, are you?” Charles’s tone was fatalistic. “Not a hint, not a clue.”

  “Nope.”

  “And that business of murder and arson charges—”

  “Not a chance.”

  18

  Mallory stood in the office kitchen and poured another cup of coffee. Her eyes were closing. When had she slept last?

  Old pictures were breaking into her thoughts again, wreaking havoc with her concentration. The rats were coming for the whore. Greedy vermin. Not content with the blood and meat of Frankie Delight, they wanted Sparrow too.

  Mallory turned on the faucet, then leaned over the sink and splashed her face with cold water. She sat down at the kitchen table. Her coffee cooled in the cup. Her eyes closed, and down came the curtain between waking and sleeping dreams. Though she had never had the smoker’s habit, one hand went up to her mouth as she lit a cigarette that was not there. She was ten years old again. Sparrow was bleeding, saying, “Don’t cry, baby.”

  But Kathy could not stop crying. The frantic child shook Sparrow to keep her from drifting into sleep and death. “I’ll get help!”

  “Don’t leave me,” said Sparrow. “Not yet.” The prostitute nodded toward the shadows where the rats were fighting over the corpse of Frankie Delight. “Keep ’em off me—till it’s over.”

  “You can’t die.”

  Sparrow gently touched the child’s face. “Baby, I’m always telling you stories. Read me a story—that’s all I hear from you. Suppose you tell me one. But mind you, don’t make it a long story.” Sparrow’s eyes were closing as she smiled at her own little joke.

  “You need a doctor!” Kathy shook Sparrow until the blue eyes opened. The child put her hands over the open wound, trying to keep the prostitute’s blood from leaking out.

  “Don’t leave me for the rats,” said Sparrow. “Tell me, how did that book end? The Longest Road, yeah, that one. The Wichita Kid decided he was goin’ home. Did he ever say why?”

  “It ends when he’s on the trail.” Kathy emptied Sparrow’s purse on the floor, straining to see by the daylight streaming in from the street door. “Wichita stops his horse in front of the sign for Franktown.” The room was growing darker; the day was ending; Sparrow was dying. The child found a handkerchief. “He just stares at that sign for a while.” She used the square of white linen to cover the stab wound. The cloth was soaked with blood the moment she pressed it to Sparrow’s side. “Then there’s these lines near the end. But I don’t—” Though the little girl knew all the books by heart, her panic was overwhelming her. Sparrow could not die.