Crime School

by Carol O'Connell

  “Maybe you noticed a stranger hanging around your building at night. He wears a baseball cap and—” Mallory turned her head toward the sound of a small bell tinkling over the front door.

  Alice White was home.

  Deluthe walked toward the closed bathroom. He could not remember if he had left the door ajar. Between the automatic sprays of insecticide, the room was dead silent. He was almost certain that he was the only living thing in this apartment. Almost certain, he drew his gun as he reached for the doorknob. His skin prickled, and drops of sweat slid down his face as he conjured up a vision of Mallory standing over his dead body, making caustic remarks about his failure to call in for backup.

  Yet he opened the door.

  A hand shot out and smashed into his face. His nostrils gushed blood. His knees were weak and threatening to dump him on the floor. The man in the bathroom was raising his other hand. Was that a gun? Deluthe raised his own weapon.

  No, it was an aerosol can.

  Pssst.

  Deluthe’s eyes were on fire. He had taken a direct hit of insecticide, and now he was partially blind, only able to discern a blurry white shape, a floating face, as he hit the floor, landing on his knees. More pain.

  Mrs. White entered the hallway, calling out to her husband, “John? Did you see my note?” She walked into the front room and set her grocery bag on the carpet, then noticed that her husband had company. “Oh, hello again. You know you’re the third police officer I’ve seen today.”

  “What? Say again,” said her husband.

  “Early this morning, there was a young man in uniform. He came right after you left. I think he must have been a friend of George’s. And then there was another one—” She stopped and turned to Mallory. “George is one of our tenants. He used to be a policeman years ago.”

  Mallory held up the sketches. “Does he look anything like this?”

  “Oh, no,” she laughed. “George is sixty-five if he’s a day. A very heavy man, and not so much hair.”

  Deluthe moved back. Tears had washed his eyes, and now he could see the shadowy form of a man in front of him. When he aimed his gun, it was simply taken from his hand, for he had misjudged the distance of his assailant. Fists waving blind, he made contact with the other man’s body. A savage kick to Deluthe’s testicles doubled him over in pain, and a hard punch to his stomach took his breath away. He hit the floor and lay there, rolling on to his side, curling like a fetus and listening to the opening and closing of drawers, then the sound of something tearing. He tried to get his bearings in the room. Where was the umbrella stand, the baseball bat?

  Next to the closet.

  His vision was still blurred, but he could make out the dark rectangle of the open closet door. He crawled toward it and located the nearby umbrella stand by touch. As he reached up to grab the bat, he heard the running footsteps, gained his legs and swung at the thing rushing toward him.

  He hit something. Yes, flesh and bone. The shadow man was down.

  Mrs. White looked at the sketches and the photograph.

  “Take your time,” said Mallory. As if she had the time. “Have you ever seen him before?”

  “Well, he looks like lots of people. He could even be that young policeman. I told him George wasn’t here. But the man he sublet the apartment to—”

  “He works nights,” said John White. “Same as old George.”

  “So I thought he might be sleeping,” said his wife. “And I told that to the officer.”

  “The first one?” asked John White. “Or do you—”

  “Well, both of them,” said his wife. “The second policeman was a detective. He asked if it was all right to leave a note under George’s door.”

  Deluthe’s legs were pulled out from under him. He cracked the back of his skull when he hit the floor. The baseball bat was still clenched in his right hand.

  The other man’s weight was on top of him, and together they rolled across the rug and knocked up against the wall. The assailant was beneath him now, and Deluthe smashed his fist into the face that he could barely see. His opponent did not seem to feel the blows, a hand was closing on Deluthe’s testicles, and he screamed in agony.

  When had he let go of the bat?

  Mallory was deep in denial. “This man lives in your building, and you never got his name?”

  “Well,” said Mr. White, speaking for his wife, “it’s not like he’s a complete stranger. He’s been visiting old George for years.”

  Once more, Mallory tapped the pictures on the coffee table. “Could this be your sublet?”

  “It could be.” Mrs. White picked up one of the sketches. “I’m not sure. It could also be one of those policemen. The detective—he’s the one who wanted to leave a note. He came by just a little while ago, and I sent him upstairs. Well, I had to run to the store, so the young man said he’d let himself out.”

  Pssst.

  Ronald Deluthe was lying on his side. He could taste the blood in his mouth as he ripped off the tape. His other hand was feeling around for the baseball bat. Blind fingers no sooner closed around the wood than it was twisted out of his grasp. His right arm was forced up behind his back, and he could feel muscle and bone ripping away from the socket. The pain was beyond anything he had ever imagined. Tiny points of shooting white lights were all that he could clearly see. His scream was muffled by another piece of tape covering his mouth.

  “George’s sublet is a very quiet young man,” said Alice White. “We never hear a sound from that apartment.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t, would we?” Her husband smiled. “It’s on the top floor. So one day, I met him on the stairs.

  He had George’s keys. He said the old man left town in the middle of the night. Some family crisis.” He smiled to reassure the skeptical detective. “Well, he did have George’s keys, and he seemed presentable. There was no reason to—”

  “And you were afraid of him.” Mallory did not have to wait for a reply. It was in the man’s face. And now she understood why no one had pressed the sublet for so much as a name to call him by. “Take another look.” She held up one sketch. “Imagine him with a baseball cap and a gray canvas bag with a red stripe.”

  “Oh, that’s the sublet, all right,” said Mrs. White. “You never see him without that bag of his.”

  Mallory turned her eyes to the ceiling, as if she could see through all the floors of the building. “Is there a back exit?”

  “We have a door to the backyard.”

  “That’s it? No fire escape?”

  “No.”

  “So if he wanted to get out, he’d have to—”

  “You’d see him out there in the hall,” said John White, who now finished sentences for the detective as well as his wife.

  “Give me your keys.” Mallory held out her hand. “Now!” Later, she would not remember screaming at this man to make him move faster. “Keys!”

  When Deluthe regained consciousness, his hands were bound. He tried to lift his head. A rope was pulling tight around his neck, and his body bucked against the heavy weight of the man on top of him.

  No breath. Eyes bulging, heart hammering.

  Panic was magnified to monster-size primal fear. His legs kicked out, then thudded on the floor. His struggles ceased. His prone body was lighter now. Head swimmy, muscles relaxing, fear gave way to euphoria, and he closed his eyes. The heavy weight that had straddled him was suddenly lifted, and gravity ceased to hold his body down. He floated up into an ether of midnight black.

  All sensation ceased.

  The door closed. The room was dead quiet.

  Riker yelled, “Yes, you can go faster! You’re with a damn cop!”

  Charles pushed the gas pedal to the floor and never flinched at the near miss of a cab and now a truck coming out of a side street.

  The detour was a long one, twisting round the gridlock traffic of a broken water main on Houston. They were driving ten miles of bad traffic to travel one as the crow flies.
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br />   21

  The landlord had disobeyed a direct order to remain downstairs with his wife. He had silently followed Mallory to the top-floor apartment, and now it was too late to threaten the man—and unnecessary. John White quickly backed down to the lower landing when she drew her .357 Smith & Wesson, a cannon among revolvers. She favored it above all others for its drop-dead stopping power.

  Pssst.

  The door was ajar by the crack of a bare inch. She kicked it dead center, and it flew back with a bang and the sound of plaster crumbling where the knob had crashed into a wall. Fresh wet blood was splattered across the rug, and some of it had stained a baseball bat. Mallory only glanced at the body on the floor. Ronald Deluthe had a rope knotted around his neck. She entered the apartment, aiming her gun at every piece of furniture that might give cover to the scarecrow. The bathroom was empty. She kicked open another door—no one there.

  Upon returning to the front room, she found John White crouching on the floor and holding the wrist of the fallen detective. Deluthe’s left arm was twisted in an unnatural attitude. His nose was smashed to one side and still gushing blood, the only sure sign of a beating heart and life.

  “I’ve got a pulse,” said White, “but it’s thready.”

  Mallory knelt beside the unconscious man, then put one finger between the rope and his neck. It was a tight fit. His oxygen had been completely cut off, but his lips were not yet blue. The scarecrow could only be a minute away.

  John White was also working at the rope, but to a different purpose; he was trying to clear the man’s air passage, saying, “I was a volunteer paramedic back in Wisconsin.”

  Mallory was not listening, nor did she watch as White performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She stared at the open closet and its contents for a moment, then reached down and ripped back the lapel of Deluthe’s suit jacket. His shoulder holster was empty.

  The scarecrow has a gun.

  She was rising, moving quickly toward the door and the inconvenient obstacle of Alice White. Mallory pushed the woman aside, shouting, “Call 911!”

  “I did. You told me—”

  “Call again! Tell them an officer’s down!”

  The last staircase at the end of the hall would lead her to the roof, and Mallory was running toward it. She had climbed to the door at the top of the stairs when she heard a scream from the apartment below. Apparently, Alice had noticed the moldy corpse on the floor of the closet.

  Riker spoke into his cell phone. “Repeat that. An officer down?”

  Charles was pulling over to allow an emergency vehicle to pass when the detective yelled, “Follow that ambulance!”

  Mallory’s revolver preceded her through the door of a small rooftop shed. Her eyes had not yet adjusted to brilliant sunlight when she took aim at the sound of footsteps. And now, in perfect focus, the profile of a young girl’s head was lined up with the muzzle of the gun. The teenager had not yet seen the detective or the weapon, but she was shaking, and her face was a study in dumb surprise as she bolted for the rooftop door.

  Mallory rounded the shed to see the back of a man’s bloodstained shirt and jeans. He used Deluthe’s gun to shade his eyes from the overhead sun. There were scratches on his face, the work of Stella Small. The scarecrow’s right arm hung useless at his side, and she guessed that Deluthe had also done some damage before he was taken down.

  Only steps away, a smaller man with carrot-red hair was huddled on the tar-paper ground amid a wash of white linen pulled down from a clothesline, perhaps in the belief that wet sheets could protect him from bullets. On the other side of a low brick wall that separated one roof from the next, an elderly woman tended a coop of carrier pigeons. She was deaf to the whimpers of the little man in the sheets and blind to the one with the gun.

  At the sound of a nervous giggle, Mallory glanced back over one shoulder to see the children standing behind her, three boys in staggered sizes, and these television babies showed no fear of either weapon.

  The scarecrow was facing her now, dazed and weaving. Blood dripped into one eye from a gash in his brow.

  A massive head injury—a bonus.

  She could hear the children creeping forward to watch the show. None of them had the sense of sheep to get out of harm’s way. Mallory left her back vulnerable when she whirled around and yelled, “Get inside!” Her gun produced no effect on the boys, but her eyes were promising something nasty if they did not move and right now.

  They shrank back behind the shelter of a door made of wood, not fire-code metal. Bullets would rip right through it. The smallest child had been left behind. He was walking between the guns.

  Thou shalt not get the sheep killed.

  That had been Louis Markowitz’s prime rule and Mallory’s hardest lesson, for it tied into a bizarre concept: When she pinned on the badge, she agreed, if need be, to die for the sheep. This had been a difficult pitch to a child of the streets, who possessed an ungodly instinct for survival.

  But a deal was a deal.

  The scarecrow’s gun hand extended slowly. Mallory’s finger touched lightly on the trigger. She could drop him any time she liked, but fast as she was, he might get off one round. His every movement told her he was not left-handed. The shot would go wild.

  One dead sheep.

  All the children were targets, the one in the open and the two behind the door. Or he might blow away the pigeon lady or the little man under the sheets. Mallory lowered her revolver to end the threat that would make him fire.

  His gun slowly drifted toward the shed where the children were hidden but not protected. In sidelong vision, Mallory caught the motion of a wind-whipped flowery dress before she saw a terrified woman creeping toward the lone boy in the line of fire. Mother courage. The woman gathered the little boy into her arms, and the scarecrow paid no attention to her running backward with the child. His eyes were fixed on Mallory. His gun hand was on the rise.

  She was faster. In a stunning flash, the muzzle of her revolver pointed at his eyes. “You really want this bullet, don’t you?”

  The threat was meaningless to him. This was not the cornered animal she had anticipated, but something even more dangerous. Perversely, she raised her revolver high to aim at the noonday sun, and then, pushing perversity to the nth degree, she taunted him, saying, “I know more about your mother’s death than you do.”

  Magic words.

  His gun was lowering, buying her time to reassess his injuries. The right arm was certainly broken. All his weight listed to the right leg, and she knew the left was about to fold. One eye was clotted with blood, and one eye was attentive as he awaited the rest of her story.

  Just like the old days—just like a whore.

  “And I even know what you did that night.”

  The scarecrow’s one clear eye flickered with surprise. His left leg buckled, but he remained standing. He seemed unaware that he was aiming at the shivering pile of wet laundry. The little man in the sheets ceased to cry and laid his head down in a faint.

  And the scarecrow was still waiting for his story.

  “You found one of the stalker notes,” said Mallory. “You found it on the floor the night she died.” She had guessed right. He was nodding. “And you had a lot of time to read it—two days and two nights. Flies in your hair, roaches crawling in your clothes. The stove burner was on. The heat was suffocating.”

  His gun was getting heavier, and his aim was drifting again. The old woman was his accidental target. He was tired in every part of his body and tired of his very life. Yet Mallory held his attention. “You were in the bathroom when he came to kill your mother.”

  The pigeon lady was oblivious to the weapon, but her birds were restless, sensing tension in the air as a threatening storm. Their wings batted against the wire doors of the cage, and a shower of downy white feathers drifted from the coop in an eerie August snowfall.

  Mallory walked toward him, slow-stepping. “You heard something.” She circled around him, drawing h
is body and his gun away from the old woman. “You opened the bathroom door—just a crack. The man was bending over your mother.” Now she was positive that he had not seen his mother strangled to death. The six-year-old child had believed that his mother was still alive while he watched a man mutilate her and hang her. If a fireman and a doctor could not tell the living from the dead, what chance did a little boy have?

  The pigeon lady was on the move again. Mallory kept track of her in peripheral vision. The old woman crossed the roof, walking into the line of fire to pick up a heavy bag of birdseed.

  Mallory backed off softly, slowly.

  Easy now.

  A hand tremor made his gun shake. He was sliding into profound shock and aiming from the hip.

  “You watched him hang her—without a sound, no screams. She never—”

  His head was shaking in denial.

  Impossible. Mallory knew she could not be wrong about this part. Yes, she was right. She had simply not pushed this idea far enough. “You never made a sound. You—just—watched.”

  The man’s head tilted to one side, as though some supporting string had been cut. His face contorted into a soundless scream, and the blood-clotted eye cried red tears. He was bleeding inside and out.

  The birds were screaming, wings in a racket, beating the wire of the coop, frantic to get away.

  “You watched that bastard kill your mother! You let him do it to her!” Of course he did—only six years old, traumatized and paralyzed, and now she played to the guilt of the innocent child. “You never called for help. You never even tried to stop him.”

  The doors of the pigeon coop flew open, and dozens of birds escaped before the wide eyes of their keeper. In tight formation, they flew across the roof in a roar of wings and cries, diving close to the scarecrow, then veering upward. His eyes were wild, following the flight of birds into the sun.