Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  “All right, I lied. After I realized that he was dead—and he had no weapon—well, none that I could see—I put the ice pick in his hand. I thought it might make the police more sympathetic. But it was dark. I was afraid for my life.”

  “That’s the only thing you’ve said that I believe.”

  “I’m sorry I misled you.”

  Mallory looked down at her notes again, as if the next question mattered not at all to her. “Are you sorry enough to take a polygraph exam?”

  “Yes, of course, if you wish.”

  “That’s good,” said Riker. “Now explain this.” He held up a small plastic bag to the light of the chandelier so that she could clearly see the key inside. “We found dirt in the front door lock, and we found this key in the potted plant on the stairs outside. Our boy put it back after he opened the door. Didn’t you wonder why the alarm went off for last week’s burglary, but not tonight’s?” He nodded toward the corpse. “This guy knew the code to turn off the alarm. You know what that means?”

  “We have an endless parade of temporary help. I suppose one of them set us up for a robbery.”

  “No, that doesn’t work for me.” Mallory nudged the corpse with the toe of her running shoe. “Someone wants you dead, Miss Winter. This man was a murderer, not a burglar. He grabbed his victims off the street. Never broke into a house before, and he didn’t break into this one, either. So tell me—who benefits from your death?”

  “My death would make no difference to anyone.”

  Riker stared at the little woman on the couch. Bitty Smyth had begun to snore. “So maybe your niece is the target. Now that should make you real eager to help us out with this investigation.”

  “And if you don’t,” said Mallory, “we’ve got you for tampering with evidence, obstruction of a homicide investigation and making false statements to the police. Does that worry you?”

  “My medication causes confusion,” said Nedda Winter, throwing the young detective’s own words back at her. “And there go your charges.”

  “Nice try,” said Mallory. “But that only tells me you’ve got secrets that’ll get you killed—you or your niece. What about your brother and sister? They were out of town for both break-ins.”

  “Nothing odd about that. Lionel and Cleo spend most of their time out of town.”

  Mallory left her chair to stand over the unconscious Bitty Smyth. Her long red nails grazed the sleeping woman’s hair. “Does Bitty know secrets, too? Let me put it another way. Would you trust your niece with a secret?”

  Nedda Winter rose to stand beside the detective. The cigarette, tightly clutched in her hand, had gone dark and smokeless, and now she broke it in half.

  Mallory never took her eyes off Bitty Smyth, her hostage in this interview. “All the doors in this house have old-fashioned locks and keyholes, except for your niece’s bedroom. She’s got a dead bolt and a slide bolt. Your brother and sister are always out of town. Why?” She looked up at Nedda Winter. “Is your whole family afraid of you?”

  Riker stepped forward to deliver the blow that he had been waiting for all night long. “Mind if I call you Red?”

  Nedda Winter smiled, perhaps in relief, now that it was finally out. “Red Winter was the title of a painting,” she said, “my portrait. Once my hair was red, but Red was never my name.”

  Bitty Smyth woke in the night, but not in her bed. The windows of the front room were looming rectangles of dull light. There was no other detail to be seen. By touch, she recognized the knitted afghan to that always draped the sofa. Her aunt must have covered her with it as she lay sleeping. Bitty pulled it up to her chin, taking a little comfort from this thin protection of wool. And now she played the childhood game of ferreting out the monsters in the shadows.

  A dark silhouette passed by one window, the shadow of someone inside the house. She held her breath and heard whispers of a silk robe and slippered feet. It was Aunt Nedda, straight and tall, marching back and forth, an aged sentry pausing at each window to part the drapes and look outside. But the aunt’s form and face were lost in the dark, and so the shadow prevailed on Bitty’s imaginings.

  Old monsters never died.

  2

  CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER EDWARD SLOPE MIGHT HAVE been taken for a military man as he walked down the hall to his office. He had a stride that bordered on a march, and his face had all the animation of a granite war monument.

  The doctor was an early riser. Though he had minions, a small army of them, he was always the first to report for work. He cherished the quiet hours of daybreak, when the dead were content to wait until he had finished the newspaper, and the living would not intrude upon him while his coffee was still hot. If there was a God, then one of the assistant medical examiners could crack open the first corpse of the morning, and he might get caught up on a backlog of files. But first—a little solitude. He unlocked the door to his office with a plan to work on the Times crossword puzzle.

  Or not.

  Kathy Mallory was asleep in his chair.

  Well, this put a lie to Detective Riker’s theory that she slept hanging by her heels like a bat. While her uncivilized eyes were closed, she looked rather like a child napping after a busy tour of duty on a homicide squad—and a bit of illegal trespass. A velvet pouch, holding bright bits of metal, lay open upon his desk blotter.

  Poor baby.

  Apparently, sleep had overtaken her before she could put her lock picks away.

  Oh, surprise number two.

  Her eyes snapped open in the mechanical fashion of a doll—or a robot. There was no middle gear of rousing from sleep and dreams. She was simply awake, and this lent credence to his own theory that she had an on-off switch.

  “Good morning, Kathy.”

  “Mallory,” she said, reminding him of the rules. She liked the chilly distance of formality.

  Well, isn’t that just too bad.

  He had known her as Kathy since she was ten years old, though she had insisted at the time that she was twelve. His oldest friend, Louis Markowitz, had bargained her down to the more realistic age of eleven so that he could complete the paperwork for her foster care.

  Eleven, in a pig’s eye.

  But who could discern the true age of a homeless child who was also a gifted liar—and worse. She was the fault in the doctor’s personal myth of himself as an intractable man. Upon the death of her foster father, killed in the line of duty, Edward Slope had tried to fill that void, loving her enough for two, but he was no pushover. And this business of breaking into his office—well, he was not about to let that slide. He reached across the desk to grab her lock picks, planning to use them as a show-and-tell exhibit while he lectured her on—

  The lock picks were gone.

  She had pocketed them in a sleight of hand, and the doctor knew this drill all too well: if he had no evidence of her illegal entry, then there had been no crime that she would own up to.

  Kathy Mallory laid her hands flat on the desk, her desk now. How she loved these little hieratic strategies of furniture and psychological leverage. “I need an autopsy, all the trimmings.”

  “Get in line.” Slope settled into one of the visitors’ chairs. “It might take a few days.” He opened his newspaper, her cue to leave, as if that ever worked. “I’ll have Dr. Morgan determine the—”

  “No. It has to be you.” She was almost petulant. “It has to be now.”

  “You don’t have the rank to make that kind of a request,” he said, tacking on, “Kathy,” just for fun.

  “Mallory,” she said, insistent.

  She held up a stack of photographs, then fanned them like a deck of cards and dealt them out, one by one—just like her old man. Louis Markowitz had been a portly soul with hound-dog jowls and a charming way about him. Charm had never been an option for Kathy, and yet, every now and then, the doctor fancied that he found traces of Lou lingering on in his foster child, sometimes a gesture or a phrase.

  Briefly put, Lou’s daughter kne
w how to manipulate him.

  Even though he was fully aware of her calculation, this deliberate and casual way she had of breaking his heart, he played along every time. The doctor leaned forward to examine the crime-scene photographs, torso shots all of them, and every camera angle showed a pair of scissors driven into the victim’s chest.

  “Good aim,” he said, “no hesitation marks. Hardly any blood loss, so it was a quick death—but you already knew that.” Truly, he was intrigued by the request for a full autopsy, but he could not simply ask her a direct question. Their relationship had the strict parameters of a duel. And now, as he leaned back in his chair, he was even more generous with his sarcasm. “So . . . you had some doubt about what killed this man?”

  “No, but it wasn’t the scissors.” She wore the only smile in her limited store of expression that was not forced. It was the smile that said, Gotcha.

  In the early gray light of her bedroom, Nedda Winter lay very still, not even drawing a breath—waiting for the panic to subside. It was always alarming to open her eyes and find herself alone. And how quiet it was. She had lived too many years with constant companions, never awakening in any normal sense, but ripped from sleep with the early morning orchestra of a one-note moaner in the next bed, and beyond that one, the screamer’s bed and a chorus of harpies singing an angry song of Shut up! Shut the hell up! or Nursey, Nursey, I’m cold, I’m wet. Nedda had played the audience for them, staring vacantly in the direction of their noise and wondering how she would get through another day. Her nights had been whiled away with plans for her own slow death. But that was over now. She had a new plan and something to live for.

  Her heart settled into a normal rhythm, and her gaze calmly roved over the daisy pattern on the century-old wallpaper. The flowers had been yellowed with age generations before she was born. All the other bedrooms of the house had been repapered in her absence. Here, nothing had changed. The furniture was the same, just as she had left it when she was twelve years old, except for the trunk that once sat at the foot of her bed. All of the Winter children had had such trunks. By custom of the house, hers had probably been consigned to the attic when she was assumed to be dead. Otherwise, this might be like any morning from her childhood.

  Only the music was missing.

  She reached out to her bedside table and turned on the old radio. It was tuned to a station that played only jazz, her father’s favorite music for as far back as memory would take her. When Quentin Winter was alive, trumpets and piano riffs had filled this house, day and night, loudest in the party hours. Mellow saxophones had dominated at the break of a new day, and, toward midmorning, Daddy had played the blues as background music for his hangovers.

  Nedda pulled on her robe and entered the bathroom, where her eyes bypassed that strange old woman in the mirror. She looked down at the wide array of pharmacy bottles lined up on the sink. One by one, she flushed her morning doses down the toilet. The medication had been prescribed for an illness that she had never had, and now she watched the tablets swirling around the toilet bowl. What luxury this was after all the years of picking up the pills that other patients had spit out, then ingesting them, tasting other people’s bile and inheriting their diseases and sundry germs. How difficult it would be to make anyone understand that this slow attempt at suicide had been the act of a sane woman. Now, in the absence of any medication, she was getting stronger every day, disappointing her brother and sister.

  Barefoot, she left her room. On the other side of the door, she met her dead stepmother on the day of the massacre. In the manner of a puppeteer, memory worked Alice Winter’s limbs, and the pretty woman crossed the threshold of the bedroom to rouse another version of Nedda—young Nedda with the long red hair. The house itself had been drowsing, running off the low batteries of nine sleepy children on a Sunday morning.

  As Nedda started down the staircase, her father, with only a few more hours to live, was climbing toward her. Fifty-eight years ago, she had stood on tiptoe to kiss him in passing. Now she simply watched him go by in his silk pajamas and dressing gown. What a beautiful man he was, long fair hair like a prince from another age. He was holding a glass with the foul-smelling ingredients of his hangover cure. The disembodied voice of Billie Holiday wafted up the stairs behind him, dogging him from the phonograph below and moaning the blues to Daddy.

  In the next century, Nedda completed her descent to the parlor floor, where Bitty was a child-size lump beneath the afghan on the sofa. She sat down in a chair beside her sleeping niece and waited. A few minutes passed before the younger woman sensed another presence in the room. Small hands gripped the afghan, and her eyes opened, cagey at first, only looking through slits for signs of danger. “Aunt Nedda?”

  Was there just a touch of fear in Bitty’s voice? Yes, and Nedda winced.

  “Good morning, dear. I was just curious. What did you do with the tape from the security camera? The police were asking about it.”

  “I put it where they’d never want to look.” Bitty fumbled with the afghan then produced her Bible from the folds of wool and opened it.

  Oh, not a book at all.

  The Bible was a clever box, and nestled inside a rectangular compartment was the videotape.

  The morgue attendant from the graveyard shift was not at his desk. The chief medical examiner was about to ask Kathy Mallory what she had done with the poor man’s body, but then the double doors swung open and Ray Fallon appeared, alive if not well. He was nervous—Kathy had that effect on him—and sweating from recent exertion.

  After handing a deli bag to the detective, the attendant was tipped lavishly but not thanked, not that Fallon cared, so eager was he to get away from her. “Men’s room,” he said to his boss.

  And Slope knew that the man would not be back again until Kathy had left the premises. “You sent him out for your breakfast?” The doctor affected the lecture mode that he used when he suspected her of cheating at cards. “If you think I’m going to tolerate—”

  “I had to get rid of him.” She dug into the brown paper bag and pulled out a bagel. “I can’t afford any leaks on this case, and he’s the worst. You know you should’ve fired that weasel years ago.”

  This was her very best trick—reversal of guilt, and he should have seen it coming because she was right.

  Kathy Mallory bit into her bagel. With her free hand, she pulled out the metal drawer where she kept her own personal corpse. The victim was still encased in the body bag, and there was no attendant paperwork attached. None of her crime-scene photos had included any body parts above or below the torso, and now she pulled back the zipper to give the pathologist his first look at the face. “It’s Willy Roy Boyd.”

  “Ah,” said Slope, “your lady-killer. So, given his current condition—dead—I’m guessing that you lost your temper when he made bail.”

  Her strip show continued downward until she had exposed the pair of scissors sticking out of the man’s chest.

  “Point taken,” he said. “Not your style.” If Kathy had inflicted this wound, the scissors would have been placed more symmetrically and at a perfect right angle to the flesh. She was peculiar that way, compulsively neat.

  The doctor unzipped the rest of the body. “If I were to roll him over, would I see any other signs of trauma?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not it.”

  And the game went on.

  He checked the dead man’s eyes and fingernails. “No obvious indication of poison.” He stared at the chest. “Those shears make a hell of an entry wound. I would’ve expected more blood.”

  “Right. He was dead when the scissors went in, but Dr. Morgan didn’t catch that. He said the scissors contained the bleeding like a stopper in a bottle.”

  In defense of his young and unseasoned, possibly incompetent, medical examiner, Dr. Slope said, “Well, that’s one possibility.” Like hell it was. Hers was the more likely explanation. The dead man was thin, his chest concave, and the shears went deep. One d
id not rupture the human heart so neatly, not with a weapon of this size and thickness. “I’ll know for sure after the chest is cracked. So you don’t think he was stabbed to death.”

  “Of course he was stabbed to death.” The perverse brat paused a moment to relish this small win, the look of surprise in his eyes. She pointed to the chest. “And that’s the only entry wound.”

  Edward Slope had to smile. He was the one who had taught her this twisted game. The student was surpassing the master.

  Kathy Mallory picked through the dead man’s hair. Finding something she liked, she said, “See this spot of blood on the scalp?”

  Slope adjusted his glasses as he leaned over the corpse. “Yes, and here’s another one on the upper lip. So small.”

  “And this drop on his shirt.” One red fingernail marked the spot. “That’s three drops total. And none of the blood is where you’d expect to find it if the shears had killed him. It’s a back-strike splatter. So the wound was made with something smaller, thinner.” She leaned down to rifle her knapsack and pulled out a bag tagged by Forensics. It contained an ice pick. “I like this for the primary weapon. I want his stomach contents. I want to know what he ate for his last meal and where he ate it. I want a screen for drugs. If he’s a user, I need to know when he got his last fix. And I want—”

  “Stop.” The doctor put one hand up in the manner of a traffic cop. “First things first. A few drops of back-strike blood doesn’t prove it was an ice pick. I can’t even corroborate a second weapon. I’ve told you a hundred times, textbook scenarios don’t even get close to the spectrum of trauma I see on my dissection table.”

  “I didn’t work this out by reading a book.” She opened the evidence bag and held it close to his face. “Sniff that.”

  No need. The odor of bleach was strong. “Someone cleaned it.”

  She turned over the evidence bag to show him the white residue of a price tag peeled from the bottom of the pick handle. “It’s brand new, a perfectly smooth surface. Heller says, even without the bleach, his luminal wouldn’t pick up any blood on the metal. But this is the weapon. It fits with the back-strike blood.”