Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  There had been no family conversation on this subject, no catching up on one more death in the family. She had asked no questions of Lionel and Cleo, not wanting to open the door to any more sorrows. And she had thought it unnecessary. An early demise had been foretold for the baby on the day she was born. Her heart ailment had been some grave defect in the bloodline of Quentin Winter’s second wife, Alice.

  “You might find this interesting.” Bitty reached behind the row of trunks and pulled out a canvas sack, yellowed and cracked with age. “Have a look.”

  Nedda opened the drawstring and emptied the contents onto the floor. Among the clothing was a little girl’s sailor suit of rotted fabric. The years had been unkind to these artifacts stored outside of the cedar-lined trunks. The next item retrieved from the pile was a christening gown, and it fell apart in her hands. All that held together was the little bit of material embroidered with Sally’s initials. Nedda’s hand passed over small moldy stuffed toys and books of nursery rhymes. She tenderly picked through the rest of the clothing in the varying sizes of a growing child who had lived for three or four years following the massacre.

  Bitty folded the child’s clothing and placed it in the sack. “My father said Sally ran away the year that Lionel turned twenty-one. So she would’ve been ten years old. But where’s her trunk? Can you imagine a ten-year-old girl dragging her trunk with her when she ran away from home?”

  “No,” said Nedda, “I can’t.”

  Sally had never run anywhere. A legion of heart specialists had all predicted a very short life of invalidism. Did Bitty know this? Nedda could not ask, and there were other questions that would never be answered. Had Sheldon Smyth lied about Sally running away from home, or had someone, Cleo or Lionel, lied to him? Nedda had lost the heart to go on with this disturbance of the dead. “Where is my trunk?”

  Bitty stood up and walked to the end of the row of murdered children. One trunk had been segregated from all the rest and pushed to the wall. “This one. You were never legally declared dead, but I guess they gave up on you after a while.” She opened the lid. “But this isn’t where I found your tarot cards.”

  Nedda joined her niece by the wall and read her own name on a brass plate. In the context of this attic, it was like viewing her gravestone. She followed Bitty to the far corner of the attic, the resting place of an old standing trunk larger than all the others and plastered with travel stickers. What was this old piece of luggage doing in the attic of dead Winters?

  Bitty opened it like a closet. “I found Uncle James’s passport in here, and that’s odd because he has a regular trunk like the others. It’s stored in the north attic.”

  “This is a steamer trunk,” said Nedda. “Your grandparents used it for ocean voyages.” She examined the drawers that lined one side. In the last one, she found a jumble of bright colors, cheap, gaudy clothing that stirred a memory.

  “I found a long red hair,” said Bitty. “It was snagged in the tarot card box.” She turned to look at the bottom drawer her aunt had opened. “That’s where I found the cards. And there were short red clippings in all of those clothes, so I wondered if your hair—”

  “Yes, it was cut off . . . very short.” Short as a boy’s. Nedda recalled her waist-long hair falling to the floor. The snip of the scissors—it seemed like only this morning. She had been sitting on a wooden chair in a small shabby room with tattered pulled-down shades while this mutilation covered the floor. The red strands had come alive, curling and writhing in the wake of a large cockroach moving through the pile of clippings. And Nedda had cried all the while, listening to the steady beat of rain against the window—the snip of scissors.

  Bitty pulled a dress from the lower drawer. “Now this is the same size as the ones in your trunk, but otherwise nothing like them.”

  Indeed, this was rather poor fare for the child of a wealthy family. Nedda well understood her niece’s curiosity. Unable to get any reliable information from her family, Bitty had produced the tarot cards at the dinner table, hoping for answers via surprise attack. And now this—gentle ambush.

  “I had a theory about Sally,” said Bitty, “I thought maybe—years after the massacre—you came back for her.”

  Intrepid Bitty.

  The detectives talked as they walked through Greenwich Village, breaking off their conversation whenever they were assailed by tourists with a wild, lost look about them. Grid logic was abandoned here, where West Fourth Street ran amok to bisect West Tenth Street. Two gray-haired people stood at this crossroad, unable to move on, gaping at the improbable street sign and willing it to make sense.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Annoyed, Mallory waved off this elderly couple, souring the message on their I-Love-New-York tote bags.

  “It’s not much farther.” Riker flicked his cigarette into a gutter. “And it’s worth the trip. This is the only place in town where you can find a tarot card reader and an ice-pick murder in one conveniently located square block. It’s the neighborhood where Stick Man screwed up royally—a killing close to home.”

  Mallory opened her borrowed copy of The Winter House Massacre and removed the brochure she had used for a bookmark. It had been written by the same author, and now she reiterated the title with sarcasm. “A guided tour of murder in Greenwich Village?”

  “The guy never made much money publishing the book. Bad writer if you ask me. So he makes a living with this walking tour.”

  “If you’ve already taken the tour, why do we have to waste—”

  “And there he is now.” Riker nodded toward a small cluster of people on the sidewalk and their tour guide, a middle-aged, chinless, hairless man, who was barely five feet tall.

  Martin Pinwitty was addressing his less than rapt audience of out-of-towners. Only tourists would politely listen to his monotonous drone while their eyes glazed over with fatigue. Any New York crowd would have left footprints on the author’s face by now. The man actually managed to bore them with the story of a mob-financed killing machine and details of murders by gun and baseball bat and, Riker’s personal favorite, the ice pick. The group’s interest was suddenly revived when Pinwitty told them that they were standing on the very site of an ice-pick murder. They all looked down at their feet, perhaps expecting to find bloodstains more than half a century later.

  “They always do that,” said Riker, hanging back with Mallory at the edge of the tour group.

  “How many times did you take this tour?” Something in her tone of voice implied that she had lost all respect for him.

  “I check in once a year. This guy’s still doing research, and his spiel is always changing.”

  Martin Pinwitty and his tour group walked a few paces down the sidewalk, and the lecture continued. “The victim was a reporter who covered the hearings on Murder Incorporated in the early forties. Now that investigation was over years before this murder took place. I believe the reporter had uncovered some new evidence on a professional assassin.”

  Mallory glanced at Riker, who nodded, saying, “I think he got this part right.”

  And the author droned on, saying, “The police made a very thorough search of this area. They spent days questioning all the residents on this block. And then it was the fortuneteller’s turn.” He pointed to a narrow building across the street. “The woman’s storefront was right there.”

  The tour group turned in unison to stare at a bodega with neon signs for beer and smokes. A drunk stood before its front window vomiting on his shoes. Yet this view held special charms for the sidewalk audience.

  “The police took great interest in the fortuneteller,” said Pinwitty. “She was the only one they brought in for questioning at the police station. And there she died. According to the obituary, it was a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “That’s wrong,” said Riker, speaking low so as not to interfere with the dry static of the ongoing monologue. “It was way more interesting than that.”

  “So what’s the real story?”r />
  “This is secondhand. I was only a kid when I heard it, and this was more than twenty years after it happened. The detectives left the fortuneteller sitting on a bench for maybe five minutes while they freed up an interview room. When they came back for the old lady, the cop on guard duty was bending over her dead body. The uniform tells the detectives she was sitting up one minute, dead the next, and there was nobody near her when she keeled over. Well, they’re hunting for an ice-pick killer, right? And thanks to a slew of exhumed corpses in the early forties, they’re hip to the ice pick in the eardrum. It simulates a stroke. Well, sure enough, they shine a light in the woman’s ear and find blood from the pick. Now they interrogate the shit out of that cop.”

  “The cop was dirty?”

  “That’s what the detectives figured. Maybe the uniform took a few bucks to look the other way. Or maybe he did in the old lady himself. But no. According to the other witnesses, the cop just wasn’t paying attention when somebody stopped to talk with his prisoner. The old lady’s visitor was only there long enough to say hello and good-bye. A few seconds later, the old woman slumps forward. The cop jostles her shoulder and asks if she’s okay. That’s when she falls to the floor, stone dead. The killer walked right into a police station and killed this woman right under their noses. A real pro.”

  “And the detectives covered it up.”

  “You bet they did. This happened maybe ten or twelve days after the Winter House massacre. The newspapers would’ve crucified the whole department. So an ice-pick murder was passed off as a stroke and buried on the obituary page. Oh yeah,” he said as an afterthought, “and that old lady was no crystal-ball gypsy. She only read tarot cards.”

  “And she had a solid connection to the hitman.”

  Riker nodded in Pinwitty’s direction. “He’s getting to that part now.”

  The author pointed upward to a window on the second floor. “After the fortuneteller was taken away, that very night, in fact, that apartment was searched by detectives. On previous calls, the tenant had never been at home. That night they didn’t even bother to knock. Sadly, the tenant was gone and so were his things. No one was able to give the police a name or description. In fact, no one in the neighborhood could recall ever having seen the mysterious tenant even once, though he’d held the lease for years.”

  Mallory nudged Riker. “So the fortuneteller’s storefront was a drop site for money, and the old lady brokered the hitman’s murders?”

  “Yeah. Two different fortunetellers used the same location. They were both murdered, but Pinwitty doesn’t know that.” Riker looked on as the author lost his audience. One by one, the escapees peeled off from the tour group. “But he did get a few things right.” He looked up to the second-floor window. “When the detectives broke down the door, that apartment was clean, and I mean spotless. No prints anywhere. Ballsy, huh? Cops breathing down his neck, and he takes the time to wipe down the walls and the furniture.”

  “And now we’ve got Nedda Winter with tarot cards at the dinner party,” said Mallory. “You think Stick Man would kidnap a twelve-year-old girl to replace his old fortuneteller?”

  “It’s a stretch. Remember, the girl disappeared from Winter House twelve days before the fortuneteller died.”

  “If Stick Man thought the cops were closing in on his drop point, maybe he planned to break in the girl as his next tarot card reader—before he killed the old woman. Nedda was tall for twelve. She could’ve passed for a teenager.”

  “Could be.” In fact, Riker had already thought of this. But why would a hitman believe that a little girl might go along with that idea?

  The spooky brat beside him read his mind. “Maybe,” she said, “Nedda wasn’t all that broken up about the murders. Maybe she knew what was going to happen to her family before Stick Man showed up at the door.”

  Riker gave this idea half a nod. “It’s possible.” There were too many possibilities and they might all be wrong.

  Mallory turned back to the author and his few remaining tourists. He had moved on down the street to the scene of another crime. She listened to the fading banter for another moment. “You said his research is an ongoing thing?”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Lionel was waiting for them. Bitty shrank back, thinking of something better to do on the upper floor, and she retreated.

  Sensible.

  After last night, Bitty would not want a confrontation with her uncle.

  Nedda accepted a cup of coffee from her brother’s hand. She was so absurdly grateful for this small gesture and hoping for something more, but he looked at her with such wariness. And hate? It was difficult to read Lionel’s thoughts anymore. As a child he had never been cold to her. There had been a bond between them once, the two eldest children against the confusing and sometimes violent world of their parents’ making.

  When brother and sister were seated in the dining room, Nedda turned her gaze to the glass-paned doors that opened onto the back garden. It looked so mournful now, pruned back to a few shrubs and a single tree. Once, there had been a swing attached to the lowest bough. Her brother had preferred the higher climbs, the branches closer to the sky. He had been a beautiful, nimble boy with a sunbrowned face and perpetually skinned knees.

  “And now,” said Lionel, “you’re wondering about Baby Sally.”

  Nedda shook her head. No, she had been hunting out of doors for some old memory to share with him, a common ground. She wanted only a bit of conversation and his company—nothing more.

  “Cleo and I were away at school when Sally . . . when she left. I’ve given a lot of thought to that day. It was nothing that we did. We were—”

  “Old history.” Nedda dismissed the rest of his words with a wave. And now she wanted so much to reach across the table, to take his hand in hers and tell him how good it was to be home. However, in this moment, she was more the coward than Bitty. She anticipated Lionel shrinking away from her touch, withdrawing his hand and turning to ice.

  Her own hands remained folded in her lap.

  Martin Pinwitty was beside himself with happiness. Two genuine homicide detectives were visitors in his humble home—underscore the word humble. There was only one room, unless one counted the closet that housed a toilet, and Mallory did not. The bathtub, concealed by a broad wooden board, did double duty as a table, and the hide-a-bed sofa had been hastily folded away, one more sign of an impoverished make-do life.

  Mallory could guess how much of this man’s meager income was daily sacrificed for stamps. Correspondence was piled on every surface that was not cluttered with page-marked books. The postmarks on his mail were wide-ranging, and a few envelopes had the return addresses of police departments in other states.

  On the way to his apartment, Pinwitty had insisted on stopping at a bodega so that he might treat them to doughnuts on this special occasion, believing, as all civilians did, that this was a staple of every cop’s diet. And now both detectives, stuffed with Charles Butler’s croissants and crepes, ate their sugar doughnuts, while feigning gratitude and swilling tea that was unspeakably bad.

  Riker shoveled more sugar into his cup. “So the reporter who died in the Village—that was the last ice-pick job?”

  “For a professional assassin? Yes, I believe it was,” said the author. “I have sources everywhere. If there’s an old unsolved murder with an ice pick, I hear about it. The pick was going out of vogue years before that man was murdered.”

  After scanning one of Pinwitty’s files, a lengthy list of muggings and murders, Mallory set it aside, agreeing with Riker that this was an amateur investigation. “What about the freak who killed the Winter family? You think he retired after the massacre?”

  “Oh, definitely,” said Pinwitty. “That or he died. You know, once, I actually thought Red Winter had killed him. A man was stabbed with an ice pick in the state of Maine.” He stood up and walked to a bookshelf crammed with texts, papers and manila envelopes. “I have a separate file for that one. Nothing e
ver came of it.” He pulled out a folder and smiled. “I even went up to Maine for a few days to check it out.”

  This piqued Mallory’s interest, for that little junket would’ve represented a lot of money for this impoverished little man.

  Pinwitty settled into a chair and opened the folder on his lap. “I’ll tell you what made this incident so interesting. The victim of the stabbing was a man named Humboldt.”

  Riker’s teacup was suspended in midair, all attention suddenly riveted to the author, and Mallory had to wonder what that was about.

  Pinwitty continued. “Humboldt once shared a cell with a murder suspect in New Orleans. The cellmate was charged with the ice-pick murder of a politician.”

  Riker’s cup clattered back to its saucer.

  “Now this suspect—” The author paused to bring the page a bit closer to his nearsighted eyes. “Oh, I don’t have a name for this one, but I know it began with an H. Well, no matter. Turned out the man was innocent. There’d been another murder while he was in custody. However, it occurred to me that Red Winter didn’t know that, and she might have mistaken Humboldt for the suspected ice-pick killer. Maybe she heard a confused report of the New Orleans murder. You see, the first time I heard this story—more like a rumor, actually—Humboldt was killed by a girl with red hair. I postulated that Red Winter might’ve hunted down the wrong man and killed the cellmate by mistake, believing that Humboldt was the one who murdered her parents.”

  Mallory smiled. Ah, the penalties of bad scholarship—death. “And this happened when?”

  “Two years after the massacre. I was originally led to believe that it happened much later than that. In any case, it wasn’t Red Winter who killed Humboldt. She would’ve been a fourteen-year-old child at that time. When I went up to Maine, I discovered that he was killed by a full-grown local woman.”

  At the time of this ice-pick homicide, Red Winter would have been tall enough to pass for someone older. Mallory glanced at Riker, who nodded to say that this was also his thought.