The old man lifted one eyebrow to say, But you’re not really sure, are you, Charles?
On a normal day, he would be madly rewriting the terms of Mallory’s contract, but now he simply bowed to the absurd and signed his name on the dotted line.
Done with the business of the day, he turned his attention to the telephone on the other side of the room, willing it to ring. He was looking forward to another conversation with Susan McReedy, the lady from Maine. Mallory had insisted that the woman would call again. The detective’s contracts were a bit dicey, but her instincts were superb. Yes, Ms. McReedy would definitely call back. He could see the woman clearly now, sitting by her own telephone, her hair gone to gray and her life as well, facing the tedium of her retirement years. This very moment, all of Ms. McReedy’s thoughts would be consumed by old acquaintance with a memorable ice-pick-wielding redhead.
He reached out to the near table and picked up his history book. As he turned the pages, he marveled anew that Riker could have ingested this dry text without the skill of speed reading and the mercy of a quick end. While scanning the pages, Charles revisited Mallory’s theory on a twelve-year-old girl’s involvement in the Winter House Massacre.
In a bibliophile’s act of heresy, he threw the book across the room. Next, he abandoned logic, replacing it with faith and feeling. He liked Nedda Winter. Between dinner at eight and the last bottle of wine in the early hours of a morning, he had come to think of her as a friend.
Head bowed over her plate, Nedda Winter finished supper in the kitchen, then disregarded the automatic dishwasher to clean her plate in the sink. She planned to retire early and spare her siblings one more encounter, though she craved their company, any company at all, rather than to be alone, that state where memory consumed her.
One benign recollection was of Mrs. Tully, wide as she was tall, the cook and housekeeper who had died in the massacre. This kitchen had been that old woman’s domain, and October had been Tully’s favorite time of the year. For weeks in advance of Halloween, she had always been allowed free rein to terrify her employer’s offspring. That last time, when five of the Winter children had only a few more days to live, they had all gathered in the kitchen, all except Baby Sally. The youngsters, rocking on the balls of their feet, had wafted back and forth between terror and delight. And then the long-awaited moment came when the housekeeper threw open the cellar door to absolute darkness and led them all down the stairs.
Five-year-old Cleo had alternately laughed and squealed in anticipation before Tully had even begun her scary work. Erica, who had turned nine that year, was much more ladylike, practicing to be blasé and determined that the old woman would not make her scream. And the rest of them could hardly wait to be scared witless.
“I never use mousetraps,” the old woman said, as she led the parade of children into the dank basement by the light of a single candle. She held the flame below her face to make it seem evil when she grinned at them. “No, traps won’t do. Might catch a child or two by mistake and break your little fingers and toes. But no fear. The house likes you—all of you. But the house hates vermin. Kills ’em dead, it does.” Tully had bent low to hold her candle over the small moldering body of a field mouse underneath a fallen box. Another mouse was found crushed by a wrench that had dropped from a shelf of tools. “Looks accidental, don’t it? But look around you, my little dears. Did you ever see so many accidents in one place?” And then she had laughed, high-throated, wicked, shining candlelight into corners, illuminating other tiny corpses caught and crushed in the circumstances of apparent mishaps.
So many of them.
Erica screamed.
Nedda glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. She should go upstairs now. Lionel and Cleo might come home at any moment.
After passing through the dining room, she walked toward the stairs at an odd angle so that she might avoid the prone and lifeless Mrs. Tully in her plain gray dress. Nedda began her ascent by hugging the rail and keeping to a narrow path so as not to tread on any part of her father’s body. She paused, as she always did. Farther up the staircase was her stepmother’s corpse. A small spot of blood marred the breast of a blue silk dressing gown, and the eyes were rolled upward, as if mortified to be seen in this unflattering sprawl of limbs.
Nedda lifted one foot, for she had just stepped on her father’s dead white hand.
Sorry, so sorry.
She looked down at his upturned face, his startled eyes, so surprised to be dying.
Behind her, she heard the familiar voice of Uncle James calling out to her from across the room and more than half a century, asking in a plaintive tone, “My God, Nedda, what have you done?”
Mallory climbed the stairs behind her partner. His new apartment was located on the floor above a saloon—Riker’s big dream.
“My grandfather was never on the case,” he said, “but the old man worked it on the side—worked it all his life. He visited every crime scene where an ice pick was used as weapon.” After opening the door and flicking on the light, he waved her inside.
Mallory remained standing while her partner flopped down on the couch, raising a cloud of dust from the cushion. Every littered surface was filmed with gray, though he had only occupied this place for a few weeks. Where was he getting his dust supply?
“So your grandfather covered domestic disputes and bar fights?”
“Everything,” said Riker. “Have a seat.”
“What for?”
Misunderstanding her, he stood up and, with no offense taken, swept the leather seat of an armchair to send his unopened mail and smaller, unidentified flying objects to the floor. “There you go.”
She sat down, careful not to touch the padded arms, for she could not identify what he had spilled there. Next, she flirted with the idea that he had brought some of his trash from the last apartment, perhaps regarding this formidable collection of crushed beer cans as a homey touch. “Why would your grandfather cover the nickel-and-dime scenes? It’s not like he expected them to tie back to Stick Man.”
“My father thought that was strange, too.” In Mallory’s honor, Riker walked about the room, bending low to pick up dirty socks and stuff them behind the couch pillows. “When Granddad retired, he lost access to crime scenes, so Dad collected all the details for him.”
“And now you do it.” And when would they ever get to the reason why? She tapped one foot as Riker opened the refrigerator and pulled out two cold beers. Accepting one from his hand, she asked him again. “Why, Riker? What can you learn from garden-variety stabbings?”
“Every way you can stab another human with an ice pick.” This time he eased himself down on the couch, cutting the dust fly by half. “The lead detective ruled out a pro in favor of a psycho, but not my grandfather. Gran developed a signature for Stick Man. Now this is something you won’t see in a rage killing. The pick was pushed into the body, perfectly level to pass through the rib cage. No false strikes, no bone chips ever. Just perfect. The picks were honed, narrow and needle sharp. Easier to pass through clothes and muscle. Then Stick Man made a little jog to the right and shredded the heart. That enlarged the entry wound. He eased the pick out. No blood fly that way. And he wiped the bloody end on the victim’s clothing. He could’ve slaughtered a battalion without getting a drop on his clothes. After Granddad retired, my father used his clout to pull hundreds of old autopsy reports, and they found matches. There was no other stab wound quite like Stick Man’s. He used that same MO for almost a hundred years. The cops caught him twice—and twice he died.”
A ghost story.
Mallory’s hands balled into fists. She hated ghost stories.
Nedda backed away from the staircase, then stopped—dead stop.
What was that?
The million fine hairs of her body were on the rise as she sorted out the noises of the house. A light slap on glass came from the garden, where a leafy branch licked the panes of the doors. Elsewhere, a clock was ticking. She turned aroun
d, looking across the front room to the foyer and the burglar alarm. There was no glowing light to assure her that the alarm was working. She rationalized this away. The new housekeeper had not set the alarm before going out, and that was common enough. They never stayed very long, and few of them had found the time or inclination to memorize the daily change of the code that disabled the alarm upon reentering the house.
Was the door even locked?
Another noise, a knock, then a thud, was followed by the sound of breaking glass.
Nedda drifted across the room and down the hall toward the kitchen, the source of her fear. She could not stop herself, though her legs threatened to buckle and fail. She was like one of those elderly women on the hospital ward, driven by a compulsion she could not name, her limbs moving of their own accord.
On the kitchen threshold now, eyes on the cellar door, fascinated and afraid, she was moving toward it. One hand trembled on the knob, and she opened the door to absolute silence, that moment between one footstep and the next, the still vacuum of holding one’s breath. And now she heard another noise. By the dim light filtering downstairs from the kitchen, she saw a mousetrap at the edge of the first step. She wanted so much to believe that it was a rodent down there, a big one with enough weight to make the sound of crunching glass underfoot. But she was not so gifted at delusional thinking.
Nedda backed away from the door, keeping her eyes trained upon it as she reached out for the nearest drawer. This was where Bitty had found the old wooden ice pick the other night, the one used to satisfy the curiosity of Detective Riker. And now that pick was in Nedda’s hand.
She backed out of the kitchen, never taking her eyes off the door until she turned and ran light-footed down the hall, heading for the staircase. Bitty’s room on the floor above had a good strong bolt on the door.
Nedda gripped the banister, and stood there very still, one foot upon the stair. She shook her head. She could not hide; she could not take the chance. What if this intruder surprised the next innocent to come through the front door?
Well, she would call the police.
And say what?
I hear noises in my house? My burglar alarm isn’t working?
The night of the break-in, she could not remember having the luxury of time to question what she should do next. Nedda looked down at the ice pick in her hand.
She could do it again.
Riker stood on a chair to reach the box at the back of his closet. He hoisted it down and dropped it on the floor at Mallory’s feet. “I was just a kid then. Every night after dinner, they’d spread all this stuff on the kitchen table. Mom called our kitchen the murder room.” He lifted the box and carried it to his own kitchen table. “The earliest cases date back to the eighteen hundreds, but they all used Stick Man’s signature. They ended in the forties, the year of the massacre.”
Somewhat mollified by Riker’s hasty disavowal of a ghost story, Mallory asked, “How many generations of hitmen?”
“Three.” He sat down at the table and opened the box. “The first one was a crazy little bastard in Hell’s Kitchen. He worked for the Irish gangs. Started when he was only thirteen. Back in those days, they called him Pick. What really spooked the locals was the daylight killing. He’d walk up to a guy on the street at high noon and just do him on the spot.”
“Too crazy to worry about witnesses.”
“Right. And who wants to make an enemy of the neighborhood nutcase? So everybody knew who he was, even the local beat cop, and nobody talked.”
Riker pulled out a handful of yellowed papers and photographs, diagrams and scraps of paper with notes in faded ink. He tapped a picture cut from an ancient newspaper and preserved in laminate. “This is his mother. Smart lady. She was the broker for all his jobs. And—surprise—she read tarot cards. That was her front for the murder contracts, and she never did one day in prison. Well, her son was nuts, and I mean a real standout kind of crazy. But the mother paid off the cops when they started asking questions. Then one day, there’s a new commission to investigate police corruption, so the cops run out and pick up her son just for show. That closes a few dozen homicides in an afternoon, and the department really shines in the morning paper.” He grinned at Mallory. “Don’t you love this town?”
“That’s when Pick died?”
“The first time? No, not yet. After the arrest, he was committed to an asylum. And that’s where he hooks up with his replacement—an orderly named Jay Holly.”
Riker had covered every inch of the table, laying out his files in stacks of a dozen folders, each one another death. “You won’t find this stuff in police reports or history books. Pinwitty’s research was pathetic next to Granddad’s.” He found a mug shot from a New Orleans Police Department and handed it to Mallory. “That’s Jay Holly. He did a deal with the fortuneteller.”
“Wait—she put out a contract on her—”
“Her own son? Yeah. Her crazy son was too dangerous to keep alive. It was just a matter of time before his mother was tied to the murders.” Riker shuffled through more papers, producing a list of assets: expensive homes and purchases beyond a fortuneteller’s means. “But the old lady didn’t wanna give up a good income. So she hired Jay Holly to kill her son in the asylum. Pick was smothered with a pillow.” He pushed an old copy of the death certificate across the table.
Mallory glanced at the date, then picked up a column cut from a yellowed newspaper. “And five days after that, there’s another ice-pick murder. All right, I get it. She pays Jay Holly to make her dead son look like an innocent man. Now the old lady’s in the clear, too.”
“Yeah.” Riker placed another file in front of her, another death. “And then—”
“The next day, she’s back in business,” said Mallory, “as the new hitman’s broker. But the cops don’t bother her anymore.”
“My grandfather would’ve loved you, kid. Yeah, that’s the way he figured it. Jay and the old lady did real well, until she died—of a stroke. More likely it was murder. There was no autopsy. Granddad figured that must’ve been the first instance of the pick in the eardrum. Another fortuneteller took over the same storefront, and this one was young and good-looking. Then Jay Holly got caught in New Orleans. That’s where he hooked up with our guy in a holding cell.”
“Humboldt.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t his real name.” He handed her another sheet. “These are Humboldt’s aliases. He did time all over the South for fleecing women out of their savings. A real charmer. The last lady withdrew the charges. So Humboldt was about to get out of jail around the time Jay Holly was taken into custody.”
“They share a cell—they do a deal.”
“Yeah. So now Humboldt knows the style. The day he gets out of jail, there’s another ice-pick murder, same MO, and the cops release Jay Holly. Then Holly dies, but it’s not an ice-pick kill. Humboldt’s smarter than that. Jay Holly was found dead on a barroom floor. He’d been poisoned, and the cops had no leads on the man he was drinking with that night.”
“Humboldt goes back to New York and uses the same fortuneteller for his broker.”
“Right. And he keeps this one alive for a long time. She was an old woman before he murdered her in the police station.”
“Twelve days after the murders at Winter House.” Mallory drummed her fingernails on the table. “And your father keeps working on this?”
“No, he stopped the night my grandfather died.”
“You think he could help us?”
“No, I could never ask Dad to do that. It’s a long story.”
Mallory’s face was a study in grim resignation.
There was no need to touch the light switch for the cellar. From the top of the stairs, Nedda could see shards of broken glass clinging to the socket of the hanging bulb. The last time she had visited the cellar, it was to help one of the housekeepers replace a blown-out kitchen fuse, and then her own head had cleared that bulb by only a few inches. So the intruder must be a tall
one, over six feet.
The new housekeeper was also tall, but Nedda had no illusions about finding the woman down there on some innocent errand. However, this might explain why an intruder had dared to come in by the front door. He must have been watching the house. He would have seen them all leave and go their separate ways, perhaps mistaking the housekeeper for herself. And then, he must have heard approaching footsteps and fled for the cover of the basement.
Nedda raised the pick high. And, because she was afraid, she gathered dead brothers and sisters around her. Mrs. Tully, an animated corpse of formidable girth, led the procession down the cellar stairs.
Just like old times.
The kitchen light petered out beyond the bottom step. There would be a flashlight on top of the fuse box to her left. But now she saw the bright rectangle of an open door on the other side of the basement. Whoever had broken into the house was long gone. Beyond the threshold, ten steps led up to the backyard and escape. A breeze called Nedda’s attention to a high window. Its heavy wood frame was propped open with a stick. This was how the intruder must have gained entrance. As she drew close to the window, dead brothers and sisters walked with her, lending comfort. All of them looked up to see a field mouse at the window, testing the cellar air, nose high, whiskers twitchy. Its small pink hands were almost human as it gripped the wooden sill. The tiny creature was half in, half out. And, though the wind had ceased and there was no visible agency to move the propping stick, the stick did fall. The slamming wood frame broke the back of the mouse. Its mouth opened wide and, in surprise, it died.
Mrs. Tully laughed.
Nedda, in concert with the children, moved back from the window. By the good light of the open door, this small audience of the dead and the living could see wet drops of blood on the steps leading up to the backyard.
What had the house done to the intruder?
Winter House Page 15
