Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  Now he could not escape his callers. The machine seemed to work for their convenience and not his own. Machines were always conspiring to strip all the charm from his life. Once, he had tried to disconnect the device, and all of the phones had gone dead. Mallory’s wiring was not to be trifled with. He had never attempted another such insurrection.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Riker sat on the floor with the emptied-out contents of another carton, searching for a lost child among the papers. “You’re right, Mallory. Sally Winter never attended a private school, either. No tuition payments.”

  “I don’t think she lived long enough for kindergarten,” said Mallory, leafing through her own stack of files. “There’s no record of payouts for nannies after the toddler years. Lots of medical bills. There was a live-in nurse. After Sally Winter turned four, the nurse’s paychecks stopped.”

  “So the kid was sick,” said Riker. “Maybe she died of natural causes. I can’t see any motive to kill Sally.”

  “Then why would Lionel say she’d run away when she was ten years old? You know that was a lie. And why isn’t there a death certificate on file with the city?”

  “Sally could’ve died somewhere else. Maybe it was a case of neglect. Uncle James wouldn’t want anyone to know he was an unfit guardian, not before he’d finished milking his cut from the trust fund.” Riker turned to the open doorway to see Charles and Robin walking down the hall toward the reception room. A moment later, that distant door opened and closed. He guessed that they were making a deli run for food and wondered if they would remember to bring him a beer.

  Mallory was sifting through the smallest carton, the one that had belonged to his grandfather. She began to pin the old man’s diagrams of the massacre to the wall.

  “Hey,” said Riker, “you don’t want Charles and Robin to see that stuff.”

  “They won’t be back. They’ll be playing poker all night.”

  Charles Butler entered his apartment behind Robin Duffy, who headed straight for the library, and now he heard Edward Slope call out, “It’s about time!”now

  Upon entering the book-lined room, he could hardly fail to notice an old gaming table surrounded by his new club chairs, and three of those chairs were filled by the charter members of the weekly floating poker game.

  “Oh, it’s a beauty,” said Robin, admiring the ornate carving and the touches of gilt and inlays.

  Indeed, it was a good piece of furniture, in the sense of being solid and made of good hardwood, but it was too ornate, not the graceful antique of Charles’s dreams. This table had obviously been constructed in the twentieth century, and one might even call it gaudy.

  “The provenance,” said Edward, handing a sheet of paper to Robin, whose eyes went round. The doctor turned to Charles, saying, “It’s a gift from Mallory. It once belonged to Bugsy Siegel.”

  A mobster and a brutal killer, but Charles let this slide, for it was so rare to receive a present from Mallory that did not require an electronics manual to operate.

  “Oh, Bugsy.” Robin Duffy ran one hand over the tabletop, caressing it with real love in his eyes. “Bugsy Siegel, the man who invented Las Vegas. It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

  Indeed, there were smiles all around the room. Even the rabbi approved. And now Charles realized that the other table, the one linked to a former president, would never have made them so happy. Mallory had found the magic that he had been searching for, a history of smoke-filled rooms and high-stakes players, a table with a provenance on the wild side.

  He sat down in a chair and smiled at this company of friends. He had inherited all of them from Kathy Mallory’s foster father. Charles’s other bequest, a seat in this poker game, was also an ongoing treasure. But the game had represented so much more to the late Louis Markowitz, that crafty, manipulative good man—that stellar card shark.

  Charles had heard all the players’ war stories of watching Kathy Mallory grow up in the Markowitz household, and he had heard all the theories for why Louis Markowitz had taken a young child to the weekly poker game. Edward Slope had once espoused the idea that Louis was teaching his semireformed street thief to steal in a more socially acceptable manner—rather than going straight for a victim’s wallet or ripping off cars. David Kaplan had been closest to the truth with the theory of playtime, for young Kathy had never had friends her own age. She had always frightened normal children.

  But these three men had never understood how truly devious their late, great friend had been. The policeman’s profession was prone to sudden death, and Louis had been a farsighted man. He had forced these men to love his only child over the years when she was learning to cheat them and beat them all at cards.

  And they loved her still.

  Though she had long ago outgrown their company and deserted their game of penny-ante stakes and wild cards, these men would never desert Kathy Mallory. They were family now.

  Canny Louis.

  Lionel and Cleo were in the park that day.” Mallory had pinned up all the old diagrams of Winter House. “But Stick Man didn’t know they were missing. I think the original plan was to kill everyone in the house but the baby and Nedda. It had to look like a psycho on a killing spree instead of a hired murder.”

  “But, as long as they had Nedda, why would they need the baby?”

  “The draw on the fortune goes to Nedda and her siblings. That’s a lot of money to ride on the life of one child. Suppose they always planned to stash Nedda somewhere else?”

  “Like an asylum?”

  “Right. They can produce her if they have to. But, even if she dies in a hospital under an assumed name, the lawyers can still keep her alive on paper, and the money rolls on. But James Winter has to be established as the legal guardian of a surviving child. This was what I got from the DA’s office. They say the court would’ve assumed guardianship for a missing child, and the court could’ve declared Nedda dead after seven years. So this is the only way that James can get his share of the money. Even if he’d had the brains to contest the original will—”

  “He would’ve been a murder suspect with a huge money motive,” said Riker. “Okay, but Sally was a bad choice. The kid was sick.”

  “She was a baby, no friends, no school connections. If Sally had been the only survivor, they probably would’ve replaced her with another kid when she died. I don’t think anyone minded that Cleo and Lionel weren’t in the house that day. That was an accidental bonus. Two spares.”

  Nedda Winter carried a plate of sandwiches into the library and set them on the game table amid the beer bottles and ashtrays filled with smoking cigars. Charles held a chair for her. “You’ll play, of course.”

  “I might watch for a while, but I’m not much good at card games.”

  “Good.” Edward Slope opened a fresh deck. “At last, Charles has someone he can beat at poker.”

  “You’re one to talk,” said Robin Duffy. “When Kathy was eleven years old, she cleaned you out once a week.” He turned his wide smile on Nedda. “Poor little kid. She used to list to one side with the weight of all of Edward’s money in her pockets. And Lou laughed so hard he cried.”

  The doctor ignored this. “Charles, did you know that Nedda’s father saw the shoot-out between the cops and Two-Gun Crowly on West Ninetieth Street?”

  “My father and thousands of other West Siders,” said Nedda. “My grandfather was with him that day. He said the shoot-out went on for three hours. When Two-Gun Crowly gave up the fight, he still had a pistol stuffed in each sock.”

  Rabbi Kaplan picked up the deck and dealt out the cards. “My father only took me to baseball games. I had no idea the Upper West Side could be so exciting.”

  Nedda, Charles, Edward and Robin fell silent.

  What if the massacre started at the top of Winter House?”

  “That’s not the way the cops figured it at the time.” Riker stepped back from the cork wall to take in the reconstruction of his grandfather’s wor
k. “But I think they got a lot of things wrong.”

  He added more pages from the old man’s files. “Check this out. Granddad made these notes in an interview with the lead detective. This was right before Fitzgerald died of cancer. Now this was maybe ten, fifteen years after the murders. It helps if you know that Fitzgerald ruled out murder for hire. The lawyers told him that the uncle knew the terms of Edwina’s will twelve years before the massacre. James Winter always knew that he could never inherit. Well, that killed the only money motive. If there’s no adult who stands to gain, then who hired the hitman? That’s why the cops settled for a lunatic on a killing spree. Fitzgerald figured it this way. Stick Man starts on the first floor and works his way up. Then he runs out of steam when he gets to the nursery. Or maybe something scares him off before he can finish the job and kill the baby.”

  “But your grandfather always figured it was a pro. Why?”

  “Fitzgerald’s theory hung on what the lawyers said. They’re the ones who killed the money motive. But Granddad never trusted lawyers.”

  “Nine people. That’s a lot of killing, a lot of risk. Maybe Stick Man wasn’t working alone. Three generations of hitmen. What if there was a fourth—an up-and-comer?”

  “A fledgling killer?”

  Most of the poker chips were in neat stacks in front of

  Nedda Winter. “This is so embarrassing.”

  Her comment was met with a chorus of encouragement. The other players had been so eager to teach her the game that they had helped her to beat them at every hand. Eventually she did manage to lose all the money back to them, but she had to fight them for the privilege.

  The telephone rang, and Nedda glanced at her watch. “I’ll get it. I’m sure it’s for me.”

  Four gentlemen rose to their feet as she left the room.

  David Kaplan turned to Charles. “She’s a charming woman. How did you meet?”

  Charles made a slight stumble in his mind. So many confidences to keep. “She sat next to me at a dinner party.” That was the truth, was it not? Well, no. And now, he could feel the heat rising to his face, and how would the rabbi read this sudden blush?

  David Kaplan’s head tilted to one side. He must find it odd and disconcerting to catch a friend in a lie. His beard framed a sweet smile, and his eyes were both forgiving and more, telling his host that he could only believe the best of him. David, the master of cryptic logic, had apparently deduced that honor must lie in the direction of falsehood—and the new player was not what she seemed.

  Nedda returned to the table, saying with regret, “I have a hired car waiting for me downstairs. I’ll have to say good night. And thank you all. This was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

  “Send the car away,” said Charles, rising from his chair. “I’ll take you home.”

  “No, no. You stay right where you are. I’ll be fine. We always use this driver. My niece has a car service.”

  “Then I can at least walk you down to the street. I insist.”

  When the apartment door had closed behind them, Charles said, “Maybe it’s unwise right now. I mean—hashing this out with your brother and sister. After what you’ve been through in the past few days—”

  “I should’ve done this the day I came home. Don’t worry about me.”

  Charles opened the door to the waiting car and handed Nedda into the backseat. And then he gave her a set of his house keys. “Promise you’ll come back tonight—no matter how late.”

  He watched the taillights of the car disappear as it rounded the corner onto Houston, then turned back to see Mallory in shadow, leaning against the wall of the building.

  “This is getting out of hand, Charles. Suppose you gave your house keys to a mass murderer?”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that,” he said. “You don’t.”

  “I know she’s killed before.”

  “Self-defense,” he said. “And that man was a serial killer.”

  “Nedda didn’t know that. And he wasn’t holding a weapon when he died. Could you stab an unarmed man in the heart? Could you even imagine it? I don’t think you could ever kill another human being. You’re just not made that way.” She followed him inside the building, close on his heels, saying, “What’s Nedda made of? Don’t you wonder? Imagine her sticking that ice pick into a man’s chest. She’d have to be fast—no hesitation, one clean strike. No fear.”

  “That’s enough.” He walked past the elevator and opened the door to the stairwell.

  “And she did it in the dark.” Mallory climbed the stairs behind him, chasing words with pictures she planted in his head. “He never saw her coming for him.” She followed him through the stairwell door and down the hall to his apartment. “And what about that man in the park last night? What if she’d killed him, too? Would we still be talking about self-defense?” They stopped outside his door, but the poisoning went on relentlessly. “When we found her in the park, she had an ice pick in her pocket. Remember that, Charles.”

  How could he forget—ever?

  “Nedda will always be welcome in my house.”

  Mallory looked as if he had struck her. “And I’m not. I’m just annoying you.”

  Oh, no, on the contrary. He could never encounter Mallory without feeling a sudden lightness of the head, a fullness of the heart and a gang of birds fluttering inside his rib cage. He reached out to touch her, but his hand dropped back to his side. Never did they truly connect, and they never would, for his nature had made him incapable of two things for a certainty: he could never kill a human being, and he could not tell this woman that he would love her until he died.

  How sad was that?

  The door to his apartment opened.

  “Finally!” A grinning Robin Duffy took Mallory by the arm and pulled her inside. “Edward’s winning streak is back. You have to stop him, Kathy. He’s murdering us.”

  Lying on the floor, her head pressed to the wood, Bitty awakened to a shrill sound from the telephone receiver, an alarm to remind her that the phone was off the hook. Rags was running about in circles, shrieking to hold up his end of the conversation with this mechanical noise.

  Bitty struggled to raise herself up to a sitting position, then cracked the bedroom door to listen for the sound of Aunt Nedda’s voice, but she was not there, not home yet. The other voices were growing more distant, fading off to another room with a door they could close for privacy.

  Aunt Nedda, where are you?

  Any more delay could cost dearly. If she closed her eyes one more time, she might never wake again.

  Robin Duffy had found the only flaw in Mallory’s gift, a hole in one of the struts that branched out from the table’s pedestal. It had been drilled by the previous owner, a ship’s captain, so he could run a chain through the wood and secure the table in rough weather.

  However, given the original owner, a renowned gangster, Robin had hopes of a more exciting explanation. His eyes were wide with great expectation. “Is that a bullet hole?”

  “Yes,” said Mallory, “that’s exactly what it is.” She dealt the cards out all around. “And away we go. The name of the game is five card stud. No wild cards. No nickels and dimes in the pot. Sky’s the limit. This is not your grandmother’s poker game.”

  Four men mentally fastened their seat belts.

  She had to smile at Charles. He was looking down at the best hand he had ever held, and she knew he was pondering a problem of ethics, one he could not solve. If his cards had been dealt from the bottom of the deck, a little gift from herself, it would not be right to play the hand, and he should fold. What a gentleman.

  It was too easy for her to read his thoughts.

  Now he was worried. Since she knew he held a world-class hand, if he folded his cards instead of playing them, it would be like accusing her of cheating. Oh, but if he won and had to show his hand, then everyone would know she had cheated. The hand was that good.

  She should know.

  Kathy Mallory was not
only a master of palming cards; she could also tie a fair Gordian knot. This one had been designed with no possibility of an honest resolution. He would have to settle for the least damage—just as she did every day.

  Charles played the hand he was dealt. She knew he would. Fortunately for him, he could never run a bluff. The other players read victory all over his giveaway face and they folded. No one called him on his hand and asked to see his cards. Of course, she had predicted that outcome—just as he had. His winning pot was small, but so was his guilt.

  Mallory fell a bit short of tradition by not taking all of the medical examiner’s money within half an hour of play. She had left him a short stack, and Edward Slope eyed his dwindled chips with ill-disguised dismay. She folded her own cards, and that seemed to give him a glimmer of hope. The doctor won this hand, but that was pure mercy on her part.

  “I’ve got a problem,” she said, addressing the doctor. “How does a man move through a mansion, killing floor by floor, stabbing nine people with an ice pick, and there’s not one scream to give him away?”

  While Edward Slope was pondering this, Mallory watched the rabbi. David Kaplan had that look of trying to recall an elusive dream. The nightmare of the Winter House Massacre? And now he let it go and looked down at his cards. This settled her mind on the problem of the other players keeping her confidences.

  The doctor sipped his beer, then leaned back in his chair. “If the murderer had chased his victims through the house, there would’ve been lots of noise. So, obviously, it didn’t happen that way. More than likely, the victims weren’t expecting to be stabbed.”