Crime School

by Carol O’Connell

  Mallory turned back to the crowd of ghouls on the sidewalk. ‘And maybe the old man’s dead.’

  ‘Well, that theory’s my personal favorite.’ Riker knelt down beside Heller. ‘His basement office was wrecked. Broken glass everywhere, and there’s blood on the floor. I didn’t see any broken skin on Stella, so it might be the watchman’s blood.’

  Without a word or even a nod to Riker, Heller closed his tool kit and climbed down from the display window. For the past hour, these two men had not traded one insult, and Mallory wondered about this sudden rift in an old routine.

  ‘Stella marked the perp with her fingernails,’ she said.

  ‘That’s my girl.’ Riker stared at the bits of hair on the floor. ‘Not a very neat scalping this time, and you should see that basement office. The perp’s not so fussy about cleaning up his messes anymore.’

  Mallory nodded. The scarecrow was coming undone.

  *

  A crime-scene tape cordoned off ten feet of space in front of the basement office. John Winetrob, the personnel director, was not permitted any closer to the broken glass wall. This aftermath of violence was beyond his comprehension. He froze when a policeman passed by carrying a bloody shard in a plastic bag.

  Detective Arthur Wang gestured toward a cardboard carton the height of a chair. ‘Sir? Why don’t you sit down?’

  Before you fall down.

  The man’s shakes were easy for Wang to account for, but not only because of the crime-scene blood. The police were also making him nervous. The unshaven personnel director wore a suit, but no tie, and his socks were mismatched. Dressing would have been difficult at this early hour while a uniformed police officer, six feet tall and armed with a gun, had waited at his front door.

  For the past ten minutes, Mr Winetrob had been talking nonstop, mostly inane chatter. Now he fell silent as the detective completed a cell-phone call.

  ‘No answer.’ Arthur Wang dropped the phone back into his pocket. ‘The watchman isn’t home, but I didn’t think he would be. And he hasn’t turned up in any local hospitals.’

  ‘Thank you for trying,’ said Winetrob. ‘You don’t really believe he could be dead, do you?’

  Yes, that was exactly what Detective Wang believed. ‘We’re still looking for him, sir. We’ve got twenty men doing a sweep, floor by floor. If he’s here – if he’s hurt – ’

  ‘What if he didn’t come to work last night? Now there’s a thought.’ The personnel director glanced at the broken glass wall of the nightwatchman’s office, then looked away. ‘Maybe it’s not his blood in there. You know, an old man like that, he could be at home right now, lying in his own bed, maybe – Oh, God. He could be having a heart attack. Can you send somebody over to his apartment? We must cover all the bases.’ He raked one hand through his sparse hair. ‘Yes – all the bases.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Wang. ‘I’ll send a cop to check it out – real soon.’ Or maybe never. This errand would hit the bottom of police priorities this morning. The more important business was a look at the store’s files. All the employees had been photographed, and this was the only helpful information Winetrob had given him so far – or so he believed.

  Gently, Detective Wang helped the civilian to his feet and led him to an elevator that would carry them up to the personnel office. Later, Arthur Wang would wish that he had prioritized in a different fashion and paid closer attention to Winetrob’s wacky ramblings, his hopes and fears.

  When Deluthe had finished Janos’s chore in the payroll department, he had been loaned out to Arthur Wang. Now he was posted at a secretary’s desk outside the office of the personnel director. He had made short work of the first fifty photographs in the stack of employee files, and the man from Kennedy Harper’s crime scene was not among them. More busywork. He glanced toward the open door. The senior detective was inside, drinking coffee and making notes on his conversation with Mr Winetrob. Wang noticed him and called out, ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Nothing yet, sir.’ Deluthe closed another folder.

  Arthur Wang walked to the door and tossed a file on the secretary’s desk. ‘That one goes in your stack. Put it back in alphabetical order, okay? When you’re done, report to Riker.’

  Deluthe opened the file of the nightwatchman and stared at the photograph. His eyes drifted down to the name, that vital clue to the man’s place in the file cabinet. The line below it was a familiar East Village address. And now, with utter disregard for the alphabet, the young detective jammed the folder into the center of the large stack and left his job unfinished. He had more important things to do.

  In the back office of Butler and Company, Mallory was on the phone, terrorizing a clerk at the Odeon, Nebraska, Police Department. ‘So what if your computer is down? What does that – Look, all I need is a photograph… Yeah, right… I told you that an hour ago… So pull it out of the hardcopy… Then fax it! Now!’

  Fortunately, there had been no computer problems at the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles. Charles was looking at a monitor and their only likeness of the scarecrow. The image was not very good, but most license photographs were less than professional quality.

  After relocating in Nebraska, Susan Qualen’s cousins had changed their family name, and the boy they had harbored was called John Ryan. No doubt the cousins had called the boy by his initials, J.R. for Junior, the only name he was accustomed to.

  Mallory sat down at the workstation. ‘It’ll probably take them an hour to figure out how a file drawer works.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Charles. ‘How do you suppose ordinary people like the Qualens became so adept at changing identities?’

  ‘Nothing to it. Idiots get away with it all the time.’ She stared at her monitor screen. ‘The scarecrow must’ve picked up another alias when he came east. He’s not in any local databases. You know what that means?’

  ‘He’s been planning this killing spree for three years?’

  ‘No, I think he only planned one murder.’

  ‘The man who killed his mother?’

  Mallory nodded. ‘In Nebraska, Junior was a small-town cop in uniform. Probably never got near a major investigation. So he comes to the big city. Figures he can find his mother’s killer in a day – and without any help from us.’

  Charles agreed. And when the boy failed, his last resort was forcing NYPD to do the job for him.

  ‘The scarecrow hates police,’ she said. ‘He’s very clear about that. So tell me, why would he become a cop?’

  ‘Perhaps he had control issues.’ Charles suspected that this was why Mallory had joined NYPD, but he could not complete this twinning image of her and the scarecrow. ‘It’s an interesting choice, isn’t it? His emotional problems must have been very tightly contained while he was a police officer. The deterioration probably started after he moved to New York.’

  He looked up to see Lars Geldorf standing just inside the door. Some tenant must have buzzed him into the building. Charles was unprepared for the change in him. The old man had aged another decade in a day.

  Ignoring the unwelcome visitor, Mallory looked down at her keyboard. The retired detective walked a few steps into the room, then seemed at the point of falling down. Charles picked up a chair and rushed toward him, but the man waved him away and remained standing.

  Lars Geldorf s eyes were fixed on Mallory. ‘I heard about that poor woman – Stella Small. You think the copycat hangings are my fault, don’t you? If I’d done my job right twenty years ago – ’ His shoulders sagged, and he braced himself with one hand pressed flat on the cork wall, then turned his defeated eyes to Charles. ‘I think I will take that chair.’ He sat down and waited out Mallory’s silence. It was clear that the old man would not leave without a word from her.

  She continued her typing, occasionally looking his way, annoyed that he was still here. Her eyes trained on the keyboard, she said, ‘I can’t discuss details of an active case. You know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Geldorf. ‘I know.’<
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  She could have killed the old man with only a few words, but she kept silent, and Charles saw this as the potential for kindness. Growing up in Special Crimes, she would have seen many of these old men coming and going, haunting police stations as confused ghosts, unable to come to terms with the end of things.

  Mallory was done with Geldorf now, and he could make no mistake about that. The conversation was over, and yet he continued his vigil. After a time, his presence began to wear on her. She pushed her chair back from the workstation and swiveled round to face him. ‘So you want me to tell you what you got wrong? Is that it?’

  Yes, that was what he had come for. He had to know.

  She strolled to the cork wall and what remained of the old murder case, then ripped down a sheet of paper. ‘This is your report on the hanging rope and the duct tape. It’s real short. ‘Common items. Untraceable.’ Wrong. The rope belonged to the building handyman. I got that information from the landlady’s granddaughter.’

  ‘The handyman was out of town when – ’

  ‘On a family emergency. I know. That’s why he left his toolbox in the hall. The landlady promised to take care of it for him. But before she could drag it back to her apartment, the killer found it and stole the rope and the tape. If you’d talked to the handyman, you might’ve gotten a print from the toolbox.’

  Geldorf had no comeback for this, but he would not look away from her.

  She ripped two more sheets of paper from the wall. ‘And then there’s the locked door. Locked when the landlady called the police. Open when the first cop showed up on the scene.’

  ‘I caught that,’ said Geldorf. The light was back in his eyes, and he rose to a stand as he defended himself. ‘That door was never locked. It was stuck. The landlady was old, pushing eighty. Tiny woman, no muscle. It was a hot night in August – and muggy. Wood swells in the damp and the heat. The door was stuck, not locked. And she admitted that when I – ’

  ‘Admitted what? That she was old? That you confused her? She never recanted her statement, and you didn’t make any notes on that conversation. And what about Natalie’s son? You never talked to him.’

  ‘What the hell for? What good would it do to torture a little boy. He’d just lost his mother. When you’ve been on the job a little longer – ’

  ‘Natalie came to you for help, and you just strung her along, you and your buddies. After she died, you built your case around the easiest target, an innocent man.’

  ‘I was right about the ex-husband!’

  ‘No, you botched that too.’ She paused a moment, waiting for him to challenge her, but he said nothing. ‘And twenty years later, here we are, cleaning up the mess.’

  Geldorf shrank down to his chair. His gaze lowered to the floor at her feet. She had won. He was finished.

  Mallory hunkered down beside his chair and looked up at his face. If she had been a cat, Charles might have seen this pose as a prelude to a lunge, but he hoped for something better from her. For a moment, he believed that she planned to soften her words with some comfort for a vulnerable old man.

  How foolish was that?

  ‘Listen to me.’ She gripped Geldorf s arm to shake him from his stupor of pity. He stared at her red nails, startled, as if she had just extended claws.

  Mallory’s half smile said, I’m done playing with you. ‘Here’s the best part, old man. This killer might be a cop. So go home and lock yourself in. If the police come knocking, don’t open that door. It might be one of your mistakes coming back on you. Scary, huh?’

  Arthur Wang finished telling the forensic expert about his conversation with Winetrob. He had intended it as a humorous story to break the tension in the nightwatchman’s basement office.

  ‘Sorry, Arty. Winetrob was right.’ Heller pointed to the red smears on the cement floor. ‘That’s not the watchman’s blood. I called the hospital to check for broken skin on the victim. When they removed Stella’s shoes, they found cuts on her soles and glass fragments in the wounds. I got a partial footprint off one of the shards – real small, a woman’s print. This is her blood.’

  One of Heller’s technicians nodded, saying, ‘And Winetrob was right about the watchman not showing up for work tonight. The security camera has a record of everybody who uses the employee entrance. He’s not on the film.’

  ‘But the watchman isn’t on vacation,’ said Wang. ‘I checked.’ ‘Then maybe Winetrob’s right about the heart attack, too.’ Detective Wang produced a long piece of stiff paper sealed in an evidence bag. ‘So who’s been using the old man’s employee card? Somebody punched in on the time clock last night.’

  Heller turned to his assistant. ‘Maybe the watchman’s still here. Call out the cadaver dogs. We’ll do another sweep of the store.’

  Mallory ended her call with the Wisconsin detective, then turned to Charles. ‘The scarecrow was planning murder when he left Nebraska. There’s nothing wrong with the police computers. The damn clerk didn’t want to tell me she couldn’t find the records. The file was deleted from the computer. The hardcopy is missing too – prints, photos, everything.’

  ‘Did the police talk to the relatives?’

  Mallory nodded, then turned back to her computer monitor.

  ‘They had to wait for a warrant, then they tossed the cousins’ house. The only New York address they found was Susan Qualen’s. Her cousins haven’t heard from Junior in three years. They had a falling-out. They finally told him his mother’s killer got away with murder. A bit late. When he came to New York, his Aunt Susan added her own poison.’ Mallory’s fingers flew across the keys, entering new parameters to narrow her search. Her eyes were riveted to the screen. ‘Where are you hiding?’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t live in New York,’ said Charles. ‘It’s only a few minutes to New Jersey on the subway.’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s living in the city. Deluthe saw him at Kennedy Harper’s crime scene thirty minutes after we found the body. Either he works for NYPD, or he was picking up local radio calls on a police scanner. He’s here.’

  ‘I suppose that makes sense,’ said Charles. ‘His aunt said he came home, and that would be the East Village.’

  ‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘Erik Homer had sole custody. Natalie never saw the boy after the divorce – not till the day she died. The scarecrow’s home was always uptown with his father.’

  ‘But his father was a bully,’ said Charles. ‘And he’s dead now. The boy never lived with his stepmother, so he wouldn’t think of that place as home anymore. Natalie was the parent he adored, the one he still obsesses about.’

  Mallory abruptly stopped tapping keys.

  Detective Janos listened to the theory on the missing nightwatch-man, then nodded. ‘Yeah, we know. Another guy was filling in for him.’

  Heller’s assistant glanced at the store’s daytime security guard, then said, ‘Can we take this outside?’

  Janos followed the man out the door of the manager’s office. When he returned, Riker was still watching the same videotape for the tenth time. ‘This is crap.’ The image was too dark to make out details finer than the profiles of shadows punching in on the employee time clock. ‘No clear shots of anybody.’ Riker glanced at the store’s daytime security guard. ‘I know, it’s not your fault. You’re sure this is the only tape of the new watchman?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It rewinds every three days. So yesterday it – ’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Riker. And that would explain the grainy images. The camera had clicked once every three seconds. The shadowy figure had the jerky motion of an old silent film. ‘The time stamp on this video is too early for his shift. And why doesn’t he punch in?’

  ‘He’s got his own time clock in the basement,’ said the guard. ‘No idea why he’d show up so early.’

  Riker waved one hand to tell the guard that he could leave. ‘Janos? What’s happening?’

  ‘The regular watchman wasn’t scheduled for a vacation. And his payroll checks are getting cashed.’
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  Riker stared at the man on the videotape. ‘So maybe the regular watchman pays this guy out of pocket.’

  ‘That fits. Nobody’s got a name for him.’Janos read notes made from interviews with store employees. ‘We talked to a stockboy who does a lot of overtime. He says this new guy showed up one night, and nobody questioned it. He had the old man’s keys on his belt and a security card to unlock the office door. That’s the only place where you can turn off the alarms.’ He looked up from his notebook. ‘But the glass wall in the office was broken. So our perp wasn’t the guy with the keys.’ He turned to the man on the screen. ‘Not that guy.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘What about the regular watchman?’

  ‘I’m on that.’ Arthur Wang entered the room, a very worried man. ‘Couldn’t reach him by phone, so I sent a uniform to knock on his door. The place doesn’t stink like a ripe corpse. But that’s all the cop could tell without going inside. He interviewed the landlord. The apartment’s been sublet.’

  ‘Works with the vacation theory,’ said Janos. ‘Still, it’s worth a look inside. The old guy might’ve left something to give us a lead. Let’s get a warrant and toss the place.’

  ‘It’s in the works,’ said Arthur Wang. ‘So now we wait another forty minutes. The chicken-shit DA doesn’t want to wake up a judge for a warrant.’

  ‘No judge is gonna sign that warrant,’ said Riker. ‘Not unless that uniform forgets he talked to the landlord. The sublet angle is a paperwork nightmare.’ He looked at Wang, and both men smiled in unison.

  ‘But what if we don’t know about the sublet tenant,’ said Wang. ‘Let’s suppose the cop forgot to mention it when I talked to him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s just suppose that.’

  ‘But it’s still gonna take forty minutes to get a warrant.’

  ‘Fine. I don’t see the scarecrow stringing up another blonde today. I’ll be at Charles’s place with Mallory.’ Riker looked down at his watch. ‘Where’s my ride? Has anybody seen Deluthe?’

  Pssst.

  The old-model humidifier emitted a light spray of insecticide every twenty seconds, flooding the room with poisonous fumes. No cockroach would ever brave this atmosphere. Yet there were roach traps on the floor, strips of sticky tape along the baseboards and fly paper on every surface, all the added precautions of a man with a phobia.