Mystery Men (& women) Volume 1

by B C Bell

  ***

  Alice reported to work at Captain Stern’s office the next morning. She spent the first two hours taking dictation and waiting for the opportunity to do what she had to do next. The chance finally came when Captain Stern went downstairs to speak to the patrolmen about some new name on the city’s Most Wanted list.

  Alice had already determined that Detective Douglas Brown was no longer assigned to her precinct. Now she needed to find out either where he was now posted or where he lived. It was not unusual for her to make calls to the main police records bureau on order of Captain Stern. She made such a call then, but without Stern’s authorization. It didn’t matter, she knew, as the person she was speaking to over the phone had no way of knowing that Stern had not requested the information. As long as Stern didn’t know about the call, Alice would be fine. Within minutes, she had information on Detective First Class Brown. He had not been transferred, but had taken an early retirement. He still lived in the city and the secretary at the main records office had been all too happy to supply Alice with Brown’s home address, especially since it was, Alice had told her, for the purpose of planning a surprise party for Brown’s birthday. Had the poor woman known why Alice really wanted the address, she would have shouted out for every policeman within earshot.

  The rest of the day was uneventful. Alice went home at the usual time, dined with Julia, talked with her for awhile as they both enjoyed a glass of wine, and finally went to her room. She did not, however, go to bed. Alice’s night was just beginning.

  ***

  No one, had they been watching the house, would have even noticed Alice leaving, so well had her life on the London streets taught her to sneak through the shadows. It was no difficult task for her to climb out the second-story window, maneuver her way down the exterior wall by clinging to the drainpipe, and run quietly through the backyard and into the alleys that ran between pieces of property in that residential neighborhood. She was impressed by how little extraneous sound her new boots made if one tread carefully, but still quickly, while wearing them.

  She could not afford to be seen by anyone, strangely attired as she now was. The place where she was going was several miles away, too far to walk and a cab was out of the question. Still, Alice was resourceful and she quickly came up with a solution. She spotted a truck heading in the general direction of her destination. She ran through the shadows, keeping the vehicle in sight. When it stopped to let another car turn onto the street, she pounced, grabbing onto the rear door of the truck and climbing up, hitching a ride, invisible to the driver and so darkly clad that even pedestrians would have had to be looking for her to have spotted her. When the truck started to go off the path she needed to follow, Alice would jump off and catch another passing truck. As she moved from ride to ride, getting ever closer to where she wanted to be, she was pleasantly surprised, satisfied, at how well that method of travel seemed to be working for her.

  Thirty minutes later, Douglas Brown sat up in bed. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and shoved aside the lock of his thick gray hair that tickled his forehead. He looked around quickly, squinting at the shadows. He had thought he had heard a sound and it was not unknown for burglaries to take place in the area where his apartment was situated, so he had come out of sleep in a state of some alarm. He saw no movement in his room, heard no further noise, so he started to lean back against his pillow, ready to resume his rest.

  “You will not go back to sleep so soon.”

  “What? Who said that? Who’s there?” Brown shouted at the shadows. “Come out where I can see you! Are you a girl? You sound like a girl! Girls don’t grow up to be prowlers! Come out of the dark and I’ll give you a good spanking!”

  Brown’s taunting tirade ended abruptly when something came out of the shadows and stood in the pale light of the streetlamps that shone through the window. Brown fell silent, felt his insides quiver like pudding as he took in the sight of what stood before him.

  It was shaped like a woman, but adorned like something out of a nightmare inspired by Hell itself. It was dressed all in black from its feet up to its neck. The strange garment it wore looked, for all that Douglas Brown could see, like a wedding dress, except that it was black as coal and torn short at the level of the ankles. Over the surreal parody of a bridal gown was a black cloak that stretched out like the wings of a bat or of some awful raven from Poe’s absinthe-induced rhyming rants. The creature’s hands were concealed within the folds of its terrible costume so that Brown could not tell if it wielded a weapon of any kind. The consistent, all-consuming blackness of its attire was broken only when the observer’s gaze looked upon the head, for the color changed there. The shape of the head was feminine enough and Brown could see long dark hair flowing and cascading down around the shoulders. The face, however, was unseen, hidden behind a piece of crimson lace that fluttered slightly as it was touched by the breeze that came in through the open window. That striking, blood-colored, ethereal and darkly lovely red veil sent a strange sensation of absolute horror shooting through every inch of Douglas Brown’s body and soul. What strange apparition stood before him? What was it…and what did it want? The retired detective did not know what to do, did not know what to say.

  The apparition spoke again before Brown could utter another word. The voice was female; of that Brown was sure, but it was unlike any other voice he had ever heard. The accent was odd, like an American woman with a voice that seemed to be fighting back a long-buried British tint. It was also somehow inhuman, as if the pitch and volume were fluctuating as the emotions behind the words rose and fell like waves upon a stormy sea. It was an eerie, almost supernatural sound, and Brown was not sure if he were awake and really seeing and hearing the strange woman-shaped creature, or if he was trapped in some strange surreal nightmare from which waking would not happen fast enough to quell his fear.

  “Douglas Brown,” the voice called out to him. “This is not a dream. I am real…and you are right to be afraid. I am a ghost of grief and a spirit of sorrow, an angel of anguish and a demon of despair. I am the Red Veil! I am the shroud over the face of every mourner; I am vengeance in the form of a woman! My body is the color of death and my face is the shade of blood.”

  Brown could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he hoped he was experiencing some strange, sickness-induced hallucination, but feared that it was some grim, gruesome reality staring at him as he lay vulnerable in his bed in the middle of the night. “What do you want?” he murmured nervously, wanting to pull the blankets over his head and hide from the terrible sight until his mother came to comfort him and assure him that it was only a dream. Twenty years on the police force of the biggest city in the world and Douglas Brown had been reduced to nothing more than a forty-five year old child, quivering in the dark.

  “I want answers,” wailed the Red Veil. “I will ask questions…and you, Douglas Brown, shall answer them. You will tell me the truth…or you will pay the price for your dishonesty, for my patience is short…and my claws are sharp!”

  As the strange being before Douglas Brown’s eyes spoke those words, that horrible threat of pain and violence, it drew forth from under its cloak its right hand and held that hand in the light where Brown could see it. The hand was gloved, clad in black like the rest of the nightmare being. Upon the ends of its fingers were sharp pointed things, talons that gleamed as the light of the lamps outside reflected off of the steel-like material that composed those dreadful nails. Brown gasped, truly suspecting, in his fear-induced stupor, that the thing that stood before him was not human, no flesh and blood woman, but a she-demon from the bowels of Hell. Had he been able to look more closely at those claws, those terrible knife-like things that flashed in the dim light as the beast flexed its fingers, Brown might have realized that they were the shards of a police badge that had been cut into strips, jagged edges unsmoothed and deadly should they make contact with anything as flim
sy and fragile as human flesh.

  “What…what do you want to know?” Brown could barely make the words rise into his throat and fly from his trembling lips.

  “One year ago,” said the Red Veil, “there was a death, a murder. Bullets destroyed a young man, a policeman, Officer Thomas Michael Carter. You went to the scene, you wrote a report, and that was all that you did. The case was terminated shortly thereafter, never solved, taken no further. Why, Douglas Brown? Why did it end so soon? Someone told you to stop the investigation! That much I know! You retired early and here you sit in your bed, wasting years that could have been spent still bringing killers to justice and protecting the innocent and avenging brave slain souls like Thomas Carter. Were you told to retire, Douglas Brown? Was the man who halted the investigation the same man who told you to leave the force? Did he give you an early pension in return for your silence, your secrecy, your loyalty to some dreadful conspiracy that leaves poor young Officer Carter unavenged? Is that what happened, Brown? Is it?”

  “I…I don’t know much,” Brown stammered. “I was the first one to go when we got the call about shots that night. I found Officer Carter in that little apartment. He was already dead when I got there. It only took a couple of days for them to tell me to give up the case. It turned out to be my last case. I don’t know why they told me to quit; I really don’t. I swear that’s all I know about the whole thing. It was a shame about Carter. He was a good cop; he had potential, might have been a detective one day. But I don’t know who shot him. I don’t know why the case was closed.”

  The voice from the veiled face was silent for moments that seemed, to Brown, to go on for hours. The face was completely concealed, but a tilt of the head gave the impression that it was deep in thought, weighing the options of what to say or do next. Brown prayed that he would not soon feel the bite of those terrible talons that adorned the fingers of that black-gloved hand.

  “I believe you,” said the Red Veil, and Douglas Brown’s heart slowed down at least enough so that it no longer felt ready to explode forth from his chest. “You don’t know who the killer was. But you do know who told you to stop the investigation and retire. Speak his name now, Douglas Brown, and you will still live when the sun rises in the morning.”

  She flashed the claws again, tapping them against each other like vampiric castanets.

  “Falk; Captain Samuel Falk,” Brown responded to the implied threat of the clinking claws.

  “Falk,” the Red Veil repeated Brown’s words. “I will leave you now, Douglas Brown. Do not rise from that bed until the first rays of dawn penetrate your window.”

  There was a blur of movement; the strange creature with which he had just conversed seemed to melt into the shadows and fade from existence, and Douglas Brown was alone. He did not leave his bed that night.

  ***

  Alice Carter reported to work as usual the next morning. She was tired, but remedied that with an extra coffee as soon as she arrived at the stationhouse. The morning was uneventful and she waited for the right time to utilize the ploy she had devised to get the piece of information she wanted next to help her in the quest that was the real reason she had taken the job as Captain Stern’s secretary.

  Stern had just returned from his lunch break. It had been vital to Alice’s plan that he would leave his office for a brief time.

  “Captain,” she said, “I’m afraid I made a bit of a mistake. While you were out, another precinct called. They asked me to send a file over to their address, but I seem to have forgotten which precinct it was. I feel so foolish now!” She flashed her flirtatious smile at Stern as she feigned embarrassment at her blunder. “But I do remember the name the caller mentioned, sir. Do you happen to know which precinct is run by a Captain Falk?”

  “Of course,” Stern answered. “That’s Sam Falk. He and I were classmates all the way back in high school. You know, he never could hit my curveball. That’s the…umm…Nineteenth Precinct, Alice.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Alice wrote the number 19 on her hand in red ink.

  ***

  As Captain Samuel Falk left the precinct for the evening, he had no idea that he was being watched from above. As he walked at a leisurely pace down the street upon which the stationhouse he commanded was located, he did not think to look up at the rooftops, for he had no cause for alarm or suspicion. Had he glanced skyward, he would have seen, silhouetted against the dimming dusk sky, a cloaked figure, clad all in black, slim and lithe and shapely, keeping pace with his homeward stroll by leaping from roof to roof along the avenue.

  When Falk reached his house, his rooftop shadow paused as well, waiting for Falk to fish his keys from his pocket and unlock his door. As Falk went inside, the follower climbed down the building’s wall and perched outside the window of the room in which a lamp had been lit. The eyes behind the red lace shroud peered through the window, watching as Falk poured himself a glass of brandy and sat down behind his desk and began going through the day’s mail.

  The window was slightly open due to the fairly warm weather, so the watcher outside the window soon became a listener as well when Falk’s telephone began to ring. Falk took a sip of his drink and picked up the receiver.

  “What?” the police captain barked rudely, unhappy at being bothered by the ringing telephone after just having arrived home for the night. “Oh…it’s you again. What do you want, Jasper?”

  Falk stopped talking, listened to the voice on the other end of the call. The figure outside the window waited, unable to hear what this “Jasper” was saying, for Falk to take his turn to speak again.

  “I know you’ve been waiting a year, Jasper,” said Samuel Falk. “I told you in the beginning, when you agreed to do the job, that it would take a while for me to get the money together. Look, you don’t work cheap you know! I probably could have had that interfering whelp of a rookie taken out for a lot less than the five grand I owe you…but I couldn’t trust anybody else. You’ve never botched a job, have you? What? What do you mean I could be the next job unless I pay up? Listen, you impudent fool! I’ll have the entire force on your back if you don’t hold your tongue! You’ll have the money as soon as I have it!”

  Falk slammed down the phone. He picked up his glass and downed the brandy in one gulp. He tossed most of the mail he had been sorting into the wastepaper basket beside the desk and stood up and left the room, angrily slamming the door shut as he walked out.

  “Perfect timing,” whispered the watcher as the one she watched went out of her sight.

  The Red Veil reached into the partially open window. Her black-gloved hands pushed the window upward, increasing the size of the opening and she climbed inside the house. She looked around the small personal office of Captain Samuel Falk. The desk would be too vulnerable a place to hide any documents or other incriminating items. There had to be a hidden place, the Red Veil decided. She looked around, seeking anything suspicious or noteworthy. Her view, eyes gazing through the red-dyed gauzy material that covered her face, alighted on the wall. Yes, she decided, that one panel seems different, slightly lighter in color, off by just a fraction of shade. She walked over to the wall and tapped on the panel with the tip of a finger. Hollow!

  The panel opened quite easily, not barred by any device, just well concealed in plain sight. Her hand reached into the small compartment and pulled forth a bundle of papers, tied together with twine. She sliced through the thin rope with one sharp talon, a claw constructed by the shearing of the badge of a fallen policeman, attached to the glove’s finger in a moment of inspired morbidity. The twine snapped, cut easily by the razor on her hand. The papers fell loose and she rifled through them, tearing open envelopes and searching for anything of significance.

  She read through a letter that had been stuck in the very middle of the pile. The name with which it was signed was a familiar one: Detective First Class Douglas
Brown.

  “Captain Falk, I accept your offer. It’s quitting time then, I suppose. Don’t worry about a thing. I won’t say a word to anybody. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never even heard your name. After all, you’re not my precinct commander. I wash my hands of the case, completely. Just get those pension checks in the mail and I’ll sit back and relax and forget the whole thing.”

  The Red Veil put the papers back into their nesting place and closed the panel in the wall. She walked out of the office room and into the hallway of Falk’s home. The hall was dark and she could see no light ahead of her. She stopped and listened. The sound of running water met her ears.