Carol O’Connell - Crime School

‘His unblinking eyes stared into the sun.’ Riker surprised himself with this hokey line quoted verbatim. ‘And guess who’s standing over the body?’ His hand formed an imaginary gun, and he blew smoke from one finger. ‘Looks real bad for the Wichita Kid.’

The situation worsened when the boy stole a horse and rode out of town. In the next chapter, the lawman was saddling a black stallion. ‘He’s riding out after the kid.’ And Riker had finished his coffee. ‘Sheriff Peety can hardly see. He’s got tears in his eyes. He loves the boy. But Wichita killed a man, and he’s gotta hang for that. At the end of the story, the sheriff runs the kid off a canyon wall. It’s a long drop, hundreds of feet to the bottom of that canyon. But Peety’s still tracking the boy in the book after that one.’

‘So it’s episodic. A series with the same characters.’

‘Yeah, and every story has an ending like that one. I guess that’s what gets you hooked.’

Charles nodded, then slid the paperback across the table. The matter was closed.

The detective picked up the novel and quickly hid it in his pocket, as if it were a dirty book instead of a dangerous one.

The Ice Queen cometh.

Whiteshield Ronald Deluthe watched the pretty woman crossing the squad room. He recognized money when it walked in the door, shod in a brand of running shoes that no civil servant could afford. No one had to tell him what Mallory spent at her tailor’s or the hair salons. And he wondered if she was on the take.

What green eyes you have. How cold they are.

She was blind to him, looking right through him, and yet he resented her less than the others. As a merely average man with an amateur dye job of bright yellow hair, Deluthe knew he was beneath her notice and contempt. It had nothing to do with his rank.

He turned back to his work, typing a meticulously detailed explanation for the news van beating the fire engines to last night’s crime scene. Detective Riker would have nothing to criticize this time.

Mallory paused to read the paper sign taped to the side of his computer monitor. Originally, it had been taped to his back. The joke had gone unnoticed until he had removed his jacket and discovered the sheet of paper stuck to the material – and his new job title, Resurrector of Dead Whores. He had gamely put the sign on open display and earned a few smiles from passing detectives.

Mallory was not amused.

She ripped the sheet off the monitor, wadded it into a tight ball, then dropped it on his keyboard. He stared at the small white marble of compacted paper; her crumpling style was more serious than Riker’s. He looked up as she moved away from him, calling after her, ‘Ma’am?’

Did that sound too needy?

She ignored him, but all the detectives did that. He abandoned his report and followed her down a hallway that opened on to a large room with no distraction of windows. Every wall was lined with cork and cluttered with bloody photographs and the paperwork of current cases. Earlier in the day, a detective had given him a brief tour of the Special Crimes facilities, also known as the men’s room and the lunch room, but not this place. Of course not. Why bother? Folding chairs were set up in audience formation for briefings he would never be invited to attend.

Near the door, a table held a large-screen television set. Mallory stood beside it, speaking to an older man, Janos.

A real detective.

Deluthe knew better than to interrupt. But rather than hover like a schoolboy awaiting permission to take a piss, he wandered the perimeter of cork walls, perusing pinned-up pictures and paperwork. None of it pertained to the hanging hooker. Obviously, it was not an important case, and his report was only one more piece of busywork for the son-in-law of the deputy commissioner, a little something to keep him out of the way.

Mallory fed a videotape into the mouth of a VCR. Deluthe was drawn to the screen and its images of fire engines and the crowd that had turned out for last night’s hanging. Now he understood why the news director had refused to copy film and outtakes from the fire. The videotapes had already been collected by Mallory.

Detective Janos flicked the remote control and froze the picture. ‘That one?’ He pointed to a figure standing well back in the gathering, a man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. ‘Yeah, he might be the old lady’s man in the tree.’

Deluthe winced at this reminder of Miss Emelda and all that he had missed in his first interview with her. But he had learned a lot from Sergeant Riker, the only detective who had bothered to teach him anything. Perhaps the useless trek to the television station had been a training exercise and not a total waste of time. He cleared his throat before speaking to Mallory. He would rather die than let her hear his voice crack. ‘I thought I was supposed to talk to the news people. Sergeant Riker told me – ’

‘I got there first.’ Mallory said this with no inflection, yet he drew the inference that he had been somehow remiss.

She undoubtedly knew everything that he knew and then some. Comparing his notes with hers would only be asking for more humiliation. ‘I’m almost finished with my report.’ His useless report. ‘What do I do now?’

‘I know what you can do.’ Mallory smiled.

A sucker grin? Yes, and Deluthe braced himself, wondering if she would tell him to get lost or worse.

She pulled out her notebook. ‘Never mind if this takes a few days. You just stay on it.’ The detective wrote down the address of a warehouse and the item she wanted, then ripped off the page and handed it to him. As an afterthought, she said, ‘That murder could be fifteen or twenty years old.’

And this vague time frame was supposed to help him locate an evidence carton for a homicide with no name or case number? He could search for years and never find a box with a hangman’s rope. In effect, Mallory had just told him to get lost. And now she glared at him, perhaps wondering why he was still here.

He marched down the hallway, then crossed the squad room, saying a silent goodbye to the walls and wondering if he would ever see this place again. A few minutes later, the young man slid behind the wheel of his car and discovered that he was out of gas.

My name is Fool.

Deluthe was surrounded by cops with motorcycles and cars. Any of these men could siphon out a pint of fuel, enough for him to reach a gas station. But rather than admit to one more stupid mistake, he abandoned his vehicle and walked toward the subway, hoping it would drop him close to the warehouse. And there he might spend the rest of his temporary assignment, wandering long corridors of dusty shelves stacked with ancient evidence cartons.

Count on it, Fool.

When he reached the subway track, the last car was running away into the tunnel. He sat down on a wooden bench assigned to screw-up cops who missed their trains. The public-address system came alive with an electronic squeal that hurt his ears. An inhuman voice was telling Ronald Deluthe that, wherever he was going, he could not get there, not from here, not today. There was a fire on the tracks, and no more trains were coming his way. New York was not a town of second chances.

On the other side of the grimy storefront window, an old man sat hunched over a desk as high as a pulpit, the better to catch shoplifters among the aisles of used books, though he had no customers this afternoon. The plaque on the edge of the desk said, ‘John Warwick, proprietor’.

Charles Butler entered the shop, announced by a buzzer. Near the door, a table and two chairs were cooled by the steady breeze of a fan. This told him that Mr Warwick was more than a merchant. Only a man who loved his trade would sacrifice valuable floor space to carve out this niche for weary readers.