Carol O’Connell - Crime School

She was pretty. He took her picture.

Click.

The reporter smiled for him.

Click, click, click, click.

She called out to him – a siren song, ‘It’s a murder, right?’

‘No comment,’ he said. This time, the crime scene was under tight control. Even the uniformed officers could not give any helpful information to reporters, however pretty they might be.

Deluthe was out of film and praying that Mallory and Riker would not show up before Officer Waller got back from the store.

He was saved. The uniformed policeman was fast approaching, elbowing his way through the crowd. Perfect timing. There was a God. Waller handed over the back-up film, and Deluthe opened the camera to remove the used roll.

A face in the crowd distracted him. The spectator was staring up at a high window while everyone else watched the front door. The young detective looked up at Kennedy Harper’s fourth-floor apartment. All he could see was blue sky reflected on glass. He reloaded the camera, but before he could snap a picture, his subject slung a gray canvas bag over one shoulder and backed up into the crowd. The bag looked like one in the trunk of Deluthe’s car, where he kept a change of clothes for a baseball game in Central Park.

And now he remembered to shoot the man.

Click.

Shit.

He had only caught the back of the civilian’s head turning away from the camera. Deluthe wondered if he should chase the man down. But what pretext could he use? Excuse me, sir. You looked up instead of down. That scene might not play half as well as his attempted arrest of the building handyman.

The odd spectator was forgotten when Deluthe spied a familiar face behind the barricades. It was the fireman who had left the prostitute hanging at the last crime scene. Gary Zappata’s eyes were fixed on the door to Kennedy Harper’s building.

Waiting for what?

Click.

Detective Mallory stepped out on the sidewalk, followed by her partner. Zappata’s angry eyes locked on to Sergeant Riker.

Click.

The detectives would not give his opinion any credence, but they had to believe a picture. Zappata clearly wanted Riker dead.

Mallory walked up to Deluthe, giving him no time to explain his theory on the fireman. She was saying, ordering, ‘Get out your notebook.’

Deluthe complied, and now his pencil hovered over a clean page.

‘Get your film developed,’ she said. ‘And don’t take any grief. You tell the techs you want it now. Go back to Special Crimes and clear a section of wall in the incident room. Pin up this paperwork.’ She handed him a large manila folder. ‘You’ll find some still shots of news film on my desk. Compare the faces to the ones you shot in this crowd. Meet Riker back here when you’re done. He’ll give you another list. Run.’

No baseball game tonight.

Detective Janos was a human tank, physically and psychologically. Nothing stopped him. However, if Lieutenant Coffey had sent him out in search of the Holy Grail, he would have been back with it long before now. The more difficult errand had been securing a voice recording for the tip line of a local news program.

He was exhausted.

The television people had called him Babe, then misused the word synergy twice in five minutes, saying nothing intelligible for another twenty minutes of wasted time. Everyone on the news staff had labored under the whacked impression that the Constitution of the United States allowed them, even encouraged them, to conceal evidence of murder.

Yet Janos had not killed any of these people. That was not his way. He had merely loomed over the news director, one hand outstretched, saying, ‘Give me the tape.’

Another member of the staff, the anchorwoman, had expounded on freedom of the press, making it clear that she had never read the pertinent passage of First Amendment rights.

And Janos had replied, ‘Give me the tape.’

Half an hour had passed by before the network attorney arrived to yell at his clients, ‘Give him the tape, you fucking idiots!'

More time had been spent convincing an overworked support technician at One Police Plaza that he could not simply leave the tape and go; he needed a copy for his lieutenant. Mere looming had done the trick with the small man in the lab coat.

And now, finally, Janos carried his hard-won trophy down the hall to the incident room. He opened the door and paused on the threshold, taking a moment to admire a crude flat scarecrow nailed to the rear wall. The boys had been busy while he was away.

He looked down at a gray canvas bag near the baseboard. A pair of wadded gym socks had been dropped on the floor, apparently rejected as feet for the image on the wall. Janos agreed with this aesthetic decision – less was more. In the space below a tacked-up baseball cap was a photograph showing the back of a man’s head; this was in keeping with Miss Emelda’s sighting of a suspicious character in her tree, a man without a face. Beneath this picture, a T-shirt had been spread out and pinned to the cork. Sturdy nails supported a pair of blue jeans to fill out the lower half of the body. Crime-scene gloves were positioned where the effigy’s hands would be, and a nail had been driven into one latex palm to hold the strap of a cheap instant camera, yet another detail from Miss Emelda’s description.

Interesting.

However, the truly original touch was a halo of fat black flies impaled around the scarecrow’s cap. One was a large horse fly speared on a long pin, but still alive, twitching, buzzing -

At the sound of footsteps, Janos turned around to see the yellow-haired youngster from Lieutenant Loman’s squad. Judging by the slim build, Janos assumed that the scarecrow’s clothing belonged to this detective. And there was more damning evidence: Ronald Deluthe’s face was flushed red with sudden guilt – perhaps because he carried a living, squirming fly impaled on a hatpin.

‘Deluthe, you’re very young to be this jaded.’Janos smiled at the blushing whiteshield, who now realized that this was a compliment and resumed breathing.

This meeting place had been chosen to increase the prostitute’s anxiety, but Daisy was too stoned to appreciate the decor of framed photographs and citations that screamed, This is a cop bar! Detective Mallory kept fifteen feet of mahogany and five drinking men between herself and the aging whore with electric-red hair.

The skeletal woman perched on the edge of her stool, one eye cocked on the door. Riker was ten minutes late, and the woman would not wait for him much longer. Mallory put on her sunglasses when the hooker glanced in her direction, though it was doubtful she would be recognized; they had both changed so much. Kathy the child had grown into a woman, and Daisy the whore had become a superannuated corpse.

In the old days, this redhead had been a long-haired blonde who had shared heroin with Sparrow. They had done everything together. Mallory had a childhood memory of the two prostitutes vomiting in the same toilet bowl.

Daisy’s bright red mouth formed a suggestive smile for a male customer. The man turned to catch the attention of the bartender, another recent redhead, though, unlike Daisy’s color, Peg Baily’s was a shade found in nature. Also, Baily was softly rounded, glowing with good health, and, in her younger days, she had been a decorated police officer.

The customer arched one eyebrow to ask why a sickly hooker had been allowed to stay so long. Tradition demanded that Daisy be kicked into the street, literally, with the press of a boot on her backside. Peg Baily held up two fingers to let him know that the whore was on the way out in just a few minutes.