Carol O’Connell - Crime School

Pssst.

‘Well now,’ said Mr White. ‘This could be most anybody.’ He looked up from the sketch, which had been no more helpful than the driver’s license. ‘Sorry. You know I’m gone all day. It’s my wife who knows all the neighbors on sight.’

‘Maybe you noticed a stranger hanging around your building at night. He wears a baseball cap and – ’ Mallory turned her head toward the sound of a small bell tinkling over the front door.

Alice White was home.

Deluthe walked toward the closed bathroom. He could not remember if he had left the door ajar. Between the automatic sprays of insecticide, the room was dead silent. He was almost certain that he was the only living thing in this apartment. Almost certain, he drew his gun as he reached for the doorknob. His skin prickled and drops of sweat slid down his face as he conjured up a vision of Mallory standing over his dead body, making caustic remarks about his failure to call in for back-up.

Yet he opened the door.

A hand shot out and smashed into his face. His nostrils gushed blood. His knees were weak and threatening to dump him on the floor. The man in the bathroom was raising his other hand. Was that a gun? Deluthe raised his own weapon.

No, it was an aerosol can.

Pssst.

Deluthe’s eyes were on fire. He had taken a direct hit of insecticide, and now he was partially blind, only able to discern a blurry white shape, a floating face, as he hit the floor, landing on his knees. More pain.

Mrs White entered the hallway, calling out to her husband, ‘John? Did you see my note?’ She walked into the front room and set her grocery bag on the carpet, then noticed that her husband had company. ‘Oh, hello again. You know you’re the third police officer I’ve seen today.’

‘What? Say again,’ said her husband.

‘Early this morning, there was a young man in uniform. He came right after you left. I think he must have been a friend of George’s. And then there was another one – ’ She stopped and turned to Mallory. ‘George is one of our tenants. He used to be a policeman years ago.’

Mallory held up the sketches. ‘Does he look anything like this?’ ‘Oh, no,’ she laughed. ‘George is sixty-five if he’s a day. A very heavy man, and not so much hair.’

Deluthe moved back. Tears had washed his eyes, and now he could see the shadowy form of a man in front of him. When he aimed his gun, it was simply taken from his hand, for he had misjudged the distance of his assailant. Fists waving blind, he made contact with the other man’s body. A savage kick to Deluthe’s testicles doubled him over in pain, and a hard punch to his stomach took his breath away. He hit the floor and lay there, rolling on to his side, curling like a fetus and listening to the opening and closing of drawers, then the sound of something tearing. He tried to get his bearings in the room. Where was the umbrella stand, the baseball bat?

Next to the closet.

His vision was still blurred, but he could make out the dark rectangle of the open closet door. He crawled toward it and located the nearby umbrella stand by touch. As he reached up to grab the bat, he heard the running footsteps, gained his legs and swung at the thing rushing toward him.

He hit something. Yes, flesh and bone. The shadow man was down.

Mrs White looked at the sketches and the photograph.

‘Take your time,’ said Mallory. As if she had the time. ‘Have you ever seen him before?’

‘Well, he looks like lots of people. He could even be that young policeman. I told him George wasn’t here. But the man he sublet the apartment to – ’

‘He works nights,’ said John White. ‘Same as old George.’

‘So I thought he might be sleeping,’ said his wife. ‘And I told that to the officer.’

‘The first one?’ asked John White. ‘Or do you – ’

‘Well, both of them,’ said his wife. ‘The second policeman was a detective. He asked if it was all right to leave a note under George’s door.’

Deluthe’s legs were pulled out from under him. He cracked the back of his skull when he hit the floor. The baseball bat was still clenched in his right hand.

The other man’s weight was on top of him, and together they rolled across the rug and knocked up against the wall. The assailant was beneath him now, and Deluthe smashed his fist into the face that he could barely see. His opponent did not seem to feel the blows, a hand was closing on Deluthe’s testicles, and he screamed in agony.

When had he let go of the bat?

Mallory was deep in denial. ‘This man lives in your building, and you never got his name?’

‘Well,’ said Mr White, speaking for his wife, ‘it’s not like he’s a complete stranger. He’s been visiting old George for years.’

Once more, Mallory tapped the pictures on the coffee table. ‘Could this be your sublet?’

‘It could be.’ Mrs White picked up one of the sketches. ‘I’m not sure. It could also be one of those policemen. The detective – he’s the one who wanted to leave a note. He came by just a little while ago, and I sent him upstairs. Well, I had to run to the store, so the young man said he’d let himself out.’

Pssst.

Ronald Deluthe was lying on his side. He could taste the blood in his mouth as he ripped off the tape. His other hand was feeling around for the baseball bat. Blind fingers no sooner closed around the wood than it was twisted out of his grasp. His right arm was forced up behind his back, and he could feel muscle and bone ripping away from the socket. The pain was beyond anything he had ever imagined. Tiny points of shooting white lights were all that he could clearly see. His scream was muffled by another piece of tape covering his mouth.

‘George’s sublet is a very quiet young man,’ said Alice White. ‘We never hear a sound from that apartment.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t, would we?’ Her husband smiled. ‘It’s on the top floor. So one day, I met him on the stairs. He had George’s keys. He said the old man left town in the middle of the night. Some family crisis.’ He smiled to reassure the skeptical detective. ‘Well, he did have George’s keys, and he seemed presentable. There was no reason to – ’

‘And you were afraid of him.’ Mallory did not have to wait for a reply. It was in the man’s face. And now she understood why no one had pressed the sublet for so much as a name to call him by. ‘Take another look.’ She held up one sketch. ‘Imagine him with a baseball cap and a gray canvas bag with a red stripe.’

‘Oh, that’s the sublet, all right,’ said Mrs White. ‘You never see him without that bag of his.’

Mallory turned her eyes to the ceiling, as if she could see through all the floors of the building. ‘Is there a back exit?’

‘We have a door to the backyard.’

‘That’s it? No fire escape?’

‘No.’

‘So if he wanted to get out, he’d have to – ’

‘You’d see him out there in the hall,’ said John White, who now finished sentences for the detective as well as his wife.

‘Give me your keys.’ Mallory held out her hand. ‘Now!’ Later, she would not remember screaming at this man to make him move faster. ‘Keys!’

When Deluthe regained consciousness, his hands were bound. He tried to lift his head. A rope was pulling tight around his neck, and his body bucked against the heavy weight of the man on top of him.

No breath. Eyes bulging, heart hammering.

Panic was magnified to monster-size primal fear. His legs kicked out, then thudded on the floor. His struggles ceased. His prone body was lighter now. Head swimmy, muscles relaxing, fear gave way to euphoria, and he closed his eyes. The heavy weight that had straddled him was suddenly lifted, and gravity ceased to hold his body down. He floated up into an ether of midnight black.