Carol O’Connell - Crime School

Heller’s face lifted and brightened, flesh deepening in the folds of a wide grin. ‘Well, I guess you won’t need this.’ He handed her a sheet of paper. ‘Too bad. I called in a lot of favors to get it.’

She scanned the brief synopsis of a psychiatric history: As a child, John Warwick had stood accused of murdering his twin sister. An eyewitness had cleared the boy, but not before the police had spent six hours wrenching a false confession from a terrified eight-year-old grieving for his twin and crying for his mother. Gangs of reporters had stalked the family, increasing the trauma of a guiltless child. And John Warwick had spent the rest of his childhood in a mental institution, clinging to the fictions of cops and newspaper headlines, irretrievably lost in deep pain and unable to believe in his own innocence.

She dropped the bio sheet on the desk, unenlightened and unimpressed. From what she remembered of the bookseller, he was not capable of killing even one of the thousand flies left at each crime scene. This connection of Heller’s was so pathetic. Something had clearly gone awry in his good brain. And this foray into Warwick’s past was outside the scope of Forensics.

Mallory smiled, for she was always happiest in the attack mode. ‘You shouldn’t have messed in our business, Heller. If Warwick had been a solid suspect, you could’ve queered everything.’

‘I had to know,’ he said. ‘That bastard Riker couldn’t trust me to keep the book quiet. It should’ve been recorded on my evidence log.’ There was no animosity in Heller’s voice – far from it. He was one happy man.

The book.

Mallory was making linkages at the speed of a computer. Her machine logic flickered and faltered, for the paperback western had shown no trace of damage from the fire or the hose. Yet this book must be what Riker had snatched from the watery floor of Sparrow’s apartment. And his other gift to her was the innocent deniability of a crime. He had risked everything to hide a dangerous connection between a whore and Markowitz’s daughter.

‘Homecoming,’’ she said, ‘by Jake Swain.’

When Heller nodded, Mallory knew this man had solid proof against Riker, and no machine logic could have guided her to the next conclusion: her partner was Sheriff Peety in a bad suit.

Riker commanded such deep respect that no one could believe him guilty of a corrupt act, not even when guilt was proven beyond doubt. And Heller, of all people, had been unable to believe his own evidence, for how could Riker steal anything? The criminalist had denied his own religion of all-holy fact. He had stepped a hundred miles out of character to doggedly hunt down proof of Riker’s innocence where none existed. And Heller had actually found something that looked the same, that shined like truth -though it was only faith.

Without another word between them, they left the stationhouse and parted company on the sidewalk. And there the young detective continued her silence as she endured a civilian’s tight embrace and oft-repeated thanks. Mallory stepped back and stared at the smiling face of the next and final victim of the man who killed Natalie Homer. Susan Qualen had believed the press reports that her sister’s only child was still alive.

And so the damage of a twenty-year-old murder would not end tonight. It would drag on well into the morning hours. Following Lars Geldorf s rushed arraignment and sentencing, Natalie’s sister would be quietly told that the police had killed her nephew after all – with a baseball bat.

‘So sorry, ma’am,’ Jack Coffey would say.

When Charles closed his tired eyes, he saw a tiny thief who ran with whores and lived by guile, surviving on animal instinct to get through the night – an altogether admirable child. Louis Markowitz’s hero.

‘Charles?’

His heavy lids flickered open, and Kathy grew up before his eyes. She was so lovely, and he wanted to tell her that, for how else would she know? The tragedy of Kathy Mallory was some malady that had no name but was akin to an aspect of vampirism. This sad insight had come to him by simple observation. She did not look for herself in mirrors, nor in the reflections of shop windows, never expecting to find herself there. He turned to the antique looking glass above his mantelpiece. Literally a magic mirror once used in a stage act of the last century, it was full of wavy lines and smeared realities.

‘Charles!’

‘Yes,’ he said, without turning round.

‘I want you to keep an eye on Riker tonight.’ Mallory walked back and forth across his front room, impatient with a cell-phone caller who had put her on hold. ‘You’ll find him in that cop bar down the street.’ She was still in motion as she resumed her phone conversation. Red designs in the weave of the mirrored carpet seemed to track the floor behind her.

Charles stared at the ancient glass, his gigantic nose, her wonderful eyes. He was fascinated by her form elongating and twisting, her legs bending back to form the hocks of a padding cat. Beast and Beauty were trading places. The reversal went far beyond their positions in the backward space of the mirror room, where she continued to walk to and fro. Her human face was gone, distorted and stripped down to the bestial aspect of Mallory in the panther cage, badly wounded by her life, elegant paws bleeding as she paced. She bore the scars, he felt the pain. How insane -

‘Charles?’

The SoHo saloon was crowded with cops and one civilian. Charles Butler had lost his jacket and tie somewhere between one death and another. His white shirt was wrinkled, sleeves rolled back, and his face was showing the wear of long days broken by catnaps.

Riker stared at his own tired image in the mirror behind the bar, then quickly looked away, saying, ‘Thanks anyway, but I’m taking a cab tonight. So pull up a glass. I hate to drink alone.’ Of course, this was a polite lie, for the detective did his best binge-drinking all by himself.

Charles obliged him and ordered two rounds of Chivas Regal. ‘So Sparrow is dying. And you’re not going to the hospital?’

‘No.’ He prayed that Sparrow would be long dead before an old enemy turned up.

Awe, Mallory, what a gift you have for payback.

It made her the ultimate cop. She was the paladin everyone wanted, a perfect instrument of vengeance. In Riker’s view, people should be more careful about what they wished for. Absent all humanity, its bias and fragility, the law was a sociopath.

Their drinks had appeared on the bar in front of them, and Charles had been left hanging again, awaiting some explanation for this failure to visit the deathbed of a whore. Riker cut the man off before he could ask one more time. ‘So tell me, how did Sheriff Peety outdraw the Wichita Kid?’

‘The usual way. The other man drew his gun too late.’

‘Impossible,’ said Riker. ‘Drunk or sober – even with the damn sun in his eyes – that gunslinger was the best man.’

‘Yes, if you mean faster. And that day – ’ Charles’s eyes were in soft focus now, and Riker knew he was projecting book pages on his cocktail napkin and quoting verbatim when he said, ‘ „That day, the gunslinger was a young god, walking out of the whirlwind of dust, growing larger, step by step. His birthright was dominion over all other men.“‘ He shuddered, then tipped back his shot glass, as if to kill a bad taste. ‘Terrible prose. You’re right – Wichita was fast with a gun, but Sheriff Peety was bigger.’

‘What?’ And now Riker was left to dangle while his barstool companion sipped his drink, taking his sweet time. Charles’s expression worried him. It was almost a Mallory smile.