Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

“So you returned home and made her some,” Shapiro said.

“Why, of course. I regretted not having thought of it sooner.”

“And Lettie was taking the bonbons to the child this evening?”

She nodded, her slender throat working. The first hint of tears glinted in her eyes. “Lettie never reached her destination, Mr. Shapiro. She intended to deliver the candy, visit briefly, and return right away. Her lengthening absence didn’t upset me right away. I assumed she’d got talking with the little girl and forgot the time. But finally I grew uneasy. I called the building super and asked him to step to the apartment and have my sister come to the phone. When he returned, he reported that she wasn’t there, hadn’t been there.”

She lapsed from the present for a moment, her soft mouth drawing into a thin, tortured line.

Shapiro quickly envisioned it, the chill that must have come to the silent vacancy of the house as she’d hung up the phone. She’d probably sat a moment, a cold pulse beginning deep within her, telling herself it didn’t mean too much, Lettie was all right and would have an explanation that would make her sister’s fears seem silly.

“You went out to look for her and found her... in the darkness of the alley beside the grocery store,” Shapiro reprised gently.

“Yes, that’s right.” The teacup began rattling again. This time she had to set it on the table and clasp her hands hard in her lap. They continued to tremble slightly. “I might have gone past without knowing she was there, Mr. Shapiro, but I heard the faint sound of her moan. It was almost the last sound she made. I stopped, listened, edged into the alley. Then I saw the pale shadow of her lying there... He had smashed her head, dragged her off the street... and gorged on the coconut bonbons while he rifled her purse...”

A hard shiver went through her. “What sort of beast, Mr. Shapiro?” The words dropped to a whisper, “Eating candy while his victim dies at his feet.”

“Maybe a drug addict,” Shapiro said. “Maybe the craving for sweets suggests a hard-drug user.”

“He was young, rather tall and skinny, with a scar on his cheek shaped like a W. Lettie managed to tell me that, Mr. Shapiro. And then she said, ‘I won’t be able to dust my rose garden tomorrow, sis.’ Her last words...” She strangled and was very pale.

Shapiro reached and touched the thin shoulder. It made him think of the soft wing of a bird. “Miss Cooksey, let me arrange for you to stay someplace else tonight.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shapiro. But no. This is my house and I’ve no intention of running from it.”

“Then at least have someone here. We have police matrons who are quite good company.”

“I’m sure they are.” She moved a little, as if not to hurt his feelings in casting off the support of his hand. “But I’ll make do. The quicker I accept the... the silence, the better it will be.”

“All right.” Shapiro slumped back. “But I must warn you. This is the fourth reported mugging in this general area in the past six weeks. There might have been others we don’t know about. Your sister was the first fatality.”

A quick touch of color splashed Miss Nettie’s cheeks. “All by the same young man?”

Shapiro lifted and dropped his shoulders, standing up as he did so. ‘“We can’t be sure. One other woman got a look at his face before she was slugged unconscious. She gave us the same description — including the W-shaped scar on his cheek.”

Her eyes reflected the way she was twisting and turning it all in her mind. “Then you’ve been trying to stop this pathological beast for some time — without much luck.”

“Without any luck,” Shapiro admitted. He hesitated. “But we try, Miss Cooksey. I want you to believe that.”

Her eyes met his. She seemed to sense something of his job, the dirtiness and thanklessness of it, the frustrations that were all too much a part of it.

“The public doesn’t always understand,” he said. “I’m not complaining, but we’re under-manned, always facing a job that grows more impossibly big every day. We can’t blanket the city looking for a single mugger. We just have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

She touched his hand, gently comforting him. Even in her own extremity , he thought.

“Good night, Mr. Shapiro, and thank you for your kindness. You’ve made it easier for me.” Shapiro drove back to headquarters with the thought of her haunting him, piercing the armor of twenty-five-years of being a cop, of seeing it all.

On his way through the corridor to Communications, Shapiro bumped into Captain Ramey. Ramey’s eyes widened as he took in the cast of Shapiro’s face.

“Wow! Who licked the red off your candy?”

Shapiro steamed a breath. “Don’t mention candy to me, Cap! Not right now. And don’t ever mention coconut bonbons!”

Ramey scratched his head and stared as Shapiro continued his stormy way to the radio room.

In the den of electronic gear, Shapiro had the order put on the air: Pick up slender man probably in his twenties, W-shaped scar on cheek, wanted on suspicion of murder committed during course of forcible robbery.

He was afraid it wouldn’t do any good — and it didn’t. He went off duty at midnight, and when he got home and sacked in he kept his wife awake grumbling in his sleep.

Between calls to knifings, shootings, and sluggings, Shapiro’s unmarked car cruised the Cooksey neighborhood nightly for more than a week.

His trained eye picked out details, the young girl who was peddling herself; the strident woman who beat up her day-laborer husband when he came home drunk; the broad-shouldered teen-ager who undoubtedly was gang chief of the block; the old grouch who chased dogs and kids from his yard with sticks and rocks.

Shapiro liked least of all the actions of Miss Nettie. Each evening right after dark she came out of the ghostly old house and walked west, past the steel-shuttered grocery, across the intersection, the full length of the next block. Then she turned and went back the way she had come, a fragile, helpless figure. She would pause at her front walk and look back at the long, dark sidewalk she had traversed. Then she would slip into her house, and a dim light would turn on behind a curtained window upstairs, and Miss Nettie would be in for the night.

She started the excursions the night after her sister was buried. Nothing discouraged her. She walked if it rained, if the wind blew, if the moon shone. It was as if the void of grief had filled her with a compulsion to retrace the steps and feel the same feelings suffered by that other twin image of herself.

In a corner of his mind, Shapiro knew he was making a cardinal mistake in police work. He’d let Miss Nettie become an entity, someone very personal. She was the memory of the grandmother he’d known in childhood, the echo of lost days buried in the smogs of time when cookies had tasted of a never-again sweetness and a tree house in a back-yard oak had soared over a world without ugliness.

The unseen observer in the shadows of a tree or dark, deserted doorway, Shapiro fretted about her. Her newly developed quirk, he told himself, was the result of her sudden bereavement. It was temporary. It would wear itself out. But if not... then he would take an off-duty hour to talk with the department psychiatrist about her.

Three weeks passed before Miss Nettie varied what had come to be her norm. Staked out in the concealment of a peeling billboard, Shapiro watched the opposite sidewalk. The night was gloomy, with low gray clouds. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. She was ten minutes behind schedule, then twenty, with no sign of her coming shadow-like along the street.