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

Shapiro drew a deep breath, but held it suddenly. The familiar, slight figure with the short, graceful steps seemed to flow out of the darkness. Shapiro watched as she neared the shadows of the grocery store across the street. His face drooped with sadness. As much as he disliked the thought of her subjected to psychiatric probing, he knew it must be. He couldn’t let her continue this way.

Out of habit, his gaze swept the street as he started to move out and cross diagonally to intercept her. His reluctant journey toward a face-to-face confrontation with her suddenly became a charge. He saw the slender figure of a tall, crouching man resolve from the alleyway darkness and slip up behind her. Unreal and dream-like, the shadow seemed to fold about her as the mugger crooked an arm about her neck and snatched her purse.

“Hold it!” Shapiro shouted the order savagely.

The man threw Miss Nettie to the sidewalk and lunged into the well of darkness alongside the grocery.

Miss Nettie scrambled to her feet, rearing in Shapiro’s path.

“Mr. Shapiro!”

She grabbed his arm and fell against him. Her weight, even as slight as it was, and his momentum threw him off balance. He twisted and almost fell, banging his shoulder against the corner of the building.

“You’re not hurt, obviously,” he said, short-breathed. “Just sit tight. That rat won’t find a hole big enough to hold him.”

She hung onto him. “I didn’t know you there, Mr. Shapiro.” Her thin hands were talons, clutching his clothing.

He tried to brush them away. “For heaven’s sake, Miss Cooksey, let go! That guy’s getting away.”

“Don’t risk yourself for me, Mr. Shapiro. He may be armed.”

“My worry,” he bit out, “if you’ll let me do my job.”

He grabbed her wrist, discovering a surprising strength. The ever-lurking hunting instinct was aware that the fleeing feet had departed the farther end of the alley.

“Miss Nettie!” he snarled in exasperation. He let his hands apply enough pressure to break her grip and shove him free. She stumbled backward and collapsed with a small outcry. Shapiro threw a despairing look down the empty alley as he dropped to one knee beside her.

Her face was a pale, soft etching in white.

“Miss Nettie, I didn’t mean...”

He slipped a hand behind her shoulder to help her up.

“I know you didn’t, Mr. Shapiro.” She got up with but little assistance, brushed a wispy spill of white hair from her forehead with her fingertips. “Don’t blame yourself. Really, I tripped over my own feet, but I’m quite all right.”

“Did you get a look at the mugger?”

Her eyes glinted, blue candles in the faintest haze of street glow. “Not clearly — but enough. He was young, tall, skinny, with the telltale W-shaped scar on his cheek.”

Shapiro dropped his hand from her shoulder, muttering an ungentlemanly word under his breath. “Well,” he sighed bitterly, “the bird seems to have flown the coop. The best I can do now is put him on the air and hope for a pickup.”

“Do you think it will work?”

“I doubt it. He’s managed to hole up pretty well so far.”

She dropped her eyes, making Shapiro think of a chastised child. “I’m glad you didn’t get hurt, Mr. Shapiro.”

“You took care of that, Miss Cooksey, delaying me as you did.”

She sighed softly. “Please don’t be angry with me. Even if you had caught him at the risk of your life, would it have done any good? The court decisions nowadays, the parole system — wouldn’t he have been back on the streets in a few years?”

“Maybe so,” Shapiro admitted, “but he would have been off of them for a few, too.”

Her eyes inched back to his. “Yes, I guess you have to think of it that way, or your lifework would be for nothing.”

The words were a gentle mirror held up to him. She had sized up the policeman’s one excuse for being with uncomfortable accuracy. By the time he was ready to sign out at midnight, he had a case of heartburn, bloodshot eyes, and a headache that would do for the whole department.

He had showered (without relieving his symptoms) and dressed, and was slamming his locker door when Browne from Communications called his name from the doorway.

“Yeah?” Shapiro growled, glancing briefly across his shoulder.

“Bounced down hoping I’d catch you,” Browne, robust and dark and an enviable twenty-seven, said. “The call just came in. I think we’ve turned up your mugger-killer. Young, skinny — with the cheek scar.

Shapiro whirled toward Browne, his headache dissolving. “Where?”

“Fleabag rooming house. One-one-four River Street. His girlfriend, a late-working waitress, breezed in for an after-work date and came out squalling. She found lover boy on the floor. Dead.”

A uniformed patrolman had cleared the curious from the scabby, odorous hall and stairway. Adams and McJunkin had arrived to take charge of the investigation. The lab men and photographer had taken their pictures and samples, and Doc Jefferson, the medical examiner, was snapping his black bag closed when Shapiro’s rough-hewn and iron-gray presence loomed in the doorway.

Shapiro nodded at the departing lab men, said hello to his fellow detectives, and crossed the dreary, stifling room to the figure sprawled beside the grimy, swaybacked bed.

“Who is he?” Shapiro looked down at the bony face with its scar and bonnet of wild, long, brownish hair.

“One Pete Farlow,” Adams said. “Or maybe it’s an alias.”

“Whoever, he must be our boy,” McJunkin added. He was a stocky, freckled redhead, ambling toward Shapiro’s side. “That scar is just too unique. Odds are a million to one against its duplicate in a city this size.”

“Drifter?” Shapiro suggested.

“I wouldn’t bet against you,” McJunkin said, “the way he showed up and took the room, according to the building super. Same old pattern. He works a town until it gets too hot and then drifts on to another room, girl, way of life just like the one he left behind him.”

“He seems to be the solution — in addition to the murder of Lettie Cooksey — to a string of muggings, drunk-rollings, and strong-arm robberies we’ve had,” Adams said. He was the tallest man in the room, dark and ramrod straight. He motioned with his hand toward the narrow closet, where the door stood open. “He’s stashed enough purses and wallets in there to open a counter in a secondhand store.”

“Maybe in his private moments,” Doc Jefferson said, “he liked to look in on them, touch them, sort of relive the big-man moment when he had taken this one or that one.” Doc shook a fine head of silver hair. “You never know about these guys.”

Shapiro drifted to the closet. Which was hers? He tried to remember; a flash of white when the mugger had grabbed it there at the steel-shuttered grocery, but not all white; not large, either — relatively small handbag, black or brown, trimmed in white.

On top of the jumble at his feet, just a little to the left of the doorjamb, lay a woman’s purse with its dark blue relieved by a diagonal band of white; a rather old-fashioned purse.

Shapiro hunkered and picked it up. Its clasp was broken. He pulled it open, and stopped breathing for a second. In one corner was a tissue-wrapped ball of candy. As if fearfully, his forefinger inched and pushed the tissue aside to expose the tempting creaminess of a coconut bonbon.

“Doc,” Shapiro said in a far-off voice, his broad, bent back toward the room, “what did our killer pigeon die of?”

“I won’t have a complete report until after the autopsy,” Jefferson said.

“But you could give me a very educated guess right now.”

“You birds always want your forensic medicine instant,” Doc said. “Okay, for what it’s worth, I’ll wager McJunkin’s freckles against Adams’ eyeteeth that the autopsy will back up the symptoms. Our vulture died of poisoning. Arsenic, I’d say. He gulped a walloping dose of arsenic.”