Dead Famous aka The Jury Must Die

Chapter 17

THE ODOR OF RANCID FOOD WAS FOUL, AND SO Johanna supervised the cleaning from a distance. Riker was stalled. He stood barefoot in the light of the refrigerator's grease-splattered bulb, his hands filled with small packets of mustard and ketchup salvaged from take-out containers, and now he debated the value of his condiment collection.

"Oh, get crazy," said Johanna. "Just toss it. Every time you throw something away, your load gets a little lighter."

Mrs. Ortega's philosophy of clutter was carried through all the drawers of the kitchen, repositories of empty matchbooks, dead batteries and metal parts that had fallen off of appliances that he no longer owned. One broken swizzle stick was tied to a memorable binge, and he was allowed to keep it. Out on the street, Johanna watched him load the garbage cans with bags of trash and throwaways, including socks with holes that could not be mended, not even with the yarn of entire socks. The effect of her drugs was wearing off. He objected to bare feet on cold pavement, but she would not let him put on shoes, arguing that dead men had no need for them, but socks might be all right. He found one hardly used pair beneath the bed, and she stood over him as he sat on the rug and put them on.

"So how old were you when you knew your father lied about your first name? When did he tell you the real story?"

Instead of answering her, he lowered his head to take on the next task, foraging under the bed for the wildlife of spiders and dust bunnies. And now it occurred to her that the story of his first name was not the small, easy confidence that she had counted on to open his mind to the healing process and the toxic secret that poisoned him.

"All right," she said, spilling pharmacy tablets into her hand. "Never mind."

The meds, a chemical cheat, would destroy his resistance. Jo held out the pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He took them willingly enough, trained from childhood to follow the doctor's orders with absolute trust. She planned to render him defenseless so that she might crack his mind wide open before this day was over.

"Let's try something easier," she said. "Why do you always slam doors?"

Coffey sat in the dark, irritated beyond belief. In the interview room on the other side of the one-way glass, his detective was not faring as well. To some extent, the silent treatment had worked, for the suspect was certainly talkative. However, the elderly lawyer was winning the day, slowly wearing down poor Janos with endless prattle about the great game of cops and killers, and displaying ignorance of both. Jack Coffey turned to Mallory. "You got his stats?" She nodded. "Old and rich. I'm guessing he got fed up with retirement. He thought I was going to arrest him for obstruction of justice."

Perversely, Mallory had arrested him for everything but that. Jack Coffey scanned the list of charges against the old man: littering, assault on a police officer and two counts of bribery. And she had no less than twelve corroborating statements. God bless eyewitness testimony, worthless as it was, and the power of suggestion. Though the evidentiary twenty-dollar bill was certainly Mallory's own money, eight of her witnesses had come to believe that they had actually seen the old man hand her the bribe. But all the lieutenant had really needed to know was that the elderly lawyer represented a young man with an obsessive interest in Detective Sergeant Riker.

"I guess this'll hold him for a while," said Coffey. "But he'll never give up his client. And now he's going to sue the city just for fun."

"Wrong," she said. "He's going to fold after a few hours in a lockup cage. The old man was a probate attorney. No criminal practice – only wealthy law-abiding clients. I'm betting this is his first visit to a police station."

"Let's find out." The lieutenant pressed the intercom so his voice would be heard in the next room. "Janos? Book the old bastard. And take your time. We got all night to dick around with him."

Jack Coffey smiled, for the attorney's expression of shock was worth the threat to his pension. It was slowly dawning on the old man that his incarceration was going to be dragged out a bit longer than he had previously supposed. He might be looking forward to lockup time in the company of prisoners with satanic delusions and head lice that were all too real.

"It was during a field trip to the downstairs laundry room that Riker made his first confession. While waiting for the washing machine to finish the spin cycle, he sat beside her on a bench by the window, his face bathed in late afternoon light, eyes in soft focus, looking inward.

"Insanity goes with the job," he said. "All the people in this town are smashed in together, stacked up like cordwood. I'm surprised they don't go nuts more often. And the things they do to each other, Jo. It's a horror show every night. And here's the scary part. Sometimes police go nuts, too. I'll never be a cop again."

"Because of what happened in the parking garage? And that day with the van?"

"Yeah, I froze. And those weren't the only times."

She waited out the silence as he loaded the wash into the dryer. When he sat down again, he would not look at her. He spoke of all the details to his waking nightmare. While the dryer ran round and round, she sat beside him, holding his hand and listening to the symptoms of his trauma, the paralysis of loud noises, the suffocation and panic that followed. It was a replay of his own death, replete with the weight of a psychotic teenager sitting upon his chest, making it impossible to breathe. Worst was the feeling of shame.

"That's what the burnouts do," he said. "They freeze up when guns go off. And then some other cop gets shot because they can't – " He lowered his eyes. "Every day, I wake up scared."

"And this is what you've been living with," she said, "every day for all these months." Johanna knew he was still holding back. The worst thing in his mind was still locked away from her. But this was a promising beginning, and she had come to share Mallory's concern for a quick solution – else she might lose him.

They sat there for a quiet hour. Her hand rested on his knee to anchor him to the solid world of the laundry room. His hand covered hers, holding on to save himself, holding on to his sanity by touch and force of will. The laundry in the dryer went round and round. The sun went down.

The elderly lawyer was pressed up against the wall of the lockup.

He was in fear of his new cellmate, a man much smaller than himself. Mallory sat at a table a few feet away and watched the performance of the perp who shared the lawyer's narrow cage. Another precinct had contributed the Central Park flasher, a bona fide pervert reportedly too shy to talk. The sex offender was wearing nothing underneath his overcoat, and now he exposed himself to the lawyer. According to the rap sheet, the man's gender preference ran to heterosexual liaisons, but a few dollars had inspired him to blow the old man a wet kiss.

"Did you see that? He spit on me," said the attorney.

"He must like you," said Mallory, though that little gesture would not get the flasher's charges dropped, and she did not intend to pay any more cash for anything less than skin contact.

They were folding laundry at the kitchen table when Johanna said, "You look ten years younger. Mrs. Ortega said that would happen."

Riker smiled against his will, liking this compliment from her. He was highly suggestible now, the lingering effect of her drugs. He took her orders and put his back into the work when they moved on to the gross problem of the tub and the shower stall. There he wiped away months of lethargy and sorrow with a sponge. The broken window glass had been replaced by a glazier, and Jo had swept the floor herself so he would not cut his shoeless feet. Next, she planned to teach him how to turn on a vacuum cleaner. By day's end, Riker would be tired and ready for a long and natural sleep, but she had yet to break down the rest of his walls.

Johanna resorted to a touch of shock therapy. "Your bouts of paralysis are a form of panic disorder."

He turned to her with a look that said, No, anything but that.

"Sorry," she said. "That sounds like a woman's affliction, doesn't it?" Ah, men – bigots every one of then. "When you hear the bang of a gun, you're always waiting for the next bullet, and the – "

He was shaking his head, not wanting to discuss this anymore.

Well, too bad, Riker.

"Last night, you opened the door on a dark room, you heard all four bullets – and you shut down. You were dead – again. That's what your mind told you, but the body rebelled. It demanded it. Your lungs filled up and you came back. This time, your brain was slow to catch up with what the body already knew. How much do you remember about last night?"

More head shaking. Riker did not want to remember. He opened the medicine cabinet and carefully examined a bottle of aspirin with an expiration date from the previous decade. To toss or not to toss? He never noticed that he was standing alone.

Treading softly into the living room, Johanna went to the closet and pulled the small silver pistol from the pocket of her jacket. She had never fired a gun in her life. She held it in both hands, bracing for the shot as she glanced toward the bathroom. Riker turned away from the medicine cabinet, and now he watched her through the open doorway. His jaw had gone slack, then he mouthed the word no. She squeezed the trigger and the bang stunned her as she felt the recoil of the weapon. She would have dropped the gun, but Riker was beside her and taking it from her hand.

"What the hell are you doing?" He pushed the heavy couch to one side and inspected the floorboards. "We got lucky. The upholstery stopped the bullet." He looked down at the gun in his hand. "Well, that figures – a peashooter. If you'd fired my gun, you could've taken out two tenants on two different floors."

"Riker, you didn't freeze up that time."

He looked down at the wonder of his body in motion. "So I'm cured?" "No. I'm good, but I don't do miracles. If it was that easy, I would've dragged you to a firing range. The drugs in your system dulled the panic response. And I should probably give some credit to the Reaper. He gave you what you've been waiting for since the day you left the hospital. He took the pressure off, the pressure that was killing you. Even without the drugs, you might've bypassed the paralysis this time. But a few visits to the firing range could be…"

She could tell that Riker was not listening to her anymore. His concentration was somewhere else as he stared at the silver gun in his hand.

"You know," he said, "most people think a small-caliber pistol is next to useless. But this little twenty-two of yours is a Mafia favorite. It's an executioner's gun. The bullet shatters and it stays in the body. No messy holes in the walls to mark a crime scene. But, Jo, if you want to kill a man with this, first you have to tie his hands. Then you force him to his knees, put the gun to the back of his head and squeeze the trigger." He glanced at the new hole in his couch. "That was the first time you ever fired a gun, wasn't it? Now, let's say your guy is on the loose and coming at you. If you can't place the shot in his head – and you can't – then you might just piss him off. But I'm betting you won't even get off one round."

He removed the clip from her pistol, then turned his back on her. He walked to the closet and placed the clip and the gun in the separate pockets of her jacket. "And it wasn't the Reaper who fired those blanks. He's a slasher, not a shooter. It was the same psycho kid who ambushed me six months ago." He gathered up a stack of clean sheets and walked off down the hall to make up his bed.

But that boy was long dead. A worried Johanna picked up the telephone and dialed the number on Charles Butlers business card.

Mallory edged her chair closer to the lockup cage and its two occupants, the pervert and the old man. She lightly rubbed the back of h hand, feigning an itch. "Damn." She gave the flasher an angry look. "I think I picked up one of your fleas."

The elderly attorney began to squirm and scratch his own hands and face, agitated by the power of suggestion. He pressed his back to the cage door and put up both arms to ward off the smaller man, who slowly extended one hand for the promised skin contact that Mallory had bargained for.

"Don't let him kiss you on the mouth," she said. "We don't know where he's been, and he hasn't been checked for TB yet." This was the flasher's cue to cough.

She smiled as the old man slid into shock. Ah, germs. She had found his soft spot, and she could read the lawyer's thoughts, No, this can't be happening to me.

"This is just a holding cage," said Mallory. "I can move you downtown to a bigger lockup if you like. You'll have more room, more people to talk to, maybe twenty or so – all a lot like him." She shot a warning glance at the coughing pervert, a reprimand for overacting.

Riker pushed the vacuum cleaner across his bedroom rug, drowning out the sound of Johanna's worried voice. She leaned down to the wall socket and pulled out the machine's plug.

"If that psychotic was still alive," said Johanna, "you'd be under police protection right now."

"I am." He dropped the vacuum hose and turned on her. "There's always cops following me around. What's the problem, Jo? Does that sound a little crazy? What about that dead FBI agent? Did Timothy Kidd sound crazy, too? He was paranoid, wasn't he? Did he think he was being followed?"

"But there was somebody following him."

"Yeah, and I know that feeling. Poor bastard – always looking over his shoulder. So now I have to wonder, how does the Reaper get so close to a paranoid fed – close enough to slash his throat?"

"Well, maybe I am a miracle worker. You're all cop now, aren't you? Isn't this how you talk to suspects? You're just trying to evade the subject. This idea of yours that the shooter – "

"How did Agent Kidd lose his edge, Jo? He knew he was being followed – followed by his own people, for Christ's sake. Here's a guy armed with a gun, and his nerves are so shot, he hears pins dropping in other rooms. How did his killer get close enough? According to your own notes, he knew that bastard on sight. So how does a thing like that happen, Jo?"

"The same way it happened to you – twice."

The flasher was more sympathetic than Mallory. He was listening with rapt attention as the elderly attorney rambled on about the death of his wife and the long bout of depression that had followed her funeral.

Mallory 's fingernails rapped on the table, just a hint that he should speed up his story and get to the good part, the identity of the young man who owned the red wig and white cane.

A uniformed officer opened the door and leaned in. "Detective? You've got company, the chief medical examiner."

Mallory was immediately suspicious, for she had done nothing to merit this kind of service. Dr. Slope preferred to have cops come to his shop.

Johanna sat on the edge of the bed, tired and feeling the need of support. Though she had not done any of the physical work, this day was wearing on her.

Riker, however, was showing no signs of all the chemicals she had used to fine-tune his body and his mind. He loomed over her, arms folded, waiting for her to say something – to defend herself. Yes, that was the sentiment, and she could not understand the change in him.

"I've already told this story so many times," she said. "It was all in my statement for the Chicago police and the – "

"And now you can tell it to me."

How did this turnaround come about? Riker was growing more remote in every passing minute. She stared at the floor as she spoke to him. "It had to do with comfort zones. Timothy had one place where he felt safe. My waiting room was very private and secure. Patients were buzzed into that room. When the sessions were over, they left by the back door of my office. Coming or going, they never encountered one another. It was Timothy's habit to come twenty minutes early for appointments. He said my waiting room was like a decompression chamber – his safety zone. I never buzzed anybody into that room after he arrived. I'm guessing the Reaper came up behind Timothy when he opened the door. His throat must've been slit instantly. So that's how it happened – in the one place where he wouldn't expect to be assaulted. And you, Riker – you never expected anyone to shoot you in your own apartment. Not the first time, not the second time."

Riker would not allow the subject to come back to him, not yet. He stepped to one side, exposing the small surprise he had prepared for her on the bureau. It was the packet of letters she had carried in the torn lining of her jacket. He must have found them when he had returned the gun and the clip to the pockets. And while she had been on the telephone with Charles Butler, Riker had been sitting in this room, reading all of them.

He picked up the packet and held it high as a tangible accusation. "Agent Kidd was working full-time on the Reaper case."

"Eventually, yes. But not when we met. I didn't lie to you."

"And you didn't tell the whole truth either. He was looking into the jury murders while the first one still belonged to the Chicago police."

"I know it looks that way."

"And you were lovers," he said. "You lied about that." "I suppose the police might've thought so – if they'd found those letters the day they searched my rooms." "He touched you." "Timothy? He never did." "He touched you."

"Oh, I see." She had not expected Riker to use that sense of the word. "I suppose he did, but Bunny touched me, too, and he wasn't so talented – only a schizophrenic."

"Timothy Kidd loved you." He tossed the letters onto the bed beside her. "And he died because of you. No defense wounds. That's what you told Lieutenant Coffey. The guy just sat down in a chair and bled out – quietly. He wouldn't put up a fight because you were in the next room. So he was bleeding, dying in your reception room. And you – a damn doctor – help was just on the other side of a door." "I didn't know," she said. "He never made a sound." "You said his trachea wasn't cut. He could've yelled for help, but he never did, and you know why. If you'd walked into that room, the Reaper would've killed you too. That's how you knew the freak stuck around to watch his victims die. Because Timothy loved you so much, he never made a sound. He died for you."

"That's not why I kept his letters." She gathered them up from the bedspread and held them in both hands, suddenly realizing that she had betrayed their precious value to her. "He was my friend. This is all that's left of him, his personality." And she should have burned them long ago, for she knew every line by heart. "I didn't encourage Timothy's feelings for me. I thought he was too vulnerable and – "

"Too crazy? He thought his own people were following him – and the Reaper. And even though it was all true, he knew you didn't believe him. And why should you? He was a freaking paranoid. But what about me, Jo? Do you believe me? Cops do follow me around, Jo. And why? Because the psycho who shot me is still out there – still alive. And sometimes it's not cops. I know that boy's watching me, Jo. Do you believe that?"

Paranoia would also go with Riker's job, the half-turned stance to see over his shoulder, the bit of business caught in the corner of his eye as he paused to listen for odd noises, singling out one from the rest. He thought a teenage psychopath was coming to steal his life, and this was his fear every day since he had been shot.

Yes, she believed him – and she cried.

He sat on the bed, close beside her and a different man when at last he spoke again. "You feel everything, don't you, Jo? Everybody's pain."

Johanna dropped the letters to the floor and placed one hand on his chest over the worst of his scars, the one perilously close to his heart. She had seen all the wounds while dressing him. It was miraculous that he had survived, and she knew what it had cost him to live with his memories of that event and the crushing weight of stress in every moment of his day.

He gently moved her hand away so his scars could not hurt her anymore.

When Mallory entered the private office, Jack Coffey rose from his desk and quit the room, most likely sensing the tension between the two men who remained and guessing that he was best left out of this conversation.

Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope was seated with his back turned on Charles Butler, who slumped against one wall in abject misery. Mallory only glanced at him, posing a question with her eyes, no doubt wondering what he had given away. Charles shook his head to tell her that he had made no admissions, but she was not reassured, for his unhappy face said so much. He could not hide a thought and never attempted to lie, which explained why Edward Slope took all of his money in a weekly poker game.

Mallory folded her arms against the medical examiner, demanding, "What's going on?"

"That's what I'd like to know," said the doctor, "but Charles won't confess. Tell me, Kathy, how is Riker these days?"

"Mallory," she said, correcting his forbidden use of her first name. "I haven't seen Riker lately. Why are you here?"

"Charles wants to know if I botched the autopsy on the boy who shot Riker."

"I never said anything of the kind." Charles turned toward Mallory, helpless now, because he was not adept at misleading people. That was her forte.

"I bet Dr. Apollo put that idea in your head," said Mallory. "Am I right? She's the one who thinks the autopsy was rigged?"

"Right," said Charles. "Not my idea."

"That fits." She circled around to the back of the medical examiner's chair and leaned down to speak to him. Her voice dropped into that low range for telling secrets. "Nothing I say goes beyond this room. Deal?"

"Knowing you as long as I have, I'm hardly going to promise that."

"You asked about Riker." She moved behind the desk and sat down. "He's in a bad way." This unpredictable truth telling was truly disarming, and she engaged the surprised man in a staring contest. "If Riker had to take the psych evaluation today, he'd fail it. So don't help me. Rat him out. See to it that he never gets his badge back." And now, assured of the medical examiner's allegiance, she faced Charles. "Dr. Apollo got this idea from Riker, didn't she?"

"Johanna wouldn't say. She only asked if there was anything odd about the autopsy report. Something withheld."

Mallory nodded. "Every time Riker walks into a room, he's checking every stranger for concealed weapons. That's been going on for a long time. Now I'm guessing he thinks the shooter is still alive. His concentration is split. He's looking for the wrong suspect, and that's going to get him killed. I told him the perp who shot him was dead. I told him that six months ago. But I guess he didn't believe me."

"Hard to imagine why," said Edward Slope, perhaps leaning a bit too hard on the sarcasm.

"I don't understand," said Charles. "How could Riker believe a thing like that? Didn't the police shoot this boy quite a few times? Thirty times?"

"Well, we shot somebody,'" she said.

Charles's lips parted to speak, but mere words would not suffice, not just this minute, nor could he get them out, for his mouth had gone suddenly dry.

Edward Slope leaned back in his chair, then graced Mallory with a rare smile. "And people say you have no sense of humor."