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

Stranger’s Gift

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1969.

Detective Shapiro took a personal interest in the case from the start. He was mildly surprised by his reaction. A man doesn’t stay on the police force for twenty-five years without developing the inner armor necessary for the protection of his own spirit. He had dealt with just about every act of violence the human mind could conceive, and prior to the murder of one of the elderly twins, he believed that he could handle any case with detachment.

Perhaps it was the quiet bravery of Miss Nettie, the surviving twin, that got through to him; or maybe in her gracious and fragile personage he glimpsed the last fragments of a genteel world that existed only in memory or storybooks.

Be that as it may, he was not altogether the tough cop when he escorted Miss Nettie home from the hospital, where emergency measures had failed to keep life from leaking from her sister’s broken skull.

The headlights of his unmarked car picked through a neighborhood of large, once-fine homes now suffering the blight of urban decay. The present dreary reality was one of converted apartment and rooming houses, a junky filling station on a corner, faded signs offering rooms to let, a gloomy little grocery store secured for the night with iron-grille shutters.

With Miss Nettie’s tea-and-crumpets presence beside him, it was easy for Shapiro to imagine the street as it had been in forgotten days: well-trimmed hedges, houses proud with paint, limousines and roadsters in the driveways, people enjoying the evening cool in porch swings; here or there a house blazing with light and the activity of a party, with Gene Austin crooning from a Gramophone.

Shapiro could see in his mind’s eye a Sunday morning with two little twin girls ready for church in the rambling house halfway down the block, bright-faced and scrubbed in their starched crinolines, white gloves, Mary Jane shoes, and white sailor straws with ribbons spilling down their backs.

Now one was dead, beaten to death by a mugger who might occupy the very house across the street, dismal as the neighborhood had become.

“This is our driveway, Mr. Shapiro,” Miss Nettie instructed politely.

As Shapiro turned, the headlights swept a two-story frame house with a long front porch. The grounds and structure were in better repair and upkeep than their surroundings. Shapiro’s sharp instincts painted in history. He guessed it was the only home the twins had ever known. It had been theirs after the demise of their parents. Dr. Cooksey, whom Shapiro vaguely remembered by repute from his boyhood, had left his maiden daughters modestly fixed, and they had continued on until one day it was too late for them to move, to change, to shed the tiny habits of endless days.

Shapiro braked the car in the shadows of the porte cochere, got out with an energy that denied his bulk, his sleepy-looking, rough-hewn face, his forty-nine years. He hurried around and opened the door for Miss Nettie. She was a soft, decorous rustling as she got out and laid a slender, waxen hand on the beefy arm he offered. He escorted her to a pair of French doors that glinted in the darkness, and followed as she unlocked and went inside.

She turned on a light and Shapiro glanced about a parlor straight out of a yellowed issue of Better Homes; velour, velvet, and mohair, heavy, overstuffed couches and chairs, lamps with tassels and stained-glass shades, tables with clawed feet resting on glass balls.

Miss Nettie, trim and girlish as a seventy-five-year-old woman could be imagined, brushed a wisp from her forehead. Her eyes were blue pools of grief in a delicately boned face cobwebbed with fine wrinkles, but her control was superb. She remembered the proprieties. “May I take your hat, Mr. Shapiro? Do sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you care for some tea?”

Shapiro was a coffee drinker, with a cold beer when he was off duty, but he was suddenly aware of the silence and emptiness of the slightly musty house, and of this little woman’s determination to bear up, to hold life on a normal keel. “Some tea would go nicely, Miss Cooksey.”

She seemed to be grateful for the chance to be doing something. Shapiro sank into a chair as she hurried out. He pulled a package of cigarettes from his suit coat pocket, but his glance didn’t locate any ash trays, and he put the smokes back, patted his pocket.

Miss Nettie came in carrying an old and ornate tea service. Shapiro stood up. Miss Nettie placed the tea things on a table before the couch.

As she busied her hands with teapot and cups, she said, “I know there are questions you must ask. Please do so, freely. I’m quite prepared and now in control of myself, Mr. Shapiro.”

His preliminary questions established what he had already guessed. Yes, she and Miss Lettie, her twin, had lived here all alone, except for a yardman who came one day every other week. They entertained rarely, a small tea or game of bridge with the two or three old friends they had left.

“Most of the girls with whom we grew up,” she explained, “have either passed away, yielded to the care of nursing homes, or live a world away from the old neighborhood. Sugar, Mr. Shapiro? One lump or two?”

When he sipped, his distaste for tea was pleasantly soothed. “I didn’t know it could be brewed like this.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shapiro.”

He cleared his throat. “Now about the events of this evening...”

“It all hardly seems real, Mr. Shapiro. Lettie was so kind... so harmless... How could anyone be so bestial as to...” Her cup rattled on its saucer. Perched on the edge of the overstuffed couch, her back stiffened. She looked at her hand as if daring it be unsteady again.

“Nothing that happened during the day warned of what the evening would hold,” she resumed, her sweet maidenly-aunt voice only slightly off-key. “In the afternoon I made a batch of coconut bonbons, with freshly grated coconut. Making the bonbons is a now-and-again hobby with me, Mr. Shapiro. Specialty of the house, you might say.”

She drew in a shallow breath. “A very poor family lives a couple of blocks west, on the same side of the street. A young mother whose husband deserted her and four children. Two of them twin girls, strangely enough... like Lettie and me.”

Shapiro nodded his understanding that an affinity might develop between two little twins and two old ones.

“We became acquainted with the family,” Miss Cooksey said, “through the twins, whom we saw now and then in the grocery store or playing along the street. During the past year or so, Lettie and I had the privilege of doing little things for the children, assisting the family in some small way.”

“That was kind of you,” Shapiro remarked.

The eyes in their shadows of transluscent blue lifted to his. “Kind? Not at all, Mr. Shapiro. The rewards were ours. We enjoyed the children. And today, when we heard that one of the twins had come down with a little flu bug, I dropped over to make sure a doctor had come. The child was doing nicely, but I noticed an expectancy and then a disappointment in her manner. She was too polite to tell me what was on her mind, but I wormed it out of her. When I’d arrived, she’d thought I was surely bringing her some bonbons.”

“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.

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.”

“The lab boys found little tissues scattered all over the floor,” McJunkin said, “the kind they used to use in the old-fashioned candy stores.”

Shapiro mumbled to himself. McJunkin said, “What’d you say, Shappy?”

“I said,” Shapiro bit out angrily, “that I’m never surprised at anything the lab boys find.”

Wearing a flannel robe, felt slippers, and a net about her soft white hair, Miss Nettie ushered Shapiro into her parlor.

“I’m very sorry to rouse you at this hour,” Shapiro said, “but it was necessary.”

“I’m sure it must have been, for you to have done so. Would you like some tea?”

Shapiro gave her a stare and sigh. “Not this go-round. Sit down, please.”

She sank to the edge of an over-stuffed chair and clasped her hands quietly in her lap.

Shapiro faced her with his hands cocked on his hips. “Was your purse a dark blue, with a white band across it?”

“Yes it was, Mr. Shapiro. And I assume from your question that you have found it.”

“In the room of a dead man. A young, skinny dead man with a W-shaped scar on his cheek.”

He thought he saw the faintest of smiles on her soft lips.

His hands came loose from his sides. He banged a fist into a palm. “Miss Cooksey, blast you, you’ve made a total fool of me!”

“Oh, no, Mr. Shapiro! I’m much too fond of you to do anything like that.”

Shapiro snorted, kicked a table leg, spun on her again with the mien of a grizzly. “You made bait of yourself, Miss Cooksey. I had told you about the previous muggings he’d pulled around here. You saw a pattern. You hoped he’d return — and take the bait.”

“Mr. Shapiro—”

He silenced her with a stern finger waggling in her face. “Don’t you open your gentle little peep to me one more time until I’m finished. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr. Shapiro.”

“You took those nightly walks, waiting for him to return, wanting him to, hoping he would strike again. And when he struck, you threw a veritable body-block at me so he could get away with your purse and everything it contained — maybe a little cash, and a batch of bonbons loaded with arsenic!”

“Where would I get—”

“Don’t play innocent with me!” Shapiro almost popped a vein across his forehead. “You have a yardman. Your sister grew roses. Anybody can get arsenic, in plant sprays, insecticides.” His teeth made a sound like fingernails scraping across sandpaper. “You pegged him to a T, Miss Cooksey. He gulped the arsenic-loaded candy. Almost all of it.”

“Almost, Mr. Shapiro?”

He reached in his side pocket and brought out the tissue-wrapped bonbon he had taken from the rooming house closet.

With exaggerated care, he peeled back the tissue and extended his palm. “It’s the one that stuck in the corner of the purse when he dumped it on his bed or dresser. It’s the one he didn’t eat. Do you deny making it?”

She rose slowly. “It’s a lovely bonbon, Mr. Shapiro, although a bit squashed from so much handling.”

She peered, lifted a dainty forefinger to touch the candy. She picked it up. Then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed before Shapiro had the first inkling of what she was up to.

Flat-footed and with a dumb look on his face, Shapiro received her soft smile.

“Mr. Shapiro, would I eat poisoned candy?”

He shook off a faintly trance-like state. “Yes,” he said. “Faced with a situation of sufficient urgency, I’m beginning to believe you’d have the courage to do anything, Miss Cooksey. I think your question is rhetorical. I think you have already, just now, eaten a piece of poisoned candy. I’m also certain that the amount contained in a single piece is not enough to kill you.” He shook his head hopelessly. “Whatever am I going to do with you, Miss Nettie?”

“Arrest me for destroying evidence?” she suggested.

“I doubt that I could make it — or any other charge — stick,” Shapiro said. “Even if we could prove you made some poisoned candy, you didn’t offer it to anyone. The only shred of evidence we have that involves you, come to think of it, is the purse — evidence of a crime against you.”

She strolled with him to the front door. “Will you come some afternoon for tea, Mr. Shapiro?”

He studied her a moment. “No, Miss Nettie — I think I never want to see you again.”

She nodded and patted his hand with a touch of gentle understanding. Then she turned a little in the dark front doorway, looking from his face to a point far along the sidewalk.

“Given the chance,” she said almost in a whisper, “I’d have been the first to warn the young man to mend his ways in time — and never to take candy from strangers.”