Winter House

Chapter 13

LIEUTENANT COFFEY SAT IN A COP BAR ON GREENE STREET, downing straight shots of bourbon with his senior detective. The mood was not celebratory, though Riker believed that Mallory would never be punished for what she had done.

The lieutenant lifted his head to pose a question, one that could only be asked at that point of inebriation where he had hopes of forgetting the answer by the time his hangover kicked in. „What the hell happened? The real story?“

„What’d Buchanan tell you?“

„I never asked for his version. I want yours“

„Okay.“ Since the lieutenant was buying, Riker ordered another round. „That morning, we laid it all out for the district attorney, more evidence than he’s ever seen for one case – a ton of documentation. Buchanan didn’t care. He refused to prosecute Bitty Smyth. Little coward. He was actually afraid to risk losing the biggest case of his career – in an election year. Can you beat that? After all this work, what does he say to us? He says it’s all circumstantial.“

„He was right,“ said Coffey.

Riker ignored this because it was true. „So Mallory says the whole package is enough to bury Bitty Smyth. Buchanan says no. He says juries are too stupid to follow her evidence. It would be a fight just to keep ‘em awake long enough to present the case.“

„The man’s right again,“ said Coffey.

„So Mallory asks him, point blank, ‘What’s it gonna take?’ Then Buchanan says, ‘Bring me a full confession.’“ Riker slammed the flat of his hand on the bar. „And that’s exactly what she did. That afternoon, we went to Winter House to wire the place for sound.“

„I don’t remember listening to any tapes, Riker.“

„Never got a chance to plant the mikes. Bitty showed up as soon as the last cop car pulled away from the house.“ In other words, no tape was better than an edited tape. He did not hold with the idea of tampering with evidence.

After a go-around with Bitty Smyth, the detectives had returned to the DA’s office and handed the woman’s confession to Buchanan along with the terms of a plea bargain.

„And then,“ said Riker, „Buchanan really pushed his luck. He told us he wouldn’t accept the confession. Said it was probably obtained under duress. That pompous little weasel never even talked to Bitty Smyth. He didn’t know squat.“

„Was he right?“

Riker was selective in his deafness. Timing was so important tonight. „Well, the DA went back on a solid deal.“ The detective leaned toward his commanding officer. „This is just between us, right?“

Jack Coffey nodded his understanding, and this was his promise, his seal of silence.

Half of the battle for Mallory’s job security was won.

„Good,“ said Riker. „So Mallory staked the confession to the DA’s desk with an ice pick.“ He averted his eyes from the lieutenant’s startled face as he added, on a point of historical interest, „It was the same pick that was used in the Winter House Massacre.“ Now he turned back to Coffey and smiled. „It was a gift.“

In a sudden change of heart – inspiration of cowardice – District Attorney Buchanan had accepted the confession, electing to follow that time-honored credo: never make an enemy of a psycho cop. And, bonus, the little man had wet his pants, further guaranteeing that what had happened in that room would never leave that room. Riker had not enjoyed any of this. Mallory had scared the hell out of him, too, and he had almost felt sorry for a lawyer. Sometimes, in unguarded moments, he forgot that she was always dangerous – and more so now that she was wounded. The cast on her hand broke his heart.

How much more should he disclose to Jack Coffey before he requested a long leave of absence for his partner? And which one of them would take Mallory’s gun away from her?

„Wait, Riker. Back up. How did Mallory get that confession? You skipped over that part.“

Stalling for time and just the right words, Riker checked his watch. A police transport would be en route to the women’s prison by now. The case had ended without a trial, only Bitty’s anticlimactic confession in open court. She had pleaded guilty to a charge of murder for hire and four counts of manslaughter, all sentences to run concurrently. The only proviso of the plea bargain had been that Mallory not be present during the proceedings. „Bitty Smyth got a better deal than she deserved.“

„That may be,“ said Coffey, „but why did she waive her right to a trial? No, wait – I got a better question. What did Mallory do to that woman?“

„Nothing.“ Riker was feigning indignation, and he must be doing it badly; the boss was still waiting on his answer. How should he put this? As if he had just recalled some minor detail, he said, „Well, she shot the head off a dead bird.“ Riker was quick to raise his right arm in the gesture of an oath. „My hand to God, that’s all she did. The kid never even yelled at Bitty Smyth.“

„So Mallory spent a bullet. Where’d it go?“

„It’s not in the wall anymore. You can’t even tell where the hole was.“

„And the headless bird?“

„It went to swim with the fishes in the East River.“ Of course, that would depend on the vagaries of plumbing and sewage routes; Mallory had flushed the bird down a toilet.

This evening, Charles Butler was dressed and showered, but not shaved; his cleaning woman had hidden the razor.

Mrs. Ortega watched her employer pulling volumes from his library shelves. He called them guidebooks for the road.

„Where yagoin’?“

„Not every journey involves leaving the house,“ he said.

She perused a volume by Hermann Hesse, but found the print too dense for her taste. „Me, I like a good fast read,“ she said, „with lots of white space on the page.“

He ran one finger down a row of titles on a lower shelf, plucked out three novels and handed them to her. „Here, gifts, first-edition Hemingways. I think you’ll like them.“

She set them on top of her cleaning cart, then turned back to his own short stack. „I don’t get it. If you’ve already read them, what good are they?“

Mrs. Ortega could wait all day for an answer to that one. Charles Butler’s eyes had gone all strange as he focused on some point above her head and behind her. She turned around to see Mallory standing just inside the door.

Spooky kid – quiet as a cat.

One icy glance from Mallory told the cleaning woman that she was dismissed from this babysitting job, and Mrs. Ortega was glad to go. She was sometimes afflicted with magical thinking from the Irish side of her family; over a passage of days, she had sensed a change in the very air of this apartment; it was thickening with sadness, and she could hardly breathe.

Charles Butler sat beside Mallory as she drove along Central Park West.

She had not yet convinced him that he was not responsible for Nedda Winter’s death, but she had finally succeeded in getting him out of the house. They were going on a field trip to see the radio. Shock therapy.

The man was badly broken. His eyes had a shattered look, and other fracture lines were showing in his face and in his rambling speech. Somehow she must put him back together again without any helpful manuals on human frailty. His world was more fragile than she knew.

Charles’s luck with parking spaces was riding with her tonight. She pulled up to the curb in front of Winter House. He was still going on and on about the radio when they climbed the steps to the front door. Why did he have to pick that one thing to obsess about?

Mallory led the way into the house. He was beside her in the foyer as she trained her flashlight on the two silver control panels by the door. „This one is for the security alarm. And this one is for the sound system. There’s a panel just like it in every room. It works the same way yours does.“ She tapped the built-in speaker. „The music you heard after the dinner party – when you and Nedda were sitting outside on the steps? It came from here.“

„No, I told you – Nedda couldn’t work this thing, and neither could I. She played the old radio in the front room.“

„All right, let’s have a look.“ Mallory took him by the hand and led him across the foyer threshold, preceded by the beam of her flashlight. She pulled the smoke-stained drapes aside, allowing the light of streetlamps into the room, and she opened the front windows to cut the smell of mildew with clean, cold air.

Charles was staring at the old-fashioned radio.

Mallory pulled it away from the front wall and turned it around to expose a rotted backing with holes in it. Charles moved closer as she used a metal nail file to undo the screws. She removed the back panel to expose the innards: another century’s technology of cracked glass tubes, frayed wires and loose connections. There were also cobwebs made by generations of spiders spinning their homes inside this antique box. The bones and skull of a long-dead mouse completed the evidence of a nonworking radio.

And now Mallory deconstructed this tiny crime scene for Charles. „Twenty or thirty years ago, this mouse took a hit of current from an exposed wire. It made him wild. He batted around in the dark and broke these tubes. Probably bled out on the broken glass. You see? This radio has been useless for a very long time. The one in Nedda’s room is in worse shape. It doesn’t even have a cord.“

„No, it’s a trick. This is a different radio.“

Mallory shook her head, and waited for his good mind to kick back into gear, to shake out the dust of deep depression and function logically once more.

„Butyou heard a radio the night of the fire,“ said Charles, „and no one has questioned your sanity.“

„Well, I know it wasn’t this one. Even if this radio had been in working condition, Bitty pulled out all the fuses that night – no electricity. What I heard was probably a small portable. It must’ve been destroyed in the fire.“

He seemed so suspicious now. Did he know she was lying? No, there was also doubt in his face. Her lie was making sense to him. Apparently, Charles did believe in the rules governing electricity.

In truth, if a battery-operated radio had been in the house – even if it had been near the fire’s point of origin, the investigators would have found residue materials, but there were none. And because it was so important to account for everyone in the house on that night, the arson team had gone looking for signs of Mallory’s radio operator, the one who had turned the music on and off. They had even run tests for music seeping in from neighboring buildings – all negative. Yet, like Charles, Mallory could not admit to imaginary songs. She never would. He must.

„I saw her play this radio twice,“ he said, insistent. „The first time was at the crime scene. And I’ve got a lot of witnesses for that performance.“

She nodded. „I heard music that night, but the built-in sound system – “

„And I heard it again,“ said Charles, angry now. „The night of the dinner party. It was a warm night. Nedda opened the front windows. We sat outside on the stoop. We drank wine and listened to this radio for hours.“

„When Nedda thought she was disabling the alarm, she probably hit the control panel for the stereo system. I’m sure Nedda believed the music came from the radio, but she was insane.“

„No, she wasn’t. I never had a conversation with her that wasn’t perfectly lucid.“ He turned his back on Mallory and left the house. She followed him as far as the open front door and watched him sit down on the steps.

After a few minutes of scavenging, she had found a wine cabinet behind the bar, and the rubber seal on its door was still intact. She selected a good sturdy merlot, the only wine that had a prayer of surviving the heat of the fire on the upper floor. With the wine and two glasses in hand, Mallory joined Charles outside on the steps. Indian summer was long gone, but he did not seem to feel the cold night air of fall.

„All right,“ she said, „we’ll restage what happened that night.“ She held up the bottle for his inspection, and he examined the label.

„This was served at the dinner party. I always wondered how Sheldon Smyth knew the vintner of my private stock. Do you have any idea what these bottles cost?“

„Not a problem, Charles. You’re receiving stolen goods from a police officer.“ She uncorked the wine and set the bottle down on the steps to let it breathe. He would consider it a worse crime if she simply filled their glasses before the wine had time to mellow. And Mallory had brought some reading material to pass the time. She opened her knapsack and withdrew a small leather-bound book. „This is Nedda’s last diary. I used it to run a bluff on Bitty Smyth. Open it.“

He did.

Every line was the same, the same words written over and over: Crazy people make sane people crazy. Charles flipped through page after page, incredulous. He turned his stricken face to hers.

„I have a whole suitcase full of them,“ she said, „all exactly alike. I believe Nedda was sane when she went into the first asylum – but not when she came out of the last one. That would be expecting too much from her. You know why? These lines are true, Charles. Any cop will tell you that. We deal with crazy all the time. And it rubs off. It gets into your head and your gut. It drives you crazy. Nedda wanted me to have her diaries. She asked me to show them to Cleo and Lionel. Maybe she thought she’d written something else on those pages. And I’m sure that Nedda believed she heard music on the radio.“

„Totally mad.“ He continued to turn the pages. „And I didn’t see it. How could I have failed this woman so badly?“

„After a few therapy sessions? You said all her conversation with you was lucid, and I’m sure it was. Trust me, she was a strong lady, very good at holding things together in situations… where all the sane people crack up.“ Mallory took the diary from his hand and looked down at the pages, lines of madness, lines of truth. „Not your fault, Charles. She seemed sane enough to me, too. Nedda was probably using all her energy to keep her mind together – for a while. She had unfinished business with her brother and sister.“

He nodded. „If Cleo and Lionel had seen the diaries, the relationship would have been quite different.“

„They would’ve taken better care of her,“ said Mallory. „So if Nedda listened to a radio that never worked – “

„But I’m not insane.“ He hung his head, suddenly recognizing that this was now open to debate. „The night you called me to the crime scene, I saw her play that radio. She raised the volume and turned it off with the dial.“

„The whole face of the radio would’ve lit up when it played. Did you see that?“

„Yes.“ Less sure of himself, he added, „I think so.“

„You’re no worse than the average eyewitness. People see what they expect to see.“ She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. „This is the play list for all the radio stations. The night of the dinner party, Nedda told you her station only played jazz from the forties. That’s wrong. There’s only one that plays jazz that time of night. But it’s a mix of contemporary and – “

„I know what I heard.“

„Do you? Your sound system only plays classical music. When I programmed the channels, those were the only ones you wanted to hear, remember? Nedda was the expert on jazz. I don’t know what tunes you were listening to that night, but she only heard what she wanted to hear.“

„I know jazz when I – “

„Listen to me. One more time, all right? Before Nedda came outside with the wine, she probably tried to disable the alarm. I’m betting it wasn’t even turned on. So she tapped the control buttons for the sound system by mistake. That was the music you heard, a local station that plays – “

„No, that’s not it. Her sister had that system programmed for popular music, rather crass – and, I promise you, nothing as elegant as Duke Ellington.“

„You know how easy it is to mess up the programming.“ She had reset the channels on his own sound system many times before painting the on/off switch with nail polish and forbidding him to touch any other buttons. „You wouldn’t know the dates of every piece you heard that night. Nedda would, but she was listening to music inside her head – no songs older than the Winter House Massacre.“

„So first,“ said Charles, still the skeptic, „she mistook the stereo panel for the alarm. Then she just got lucky with all those buttons and called up the one jazz station out of all – “

„What, at core, do you believe in? Coincidence and luck – or a haunted radio?“

Her solution had trumped his ghost story. She could see that he was defeated. At least, he had ceased to resist her take-no-prisoners logic. A graceful loser, Charles smiled, but not in the usual inadvertent manner of a happy loon. He had learned a new expression, more sardonic, and Mallory knew that he would never be the same; the cost of closing her cases had become too damned high.

She poured the wine, the medicine, into their glasses, then lifted hers in a toast. „To the lady who loved jazz.“

Charles clinked his glass with Mallory’s, and they sat very close together in the chill night air, sharing wine and a bit of body heat and the illusion that life had not been forever changed by a death too many.

Nearby was a burst of static, and a radio began to play an old Count Basie tune. Mallory drummed her fingers to the same rhythm.

Charles did not.

If he heard the music, he never acknowledged it, not by the tap of his foot or a nod in time to the beat. No, of course not. He was stable now and smiling as he looked up at the stars – the silent stars. All was right on Charles Butler’s planet.

Mallory’s fingernails dug deep into her palms, making red crescent wounds in the flesh, as if pain could drown the low notes of a string bass thrumming close to the earth – the ripple of piano keys that flew over the trees and up to the sky.

Crazy people make sane people crazy.

She looked back at the open windows of Winter House, expecting to detect a faint glow from the dial of an old-fashioned radio.