A canvas bag hit her in the side of the head.
‘Hey!’ she yelled, just like a real New Yorker. ‘Watch it!’ She looked up to see the crotch of a man’s faded blue jeans a few inches from her face. He reeked of insecticide. She lowered her eyes to the postcard and wrote the words, I love this town.
She wanted to go back home to Ohio.
Last year, as the family’s first college graduate, she had qualified for the traditional entry-level job of all theater majors – serving fast food to the public. And this had come as a bitter surprise to the Abandoned Stellas, two generations of tired truck-stop waitresses, impregnated and deserted before the age of seventeen.
Grandma, the original Stella, had cashed a savings bond to send the aspiring actress to New York City, a place with no roadside diners, and more money had followed every month. The second Stella, also known as Mom, still waited on tables and sent all the tips to her daughter, the only Stella ever to leave Ohio.
The train’s air-conditioner was not working, and Stella Small resented everyone around her for using up precious oxygen. She singled out the woman seated next to her for The Glare, a practiced stare that said, Die. The other woman, beyond intimidation, happily chomped a meaty sandwich that was still alive and moving of its own accord. Rings of onion and dollops of mayonnaise slithered from the greasy slices of bread and added a new odor to the stink of sweat and bug spray. Stella slipped the finished postcard into her purse and began to spin a new lie, this one for her agent. How would she explain losing a role to an idiot with no acting experience?
The train was one stop away from Astor Place and home. The smelly sandwich eater got up, leaving a residue of tomato slices on the plastic seat. This prevented other passengers from sitting down, but Stella could not stand up against the press of new passengers, nor could she edge away from the scratching man seated next to her. Had she already contracted body lice? The flesh of her upper arm felt crawly, itchy. Her hand moved to her sleeve to scratch it, then touched something alive and twitching.
Oh, shit!
A fat black fly. And now a rain of flies fell down on her head in the numbers of a biblical plague. Incredibly, most of them were dead. Others still twitched, only sick and sluggish, crawling slowly across her lap – down her legs.
Up her skirt! No!
She jumped up from the bench, wildly slapping her hair and her clothes. Insects dropped to the floor around her shoes and crawled in all directions. Stella screamed and set off a chain reaction of squeals from other riders. People were trampling one another to get to the other end of the car. Dry fly carcasses crunched underfoot as she jumped up and down, trying to shake loose the bugs that were still alive and crawling up her pantyhose. Other riders joined the hysteria dance, feet stomping, hands waving, fingers flicking. One passenger accidentally dislodged a note taped to Stella’s back; it drifted to the floor as the train lurched to a stop, and all the doors opened. The small piece of paper and its message ran away stuck to the bottom of another woman’s shoe.
CHAPTER 9
Charles Butler stood at the center of the Special Crimes incident room, only glancing at the flanking walls, each one devoted to a hanged woman. Now the rear wall – that was fascinating. The halo of dead flies around the scarecrow’s baseball cap was definite proof of creativity. He turned to the detective beside him. ‘Seriously? Ronald Deluthe did this?’
‘Yeah.’ Riker diddled the controls of a small cassette player. ‘I may wind up liking that kid.’
Pssst.
‘Then why not stop treating him like a half-bright child?’
‘Okay, I’ll buy him a beer. That’s the highest honor I’m allowed to confer on a lame trainee.’ Riker raised the volume of the cassette to play a few words spoken in an empty monotone. This was the voice of the scarecrow alone in a gray landscape, a monotonous plain with no rise of emotion, no depth of despair. The only relief in this flatline existence was the ambient sound.
Pssst.
Charles stared at the other walls papered with handwritten notes and typed reports, fax sheets and photographs. He could perceive no order in this work of many hands and minds. ‘Can we take the paperwork back to – ’
‘No,’ said Riker. ‘We can’t remove anything from this room. Can’t copy it either. Coffey’s orders. So just read everything.’
And now that Charles understood his role as a human Xerox machine, he walked along the south wall, committing the paperwork of Kennedy Harper’s murder to eidetic memory. Obviously all the autopsy information had been pinned up by Mallory. It was a small oasis of perfect alignment on an otherwise sloppy wall where neighboring papers hung straight only by accident.
The detective walked alongside him, working the volume of the cassette player as they crossed over to the opposite wall. ‘Listen to this one more time.’
Pssst.
‘Regular intervals,’ said Riker. ‘We know it’s automated. Our techs think it might be a plant mister in a florist shop or a commercial greenhouse.’
‘I’d rule out a workplace,’ said Charles. ‘If the scarecrow was worried about being interrupted, you’d hear that in his voice. But it’s level, isn’t it? Utterly flat.’ He listened to another sentence fragment, then – Pssst. ‘There – a breath pause. The rhythm of his speech works around the ambient sound. It’s like punctuation. I’d say he’s been living with that noise for a very long time. It might come from a machine related to health issues.’ While Charles was speaking to Riker, in another compartment of his mind, he was absorbing the text of Edward Slope’s autopsy report on a living woman. ‘Doesn’t this coma patient have a last name?’
‘Sparrow,’ said Riker. ‘That’s it.’
Mallory was in the room, but Charles could not say just when she had arrived. Cats made more racket with soft padding paws. He sometimes wondered if this was her idea of fun, watching startled people jump – as Riker did when he noticed her strolling along the wall behind them. She showed little interest in the photo array of Sparrow’s nude body. Only one picture at the edge of the group attracted her, a close-up of a vicious wound on the victim’s side. The scar was an old one, a gross knot of flesh grown over a hole. Mallory closed her eyes, a small but telling gesture, and he read much into it. She had more in common with Sparrow than a paperback western retrieved from a crime scene.
Mallory looked up to catch Charles staring at her. ‘What?’
Pssst.
‘There’s something I’m curious about.’ He stepped back to the group of photographs taken at the hospital. Edward Slope’s signature appeared on the last page of notes in Mallory’s rigid handwriting. He pointed to the picture of Sparrow’s scar framed by the gloved hands of the medical examiner. ‘Evidently, Edward spent some time exploring this wound, but you didn’t mention it in any of your notes.’
‘It’s old history,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with this case.’
‘So you know how it happened.’
Pssst.
Riker was suddenly leaving them with uncommon speed, moving to the other side of the room, and that was the only warning that Charles had trodden on some personal landmine.
‘It’s an old knife wound. Very old. A waste of time.’ She ripped the photograph from the wall. ‘It shouldn’t even be here.’
‘But you told Coffey this woman was good with a knife.’
‘None better.’ She crumpled the photograph in one hand, and Charles could see the bright work going on behind her intelligent eyes.
Because he was handicapped with a face that could not run a bluff in a poker game, most people wrongly assumed that he could not tell when he was being lied to. Mallory never made that mistake. He guessed that she was simply wondering what half-truth might be most misleading.