Winter House Read online

More formally, she was Detective Mallory and never Kathy anymore. She preferred the distancing surname even among those who knew her best. And, though Charles was her foremost apologist, he found the background music fitting. Louis Armstrong was belting out the lyrics of Savannah’s hard-hearted Hannah.

  —pouring water on a drowning man—

  One cream white hand with red fingernails—call them talons—lightly touched the banister as she slowly descended the grand staircase, circling in a wide arc, her eyes fixed on one face in the crowd.

  But not his face.

  Two crime-scene technicians moved out of Charles’s way, and now he could see the object of Mallory’s fixation.

  A child?

  Detective Riker had told him that two women lived at this address. There had been no mention of this little girl shivering like a whippet, that nervous, tremulous breed of dog that can never quite get warm, no matter what the temperature. No—wait. This was no child, but a tiny woman with a few silver threads in her dark brown hair, someone closer to his own age. Eyes cast down, this person presented herself at the bottom of the staircase in the manner of a penitent—or a volunteer for human sacrifice.

  Tall Mallory literally descended upon the smaller woman, rapidly closing the distance and causing the little householder to shrink even more. Before the small head could turtle into the cowl of a white robe, Charles noted one charming detail: the short brown hair was angled across the ears, creating the illusion that they were pointed in the elfin way.

  “That’s Miss Bitty Smyth.” Detective Riker raised one eyebrow, as if expecting Charles to recognize the name.

  He did not.

  “Bitty? That’s a nickname?”

  Riker shrugged and splayed one hand to say, Who knows? “That’s how she introduced herself. If she’s got another name, we can’t get it out of her. We can’t get anything out of her.”

  “She might be in shock.” Charles watched on in helpless fascination as Mallory reached out to Bitty Smyth and gripped the woman’s thin arm. He was about to discount the possibility that Miss Smyth was the scissor-wielding homeowner when he turned to see the other resident of the house, a woman with long white hair and a green silk robe. She was barefoot and seated beside an antique radio, the source of the music. How amazing to find this old piece in working order. By the detail on its cabinet, he could date the radio back to the middle nineteen-thirties—the woman, too. He guessed her age at seventy or thereabouts. Her hand was on the dial, raising the volume.

  “That’s Miss Nedda Winter,” said Riker. “She’s Bitty’s aunt.” Again, something in Riker’s manner suggested that Charles should also know this person.

  She caught Charles staring at her, and he could only describe her expression as one of curious recognition.

  The old woman turned off the music. Her attention had quickly shifted to the young homicide detective who had hold of Bitty Smyth’s arm. Nedda Winter rose from her chair. She was taller than many of the men in this room, and her strides were long as she rushed toward her niece with an obvious plan of rescue. Riker, moving faster than his usual mosey, headed off Miss Winter. And now Charles was treated to a display that simply did not fit the man he knew. Playing the consummate gentleman, Riker extended one arm to the lady, as if she might need his support, then dazzled her with a broad smile and smoothly led her out of the room.

  Star treatment. Perhaps he should know that old woman.

  Charles turned back to the interrogation of Bitty Smyth, who was now facing in his direction. A Bible was clutched to the tiny prisoner’s breast, and her large brown eyes rolled back as her lips moved in what he took for whispers of fervent prayer.

  Well, Mallory had that effect on people.

  His next impression was that Miss Smyth had disconnected from the solid earth and might fly upward if not restrained. As Charles drew nearer, he heard Mallory say that, no, she had not found Jesus and had no intention of being saved. The smaller woman’s head wobbled and nodded, perhaps in a fearful palsy, or maybe agreeing that this young policewoman was beyond salvation.

  “Charles.” Mallory quickly dropped her hold on Bitty Smyth’s arm, as if caught in the act of beating a suspect. Supporting this illusion, Miss Smyth sank to an armchair, still nodding and trembling on the verge of a smile, so greatly relieved.

  The long slants of Mallory’s eyes were always the first thing one noticed—a strange bright shade of green not found in nature. She did not smile upon greeting him, and he had not expected that. Her expressions were usually deliberate or absent, a chilling idiosyncrasy.

  She had others.

  Though Charles Butler possessed a vast knowledge of abnormal psychology, Mallory sidestepped every attempt to classify her with any sense of confidence, as if she belonged to a separate species of one, a denizen of some unsentimental planet of perpetual cold weather.

  “Hello,” he said, smiling and standing back a pace to take her in, as if he had expected her to have grown over the weekend.

  Her hand was on his arm, and, with the lightest of pressure, she was able to drag him down a narrow hallway and into a small boxy room all decked out like a tailor’s shop with the tools and machines of the trade. Racks of thread spools lined one wall, and a basket of mending sat on the floor near a dressmaker’s dummy.

  “A sewing room,” she said, “without a single pair of scissors.”

  “I think I noticed them back in the parlor.” And here, wisely, he stopped, for Mallory’s eyes widened slightly to tell him that she did not appreciate his pointing out the obvious thing—the shears planted in the dead man’s chest. And neither did she care to be interrupted. Arms folding across her chest was all the warning he would ever get.

  “So,” the detective continued, “this woman comes downstairs—in the dark—sees the burglar. Then she runs to the other end of the house to look for the sewing shears. And the perp just stands there in the front room, waiting for her to come back and stab him to death.”

  Charles hesitated—always a good idea to tread carefully with her. There was only one logical conclusion, but he sensed a trap in the making. “Then it’s not a case of self-defense?”

  “No, that’s exactly what it is,” she said, somewhat impatient. “Self-defense. That much I believe.”

  “Right.” Charles needed no mirror to tell him that he wore the comical face of a fool who has just discovered that it was not night but day. Hands in his pockets, he stared at his shoes. “I gathered from Riker that you wanted a psych evaluation of those two women.”

  “No, that was just an afterthought.” She closed the door, then leaned her back against it, as if to block his escape. “What can you tell me about those people?”

  He shrugged. “Only their names. I just got here.”

  She put one hand on her hip, a sign that she did not entirely believe him, but then it was her nature to be suspicious of everyone who did not carry a badge—and everyone who did. “You’ve never met them before?”

  “No,” said Charles, “I don’t know either of them.”

  “Well, they know you. And they’ve known you for a long time.” Her eyes were asking, accusing and demanding all at once, And how do you explain that?

  Detective Riker liked the kitchen best. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was built to human scale. The low ceiling made it cozy, almost cottagelike. He declined an offer of alcohol but allowed Nedda Winter to make him a glass of iced tea with thanks.

  She selected a lemon from a bowl of fruit. Knife in hand, she stood at the butcher block and smiled at him. It was almost a tease, as if to ask—did he object to her holding this dangerously pointed object?

  Riker’s mouth dipped on one side to say, Yeah, right.

  He made a cursory inventory of the room, his gaze passing over a meat cleaver, then traveling onto a cutlery block of knives. A case bolted to the far wall contained a fire extinguisher and a small ax. With all the lethal weapons in this kitchen arsenal, a pair of scissors had been an odd choice to
bring down an intruder tonight.

  Miss Winter made short work of the lemon, cutting a slice and draping it over the edge of a tall glass full of ice cubes. She stood at the table, pouring tea from a pitcher and saying, “Please sit down, Detective. Don’t wait on me.”

  As Riker settled into a chair, the woman pulled a frosty beer from the refrigerator and uncapped it. Now he revised his ideas of society matrons, for Nedda Winter drank straight from the bottle, long swigs.

  “Beer,” she said, pulling up a chair on the other side of the table. “Nothing like it on a warm night. They go together, don’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was no false note in her voice and nothing ingratiating in her manner. He liked her style and her brand of beer. This was one of his people.

  “Of course—” She paused to study the bottle in her hand, then flashed him a wry smile. “If you do beat a confession out of me, the alcohol might argue for diminished capacity.”

  “I can live with that.” Riker reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of yellow-lined paper. “We’ve already got this statement you gave to the West Side detectives. But there’s just a few . . . inconsistencies .” This word was a cop’s euphemism for lies and more lies. “A few things that need explaining.” In other words, Try and talk your way out of this if you can.

  Her gray eyebrows were on the rise. They were whimsical things, stray hairs growing this way and that. How old was she? So much hung on the year of Nedda Winter’s birth. The detective searched her face and found wrinkles enough to make her seventy—the right age for a legend—but he could not be certain, not in this world of plastic miracles where women of sixty passed for forty. There was evidence of surgery, anomalies in the planes of her cheeks and forehead, as if she had been badly broken long ago and put back together. She withstood this intense scrutiny with smiling pale blue eyes. Their directness appealed to him and also put him on his guard. She was looking past his smile.

  There was still some doubt about her identity. Or maybe he could simply not believe his own luck to find her in this house tonight. Blunt questions were not an option, not yet, and so he must go slowly with this woman. Intelligence lived in those quick blue eyes that missed nothing. As he took her measure, she measured him.

  “So why are all of these people still in my house?” She set her beer bottle to one side. “The truth.”

  Riker settled on a half-truth. “They’re trying to reconstruct what happened here.”

  “I told them what happened—several times.”

  “Like I said, Miss Winter, there’re a few glitches in your statement. And then there’s the problem of the ice pick.”

  Charles Butler followed Mallory into the front room, where the tall mirrors created an unsettling carnival effect. It was impossible to look anywhere without encountering one’s own reflection repeating two and three times.

  Yet Mallory managed it.

  He watched reflected copies of her negotiating the ocular maze with downcast eyes. Actually, this was a familiar phenomenon. She had always avoided every looking glass, even shunning reflections in shop windows. He once had a theory to fit her early history as a homeless child: she might see something ugly or worthless when she met herself in mirrors; self-esteem issues were the sad baggage of that background. However, he had retired this idea for another one that was truly eerie and almost akin to vampirism. She raised her eyes now, and there was no way she could fail to see her own reflection walking toward her from three directions. Yet she lacked the instant catch-eyes response of every normal person. She appeared to see nothing at all, no recognizable form or proof of her own existence, and she moved on without pause.

  What a bundle of contradictions was this stunning young woman who could not enter any room unnoticed—invisible Mallory.

  He climbed the spiral staircase, following her black running shoes, Italian leather imports that might cost a week’s pay for the other civil servants in this house. He sometimes wondered if she did not delight in raising rumors that she might have an illegal source of income.

  And, of course, this was true. She was his business partner. They were headhunters.

  Halfway up the stairs, Charles discovered a design flaw. Because of the cathedral ceiling, this march of steps to the second floor was the length of more than two flights. The house had been made for appearances only and with no consideration for inhabitants of Nedda Winter’s age. Did that name sound more familiar to him now? He was distracted by Mallory as she explained that there were not enough ice picks in the house.

  But there had been an ice pick lying on the floor by the dead man. Surely the one was sufficient.

  Enigma, thy name is Mallory.

  And sometimes he wondered if she simply enjoyed sharpening her claws on his brain. He looked over the railing and down at the lavishly stocked wet bar by the foot of the stairs—and the silver ice bucket, which would so nicely complement the burglar’s expensive ice pick. He could not recall when he had last found a use for his own pick. Regrettably, the day of the old-fashioned ice block delivered by horse-drawn cart was long gone. Perhaps Miss Winter, like himself, had inherited one with the family silver.

  “Well,” he began, picking his words more carefully this time, “I’m guessing—not assuming, mind you—that the ice pick near the body doesn’t belong to the burglar.” So far, if he interpreted her silence correctly, he was on safe ground. “I suppose the man found the pick after he broke into the house?”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” she said.

  And so, of course, his theory must be dead wrong. All right, the bedrock of logic was a bit shaky here. Mallory had already conceded self-defense, so either the pick belonged to the burglar or the man had found it in the house. One of these two things must be true—or not.

  He sighed.

  Mallory paused on the stairs and turned to face him. “The dead man wasn’t a burglar. He was a serial killer out on bail. I’m the one who arrested him. He always used a hunting knife. I found one strapped to his leg. He never had a chance to pull it out before one of those women stabbed him. There’s only one line in her statement that rings true. She said it was done in the dark. Now that part’s true. If the lights had been on, she’d never have gotten close enough to kill him.”

  “This serial killer was out on bail?” Dangerous, but he had to ask. “How is that possible?”

  “Bad judge, good lawyer.” Mallory glanced over the railing, looking down at the front room below and the dead man at its center. “So that ice pick was out of character for him—and one weapon too many.” She resumed her climb.

  “Well,” said Charles to Mallory’s back, “given his history with women, the very fact that he broke in with a knife strapped to his leg, that should be enough to—”

  She paused on the second-floor landing to stare at him in a way that asked whose side he was on. “Neither one of those women knew he had a knife.” Mallory turned her back on him and approached a door to the right of the stairs. “Odds are, they still don’t know.” She rested one hand on the knob. “When Riker and I showed up, the West Side cops were still trying to get Bitty Smyth to unlock this bedroom door. I had better luck.”

  Charles was not certain that he wanted more detail on this.

  “I told her to open up or I’d shoot off the lock. That’s when Bitty decided to come out.” Mallory opened the door and waved him into the darkness ahead of her, saying behind his back, “And this is what she didn’t want the cops to see.”

  What a flair she had for drama.

  The lights switched on, and, in the sudden bright light, Charles faced a wall lined with scores of photographs and saw his own face looking back at him from the picture frames.

  His eyes gravitated first to a shot taken when he was a child of ten. The backdrop was a birthday party in Gramercy Park. A neighboring frame held a small portrait with the gray grain of newsprint and a companion article about the youngest student ever to matriculat
e at Harvard University. Next was a picture of a child in cap and gown, inches taller than his graduating class of young adults. In successive photographs, he passed through puberty, collected more academic credentials and entered a prestigious corporate think tank. The caption of an old photo cut from Fortune had him escaping the corporation to strike out on his own. And the rest were a collection of society-page shots from weddings and funerals.

  The most recent picture of the lot was a candid photograph taken on the streets of SoHo. This one was framed in silver on the table beside Bitty’s bed.

  “So you have a stalker.” Mallory turned to the bureau and picked up a stack of three diaries, each with a flimsy lock that had been opened. “Take a look at these. I need to know if she’s dangerous.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Her chin jutted forward, and an angry line appeared between her eyes, an unsubtle reminder that she had no sense of humor. Mallory held out the journals.

  Charles recoiled as if she were offering something unclean. “This can’t be right, reading her personal—”

  “This is a crime scene, Charles. I don’t need a warrant.” And her subtext was unmistakable: she was the law; friend and business partner aside, he should not push his luck with her tonight.

  A third voice chimed in to say, “What?”

  They looked over to the far corner of the room to see a bird emerge from a large cage on the floor. It was smaller than a parrot but somewhat larger than a parakeet. A comb of yellow feathers unfurled at the top of its head in a gesture of surprise.

  “It’s a cockatiel,” said Charles.

  Mallory looked down at the bird, clearly regarding it as something that she planned to wipe off the sole of her shoe. Charles sensed that this was not their first meeting. The tiny creature was too quick to pick up on her hostility. It opened its beak wide, but not to scream. The posture reminded Charles of a baby bird begging for worms, or, in this instance, begging for its life. The cockatiel flattened its comb of yellow feathers and, head ducked low to floor, retreated behind the fringe of the bedspread.