Dead Famous Page 23

  “A bribe?” The young woman held up the handkerchief and the mysterious twenty-dollar bill. She handed the money to one of the men in uniform. “The bill is evidence. Bag it.”

  “That’s not my twenty,” said the incredulous lawyer. “I can prove it.” He opened his wallet. “See? I don’t have anything smaller than a fifty.”

  “So now you’re trying to bribe all of us?” She turned to the officers. “That’s probable cause for a search. Pat him down for weapons.”

  The brief foray into his clothing turned up the odd contents of his pockets and what was hidden under his folded coat. A red wig, a white cane and dark glasses were confiscated as the audience of civilians stepped closer. This show kept getting better and better.

  The detective had a very unnerving smile. “This better be a good story. What are you up to, old man?”

  It was the tapping of the blind man’s cane that woke Riker.

  No, not that.

  Jo was lightly rapping the floor with her soles, a sit-down tap dance, an old soft shoe to the rhythm of Wake up, wake up. He opened his eyes a bit wider when he saw the long tube that began with a needle in his arm and led up to a bag of fluid hanging from the bedpost.

  “That’s a Valium drip,” she said.

  Valium? How humiliating—the drug of choice for old ladies and other sissies. A cluster of pharmacy bottles on his nightstand completed the image of an invalid’s sickroom. He looked down at his chest, where four new bullet holes should be, and saw that his clothes had been changed. He wore a black T-shirt. His pants were also black, part of a suit that he seldom wore, and that accounted for the lack of stains and cigarette burns in the material. And his feet were bare. He was all laid out like a corpse at his own wake.

  “So, Jo, who picked out my ensemble?”

  “I did. That’s your shroud. You’re dead today.” She smiled, as if this might be a good thing. “It’s a trick I learned in college. Remember final exams? Those days when you didn’t want to get out of bed—ever again? Playing dead can actually cheer you up. Nobody expects anything of a corpse. Life gets so much easier after you die. Oh, did I mention that I’m the one who dressed you? And now that I’ve seen you naked, shouldn’t I at least know your first name?”

  “I told you the day I met you, Jo. I don’t have a first name, never did.” He fished in one pocket and found it empty. “Go get my ID. Check it out.”

  “I already looked at it. There’s an initial, a P. What does that stand for?”

  “That’s all it says on my birth certificate.” He watched her remove the needle from his arm, then noticed the puncture wounds of other injections, a chemical soup. He felt docile but not dopey, no fog in the mind, and he needed no help to get out of his bed. Had he known what Jo had in mind for the day, he would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.

  Lieutenant Coffey had a comfortable front-row seat in the shadows, but the show on the other side of the one-way glass was over. In the next room of bright lights, an elderly prisoner sat with his baby-sitter, a great hulk of a cop, whose facial features suggested that he might be prone to bone-snapping violence. Detective Janos was under orders not to speak, for his soft and gentle voice was evidence of a benign soul adored by dogs and children. So he merely stared at the old man, sometimes grunting a reply. The prisoner was smiling, apparently enjoying Janos’s company and chatting amiably, not caring that the guttural responses were somewhat limited.

  Lieutenant Coffey turned to the young detective seated beside him in the dark. “What possessed you to arrest a lawyer?”

  “Always wanted to,” said Mallory.

  Jack Coffey nodded. This was every cop’s fantasy.

  “What the hell?” Riker would have decked anyone else for trying to wrap him in an apron, but since it was Jo, he was helpless to untie the bow she had fashioned behind his back.

  “We’ll start with the kitchen,” she said. “It’s a pit.”

  A good description. The floor was so sticky with spilled food and beer, he sometimes got stuck like a bug on flypaper when he walked through the room barefoot. She led the way down the hall to the kitchen, where a familiar object was waiting. Riker had never seen Charles’s cleaning woman separated from her wire cart of tools and supplies. “Don’t tell me what you did with Mrs. O.’s body. It’s better if I don’t know.”

  Jo pulled a garbage bag from a box on the cart and handed it to him. “I supervise. You do the work.” She sat down at the table and watched him bundle junk mail and beer cans into the bag. After the floor had been cleared, she handed him a plastic bottle. He struggled with the concept of a spray nozzle as she explained that the liquid would cut through the grease on the tiles, then asked, “So what did your parents call you when you were little?”

  After spraying the floor, he pushed the mop around in silence. Jo’s foot tapped to an impatient rhythm, and he said, “My dad called me Hey Kid. My little brother’s name was You Too.”

  “You never asked what the P stood for?” Highly unlikely, said the tone of her voice.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you the story my old man told me.” Riker pretended interest in the floor tiles emerging from the dirt. “Dad’s name was Phillip. He said I was named after him. But he didn’t want me to get stuck with a tag like Junior for the rest of my life, so he just put the P on my birth certificate. He said it was a secret, just between us, and even my mom didn’t know. Well, I loved that story, and I never told it to anybody, not ever. Not having a first name—that drove the other kids nuts. It was great.”

  “But when you were older and less gullible, you asked him for the real story, right?”

  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 match-books, 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?”

  Lieutenant 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 ta
lkative. 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 air. 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 Butler’s 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 her 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.