Remember leaving me behind?
As always, the drag queen had been standing a safe distance away while Kathy had done the robbery alone, a little girl with puny arms struggling to unload VCRs into a grocery cart. At the first sight of a police car, Tall Sally had climbed into a station wagon, obeying all the laws and traffic lights while driving away and abandoning the child.
Two uniformed officers had seen Kathy standing just inside the open doors of the delivery truck – nowhere to hide, no way to run. The small thief had walked to the edge of the truckbed, raised one thin white hand and waved at the policemen. Big smile. Grinning, they had waved back, and their car had rolled on by.
All these years later, Tall Sally did not recognize the child all grown up and still holding a grudge.
‘So it’s just a coincidence,’ said Mallory. ‘You get a vagina installed about the same time Sparrow gets a new nose.’
‘That junkie whore got her nose fixed?’ Tall Sally’s voice had shifted back to fluttery high notes, for this was girl talk. ‘So tell me, how’s it look?’
And now Mallory could believe that the two prostitutes had no recent history. Tall Sally had always been an inept liar, embroidering details to death and advertising every falsehood – but not this time. There was no exaggerated protest. Sal had never seen Sparrow’s new face.
Along Avenue A, half-naked men with jackhammers ripped up the street, choking the air with particles and shaking the pavement in front of the bookshop. Riker had the taste of dust in his mouth as he stood before the display window and perused the titles of worn paperbacks. This morning, he planned to be the first customer.
John Warwick was walking toward him now, thin and wasted, moving slowly, doing his old man’s shuffle. He bowed his white head, unwilling to meet the eyes of passing pedestrians. And now he paused at the door to his shop.
‘Hey, John. Remember me?’
The bookseller turned his face to the window and spoke to the detective’s reflection in the glass. ‘Riker. What’s it been, fourteen, fifteen years?’
‘Sounds right. I came about that old western you tracked down for Lou Markowitz.’
The bookseller drew back, as if he feared that Riker would strike him. ‘It’s not for sale. You can’t have it. It belongs to the girl.’
‘She’s dead,’ Riker lied. ‘And you know that. Markowitz told you – ’
‘No.’ Warwick shook his head. After fifteen years, he still believed that a ten-year-old Kathy had merely been lost. How close to the truth he had come. And he had sussed out his truth aided only by his paranoid distrust of police.
‘So you still have the western?’ This was impossible, for Riker had found that book in Sparrow’s apartment, but evidently Warwick had lost track of the shop’s inventory.
‘Of course I have it. You think I’d give it to anyone but her?’
‘It’s over, John. The kid’s never coming back.’ And now he posed a question disguised as frustration. ‘When was the last time you heard anyone ask for that book?’
‘Every day for the past two weeks.’ Warwick winced. ‘This woman – a tall devil with blond hair.’
Close, but Riker knew that the man was not describing Mallory.
‘Sparrow,’ said Warwick. ‘That was her name. She wrote it down on a piece of paper – her phone number too. I threw it away.’
‘But before this woman came along? Nothing, right? Not a whisper in fifteen years. Doesn’t that tell you – ’
‘The child is alive,’ said Warwick. ‘You couldn’t catch her. No one could.’ His thin arms were rising as if to defend himself from a blow. ‘And you can’t have her book.’
Riker wondered how he would phrase questions about Sparrow. He needed a time line for the last days of her life, but he could not interrogate this man in the name of the law. Given Warwick’s psychiatric history, that would mean knocking at the door of a very scary closet. ‘John? Can we sit down and talk about this? Just for a few minutes. Then I’ll go away.’
Warwick pulled out a gray linen handkerchief. He removed his glasses and made a show of cleaning them while casting about for something to say. ‘Markowitz put me through a lot of trouble tracking down that novel. He told me to – ’
‘She’s dead. She can’t come back for the book.’
‘You can’t have it!’ Warwick shouted, then shrank into himself, hunching his shoulders and furtively looking from side to side, as if he believed those loud words had come from someone else. He continued in a hoarse whisper, ‘Because she might come back.’
John Warwick was a member of Lou Markowitz’s choir. He would never give up his vigil, but the threat this posed to Kathy Mallory was very small. Riker was satisfied that this man had never known her name. In the worst possible case, the bookseller might meet her on the street one day and recognize the remarkable green eyes. Or was he still waiting for a ten-year-old child?
Riker stepped back to reappraise this fragile little person, who had always teetered on the edge of sanity. The threat of any authority figure terrified John Warwick. Yet he was making a stand against the police, though he trembled to do it. And this was bravery in any man’s philosophy.
Please. Don’t make me do this the hard way.
The detective sat down on an iron bench in front of the store. Now that he no longer loomed over Warwick, the smaller man relaxed. ‘I can’t make you talk to me,’ said Riker. ‘And I can’t go away until you do.’ He would not risk another cop canvassing this street and stumbling on to a connection between Sparrow and a green-eyed child who loved westerns. He looked down at the sidewalk and whispered, ‘Please.’
Shaking his head, Warwick unlocked the door to his shop and shuffled inside. Two minutes later, he was out on the street again, eyes wild and close to tears. ‘She stole it! Yesterday that book was on the shelf behind my register, and now it’s gone. That woman stole it when my back was turned.’
Playing the public servant, Riker pulled out his notebook to take down a citizen’s statement on a theft. ‘You said her name was Sparrow? So she was in your store yesterday.’
‘And every day for two weeks. Yesterday she was the last customer. It was just a few minutes before I closed the store. So I know she’s the one who stole it. You write that down.’
Riker glanced at the hours posted in the shop window. Poor Sparrow. She had wanted the book so badly, but there had been no time to read it before she was mutilated and hung.
CHAPTER 4
The sunlit room was racked with gleaming copper-bottom pots, more spices than the stores carried and every cooking utensil known to God and Cordon Bleu – and even here, antiques prevailed. Charles Butler lit a flame under an old-fashioned percolator. He was dressed in yesterday’s shirt and jeans, and his eyes were sore from working through the night on Mallory’s account, though he would never get credit for mending her present, a waterlogged paperback western. Riker had never understood this man’s one-sided infatuation with her. Charles was hardly a virgin in the area of abnormal psychology, and he must know what she was.
The detective sat at the kitchen table and opened the restored book to the page with the inscription. Apart from Lou Markowitz’s lost signature, there was no sign of damage, and he toyed with the idea of actually giving it to Mallory. ‘Good as new. It’s magic’
‘The paper was very brittle.’ Charles set the table with coffee cups and forks. ‘I had to treat it with a matte polymer so the pages wouldn’t crumble. Of course, that would’ve destroyed the value of a rare book. So I did some research first.’