„The police took great interest in the fortuneteller,“ said Pinwitty. „She was the only one they brought in for questioning at the police station. And there she died. According to the obituary, it was a cerebral hemorrhage.“
„That’s wrong,“ said Riker, speaking low so as not to interfere with the dry static of the ongoing monologue. „It was way more interesting than that.“
„So what’s the real story?“
„This is secondhand. I was only a kid when I heard it, and this was more than twenty years after it happened. The detectives left the fortuneteller sitting on a bench for maybe five minutes while they freed up an interview room. When they came back for the old lady, the cop on guard duty was bending over her dead body. The uniform tells the detectives she was sitting up one minute, dead the next, and there was nobody near her when she keeled over. Well, they’re hunting for an ice-pick killer, right? And thanks to a slew of exhumed corpses in the early forties, they’re hip to the ice pick in the eardrum. It simulates a stroke. Well, sure enough, they shine a light in the woman’s ear and find blood from the pick. Now they interrogate the shit out of that cop.“
„The cop was dirty?“
„That’s what the detectives figured. Maybe the uniform took a few bucks to look the other way. Or maybe he did in the old lady himself. But no. According to the other witnesses, the cop just wasn’t paying attention when somebody stopped to talk with his prisoner. The old lady’s visitor was only there long enough to say hello and good-bye. A few seconds later, the old woman slumps forward. The cop jostles her shoulder and asks if she’s okay. That’s when she falls to the floor, stone dead. The killer walked right into a police station and killed this woman right under their noses. A real pro.“
„And the detectives covered it up.“
„You bet they did. This happened maybe ten or twelve days after the Winter House massacre. The newspapers would’ve crucified the whole department. So an ice-pick murder was passed off as a stroke and buried on the obituary page. Oh yeah,“ he said as an afterthought, „and that old lady was no crystal-ball gypsy. She only read tarot cards.“
„And she had a solid connection to the hitman.“
Riker nodded in Pinwitty’s direction. „He’s getting to that part now.“
The author pointed upward to a window on the second floor. „After the fortuneteller was taken away, that very night, in fact, that apartment was searched by detectives. On previous calls, the tenant had never been at home. That night they didn’t even bother to knock. Sadly, the tenant was gone and so were his things. No one was able to give the police a name or description. In fact, no one in the neighborhood could recall ever having seen the mysterious tenant even once, though he’d held the lease for years.“
Mallory nudged Riker. „So the fortuneteller’s storefront was a drop site for money, and the old lady brokered the hitman’s murders?“
„Yeah. Two different fortunetellers used the same location. They were both murdered, but Pinwitty doesn’t know that.“ Riker looked on as the author lost his audience. One by one, the escapees peeled off from the tour group. „But he did get a few things right.“ He looked up to the second-floor window. „When the detectives broke down the door, that apartment was clean, and I mean spotless. No prints anywhere. Ballsy, huh? Cops breathing down his neck, and he takes the time to wipe down the walls and the furniture.“
„And now we ‘ve got Nedda Winter with tarot cards at the dinner party,“ said Mallory. „You think Stick Man would kidnap a twelve-year-old girl to replace his old fortuneteller?“
„It’s a stretch. Remember, the girl disappeared from Winter House twelve days before the fortuneteller died.“
„If Stick Man thought the cops were closing in on his drop point, maybe he planned to break in the girl as his next tarot card reader – before he killed the old woman. Nedda was tall for twelve. She could’ve passed for a teenager.“
„Could be.“ In fact, Riker had already thought of this. But why would a hitman believe that a little girl might go along with that idea?
The spooky brat beside him read his mind. „Maybe,“ she said, „Nedda wasn’t all that broken up about the murders. Maybe she knew what was going to happen to her family before Stick Man showed up at the door.“
Riker gave this idea half a nod. „It’s possible.“ There were too many possibilities and they might all be wrong.
Mallory turned back to the author and his few remaining tourists. He had moved on down the street to the scene of another crime. She listened to the fading banter for another moment. „You said his research is an ongoing thing?“
At the bottom of the stairs, Lionel was waiting for them. Bitty shrank back, thinking of something better to do on the upper floor, and she retreated.
Sensible.
After last night, Bitty would not want a confrontation with her uncle.
Nedda accepted a cup of coffee from her brother’s hand. She was so absurdly grateful for this small gesture and hoping for something more, but he looked at her with such wariness. And hate? It was difficult to read Lionel’s thoughts anymore. As a child he had never been cold to her. There had been a bond between them once, the two eldest children against the confusing and sometimes violent world of their parents’ making.
When brother and sister were seated in the dining room, Nedda turned her gaze to the glass-paned doors that opened onto the back garden. It looked so mournful now, pruned back to a few shrubs and a single tree. Once, there had been a swing attached to the lowest bough. Her brother had preferred the higher climbs, the branches closer to the sky. He had been a beautiful, nimble boy with a sunbrowned face and perpetually skinned knees.
„And now,“ said Lionel, „you’re wondering about Baby Sally.“ Nedda shook her head. No, she had been hunting out of doors for some old memory to share with him, a common ground. She wanted only a bit of conversation and his company – nothing more.
„Cleo and I were away at school when Sally… when she left. I’ve given a lot of thought to that day. It was nothing that we did. We were – “
„Old history.“ Nedda dismissed the rest of his words with a wave. And now she wanted so much to reach across the table, to take his hand in hers and tell him how good it was to be home. However, in this moment, she was more the coward than Bitty. She anticipated Lionel shrinking away from her touch, withdrawing his hand and turning to ice.
Her own hands remained folded in her lap.
Martin Pinwitty was beside himself with happiness. Two genuine homicide detectives were visitors in his humble home – underscore the word humble. There was only one room, unless one counted the closet that housed a toilet, and Mallory did not. The bathtub, concealed by a broad wooden board, did double duty as a table, and the hide-a-bed sofa had been hastily folded away, one more sign of an impoverished make-do life.
Mallory could guess how much of this man’s meager income was daily sacrificed for stamps. Correspondence was piled on every surface that was not cluttered with page-marked books. The postmarks on his mail were wide-ranging, and a few envelopes had the return addresses of police departments in other states.
On the way to his apartment, Pinwitty had insisted on stopping at a bodega so that he might treat them to doughnuts on this special occasion, believing, as all civilians did, that this was a staple of every cop’s diet. And now both detectives, stuffed with Charles Butler’s croissants and crepes, ate their sugar doughnuts, while feigning gratitude and swilling tea that was unspeakably bad.
Riker shoveled more sugar into his cup. „So the reporter who died in the Village – that was the last ice-pick job?“
„For a professional assassin? Yes, I believe it was,“ said the author. „I have sources everywhere. If there’s an old unsolved murder with an ice pick, I hear about it. The pick was going out of vogue years before that man was murdered.“