The Best of Sisters in Crime (40 page)

Now she listened
quietly as Tillie described Ray Macken, a swaggering native of Boyle’s Brooklyn
precinct, who’d married the neighborhood beauty and moved to Texas to cash in
on the sunbelt boom. His glib and easy manner had started him up half a dozen
ladders, but alcohol and an aversion to hard work kept knocking him off.

Three months ago
his mother had died and left him the two-family house of his childhood. Since
he’d exhausted all the unemployment benefits Texas had to offer, the rental
from the top floor and his mother’s small insurance benefits were enough to
bring him back north to Flatbush with his wife and son.

“He promised her
a mansion,” growled Boyle, “then he brought her back to an old house that hasn’t
had a new stick of furniture in thirty years. No air conditioner, no dishwasher
in the kitchen, just a beat-up stove and refrigerator from the fifties!”

He lapsed into
moody silence.

Sigrid fished
four linked silver circles from a small glass bowl on her desk and toyed with
them as Tillie resumed his narrative. It was a new Turkish puzzle ring which
someone, knowing her fondness for them, had sent to her disassembled. She hadn’t
quite found the trick of fitting these particular sinuous circlets back into a
single band, but it was something to occupy her eyes as she waited for what she
suspected was coming.

Emotion always
embarrassed her and this was the old familiar tale of high school sweethearts
reunited, of a still-beautiful wife who realizes she picked the wrong man, of a
young police officer who suddenly falls in love all over again: the secret
meetings, the husband’s suspicion and jealousy; the bruises where he’s hit her
in drunken rages.

Then, last
night, the tenants upstairs had overheard a loud abusive argument, followed by
the banging of the back door as Liz Macken fled to a friend’s house.
Afterwards, only silence until Ray Macken’s body was found early this morning
with a .38 bullet lodged just under his heart.

As a woman,
Sigrid had remained curiously untouched by love or hate, but as a police
officer she knew its motivating force. “Involuntary manslaughter?” she asked.

Tillie shrugged.

“Hey, no way!”
cried Boyle. “Liz isn’t a killer and anyhow, she couldn’t have used that
particular gun.”

He slumped back
down in his chair dispiritedly. “Nobody could have used it except me and I
swear I didn’t.”

“Tell me about
that gun,” Sigrid said.

“It was four
days ago,” Boyle began. “Friday, and St. Simon’s kindergarten class.”

Even though
Labor Day had marked the official end of summer vacation, everyone at Boyle’s
precinct house kept finagling for extra leave time while the heat wave
continued and beach weather held. Sergeant Fitzpatrick, the duty officer, had
juggled rosters until his temper frayed and he’d made it profanely clear when
he tacked up the month’s final version that no officer would be excused from
duty unless he could produce a death certificate signed by three doctors and an
undertaker.

Unfortunately,
he’d forgotten about Sister Theresa, which is how Boyle got yanked from patrol
duty that hot September morning.

“You’ll take
over for Sergeant Hanley until further notice,” Fitzpatrick had informed him at
morning shape-up.

“Hanley?” Boyle
was puzzled. Hanley was a real old-timer who was trying to finish out thirty
years on the force. He was nearly crippled with arthritis and, as far as Boyle
knew, only puttered around the station house and kept the coffee urns full. He’d
been on sick leave all week and, except for grousing about coffee, no one
seemed to miss him. Boyle was incautious enough to voice that thought to the
sergeant.

This earned him
a blistering lecture about macho motor jockeys who thought riding around in an
air-conditioned patrol car was all there was to being a policeman.

An hour later, a
sweaty Jimmy Boyle stood before a blackboard in the briefing room, clutching
Hanley’s keys, and faced the true reason Fitzpatrick needed a sacrificial goat:
Sister Theresa, nineteen wide-eyed five-year-olds, and two of their mothers.

One of those
mothers was Liz Macken, cool and lovely in a simple cotton sundress that he’d
slipped from her tanned shoulders only a few days earlier in one of their
stolen mornings together in his bachelor apartment. As his lover, she made his
blood course wildly; today, however, was the first time that he’d seen her in
her maternal role and it’d taken him several minutes before he could meet her
mischievous smile with a casual smile of his own.

Luckily a fight
broke out over a lecture pointer just then and Sister Theresa clucked in dismay
as he tried to separate the combatants. Mrs. DiLucca, a six-time grade mother,
confiscated the pointer and promised the two kids she’d rap it over their heads
if they didn’t settle down.

Every September,
Sister Theresa taught a unit called “Our Community Helpers” to her kindergarten
class at St. Simon’s.

Already they had
trooped over to the clinic on Arrow Street where a nice nurse had taken their
blood pressure and given them tongue depressors, to the local firehouse where
they’d slid down the pole and clambered over a pumper truck, and to the branch
post office where they’d seen mail sorted and had their hands postmarked with a
rubber stamp.

“And today,”
chirped Sister Theresa, “this nice Officer Boyle is going to show us exactly
what policemen do to help our community.”

Nineteen pairs
of skeptical eyes swung to him and Jimmy Boyle scrapped any thought of giving
them a comprehensive view of the department. No way were these kids going to
sit still for a lecture on hack licensing, housing violations and the other
unexciting details policemen have to keep tabs on. Besides, with Liz sitting
there he couldn’t concentrate, so he yielded to the kids’ appetite for
sensationalism and passed out handcuffs for them to examine before herding them
upstairs.

The drunk tank
was empty for once and a deceptively fragile-looking child got herself wedged
between the bars while another shinnied up to the ceiling and swung from the
wire-caged light fixture.

He heard Liz say
firmly, “Tommy Macken, you get down from there this minute!” and he looked
closely at the little acrobat who could have been his son if things had gone
differently.

If Liz hadn’t
thought him dull and square seven years ago.

If Ray hadn’t
dazzled her with a silky line and visions of the rich life in Texas.

The rest of the
hour was just as hectic. In the basement, Boyle showed the children the small
outdated lab that no longer got much use since all the complex needs were
handled by a central forensic lab elsewhere. They compared hairs under a
microscope—Tommy yanked a few from the small blond girl beside him and Liz gave
him a quick swat on the bottom. He demonstrated how litmus paper works, then
fired several shots from an old .38 into a cotton mattress and retrieved the
slugs to show how the markings matched up for positive identification.

“Did that gun
ever kill somebody?” they asked eagerly.

Boyle knew they’d
be bored with the true story of two derelicts arguing over a bottle of cherry
brandy, so he improvised on a television program he’d seen the week before and
they ate up the blood and gore. Several grubby little hands had clutched at the
pistol, but he put it back in the property cabinet and locked it securely. Of
that he was positive.

He had capped
the tour by taking every child’s fingerprints and warning them mock-ferociously
that if any crimes were committed, the department would know whom to pick up.
There was a moment of sheepish shuffling and a sudden emptying of pockets.

“Oh dear!” said
Sister Theresa as ink pads, handcuffs, a set of picklocks and Sergeant Hanley’s
keys were returned to him. Liz laughed outright, but Mrs. DiLucca pursed her
lips in disapproval.

Upstairs, he had
passed out some lollipops from Hanley’s desk and managed to wave back as the
children filed down the front steps onto a sidewalk shimmering with heat.
Sister Theresa had chirped again, “Now aren’t policemen
nice?’

Liz had smiled
back at him then, the memory of their last meeting in her eyes, but Boyle didn’t
think Lieutenant Harald would be interested in that particular detail.

“So you’re
positive the key to the gun cabinet was still on the ring when the kids gave it
back?” asked Tillie.

“It had to be,
Tillie, because it was sure there when Sergeant Fitzpatrick asked for the keys
this morning. Ballistics got a make on the gun right away and they knew where
to go for it. Ever since the kids left, those keys’ve been locked in my own
locker at the station. I stuck them there Friday afternoon and forgot to return
them when the sarge said I could go back to my own beat. Nobody needed them.
Hanley’s still out.” Boyle twisted his blue hat in his hands and shook his
head. “I just don’t see how the gun was taken and then put back.”

“No sign of the
cabinet’s lock or hinges being tampered with?” asked Sigrid.

“No, ma’am,” he
said unhappily.

“Do you have the
M.E.’s report?” she asked Tildon.

Tillie shook his
head. “Too soon. But I talked to Dr. Abramson, who did the autopsy. He said the
bullet entered about here”—he demonstrated an area just under his left midriff—”and
traveled up at an angle to nick the heart and lodge in the pleural cavity. The
actual cause of death was internal hemorrhaging. Macken might have lived if he’d
been rushed to a hospital in time; instead, he drowned in his own blood, so to
speak.”

Sigrid looked up
from her puzzle ring. “The bullet traveled upward? That means he was standing
while the killer sat or—”

“Or the killer
stood over him and fired down?” asked Boyle eagerly. “Liz said they had a fight
in the kitchen while she was trying to fix herself a glass of iced tea. That
old icebox ought to be in a museum the way the frost builds up around the
freezer so fast. Ray’d been drinking and he grabbed her. She twisted away and
he slipped on a piece of ice and was lying on the floor half-zonked as she ran
out the door. What if he never got up? Just lay there till someone who hated
him came along and shot him. Liz certainly didn’t stop to lock the door. Anybody
could’ve—”

He saw the
lieutenant’s imperceptible frown. “Yeah,” he said, slumping again. “That damn
gun.”

“Did the tenants
or neighbors hear the shot?” asked Sigrid.

Young Boyle
shook his head. “No. The neighbors on either side had their windows closed with
air conditioners running and the tenants said they slept with a fan that was so
noisy it could drown out fire engines.”

“Abramson said
Macken wasn’t shot from close range,” said Tillie, reading from his notes. “No
powder burns and the fact that the bullet only penetrated four or five inches
show that; but there’s a bruise around the wound that puzzles him. Maybe he
fought with his killer first and got punched there? And all Abramson can give
us is an approximation of when the shooting occurred since, like I said, Macken
didn’t die as soon as he was shot.”

Sigrid nodded
and resumed her manipulation of the four silver circles. Young Boyle looked at
his cousin and started to speak, but Tillie signaled for silence. After a
moment, she lifted those penetrating gray eyes and said to Boyle, “What did
Tommy Macken give back?”

Boyle looked
blank. “Give back?”

Her tone was
coldly patient. “In describing the tour you gave those unruly children, you
said that several of them had pocketed different items which your remark about
fingerprints caused them to give back. What did Tommy Macken take?”

Boyle thought
hard, visualizing the scene in his mind. “Nothing,” he said finally. “He never
touched the keys, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was the other kids who
took things, not Tommy.”

“I rather doubt
that a child as agile and inquisitive as you’ve described would have gone home
empty-handed,” she said dryly.

Three of the
silver circles lay perfectly stacked between her slender fingers. Delicately,
she inserted a knob of the fourth circlet between the first two and gently
rotated it until all four locked into place and formed one ring. She examined
it for a moment, then returned it to the glass bowl on her desk with a small
sigh of regret at how easy it had been to solve.

Equally
regretful was the look she gave Tillie’s young cousin. “I’m sorry, Boyle, but
my first opinion stands. I really don’t see how anyone else could have killed
him except Mrs. Macken.”

“You’re nuts!”
cried Boyle. He pushed up from his chair so hard that it scraped loudly against
the tiled floor. He glared at Detective Tildon angrily. “You said she could
help, Tillie. Is this how? By pinning it on Liz?”

“Sit down,
Boyle.” There was icy authority in Sigrid Harald’s voice. She pushed her
telephone toward him. “Someone must still be posted at the Macken house. Call.”

Resentfully he
dialed and when one of his fellow officers from the precinct answered, he
identified first himself and then Lieutenant Harald, who gave crisp suggestions
as to where he should search and what he should search for. She held on to the
receiver and only a few minutes had elapsed before the unseen officer returned
to his end and admiringly reported, “Right where you thought, Lieutenant—stuck
down in one of the garbage pails in the alley. It’s already on its way to the
lab.”