Winter House (8 page)

A fair detective in his own right, Coffey had worked through the puzzle in the very next minute. These two were holding something back, a bombshell. There was no other explanation. „Riker, do you have any idea how old Stick Man would be today?“

„Well, yeah.“ The man’s tone indicated that this might be a silly question since he was the expert on all things related to icepick homicides.

„All right, let me see if I understand this.“ The lieutenant uncovered his tired eyes to look at Riker. „You’re planning to reopen the Winter House Massacre. Have I got that right?“

The man only shrugged to say,
Yeah, that’s about right.
And his partner was busy inspecting her running shoes for smudges.

Jack Coffey shook his head. „Riker, you’ve got two minutes of my time. Give me the rest or get out.“

„Okay. The old lady you talked to this morning? That was Red Winter.“

„Of course it was.“ Jack Coffey wore that special smile reserved for dealing with lunatics. „I should have guessed.“ His smile never wavered, though his teeth were locked together and grinding. „So… when you asked Red Winter where she ‘d been for the past sixty years – “

„Fifty-eight years,“ said Mallory. „She was twelve when she disappeared. She’s seventy now.“

„Shut up,“ said Coffey. He only had eyes for his senior detective.

„Well, sure,“ said Riker. „We asked where she’d been, but she just yawned and went upstairs to bed. Left us to lock up the house.“

With one angry sweep of his hand, Coffey wiped his desk of papers and sent them flying to the floor. He was on the verge of the explosion his squad had been waiting on,
betting on.
And now he realized that he was still smiling – actually grinning – not a good sign, not a
healthy
sign.

Mallory bent low to pick up the scattered papers around her chair. „We got the medical examiner to lose the ID on Willy Roy Boyd for a week.“ She was already assuming that he would believe the most ludicrous story ever told within these walls. „We have to keep a low profile,“ she said, collecting the sheets and stacking them neatly on the edge of the desk, then bending down for others. „The reporters can’t get near this story.“ She settled back into her chair to concentrate on aligning all the edges of every sheet. „It might be better if the rest of the squad didn’t – “

„I won’t tell a soul,“ said Jack Coffey. And he would not – no more than he would run naked through the streets, scattering rosebuds along the way. He continued to smile, feeling oddly calm. He just needed a little time was all, that and a bottomless bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Most of all, he needed to make these two detectives disappear. So much depended on that: his sanity, his stomach lining and what was left of his hair. Though the blinds were closed, he could sense the troops massing out there, pressing up against the glass, tensing, waiting for him to crack wide open.

Any minute now.

„You got seventy-two hours,“ said Coffey. „I don’t expect to see your faces for three days. Got that?“

He very much wanted to lay his head down on the desk and bang it a few times, but his detectives were still seated in their chairs, perhaps not fully comprehending that they had gotten away with this.

„Leave,“ he said,
„now!“ And
leave they did.

They left the door open, unfortunately, and he heard a snatch of their conversation.

Riker asked his partner, „Where to now?“

„We ‘re going to mess up a lawyer,“ she said.

„That’s my girl.“

Money was changing hands in the squad room, but the lieutenant no longer cared who had won or lost this round. He knew Mallory was going after the lawyer who had won a bail hearing, against all odds, for a cockroach who had murdered three women. The high school student, Boyd’s youngest victim, had been closer to a child. Jack Coffey had been the one to break the news to her parents, to show them the morgue photograph of their daughter’s face, a shot framed to expose the features least bruised and broken. The mother had touched the photo, caressing it with her ringers, then rubbing the glossy surface, as if desperately trying to break through that artificial dimension to get to her only child.

Both parents had cried.

The morale of the squad had gone down when that serial killer had walked out free on bail, spitting on the sidewalk and spitting on the law. The timing had been a gift from hell, the very hour of the schoolgirl’s burial. And so the lieutenant gave no thought to blowback from Mallory’s upcoming confrontation. Finally, he understood why she needed jurisdiction on the dead body of Willy Roy Boyd.

She wanted payback.

Coffey wondered if Mallory would go after the defense attorney’s testicles. There were some things in life that were worth his rank and pension; neutering a lawyer was high on the list.

He picked through the cards on his Rolodex until he found the number for the parents of Boyd’s last victim. He would call them first and tell them that the man who had destroyed their lives was dead – stabbed to death by an elderly woman. They might find some just irony in that.

No – they would cry.

N
edda Winter pulled back the sheer white drape of the front window for a better view of the old Rolls-Royce. Once it had been her father’s car, and now it belonged to her brother. A dozen suitcases were disgorged from the car’s trunk. Tall Lionel, sixty-nine on his last birthday, handled the bags with surprising ease, though he did this service grudgingly, for most or all of the luggage would belong to his sister Cleo Winter-Smyth. Bitty’s description of the summer house in the Hamptons filled its closets and drawers with her mother’s clothing. And Cleo’s room upstairs was packed with more designer dresses like the one that she wore now.

So why this spectacle of suitcases? What was the point of two houses if one could not travel lightly from one to the other?

Without taking her eyes from the window, Nedda spoke to the small woman behind her. „They’re here, Bitty.“ She glanced back at her niece, who was still holding the Bible. „Go up to your room if you like. I’ll deal with them.“

This arrangement was very agreeable to her niece, who stole up the staircase with exaggerated stealth, perhaps on the off chance that Cleo and Lionel could hear escaping footsteps through the solid walls of the house.

Nedda turned her eyes back to the sidewalk activity. Her brother stood beside the car, shaking his head. He was refusing to lug the suitcases up the stairs. Lionel put two fingers to his lips and whistled. The doorman from the neighboring condominium came running, smiling as a dog would smile if it only could. Money changed hands, and Lionel slipped behind the wheel of the Rolls and drove off to the parking garage, leaving his sister to supervise the doorman, who gathered up her bags. Cleo looked up at the parlor window, saw her elder sister standing there, then quickly looked away. This was only one small slight of many.

Nedda understood. She might never be forgiven for coming home again.

Though Cleo and Lionel had been to town only a week ago, Nedda was amazed anew each time she saw her sister and brother, these chic people so little affected by time. In her early sixties, Cleo appeared closer in age to her forty-year-old daughter. There was not a single strand of gray in the perfectly coiffed ash blond hair, and her flesh was suspiciously smooth and firm.

Nedda let the drape fall, then sank down to the window seat. The front door opened, and the foyer was filled with the sound of dueling accents, American diva and Spanish immigrant. The doorman was making short work of the bags, stacking them inside the door, while Cleo surveyed the front room, checking for signs of sudden death. Or would she be more concerned with possible breakage?

Cleo turned to her sister with a vacuous smile; one might call it professional, the way a stewardess can smile at her passengers though she hates them and hopes they will die. „You look wonderful. Your color’s so much better.“

The yellow cast had passed off months ago in the hospice, where Nedda’s siblings had expected her to pass away from natural causes.

Fooled you all. So sorry. I never meant to.

„But you’re still a little pale, Nedda. You really must get some sun and fresh air. We’ll have to get you out to the Hamptons one day.“

The sisters both knew that day would never come. There would be too many questions from the Long Island neighbors. It was so much easier to hide embarrassing relatives in the more anonymous city. And now, small talk exhausted, they fell into a silence – awkward for Nedda, easy for her sister.

When the doorman had lugged the last suitcase indoors, he learned to his dismay that he had not yet earned his money, not until he carried them up the stairs to a bedroom. He looked up at the winding steps – and up, and up, shaking his head in denial. Finally, the job was done, and her brother had returned from the garage on the next block. Lionel preened for a moment before a mirror, running one tanned hand through hair as white as her own.

Her brother could still be called a handsome man and surprisingly youthful in the way that a waxwork can never age. So this was what sixty-nine years looked like in the twenty-first century. Nedda rarely consulted a mirror on her own account, for she was a different creature now, and no such comparison to her former self was possible. Though she had made good use of the third-floor gymnasium, the treadmill and the weights would not give her back any of the time she had lost. She was marked by the wrinkles and stitched up scars of a difficult life.

Not so for Lionel and Cleo.

Nedda had returned to find her siblings well preserved in the amber of younger days. Every creature so preserved was dead, and still the simile held true. There was no life in their dark blue eyes, dead eyes, flies in the amber.

„Neddy“ was all that Lionel said to her by way of a greeting. She could see that it irked him to slip and call her Neddy, but he had never known her by any but that childhood name. In a cruel departure from a good-natured boy of eleven, Lionel the man reminded her of their father now. Quentin Winter had been a cold one, too. It had been said of Daddy, in his youth, that he left footprints of ice across the floor of a warm room on a summer day. She recalled Lionel as a child of five, following his father about in the month of July to see if this was true. In part it was.

She turned to her sister, always searching Cleo’s face for evidence of the child she had been. Up to the age of five, young Cleo had danced through the average day, always in motion to music that had played round the clock, a laughing child, who had no bones, who moved to the beat of drums and cornets with fluid joy. Daddy’s little Boogie Woogie Wunderkind had never been able to pronounce this mouthful, and so she had been called Jitterbug by one and all. But Nedda never forgot herself and called her sister by this old pet name. It was unsuitable now, for Cleo had become somewhat stiff on several levels.

Nedda wondered how she was remembered by her siblings. She shuddered, and this thought passed off like a chill.

Lionel walked to the center of the carpet. „Was it here? Bitty wasn’t all that clear on the phone.“

„Yes, that’s where the man died.“ Nedda turned from one sibling to the other, saying, „Charles Buder was here last night. Did Bitty tell you that?“ Cleo broke into a rare wide smile. „The
frog prince?
No, Bitty never said a word.“ And now something dark had occurred to her, no doubt linked to the shrine in Bitty’s room. The woman sat down, more solemn in her tone, saying, „My God, did the police see the – “ Nedda nodded. „And they brought Charles Buder here? They showed him – “

„The shrine in Bitty’s room? Yes, he saw it.“

Lionel and Cleo turned to one another to hold one of their eerie conversations of the eyes. It was something akin to the made-up languages of small children bonding in secret alliance against the adult – herself. This time, it was easy for her to guess the content of their discussion, and, in answer to their unspoken question, she said, „The police believe that Bitty was stalking Mr. Butler.“

„Charles Butler,“ said Lionel. „Wasn’t he one of the Gramercy Park Butlers?“

„Yes, dear,“ said Cleo, the keeper of the social register. „Charles is the
last
one, but there haven’t been any Butlers in Gramercy Park for ages. He lives in SoHo, of all places. He owns an apartment building there.“

Trust Cleo to know the details of wealthy families who would not take her phone calls and the environs where she was not welcome. The Winter family had fallen away from polite society long before the massacre.

„Charles Butler,“ said Cleo. „Bitty must’ve been
thrilled.“
And, by inflection, she conveyed the opposite meaning. „Well, we must do something before this business gets out of hand. I’ll call Bitty’s father. Sheldon will know how to handle it.“

„Oh, Christ,“ said Lionel, at this mention of his erstwhile brother-in-law, the attorney. „Did the police take Bitty away?“

Both faces turned to Nedda. They were almost twins in expressing the horror of publicity.

She shook her head and stood with them in cold silence, the natural state of their every reunion, until a movement in one of the many mirrors caught her eye. Nedda turned around to see her niece slowly coming down the grand staircase, hesitating now, eyes wide and wondering if it was safe yet. Bitty had never outgrown a child’s stature and a child’s issues, the cowering deference to her mother and her uncle. And yet, one day, brave as any knight, this tiny woman had marched into a hellhole and plucked Nedda out of it, soul and all.