“So, I guess you know why you’re here,” I said. “I can understand why you didn’t bring your mother.”
She licked her lips.
“Susan, we know about the porn sites and we know that you were there, in Chrissie’s room, when it happened.”
Her eyes widened. “No — ”
“We know that you and Abigail gave Chrissie pot-laced brownies. That you baked them in Abigail’s kitchen and told Chrissie they were a peace present.”
“But — ”
“We know that once Chrissie was high, you and Abigail stabbed her and pushed her out the window.”
“No! I would’ve never hurt Chrissie. I — ”
“You were just angry at her because she was being selfish. You guys had worked just as hard as she had. It wasn’t fair that she should end up with the best-paying customers, right?”
“But — ”
“I should tell you that Claire’s in the other room.” I paused. “And she’s told us everything.”
She was frantic. “But she — no! It didn’t happen that way. I swear it!”
“Then what did happen?”
She looked down. “I . . . I can’t talk about it. Abigail said — ”
“Abigail said to lie to us, didn’t she?”
She didn’t answer.
“Susan, it’s time for me to read you your rights.”
“Does this mean I’m under arrest?”
I didn’t answer, just pulled out a card bearing Miranda and read it to her. I looked at her and shook my head. “It’s a shame.”
“What?” she asked, her eyes sparkling with tears.
“I’d like to believe you didn’t kill Chrissie. But the evidence says you did. And unless you speak up, you’re going down for it.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but I held up my hand.
“Too late,” I said. “I can’t hear another word you have to say — not unless . . .” I handed her the card and the pen. “Initial it and we can hear your side of it.”
She hesitated, and then, tears rolling down her cheeks, she scratched her initials.
“We didn’t kill her.” She sniffed. “I swear we didn’t.”
“We can prov — ”
“We did give her the brownies. But we really meant to make up with her.”
Lee and I maintained a cynical silence.
She looked from me to him, wide-eyed and terrified. “Please! You’ve got to believe me!”
“Susan, I’m trying to help you. Don’t bullshit me.”
She swallowed and gave in to a shudder but didn’t speak.
“Okay. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then . . .” I spoke to Lee and pointed to Susan. “Take her out.”
She blanched. “Wha — ?”
He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“No!” She twisted around. “Please! I’ll tell you what I know.”
“I don’t have time to waste,” I said.
“I’m not going to jail for her. I want this to be over. I want it to stop!”
She covered her face with her hands and burst into terrified sobs.
ABIGAIL EXAMINED ONE expensively manicured fingernail.
“So,” I said. “Whose idea was it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Am I under arrest?”
“Should you be?”
Abigail pushed her chair back and stood up. “I’m leaving. You can’t — ”
“Girlfriend, we can do this hard or we can do it easy. You talk to me alone or with your parents. Either way, you will talk.”
She thought about it, lifted her chin, and flopped back down in the chair. “What do you want?”
“The truth.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Did I tell you that my daddy’s a lawyer? He eats people like you for breakfast.”
“Well, he’s about to get a bad case of indigestion, and you’re the reason why.”
She started to retort but thought better of it.
“We already have you on the porn,” I said. “And now we’re going to get you for murder. We know how you did it and why. Best of all, we have proof: the brownies that made Chrissie so dizzy she couldn’t fight you, and witnesses who saw you leaving the apartment.”
Lee came in and handed me a file with Abigail’s name written prominently on it, and three typed sheets of paper laid atop it. He glanced at Abigail, who gave him a knowing look and ran the tip of her tongue along her lower lip. He laughed at her, and she flushed. He started out, then turned back.
“Take some advice,” he told her. “My partner here, she’s not interested in giving you another chance. Me, I think it’s only fair to tell you that Claire’s already cut a deal. She’s hung you out to dry.”
I held up the three sheets. “It’s all here.”
“She said that I . . . ?” Abigail’s mouth dropped open. “That little bitch! That crazy little bitch!” She sat up. “Now, you listen to me . . .”
“HER MOTHER SHOULD be here,” Lee said.
I agreed.
We glanced through the wired glass pane in the door. She’d taken out a small fingernail file, the handle ornate, not something you’d expect a girl too shy to wear makeup or stylish clothes to have.
The tip was broken.
I went in. “What an unusual file.”
“Chrissie gave it to me.”
“No, she didn’t.”
She went very still. “You’ve been speaking to Abigail, haven’t you? Why do you believe her? She’s a liar.”
“So are you.”
What color she had drained from her face.
“But it doesn’t matter,” I continued. “The nail file won’t lie.”
For a long moment, she forgot to breathe. Then, hands trembling, she continued to file her nails. “So what’s next?”
“We’ve called your mother.”
“She doesn’t care.”
“I’m reading you your rights.”
“Don’t bother.”
I took out the card. “You have the right — ”
“Don’t. Bother.”
Carefully, she stored the file in her backpack. “Am I supposed to sign something? Let’s get this over with.”
“The file: why didn’t you get rid of it?”
“Because it was Chrissie’s. It’s pretty . . . like she was.” Her voice was calm, her tone rational. “It was their fault. Chrissie’s and Abigail’s. They made it happen. They wanted it. Maybe not Susan — but Abigail definitely.”
“She actually asked you to kill Chrissie?”
“No, but she said Chrissie was a problem and that we had to find a solution. I thought . . .” A quaver crept into her voice. “I thought that if I did this, then maybe Abigail would help me. Show me how to do my hair and fingernails. Help me be pretty.” A pause. “I’ve always wanted to be pretty.”
She swallowed. “So after Chrissie came back from seeing her stepfather, we took some brownies over. Abigail and Susan left. I told Chrissie I had to talk to her. I thought it would be easy, you know, to get her to open the window . . . and then come up behind her. But she turned around. I had to do something. The nail file was there.”
She drew a deep breath. “And then, when I told Abigail, she said she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. She said . . .” Her voice dropped. “She said I was crazy.”
Lee and I exchanged glances.
“But why didn’t you ask Chrissie to give you a makeover?”
“She refused to. She said I was lucky . . . lucky to be ugly. Can you imagine?” Angry tears sparkled in her eyes. “That’s when I did it. I pushed her . . . pushed her out the window, so I wouldn’t have to see her pretty face anymore.”
The image of Chrissie’s face, crushed and contorted by agony but still lovely as she lay broken on the sidewalk, came to mind. The sound of her last breath whispered in my ear. Then came another voice, soft and malevolent.
Such a lucky, pretty girl —
/> Yeah, dead lucky.
THAT NIGHT, AT McKinley’s, Lee said, “The memories, they’re coming back, aren’t they?”
I nodded. My mother’s screams, the police, the social workers, the decision not to prosecute her for letting her husband do what he did and the judge’s decision to set me free — it was all there.
“But it’s okay,” I said. “No need to worry.”
“No?”
My image in the mirror returned my gaze. I smiled, it smiled back, and it hit me that this was no ghost but a reflection of the living.
“My mother always told me I was lucky. For once, she was right. I am lucky. I survived.”
Friday Night Luck
By Edward D. Hoch
It happened on a Friday, which had always been a bad day for Will Blackstone. Ever since college, he’d had a habit of relaxing at week’s end with a few drinks or a joint. It had lost him a pretty good job and more than one girlfriend. Sadie Murray was finally interested enough to stick by him, and it was she who got him the job at Techno-Bio, a firm whose specialty was cleaning up the remains at particularly messy crime scenes.
He liked the work, and it brought him into contact with a number of city detectives. One night over coffee, after a double-suicide cleanup, a detective named Tim Press told him he’d make a good cop. “I passed the exam once but didn’t make the cut,” Will told him.
“Why don’t you volunteer a few hours with the police auxiliary?” Press suggested. “We got two men in our squad started out as auxiliary cops. It looks good on your record, gives you an in.”
It sounded worth a try. Soon Will was putting in ten hours a week as an auxiliary, wearing a basic uniform and badge that were impressive even if they didn’t quite look like the real thing. Santos, head of the clean-up crew, kidded him about it. “You big Dick Tracy guy now!”
“Hardly! They’ve got me on park patrol. Last weekend I stopped some kids from throwing stones at the ducks.”
He’d been on the auxiliary force for three months, working Friday evenings and weekends in addition to his regular job. Sadie was pleased that he’d stuck with it and that he was thinking again about taking the police department exam. “You passed it last time, Will,” she told him. “And you’ve done well with the auxiliary. That should help.”
It would have helped, if it hadn’t been for that damned Friday. It was toward the end of the summer, on one of those rainy August weekends that seem to tell you autumn is just around the corner. No one came to the park on evenings like this. Sitting in his car, he’d found a half-smoked joint in his jacket pocket and decided to finish it. He’d just lit up when his supervisor came by.
Will tried to palm the joint, but its odor lingered in the car. “What’s that I smell, Blackstone?” the supervisor asked. He was a grizzly old man named Cranston who went by the rule book.
“I . . . I guess I — ”
“Are you smoking pot while on duty?”
“I had maybe one puff.”
“That’s one too many. You know the rules. Finish your shift tonight and then turn in your badge. You’re finished with the auxiliaries.”
“Yes, sir.” He flicked the butt out the car window into a puddle.
WILL DIDN’T TELL Sadie about the incident right away. He just said he was off for the weekend because they were overstaffed. He simply didn’t go in the next day and didn’t turn in the silver badge he’d come to admire. He kept it in his pocket when he went to work on Monday, half-thinking Cranston would be on the phone at any moment, demanding its return. But the police auxiliary was a volunteer organization and more loosely managed than the Force itself. The week passed without his hearing a thing.
That Saturday night he told Sadie Murray he’d quit the police auxiliary. “Why?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to get on the Force someday.”
“I did, I still do. But there are other ways to go about it. This way wasn’t getting me anywhere, and it was keeping us apart on weekends.”
“Your career is the important thing right now, Will. You don’t want to spend your life scraping brains off wallpaper.”
He was sorry he’d told her about some of Techno-Bio’s messier jobs. “I won’t be there forever,” he promised.
But the following Monday he was back again, working with Santos and the rest of the crew on an uptown apartment where an elderly woman and all her cats had passed away without notice several weeks earlier. Usually the routine was about the same. They entered the home or apartment dressed in biohazard suits until they could establish the extent of the cleanup. With luck, it might be confined to a tile bathroom, where the job was relatively easy.
The next few days passed uneventfully. The police auxiliary still hadn’t asked for their badge back, and the cleanups were messy but manageable. It was on another Friday — that damned day! — when the crew reached a Chestnut Street loft and found a nightmare of blood and guts covering the walls and floor.
“What happened here?” Santos asked the detective in charge. It was Sergeant Rafferty, and they all knew him.
“A mess is what happened, and we still haven’t straightened it all out,” Rafferty told them. “We had one body, a known drug dealer named Hashid, shot several times. But there’s a large quantity of blood from a second person whose body wasn’t found, as much as two or three quarts. The medical examiner doubts he could have left this loft alive after losing half the blood in his body.”
After he’d gone and the crew got to work, Santos said, “It is too much blood here. I feel death.”
“He could have had a friend who carried him away,” Will suggested.
“No elevator. Steep stairs and no blood on them. Why bother if he’s dead or dying?”
“His identity may implicate others.”
“Ha! Dick Tracy!” They’d been working most of the day on the loft, scrubbing and spraying, when Sergeant Rafferty returned, this time with the loft’s owner, Carlos Palmeto, a stocky man of about fifty who’d recently made a name for himself by converting a couple of loft buildings into upscale apartments for the gentry. His pale features were not particularly Hispanic, despite his name. As he walked through the areas they’d already scrubbed, running his fingers over some surfaces like an inspector general, Will felt that he was more interested in welcoming his next tenant than in mourning the past one. “Hashid was a loser from the start,” he told the detective. “More money than brains. I should have figured there were drugs involved.”
“Your statement says you were at the doctor’s about the time of the killing.”
The landlord nodded. “Near as I can tell. I have to see Doc Soloman twice a week for a phlebotomy. I stopped by here after the doctor’s and found this mess.”
“We’ve identified the other man through his DNA. We keep a file on convicted felons now. His name is Gutman, Samuel Gutman. Do you know him?”
Palmeto shook his head. “A lot of these people I know by sight, but the name means nothing to me.” He shifted his large frame as if trying to get comfortable in his leather jacket. “What was his felony?”
“He stole a large quantity of prescription drugs five years ago from a nursing home where he worked. He served fifteen months and was on probation for a year. Right now he’s missing from his apartment, and I expect we’ll find his body sooner or later.”
After Palmeto and the detective left, the Techno-Bio crew finished the cleanup. They were in the final phase, checking out the bathroom, when Will peered beneath the old claw-foot tub and spotted something the police had missed. It was a little black address book leaning against the black tile that circled the bottom of the wall. He wasn’t surprised that they’d missed it, if they even bothered to look beneath the tub.
The wisest thing would have been to turn the address book over to Sergeant Rafferty or Santos. But he might not see Rafferty again for a month or more, and Santos would only kid him about being Dick Tracy. He slipped it into his pocket and said nothing. Later, at his apartment, he opened it
and glanced through the names and addresses. Apparently it had belonged to Hashid, the man who’d rented the loft and died there. Will flipped to the G page and found several crossed-out addresses and phone numbers for Samuel Gutman, the man who was missing. The only number not crossed out was marked “cell.” He took a chance and punched in the number on his own cell phone. He heard a blast of music he vaguely recognized, plus the sound of male and female voices. “What’s up?” a man’s voice asked.
“Is this Gutman?” Will asked.
The voice didn’t answer, and after a few seconds the connection was broken. To Will’s ear, the music sounded like a jazz combo called the Lucky Spots who played at an East Side club named Schuster’s.
SADIE WAS OFF with some girlfriends that night, and he decided there was no harm in checking Schuster’s. He occasionally dropped in there anyway, and there was a good chance he could spot the man with Gutman’s cell phone. Before he left the apartment, he pocketed the police auxiliary badge that he’d failed to turn in. Maybe it would come in handy, and if he held his thumb over the word “Auxiliary,” it looked fairly authentic.
Schuster’s was always crowded on a Friday evening, when young (and not so young) singles were drawn there from the nearby office buildings. Will could hear the jazzy sounds of the Lucky Spots before he was through the door, and he was certain that that was the music he’d heard on the cell phone. The bar was crowded, three-deep in some spots, with every table taken. He managed to get close enough to order a beer, glancing around for someone he knew. Finally he stood against one wall, out of the flow of traffic, and tried to spot the man he sought. It occurred to Will that the man might have departed in the time it took for him to get there. He reached into his pocket for the cell phone and entered six of the seven numbers on Gutman’s phone. Then he made his way into the thick of the crowd, about halfway to the bandstand. Moving between the booths and the tables, he pressed the final number on his cell phone.
Even with the noise, he heard it ring, about ten feet behind him in one of the booths. He casually turned in that direction, leaving the phone in his pocket. A young woman with a reddish-brown ponytail held the phone to her ear and tried to get a response. “Hello? Is anyone there?” Finally she muttered something he couldn’t catch and returned the phone to her purse. She was seated with two men, but neither of them had claimed the cell phone. Still, it was a man who had answered earlier.