Stella rose from her bed and straightened her spine. She was an actress. She would make them believe her. All it would take was attitude and the right persona, but which one? Turning to the mirror on the wall, she asked, ‘Who am I today?’
Nobody, said the mirror. You’re just a little girl from Ohio.
Stella nodded, then picked up the ruined suit jacket and traced the nasty black X with one finger. Every nice thing was ruined in this town, Bitch City.
Heavy footsteps were coming down the hall. They stopped outside her apartment. The police? She held her breath and played the statue, eyes fixed on a white envelope sliding under her door. It must be a summons. Oh, she was in so much trouble. The footsteps trailed off toward the stairs. Overwhelmed by dread, her feet weighed a hundred pounds, each one, as she approached the envelope on the floor. It was another few minutes before she gave herself up for dead and opened it.
Impossible.
It was a gift certificate from a Fifth Avenue department store where she could not afford to breathe the air. So much money. This would replace her ruined suit with something from the designer section – and shoes, new shoes.
Fifth Avenue was singing to her, Get your tail down to the store, babe.
On her way out the door, she considered the source of this bounty, quickly ruling out her Sunday school God, Who would not have survived for six minutes in New York City. Her savior could only be an apologetic vandal, a disturbed soap-opera fan who had gone too far and wanted to make amends.
Blessed are the mental cases.
Halfway down the stairs she stopped. There was no air-conditioning in the common areas of the building, yet she felt an icy sensation in her chest. In movie lore, scary cold spots marked the presence of haunts in abandoned houses. And women?
He knows where I live.
Sergeant Bell sat behind the front desk facing the door of the police station. He was waiting for Lieutenant Coffey’s order to send up the suspect. In peripheral vision, he kept watch over the fireman. Gary Zappata was working the cops in uniform, slapping backs and politicking, though he had never had a single friend in this precinct. The detectives walked in the front door – three of them, if Sergeant Bell counted the whiteshield from the East Side squad. Riker had a few words with Deluthe, who then raced up the staircase to Special Crimes Unit, his feet hitting every third step like a galloping puppy.
Riker and Mallory were in no hurry as they crossed the wide floor, walking in tandem. They ignored the rookie fireman swaggering toward them.
Zappata squared off, legs apart, hands on his hips, then yelled, ‘I know what you did to me, Riker! You cheap shit! You snitch!’
The desk sergeant silently begged, Please, Riker, don’t do anything stupid. It was worth a lawsuit if the detective slugged this man. And perhaps that was what Zappata was hoping for, since he was out of a job with the fire department and could never come back to NYPD.
The fireman strutted toward the partners. ‘You ratted me out.’ He glared at Riker, then puffed out his chest. ‘You drunken asshole.’ Zappata turned his smug face to Mallory, saying, ‘Well, if it ain’t the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Stay out of my way, bitch.’ He glanced over his shoulder and smiled at the battery of men and women in uniform, as if expecting applause for this very big mistake.
Mallory never flinched, but Riker’s hands balled into fists. Sergeant Bell thought of calling the lieutenant down to end this before it -
The desk sergeant looked up to see Jack Coffey standing at the top of the stairs, hands in his pockets, quietly watching.
The short fireman moved to block Riker’s path.
Another big mistake.
‘You couldn’t face me like a man,’ said Zappata. ‘You back-stabbing piece of crap.’
The two detectives closed their distance with the fireman.
Any second now.
The phones stopped ringing. The only noise came from a civilian clerk, fingers typing, lightly skimming the keys.
– tap, tap, tap, tap -
The fireman was playing to his audience of uniforms, and he was so cocky, rocking on his heels, smiling too wide for a man so off balance. The dead silence from the uniforms gave him no clue that Riker was about to pound him into the ground.
It was not a sucker punch, though Zappata never saw it coming, not from the Ladies’ Auxiliary. One moment he was standing up – Mallory’s fist shot out fast and sure as a hammerfall, and then he was lying on the floor, having a quiet nosebleed.
She stood over Zappata’s prone body, braced like a prizefighter awaiting the payback that would surely follow when this man found his feet again. With one quick glance at Riker, she warned him away. Sergeant Bell smiled, and there were nods of approval all around the room. Markowitz’s daughter would not look to her partner or anyone else to finish off Zappata. By Mallory’s stance, he could even guess which knee she planned to smash into the fireman’s testicles.
The man at her feet was conscious, but he would not or could not move. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with an idiot gape of wide eyes and slack mouth.
The clerk stopped typing. The uniforms were stealing glances at Mallory, the bomb at the center of the room. A telephone rang to jangle nerve endings, and then another phone went off. Papers shuffled, typing and conversation resumed. Officers walked to and fro, some stepping over Zappata’s body on the way to the door -life went on.
Once the squad room door was closed and Jack Coffey was facing Mallory, she missed her opportunity to say, I told you so, but the sentiment was clear when she turned her back on him and walked down the hall toward the incident room.
Sergeant Bell opened the stairwell door and leaned in, asking, ‘Hey, Lieutenant? You still wanna question Zappata?’
‘No, just roll him out on the sidewalk.’ Coffey planned to follow the lead of ten uniforms and the desk sergeant, to say that he had been looking elsewhere when the fireman tripped. A blue wall of cops was securely closed around Mallory. Not that Coffey worried about consequences. What were the odds that Zappata would file a police brutality suit against a girl? Mallory was going to get away with this. The lieutenant watched her disappear through the door at the end of the hall.
‘Maybe you noticed.’ Riker slumped down in a chair. ‘Your favorite suspect has a glass jaw.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Now Sparrow was a big girl, and real good in a street fight – better than Mallory. There’s no way that twerp could’ve taken her down.’
‘Even with a razor in his hand?’
‘You think he’d know what to do with it? I don’t. We’re looking for somebody a lot scarier than Zappata.’
Riker stood before the back wall of the incident room and cleared a space for a photograph from Natalie Homer’s actress portfolio. The hangings had finally been merged into one case. He pinned the woman’s smiling face to the cork alongside the effigy made of clothes. Now they hung together, Natalie and the scarecrow, mother and child.
Detective Janos pinned a note near the newspaper account of a stabbed actress. ‘I talked to Stella Small’s agent and the doctor who treated her razor cut. They both say the assault happened on a crowded street. Now that works with what you got from Lieutenant Loman. All the hassling went on in crowded places.’
‘That pattern won’t hold up for Sparrow, not the week before the hanging.’ Riker walked over to the next wall and pulled a statement down, then handed it to Janos. ‘That’s the interview with the director of the play. Sparrow told him she was between day jobs, and she spent four days learning the lines of the play before she auditioned. Well, that just impressed the shit out of him. That’s why he gave her the part. And there were no open auditions the week before she died, so she wasn’t commuting on the subway at rush hour.’