Authors: Tom Piccirilli
Jessie said, “She never came back.”
For a second he thought she meant Ava. It stymied him. Ava didn’t go anywhere at the end. Then he realized she was talking about Florence.
He scanned the theater. Florence never left a movie. She had to use the bathroom a lot, but she never spent more than five minutes away from the film. She never would’ve quit on Edmond.
Flynn stood and started up the aisle. The box of Dots spilled around his feet and the candy rolled under the seats, loud as ball bearings. Jessie Gray followed him closely. He wasn’t sure if she should. He wanted to send her away but didn’t want her to go anywhere alone. He got that intense feeling again that everything he was doing was the wrong move.
They got out into the lobby. It was empty. Through the wide glass doors he could see Huey and Hazel out on the sidewalk sharing a cigarette. The sun was down. It looked like it might snow again.
“I’ll check the ladies’ room,” Jessie said.
“I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t.”
“Consider me an escort.”
“You’re starting to scare me.”
The black nerve began to bang around inside him. Every step took him farther along the midnight road. He pushed in the ladies’ room door. Jessie Gray came in behind him and let out a brief scream.
Florence sat on the floor, near the sink, with her blouse torn open and her breasts exposed. Her hands lay on the tile beside her legs, palms up. They looked youthful and soft. Her chin rested on her chest. Her eyes were half-open in an endless gaze. Her breasts were what he thought of as medium-sized, drooped and wrinkled. But there was something else. Her chest was pink and slightly puckered over her heart. Her nails were cracked. Half-moon indents scored her palms. Whatever had happened, she’d felt it.
The uneaten box of popcorn was propped in her lap.
Set on top of it was a neatly typewritten note.
I CAN’T STAND THIS ANYMORE. CAN YOU?
ELEVEN
No, he couldn’t. And he wanted to climb a tower in the center of the city and let everybody know it. Sometimes the scream inside you needed out, and it was all you could do to keep your teeth champed.
Jessie was talking to the cops, smiling and looking very sincere and cooperative. She’d upped the charm factor and somehow looked even more attractive. She’d slid into reporter mode. It was just her way, he knew, as she hounded out a story. It activated her, brought out her best.
Flynn hoped she’d do the
Parade
article one of these days and make Florence’s love of film, rather than her murder, the centerpiece.
Raidin was on the scene even though the city homicide dicks had caught the squeal. They kept up a steady stream of questions that Flynn answered as well as he could.
It wasn’t long before they started implying he’d killed the old lady himself. If Flynn hadn’t been expecting it, he would’ve been sickened, or maybe he would’ve laughed in their faces. The Manhattan police made up the dumbest reasoning he’d ever heard. Flynn had wanted her money. He’d killed her in self-defense. He did it for the media coverage. Grinning and telling him he was a murderer in an amiable matter-of-fact manner, as if they were all good friends, like they might go out and grab a beer afterward. He thought if this was how they ran every investigation, it was amazing that anybody ever got put in prison.
They had no one else to cling to. Things were going to be even rougher now. They were going to turn up the heat on him.
Huey and Hazel stood huddled together in the lobby as Raidin questioned them. Huey’s breath reeked so bad that Flynn smelled it from fifteen feet away. He was drinking the cheap stuff nowadays. Four Roses, the same shit Flynn’s father had downed toward the end. Huey admitted he’d been up the block having a couple of shots. Hazel had been in the back going through yesterday’s receipts. Nobody ever came into the Paradigm halfway through the film. She hadn’t seen anyone.
Raidin didn’t believe it, or acted like he didn’t. Nobody left an entire theater unattended for any length of time. Hazel said it wasn’t unattended, Gramps and Flynn were here. Raidin had no idea how houses like this worked. How few people came for the early show. It didn’t matter. The stiletto was determined to give everybody a hard time. Flynn didn’t have much faith, but he decided that Raidin might work the case hard enough for something to shake loose.
Flynn finally got his first look at Gramps. He was a hard man, maybe seventy years old, clean-shaven, bald, with hip, fashionable glasses that changed tint depending on the light. He didn’t like the way Raidin spoke to his son and daughter-in-law and let the detective know it. Flynn loved older folks who didn’t take shit off anybody. He didn’t think he was ever going to be one.
Gramps was acting like he was about to throw down. The other cops started to move in a little closer. Huey tried to calm his father and eventually the old man had his last say and stood there breathing deeply, the tendons standing out on his wiry arms.
The stiletto turned to Flynn and did a short skinny guy’s dance over to him. He was decked in the same black outfit as before: black raincoat with heavy lining, gloves, three-piece suit. A different tie today. His hazy gray eyes appeared even more lifeless in the dim lighting of the Paradigm.
Raidin said, “Okay, please tell it to me from the beginning.”
At least he wasn’t going to waste any more of Flynn’s time. Flynn told him everything. His brief exchange with Florence. He explained about Flo’s colon cancer and how she still bought lots of candy. Every detail he could remember. When he got to the end of it he should’ve stopped but couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He said, “He’s bringing it closer to me now. Florence always had to run to the ladies’ room halfway through a show. If he’s targeting people around me, she fell into his lap. If he was waiting out in there for me to go hit the head—” Flynn thought about it, wishing it had happened. “He’s slick and steadfast.”
“He couldn’t plan on the owners being out of the theater.”
“It was a safe enough bet. Huey always goes for a bar run. There’s always something for Hazel to do in the office. She’s busy. She doesn’t just stand in the lobby. If he’s been watching, he knew that. If not, he got lucky.”
“Things run a little differently here than at the multiplex.”
“Oh yeah.”
Raidin ran his thumb under his chin. He stared through Flynn, then through the wall, his gaze brooding and steady, seeing how it would’ve gone down. “By his own admission, he’s in pain. At his breaking point. Why? What does he feel that you’ve done to him?”
It always came back to Flynn hurting the poor killer in the snow. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” Raidin said, assured and calm. “Somewhere. You’ve got to think it through.”
“I’ve been doing nothing but.”
“You’ve got to make more of an effort.”
It nearly sounded like encouragement or faith. Flynn knew it was neither. Raidin would always be suspicious, he had to be. It was the way he went at the world, probably what made him a good cop if he was one. He’d always have one finger ready to tap Flynn for murder.
“I’ve tried,” Flynn said.
“Not hard enough.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“The only one I can think of is Bragg. That’s when this all started.”
“Bragg’s dead.”
“Maybe.”
“Forget him. Guy like you, with all your natural charm, has got to have plenty of enemies.” He drew several creased pages from his pocket and handed them to Flynn. It was a lengthy list of names. He recognized some of them. All the real hardasses and violent offenders from his past cases.
Flynn said, “You’ve been checking them out?”
“Yeah, so far it seems like everyone’s got a firm alibi for the Angela Soto murder, and now we’ll go through them again to see where they were all at this afternoon. Any name on there jump out at you?”
Flynn scanned the list, remembering a lot of rough scenes, some fisticuffs, a couple of serious threats. A couple of the folks jabbing knives, waving guns. Seeing it all laid out before him now, the names stacked up like this, he was surprised to realize at least half of the real scary times he’d had were when he was dealing with women. He said, “Miriam Welby.” He recalled a vicious woman who tried to brain him with a meat-tenderizer.
“She’s in prison.”
“For hurting her daughter?”
“No,” Raidin said, “for capping her husband. The daughter’s with relatives and flourishing. Anybody else?”
They were all loose cannons, he tried to put them in order of the loosest. “Don Charrier. Guy pulled a .22 on me. Shot his house up, tried to chase me out.”
“What’d you do?”
“He was ranting and drunk, nearly out on his feet. He could barely see. He fell on his face and I took the pistol away. In court he said he was stressed because his mother was sick, but when he lost custody of his kids he swore he’d get even. With me, with the judge. He was just letting off steam. It was over two years ago. What was his alibi?”
“He’s dead. His mother was terminally ill. He shot himself in the head on his ex-wife’s lawn.”
“Jesus!” In Flynn’s hands, pages of misery, like all the files and records of pain he dealt with every day. “Not for nothing, but if they’re no longer viable suspects, shouldn’t they be crossed off the fucking list?”
“I wanted your unbiased opinion on your past caseload.”
“Yeah right.” So, not only checking them out, but checking him out too, Flynn thought. He got out a pen and put a check next to three more names. He didn’t think any of them would come at him in this way, killing folks around him, but it gave him a feeling that he was doing some thing proactive. Even though, for all he knew, they were dead or in prison or comatose too.
Their gazes locked, and they had a brief stare-down. You could learn a lot from a person during those five seconds. Flynn kept trying to look into Raidin’s brain and see what lay behind the steel-gray front.
“Are you married?” he asked.
The cop cocked an ear, and his brow furrowed like he couldn’t quite believe he’d heard what he’d heard. “What did you just ask me?”
“I asked if you were married. Do you have children?”
Raidin’s features flattened and hardened until he seemed carved from stone. Absolutely no emotion showed but Flynn sensed Raidin’s rage growing by the second. Flynn had crossed a line. You could do a lot but you had to know when to ask about somebody else’s personal journey and when to keep quiet about it.
Okay, bad call. Erase it, make like it never happened.
“The notes,” Flynn said. “What can you tell me about the forensic testing? Fingerprints? The ink?”
“Tell you?” Raidin’s lips moved, framing the words like he didn’t fully understand them. He looked Flynn up and down, allowing just a minimum of annoyance to enter his eyes. “Who are you? I’ve got nothing to tell you.” Saying it quietly, but with his usual edge.
The EMTs wheeled Florence out on a gurney to an ambulance parked at the curb. They hadn’t fully covered her face. Flynn thought they always draped a sheet over a corpse’s face, but there Florence was for everyone out on the street to see. The vultures were out, excited, angling over the police line to get a better glimpse of the dead. The M.E. had searched inside her mouth and left Florence’s lips skewed in an unnatural manner, skinned back over her brown teeth. Flynn watched them load her body into the back of the ambulance. The paramedics sat across from her talking. One of them let out a laugh. It was a normal thing. She was dead. There was no implied insult, but Flynn wanted to bounce the guy on his ass up and down the block. You could get angry at anyone for any thing.
“What did he do to her?” Flynn asked.
“She’s got burn marks to the chest.”
“I saw that. What kind of burns are they?”
“Maybe a taser.”
“She was fit. Hard, strong.”
“She got zapped repeatedly, and the ordeal brought about fibrillation and heart seizure.”
“Jesus Christ,” Flynn whispered. The black nerve tore through him, on fire.
He held his white-knuckled fists down to his sides. He drove them against his legs. It didn’t hurt enough to dampen the ache that continued to grow inside him. While he’d been watching Burt and Ava getting it on, his friend was being murdered in the bathroom. He swallowed down a meaningless noise.
Raidin said, “Now he’s inflicting himself upon people you definitely know.”
“Where were your men? You had them tailing me for weeks.”
“We pulled them off four days ago. Didn’t you notice?”
Flynn’s tongue got away from him. He couldn’t help himself. No style, no composure. Iced, but no cool. “You stupid bastard.”
Raidin chopped Flynn in the throat with the side of his gloved hand. It was a fast and efficient move that hurt like hell. Flynn fell to one knee and tried to suck air but nothing went down his windpipe. The panic rose and began to overshadow his thoughts. Sweat slithered through his hair. He was going to die again. Jessie Gray would have to rewrite the story. Scratch out the last paragraph and substitute,
And then, in a deadly twist of fate—