Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (67 page)

“But it cannot have been honor, Magnus,” said Treviscoe. “'Twas pride and hatred. It were to satisfy honor if Captain Muldaur had challenged Dr. Synge to a duel and kept the combat between them. Instead he saw fit to involve a slave, a man without recourse to his own will, and submit him to the indignities of bondage and the boxing ring, and even to renege on a promise of manumission so his pride might be salved through an act of vengeance. I cannot call that honorable behavior.”

“But Hero is free at last.”

Treviscoe nodded.

“Yes, there is that. I do not think that a man of his parts will long be satisfied to submit to a life of service, having so recently gained his liberty. Yet he is old to 'prentice to any trade.”

“He has skills you may find useful in your profession, Alan. It may be just the calling for him.”

At that moment Hero entered the room. “I have just been to Lloyd's, sir, to collect your correspondence,” he said. “When it became known I was acting on your behalf, a gentleman made so bold as to ask if you might entertain a proposal for a commission.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, sir. It seems there may be some question as to the confidentiality of maritime reports arriving on the Plymouth post coach.”

Treviscoe exchanged a meaningful glance with Captain Gunn. He sat up and said quietly, “Tell me more, Hero. There may be work for us here.”

7:00
A.M.

The radio alarm
by Larry Erie's queen-sized bed turned itself on. A deep-voiced announcer began telling Erie about the morning's top stories. Erie didn't really care what the morning's top stories might be, but he lay there for a while and let the announcer ramble.

There was nobody there to give him a playful kick and tell him to shut that noise off. There was nobody there to make breakfast for. There was nobody there to fetch pills for. It was just him and the announcer.

7:19
A.M.

E
RIE FINALLY PULLED
himself out of bed and went out to the porch in his pajamas and robe to pick up the morning paper. It was cool outside, just like the cheerful people on the radio said it would be. A storm passing through in the night had left puddles on the pavement.

He scanned the yard for the little black shape that sometimes came bounding up to him from behind shrubs or garbage cans, meowing greetings at him as if he were a long-lost relative. But the cat wasn't there. Erie went back inside.

He ate breakfast sitting on the edge of the bed. It was a habit he couldn't drop even though there was no longer anyone there to keep company.

7:42
A.M.

E
RIE SHOWERED,
shaved, flossed, brushed, gargled, rinsed, and repeated. Then he carefully picked out his clothes. He pulled on his best white shirt, his best suit, his favorite tie. He shined his shoes before putting them on. He looked at himself in the mirror, straightened his tie, smoothed a few errant hairs into place. Then he pulled his gun off the bureau and clipped it onto his belt.

Some cops started to get a little sloppy years before they retired. Others waited till just a few months or weeks before their last day to start letting themselves go. Erie remembered one cop, a fellow detective, who came in for his last day in a Hawaiian shirt and bermuda shorts. It gave everybody a good laugh.

But that wasn't Erie's way. He was determined to make every day of his time on the force count. Even his last.

8:07
A.M.

E
RIE WAS REACHING
out to open his car door when he heard the cat. She was hurrying up the driveway toward him, meowing loudly. He knelt and stretched out his right arm. As always, the cat rubbed her face on his hand several times before flopping over on her back and stretching out her legs. He rubbed her stomach. Her fur was long and matted.

“How do you like that, buddy? How do you like that?” Erie asked the cat.

The cat purred.

Erie had never owned a cat, never really known a cat, never been interested in them. He had no idea how old the little black cat was. She'd been hanging around the neighborhood about a month. She had grown noticeably bigger since he'd first seen her. She had also become friendlier. She wore no collar or tags.

Occasionally Erie had found himself worrying about the cat. Where was she sleeping? What was she eating? He'd seen her once over by Green River Road, and the thought of her trying to cross busy streets had haunted him for hours.

But Erie always reminded himself that he wasn't a cat person. And he had bigger things to worry about than dumb animals.

“That's enough for today,” he told the cat as he stood up. She rolled over on her stomach and looked up at him expectantly. “Nope. No more. So long.”

He climbed into his car and started the engine. He backed out of the driveway slowly, keeping an eye on the cat lest she jump up and dart under the tires. But she stayed where she was, watching him, seemingly puzzled by his desire to leave this perfectly wonderful driveway and this perfectly wonderful cat.

8:33
A.M.

O
N HIS WAY
into police headquarters from the parking lot, Erie was stopped by three cops. They were all men he hadn't seen or spoken to in the last week. Each one stopped him separately and said the same thing.

“I'm sorry about your wife.”

Erie said the only thing he could: “Thanks.”

On his way past the human resources office a female coworker called out, “Look who's early! Hey, Larry, don't you know you're not supposed to come in before noon on your last day!”

“The early bird catches the worm,” Erie said.

A uniformed officer stopped as she passed. “You don't have to worry about catching worms anymore, Detective Erie. You just head down to Arizona and catch some sun. Leave the worms to us.”

8:45
A.M.

E
RIE HAD ALREADY
cleaned out his office, for the most part. The walls were bare, his desktop was free of clutter, the drawers were practically empty aside from a few stray pens and paper clips and leftover forms. So it was impossible to miss the yellow Post-it note stuck to the exact center of his desktop. It was from Hal Allen, director of Detective Services/Homicide—his boss. The note read, “See me in my office ASAP.” Erie hoped it was a special assignment, a favor he could do for Allen or the department, something that would draw on his decades of experience, something that would make his last eight hours as a police officer count.

8:48
A.M.

E
RIE KNEW
he was in trouble the second he stepped into the office of May Davis, Allen's administrative assistant and official gatekeeper. He'd walked into a trap, and there was no way out.

Twenty people were crammed behind Davis's desk. Behind them was a banner reading WE'LL MISS YOU, BIG GUY! On it were dozens of signatures surrounded by drawings of handcuffs and police badges and men in striped prison uniforms. The people waiting for him, the entire Homicide Division reinforced by a couple of evidence technicians and some of his old buddies from other departments, began singing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Erie stood there, smiling dutifully, and took it like a man.

9:09
A.M.

E
RIE ENDURED THE
song and the hugs and the slaps on the back and the vanilla cake with the outline of Arizona in orange frosting. He endured Allen's speech about thirty-three years of service and one hundred twelve murderers behind bars. He endured it all without ever saying, “What about those twenty-nine
unsolved
murders?” or “Why would I move to Arizona without Nancy?”

And after the ordeal was over and the revelers had all drifted away, it became clear that he was supposed to drift away, too. There were forms to fill out and drawers to empty, right? Instead, he asked Hal Allen if they could step into his office.

“What's on your mind, Larry?”

Allen was a different breed of cop. He was younger than Erie. He worked out every day. His walls weren't covered with pictures of his kids or newspaper articles about his big busts. He had his degrees—a BA in criminal justice, a master's in psychology—and inspirational posters about Leadership and Goals. For him, being a cop wasn't a calling, it was a career choice. But Erie liked him and hoped he would understand.

“I was wondering if I could take back one of my cases.”

“Come on, Larry,” Allen said. “You're going to have to let go.”

“Just for today, Hal. I just want to make some inquiries, see if I can get the ball rolling again. At the end of the day I'll turn it back over to Dave Rogers with a full briefing.”

Allen shook his head, grinning. “I've heard of this condition. It's called dedication to duty. We're going to have to cure you of it. I prescribe a day playing computer solitaire followed by a much-deserved early retirement in beautiful, sunny Arizona.”

“Nancy liked Arizona, Hal. We were moving there for her.”

“Oh.” The smile melted off Allen's face. “So you're not—”

“I don't know. We hadn't signed anything yet when Nancy took that last turn for the worse. I'm not sure I want to leave Indiana. I've lived here all my life.” Erie shifted nervously in his seat. “But that's neither here nor there. I'm just asking for one more day to protect and serve.”

Allen leaned forward in his swivel chair and gave Erie a long, thoughtful look as if really seeing him for the first time. “You're not going to solve your one hundred thirteenth homicide today, Larry. You're just going to end up chasing around stone-cold leads and getting nowhere.”

“I love days like that.”

Allen nodded. “Okay. Do what you have to do. But drop by my office before you go home tonight. I want to talk to you again.”

Erie practically jumped up from his chair. For the first time that day he actually felt awake.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Anything you say.”

9:31
A.M.

D
ETECTIVE
D
AVID
R
OGERS
was on the phone when Erie appeared in the doorway to his office. Rogers waved him in, said, “No problem,” and hung up. “The boss says you want to catch a bad guy today,” he said.

“I just want to borrow back one of my cases. Is that okay with you?”

Rogers smiled and pointed at a stack of bound folders on one corner of his desk. “Pick your poison,” he said. “If you insist on working your last day, I'm not going to stop you.”

Erie shuffled through the case files. Did he want the fifteen-year-old crack dealer, four months dead? The unidentified, twenty-something woman found in the woods of Lloyd Park, six months dead? Or the middle-aged insurance salesman, ten months dead?

Lifeless eyes stared up at him from Polaroids paper-clipped to Xeroxed autopsy reports. They looked inside him, told him, “Do something. Avenge me. Avenge
me
.”

But justice isn't for the dead. That was one of the things he had learned in his years working homicide. It's no use fighting a crusade for a corpse. It will still be a corpse even if somebody turns its killer into a corpse, too. But the family, the loved ones,
the living
—they can be helped.

He chose a file and left.

10:07
A.M.

U
NLIKE MOST OF
the older, lower-middle-class neighborhoods around town, Pine Hills actually lived up to its name. It had both pines and hills, though not many of either. It also had a reputation among Erie's fellow cops for producing wild kids. On Halloween night, patrol cars cruised through the neighborhood as if it were Compton or Watts, and EMT crews waited on standby for the inevitable wounds from bottle rockets, M-80s, broken glass, and exploding mailboxes.

O'Hara Drive was a short, crooked, sloping street in the heart of the neighborhood. It was all of one block long, bracketed on each side by longer streets that curved up to the neighborhood's highest hills. From the top of one you could see the airport just a mile away. From the other you could see the county dump.

The house at 1701 O'Hara Drive wasn't just where Joel Korfmann, insurance salesman, had lived. It was where he had died, too. There were two vehicles in the driveway when Erie arrived—a silver, mid-'90s model Ford Taurus and a newer Ford pickup, red. The Taurus he remembered.