As Halloween draws nearer, the ghostly images from their past become more threatening for Starsky and Hutch, while their current case draws them further into the unexplained realm of the dead.
Artwork by Shar.
Revenant: One who returns after a long absence…or, one who returns after death.
“Anything new from the lab?” Hutch asked as he and Starsky took their seats in Dobey’s office, having been summoned there as soon as they arrived for work.
“Well, they did find a blonde hair–”
“In Hutch’s apartment? That’s kinda expected,” Starsky said, taking a drink of his coffee.
“A female blonde hair. Which may or may not be significant,” Dobey added, smiling a little conspiratorially before looking back at the file. “We’ll need to know if there have been any blonde females there in the recent past who may have left it behind.”
“Nope,” Hutch said decisively, and if the statement surprised Dobey, he didn’t give any indication, though his expression sobered. “Besides, the lab just went through the place a few days ago.”
“It’s entirely possible they missed it on the first round,” Dobey conceded.
“So we’re looking for a blonde woman?” Starsky asked, his eyes widening.
“There could be another explanation for how the hair got there,” Hutch said. “Still, it’s a pretty strong lead.”
“Speaking of strong leads, I was reading through your report of your meeting with Marie Sherman. That’s one sick bunch over at that Sayer place, apparently.”
“It just doesn’t make sense, Captain. You run a respectable business for years–you’re the second generation, it’s making good money…. In both cases, the families were planning open casket visitations. Even if one of the Sayers is some sort of nut, he’d know enough about handling corpses to know that you couldn’t reposition them and fiddle with their expressions when they were still somewhat flexible, and then…fix them in time for the families to arrive. So why would you do it? It doesn’t add up. It’s more likely that someone was out to get them,” Hutch concluded. “We’re going to question Perry and Rydell again, as soon as we talk to the other lady–what’s her name, Starsk?”
“Judy Waxman. Her husband was supposedly…uh…mishandled by the Sayers. Once we have both dates, we’re going to make sure our favorite frat boys can account for their whereabouts.”
“Is there anyone in the Sherman family who might have been angry enough to fake the situation with the Waxman family to make the Sayers look bad?” Dobey suggested.
“It’s always possible. I guess the dead woman’s brother got physically aggressive with Michael Sayer,” Starsky responded.
“Well, keep on it. Meanwhile, you better go lean on Huggy Bear to track down that private eye friend of his. Whoever is playing these little jokes on you is getting more serious by the day.”
“No arguments there, Captain,” Hutch agreed.
“And while you’re at it, I need the final reports on the Fielding and Grayson cases.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” Starsky said, trying to sound cheery at the thought of more paperwork. Dobey just gave him a skeptical expression and waved them off to go about their business.
“I’ll type the old reports if you want to call and see if Steven Sayer’s back in town yet,” Hutch offered. Starsky brightened immediately.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” Hutch said a bit dismally, but then smiled. “Of course, you realize this means that you owe me. Big.”
“You can take it out in trade, Blondie,” Starsky whispered back, flexing his eyebrows. The telephone pre-empted Hutch’s response.
“Hutchinson,” he said, his boredom with the upcoming paperwork plain in his voice.
“Yeah, Hutch, it’s Lizzie. Would you have a minute to meet me in the cafeteria?”
“Uh, yeah, I suppose. I’m just catching up on some paperwork.”
“It won’t take long, but I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure. See you in a few minutes.” Hutch hung up and looked over at Starsky. “Lizzie wants to talk to me.”
“You think Flores said something to her?”
“I don’t know.” Hutch shrugged. “I hate being in the middle of this.”
“Yeah, well, maybe she just wants to talk to somebody about it. Not a lotta people she could trust talkin’ about that.”
“I told her I’d meet her.” Hutch rose a little hesitantly.
“Bring me back a jelly donut, will ya?” Starsky didn’t look up from his reading as Hutch walked around the end of the desks and paused behind Starsky’s chair. He leaned in close to his partner’s ear.
“Sweets for the sweet,” he said in a husky whisper, running his hand lightly over Starsky’s back as he walked away toward the door. When he glanced back, his partner was grinning and blushing, surreptitiously looking at him from under lowered lashes.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Lizzie said, stirring her coffee with the little plastic mixing stick, more as a nervous gesture than a need to blend in the creamer, which had become one with the dark liquid many revolutions earlier.
“Something wrong?”
“Arturo said he’s requesting a new partner.” Lizzie watched Hutch’s reaction carefully with a detective’s eye. Hutch knew perfectly well he wasn’t concealing his lack of surprise, or his disappointment. “So you do know what’s up with him. I figured.” She finally stopped torturing the coffee and took a drink of it.
“Didn’t he give you a reason?” Hutch asked hopefully, thinking maybe Flores had come up with something to cover his actions that Lizzie could accept.
“If he’d given me one that I believed, would I be asking you?” She shook her head. “He just said ‘this isn’t working out, but it’s nothing personal’ and that was it. Just like that. He dropped that one on me at the end of our shift last night. I was driving, and I dropped him off at his place, and he said that and got out of the car.”
“Look, Lizzie, I’m in a really bad position here. You and Arturo are both friends, and–”
“Yeah, I know, and my putting you on the spot is a lousy thing to do. I guess I’m grasping at straws.” She was quiet a moment. “Hutch, this is my first serious police work. I know I made a few busts working for Vice, and we worked that murder case together, but making the move to Homicide, hitting the streets to do more than stand under a streetlight luring perverts means a lot to me. It’s a big step. I was really happy to get partnered with Arturo, because he’s a good cop. He knows his stuff. We made some good collars. I’m not saying this right. I guess I keep wondering if I did something wrong, or if he doesn’t trust me, or if I’m not handling real police work well.”
“I’m sure that’s not it.”
“Really? I’m not trying to put you on the spot, Hutch, honestly. I have a little girl to consider, and if I’m not a good cop, I’ll end up a dead cop, and that’s not fair to her. I also don’t want to get some other cop I’m teamed up with killed. I thought I was doing all right. My scores at the shooting range are good, and I’m not afraid to use my piece if I have to.”
“This isn’t about your abilities, that much I can tell you. At least, I think you deserve to know that much.”
“I deserve to know the straight answer, and you know it. How would you feel if Starsky just got out of the car one night and said, ‘that’s it, it’s been real, see ya ’round’?”
“We’ve been together a little longer than you and Flores.”
“Even when you’d only been together a few months, then.”
“We were friends in the Academy. I can’t picture that. We were too close even before we were officially partners for one of us to walk away from any project we were on and get away with that. I had partnerships when I was first learning the ropes that were temporary, and they weren’t all that meaningful, beyond appreciating some of the things those guys taught me.”
“But this decision came from Arturo, not from Dobey. I don’t get it.”
“There must be something that’s changed in your relationship lately that would give you a clue,” Hutch said, knowing he was skirting close to the truth, but unwilling to say it in so many words.
“The last couple days, he’s been pretty moody and withdrawn. I know things aren’t perfect at home since Carolyn lost the baby, but that’s an awfully hard thing to go through, so it takes time. Maybe it’s just pressures from home. I don’t know.”
“I think you should talk to Arturo. He really does like and respect you, Lizzie. I know that. This isn’t about thinking you’re an inferior cop or not liking you. But he’s got to be the one to explain his reasons.”
“There is one thing. It’s so stupid that I never really gave it much thought…. The other night, we were on this stake-out, and I guess we should have known better than to be so close to the subject, but we had to do something to be sure we weren’t spotted sitting there in the car like a couple of cops on a stake-out. I grabbed Arturo and…well, let’s just say I really put a lot of energy into that fake kiss. But I was doing it for the car that was passing us. I mean, I couldn’t look like I was kissing my brother on the cheek.”
“Did he say anything about it?”
“Not in so many words, but he seemed a little unnerved by it. I tried to joke about it with him. I didn’t mean to make him feel…I don’t know…violated. It was just a kiss–well, more like a few of them until we were sure the coast was clear. It’s not like I groped him or something,” she said, lowering her voice. She watched Hutch’s expression intently, and Hutch hoped he was keeping his features neutral enough to not betray that she had hit on the very heart of the issue. Or, at least close to it.
“That’s an old trick. I doubt he’d feel violated by it.”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Hutch, come on, at least tell me if I’m on the right track.”
“You’re a sharp cop, Lizzie.” Hutch rose from his chair. “You don’t need me to figure this out. You need to talk to your partner.”
“If he still is. Thanks, Hutch. I didn’t mean to cross-examine you. I’m just not having much luck getting anything out of Arturo, but I’ll try again.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah. Put in a good word for me if you see the jerk, will ya?”
“That I can do,” Hutch said, smiling as he left the table and headed back to the squadroom.
Judy Waxman was a stout woman in her mid-fifties with dyed brown hair and glasses. She arranged to meet with Starsky and Hutch in a small restaurant a short drive from police headquarters. When the two detectives arrived, they spotted a woman wearing a blue sweater and slacks, the outfit she described on the phone. They approached her table and introduced themselves, and when they were seated, Starsky asked the first question.
“Mrs. Waxman, I know this is a difficult subject, but being the Sayer Funeral Home is a crime scene now, we really do need to know the details of what happened when you made arrangements for your husband there.”
“You know, I still can’t believe what those sick bastards did. I hope they revoke their license and then throw their miserable carcasses in the joint,” she responded, her blunt phraseology surprising both men.
“We spoke with Mrs. Sherman–she certainly told a very upsetting story,” Hutch said.
“Marie’s a nice lady. She’s been a lot of help to me getting through this.” She paused. “My husband died of a heart attack in March, and our family has always used the Sayer Funeral Home. My parents were both buried by them, as well as most of my other relatives. Old Mr. Sayer is still keeping an eye on the business, and it was always a class operation. Very professional, and very attentive to the family’s needs and requests.” She took in a deep breath. “My husband died late at night, and the Sayers sent over a hearse to pick him up from the hospital. I went in that morning to make the arrangements. I was very overwrought, as you can imagine, and I didn’t sleep at all that night, so I was at the funeral home very early. I’m sure it was long before they normally opened. Steven Sayer arrived about a half hour after I did–I was parked on the street waiting for him.”
“You were alone?”
“No, Walter’s sister, Lucille, was with me at the time. Mr. Sayer unlocked the front door and led us back to the office, apologizing that we’d had to wait. I wasn’t really offended at that, as it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. He opened the door to the office and stepped aside so we could walk in.” She hesitated, shuddering visibly. “My husband was sitting in the chair behind the desk, with…with his hands out like this,” she demonstrated by placing both hands flat on the table top, arms straight out in an “A” formation, “and his eyes were wide open.”
“What did Mr. Sayer do about that? Did he react?” Hutch asked.
“I know Lucille screamed, and I fainted. When I came to, I was in a sitting room, and the older Mr. Sayer was there with Michael Sayer. Apparently Steven was ‘taking care’ of the situation,” she said sarcastically. “We had my husband transferred to another funeral home, and I filed the lawsuit as soon as I felt able.”
“Did any of them offer any explanations for how it might have happened?” Starsky asked.
“No. They swore the building had been locked, that my husband had been left ‘downstairs’–I assume the embalming facilities must be in the basement, from the way they spoke. We were going to wait a few days for the funeral, since my daughter was studying in Europe and we had to reach her and wait for her to get home. Old Mr. Sayer said that the body was ‘downstairs’ the last time he saw it, after being brought in the night before. They locked up for the night and hadn’t been back in the place until Steven Sayer opened up to let us in that morning.”
“You said your husband died in March–could you give us the exact date this all happened?” Hutch had his pen poised, ready to jot down the information.
“March eighteenth.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Waxman. You’ve been very helpful,” Starsky said. “Can we get you anything?” he gestured at her cup of coffee. Judging by the lack of approach by a waitress the entire time they’d been there, their hopes weren’t too high of getting served.
“No, the coffee’s fine. Where are my manners? You don’t even have coffee!”
“Not to worry. We got our quota in at work today,” Hutch said, smiling. “Thank you again for meeting with us.”
Steven, Michael and Melvin Sayer met with Starsky and Hutch at the funeral home early that evening. Steven Sayer was over six feet tall with dark hair and mustache, while his younger brother, Michael, had brown hair and wore gold wire-frame glasses. All three men were dressed casually, in sweaters and pants.
“We figured this would be the best place to meet,” Melvin Sayer began, as they sat in a small sitting room near the office. “In case you had any questions about the facilities.”
“Well, we’ve met with members of the families who have brought the lawsuits against your business,” Hutch said, leaning back in the cushions of the blue sofa he shared with Starsky, who was seated at the opposite end of it. “Do you have any theories on how those corpses moved from where you last left them?”
“None you’d want to hear,” Michael said dismally, then fell silent after a withering look from his older brother and a puzzled expression from his father.
“You’d be surprised, Mr. Sayer. We’re open to hearing anything you want to tell us about this so we can find out how Preston Mansfield ended up dead in your showroom,” Starsky said.
“My brother’s not very comfortable with the business we’re in, so I’d take his superstitions with a grain of salt, detectives.” Steven stood up and started pacing. “There’s little or nothing to be feared from the dead–unless, of course, they have litigious relatives.”
“You deny mishandling those bodies?” Hutch asked.
“Absolutely,” Steven responded. “Have you ever asked yourselves why we would do such a thing? It doesn’t make any sense. We had a flourishing business until this happened.”
“I’d still be interested to hear what you have to say on the subject,” Starsky directed to Michael, who took in a deep breath, and, ignoring the annoyed looks on his father and brother’s faces, he finally spoke.
“There’s something not right about this place. Right before all this hoopla with the bodies, I refused to stay here after hours and work late. Steven and I often used to stay late and prepare a client, or just catch up on paperwork. When you grow up around dead bodies, they don’t really unnerve you all that much. But things changed.”
“Michael, for God’s sake, don’t start in on that,” the elder Mr. Sayer spoke up angrily. “My son has some strange ideas about the place suddenly being haunted. Funny it wasn’t haunted for all the years I worked late at night and closed the place up by myself.”
“What made you feel there was something wrong with the place?” Starsky persisted.
“One night, when I was here by myself and we had a couple of bodies in the embalming room, I heard noises. We always kept a gun in the desk drawer because even though this is a fairly decent neighborhood, there have been some break-ins–and we do have a permit, but it’s home with the gun at the moment. Anyway, I called Steven and told him I was going to check something out, and for him to come over. He only lives about ten blocks from here.”
“Did you find anything?” Starsky asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, eyes riveted to Michael Sayer. Hutch had to control an urge to grin a bit–Starsky looked just like a little kid intent on hearing a scary story.
“Not at first. I didn’t go downstairs until Steven arrived. Not because I was worried about the bodies, but because there are a lot of places for someone to hide down there, and I was concerned about getting myself trapped if there was an intruder.” He took in and expelled a deep breath. “When I checked the large chapel, one of the bodies that had been downstairs on the table, was in the casket in there. I knew I didn’t move it, so I flew out of there like a bat out of hell and waited outside for Steven. When he got here, he insisted on going back inside, because he didn’t believe me.”
“So you saw the body, too?” Hutch asked Steven Sayer, who was leaning against the door frame now, arms crossed over his chest, a look of exasperation on his face.
“Sure I saw it. Downstairs on the slab where it was supposed to be.”
“How do you explain what your brother saw?” Starsky asked.
“I don’t explain it. He can’t either. I think he was tired and jittery and expected to see something, and so he did. He’s never been as at ease with this business as Dad and I are.”
“That’s not true, Steve, and you know it,” Michael responded angrily. “I know what I saw. After that, I wouldn’t stay in here alone, and I wouldn’t work beyond sundown. Period. So that’s why we ran late sometimes having things ready for clients. But I never moved a single one of those bodies into an inappropriate place.”
“I’m surprised you were willing to work in this business at all if you in fact saw what you claim to have seen,” Hutch said.
“I wasn’t afraid of the bodies. I was afraid of whatever moved them.”
“All of this started after the break-in, when the kids were here from the college?” Starsky asked.
“I guess it did. Yeah, it did. They were here on Halloween–just about a year ago now.”
“The only bearing that has on anything is that they might have come in and done something again with moving the bodies around,” Steven said irritably. “But could we get the cops interested in looking into that for us? Hell, no. All the cops could see was a funeral home with lawsuits pending and they figured we were some kind of ghouls, I guess.”
“Do you remember the date and approximate time of the incident with the corpse?” Hutch asked Michael.
“November sixteenth, and I think it was near eleven o’clock.”
“How sure are you of the time?”
“Within fifteen minutes or so. It was after eleven when Steven got here, so it had to be close to eleven when I first heard the noises.”
“There were no signs of forced entry?” Hutch clarified.
“No. We didn’t call the police because Steven didn’t believe me, and I had no proof.”
“These other incidents…where were the bodies when you last saw them?” Starsky asked.
“With the Sherman case, Elaine Sherman was in her casket the night before the visitation. I was just going to do a little finish work and put out the floral arrangements in the morning,” Michael explained. “The family was a little early, but all I was missing was a few flowers, so I figured if they really wanted to go on in, there’d be no harm in that. I was as shocked as they were by what we all saw, and I have no explanation for how it happened. Again, there was no sign of anyone having broken in and nothing out of place…well, beyond the obvious.”
“It was the same with Mr. Waxman,” Steven said. “He was downstairs when we left, and nobody was more surprised than I was to find the guy in my chair the next morning.”
“I’m convinced it’s those kids from the college,” Melvin spoke up, shaking a finger in the detectives’ direction. “Not once did anyone from your police department go out and question any of the little hoodlums out there who were suspected of the first break-in.”
“Well, we’ll be questioning them now. Something is obviously going on here, and now someone’s dead,” Hutch stated. “That makes every detail a police matter.”
“There’s one obvious question here we haven’t asked yet,” Starsky began. “Can all of you account for your whereabouts on the dates when these incidents occurred?”
“Believe me, Detective Starsky, we’ve had to assemble that information for the civil lawsuits, so that’s nothing new.” Steven stopped his pacing and sat down again. “On the night of the Sherman incident, I was with my wife. We were reading and watching TV in bed. She can account for my whereabouts all night. She’s a very light sleeper, and unless I developed the ability to levitate, there’s no way I could get out of the room without her hearing me. We were entertaining friends the night Mr. Waxman took up residence in my desk chair, and I was in Palm Springs visiting my mother when this most recent incident occurred.”
“I was at home alone–all three nights,” Melvin spoke up. “I live alone, so there’s not much way to verify that, aside from the fact that it would be a little difficult for me to haul corpses up and down flights of stairs. I have a heart condition and am not supposed to over-exert. If I do, I risk a heart attack.”
“I was at my girlfriend’s place when Ms. Sherman was…moved. I was attending a seminar for funeral directors the night of the incident with Mr. Waxman. They have my name on the check in sheet, and I spoke to a few colleagues during the program. I provided their names to our attorneys, and I can do the same for you if necessary. The last night? I was in Palm Springs with Steven and our mother.”
“We’re divorced,” Melvin clarified. “I don’t see much of her, but the boys visit her on occasion.”
“We appreciate your cooperation,” Hutch said, standing up. We’ll be questioning a few other individuals in connection with the break-in and the other incidents, and we’ll be in touch.”
Finally returning home to Starsky’s place, they trudged wearily up the front steps, and before Starsky put the key in the lock, he pulled down an envelope that was taped to the front door. His last name was printed in block letters on the front.
“What do you wanna bet this is from our friend?” Starsky said, turning the envelope in his hand to look at the unsealed flap.
“Let’s take it inside and see if we can get the contents out without leaving our own prints all over it,” Hutch suggested, and Starsky nodded.
Once inside, Hutch handed Starsky a tissue, and Starsky used it to ease out the photograph that was in the envelope. It was a picture of the two of them, a black-and-white glossy from the ceremony where they received citations from the mayor for solving the McClellan/Sunrise Mortgage case. Both men were smiling, dressed in their suits and ties…and a large, head-to-toe red “X” was drawn over Hutch. Starsky turned the photo over, a barely perceptible tremor in his hand as he did so.
A heart now is blue
That once was bright red,
Yours would be too
If your lover were dead.
It’s time to even the score, Starsky.
“This isn’t fun and games here,” Starsky said, easing the defaced photo into its envelope. “Whoever that private eye friend of Huggy’s is, I wanna see him.”
“Maybe we ought to go talk to the man,” Hutch agreed.
The Pits was doing a steady business for a weeknight, and the proprietor himself was at the bar, chatting with a tall, dark, lovely lady who was obviously reciprocating the interest. When the intent stares from the two cops at the opposite end of the bar intruded too heavily on his concentration, he excused himself and ambled over, wearing a frown.
“You tryin’ to ruin my action here?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“Somebody’s trying to ruin ours,” Starsky said. “Our friend who’s been leaving the nasty notes just made a death threat against Hutch. We need the name of your private eye friend.”
“Oh, man,” Huggy complained. “I told him it wouldn’t go down like that.”
“Then you made a promise you can’t keep. This can happen here and now or it can happen officially, Hug. This psycho is screwing with my partner’s life now, and nothin’s gonna get in my way of finding him.”
“Okay, okay, just settle down, my man.” Huggy looked around surreptitiously. “His name’s Danny Marconi, and he has a little office on Holland Avenue.”
“I’ve heard the name before,” Hutch spoke up. “Thanks, Huggy.”
“Not like I had much choice,” he retorted. Then, sighing, he added, “Look, I’m not blamin’ you two for what went down with Lionel. I know you did what you could and made some…bad calls, I guess. It’s just that I don’t like playin’ the game with people’s lives, y’know?”
“Neither do we. It was never a game with Lionel. At least, we never meant it that way.” Starsky paused. “Maybe it started out that way, because Lionel was such a great…player. The set-up and the meet were almost fun. We just didn’t expect things to take the turns they did. If there was a way to go back and undo it–”
“I know,” Huggy interrupted, nodding. “Lots’a things in this life we wish we could do different. You just gotta live with things the way they are and hope history doesn’t repeat. So, uh, this dude sendin’ you notes is gettin’ nastier, huh?”
“It’s been pretty nasty all along, but this was the most direct threat, and the first time he’s written anything but just the poetry.”
“You keep sayin’ he–”
“I saw him,” Starsky said. “Some nut dressed up to look like Lionel. Did a damn fine job of it, too. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Well, from across the street and one floor up, anyway,” Hutch clarified. “I don’t know how good the disguise would have been close up. I didn’t see the guy.”
“I gotta go,” Huggy said as his name was called from the kitchen. “Take it easy.”
Danny Marconi’s office was everything a private eye’s office should be. It was on the third floor of an aging downtown office building, in which all the other offices had closed their doors for the night. From the street, Starsky and Hutch could see a light burning in what turned out to be the office of Marconi Investigation Services. Once the somewhat beleaguered elevator begrudgingly carried them to the third floor, they approached the door, which was wooden with a textured glass window, lettered in black with the name of the business. The reception area appeared to be in shadows, but a light could be seen spilling into the darkened room from an inner office. Starsky rapped on the door sharply, and both men waited. There was no response.
“Open up, Marconi. Police,” Starsky announced, one hand slipping beneath his jacket to hover near his weapon.
“All right, already,” an annoyed voice retorted from inside.
“Sounds like we just dragged him out of the sack,” Hutch commented, shaking his head. A moment later, a middle-aged man of average height and build with receding dark hair and glasses opened the door. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar unbuttoned, and the tie loosened until it formed a striped “Y” on his shirt.
“You got a warrant?”
“Do we need a warrant to get you to answer the door, Marconi?” Starsky asked, flashing his badge. Hutch did the same.
“I was asleep. Was out all night on a stake-out last night. Come in.” He closed the door behind him. “Spent all last night watching for this guy to show up at his bimbo’s apartment. Turns out the bimbo’s cheating on him. Guess there’s some poetic justice in that, huh?” he said, chuckling. “His wife got a kick out of it, anyway.” He led the way back to the small, messy office where he’d obviously been napping on the sagging leather sofa. “All I can offer you is one shot of whiskey or a cup’a cold coffee my secretary made this morning.”
“Uh, no thanks,” Hutch responded, smiling slightly. “We’re here about one of your clients.”
“I figured it wouldn’t be long before you two showed up.” He sat behind his desk in the padded office chair, and the two detectives took the straight chairs across from him. “Starsky and Hutchinson, right? I oughtta know. I got enough pictures of you.”
“What we want to know is who hired you, and why,” Hutch said.
“I already told Huggy the guy’s name and address. Whadd’ya want from me, blood?”
“No, but your client does. We’ve been receiving a number of…unpleasant notes and items over the past several days, but tonight, we got the first death threat. This isn’t a game anymore, Marconi. If you know anything you’re not telling us, you better come up with the information real fast unless you want to do time on an accessory rap,” Starsky concluded.
“Look, he paid in cash, and the address I gave Huggy was the only one I had for him. He was average height, slender, real quiet, kept his sunglasses on most of the time, even indoors. All he asked was for all the information I could get on you two. Your arrests, your cases, your lifestyles, where you went, what your schedules were like, basic tailing and private investigating.”
“Didn’t it occur to you to ask why this guy wanted this kind of info on two cops?” Hutch pressed, leaning forward in his chair. “Did it ever cross your mind that this guy might have less than innocent motives in building this…profile of our lives?”
“Not at the time. Look, business isn’t spectacular, and he paid up front in cash. I didn’t do anything illegal to get the information I got on you two. Just dug up some records, called in a few favors, and did a little old-fashioned legwork.”
“What exactly did you turn over to your client?” Hutch asked. At the other man’s reluctance, he added, “We can make this official.”
“All right already.” Marconi got up and walked over to a closet and pulled out a small carton, setting it on the desk.
“You have a whole box of stuff on us?” Starsky stood up as Hutch did to examine the contents of the box.
“Starsk,” Hutch said quietly, holding up a couple of boxed video tapes. A homemade label on the cover of the first read “Service Calls,” and the other read “Sexy Stewardesses of Flight 235.”
“When I started digging into the Gillian Ingram case and discovered she’d been in porno flicks, I found a private collector who had a few of them. One of her girlfriends who still works the streets told me Gillian bought it because she was having an affair with a cop. When I pressed her for the name, she didn’t remember, but she said he was tall and blond–Gillian had described him to her. It wasn’t all that hard to put two and two together.”
“What else did this friend of Gillian’s tell you?” Hutch asked, his voice controlled and icy.
“A lot of little personal details. I wrote it all up in my notes.” The man sighed. “Look, I didn’t intend for any of this to be used for a crime, or for attempted murder, or any other purpose like that. I didn’t know why this guy wanted all this dirt on you two, but I had no way of knowing if you were dirty cops he was trying to expose, if one of you was cheating with his old lady, or if he just wanted to do some kind of exposé on cops in general. I’ve had lazy reporters pay me to dig up dirt on people before, so that wouldn’t be a first. If you want to take this box of stuff, read through it–hell, you can burn it for all I care.”
“How come you’ve still got it? This is what your client paid for, isn’t it?” Starsky asked, thumbing through a spiral notebook of handwritten notes obviously taken while documenting their usual daily schedules.
“He brought it back. He took the whole batch of stuff, kept it a couple weeks, and then it was just sitting outside the door of the office–sealed, with a letter attached thanking me for my good work. He must’ve put it there during the day, but my secretary didn’t see or hear him leave it. She just noticed it when she left for lunch, and set it on my desk. That was a few weeks ago.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about this guy? Anything that stood out?” Hutch asked.
“He was pretty slightly built, and he was nervous, always keeping his head kind of down, like he didn’t want me to be able to get a good look at his face, or to really be able to ID him. He always came after hours and never would make or keep an appointment. He’d drop in. He wore black leather gloves, which I thought was sort of odd because there were days when it was a little warm for that. But I never saw him without his gloves on.”
“The man you described bears a striking resemblance to Lionel Rigger,” Starsky said. “I’m sure we don’t have to tell you who he is.”
“No, I know all about that. Yeah, I saw a photo of him in the papers, and came across some of that information again when I was researching this. This guy did look like him, but more in the way that someone who was trying to look like someone else would–if you know what I mean. The clothes and the stocking hat and the shades were similar to photos I’ve seen, and the general description fit, but the features weren’t right.”
“If we put you with a police artist, do you think you could come up with a sketch?” Hutch asked.
“You’re puttin’ me in a hell of a position. I’ve already thrown this guy’s confidence out the window.”
“This client of yours is a nut who’s threatening our lives. You’re either on his side or you’re with the good guys,” Starsky said. “Which is it?”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” he conceded, shrugging.
Dobey was working late when Starsky and Hutch arrived with Danny Marconi. All three men sat around a conference table and watched silently while a police artist sketched, erased, refined and sketched some more as Marconi gave his description. When she finished, and Marconi finally nodded that it was a good likeness, she passed the sketch to Hutch, who sat closest to her. He held it up for the others to see.
The face was obscured by the dark glasses and the mustache, and the stocking hat was in place just like Lionel had always worn it. This face, however, had a slightly sharper chin and a more turned-up nose than Rigger did. There was something almost familiar in it.
“Monique Travers…remember her, Starsk?” Hutch referred to the female serial killer who dressed up as a man to commit her crimes, and had almost claimed Starsky as her final victim.
“Only too well.”
“I was trying to figure what it was about this sketch that bothered me, the same way something about the sketch of ‘Harry’ bothered me when we were working the Travers case. This isn’t a man’s face. It’s too…pretty.” Hutch pointed at the drawing. “If you took off the mustache and glasses, and put a pair of woman’s eyes and some kind of feminine hairstyle around this face, who would you have?”
“Oh my God,” Starsky mumbled, staring at the drawing.
“You two want to clue me in on this?” Dobey asked.
“She came to see you, Cap’n. Look at this face and imagine long blonde hair and a pair of pretty female eyes.
“Mardean Rigger?” Dobey asked, raising his voice in surprise. “I don’t buy that. She was hurt and angry and scared about her husband, but she was no psycho.”
“She wasn’t then, but who knows how she feels about things now? You met her before Lionel died. When I saw her after…she was angry.” Hutch sighed. “She seemed to accept what I was saying to her about the case and how it went down, but she was never very receptive to talking to us, and judging by how Huggy still reacts to the subject, I doubt she’s feeling any more positive now. I know he still visits her and Jamie.”
“Now that you mention it, his voice was a little odd. It was deep enough, but it was sort of hushed and strained all the time–like it might have been a faked voice,” Marconi said.
“It all fits,” Starsky said, shaking his head. “Damn, I never would’ve pictured that.”
“Go pick her up for questioning,” Dobey directed.
The small ranch-style house where Lionel Rigger had lived with his wife and daughter was still his family’s home, and Starsky and Hutch both felt a certain chill at pulling into the driveway. The last time they’d been there had been to offer their condolences after Lionel’s death–only to have the door slammed decisively in their faces. Mardean had talked with Hutch briefly at Huggy’s and seemed somewhat placated by what he’d said, but there had still been little or no further contact between Starsky and Hutch and Lionel’s widow and daughter.
Anticipating that Mardean would be unable to leave her daughter, and not wanting to put Jamie through the unnerving experience of accompanying her mother to police headquarters, Starsky and Hutch had stopped by The Pits and picked up Huggy, who readily agreed to leave the bar under Anita’s supervision so he could offer babysitting services to Mardean if she had to go downtown for questioning.
“Must be in bed already,” Starsky said, noticing the darkened windows.
“It’s pretty late,” Hutch said, checking the time on Starsky’s watch. It was almost midnight. “We could wait until morning.”
“We’re dealing with a death threat here, Hutch. If she’s the one behind this, I’m not waitin’ until morning to do something about it. She’s not gonna make that big red ‘X’ happen,” Starsky concluded, taking out his gun and checking it.
“Hey, man, put that thing away!” Huggy said, looking over the back seat. “This is Mardean and Jamie we’re talkin’ about, not some criminal type.”
“Wait here, Hug,” Hutch said evenly. “We don’t have any plans to hurt Mardean or Jamie. You know better. But if she’s doing this, she’s not playing with a full deck anymore, and we have to be ready for anything.”
“Yeah, okay. But don’t be pointin’ that thing where Jamie can see it.” Huggy sat back in the seat.
“Hopefully, we won’t have to point it at all.” Starsky got out of the car and Hutch followed suit, the two of them walking toward the front porch. As they rang the bell and waited, something caught Starsky’s attention out of the corner of his eye. It was just a momentary glint of light off something shiny, a split second before a shot rang out, glass shattered, and the two men landed on the porch with a muffled “oomph.” Starsky pulled his hand back from where it rested on Hutch’s arm, and his eyes widened as he saw and felt the red wetness there. “Hutch? Babe, talk to me.”
“I’ll stay with him,” Huggy said, having rushed up to the porch after the shot rang out. “Go! Jamie might be in there!”
“Stay down,” Starsky said, reluctantly moving away a little. “I don’t know where–”
“I’ll find it and get pressure on it.”
“Right.” Starsky finally tore himself away and edged up to the front door, taking a deep breath and kicking it open, popping inside with his gun drawn in both hands, eyes scanning the darkened living room frantically. He spared one hand to grope for a light switch. As a small overhead light near the door cast its glow on the room, it was obvious that whoever had fired the shot was no longer there. “Mardean! I know you’re angry, but this isn’t gonna solve anything! All it’s gonna do is cost Jamie both her parents. She’s a great little girl, Mardean! She doesn’t deserve to lose you, too,” Starsky shouted into the silent house. There was no response until he heard an engine start, tires squeal and a crashing sound.
Rushing out onto the porch, he watched as a blue sedan sped backwards down the driveway, leaving a shattered garage door behind. At first he raised his gun to fire, but since he couldn’t dismiss the possibility of Jamie being in the car as well, he refrained and ran for the Torino, finally able to radio for back-up as he took off in hot pursuit of the vehicle. The call was most likely unnecessary, as neighbors were spilling onto their lawns to investigate the horrible explosion of noise and chaos on the quiet neighborhood street.
“I’m in pursuit of a blue Pontiac Grand Prix, ’78,” Starsky said into the microphone, swallowing and trying to ignore Hutch’s blood drying on his hand. Oh, please, God, let him be okay. Hang on, darlin’. I won’t be long. “Traveling southbound on Freemont Avenue, just passed Ryland Street. I need back-up! The driver just shot my partner! Get me an ambulance at 2574 Freemont!” Starsky blurted, not expecting the panic to come through so clearly in his voice. The dispatcher made a call to all units of “officer down.” Starsky took some comfort in knowing the streets would be crawling with black-and-whites any minute now.
The Grand Prix was making a good run for it, giving the Torino a real workout keeping up, and testing all of Starsky’s best driving skills to maintain the speed as well as some semblance of control over the car as they raced down the quiet residential street. Still, no back-up units had appeared on the scene.
“Goddammit, are you people asleep?! I said I need back-up!” Starsky shot angrily into the mike. “Where the hell is everybody! I’m doin’ eighty-five in a thirty zone and somebody’s gonna get killed! Get me some fucking back-up!”
“This is Zebra Twelve, we’re in the area and responding,” Lizzie’s voice came over the airwaves. A moment later, the sound of another siren and the flashing of another red mars light sliced through the darkness ahead, and the driver of the Grand Prix attempted a turn to avoid the approaching car. After a squeal of brakes and a dramatic 180-degree turn in the intersection, the suspect vehicle came to a stop. Lizzie and Flores’ car stopped closest to it, and the Torino came to a halt nearby. Amid all the commotion, it surprised Starsky to see Lizzie jump out of the driver’s seat. Their unit had flown into that intersection like a bat out of hell and managed to come to a perfect, though screeching, halt short of hitting the suspect vehicle.
“Out of the car, now! On the ground!” Lizzie was holding her weapon on the driver’s side of the car, and finally, the door opened just a little. Starsky joined her on that side of the car while Flores moved around the passenger side. “Move it, lady!” Lizzie shouted as the overhead light in the car glinted off blonde hair. “I said hit the ground! Move!” she ordered, and obviously sensing there was no arguing with the command, Mardean Rigger was soon face down on the cement, while Lizzie slapped cuffs on her and searched her.
“You don’t understand,” Mardean said miserably, her voice breaking.
“You just shot a cop, honey. That I understand. All right, get up.” She hauled her prisoner to her feet and started to pull her toward their car.
“Where’s Jamie?” Starsky asked, not seeing any sign of the child or anyone else in the car.
“At my mother’s,” Mardean said. “You bastard. You promised Lionel you’d protect him! Do you know how I felt when I finally got my hands on the police report? When I found out that you left him? You left him for dead so you could save your partner! Do you know how it feels to have the other half of you torn away? Do you? I wanted you to feel that! I wanted you to know what it was like to be cold and alone and to have no one to hold you and no one to love!”
“You’re breakin’ my heart, lady,” Lizzie interrupted, hustling Mardean to their car. “Get in and shut up. You’re in enough trouble.”
“Mardean, I–nobody feels worse about Lionel–”
“Than I do,” Mardean concluded coldly. “What do you care? You still have the one you love. Or maybe you don’t. I hope he’s dead! I hope you have to feel what I felt! How does it feel, Starsky? How does it feel?” she shouted, finally dissolving into sobs as Lizzie maneuvered her the rest of the way into the car and slammed the door. As Starsky ran toward the Torino, he hesitated a second.
“Go. We’ll take her downtown. Call us from the hospital,” Flores hollered as he got into the car.
When Starsky squealed to a stop in front of the Rigger house, there were four black-and-white units and an ambulance clustered around the property. He jumped out of the car and shoved his way through the neighbors who had gathered outside to watch the spectacle. When he finally reached the ambulance, he froze in his tracks, his breath caught somewhere between a gasp of relief and a sob, a sound somewhere in between escaping him. Hutch was sitting on the back step of the ambulance, his jacket in his lap, his shirt sleeve cut open and a large white bandage around his upper arm. With his free hand, he held an ice bag on his head.
“Hutch?” Starsky’s voice was little more than a strained whisper as he approached his partner, his hand going over Hutch’s to move the ice bag aside to inspect the scrape and bruise on the fair forehead.
“I hit my head on the porch when we fell. That’s why I was out. It’s just a flesh wound, Starsk. I’m okay.”
“Thank God.” Starsky impulsively hugged his partner, not caring if a crowd watched or if the paramedic was sputtering and annoyed at being interrupted in his tasks. Hutch hugged back.
“Mardean?” Hutch asked as Starsky pulled back, encouraging Hutch to put the ice bag back up to his head.
“She’s safe. Lizzie and Flores are taking her downtown.” Starsky swallowed, remembering the pain he’d felt at Mardean’s words, though it wasn’t new pain, and she didn’t have to voice all those thoughts to plant them in his mind, or for them to haunt him in the dark of night. He knew he’d made a choice that day, with his heart and not his head. Moving the fine blond hair back from the bruise on Hutch’s forehead, he fought tears. Nowhere in his heart could he find it then, or now, to regret that choice–only that it had to be made in the first place and that an innocent man–and his family–had suffered for it.
“You need to get to the hospital right away for that wound to be properly cleaned and dressed,” the paramedic said. “We can transport–”
“My partner can transport me just fine. Thanks for your help,” Hutch said, smiling faintly at the younger man in the paramedic uniform, as he slid off the ambulance and Starsky offered a supporting arm to lead him to the Torino. “Where’s Jamie?”
“With her grandmother. Where’s Huggy?” Starsky asked as he opened the passenger door and steadied Hutch as he got into the car. He most likely didn’t need the help, but Starsky needed to give it.
“He went to the neighbors’ house after the ambulance got here. They offered to let him use a phone to look for Jamie. He’s probably talked to her grandmother by now.”
“Here he comes.” Starsky motioned to Huggy, who hurried over to the car. “You want to ride with us? We’re goin’ to the hospital now.”
“You still feelin’ okay, Hutch?” Huggy looked into the car.
“I’ll be fine, Hug.”
“I think I’ll catch a ride with one’a your boys in blue, then. I’m goin’ over to Mardean’s mother’s place to watch Jamie so she can go downtown and be there if she can see Mardean or maybe post bail for her.”
“You might as well know, Hug. Mardean’s not really…she’s a little…unbalanced. She’s probably gonna need some help. I don’t think they’ll be letting her just walk out’a there, so you might as well start gettin’ her mother prepared for that.”
“Right. Man, I never would’a guessed.” Huggy wandered away, shaking his head.
“Good thing we did,” Hutch said quietly.
“Starsky, for the last time, I’m fine. I wasn’t this helpless when I had the plague,” Hutch objected with annoyance as Starsky led him by the good arm to the bedroom. They’d gone back to Hutch’s place, since Starsky wanted his wounded partner to be as comfortable as possible.
“Don’t remind me of that,” Starsky said softly as he deposited Hutch on the foot of the bed and knelt to untie his partner’s shoes. “Just sit still and I’ll get ya out’a these clothes and put you to bed, babe.”
“Starsk,” Hutch said gently, reaching down to stroke Starsky’s hair. “Talk to me, buddy.”
“Your…blood was on my hand and you were out cold. I couldn’t see how bad it was,” Starsky said without looking up from his task.
“I’m okay, Starsk. It was just a flesh wound–lots of blood and some pain but nothing serious. There’s something else. Will you leave the damn shoes where they are and just look at me?” Hutch demanded, his tone coming out sharper than he’d planned. His next words were softer. “Come on, buddy. Tell me what’s really eating you.”
“I left him for dead,” Starsky said, finally looking up at Hutch. “I’m not such a sorry-ass excuse for a cop that I didn’t realize it. That I didn’t know it could all be a set-up.”
“If you’re talking about Lionel, babe, it was a tough call and you made the one you thought was best at the time.”
“I’d do anything for you, Hutch. Anything in this world. And when Mardean was yelling and accusing me of letting Lionel die and choosing you over him, I tried to regret it. I really did. I tried to regret choosing love over duty.” Starsky took in a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t regret it. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change anything. If you’d gotten your second wind and really been able to get up, you might’ve gone back to the car–you wanted to for a minute there. Or Soldier might have finished the job on you when he couldn’t get me out with the explosion.” Starsky shook his head. “I didn’t have time to think of all that then. All I knew is that you were hurt, and I wasn’t there to take care of you. And I had to be.”
“IA didn’t even press charges on that mess, babe. There were innocent bystanders around that explosion, and–”
“I wasn’t holdin’ the innocent bystanders in my arms, and they weren’t the reason I ran out there. I honestly couldn’t even tell ya how many people were out there at the time. Just that you were out there.”
“I know that, Starsk.” Hutch used his good arm to tug on Starsky’s sleeve and encourage him to sit on the foot of the bed. “Mardean lost her husband, and it’s worn on her mind and spirit until she resorted to this…game to make us pay for it. If Mardean had stood in your place that day, and I had been in Lionel’s place, and Lionel had been down there on the street after that explosion, do you think for one minute she’d have made a different choice than you did?”
“She figures I’m a cop, I guess. In her eyes, it was my duty to risk someone I love dying in order to save her husband.”
“Deciding who should be saved in an either/or situation is not something anyone on Earth should have to do. But sometimes it is. We’re cops, but we’re also human beings with hearts. Sometimes they take over.” Hutch leaned over and kissed Starsky’s cheek. “Hey, buddy, you did the best you could. Time to stop beating yourself up for not being able to be two places at once.”
“You really think Lionel’s death isn’t my fault?” Starsky turned to have eye contact with Hutch. “Honestly? I agreed to give up his name when you didn’t want to, and I–”
“Lionel’s death was McClellan’s fault–ultimately Gunther’s fault. We were pawns in something too big–something that eventually nearly killed you. We didn’t know how big it was when we started messing with it, but I don’t see how we could have protected Lionel for the long haul no matter what we did. We’d have had to keep him in protective custody for months, and we might never have brought down Gunther if…”
“If I hadn’t been shot, which probably wouldn’t have happened if a lot of other things had gone differently.”
“Lionel was a dead man when he agreed to testify. We didn’t know that. We thought we could protect him, but we were wrong. We made some mistakes, and Lionel took some big risks, and we all misjudged. We thought we were safe that day…when you were shot. Even then, we didn’t know what was happening, what we had stirred up. That wasn’t our fault. It just…was.”
“Then you went out and busted Gunther all by yourself,” Starsky said, his mouth twitching upward in a little smile.
“I had a little help.”
“Not very damn much. I know how it was, Hutch. I know how you went after him, and you didn’t stop until you brought him down.”
“And I couldn’t have done any of it if I hadn’t been driven by loving you like I do. So how many lives did that save, getting Gunther out of power and into prison? If our love cost Lionel his life because you ran to me after the explosion, maybe our love, the thing that drove me to find the bastard who ordered your death,” Hutch said through gritted teeth, still seething at the memory, “saved countless other lives.”
“You’re my hero, you know that, Hutch?” Starsky said, looking down at his hands where they rested in his lap, fingers loosely entwined. “You always are. Always were. But when you brought down Gunther like that, just because’a what he did to me…. I never knew anybody like you.”
“You’re making me sound like Superman or something,” Hutch said, laughing softly, and a little uneasily. This kind of naked praise and open adoration was hard to accept, as much as it was beautiful to hear.
“Anytime things have been really bad, or hopeless, or I didn’t think it could be okay, or turn out all right…those were the times you made it happen. You fixed things.”
“I didn’t do anything for you that you wouldn’t do for me. Hell, probably nothing you haven’t done for me.”
“Doesn’t matter, babe. You’re still my hero, and I love ya so much I can’t ever figure out a good enough way t’say it.”
“How can I be your hero when you’re my hero, huh?” Hutch rested his forehead against Starsky’s, carefully avoiding the bruised spot he’d earned on the porch of the Rigger house.
“I said it first,” Starsky defended, and both men laughed.
“Maybe enough love can make heroes out of all of us,” Hutch concluded softly, before covering Starsky’s mouth with his, drawing him into a deep kiss.
“Let me take care’a you, Blondie.”
Mindful of keeping the bandage dry on Hutch’s injured arm, Starsky insisted on filling the tub and bathing his lover carefully, moving hands, soap and washcloth over every inch of Hutch’s body as if he didn’t trust Hutch were truly safe and all right until he’d seen for himself. Hutch relaxed and allowed the pampering, enjoying the warm, soapy bath on tired muscles and the feeling of being so thoroughly loved. His body took another sort of pleasure in the wet caresses, and by the time Starsky was satisfied he was finished with his bath, he was sporting a rigid erection.
Starsky went about the task of toweling him off gently, simply flashing him a mischievous grin when he carefully dried the sensitive area of Hutch’s groin. When Hutch had despaired of attracting his partner’s sexual interest and was convinced Starsky was going to do nothing to ease his present condition, Starsky knelt before him and took the long cock into his mouth. Strong hands anchored Hutch’s hips until one slipped down to cup his balls.
“Starsk…so good, babe,” Hutch managed, wondering if his legs would hold him while the wondrous suction pleasured him, and the questing hand moved from his balls to the tender regions behind them, a finger probing at his center, poking inside just a bit. The teasing stimulation was too much, and he cried out, feeling his climax sweeping over him, pulsing out in waves down Starsky’s eager and willing throat.
As his spent cock was released, strong arms came around him, holding him close. There was something remarkably tantalizing about his own nakedness against Starsky’s clothed body.
“You’re mine now, babe. Gonna take you to bed and then take you to heaven,” Starsky growled against his ear, and Hutch shivered at the words, less from his nudity than the raw passion he could hear in the husky voice.
Hutch allowed himself to be led to bed and tucked in like a child. To his disappointment, Starsky left then, and a moment later, he heard the shower. He reached down and stroked himself as he thought of Starsky’s words and what they could mean, and soon, he found himself hard again. By the time his freshly showered, naked lover climbed into bed with him, he was more than ready for him.
“Startin’ without me, huh?” Starsky teased, straddling Hutch and kissing him deeply.
“Getting ready for you,” Hutch countered when he came up for air.
“Wanna be deep inside you, babe.” Starsky leaned down close to his ear. “So deep I can touch your soul.”
“I want that, too,” Hutch agreed, smiling and indulging in another long kiss before Starsky leaned over to the nightstand for the lube.
“Do you feel okay to do this?” Starsky asked, nuzzling Hutch’s neck.
“Hey, look at me.” Hutch caught Starsky’s face in his hands. “It was just a scrape and a bump on the head. I’m fine.”
Starsky smiled at that, and leaned in for another kiss. He kissed Hutch’s lips, his nose, his chin, and then trailed hungry lips down the long throat to the smooth chest, where he planted a very slow, deliberate kiss over Hutch’s heart. With that, he moved up to kneel between Hutch’s legs, which were parted and bent at the knees, his feet resting on the bed. Coating his finger, he slid it carefully into the snug opening, stretching and preparing Hutch with a languid patience his straining cock didn’t share. While his fingers worked their magic, he rested his head against a raised knee, hugging it with his free arm, moving to plant kisses along the inside of the long thigh.
Then he was coating his own length, and Hutch drew his knees back further to grant him access. He slid in slowly, feeling Hutch’s body close around him, pulling him in, holding him with the same intensity and warmth he always found in Hutch’s arms. He pumped slowly in and out, wanting to prolong this, keeping his eyes locked with his partner’s, trying to let their eyes convey the feelings that words would never capture. Starsky leaned in close, stealing another kiss, feeling tears burn his eyes at the memory of Hutch, unmoving on that porch, feeling the blood on his hand…all of a sudden, he couldn’t even fathom what Hutch had felt that day in the police garage, faced with all those wounds and all that blood and the utter hopelessness of believing it was too late…what Hutch must have gone through while Starsky was in that coma.
“I love you, darlin’. God, I love you so much,” Starsky managed, his body demanding an increase in tempo. He reached down and gently pumped Hutch’s cock in time with their movements.
“Me, too, babe. Me, too.” Hutch smiled, then let out a little cry of pleasure as he came, his climax pushing Starsky over the edge to his own completion, with a shout of Hutch’s name.
They lay there quietly for a long time, listening to the rain tapping lightly against the window and the wind whistling, held at bay with the rest of the outside world. It was a good night to be off the streets and sheltered here, in each other’s arms, dozing a little, kissing a little, and celebrating another close call survived.
Mardean Rigger was lodged in a room at Memorial Hospital, having required eventual sedation to calm her for the night. When it had become apparent she was not going to calm down on her own at headquarters, she’d been taken to the psychiatric ward. Full psychiatric evaluation was a given, and there was a distinct possibility the best course of action for this woman who had obviously suffered so greatly with her grief would be therapy, rather than a prolonged incarceration.
Meanwhile, Starsky and Hutch joined Lizzie and Flores–who appeared to still be functioning as partners–for the moment–in searching the Rigger house. They found a video cassette player, an audio cassette recorder, and a number of audio cassettes there, one of which bore the chilling phone call Hutch had received from Gillian.
“She must have spliced together dialogue from those movies,” Flores speculated, bagging the tapes as evidence.
“I knew it was Gillian’s voice. I just didn’t know how it was possible,” Hutch said, conducting his own search of a nearby desk. “Starsky found a reference in Marconi’s notes about the red balloons. I guess Gillian used that imagery with her friend, saying she was afraid of something bad happening to mess things up between us.” Hutch sighed, pausing in his search, thinking for a moment of how chillingly prophetic Gillian’s fears really were. Maybe Mardean had accomplished all she’d set out to do–she’d brought back all the grief of the past, and the reality of the deaths they’d both lived through, with a startling and painful clarity.
“She’s got some literature over here from the Marshall Center,” Lizzie said, holding up a manila folder. “She must have gotten close to someone there, or managed to somehow get a hold of that photo of Terry Roberts.”
“Garage is pretty much clean,” Starsky announced as he rejoined the group. “Nothing of interest in there except…looks like that’s where she had stored a lot of Lionel’s stuff. And I did find this bag under the work bench,” he said, holding up a trash bag. He pulled a brown wig and stocking hat out of it. “These were in here, along with some jeans, a t-shirt and a man’s shirt. The same one she must’ve been wearing the night I saw her down on the street and thought… Well, I recognize the shirt.” Starsky tossed the wig back in the bag and set it by the front door with the other items of evidence they’d been collecting.
“Any word on Mardean this morning from the hospital?” Hutch asked Lizzie, who had been at headquarters earlier that morning, prior to meeting them at the house.
“They kept her pretty heavily sedated last night and she slept, I guess. This morning, they said she was basically unresponsive, but she was docile at least.”
“I hope she’s okay.” Hutch shook his head. “This is so much for Jamie to handle–losing her father and now her mother as well. I hope Mardean’s able to pull through this.”
“Sounds like you two don’t really want to throw the book at her if she does,” Flores said, placing his box of audio tapes and other items by the door as well.
“We haven’t really talked about it,” Starsky said, flashing a look at Hutch. In that moment, he knew they agreed that the person who stood the most to lose from unleashing the full wrath of the law on Mardean was Jamie. Whatever wrong lengths she’d gone to in attempting to avenge his death, Mardean had loved Lionel with all her heart, and both men could understand how easily losing that love could push a person over the edge. “She’s got a little girl who’s gonna be an orphan if she does time. If the docs feel she doesn’t have it all together and needs some help, I guess I’d rather see her get that than a stint in the joint.”
“So would I,” Hutch agreed. “Fortunately, we both lived through this. If she’s not a danger, and she can move past all this with some counseling, and be a good mother to her daughter, that’s a better outcome for everybody.”
The four of them headed outside and loaded the items that would be taken to the evidence room in the back of the Torino. Lizzie and Flores were about to start out on their rounds for the day, and seemed glad to turn the problematic case and its unstable perpetrator back over to their colleagues.
“I thought you’d put in for a new partner,” Hutch said quietly, pulling Flores aside as they stood on the porch of the Rigger house. Their respective partners were already in the cars, waiting for them while they checked to be sure the door was locked
“Yeah, well, Dobey didn’t take that request too well.” Flores handed Hutch the keys to the house. “His exact words were, ‘Grow up, get over it, and get back on the streets with your partner’.” Flores snorted a laugh. “Not too much I could say to argue with that.”
“Are you okay with this?”
“Don’t have a lot of choice. Lizzie’s a great cop, so working with her’s no problem. There’s just this little spark there, and I guess Dobey nailed it. I just need to grow up and get over it. I’m trying to do that.”
“Talking to her might be a good idea. She’s not stupid, Arturo. She knows something’s up.”
“She said something to you?”
“She was just concerned about why you wanted a new partner.”
“What did you tell her?” Flores asked, looking a little panicked.
“I told her to talk to you.” Hutch flashed a look toward the cars. Starsky wasn’t even looking in their direction, but was engrossed in something he was reading. Hutch smiled slightly, hoping it was the Bay City College catalog he’d left on the seat. Having stopped out there and picked one up for Starsky not long after his obvious interest in Littlefield, he’d slipped it into the car that morning, wanting Starsky to really look at it and think about it before he offered another flurry of objections.
“I guess I owe her that much, huh?”
“Yeah, you do.” Just then a car horn honked, and they glanced out to see Lizzie gesturing with both hands up, as if to ask what the hold-up was. Starsky just looked up from whatever he was reading and chuckled. “Looks like she’s about due to collect, too,” Hutch said, smiling as they parted company to join their partners.
When Hutch got in the car, he saw that Starsky was in fact reading the course catalog he’d left for him.
“Where’d you get this?” Starsky asked, looking up as Hutch slammed the passenger door closed.
“I stopped by the college and got one. You don’t even have to mortgage a kidney to take a class there. Their tuition rates are pretty reasonable.”
“C’mon, Hutch, we already settled this. I’m not college material, and I don’t have that kind of money.” He set the soft-cover booklet aside and started up the car, backing out as Lizzie and Flores did.
“What do you mean, you’re not college material?”
“You need me to spell it out?” Starsky started out down the road in the opposite direction as the other two, taking them back to headquarters. “I blew off most of high school. I never really…. I’m just not much of a student. I passed tests based on what stuck in my head in class, not from studying. I wouldn’t even know how to…to get through all that reading and studying and paper-writing…. even Dobey thinks my reports stink half the time. How could I write papers if Dobey doesn’t even like my writing on two-page reports?”
“Starsky, this is all bullshit. You read voraciously, you like to learn, and there’s nothing wrong with your writing except that you like to add a little color to it, which is something someone proof-reading your papers could help you cut down on in factual writing. We’re detectives. We do research all the time and report on it.”
“I’m too old. I’d feel ridiculous sitting there with all those kids–like the big stupid kid that got held back four grades when I was in grade school. He was about six feet tall and he was still in the fourth grade.”
Hutch couldn’t help but chuckle at that image.
“There are a lot of people who go back to college and work on their degrees long after they’re fresh out of high school. Getting an education–that’s something to be proud of, at any age. Not something you should feel self-conscious about.”
“What if I flunk? Huh? Then I wasted all of that money and time going to classes for nothing.”
“You aren’t going to flunk anything.”
“How do you know?” Starsky challenged.
“I know because I know you. Unless you don’t care about it in the first place, you won’t flunk it.”
“You really think so?”
“I really think so. Starsky, I went to college with some real idiots. All of them have degrees and most of them are making more money than I am. Trust me, getting a degree is not a great, mystical thing reserved for only a select few.”
“I guess if idiots can manage, I might have a shot at it,” Starsky said dismally. Hutch rolled his eyes, wishing it were physically possible to kick himself repeatedly in the ass for that last remark. He should have realized Starsky would feel he was being lumped in with the idiots. It’s not like you haven’t called him “moron” enough times to drill that into his head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Let’s just forget it, Hutch. I can’t afford it anyway.”
“We could afford it.”
“I don’t want you having to pay for my classes.”
“If things weren’t…the way they are, and we were able to, don’t you think we’d be married by now?” Hutch asked directly. Starsky thought about that for a moment.
“Probably for a while now,” he finally responded.
“Okay, then. Just because we can’t have the piece of paper doesn’t mean we can’t face some things like other couples do. Getting a degree is sometimes a sacrifice and an effort both people in a couple have to get behind to make happen. I want to do that with you. If you want this…if you want to try it…I want to help. Don’t shut me out just because things between us aren’t…legal.”
“I wasn’t tryin’ to do that.” Starsky was quiet a few seconds. “I don’t know if I can do it, Hutch. I mean, if everybody knows I’m taking classes and then I flunk out, I’m gonna feel like an idiot in front of all our friends and everybody at the station.”
“You won’t flunk out.” Hutch thought a moment. “Why don’t we pick something we can both take?”
“You’ve got a degree.”
“Well, sure, but it’s never a bad idea to take a class here or there to keep yourself updated. Let’s pick something we can both take, and we’ll try it out that way. Nobody has to know you’re thinking about a degree, or that we’re doing anything more than expanding our horizons or honing our professional skills a little. If you like it and it goes well, it won’t be so hard to sign up for something else and keep moving forward.”
“You’d take a class with me?”
“Starsky, I’d throw myself in front of a bullet for you. Taking a class with you doesn’t really seem that taxing by comparison.” Hutch shrugged. “Although I did have a couple classes in college I’d probably have traded in for the bullet.”
“Can you pick something? I mean, I don’t know which one to pick out, and I don’t know what they’d let me into without any other classes.”
“Let’s get some Chinese food tonight, go back to my place, and go through this thing and find something we both like the looks of that doesn’t have a bunch of prerequisites.”
“Okay.” Starsky nodded, then smiled a little. “Might be kinda fun.”
“Well, you’ve got one mess settled, but there’s still the little matter of the Mansfield case. What did you find out from the Sayers?” Dobey asked, leaning back in his chair and taking a drink of his coffee.
“Michael Sayer tells a good Halloween story,” Hutch said, smiling.
“You don’t believe him?” Starsky asked, his voice rising slightly.
“Unless you believe corpses get up and run around by themselves, believing him would be a little difficult. R&I;’s doing background checks on all the Sayers. I want to know if they’ve had any DUIs or drug-related stuff from their younger days.”
“Michael Sayer was not drunk or on drugs.”
“Not when we talked to him last night, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t three sheets to the wind when he thought the dead bodies were running up and down stairs by themselves.”
“You want to clarify that, Hutchinson?” Dobey asked, raising one eyebrow. “Forgive me for intruding on your argument, but I’m not following.”
“Sorry, Captain. Not long before they shut down, Michael Sayer refused to work nights anymore–especially if he was going to be alone. He claims that one night while he was working late in the office, he heard something, and when he went to investigate, one of the corpses he’d left in the embalming room downstairs was in the casket in one of the chapels that had been empty earlier. He had called his brother when he heard the noises, so he ran outside and waited for him. When they went back in, the corpses were where they were supposed to be and the casket was empty.”
“You think anybody could have gotten in and moved the body around fast enough to pull it off without him seeing them as well as the corpse?” Dobey asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Hutch said, shrugging. “I guess I’m having trouble picturing that.”
“Maybe it’s time to pull your college boys in for official questioning. Sometimes a stint in the interrogation room loosens tongues a little more than coffee at the student union.”
Jack Rydell sat at the table in the interrogation room, turning a Styrofoam cup of coffee around and around in his hands. Occasionally, he’d run a slightly shaky hand through his hair. Starsky watched him from the other side of the two-way mirror. They’d left him waiting there better than an hour, having sent a black-and-white to pick him up. It was their hope that he would break more easily, and without the moral support of Paul Perry–who seemed shaken by almost nothing–their chances increased significantly.
“You think we should have mercy on him and go ask him the questions before he screws that coffee cup into the table top?” Hutch asked, joining his partner.
“I was kind of enjoyin’ the show.” Starsky grinned. “Okay, let’s do it. You want me to be the bad guy?”
“You were the other day. You better stay in character,” Hutch said with a smile.
When Starsky abruptly opened the door of the interrogation room, Jack Rydell visibly lurched in his chair, spilling a little coffee out of the cup.
“Okay, Jack, let’s just cut the shit and get down to business here.” Starsky pulled a chair out more roughly than necessary and sat down across the corner of the table from their jittery suspect. He leaned forward, resting on one elbow. Then he pointed a finger inches from Rydell’s face. “I know you know somethin’ you’re not telling, and you and me are gonna sit here if it takes all night, until you quit holding out on us. As a matter of fact, if we have to spend those seventy-two hours in this room, I got no problems with that.”
“I have rights,” Rydell said nervously.
“So did Preston Mansfield, but somebody violated his rights pretty badly, and we wanna know who it was,” Hutch spoke up, sitting across the table. “Look, Jack, this can either be a situation where we pull attorneys into it and you get arrested and your dad ends up having to bail you out of jail and pay for legal defense and deal with the family name all over the news, or you can help us out now, and we can settle this thing. But you’re right. You have rights, and we won’t stand in your way if you choose to invoke them. We also then will have to go through official channels to ask you questions, and to keep you here. Which means arresting and charging you.”
“With what?”
“Breaking and entering, not to mention suspicion of murder. There’s no proof you didn’t have a hand in Mansfield’s death.” Starsky leaned back, glaring at the younger man. “You and your buddies sent him to it, after all.”
“That’s not true! We didn’t know–”
“You knew something, Rydell. Something that made you run out’a that place and forget your jacket a year ago tonight. Halloween. A bunch of guys, a little beer, and a Ouija board. Remember that?”
“We told you what happened with that.”
“You spun us a story. We’re interested in the truth, Jack,” Hutch said calmly. “We’re also interested in where you were on the night of November sixteenth, last year.”
“That’s easy. I was in the hospital.”
“The hospital?” Starsky asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah. I got food poisoning really bad at this Italian place–Paul and I went there for lunch, and I guess the pizza he had was okay, but I had something with white sauce on it, and the doctor figured the sauce was bad. Anyway, about dinnertime, I was really sick–I couldn’t even get out of bed. Paul took me to the hospital, and he was there the whole time. You can get hospital records if you want.”
“You know for a fact Paul was there the whole time?” Hutch asked.
“Yeah, I do, because I thought I was dying and I didn’t want…” Jack paused, looking a little sheepish. “I was kind of scared, and he stayed with me. I know he was there, because he wasn’t out of my room long enough at a time to go anywhere.”
“Okay. What time was that, Jack?” Hutch asked, taking notes.
“He took me over there about six-thirty, and the last time I was really with it and not dozing a lot was probably…oh, geez…I think about one in the morning.”
“How sure are you of the time?” Hutch persisted.
“That Paul was there or that I was there? I know I didn’t move until about ten o’clock the next morning. I was released that afternoon. Paul was there all night, but if you mean can I swear to where he was every minute, not beyond about one. I know every time I came around, he was sitting by the bed, and a couple times he was sleeping.”
“Okay, so we have the sixteenth accounted for,” Starsky began. “That still leaves us with no straight story about what went down last Halloween.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try us,” Starsky stated flatly.
“About two years ago, right after graduation, I had some…problems. I had to see a shrink. When all this stuff happened, I figured if I told the story, I’d probably end up back in therapy again. I wasn’t crazy–and I’m not now. But do you know what the guys would do with information like that? Littlefield’s a really…demanding place. You gotta be perfect to fit in.”
“We’re not interested in publicizing your private life to your friends. We just want the straight story,” Hutch reiterated.
“Paul got a call to pick up a body about ten o’clock that night. I went with him–we usually went together on those runs. I mean, supposedly it was just for company but you know, it’s kind of creepy going on your own. We picked up the body at the hospital and put it down in the embalming room. There’s a service elevator at the back entrance, so you don’t have to haul the gurney down the stairs. We were just about ready to leave, and Paul thought it would be a cool idea to have some guys over, have a few beers, and play around with this Ouija board that one of the guys in our dorm had.”
“That was all there was to the plan?” Starsky asked.
“Well, yeah. The whole gimmick was hanging out at the funeral home on Halloween, so there wasn’t much more to the party than some beer and the Ouija board, and showing the guys the casket showroom and the embalming room.”
“Cheap thrills, huh?” Hutch commented, taking notes as Jack spoke.
“Not as cheap as we thought. Anyway, about four other guys came over, and we set up the board in one of the viewing rooms. There was nobody in there at the time–just the old guy we’d put downstairs. We had a couple beers, joked around a little, and then we got down to business with the Ouija board. Paul started asking it stupid questions–like, is Littlefield going to win the division championships this year, and stuff like that. ‘Course all the guys pushed it over to ‘Yes’. Then, out of nowhere, Mark asks it, ‘Are the spirits of the dead with us tonight?’ I don’t know why that gave me the creeps. That was kind of why we were there.”
“Was that Mark Forest?” Starsky clarified.
“Yeah. It was his Ouija board.” Jack sighed. “Anyway, everybody got real quiet, and the pointer-thing moved over to ‘Yes’.”
“The first time, you said everyone moved it to the ‘Yes,’ but now you’re saying it moved by itself?” Hutch asked.
“That’s how it happened. Everybody looked kind of freaked out when it moved, including Mark. Nobody pushed it. Paul started joking around, saying that we oughtta call it quits because old man Sayer sometimes came by to check on the place at night. Once they got over the shock of the thing moving, everybody got intrigued and nobody wanted to leave. They started asking it a bunch of questions.”
“You keep saying ‘they’–like you weren’t part of this.” Starsky leaned his chin on the palm of his hand. “Weren’t you participating?”
“Not really. I even took my hand off the pointer-thing after that one really weird one where it moved by itself.”
“What happened next?” Hutch prodded.
“The lights went out. Mark asked it something like, ‘can you show us a sign?’ and then the lights all went out. They went back on again a couple minutes later. I wanted to leave then, but the other guys didn’t, and Paul didn’t want to go because we had the keys and we’d be responsible for the place, so we didn’t want to leave those other jerks in there.” Jack finally took a drink of what had to by now be tepid coffee and took in a deep breath, as if he were steeling himself to go on. “Mark was really getting off on this whole bit with getting an actual response, so he kept it up. He asked if the spirit could tell us its name. There was this long silence and nothing happened. Then the pointer started moving, and it spelled out ‘Andrew’.”
“Did that name mean anything to you?” Hutch asked.
“No. The old guy downstairs was Orville or something like that. I don’t remember his name for sure, but I know it didn’t have ‘Andrew’ in it anywhere. There was no ‘Andrew’ in our group, either. Mark asked Andrew if he would speak to us.”
“Did anything happen?” Starsky asked, and Hutch detected that same rapt fascination in his partner he’d seen when they were talking to Michael Sayer. Starsky loved a good scary story, no matter what the venue.
“Not right away. Mark was disappointed, thought his ghost had moved on, and then we heard it. Footsteps. Paul said we should get out, that it was probably old man Sayer. Mark just laughed and said it was ‘Andrew’. The lights started flickering on and off, and in walks this guy. We couldn’t see him real well at first, with the lights and everything, but then all of a sudden the lights came back on, and there was the old guy from downstairs, just standing there. He was dressed in this old sweater and pants, like maybe he had a heart attack or something and they couldn’t save him in the emergency room–you know, one that wasn’t even dressed in a hospital gown, who died on arrival? Then he says, ‘Good evening, boys. You wanted to see me?’ And he laughs, this really awful laugh. Deep and guttural and raspy, like he wanted to make more sound but he couldn’t get the old man’s voice to go any louder. Like he was something else stuck inside that old guy’s body.” Jack shook his head. “I was so scared, I swear to God I probably pissed myself. Somebody gave me a yank, turns out it was Paul, and we started running. There was another exit out of that room, and we all took off out’a there, got in our cars and drove like crazy back to the campus.”
“Your other friends…what did they have to say about this?” Hutch asked.
“We were all freaking out, going nuts, and when we were all in the parking lot back at the college, Mark says, ‘I don’t know what the fuck that was, but I didn’t see it.’ All the other guys started chiming in with that, and we stuck to our story and came up with alibis for that night. Since they really only were looking for Paul and me, we used Mark and the rest of the guys for our alibis. It worked and the cops dropped the whole thing.”
“So you’re claiming you saw the dead man you’d brought in earlier, up walking around and talking?” Hutch summarized.
“I told you it sounded crazy. I wouldn’t believe it if someone else told me. That’s what happened. But you know, after all these months went by, and nobody would really talk about it, even Paul, I kinda started telling myself that it was the beer and the shadows and something shorting out in the wiring and that we didn’t really see what we saw.”
“Still, you encouraged Preston Mansfield to go in there?” Starsky asked.
“I didn’t have anything against Preston–nothing so bad I’d want him dead over it. We were just yanking his chain, and all of a sudden, he went for it. Paul said the worst he’d get was a good scare. Besides, the Sayers had worked in there for months after we were there, and they were all still alive.”
“Who are these other guys who were with you that night?” Hutch asked, pen poised.
“They won’t back up my story. They’re gonna kill me when they find out I ratted them out to the cops.”
“We know Mark Forest was one of them, and that he’s at Cal State Long Beach now. Look, Jack, our object here isn’t to ruin your life. We’re trying to solve a murder,” Hutch said. “Give us the names, and if we can get to the bottom of this without questioning all the guys involved, we will.”
“I know we started something that night. I swear we never went back near that place. I wish we had and that we could say we set those bodies up in different places just to make the Sayers look bad because they fired us, but we didn’t. We started something that’s obviously still happening there.”
“You believe you raised some kind of spirit who’s doing this?” Hutch asked, looking a bit incredulous.
“Yes, I do.” Jack slumped back in his chair. “Now you can call my shrink and have me committed.”
“I think we can forego that for now. You want us to call you a cab to get back to campus?” Starsky asked.
“That’s it? I’m not under arrest?”
“That’s it for now. We just wanted the truth as you knew it. We still want to question Mark and your buddy, Paul. But you don’t have to bleed for us, just give us some answers.”
“Paul won’t admit he saw anything. You can ask him, but he won’t admit it.” Jack paused. “If my dad finds out about this, he’ll put the pressure on me to go back to that damn therapist again.”
“Why were you seeing a therapist in the first place?” Hutch asked.
“If I tell you, it’s gotta be off the record.”
“We can’t make promises like that, Jack. But we can promise it isn’t information we’ll disclose to your friends or use inappropriately,” Hutch responded.
“I…I’m gay.” Jack swallowed hard. “I figured it out in high school, and I made the mistake of telling my folks. They put me in therapy. After two years of it, I finally just started dating girls and went along with the shrink when he suggested I had just passed through a phase of sexual exploration on my way to maturity–or something like that.” Jack shook his head and smiled. “If Paul finds out, man, it would just…it would really ruin our friendship. He’s the best friend I’ve got. I don’t want him to know.”
“That you’re gay or that you’re interested in him?” Hutch asked quietly.
“I never said I was–interested in him.”
“No, you didn’t.” Hutch smiled slightly. “Come on. We’ll take you to a telephone so you can call for a ride back to campus. Just keep your conversation with us under your hat, huh? We want a chance to talk to your buddies.”
While Jack made his phone call, Starsky got some fresh coffee for himself and his partner.
“What was all that about him being interested in Perry?” Starsky asked Hutch quietly.
“I don’t know. Probably way out of line. There’s just something in the way those two look at each other, the way they are together…I can’t help thinking a little bit about–”
“Us?” Starsky suggested.
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe I’m like all those other pathetic saps–you find somebody to love and then you want to match up the whole damn world.” Hutch chuckled a little.
“What now?”
“Now? I think we go ask the Sayers if the name ‘Andrew’ means anything to them.”
“You’re taking this seriously?” Starsky asked, looking a little uncomfortable with that.
“I don’t know what happened there that night, and I’m not saying I buy the idea that some dead guy got up and walked around. At the same time, I don’t think Rydell was making this up. He believes what he’s telling us.”
“Paul’s gonna pick me up in about a half hour,” Jack said, leaving the phone they’d directed him to use and joining the two detectives near their desks. “So this is where you guys fight crime all day, huh?” he joked a little nervously. At that moment, Hutch felt very sorry for this young man. He was in an all-too-familiar predicament: in love with his best friend and scared to death of losing him because of it.
“You know, Jack, don’t sell Paul short. You might want to level with him one of these days…about things.”
“You’re one weird cop. Most of you guys are ready to play kick-the-can with a guy like me, and you’re giving me relationship advice.”
“I’m not, really. More like friendship advice. Secrets are hard on a friendship, especially when they come out.”
“I guess. I just don’t really feel like going through the rest of the fall semester with a new roommate–and my jaw wired shut.”
After Jack left with his roommate, Hutch noticed a file that had been left on the desk. Picking it up, he read the note clipped to it.
“Looks like Minnie did some research for us,” he said, handing it to Starsky, who snickered at the note.
“‘Here’s more dirt on your creepy undertakers.’ Count on Minnie,” Starsky said, still smiling as he skimmed through the file. “Interesting.”
“What?”
“Mansfield’s not the first one to buy the farm in the funeral home.”
“Meaning?”
“Melvin’s brother–get this–Andrew Sayer–committed suicide in the embalming room back in 1936.” Starsky looked up, unnerved. “The name they got from the Ouija board was–”
“This was in a newspaper back then, I’m sure. Maybe one of the kids came across it in his research. When I was in college, I had to use old newspapers for research–”
“Aw, come on, Hutch. What’re the chances of those guys knowing anything about this?”
“What’s the rest of the story?” Hutch looked over Starsky’s shoulder as he read.
“Says here that the coroner’s inquest ruled it a suicide. Melvin reported the death. Found him in the embalming room when he went there to do some work on a client after hours. A neighbor reported hearing a noise they said could have been a shot about ten o’clock, and Melvin called the cops about ten thirty. Oh, this is spooky.”
“What?”
“It happened on Halloween.”
“Bizarre coincidence, I’ll say that for it.” Hutch frowned. “Melvin said he’s been running the place since 1936. He never mentioned a brother at all.”
“Yeah, well, back in those days, a suicide was sort of a scandal in a family. They probably didn’t tell it around anymore than they had to. I had a cousin who committed suicide–this was just before I was born. I know Ma always talked about it in hushed tones with relatives, like it was the biggest family secret in the world.”
“Suicides are fairly common ghosts,” Hutch said, almost as if he were thinking aloud.
“You think there’s something to what Jack was saying about the Ouija board?”
“Jack believes he saw and heard something that night, and he doesn’t strike me as a dopehead or a drunk, and I think he was sincere. What he saw and heard I can’t say for sure, but I know how we could find out.”
“How?” Starsky asked, eyeing Hutch suspiciously.
“See if our old buddy Collandra’s willing to put on his psychic hat and have a look around the place.”
“He’s not the kind of psychic who does séances, Hutch.”
“They don’t have a union–I’m sure he can pick up impressions in a number of different situations. Besides, if he’s not willing to do it, then we’ll have to figure something else out. I would trust him to be honest, if he did think there was anything wrong there, and if he did pick up on something…well, he’s one of the few psychics I’d really trust to give us a truthful story about what it was.”
“He’s probably not going to be willing to do it.”
“Won’t know ’til we ask, will we?” Hutch sat down at his desk and pulled his address book out of the drawer.
“You’re serious about this,” Starsky said flatly.
“Sure I am. We’ve got a witness we both feel is credible who saw something unexplainable there last year. We’ve got two totally unexplained incidents involving corpses there, and an unsolved homicide–with no worthwhile leads, which Dobey doesn’t miss the opportunity to point out from time to time. What have we got to lose?”
“It’s Halloween,” Starsky protested.
“Look, we’ve got no leads, and we’ve got nowhere to go with this. Preston Mansfield didn’t die from a simple cardiac arrest. Something put that expression on his face. This is probably so much hogwash, but if we’d taken that attitude with the Haymes case, Joanna would be dead and buried.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll call Collandra.”
“Let’s go by his place and see if he’s open,” Hutch suggested. “We need to grab dinner anyway.”
Thunder clapped loudly and lightning illuminated the sky. Starsky zipped his jacket as he led the way out to the parking lot, Hutch trailing only slightly behind him.
“I can’t believe we gotta spend Halloween in a funeral home.” He started up the car.
“What, you were going trick-or-treating? Cheer up, Starsk. There’s probably a logical explanation for everything that’s happened there. After all, look at what we just went through with Mardean? A couple nights ago, I was ready to believe Gillian was calling me on the phone and you were ready to believe that Lionel was standing on the street across from my apartment building. Some tricks are very, very effective and very real. We know that first hand. I don’t know how or why all the other stuff happened there, but I’d be willing to wager that there’s a very earthly reason for it.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Starsky said with a definite frown as he drove toward Collandra’s restaurant.
The dinner crowd was sparse, but then it was Halloween, and hoards of little goblins would soon be hitting the streets, goody bags in hand, provided the rain let up a bit. Collandra was behind the cash register, taking payment from a couple who were just leaving.
“How’s business, Joe?” Hutch asked congenially.
“Pays the bills,” he said with a slight smile, then paused to thank the departing customers. “So, did you finally get sick of Huggy’s cooking and decide to eat some real food?” he joked.
“We need your help,” Hutch said directly, and the smile disappeared.
“Look, I told you before, I don’t do that anymore. I did it for the Haymes girl because I didn’t want to see something awful happen to her if I could prevent it. But you know how I feel about getting back into the psychic business.”
“This is a strange case,” Hutch began. “We’re not looking for anyone. Well, not anyone who’s missing. I’m not saying this well.” Hutch rubbed at his chin and was about to speak when Starsky cut to the chase.
“Some kids went out to this funeral home a year ago Halloween with a Ouija board, and they think they called up some kind of spirit–claimed they saw and heard some dead guy walking around, though we don’t have any proof. One of the kids is a pretty credible witness, so we believe they saw something weird there. Since that happened, two corpses have ended up being moved to different locations than where the undertakers left them, and one college kid died there just recently.”
“You’re talking about the Sayer place?”
“You’ve heard about it?” Hutch asked.
“I’ve read about it in the paper. Sounds to me like a bunch of twisted morticians with sick senses of humor.”
“Yeah, that’s what we thought at first. But not only has there been a death there, but something one of the boys said ties in with a suicide that took place there back in the thirties,” Hutch explained.
“What’s that?” Collandra asked, his interest appearing ever-so-slightly piqued.
“Our witness said that the Ouija board spelled out the name ‘Andrew,’ and that the spirit they saw, or the walking dead man they saw, answered their call to ‘Andrew’,” Hutch explained. “Where that becomes significant is that Andrew Sayer, the brother of the elderly man who is now passing the business to his sons, committed suicide in the embalming room on Halloween night in 1936.”
“The plot thickens,” Collandra said, deadpan. “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate you two dropping by to share this cheery little Halloween tale with me, but I’ve got a business to run, and–”
“We’ve got a dead college kid and no leads, Joe,” Hutch persisted.
“What exactly would you want me to do?”
“Come with us to the funeral home and tell us what you feel,” Hutch replied.
“Oh, come on. You know I don’t do things like that.”
“Last time you told us you didn’t find missing kids anymore either, but you helped us save Joanna Haymes,” Starsky spoke up. “Look, Joe, if there’s nothin’ to it, what harm is there?”
“None. But if there’s something going on there, I don’t wanna get in the middle of it.”
“Do you think it’s possible those kids could’ve conjured up something that night?” Starsky asked.
“Well, let’s put it this way. Suicides are real likely candidates to be ghosts. They not only die prematurely, but they have something that causes them such great anguish that they take their own lives. Sometimes that anguish is unresolved and they don’t move on to the next plane. That could be what’s happened here.” Collandra raised one eyebrow. “Or he didn’t kill himself.”
“You mean he was murdered?”
“All I’m saying is it would be a good reason for an alleged ‘suicide’ to haunt. Talk about unfinished business–which is the primary reason ghosts haunt. Unfinished business on earth.”
“Come on, Joe–just give us an hour. I can’t pull out a picture of some pretty little girl and tug on your heartstrings, but I can say that a young man did die there recently, and we’ve got no leads. We’ve also got no guarantees someone else won’t end up dead,” Hutch stated urgently.
“I gotta be crazy,” he mumbled, shaking his head and walking back into the kitchen. A moment later, a young man in his twenties followed Collandra out of the kitchen as he gave him instructions for taking customer payments and running the small diner until he returned.
The thunder clapped loudly and a bright flash of lightning split the sky as the three men trudged out to the Torino.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” Collandra said dryly. “For somebody who’s trying not to be in this business, I sure end up doing a lot of it.” He got in the back seat of the Torino, and Hutch slid into the passenger seat as Starsky started up the car. “And it’s usually you two who drag me into it.”
“Oh, come on, Joe. Don’t tell us running that diner is enough excitement for you. Besides, all joking aside, what you have is–”
“Yeah, yeah, a gift, I know. I’m going already. You don’t need the sales pitch.”
“It’s not a sales pitch; it’s the truth.” Hutch was quiet a moment. “Though I admit if I had the same ability, I might not view it the same way.”
“Trust me on that one,” Joe said grimly. “You have keys to this place or do we have to climb in through the windows?”
“We still have keys and it’s still considered a crime scene. Mr. Sayer told us to keep them as long as we needed them,” Starsky explained. “Y’know, he could probably just as well get impressions in the daytime–”
“Starsk.”
“Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it isn’t,” Collandra said. “In the dark, a ghost can appear as an area of light. Besides, spirits often are more active at night. Especially a night like tonight.”
“Terrific,” Starsky grumbled.
The storm was showing no signs of subsiding as the three men arrived at the Sayer Funeral Home. The rain was coming down harder now, sending all three of them rushing for the shelter of the large front porch while Hutch unlocked the door. Once inside, he turned on the ornate crystal chandelier that illuminated the reception area.
“There is something here,” Collandra said, barely inside the front door, which Starsky closed behind them. “Unrest. Terrible unrest.” He walked farther into the room, standing near the staircase. For a moment, both men thought he might go up to the showroom, where Preston Mansfield had been found. Instead, he merely paused there, holding onto the end of the banister, closing his eyes. “Something about the basement,” he said.
“The embalming room’s down there, but there aren’t any corpses down there at the moment,” Hutch said.
“This isn’t a physical presence. But that’s where it is.” With unerring certainty, he walked through the reception area, down a hallway and opened the door to the basement stairs. Flipping on the overhead light, he started downstairs with the two detectives close behind him. The three of them stood there in the hallway with its gray cement floor and white-painted brick walls. It was an old building, but the fresh coats of paint had kept even the basement from looking too dreary. “In there,” he said, moving toward the swinging double doors with their little round windows at the end of the hall. Beyond them was the embalming room.
In the bright fluorescent lighting, it was nothing more than a rather clinical-looking room with shelves of chemicals and supplies, a couple of empty slabs, and a few large pieces of equipment. Collandra stopped in the middle of the floor and clamped his hands on either side of his head, his eyes squeezed as if in pain.
“I see blood.”
“That’s not much of a stretch in here,” Starsky grumbled, earning him an aggravated “Shhh” from Hutch. As he usually did when he was having visions, Collandra ignored the exchange.
“It’s on the wall. And there’s so much anger. And the explosion! It echoes. All I can hear is the echo…” All of a sudden he lurched backward, flattening himself against the wall, eyes bugged. The lightning flashed and the lights went out, leaving the room in darkness, the rain beating on the window and thunder rumbling in the distance.
In the middle of the room stood the nearly transparent figure of a man, his skin a startling white, his form clothed in what appeared to be a dark suit. On his forehead, above his right eye, was a large, dark hole with a small rivulet drizzling downward from it.
“Andrew,” Collandra said simply, and then there was a rustle and a thud, indicating that the psychic had collapsed, though it was too dark to see.
Lightning flashed, and in the ensuing darkness, the figure had disappeared. A moment later, the lights were burning brightly again.
“Joe?” Hutch knelt by the fallen man. “Hey, come on, snap out of it,” he said, patting the other man’s face until he shook his head and sat up with a start, staring at Hutch, and then up at Starsky as if he had no idea where he was or how he had arrived there.
“It wasn’t suicide,” he said simply. “That man did not want to die.” He allowed Hutch to give him a pull to get up, which caused Hutch to grimace and grip his upper arm.
“You okay, buddy?” Starsky was immediately concerned, remembering the flesh wound that had left Hutch’s arm still a bit tender and his movements a little painful.
“I’m fine,” Hutch assured, smiling and nodding, though the little crease in his forehead said otherwise.
“I never saw…anything like that,” Collandra said, still a bit shaken.
“What was that thing? Some kind of trick or something?” Starsky started searching the shelves for any sort of equipment that could have generated the image. He found nothing.
“That, my friends, was a ghost. You can save yourself the trouble of hunting for some sort of movie projector. That was a vision, and if you saw it, too, it only means that it’s a powerful entity. This building practically vibrates with anger and…and this overpowering feeling of…sadness…of betrayal.”
“This is the room Andrew died in…and back then, it was ruled a suicide,” Starsky explained.
“Well it was ruled wrong. One thing I know is that Andrew wants the record set straight.”
“I guess we ought to give the man what he wants, then,” Hutch concluded.
Shaken by his experience and now intrigued by the case, Joe Collandra accompanied Starsky and Hutch back to headquarters to review the file on Andrew Sayer’s alleged suicide, retrieved by Minnie from the bowels of the archived files. Clustered around Starsky’s desk, Hutch sitting against the side of it, Starsky in his chair and their guest in a chair pulled up next to Starsky’s, the three men pored over the old case materials.
“Sure doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail, does it?” Starsky complained, flipping through the meager collection of notes and reports. He paused to look at the black-and-white autopsy photos. His hand shook slightly as he spread them out for the other two to see. The image they had seen briefly in the basement of the funeral home was an exact match for the image of the dead man on the slab–right down to the location of the bullet wound, and the slight trickle of blood that appeared to have escaped between the initial cleaning of the body and the capturing of the image on film.
“His brother, Melvin, found him,” Hutch said, trying to ignore the images, and wishing Starsky would quit staring at them with a sort of fixed horror. Collandra was the one who broke the concentration on the photos.
“Seeing that guy once tonight was enough,” he complained, and Starsky stacked the photos neatly and slipped them beneath the coroner’s report.
“If you were gonna shoot yourself in the head, why would you do it that way?” Starsky queried, resting his chin on the heel of his hand as he read through the coroner’s report. Hutch, meanwhile, was skimming the report of the police officer who questioned Melvin Sayer at the scene.
“He didn’t shoot himself. I told you that,” Joe protested, getting up to get himself another cup of coffee. “Why go over what we already know?”
“Because we don’t have proof that’ll get this verdict changed, and if that’s what Andrew wants in order to find peace, then we need evidence.”
“You know, this is insane.” Hutch shook his head. “We’re all sitting here investigating a forty-three-year-old case to satisfy the wants of some…vision we think we had in the basement–”
“We think we had? I know what I saw,” the psychic stressed. “I think you two both know what you saw, too. It’s just taking you a bit longer to accept it, because you have to believe just your eyes. You didn’t feel what I felt.” He paused. “Listen, there was no earthly way I should have been able to help you find Joanna Haymes, and there was no way…” he sighed, still visibly saddened by the memory, “no way I should have been able to find the body of that missing boy. There are things in this world you can’t explain easily. There’s a whole other dimension out there that operates parallel to this one. I spend more time there than I’d like to. Just because I don’t particularly love it doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge it’s real. You know what I’m talking about, Starsky,” he said, looking pointedly at Starsky, who shifted in his chair a little uneasily.
“What do you mean?” Hutch asked.
“I mean that your partner knows perfectly well there’s another realm out there, because he saw it. Maybe not all there was to see, obviously, but he was there. Just as a soul can begin to cross over and then be called back, a soul can fail to cross over successfully, but not have the option to return to its mortal form. So where does it go? It haunts.”
“Because it has unfinished business,” Hutch concluded, nodding.
“Right. Andrew Sayer didn’t kill himself, and he has major unfinished business with the person who did the deed.”
“But you don’t know who that is?” Starsky asked.
“If you mean did I have a vision about it, no, I didn’t. But his brother found him, and much of what I was feeling was hurt and betrayal mixed in with anger. Those feelings would make sense if his brother did it.”
“When we talked to Melvin Sayer, he said he took over the business in 1936. Like I said to Starsky earlier, he never admitted having a brother at all. So he did it for the business?”
“Makes sense. Didn’t want to split everything fifty/fifty. Besides, Melvin said it was a thriving business until all the weird stuff started happening,” Starsky said. “Jack and his friends dredged up Andrew on the anniversary of his murder. Once he was there, he started working at getting revenge. The best revenge against Melvin would be to destroy the business he stole–and to do it in such a way that it left him humiliated and destroyed.”
“If you read the details on the coroner’s report, there is some other bruising on the body,” Hutch said, rereading the report. You think Ginny’s still in?” he asked Starsky, who shrugged. Picking up the phone, he called down to the lab. Fortunately, she was still in, doing a late autopsy, and was willing to review the file. The three men headed for the lab.
“This is really pretty strange.” Ginny frowned, reading over the old coroner’s report as she sat at her desk in her office adjacent to the lab. Joe and Hutch sat in chairs while Starsky sat against the side of the desk. “If what this report says is true, he would have had to hold the gun like this,” she said, demonstrating by positioning her fingers in the shape of a gun and aiming the extended forefinger above her right eyebrow. The angle was awkward at best, indicating that the gun would have been pointed downward when it was fired.
“That’s a hell of an awkward way to kill yourself,” Starsky observed.
“Well, it’s not very likely. It’s possible, but not likely. There’s some bruising on the body, and even a bit on the face itself. If this were my case, I’d say someone knocked this guy on his can and then shot him in the head, probably while he was sitting on the ground, and the shooter was standing over him. There’s another thing that doesn’t add up here. There were no powder burns around the wound. If you press a gun against your skin and fire, you’re going to leave a different pattern and amount of powder residue, as well as powder burns, around the wound. This is just a nice clean hole in this guy’s head.”
“Seems like the cops on that case missed quite a bit, didn’t they?” Joe commented. “The coroner must have sleep-walked through the autopsy.”
“You want to know my take on this?” Ginny asked.
“You’re the expert. You bet we do,” Starsky responded.
“The Sayers were a reasonably wealthy, respectable family in town. At the time, probably the prominent local undertakers. Somebody probably knew somebody, and if there was something that didn’t add up about this case, they just finessed it away. It’s not humanly impossible to shoot yourself this way–but now you have to remember that the gun wasn’t pressed against his forehead, either, so now he’s holding it out here,” she said, demonstrating several inches from her own forehead, “and tilting it down, and firing. That’s just nonsensical as a suicide. It’s possible, but illogical.”
“Maybe we need to pay little brother Melvin a visit,” Hutch suggested. “Joe, you free to tag along?”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Thanks for your help, Ginny. You’re a gem.” Starsky leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
“That’s the first time a cop ever kissed me for coming up with the right verdict. This job just keeps getting better,” she joked, handing Starsky the file.
Melvin Sayer lived in a small one-story house in an exclusive suburb characterized by expensive cars in the driveways and overpriced landscaping. When the three men parked in the driveway and got out to walk up to the door, they had to step aside for a group of chattering, laughing trick-or-treaters who ran out to the street to join another group and move on to the next house. The rain had finally stopped, but the continued rumble of thunder promised it was not finished for the night.
“Wonder if those kids would share? Is there any special reason we had to skip dinner to do this?” Starsky grumbled. Hutch just laughed, still watching the kids.
“I’ll make you guys dinner when we get done here. Maybe I can get the business away from Huggy,” Joe joked as they headed up to the door.
“Hey, right now, the first guy that offers me a hamburger gets my business,” Starsky retorted. Hutch used the small brass knocker to rap on the door. A few seconds passed, and it opened. Melvin Sayer stood there with a bowl of candy in hand, his smile fading when he saw his visitors.
“You’re a little old for this, aren’t you, detectives?” he asked, smiling again.
“Actually, we’re here about the case,” Starsky said. “This is Mr. Collandra–he’s a consultant we asked to help us out.”
“Come in. I’ll turn out the porch light for a while so we’re not interrupted.” He let them in and turned off the outside light, closing the door behind them. “It’s getting late, so they’re probably almost done anyway. I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen.” He set the bowl of candy on a small table near the door. Starsky resisted the urge to ask for some of that instead. All three men accepted the coffee offer and followed their host to the kitchen, feeling he might be more relaxed to discuss his brother’s case if they kept things casual.
“We questioned the college kids who were in your place that night–the kids from Littlefield,” Hutch said. “You were right that Jack Rydell and Paul Perry were involved, though I understand no damage was done to the funeral home. They offered to make restitution for anything of that nature.”
“The little hooligans belong in prison. Typical spoiled little rich boys who think they’re above the law.” He shook his head. “They’d probably get community service and then come back and bash my head in for pressing charges.”
“Whether or not you press charges on that incident is up to you, Mr. Sayer, but they did provide us with some interesting information,” Starsky spoke up. “Apparently, the night they were there–exactly one year ago tonight–they were playing with a Ouija board, and got some responses to their questions.”
“My sons used to play with those things, and they’d get responses, too–especially when they pushed the thing around where they wanted it to go.”
“One of the boys asked if the spirits of the dead were with them, and the board said ‘Yes’.”
“There’s a surprise,” he responded sarcastically to Hutch’s statement.
“They asked if the spirit responding had a name. The name that was spelled out on the Ouija board was ‘Andrew’.” Starsky watched as the old man’s hand shook and faltered, causing him to set his coffee cup down abruptly, spilling a bit. “We pulled the old case file on your brother’s death, Mr. Sayer. What can you tell us about it?”
“I’m sure it’s all in the file. Andrew committed suicide in the embalming room.”
“Any thoughts on why he would do such a thing?” Collandra asked.
“Is he a detective?” Mr. Sayer asked, pointing at the psychic.
“Actually, I’m a psychic. I visited your funeral home tonight.”
“Of all the–” Melvin threw his hands up in exasperation. “You’re calling in psychics on this now? You can’t solve the case with a little simple investigation, so you have to dredge up one of our family tragedies and make an issue of it?”
“We’d appreciate an answer to Mr. Collandra’s question,” Hutch said calmly. “You see, there are a number of things in your brother’s file that don’t add up.”
“That was over forty years ago!”
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Mr. Sayer,” Starsky stated. “If Andrew’s death was not a suicide, there’s nothing stopping us from re-opening the case. Frankly, based on a re-evaluation of the physical evidence and autopsy report, that’s very likely.”
“Most of the people involved in that situation are dead now,” Mr. Sayer objected.
“Andrew certainly is, and the evidence suggests he didn’t get that way by himself,” Hutch said. “Obviously, then, it becomes relevant to discuss why, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, we ought to believe your brother killed himself.”
“Andrew wasn’t cut out for the funeral business,” Sayer began, then cast a nervous look at Collandra, who was staring at him intently. “It made him very d-depressed,” he stammered nervously, still watching the psychic, who kept his unwavering gaze fixed on the elderly man. “He felt obligated to our father, who had just passed away not a year earlier, to stay on and run the business, being he was the elder brother. I suppose it was all too much for him, and he wanted to end it.”
“The report said the gun was kept in the funeral home as a means of self-defense against break-ins. Had you experienced many break-ins at that time?” Starsky asked.
“No, but we often had a significant sum of money in the safe. We wanted to be sure we had some means of defense against burglars.”
“What became of the gun?” Hutch asked.
“It was kept in the office desk drawer until we closed the place down. Why?”
“You kept the gun your brother killed himself with?” Starsky asked, incredulous.
“The gun didn’t do it, my brother did it. No reason to get rid of the gun.”
“I think the killer was someone very close to your brother,” Collandra said. “I felt a sense of loss and betrayal there…as well as violent, vengeful anger.”
“Judging by the autopsy report, we think that your brother struggled briefly with his killer, fell to the floor, and when he was either sitting on the floor or attempting to get up, the killer fired the fatal shot into his head,” Hutch summarized. “You see, the angle of the bullet entry was all wrong for a suicide.”
“Your brother would have been holding the gun like this,” Starsky demonstrated, holding the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in the shape of a gun and pointing it at his own forehead, several inches away from his head. “In all my years on the force, I’ve had the bad luck to see quite a few people with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. I’ve never seen one come in at that angle.”
“Does that make it impossible? My brother wasn’t stable, he–” Melvin stopped speaking as the lights went out all around them. Collandra closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his face a mask of concentration. When he opened them again, nothing but the whites showed.
“You two-timing, murderous little bastard,” he snarled at Melvin in a deep voice neither Starsky nor Hutch recognized. The old man’s eyes widened as he backed his chair away from the table, as if he could escape the hideous, sightless gaze of the psychic. “How’s business?” the voice asked, before cutting loose with a resounding laugh. With that, Collandra’s eyes drifted shut and he slumped forward on the table. When Hutch found the voice to speak again and managed to make himself move from the spot he’d been riveted to, he gripped the slumped man’s shoulder and pushed him upright in the chair, working at bringing him around.
“Mr. Sayer,” Starsky began, turning his attention to the old man, “before we came here, Mr. Collandra informed us that Andrew’s spirit was angry, and he wanted the record set straight regarding his death. Is there anything you’d like to tell us?”
Hutch was having some luck bringing Collandra around, and the psychic was now blinking and shaking his head, finally accepting the coffee cup Hutch handed to him.
“Mr. Sayer, you’d better set things right,” Collandra said, setting down the coffee. “Your brother’s spirit won’t rest until you do–and that spirit is no longer confined to the funeral home.”
“If you think for one minute that barging into my house and putting on this…this…display is going to wring some sort of confession out of me, you have another thing coming!” He shook his finger at the three men, though the hand itself appeared a bit unsteady. The room was still only lit by the faint glow from a streetlight outside. The interior of the house remained shrouded in darkness. For a moment, all was silent except for an occasional clap of thunder, threatening the return of the rain.
“Thank you for your time,” Hutch said succinctly, standing up. “You give all this some thought, and we’ll be in touch. We are reopening the investigation into your brother’s death, so don’t make any out-of-state travel plans until you check with us.”
“What about my lights?” he demanded.
“What about them?” Starsky retorted. “We didn’t put them out in the first place. I’m sure you know where your own fuse box is.” As they moved carefully through the darkened house to the front door, the old man’s voice stopped them.
“He went to New York for five years and then came back here when our father was dying. I ran that business every day while he was sick. Our father had cancer, and back in those days, treatments for cancer weren’t what they are now. People took care of people at home, and you…you waited for death. God knows we handled enough cancer deaths in our careers.” He paused, sighing. “My mother died two years before that, so I was alone here with my father. I had to hire a nurse to help sometimes, but most of the time, I took care of him and I ran the business. Seems like I was always handling bodies–either at the funeral home or trying to move my father around for baths. He was an invalid at the end.”
“Andrew wasn’t around during this time at all?” Hutch asked, as the four men moved toward a grouping of chairs and a couch in the shadowy living room and sat down.
“Andrew decided to run after some woman he’d met who lived in New York. They got married, lived out there for five years, and she left him for another man. So he came home, a week before our father’s death. I knew there was a flurry of activity with the family lawyer coming over, and my father was getting worse, so the doctor was in and out, and all the while, I was running the business, embalming bodies, burying other people’s relatives while one of my own was dying. I had no idea what all the paperwork was about. I knew my father had gotten angry and written Andrew out of the will when he left so abruptly, so I figured maybe he’d had a change of heart and was leaving him something, or maybe writing him back in as a partner in the business.”
“Is that why you were so angry with your brother? Because he got in on the inheritance?” Starsky asked.
“No, I had no objections to him getting his share.” Melvin took in a deep breath. “Our father left him everything. The business, the house…all he left me was a few thousand dollars and the condition that Andrew always keep me employed as second-in-command at the funeral home. There was a stipulation in the will that if something would happen to Andrew, it would all go to me.”
“So you killed him to get it back?” Hutch clarified.
“It wasn’t the money. You know, no one would believe that, I suppose, and I probably wouldn’t either if it hadn’t happened to me. I worked like a dog to make a go of that business. For years, I worked side by side with my father and Andrew, building the business, doing the work, learning the trade. Then Andrew wanted to go away to college. I stayed behind, went to a local college, and helped Dad run the business. I studied History and English, but my brother studied Business, and he was two years older–so when he returned, he was put in charge, even though he knew practically nothing about the day-to-day operations of the place. I poured my life into that business, and into doing what my father wanted–always doing what would please him. Andrew did exactly what he wanted and the business never meant anything to him except for the money.”
“What led to the confrontation?” Starsky asked.
“I told Andrew I thought it was only fair that I be made a part owner of the business. I threatened to contest the will. The argument got ugly, then it got physical, and even though Andrew was a little bigger, I managed to knock him on his ass. I don’t know why in hell the gun had to enter into it. I had it in my suit coat pocket–I had taken it home with me to clean it, and so I brought it back to put it in the drawer–except I decided to go downstairs and talk to Andrew first.”
“So when he was on the floor, you shot him?” Hutch asked.
“Sounds pretty cold-blooded when you put it that way. That wasn’t how it was. I was so angry, so…betrayed. I loved that business. I worked at it all my life, since I was a young boy. It meant nothing to Andrew and he had it all. And he loved to rub my nose in it every chance he got. I’m sorry I pulled the trigger on him, because looking back on it, it was the wrong thing to do. But Andrew was a cruel, manipulative horse’s ass. He blew into town just in time to collect the inheritance, and the way he ran that place, he would have run it into the ground eventually anyway. He kept me on at a low salary, while he lined his pockets. He started yelling at me that I was fired, I could get out, don’t bother to clean out the desk, how our father was right about me–whatever that meant–and something in me snapped. He was still on the floor, and before he could get up again, I pulled out the gun and shot the bastard in the head.”
“Doesn’t sound like you have a whole lot of remorse for that,” Starsky said.
“Believe it or not, I do. I couldn’t stand my brother, but I don’t believe in killing and I know it was wrong. I was horrified after I did it, and I would have given anything to go back that few seconds and not pull that trigger. But it was done, and he was sitting there on the floor, back against the cabinets, staring up at me with a hole in his head. I put the gun in his hand and called the cops, saying I’d found him like that. I had a pregnant wife at home and bills to pay, and a life to live. I didn’t want to go to prison. So I told the police he was unhappy, depressed, didn’t want to run the business anymore, and that he killed himself.”
“The physical evidence doesn’t support that at all,” Hutch said. “I’m surprised they believed that story.”
“The police commissioner was a very good friend of my father’s. I think he urged them to bring the case to a discreet closure in a timely manner.” He paused. “So what happens now?”
“You just confessed to a murder, Mr. Sayer. I think you know we have to arrest you,” Starsky said, and all four of them started a little as the lights went back on, illuminating the room and making them all blink at the brightness. All were silent for a moment, and then Melvin spoke again.
“I consider myself lucky to have had this long. I watched my sons grow up, ran a respected business…” He smiled and shrugged. “The kids are grown, my marriage ended years ago, the business is shot to hell with these lawsuits–to tell you the truth, I don’t have much more to look forward to, and if going to prison now sets things right again, I suppose it’s a fair price to pay.” He paused. “How do we do this? I never was arrested before. Do you put cuffs on me?”
“I don’t think cuffs’ll be necessary, Mr. Sayer. We’ll read you your rights and take you downtown for booking. We’ll wait if you’d like to call your sons,” Hutch offered.
“Yes, I would, thank you.”
“After you’re booked and appear before the judge, he’ll determine if bail is set. If it is, your sons can get you out on bail pending the trial. We’ll make sure you’re in a secure spot if you have to spend the night in jail,” Starsky assured, fully intending to see that the elderly man was held in a safe place rather than in with the general population.
“Thank you. You’ve been very courteous about this. I’m not sure I deserve that, but I appreciate it.” He went to the phone to call his sons.
Sitting around a table in Collandra’s diner at ten o’clock, the three men ate the evening meal they’d all missed, dining on burgers and fries and soft drinks.
“You figure the judge’ll set bail?” Starsky asked through a mouthful. Hutch shrugged.
“He’s an old man, respected member of the community, not a big flight risk…I would set bail if it were up to me.”
“Joe, you’re awfully quiet. Do you think this balances the scales?” Starsky asked.
“When the lights went on in that house, something…lifted. I don’t know for sure that everything’s okay, but I would be very surprised if there was ever another disturbance from Andrew. I think he’s been trapped on the wrong side of the line for too long.”
“Wonder what happens to an SOB like that when he dies?” Starsky said. “I wonder if he was as bad as Melvin made him sound.”
“There’s an old saying, Starsk,” Hutch said, pausing to take a drink of his cola. “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. I suspect Andrew was somewhere between a sainted victim and the devil incarnate.”
“Melvin was right about one thing, though,” Collandra confirmed. “Some of that sadness and betrayal I picked up on was his more so than Andrew’s. Andrew was consumed with anger. His spirit was driven by anger, not emotional pain. I felt most of that coming from Melvin, I think. Too bad we can’t dig up his old man and put him on trial.”
“Yeah, well, parents do some strange things to their kids,” Starsky said, slumping back in his chair. “Thanks for the food, Joe–and for everything you did tonight. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Busting ghosts can get a little tricky for cops,” he said, smiling slightly. “This doesn’t mean that I’m going to make a habit out of this psychic business, so don’t be showing up here with all your tough cases. You know how I feel about getting involved in police cases.”
“Oh, come on, Joe, you can’t tell us it wasn’t a little bit of a rush tonight–connecting with the other side,” Hutch needled.
“What’s on the other side is nothing to play with–which is something those drunken half wits with their Ouija board would be wise to remember. Sometimes you pull something over that was better left alone.”
“So how do we explain the Mansfield kid?” Starsky asked.
“Short answer? We don’t,” Hutch responded, taking another drink of his coffee. “Remember the corpse in the embalming room?”
“You mean the old lady that was there the night Mansfield died?”
“Right. You and I both know how it looked–the way that sheet was thrown back.”
“Like she covered herself back up,” Starsky concluded, and Hutch nodded. “Great. We can bust Andrew for at least manslaughter for running around in some old dead lady’s skin. Wonder how the DA’ll handle this one.”
“You know, this case does have some frightening implications when you think about it,” Collandra began. “Andrew figured out a way to inhabit other dead bodies and move them about–to use them for his own purposes. That puts a whole different spin on the behavior and power of ghosts, possession…” Collandra shuddered. “Makes me wish I’d stuck with my first impression and flipped burgers tonight instead of going ghost-hunting.”
“I have the feeling Preston Mansfield is going to get shelved as a cardiac arrest brought on by cause or causes unknown. Young people can have heart attacks. There’s no external sign of violence. What else can we do with it? There’s no way any of what went down in that funeral home tonight can go in the report. We can’t tell Dobey that a dead man’s spirit inhabited the corpse of an old woman and scared the kid to death.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, I guess,” Starsky said a bit dismally. “Looks like we’re left with giving Minnie the credit for this one when she found that old case file on Andrew’s death,” Starsky said.
“I’m sure she’ll bring that to our attention soon enough,” Hutch responded, smiling and shaking his head a bit.
Mardean Rigger was still in the psychiatric ward undergoing evaluation, but she was conscious and sitting up in bed now, no longer medicated and borderline hysterical. In fact, when Starsky carefully entered the hospital room, she was reading a book. She looked up when he had stood in the doorway for a few moments.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“You’re the cop on the case. I imagine you can do whatever you like,” she said, laying the book aside.
“I won’t stay long, but there were a few things I wanted to say–”
“I have nothing to say to you,” she shot back. “You let him die. How could you do that?” she asked, her eyes filling with tears. “He trusted you. We all trusted you!” She swiped at her eyes, quickly regaining her composure. “I didn’t know the whole story. It was too painful. I didn’t want to read the details about Lionel’s death, and then one day, when Jamie asked me how he died–really how he died…well, it made me think that while I knew enough to tell her what she needed to know for now, I didn’t know either. I didn’t know the whole truth. So I got a copy of the police report.”
“Mardean, I know nothing I’m going to say is going make a difference in how you feel, and if you want to hate me for the rest of your life, you have that right. In your place, I’d probably hate me, too.” Starsky moved a bit closer. “You’ve got to understand…it all happened so fast,” Starsky paused, laughing a little ironically. “If I had a dime for every time I heard that one from a witness, I could retire. The thing is, it did happen that fast. When Hutch’s car exploded…I know I wasn’t thinking like a cop. I wasn’t thinking straight. I panicked. In my mind, at that moment, Lionel was safe and Hutch was the one in danger. We thought no one knew where Lionel was being held. I figured someone had planted a bomb in Hutch’s car, trying to get at us, and it went off. I had no way of knowing there was a hit man with a remote detonator right down the street.”
“You made a choice and Lionel got the short end of it,” she said simply.
“I guess that’s true. But I thought it was a sound choice. Looking back, I see all the holes in my logic, but right then, when it was happening, I thought someone had made an attempt on Hutch’s life, and I couldn’t leave him lying injured in the street in case another attempt was made, and it seemed Lionel was safe. We’d been so careful getting him there, and so careful keeping him away from the windows…” Starsky shrugged. “We just weren’t careful enough, and it was Lionel they were after. The bomb did what it was supposed to do–take Hutch out of commission for a few seconds and draw me out. You’re never going to know how we felt when we saw Lionel…lying there.”
“If you’ve come here looking for absolution, you came to the wrong place. I’m glad your partner wasn’t seriously injured from my shooting at him. I thought I wanted to kill him, to make you go through what I went through when I lost Lionel, but I realized while I was lying here that it wasn’t going to bring him back or solve anything to take another life. You were so happy…” she looked up at Starsky, tears in her eyes again. “I hated you for having that.”
“Hutch is my best friend, we’ve always been close–”
“I had you tailed by a private detective, Starsky. I was in Hutch’s apartment when you two were in bed together. I know how close you are. Don’t look so panic-stricken. I’m not going to tell anyone your little secret.”
“What did you really see when you were at Hutch’s place, Mardean? That we were sleeping together? So what? Didn’t you ever sleep over at a friend’s house?”
“You can deny it all you want. I didn’t expect you to admit it. Marconi even said he figured you two were getting it on, because nobody he knows stays over at a friend’s place that many nights in a row. He just didn’t have the nerve to go in and have a look for himself.”
“Why would you want to cover for us, then, if you think you’ve ‘got the goods’ on us?”
“What would be the point? I’m sure you’ll double-talk your way out of it just like you talked your way out of any responsibility for Lionel’s death.”
“The only reason I came here today–well, I guess there are two reasons, really. The first one was that I wanted to apologize. I know you don’t want to hear that, but I never meant for Lionel to be hurt, and I never meant to disregard his life or his safety. The other reason is that Hutch and I don’t want to press charges for this.”
“Why not?” she asked, a stunned look on her face. “I took a shot at your partner.”
“If you’d hit your target, things would be different, but we’re both okay, and the one who stands to suffer the most from you going to prison for this is Jamie. She doesn’t deserve to lose you, too.”
“I never meant to hurt her,” Mardean said shakily. “I’ve just been so lost without Lionel, and it seemed as if you two were the heroes of the day for that case, and my husband was just some…incidental footnote. Lionel didn’t care about being a hero, and I don’t care about making him one now–he was my hero. Maybe I just wanted you to stop and remember the people who died along the way to your glowing arrest record.”
“Do you think for a minute that the people you reminded us of are ever that far from our minds? Some of them we loved, some of them we liked and respected…some of the people who have died in the course of our cases were criminals and there was no other way. Human life isn’t cheap or disposable, and every one that’s lost in a cop’s career comes with an emotional price tag on it. Lionel’s price tag was a big one, and I wish I’d thought faster, or been able to be two places at once…but I’m only human, Mardean. I saw Hutch go down and I panicked.”
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you, so if that’s a condition of you not pressing charges, you better go ahead and prosecute me.”
“No, it’s not.” Starsky sat in a chair a few feet from the bed. “If you had been in my place, and you’d seen Lionel in the same situation I saw Hutch, could you have stopped yourself from going to him? Would you have been able to stick to your assigned duty? Would even someone you liked and respected as a friend have kept you upstairs in that room while he was lying on the street below? I’m not asking for your forgiveness, Mardean, because if you’d done something that resulted in Hutch being killed, I probably couldn’t forgive you either, no matter what the circumstances. I just want you to understand what happened that day. That it wasn’t about letting Lionel die because he didn’t matter. I’m not denying responsibility for it, but if something similar happened tomorrow, I doubt as I could do differently.”
“At least you’re honest,” she said, sighing.
“Whoever planned that hit knew enough to know how to get to me, to get me away from Lionel. Maybe they’d tailed us, too, and drew the same conclusion you and Marconi did. I don’t know. I know that I didn’t do things the way a cop should do them that day. I’ll live with that for the rest of my life. But never once did I take Lionel’s life, or his death, lightly. And I never forgot about it and never will. Neither will Hutch.”
“Thank you for not pressing charges,” she said quietly. “I know I need some help to get through this. I just don’t feel like I can live without him, or as if I want to. But I have Jamie, and I know she needs me. When I realized what I had done, how far I’d really gone with it, I was so afraid of having to leave her…. Thank you for caring about her.”
“We can’t make up to Lionel what happened, but we know how crazy he was about both you and Jamie. Maybe if you two can find some peace and happiness…if us backing off pressing charges on this thing can help at all…that’s the least we can do.”
“I meant it when I said I was glad your partner was all right. I never really thought about it at the time, when I was so caught up in things, but he didn’t deserve to die just so I could feel…vindicated. Most of all, I really don’t believe that’s what Lionel would have wanted. He wasn’t like that.”
“I’m glad you’re willing to get some therapy. The only reason we would have pressed charges would have been to force that issue if you weren’t willing to do it on your own.”
“My mother and sister are here in town, and they’re finding me a good doctor. Once I get the okay to leave here, I’ll probably go stay with my sister for a while. My mother said she’d take care of Jamie. I need to be okay when I spend time with her, and I need some time to get there.”
“I think you’ll get there just fine.”
“I’m working on it,” she said, smiling faintly.
When Starsky walked out of the hospital into the late afternoon sunshine, he couldn’t restrain the smile that spread over his features at seeing his blond partner sitting on the front fender of the Torino, sun glinting off that impossibly blond hair, which contrasted with the dark blue shirt he was wearing. He hoped this perfect weather would last all weekend–especially if their request to have it off got approved by Dobey.
“You okay?” Hutch asked, smiling a little at Starsky’s jubilant expression. “I thought you might be kind of down after talking to Mardean.”
“That was rough, no question about it. She’s a tough lady, though. I think she’ll be okay. She said she was glad you were okay.” Wishing he could do more, Starsky put a hand on Hutch’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “So’m I.”
“Ready to call it a day, buddy?” Hutch asked, sliding off the fender and heading for the passenger door.
“Yeah, call us in. I’m ready to go home.”
“Dobey okay’d our weekend off,” Hutch said, grinning as they both got into the car. “He just called a few minutes ago.”
“Let’s just turn off the phones and lock the doors and let everybody think we’re out’a town for the weekend.”
“Why do you think I did all that grocery shopping yesterday?” Hutch asked, smiling a little evilly.
“Sometimes I wish we could do something to help old man Sayer. I know he’s guilty, but I can’t help feeling sort of sorry for the old guy.”
“At least he’s out on bail. His family got him a good lawyer.” Hutch held up a tri-folded piece of notebook paper. “We got a note from Jack Rydell in the mail.”
“Really? What about?” Starsky pulled out into traffic and started driving toward Hutch’s place.
“He wanted to thank me for the advice about his roomie. Seems he told Perry the truth, and things went okay.”
“Okay? Well, I guess that means he’s not dead or maimed, so that’s good.”
“His exact words are, ‘I told Paul the truth and it turned out okay. I mean, really okay.’ He underlined ‘really okay’ three times. He also thanked us for getting them off the hook with the Sayers.”
“They’ve got bigger things on their minds right now.”
“Which reminds me. Advance registration for next semester starts at the college on Monday. Maybe we can finally get around to picking out our class this weekend.”
“You’re really serious about this, huh?”
“Only if you are. But I’d really like to see you explore it, babe.” Hutch reached over and took a hold of Starsky’s hand.
“Okay. Like that saying says, ‘a mind is a terrible thing to lose’.”
“Waste, Starsk, waste. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
“Oh,” Starsky said, nodding solemnly before the corner of his mouth twitched upward in a devilish grin.
Next week on Starsky & Hutch:
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