Mallory's Oracle (23 page)

Henry Cathery stood by the wide window of his bedroom and watched her leave the building with the old woman. She was so pretty. He had stood at the window for a long time, waiting for her to come out again, not moving from this spot, though he ached to use the toilet.

She hadn't kept him company today, either. He had to take his opportunities where he could find them. Now he was ready for her. He lined her up in the telescopic site and shot her over and over, framing her in the camera lens, her pretty face in an unsettling pain. Another shot clicked off as she walked out of the square to the place where she had parked the little tan car that smelled of her. She and the old woman disappeared into the car and it rolled out of sight. He remained at the window, staring down on the park, the ultimate game board.

The police error had been the oversight of ungifted chess players. The idiots would continue to plod on in their routine way, unimaginative players drawing only on past experience, incapable of the leap of logic, the only move that would get them to endgame.

 

In the coffee shop off Gramercy Park, Edith signaled the waitress for another cup of tea, and Mallory watched the door over the rim of her coffee mug. Forty minutes had passed before Jonathan Gaynor walked in and joined them at the table. He put the pocket watch down by her plate, which held an untouched croissant. She stared at the watch and wondered where her mind had gone without her. How could she have left it behind?

“Are you okay?” His voice was all concern as he eased his lanky frame into the booth beside Edith.

Mallory forgot to cut him dead, to wither him, to explain to him, with only her eyes, that he was a fool if he thought they were going to share a warm moment. She was off her stride, and rattled enough to let the kindness slide. She felt like a fool, getting suckered by Redwing. It must be showing, because Gaynor was really pushing his luck, all sympathy and commiseration in his eyes, smiling at her with an easy grin that belonged to a shy boy in a Kansas wheat field.

She smiled back and startled herself. Her smile was almost natural, nearly spontaneous.

“You shouldn't have given her something real to work with,” he said.

“Well, she had to,” said Edith. “Redwing would have spotted a ringer. She is talented, you know.”

“The hell with talent,” said Mallory. “Redwing runs her marks through an information network. The story had to check out in the computer system, so I gave her Markowitz.”

“That was risky,” he said. “So she also knows you're a policewoman.”

Mallory nodded.

“It was really Markowitz you saw in Redwing, wasn't it?” Edith asked.

“A first-rate imitation, I'll give her that.”

“It would be a grave mistake to underestimate her gift,” said Edith.

Gaynor smiled at Edith. “Apparently you were more impressed with the show.”

“Very stylish,” said Edith, “Nothing tacky or flamboyant.” For the third time, she signaled to the waitress with her raised teacup and hopeful eyes. The young woman in the food-spotted white uniform hurried by, eyes seeing nothing but the clock on the wall. Edith's cup settled back to the table. Hope died.

Mallory caught the waitress's eye and arrested it. Her expression gave only the suggestion of violence. A moment later, the waitress could not get more tea into Edith's cup in a big enough hurry. The young woman left the pot on the table in her haste to be anywhere that Mallory was not.

“You two missed the best part,” said Gaynor. “That card table rose straight up off the floor, maybe two feet in the air.” His gesturing hand swept the sugar container off the table. “It scared the life out of me.” He leaned down to retrieve the container. When he set it back on the table, the pepper shaker was sent to Edith's lap. “Sorry. I wish I knew how she did it. The little boy was in plain sight a good three feet away, and Redwing's hands were flat on the table.”

“That one's easy,” said Mallory. “When she put her hands on the table, I saw the rings digging into her fingers. Then I saw the two ripples in the tablecloth where her rings had hooked the pins under the material. All she had to do was lift.”

“Oh,” he said, and there was some disappointment in this syllable, as though he had only lately made the discovery of Peter Pan's wires. “But there was more. Tell me, were any of the murdered women stabbed in the breast?”

“Why do you ask?”

“When she contacted my dead aunt, the boy put his hand to the right breast. He cupped his hand, like this. No doubt there was a breast there, and then it was all bloody, stabbed or slashed open.”

Mallory lifted her shoulders to say ‘Who knows?' and then looked around for their waitress in time to see the white flash of the uniform disappearing through the ladies' room door, which banged against the frame to say, ‘Fat chance she's coming out again anytime soon.'

On the sidewalk outside the café, Edith and Mallory parted company with Gaynor. After Mallory had driven Edith Candle home and seen her to the door of 3B, she stopped the elevator at the second floor. She had two hours to kill before her last appointment of the evening.

The door was unlocked. Was Charles picking up bad habits from Edith? In the reaction time of a good New Yorker, her gun cleared the holster with speed enough to fool the eye into thinking it had simply appeared in her right hand. Gun raised, she pushed open the door. All the light came from one of the back rooms. Silently, she made her way down the hall to the back office. A cat would have made more noise with its footfalls.

Charles was sitting in a warm pool of light which spread outward from the stained-glass lamp on his desk. He was completely absorbed in the journal on his blotter, with no idea that she was in the office or in the world. She envied him his perfect concentration. It was only a little unsettling to watch him reading at the speed of light.

Her gun returned to the shoulder holster as she stole back to the front room, not wanting to disturb him. There was just a little comfort in knowing he was there. Markowitz had said to go to Charles if she needed help, not if she wanted to use him and his connections. The old man would never have wanted her to drag him into this.

She sat down on the couch. It was not the typically uncomfortable antique, but well padded and more like the furniture in the Brooklyn house. It was friendly in its response to her, plumping up around the slender outline of her body. She would have liked to stop here, to not move again. This night would not be over for a long time yet, and she was already flagging, eyes closing.

However she turned the thing over, she could not see what Markowitz had seen. Logic told her Coffey was right, and Markowitz had been caught out without a clue in hell as to who the perp was. But she continued to believe in Markowitz in the same way he had taught her to believe in the Shadow. Never mind logic. It only worked half the time, anyway. Her eyes closed.

She snapped awake when the couch rearranged its stuffing to accommodate another sitter. Charles was smiling at her. He had such a wonderfully loony smile. But now, his face was slowly changing to worry lines. What was he reading in her own face? she wondered. What had she given away to tell him something was wrong? Was there really any point in holding out on him? Could she? No, probably not.

“I gather the seance wasn't much of a success.”

So Edith had told him they were going to Gramercy. And what else did he know? He could extrapolate volumes from near nothing.

“No, it wasn't. But I did have a nice chat with Markowitz .”

Oh, she could see he didn't like that, not at all. There was more than worry in his eyes, but she could not account for it. Was he angry with her? Why?

“How did the medium know about you and Markowitz?” he asked.

His voice was very gentle. So she was not the one who angered him. Who then? Edith?

“I told her.”

“That may have been a bad mistake. Did you tell Edith you were going to use Louis?”

“Yeah. I didn't have any choice. Gaynor thought it was a mistake too.” If Charles was her barometer, then Markowitz the dancing fool must be rocking and rolling in his grave. She was getting too messy, too noisy, telegraphing every damn move.

“Tell me what happened.”

His hand was covering hers with the human warmth that Markowitz's last letter had promised. It had been so long since she'd been touched this way, she nearly didn't recognize the sensation. ‘Go to him if you need help,' said the Markowitz who lived inside her head with Helen, abiding in a detailed replica of the house in Brooklyn in the days when it gleamed with polish and smelled of canned pine trees.

She described the seance in every detail, the compulsive detail of habit. She only left out the part where she had been suckered into believing that it was Markowitz simply because Redwing had looked and talked and acted like him, because Mallory had been one beat away from taking the chance to settle old business and say goodbye, and she had blown it. And hadn't that been the worst of it? Her eyes were open now. She had lost all the threads to make-believing, and never would she get them back. She had seen the wires behind the works.

“Charles, how could she do him so well? She knew about the wounds. Nothing that specific was in the papers.”

“That computer of yours has you blindsided. With more field experience, you might have realized that quite a bit of data can be had through human networks. How many police officers were at the crime site, how many civilians, how many have wives, brothers-in-law, sisters, mothers, and who do those people talk to? If it all hangs on Markowitz's wounds, you have nothing. As to the impersonation, we've all seen Markowitz on television. He was on for days during the Senate hearings. He signed two autographs one night when we were having dinner in Chinatown.”

“And the boy imitating the slashed breast?”

“The boy was imitating a woman. He made a breast. Gaynor could hardly have seen it slashed. But that's not his fault. The more people you gather into one room, the more energy there is, and mass psychosis is more possible. You can be convinced you saw all sorts of things that never happened.”

“All those old women knew about the link to the seance, and not one of them thought to call the cops. How do you figure that?”

“Well, as the woman said, it's miles more exciting than waiting to die in your sleep. You don't take anything at face value, do you?”

No, she did not. “Maybe something else frightened them more than the killer did.”

“Fear of the police, for instance? You think these women are a gang of geriatric criminals?”

Well, Charles had one geriatric criminal in the family, didn't he? Edith did say you could get away with a lot when you were old. But that subject was forbidden.

“Maybe Redwing has some hold on them. She's good, Charles. You should have been there. And the Markowitz imitation was just too damn good. It took Markowitz an hour to die. Maybe Redwing had time to get to know him then.”

“An incomplete portrait would have sufficed. Your memories of Louis filled in whatever she missed. You did most of the work for her. Mediums depend on that. I've watched the best of them work. They put out half a general sentence, and the client fills in the blanks. Then the medium builds on the volunteered data. It's an art form. They're also guided by subtle nuances of facial expressions. Don't underestimate the power of an observant empathic to rip your mind inside out.”

“I know she's mixed up in this.”

“Perhaps, but I don't think she makes a good suspect. All the victims being tied to the seances doesn't make for a very smart set of murders. I believe Louis did say the killer was smart.”

“Maybe she's so smart she'd figure it that way—like a double blind.”

“No, too convoluted. She may be gifted, but there's no correlation between a gift and IQ points. Redwing intuits everything.”

“What about Edith? How did she know her husband was going to die that particular night? Coincidence?”

Charles sat up straighter. His eyes wandered off to the side where he was looking at something in a memory. He turned back to her. “Edith predicted the date? Is that what she told you?” His hand withdrew its covering warmth. “Well then, you probably know more about the particulars than I do.”

“She didn't make it up, Charles. I researched it in the periodicals section of the library. She knew the night he was going to die. She knew it days in advance. The neighbors confirmed it.”

“It could easily be a coincidence that she guessed the night. It was a very dangerous trick. Death was always possible. He didn't drop down through a trapdoor in the stage, you know. He went into a tank of water, chained with iron and tied with rope. On the first night, the trick worked as it was supposed to. I went with my parents that night. I saw him struggling with the locks underwater, then working his way out of the ropes in full view of the audience. There was a large time clock onstage, set to go off at the limit of human endurance. The clock went off with an earsplitting ring. And Max wasn't free yet. He hadn't managed to undo the last coil of rope in time, and for a while, he hung there in the water like a drowned man, and all the while the clock's alarm was screaming and the audience was screaming. Then suddenly, he burst out of the ropes and pushed off against the bottom of the tank and erupted into the air. It was an amazing stunt. It took all his concentration to slow his heart and his respiratory system while he worked the locks of the chains. One slip of the mind and there you go.”

“Were you scared when you thought he'd drowned?”

“Oh, no. I'd seen Max die a hundred times. Part of the fascination with dangerous stunts is that the audience believes the performer might die. Max gave them their money's worth. He died every time. I didn't see him die the last time. My parents went without me that night.”