Mallory's Oracle (3 page)

“So he knew he was dying.”

“Yes.” And that hurt her, he knew. He discerned it in the slow deadening of her eyes. So Louis Markowitz had spent his last hour in pain and fear.

“The killer didn't take much time with him,” he said. “He was more interested in the woman. Markowitz has defensive wounds on his arms. By the position of the first blood splatter, he put himself between her and the killer.” And now he detected the first signs of mild shock with the slight loss of focus in her eyes. “Can I do anything for you, Kathy?”

His first error was using her Christian name on the job, and his second gross presumption was kindness. He was rewarded with universal contempt throughout the crowded tenement room. He should've known better, said the frozen silence of the uniforms, the technicians and the photographer.

“You're done with the body?” she asked, focused again, all cold to him now, all business.

He nodded.

“Okay,” she said, turning to the medical examiner's men. “Bag him and take him out.” Now she looked to the far corner where the old woman's body was. “And that one? How long?”

“She only lived a few minutes.”

“Bag her.”

Her next order cleared out all the unnecessary personnel, and that included old friends of the family. Dr. Slope left in advance of his team. The way out of the building and into the light was much longer than the way in had been.

 

Sergeant Kathleen Mallory sat on the only chair in the room while the forensic team crawled on hands and knees, looking for fibers and hairs, the minutiae of evidence. She traced the pattern of blood. He fell there, near the door.

And he had gotten up and dragged himself along that blood-smeared wall to the window.

And there by the window, where the blood had spread around his body in a wide stain in the dust, he had collapsed and died. But it had taken some time. He'd had time to think.

She looked up as they were carrying him out in a black plastic body bag.

A small notebook lay open on her lap. She drew a quick slash through the notes on Markowitz's car. It must have been stolen. Nothing had turned up on the impound lots in the two days she'd been hunting for him. It was probably in Jersey by now and painted a different color.

‘Defensive wounds' she wrote on a clean page. So he had tailed the perp to the crime scene and gone in without backup. Why? ‘Because the woman was about to die,' she wrote in a clear, neat hand. She could assume he was on foot—no car radio, or he would have called for backup. That was something. So the perp was also on foot.

Her pen scratched across the paper again. ‘No drive-by snatch.' She was certain of that much. The killer had arranged to meet the old woman well away from Gramercy Park—a break in the pattern of the other two murders. There had to be a record on some cabby's log. A rich old woman doesn't ride the subway or the bus. And she wouldn't have come here alone to meet a stranger. ‘She knew her killer.'

So she could also assume that Markowitz had figured out how the park murder was done. Smart old bastard. But if he was so smart, why did he keep it to himself? And since when did a cop with Markowitz's rank do surveillance detail?

One of the forensic techs looked her way and then nervously looked everywhere else.

Was he checking for tears, she wondered, for signs of disassembling? No way. No compassionate leave for Mallory. But Commissioner Beale was such a twit, he might order it. Then what?

The worst of the stench from the old woman's corpse still lingered. Pearl Whitman had not been such a neat kill as Markowitz. The butcher had punctured the intestine. In the absence of food, the cloud of flies was dwindling to a few annoying strafers. There were no windows that were not broken, no barriers to contain them. They whined past her ear, buzzing and black, fat with blood. Gone. All quiet now, only the sound of the brush in the hand of the man at her feet who was looking for omens in the dust and the dried blood.

 

“I shouldn't have called you so late.”

“No, Mr. Lugar, you did the right thing.”

The sleepy rabbi and the night watchman were both in their late fifties, and both were balding, but there they parted in likeness. The watchman was furtive in all his movements and shaped like a beer keg on toothpick legs. The rabbi was a tall man and comfortable in his slender body. His face was catlike and tranquil in the half-closed lids of lost sleep.

The watchman jerked his head up to look at the taller man. “Wait till you see her. She looks like a little kid, just sitting there in the cold. We have to keep it cold, you understand.”

“I understand.”

“It's so peculiar. I worked here maybe two years now, and nobody ever wanted to sit up all night with the body. It's so peculiar. I didn't know who to call. Well then, I seen your name on the manifest for the funeral arrangements. So I gotta figure you know the family, you know?”

“I know.”

He led him to the door and pointed to the square window.

“Don't she look just like a little kid?” The watchman moved his head slowly and sadly from side to side as he unlocked the door and stepped back. “I gotta go on my rounds now, Rabbi.”

“Thank you for all your trouble, Mr. Lugar. It was very kind of you.”

The smaller man smiled and ducked his head under the rare burden of a compliment. He turned and walked down the dimly lit hall, stiff and disjointed as though he had borrowed this body for the night and had not quite gotten the hang of walking around in it.

The rabbi pushed through the swinging doors and into a bright, cold room painted antiseptic green. She was sitting on a metal folding chair by the wall of lockers, each one home to a body, and one of those bodies was very important to Kathy Mallory. Her blazer collar was pulled up against the cold, and her hands were tucked into the fold of her arms. She was hugging herself, it seemed, for lack of anyone to hold her.

She was twenty-five years old, he knew, but she was also the child who stared defiantly from the old photograph in Louis's wallet. She was not much changed since that day, fourteen years ago, when he first saw her walk into the front room of the Markowitz house, following along in Helen's wake, never going very far from Helen's side. Of course, she was taller now.

“Kathy, why are you here? Mr. Lugar was concerned about you.”

“Someone's supposed to sit with the body. A relative.”

“No, Kathy. That's not necessary. Louis was not so orthodox a Jew. He was only religious about our Thursday night poker games. And he missed last Thursday's game.”

He bent his knees, and his body folded down in the neat illusion of shrinking until he was sitting on the backs of his shoes. It was his custom to speak to children at eye level.

“Louis was so unorthodox I caught him buying a Christmas tree one night. That would have been the first year you lived with Louis and Helen. Louis tried to fob it off as a Hanukkah bush.”

“Did you ream him out?”

“Of course I did. As we were carrying it home. I was merciless.”

“It was a twelve-footer. I remember that tree. It went up to the ceiling.”

“So can you picture an orthodox Jew putting up Christmas trees and raising a little Gentile? You don't have to sit up with him.”

“Helen would've liked it.”

“You got me there.” He shrugged and smiled. “She would've liked it. Louis would've liked it too.”

Mallory looked down at her hands.

“It's all right to cry, Kathy.”

“Don't get your hopes up, Rabbi.”

Rabbi David Kaplan seemed to be growing taller instead of merely standing up. He walked over to the rear wall, where three more folding chairs rested near the door. He carried one back to the wall of lockers and dragged out the mechanics of unfolding it and settling himself into it.

“I think I'll stay too,” he said.

“What for?”

“Helen would have liked it.”

“I'm okay.”

“Me too, Kathy. I'm okay. How long have I known you now? Since you were a little girl.”

“I was never a little girl. Markowitz said so.”

“Since you were a short person. I've known you that long. If you need me, I'm here.”

“I'm not Jewish.”

“You're telling me? But there's so much of Helen invested in you. I got to protect her investment, keep it alive, you know?” He looked up to the fluorescent lights. “It's Thursday. When I knew I would never play poker with Louis again, I cried.”

“Not me.”

“I believe you. Louis used to tell me—when you were very short—that you had principle. ‘Tears were for suckers, by her lights,' he said. I'm a sucker, Kathy. You can take from me what you want, you can tap me for lunch every now and then, for advice. Are you very angry with Louis?”

Well, that got her attention. And yes, she was very angry.

“He was a good cop,” she said. “When a cop gets killed, it's because he got careless. How could he do that?”

“How could he do that
to you?
Louis used to worry about you working in Special Crimes.... Ah, you didn't know that? Well, you spent more time with computers than criminals. He was so proud of you. She's so smart, he would say. But these people he dealt with were so dangerous. He always knew the risks. I believe he knew it would end this way.”

“I'm going after the dirtbag that did this to him.”

“Your expertise is in the computer, Kathy, not fieldwork. Leave it to the others. He only wanted you to be safe. Give him that much. He wouldn't want you involved in this. Promise me you'll let go of it now. Make this promise a last gift to Louis.”

She sat well back in the chair and folded her arms across her chest in the attitude of ‘now it begins.' “So Markowitz spilled all of this to you. That's interesting.”

“We talked. So?” He found her slow widening smile disturbing. Louis had called it the Armageddon grin. “I was more than his rabbi. I was his oldest friend.”

“And you want to help me? I'm calling you on that, Rabbi. You're either all talk, or you give me what I need.”

The cold air was creeping through the light threads of his jacket. Her eyes were narrowing—another sign of trouble. How incongruous was that incredible face with those gunslinger eyes.

“So, what'd the old man say about the Gramercy Park murders?”

“Louis would come back to cut out my tongue if I led you into that mess.”

She leaned forward suddenly, and pure reflex made him pull back with his body and his mind. She was rising from the chair, standing over him, and he forgot that he was the taller of the two.

“Fine, then I jump into it stark naked, no defenses, none of your promised help, your hot air, your—”

“Enough.... A deal is a deal, as Louis would say. But he never told me anything concrete. He was so cryptic he could have had
my
job. He said the clues were false and they were not. He said it was complicated and simple, too. Does this help you, Kathy?”

“You're holding out on me.” She sat down again and leaned forward to bring her face close to his. “He knew who it was, didn't he?”

“He never told me.”

“But he knew.”

“He said the only way he'd get that freak, that thing, was to catch it in the act. This one was too clever, smarter than Louis himself, so he told me, and maybe even smarter than you.”

“Why did Markowitz tell all this to you and not me?”

“Oh, you know how parents are. They start to get independent of their children. Then they think they know it all, never need advice, never call the kids anymore. Like it would break an arm to pick up a phone. And you kids, you give them the best years of your lives, the cute years. This is how they pay you back, they take all the horrors of life and keep them from you.”

“There's more. Give, Rabbi. Why would he do the tail himself? Why not send detectives or uniforms to do the surveillance?”

“This one scared him, Kathy. This was not an ordinary human. This was a freak from the night side of the mind. How could he send in one of his beautiful young boys and girls?”

“Not good enough, Rabbi.”

Her reflection elongated in the bright metal of the morgue locker, twisting in ugly distortions as she moved her head. He looked away.

“Did you know Louis was a dancing fool?”

“Rabbi.”

“Patience, Kathy. He loved to dance. But there were no dancing Jews in his family. Very conservative they were, very pious, but not so much fun as you might think. So Louis would sneak out with the Irish kids, and they'd go dancing. One night, when we were young—when we were two other people, almost brand new—Louis took me with him to a nightclub. As memories go, it's right up there with the night my first child was born.

“Oh, how he could dance, Kathy. The other kids made a ring around him and his partner. They clapped, they screamed. All of us who watched on, we stamped our feet and rocked our bodies like one gigantic throbbing animal, and we made the building move with our rocking, and the band went on and on and faster and faster. And when the music did stop, the animal with two hundred mouths screamed out in this terrible, beautiful agony....