Mallory's Oracle (36 page)

“And Lou's bulletin board.”

“That too.”

“You're too weak to go anywhere.”

She threw back the covers and swung her bare feet over the edge of the high hospital bed. She landed on the floor, sitting unceremoniously on her backside with a new pain to contend with.

“I told you so,” said Riker.

 

Three women had chimed the warning bells, but they had charitably overestimated him. Bells or no bells, the village idiot was always the last to know his house was on fire.

There had been a warning of sorts toward the end of his mother's life. ‘You must never break Edith's seclusion, Charles. Remember that.' And then his mother was gone. And later, when her remains were going to the ground, he was handed a telegram at the graveside, a message of condolence and an invitation to tea. His mother had said nothing about invitations to tea.

Then Mallory had tried to warn him, and how he had thanked her for that. Henrietta had not even tried, wise woman, but tripped the alarm in trying to work around him. One day, if he was to survive this life, to pick up on all the warning bells, he must get a woman of his own, and maybe a white cane and a guide dog as well.

Raindrops pocked the windows of the cab. Forked lightning lit up the streets and lifted the gloom of overcast for an instant before menacing the earth with a clap of thunder. The cabby was driving through the rain with laudable caution and no speed at all, not realizing that the house was on fire.

“Look here,” Charles said to the driver. “I'll pay you ten dollars for every red light you go through.”

“Oh, you crazy Americans,” said the driver, whose name was made up entirely of consonants.

Charles pushed a twenty-dollar bill through the slot in the bulletproof glass.

“I love this country,” said the cabby.

 

She sat across the kitchen table from Riker while the coffeemaker gurgled between them. Her head throbbed, and it crossed her mind that the doctors had packed her braincase with cotton batting.

“Why didn't Charles come back to the hospital with my stuff and my keys?”

“Maybe he did,” said Riker. “You didn't hang around very long.”

Mallory shook her head. Charles had already been here, so the doorman said, and left in a hurry. She got up from the table.

“Where are you going, kid?”

“Well, not out the front door.” Even the Shadow could not pass through solid oak.

After the doorman had let them in with a master key, they had reached a mistrustful standoff when Riker locked the front door dead bolt from the inside and pocketed the spare key from the ring in the kitchen. Next, he had gone to the bedroom window's burglar guard leading out to the fire escape. He had found the key to the padlock and secured that exit, too.

Now she had drunk as much coffee as she could stand, and Riker had matched her cup for cup. Her mind had cleared only a little, and he was showing no signs of the lost night's sleep. If anything, he was jazzed with caffeine, and for the first time, capable of thinking rings around her, anticipating every ploy.

Maybe.

When he was safely lost in the sports section of the morning paper, she walked into her den and pulled the door shut behind her. She dragged a chair from its position at the computer to the center of the room and sat before the board, scanning the whole of the cork wall as one unit, one mind at work. Despite the mess of papers at the baseboard, she was slow to focus, to realize there had been an intrusion here, another mind at work on the board.

Charles.

He had torn off layers of paper and rearranged the photos and printouts. Samantha Siddon had come to prominence in a centered and solitary position. Anne Cathery, Estelle Gaynor and Pearl Whitman were grouped together and off to the side, lined up in the order of their deaths. The financial data came next in Charles's own hierarchy of paper shuffling.

She was staring at the small white beads, Anne Cathery's, torn from her neck on the day of the murder in Gramercy Park. They lay scattered all over the pile of papers and the plastic bag. The ground had been soaked in blood, strewn with beads. In the slide show inside her head, the Cathery murder scene was blending with Markowitz's. She could see herself lining up the blood pools of Markowitz's face. ‘Line 'em up flat with the floor,' Dr. Slope had told her then.

She walked to the baseboard and knelt down by the pile of Charles's rejects and the plastic bag. Something was missing. What had Charles taken away with him? Her drugged brain would not move quickly enough. She turned to the faster brain of her computer and called up the files to match the missing sequence numbers. And now she could see all that Charles had seen.

There was writing on the wall, and there was writing on the wall.

Charles hammered on the door.

No response.

He tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He entered slowly. The front room was curtain-drawn dark. Down the hall, a rectangle of light reflected off one wall opposite the door to the library. When he rounded the wall and stood in the open doorway, he faced a dark shape in an armchair pulled out to the center of the room and backlit by the bright light of a table lamp.

“Oh, it's you,” said Edith's voice.

His eyes were slow to sort out the details of the gun's barrel and bullet chambers as she lowered it to her lap.

Edith smiled. “I suppose you think I'm a foolish old woman to be so frightened.”

“Oh, no. I don't take you for a fool. And you left your door unlocked—that doesn't argue well for fear. Herbert's gun, I presume? How did you convince him to part with it? Ah, but wait. I forget. You're the one who talked him into getting it. And you were the one who sent one of the seance ladies that threatening letter. That was for Mallory's benefit, wasn't it? To send her after Redwing. Who else have you been sending notes to?”

“What are you saying?”

“This isn't a case of second sight.” The wave of his hand took in the gun, and the lamp. “It's a sure thing. You're expecting an invited guest. Did you telephone or write?”

“You believe that I would deliberately use myself as bait? I'm not so brave.”

“I'd say it was more like an ambush. Oh, Mallory is alive. That must be a great disappointment to you.”

“Charles, how can you—”

“You knew who the murderer was. The last thing you wanted was to have the monster caught by Mallory. You were going to do that job yourself. What a coup. You protect yourself from prison and make a career comeback in one shot.”

“If your mother could hear the things you're say—”

“My mother knew what you were,” said Charles. “You've branched out a bit, though, added on a few more enterprises. I might have worked this out sooner, but it was so out of character for you to let a mark in on the action. Now there are forty of them, all in on it. Getting a bit out of hand, isn't it? Were you craving a little excitement? All those people involved in the scam. Did you enjoy the thrill to the threat of discovery? A young chess player tried to explain that special joy to me the other day. You look frightened, Edith. I think the killer has the same fears.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Read my mind—if the prospect doesn't frighten you. The Whitman merger wasn't your first or last bit of larceny. It wasn't sufficient to account for the amounts in your stock portfolio. You see these?” He pulled a wad of computer printouts from his pocket. “Mallory knew, but I wouldn't listen to her. She backtracked the increases in your fortune and tallied them with details of insider trading. The forty partners told you everything—a new product that led to an increase in stock value, a pending merger, a sale, a take-over. They even allowed you to set the dates of their transactions, just as Pearl Whitman did when her company went into merger. Then somebody started killing off your partners. The police started investigating commonalities among the victims. Exposure was a threat.”

“Stop this, Charles, before you—”

“You and the murderer had so much in common. First killing for the money, then learning to love it. You were soul mates, twins, and the two of you were bound together by the same racket.”

“This is ludicrous. You can't hold me responsible for—”

“I see your hand in everything, Edith. You primed Redwing and baited Mallory. You set Mallory up to die. That's your forte, isn't it? First you predict the death and then you make it happen. She was bright enough to expose you. That would have meant the loss of your fortune and freedom. Hers would have been a challenging death and so functional, too. How neat. But you're not orchestrating things anymore. When the killer walks in, I'll be here. Not you. Now get out of here. Go across the hall to Henrietta's apartment.”

“I assure you, I'm capable of—”

“Get out!”

 

Mallory closed out the file raided from the last financial house on her list and pushed her chair away from the computer. Well, Edith had told her, straight out, you can get away with a lot when you're old.

She slipped by the open kitchen door. Riker was still immersed in the sports section. She walked through her bedroom and into the bathroom to turn on the shower. She left the shower running as she opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out the old .38 Long Colt which had belonged to Markowitz and his father before him. Riker had thoughtfully confiscated her Smith & Wesson, but this would do. The holes would not be so big, but the bullets would travel as far and nearly as fast. The shower was steaming the bathroom mirror as she strapped on her shoulder holster.

Edith had no police protection. They had covered the other seance connections, but they hadn't known about Edith. Mallory thought to call Coffey, and then thought better of it. The evidence was so slender, it was better to catch the perp in the act. Coffey would never let her use Candle.

If she didn't act now, she'd lose the only leverage she might ever have. The seance investors were being rounded up. It was all coming undone, and it was only one newspaper edition to common knowledge. Time, she had none to spare. SEC investigators would be working the data, running the matches. If Charles had gone to Coffey with her printouts, they'd be knocking on Edith's door within the hour.

What if Charles had gone to Edith first? What was she going to do with Charles? Maybe say, ‘Excuse me, would you mind turning your back while I hang old Edith out in the breeze?'

She went to the bedroom closet for her blazer. Her hand was on the door when she thought of Helen. Helen wouldn't like it if she knew her Kathy had used a little old lady to cheese the trap. That would've made Helen cry.

Well, a lot of things made Helen cry.

The first night Helen had tucked her in, Mallory smelled clean sheets for the first time in her child's memory. And there had been clean clothes to wear that next morning. The clothes smelled of fabric softener, and so did Helen on laundry day. On other days, Helen smelled of pine-scented disinfectant, scouring powder and floor wax.

She opened the door, and Helen came out of the closet in scents of sachets and mothballs. Mallory slammed the door on Helen.

 

Riker knocked softly on the bedroom door. No response.

“Hey, Kathy?”

She had been moving slow and dragging, even after all the coffee she'd put away. She could be taking a nap, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was alone in these rooms. He wandered into the den and looked at the mess of the back wall which had undergone a change of clutter style. The square computer eye was glowing blue with white type. She had left her computer running.

While she took a nap?

In a heartbeat, he was back at the bedroom door, forcing the lock and putting his shoulder to it. He was half fallen into the empty room when he heard the sound of the shower running. He knocked on the bathroom door. “Kathy, you in there?”

The burglar guard was still padlocked. The bathroom door lock was standard apartment flimsy. He kicked the door at the midsection and it gave way. The shower stall was empty and the window was open. He put his head out into the drizzling rain. It was a fourteen-foot drop to an overhang below the window. Then she would only have to walk along that overhang to gain access to the fire escape.

 

Not a big believer in invisible murderers, Charles had angled the lampshade to spotlight the door. Edith's ambush preparations told him he would not have long to wait.

Markowitz had been right. The evidence was so slight, there was no other way but this to end it.

He never heard the steps approaching.

A mass of energy burst through the door, with no face, no identifiable shape to the colors and materials in the rush of flying, sprawling bulk. The lamp crashed to the floor. Its naked light bulb burned like a sun in the peripheral corner of his sight. And then all was still and quiet, and his attention was focused on the point of the knife one inch from his left eyeball. When he could look beyond the knife, he was staring into the familiar eyes of a serial killer.