Mallory's Oracle (37 page)

The lamplight from the level of the floor made the body into a giant, casting its shadow up beyond the wall, which was too small to contain it, and across the ceiling. The shape blurred as he focused again on the point of the knife, light dancing on the sharp tip, calling his attention to the matter at hand. Any movement would cost him an eye. By great effort of will, he dismissed the knife, refusing to see it anymore, looking back to the eyes of his assailant.

“What part are you playing now, Gaynor? Jack the Ripper?” Charles smiled.

The knife pulled back only a little, a fraction of an inch. Jonathan Gaynor's eyes did the wide-then-narrow dance of ‘what's going on here?' The knife came closer, all but touching Charles's eye. “Where is Edith Candle?”

Charles blinked slowly, and his smile widened into a lunatic grin. “You didn't think I'd endanger an elderly woman, did you?”

“How did you put it together?”

“You're wondering if the police could figure it out as easily as I did? They have. It was hardly challenging.”

“I think you're running a bluff.” The knife wavered back and forth, mimicking, in smaller degrees, the slow shake of Gaynor's head. “You never called the police. You're on your own, aren't you? You sent the note, and signed the old lady's name, right?”

“Believe what you like.”

“Tell me how you worked it out.”

“No, if you're going to kill me, I don't mind annoying you by taking the list of your stupid mistakes with me.”

“It doesn't matter,” said Gaynor, drawing the blade back an inch, hefting the weight of the hilt in his hand. “They could only have a circumstantial case. The same evidence could argue for Margot or Henry.”

“Oh, sorry. I just had a chat with the police department a few minutes ago. Margot Siddon is in jail. Henry's down there now, trying to make bail for her. Not that they'll let her out. Seems she was having a bad day. She tried to kill an off-duty NYPD detective.”

“You're lying, Charles.”

“For the next hour or so, they'll have a score of policemen for alibis. So what now?”

“We could while away some time till Henry gets home. Or you could die in the rather boring murder of an interrupted burglary. This is New York City—unsensational corpses get stacked up like cordwood.”

Never taking his eyes from Charles, Gaynor reached out one blind hand to pick up the telephone on the table next to the chair. “Dial the numbers as I call them.” When the connection was made, he took the receiver and held it to his ear, waiting out the time of six rings. He put the receiver back on its cradle.

“No answer at Henry's apartment. But then I take it you'd rather not wait on Henry?”

“I've changed my mind,” said Charles as the knife came closer. “I'll tell you how I figured it out. And maybe you could clear up a few small details for me. Deal?” as Mallory would say.

“Deal.”

“Your choice of victims wasn't very clever. You might as well have signed Samantha Siddon's corpse.”

“She wasn't even—”

“Now, Louis Markowitz's key was your aunt. Louis loved money motives. Of course, you knew your aunt was mentioned in an investigator's report on the Whitman Chemicals merger.”

“How do you make the leap from a recent murder to a stock market transaction in the eighties?”

“A routine background check on your aunt footnoted an SEC investigation on the merger. All the heavy profiteers were investigated. The U.S. Attorney's office elected not to prosecute. A few old women and a seance got lost in the bigger game of the junk bonds and broker swindles.”

“What's the connection to me?”

“Your aunt tipped you off to the merger, didn't she? According to Mallory's reports, you made a modest gain that year, almost too modest. I found that interesting. But then, you could count on inheriting a fortune, couldn't you?”

“I never purchased any stock in Whitman Chemicals.”

“I'm guessing you exchanged the insider tip for a straight percentage of profit. Perhaps you learned that trick from your aunt. She was a rather small operator up to that point, only steering the marks to Edith and making use of the dates.”

“Even if you could prove that, I couldn't be prosecuted. I'm past the seven-year statute of limitations.”

“But your aunt wasn't. Mallory told me you quarreled with your aunt over the seances. I believe you did. It must have been a shock to discover her activities were ongoing and so extensive. Your aunt's fortune doubled after the merger Edith arranged. But subsequent deals with the cartel made it grow to ostentatious proportions. It was out of control, wasn't it, so many people in on the action. It was only a matter of time before the cartel was exposed. And the government people routinely take all the profits, don't they? Not to mention fines in the millions of dollars. But even the SEC can't seize a dead woman's estate once it's gone through probate. Mallory's first instincts were good. She liked money motives as much as Louis Markowitz did.”

“Back to Samantha Siddon, if you don't mind. I don't see the connection to me.”

“It was because Siddon followed Whitman. With a few reservations, I finally gave in to Mallory's fixation with money motives, the idea that, of the four murders, there was one main target. Pearl Whitman left no heirs, no one benefited by her death. The only motive for her murder could be the framing of Henry Cathery.”

“One might take the view that Pearl had changed her mind about giving Henry a solid alibi for the time of his grandmother's death.”

“I wouldn't. Four murders would be too complex for a young man who thrives on simplicity and lack of distraction. He wouldn't bother to go to all that trouble—certainly not for money. I gather you didn't know he was coming into a personal fortune of his own. You seemed surprised. That's a snag, isn't it?”

“You keep digressing. How does Samantha Siddon give me away?”

“Samantha Siddon was an interesting departure from the pattern. Everyone was so busy with patterns and common motives. And that place where Louis died with Pearl Whitman, that made another interesting departure. Then I realized it wasn't a departure at all. It was business as usual with an unexpected interruption.”

“You're wandering off the path again, Charles.”

“Sorry. Well, the order of the murders is important. You killed Anne Cathery first to put suspicion on Henry Cathery. He was perfect, wasn't he? A strange boy, reclusive. But even if he had been arrested, there were no witnesses, no physical evidence. All that Cathery money, what were the odds he couldn't make bail? So you didn't have to worry about his confinement while you were killing your aunt. You didn't count on Henry intimidating Pearl Whitman into an alibi after the police came around a second time. Then Miss Whitman was the third victim. That would have been predictable for Markowitz, once he sized Henry Cathery up for a frame. That would have occurred to him shortly after your aunt died. He was following the money motive.”

Gaynor kicked the lamp, and the shifting light made his shadow smaller. “It couldn't have been that simple.”

“Did it rattle you when he followed Pearl Whitman into the building? Yes, I suppose it did. You must have thought it was all over at that point. You left the plastic bag behind. Very sloppy. It was photographed at the site.”

“Siddon,” said Gaynor, bringing the knife close and then drawing it back. “Samantha Siddon.”

“Right. The last one. It followed Markowitz's logic for the framing of the Cathery boy. You knew about that odd little symbiotic relationship between Henry and Margot. You'd lived in the square for several months by then. I expect you'd seen them together quite a few times. You would have been interested in every aspect of Henry's routine. You couldn't count on Henry not having an alibi for all the murders, so you implicated the only other human he had any ties to. It would destroy her credibility as an alibi and lead the police down the path of a conspiracy.”

“I have an unbreakable alibi for the Siddon murder.”

“Well, no you don't, not if you're counting on Mallory. I'm sure you noticed her staking out Gramercy Park and following you on campus. Her tragic flaw is beauty, or rather, the fact that she's unaware of it. She actually believes she can blend into her surroundings. So you were aware of her, and you made her your alibi.”

“I was never out of her sight for more than twenty minutes.”

“Nineteen minutes. She's obsessive about her notes. Do you know, she even has a note about the change in your physical characteristics during the play? You do have a distinctively awkward body language, but you can lose it when you want to. Onstage, you were even graceful.”

“Nineteen minutes isn't enough time to go to Gramercy Park, kill the old woman and get back to the theater again.”

“Oh, I don't believe any of them were killed in Gramercy Park. The university borders a seedy area with lots of places to do a murder unobserved.”

“The police have no reason to believe she wasn't killed in the park.”

“You mean because of the blood at the supposed crime sites? I liked the detail of the beads spread out all over creation. You arranged the bodies as they were when you killed the women. Once the bodies stiffened, it would have been easy to leave them in the same positions at another site, even working in the dark. Originally, the police believed the plastic bag was used to prevent the blood from splattering the killer. But the bags were used to retain all the blood necessary for a convincing crime scene. Excellent idea. The bag would keep it nice and moist so it would saturate the surroundings instead of lying caked on the surface. The bloody palm prints were another nice touch.”

“They'll never prove it.”

“No? But you've made so many errors. Shall I tell you what I believe tipped off Edith Candle? You mentioned the slashed breast from the seance. Blood and gore are not the mainstays of a medium's routine. Edith knew you'd filled the gaps in that performance from memory. You couldn't have seen it.”

The knife had dropped away from his eye by a bare inch, and then another.

“It was more than money, wasn't it? I always thought that was a flaw in the police logic. You took an unnecessary risk planting the first body in the park. You craved the excitement, didn't you? How did it start?”

The lamp on the floor created the illusion of footlights and the drama of contrast. Gaynor's grin had a ghoulish aspect.

“It started with Anne Cathery's dog. He got away from her and led her out of the park. We were looking for him by the trash bins when I saw the monkey puzzle worked out for me.”

“The monkey puzzle. That sounds familiar.”

“When you were a schoolboy, did you have the paradigm of the monkey, the chair, the pole and the banana?”

“I think so. The banana is suspended from the ceiling by a thread?”

“Right,” said Gaynor. “Just out of reach. And this very hungry monkey is given the tools to retrieve the banana—a chair and a pole. But the monkey doesn't know how to use them. So he paces back and forth until he gives up and sits in the corner, beaten. Suddenly, everything falls into line. From where he sits, he can see the pole leaning on the chair and pointing up to the banana. He grabs up the pole, leaps on the chair and swats the banana down.”

“So it was spontaneous?”

“Yes. She was looking for the dog by a row of trash cans. Some building super had left half a box of large plastic bags by the cans. The garbage was bagged, just waiting to be put out on the street in the morning. There was a kitchen knife on the ground—someone had discarded it for a broken handle. The hilt of the knife was touching the box of trash bags and the blade was pointing at Anne Cathery. Beyond that silly woman, on the next street, was Henry Cathery, sitting in the park playing chess with himself. I picked up one of the bags and punctured it with the knife. That gave me cover from the blood. I used another bag to put over her as soon as I'd put the knife in her throat. They were all small women. It wasn't difficult to bag her, so to speak. With the cover of a plastic bag around the body, I had all the leisure to make it look like the work of a lunatic.”

“As if it wasn't.”

“A profit of hundreds of millions of dollars is not the goal of the average lunatic.”

“But you did like it, didn't you?”

Gaynor ignored this.

“Later, I came back for her. She was stiff by then. You were right, it was easy to arrange the body in the park so no one would know she'd been moved. Then I broke her beads and sent them flying everywhere.”

Gaynor was smiling, and it was hardly an engaging smile. The man was enjoying his exposition. Of course, the downside of the perfect murder would be the lack of an appreciative audience.

“That was risky, even in the small hours of the morning,” said Charles, hoping for the ring of appreciation in his own voice.

“I admit that part was exciting. But what were the odds of anyone watching at four in the morning? No one's very alert at that hour. I wore jeans and a baseball cap to pass as a maintenance man. I threw a bowlegged gait into the role. I was only carrying a large garbage bag. Nothing too sinister in that. Maintenance drones are invisible in that neighborhood. If it hadn't worked, if anyone had come forward with a description of a maintenance man with a garbage bag, it would never have come back on me. No motive. This was Henry's grandmother, not mine.”

“It never occurred to you that Henry would report his grandmother missing during the night?”