Mallory's Oracle (5 page)

He was testing the waters. If she let him call her Kathy, she probably wouldn't shoot him. She gave him a smile. A stranger wouldn't have guessed how little practiced she was in that expression.

She opened the door wide and waved him inside. While she stashed her gun back in the purse, Riker was already moseying to the refrigerator where she kept the beer. He flicked off the cap of a cold bottle, and the metal top went spinning across the kitchen floor. Mallory stooped to pick it up and dropped it in the garbage can. She hated anything out of place. Helen Markowitz had always kept a neat, clean house.

The day after Helen died, she had begun to clean the house in Brooklyn where they had all lived together before the surgeon had cut Helen away from her. When Mallory was done with that old house, there was not a cleaner attic nor cellar, nor all points in between, in all of Brooklyn. But when she took to cleaning the fireplace and then what she could reach of the chimney, Markowitz had pulled her out of there, out of the ashes which were spreading to the carpet beyond the drop cloth, and she was horrified to see the carpet smudged after half a day of scrubbing with a wire brush. She had flown into a rage as Markowitz held her tight. She had screamed and beat her fists on his chest. He let her, pretended not to notice, and held her tighter. And then she had cried. The crying had gone on for days. Then the tears were over with, and she had never cried again. It was as if Helen had taken all her tears, all at once.

Riker made himself to home on the couch.

“Coffey sent me to pick up all the stuff you pinched. But not the Xerox machine. He hasn't missed that yet.” He started to drape one leg over the arm of the couch but checked himself, remembering where he was and who he was dealing with.

“You can have the Xerox, too,” she said. “I'm done with it.”

“Naw. I'm the sentimental type. It was Markowitz's Xerox. You hold on to it.” He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and held it up with a question.

She nodded and pushed the ashtray across the low table.

Before he set the silver cigarette lighter back on the table, it was marred with his paw prints. “So, are you hanging in there, kid? We didn't get much chance to talk during the great precinct robbery. Jeez, the way Coffey carried on. I thought the poor bastard was gonna cry.... So, how are you, Kathy?”

“Just fine.”

“Anything I can do for you?”

“Yes.”

One hour later, the cork roll was flattened out on the back wall of the den. It only took up half of the wall; the other half was newly covered with fresh cork. She walked up to the dividing line to approve the joining of the old and new surfaces with a carpenter's plumb line and pronounced it perfect. Riker struck in the last nail. She stepped back to the door and took in the entire room and its new character. There were snips of cut-away Xerox paper all over the floor, and empty film boxes. Two empty beer bottles had rolled to the far corner, and Riker was in the act of spilling much of the third bottle on her polished hardwood floor.

The collage of paper on the wall was a disorganized layer of trash to anyone who hadn't known Markowitz. The room was no longer a reflection of neat perfectionist Kathy Mallory. It was more like Markowitz now, as though he had recently inhabited it.

She was holding the copy of Markowitz's pocket calendar when Riker walked over to spill beer at her feet.

“You got any ideas on the Tuesday night appointments?” he asked, reading over her shoulder. “It's driving Coffey nuts.”

Scrawled in black ink on each entry for Tuesday were the initials BDA, and the time, 9:00 p.m. According to older calendars, this habit of Markowitz's Tuesday nights had begun a year ago, after she had moved out of the old house in Brooklyn.

“I asked the guys in his poker game and the neighbors. They don't know where he went on Tuesday nights. Can you get me a list of the cross-offs?”

“Sure thing, kid. Just cross off every business in the phone book with those initials. And we don't have any prior arrests with those initials either.”

When Riker was gone with his bag of looted paperwork and the copy camera, she went back to the den to admire the new corking stretched over the wall alongside of Markowitz's collection. This half of the wall was pristine in its emptiness, a painter's canvas in the moment before the first stroke. She stepped up to the wall and added the reports and photos from the double kill in the East Village. For this murder, she had her own glossy prints of the crime site.

There was more than an absence of paper dividing the wall between Markowitz and Mallory. Markowitz's thumb-tack style was haphazard. Out of the hundreds of bits of paper, in positions she had duplicated exactly, only one was straight, and this was by accident and law of averages. On her own side of the wall, each sheet of paper and glossy print was machine-precision straight. The spaces between the statements and reports, the prints on the corpse robber, the photographs of Markowitz and the woman, each page of the preliminary medical examiner's report—all these spaces were exactly the same.

She looked at the most recent crime-site photos. There were ten. She walked down the length of the wall and studied Markowitz and Pearl Whitman killed ten times over. Below these photos, she tacked up a new printout on the Whitman Chemical Corporation, courtesy of the raided computer in the U.S. Attorney's Manhattan office. One party listed in the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation was Edith Candle, described by the SEC investigator as a psychic financial adviser. She resided in Charles Butler's SoHo apartment building.

This slender case connection to Charles wouldn't have startled Markowitz. He had told her more than once that they were all only a few people removed from everyone else on the planet. The core of good police work was ferreting out those connections. ‘There are no dead ends, kid. Everybody knows somebody who knows something.'

‘Don't call me kid,' she had said to him then.

She had only one sheet of scant information on Edith Candle. She used the last tack and centered it at the top so the paper would hang perfectly straight. As she walked away from the cork wall, the page on Edith Candle defied the laws of perfect paper balance and dipped to hang at an odd angle, as though a hand had done it. And it was odd, too, that she did not notice this as she took one last look at the wall and closed the door behind her, car keys jingling in her jeans pocket.

In the last hours before dusk, she made a left turn on Twentieth Street, and her compact brown car left the noise of horns and sirens, street confrontations and the loud static of heavy traffic to roll quietly into another century.

Gramercy Park had lost its cobblestones and gaslights, but little else had changed in the past hundred years. The square was all sedate mansions of red brick and brownstone, marble and granite, mahogany and brass. And there was an island quality to its tranquillity. Though New York traffic drove through the square and walked through it, the formidable buildings, giant overlords with watching windows, managed to subdue what little hustle entered there on foot and to intimidate those feet to a respectful march.

The grand design of the place made it clear that one who did not belong could not tarry here. The park at the heart of the square was enclosed in spiked wrought iron. Each of the residents had their own key, and all the other New Yorkers did not. For the outsiders, there was no place to pause, to rest. Each street of the square led the interloper straight out, and quickly. Only walkers of dogs might occasionally come to a halt. All others marched through and away and left no imprint in passing.

There was only an hour of good daylight left when she pulled close to the curb, well behind the cab that had carried the suspect from his last class at Columbia University. The streets were quiet around the park's iron bars, which caged only Gramercy's own. Inside the bars, women in summer dresses and winter-white hair sat on the wooden benches, talking with their hands, and a young mother walked the gravel paths with a small child. An old man sat alone but for the company of pigeons. The perfume of flowers drifted through the open window of her car.

While the suspect paid his driver, she opened her glove compartment and pulled out the folder containing the printout of his class schedule—an unwitting contribution of the university's computer—and the playbill of a student production which bore Gaynor's name on the cast listing. The murders always occurred in the daylight hours. There were gaps between his classes and the student counseling appointments. With a fast car, and some luck with the traffic lights, there was time enough for a hundred-block dash to the square and a little murder. It was only a question of when.

It didn't actually bother her that Professor Jonathan Gaynor had an alibi for the time of his aunt's death. Anyone smart enough to pull off these murders was smart enough to convince a pack of students that they had seen him when they had not. That was the core of a magic act, wasn't it—convincing the audience they had seen what they had not. The daylight killing had the aspect of magic, but she was an unbeliever. It was a trick, and she would work it out.

She looked past the bars of the fence and the well-tended shrubbery and flowers, across the green grass to the murder site of the first victim. The Cathery woman had been found by one of the small brown sheds constructed as toy houses at one end of the park.

It was a maddening puzzle: so simple in its brutality, so convoluted in its accomplishment. Twenty-eight of the square's residents had admitted to being in the park at various hours of that day. Not one of them remembered any stranger entering the park, luring an old woman to the shed, cutting her up, and scattering her beads and her blood with surprisingly little cover. Well, there wouldn't have been any noise to speak of, no screaming. In Slope's opinion, the first thrust of the knife to the victim's throat had prevented that. Maybe a gurgle had come up with the blood, nothing more.

She knew she was missing something here, but damned if she could see it. There had to be a logical explanation. Smart the freak might be, but not invisible, not supernatural.

The playbill from the university theater slipped from the folder and wafted to the floor of the car. She stared down at the boldface type.
Radio Days
was the name of the production by students from Barnard College. The only segment that interested her was the title of an old program from the Shadow series. She knew all the scripts by heart. In the basement of the house in Brooklyn was a space for Markowitz's old records. He had collected the gamut of popular music from Artie Shaw to Elvis, but his best-loved albums were the recordings of “The Shadow.” There were others he had liked well enough—“The Lone Ranger” and “Johnny Dollar”—but he dearly loved “The Shadow.” She had sat beside him on countless Saturdays, listening to recordings of the old broadcasts from the forties and fifties.

Most of the fathers in the neighborhood had workshops in the basement where they built furniture which their wives would not allow on the upper levels. In Markowitz's workshop, he was building an imagination for a child who had lived too real a life, eating out of garbage cans and holing up for the night in doorways and discarded cartons.

The hero of the old radio series had the ability to cloud men's minds and render himself invisible.

No, she was not buying it, she had told Markowitz then. ‘No way could anyone pull that off,' said the child she had been.

‘Make believe he can, Kathy,' Markowitz had said to her, looking down at her in the days when she was much shorter than he was.

‘No. Only suckers believe in crap like that.'

‘Don't say crap, dear,' said Helen, who had suddenly appeared at the foot of the basement stairs to wrap a sweater around the child who was sitting within four feet of the furnace. ‘She can't possibly be cold,' Markowitz had protested. So Kathy had shivered to please Helen, and Markowitz said, ‘Now you've got it, kid.'

Mallory had parked her car near the doorway of the Players' Club. She shrank down in the seat when she spotted Jack Coffey chatting up the doorman. Now he was going in. This was the building the stakeout team had selected for the department's watchers on the square. This was also the spot where the second victim, Jonathan Gaynor's aunt, had been found inside a private car with tinted windows. The second murder had been daring, but not quite the stunning trick of a kill in full view of every living thing in the square.

Estelle Gaynor had also been a brutal daylight kill. Impossible, but it had happened in this place of Social Register old money and new-wealth rock stars. Pearl Whitman, the third victim, had broken the pattern by dying in low-rent environs. Why? And what had the old man seen that she was missing? Pearl Whitman was a tantalizing snag because she had left no heirs. The old SEC connection to Edith Candle, the woman who lived in Charles's building, was also nagging at her. Perhaps it was the scarcity of information on Candle that made her suspicious. This woman knew how to keep her private business underground.

Another cab pulled up to the curb on the adjacent street. The rear windows of the car were blocked by shopping bags and cloth of bright colors and, here and there, a white face and a brown one. The rear doors on both sides of the cab opened, and an endless stream of goods spilled out onto the sidewalk with the cabdriver, a small boy and a Doberman puppy. The shopping bags were every color of the rainbow, and bulged to rips at the paper seams. A flimsy circular table with folded legs leaned against the car. Boxes were being stacked precariously by the driver while the boy grappled with an antique gramophone with a large horn.

What now piled up on the sidewalk was greater than the interior volume of the cab. The magic show went on. The front passenger door opened, and an immense woman stepped out. She was at least six feet tall and simply too wide in the girth to have come out of that cab.