Mallory's Oracle (7 page)

“I stacked up the tenant paperwork in the next room, along with all the research material and the reports. You've got close to six square feet of paper in there. I can put all of that on disks with a scanner. When I'm done, it'll take up five square inches of space.”

Oh, back to that again. “I prefer the idea of papers I can hold in my hand. Seems more real somehow.”

“You can't do that anymore, Charles. You're being buried alive by paper.”

“My accountant comes by once a month and takes a bag of it off my hands.”

She was not amused. “So, next month, you can send him a disk over the modem—save him a trip and a hernia.”

“Ah, now you see, Kathleen, that's the problem with computers. One day there won't be any human transactions left. We'll all socialize by computer networks.”

And her eyes said, ‘Nice try.'

She was right; he knew that. He lacked Louis Markowitz's gift for creating order that passed for chaos. The more clutter Louis had added to his surroundings, the more details and data, the more efficiently his brain had worked. Charles's own clutter was mere confusion. He looked over the office and the perfect order she had created for him and wondered how many days would pass before he slipped beneath the snow line of the paperwork once more.

She was already reading the I-give-up signs in his face. She smiled slow and wide. “You need me. I'll start tomorrow. I can use one of the back rooms for my office.”

“What? Work here? Kathleen, why would you want to work for me?”

“With
you. I'm talking partnership.” Purse and car keys in hand, she stood up and crossed the room to set a check on the cherrywood table by his chair.

The check bore the name of a major life insurance company. The claim on Markowitz's death should have taken two months, not two weeks. He wondered if she had facilitated the speed of the check with her computer-hacking skills or her gun.

“That'll buy a lot of computer equipment,” she said. “So, do we have a deal?”

It was hard to picture her even in temporary tandem with another human being, let alone a partnership. She hardly acknowledged that there might be one or two other officers on the same police force.

She was always such a loner,
said Louis Markowitz's letter, which Charles had opened on the day the body was found.
She never hung out in cop bars, never saw the sad, mean side of burnout. She keeps company with machines.

When Louis had given him the letter to hold against that day, Charles had felt honored, but curious, too. Why him, why not Rabbi Kaplan or someone else he had known longer?

Louis had said then, ‘Kathy's a special case. You deal with special cases all the time.'

Indeed. Kaplan or any other man of the cloth would be a poor match for what Louis had described in his letter as an amoral savage:

As he recalled, she had been very civilized about the forced leave. She had taken his advice on that matter with no argument, no protest at all. Why hadn't that made him suspicious? Well, obviously because he was an idiot.

He could only wonder what else had gone by him. He supposed there wasn't much point in asking her a direct question. He believed she really did like him well enough to count him as a friend, to confide in him at times, but there were limits. He would have to settle for damage control.

He looked around this perfectly ordered room. It was obvious to both of them that he needed her, even if she didn't need him—not him or any other creature on this planet. But her proposal of a partnership would cost him sleep. The things she did with other people's computers, and without their knowledge or consent.

She had a gift that would have gone begging in an era without computer technology. He marveled over the farsighted genetic blueprint. Each encounter with a human born to a specific talent, applied or not, gave him a window on the future of all mankind. But his limited window on Kathleen Mallory was frightening. The partnership was an insane idea to be considered with the same careful thought he might give to walking through a mine field or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. And Louis would have been the first to tell him so.

In a far corner of his compartmentalized brain, he could see the specter of Louis Markowitz rolling his eyes and saying sardonically, ‘Ah, Charles?' and shaking his head from side to side with the sentiment of ‘No. Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.'

“All right, Kathleen, a partnership.” He extended his hand and she shook it with a firm grip.

“Call me Mallory, now that it's business.”

“And you'll call me Butler, I suppose? No, I don't think so. I know you too well for that. It would seem unnatural.”

“All right. I'll call you
Charles.
When the stuff shows up, just sign for it. Here,” she said, handing him a business card. “Just a sample. You like it?”

Business cards? Hardly samples, they were printed on good stock in two colors, maroon and gray. She had to have ordered them at least two weeks ago, perhaps on the very day of the funeral.

“Kathleen—”

“Mallory.”

“Sorry. I'm just a little curious about the wording.
Discreet investigations?
As in private investigations?”

“What's the problem, Charles?”

“We're a consulting firm.”

“What does a consultant do, Charles?”

“Well, someone comes to me with a problem, and I look into it and come up with a solution for them.”

She kissed the top of his head and walked to the door as if his own answer were answer enough. And it probably would be if his field was not finding practical applications for new modes of intelligence and odd gifts. And she was not even going to deal with the little matter that her own name preceded his in
Mallory and Butler, Ltd.

“Wait,” he called to her as she was pulling the door closed behind her. “Wouldn't I need a special license for this kind of thing?”

“You have one,” she said.

“How—?” He aborted this stupid question. Of course, she had simply arranged it with a midnight computer requisition. Willing or no, he was in the computer system as a properly licensed private investigator ... while she remained a police officer on compassionate leave, and with certain restrictions on her behavior.

Their partnership was minutes old, and already he'd been had. This could not possibly be legal. There were rules and regulations and—

She smiled. The door closed.

He was feeling a sense of loss when she had been gone only a few seconds. She always had that effect on him. When she left a room, she left a vacuum, a hole in the air which smelled faintly of Chanel.

Only in daydreams had he considered that they might ever be more than friends. She was a beauty, while he was ... a man with a prominent nose, a beak actually. And when he smiled, he had the aspect of a happy lunatic. And there were other standout qualities that some called freakish.

His eidetic memory called up the last page of Markowitz's letter. He projected it onto a clear space of the wall. The mental image was perfect to the details of the folds in the paper and the black ink blots of the fountain pen Louis favored over the ballpoint:

He missed Louis sorely. The day he had been given the letter was his last memory of the man. Louis had handled his sherry glass delicately. He had been graceful in all his gestures and in the way he carried himself and his excess poundage. Yet, at rest, the first creature the inspector called to mind was a fat basset hound. Then the fleshy folds of Louis's face would gather up into a smile, dispatching the hound and exposing the great personal charm of the man. One tended to smile back, willing or no. People in handcuffs tended to smile back.

Had Louis known who his killer would be? Was it the man who killed the elderly women? He supposed he could assume it was a man. This was not the sort of violence a woman would do. And he could assume great intelligence. If Louis thought the killer was not a fair match for Mallory, that put him in the upper two percentile.

But he was thinking out the wrong puzzle. Louis had not asked him to find his murderer, he had asked him to look after his daughter, a more convoluted problem and the greater challenge of the two.

 

Mallory switched off the ignition and settled back to watch Jonathan Gaynor pay off the cab and enter his apartment building. Monday through Friday his routine seldom varied. She would stay on him until dusk. The daylight timing was a constant in the killing.

A shift in the September breeze carried the pungent smell of new-cut grass. She approved of Gramercy's clean streets, well-tended park and perfect order. It was so quiet here, and while the flowers bloomed, so unlike the rest of the town in the way it soothed all her senses and brought her a kind of peace unknown in her normal workaholic existence. She stared at the small park-maintenance building where Anne Cathery had lain beneath a garbage bag on the blood-soaked ground amid her scattered beads. And there, seated on a bench only a few yards from the building, was the victim's grandson, Henry Cathery.

He looked much younger than his twenty-one years; he might have been a giant twelve-year-old. He was another one who lived a somewhat routine life. Cathery's hours in the park might vary, but he was there each day, always sitting on the same bench. He had been sitting there, only yards away from the murder site, during some part of the day his grandmother was murdered.

Cathery was working at his portable chessboard, oblivious to other life forms on the planet. More than ten weeks ago, NYPD investigators had discovered that this oblivion worked both ways. The doormen and residents of the square were so accustomed to his presence, Cathery had become invisible to them. They could no more swear to his comings and goings than they could swear the fire hydrants had not been missing for a morning and then restored to their accustomed places in the afternoon.

The deceased Pearl Whitman had been Cathery's only alibi for the time of his grandmother's murder. Mallory wondered what Markowitz would have made of that. He had been no believer in coincidence. He might have wondered if Pearl Whitman had wavered in her testimony. Or was it just Cathery's hard luck that his alibi was the last victim?

The Shadow knows.

Mallory smiled at the memory of the old radio program's opening line. Markowitz had never given up his lesson plans to inculcate her with a creative vision that could see around corners and beyond normal parameters. Her latest exercise in imagining was the thought that if there were aliens among us, Henry Cathery would be one of them. His eyebrows were permanently surprised and contradicted by his half-lidded lethargic eyes, which rolled around in their sockets in a listless fashion. The mouth was small and fixed in the permanent moue of one who had recently stepped on a dog turd. He was also strange in his reclusive habits. There was an odd little relationship with a badly dressed young woman who sometimes came to sit beside him and hold one-way conversations while he ignored her, but he had no real friends.

And neither did Mallory have any friends, not now that she and Charles were business partners.

If Markowitz had abandoned the FBI profile which Cathery fit so well, he had not abandoned Cathery but only saved him off to one side of the cork board in a class by himself. Cathery would have come into a large trust from his parents' estate whether the grandmother lived or died. He didn't fit the money motive quite so well as Gaynor.

She had fixed the blind spot for the NYPD surveillance team and parked closer to Jonathan Gaynor's building. A cab pulled to curb four cars in front of her, and she made a note that the giantess and her small entourage had arrived an hour earlier this week. The boy was first to alight from the cab. Now the Doberman puppy barked as a doorman joined the cabby in unloading the paraphernalia of bags and table, gramophone and boxes. When the giantess emerged from the back seat of the cab, Mallory matched the woman, stat for stat, against the computer-raided rap sheet of a high-tech con artist whose description listed height and weight, three arrests and no convictions, companions of boy and Doberman. But not the same Doberman. The rap sheets went back for years; this dog was not six months old.

So far, the only inroad on Gramercy Park was Charles's connection to Edith Candle, the woman in the SEC investigation on Whitman Chemicals, the woman who proved out Markowitz's theory on the relatedness of every living being to one another. Now, if she could only cultivate or terrorize the giantess, it could be her entrée to the community. Perhaps with a light threat, the mere twist of an enormous arm, she could leave the car, the sidewalk, and move freely among the old women of old money.

She raised up the telescoping lens of her camera and focused on the face of the giantess. This woman was not the fair mulatto Mallory had taken her for from the distance of the last sighting. The irises were dark with the cast of blue gun metal, and sliding like oiled bearings within the Asian folds of her eyes. Her complexion was the olive tone of the Mediterranean. Her nostrils and lips were classic African. Today her hair, long and reddish brown, was hanging in a straight fall below the cap of the scarf. How many races lived under that immense skin? She was the whole earth.