Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  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 ho
urs 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.

  Now the cabby launched into a screaming match with this woman who had crossed his palm with too few dollars. He was an Arab, not too long in the country by the barely comprehensible English and the inability to deal with American women without going ballistic. He was making fisted hand gestures to go with the inarticulate screams. All Mallory could understand of the bad hollered English was, “You don’t rob me, you bitch!”

  He looked up at her from his height of one foot smaller. Looming over the driver, the woman seemed less the fat lady and more a regal presence. She leaned down, put her face in his face, and spoke in tones that did not carry.

  The cabby nearly ripped the door off the hinges in his haste to open it. He jumped into the cab and laid a squealing strip of burning rubber all the way out of the square.

  Mallory nodded in rare approval of the giantess.

  3

  Charles Butler tapped his toes and willed the elevator to move faster. He would be ten minutes late if he was lucky, if the elevator made no more stops. He looked down at his shorter fellow passengers, who had conspired to slow his descent by stopping the elevator on every other floor.

  Of course, Mallory would be on time for their appointment sixty blocks south and as many flights down. She would be knocking on the door of his empty office on the hour, not a second before or after. She was as compulsive about time as she was about neatness.

  And now he remembered he had two things to be anxious about. His new office, a recently vacated apartment across the hall from his residence, would be best described as an Escher maze of tall stacks of paperwork and books, an unholy gathering of spiders and dust.

  The elevator stopped again, and he glared at the boarding passenger. He was taking every stop quite personally now. These people had had all morning to ride the elevator up and down as much as they liked. However, on the upside of slowing down, Mallory might decide not to wait around. There might be a reprieve long enough to give the office a proper cleaning.

  This morning, he had made a stab at straightening up, but correspondence still littered every surface. Quarterly tax forms, state and federal, bulged out of desk drawers and cardboard boxes, all waiting on a day when he was in the filing mode. And then there was all the added paperwork that went along with owning an apartment building. The hundred-odd books and a few years’ worth of journals were only in proximity to the new bookshelves.

  How would she react to the mess? She might assume he’d been vandalized. He could walk in behind her and feign shock.

  Mrs. Ortega, his cleaning woman, had arrived while he was scrambling around on the floor, trying desperately to clear a few square feet of the carpet. Putting his head out the office door as she was turning her key in the lock of his apartment, he had smiled at her, his eyes filled with hope. Her own eyes had turned hard. ‘Fat chance I’m going in there,’ said the back of her as she had disappeared into his residence, which was her territory and all that she might be held accountable for.

  He knew Mrs. Ortega believed him to be a visitor from somewhere else—perhaps some point straight up, miles out, but nowhere on the surface of her own earth, which was square, shaped by the streets of a Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn.

  And he supposed he was a bit out of the mainstream. He had grown up in the sheltered community of academia and then transferred to the closer-knit community of a research institute without stopping off in real life until very recently. A year ago, when he had given Mrs. Ortega the new address, she never asked why he would leave the luxurious boulevards of the Upper East Side for the narrower, dirty streets of SoHo. She had always known the ways of outworlders were not the ways of Brooklynites.

  In the last few minutes before he’d had to leave off the cleaning up and straig
htening up to keep his uptown appointment sixty stories in the sky, he had considered reaming the office out with a blowtorch.

  Now his stomach was rising, independent of the rest of him, as the elevator stopped again. A woman and a child got on. As the doors were closing, the child reached out and pushed ten buttons.

  Mrs. Ortega’s mother was Irish and had the same green eyes and red-gold hair as this stranger at the door. But Ma had not been a cop. Mrs. Ortega smelled cop when the woman ordered her to open the door of Mr. Butler’s office across the hall. There was never a question of cop, or not a cop.

  She turned the key in the lock and opened the door on a room in hell for cleaning women who had been sinners while they lived. She didn’t like having the key to the office. Mr. Butler might get the idea that she would one day clean here, too. No way, not Shannon Ortega. She knew her rights. He couldn’t make her clean it, not this mess.

  She had been happy enough when he took this apartment over for his office, sweeping the whole nasty mess of papers and books across the hall. And it gave him another place to be, not underfoot while she was vacuuming and scrubbing. But no way was she going to deal with this pit, this mother of all dust collectors. All that she approved of were the freshly painted walls. The windows were at least a bucket of ammonia’s worth of grime on each pane, and in the spaces between the tall stacks of paper, spiders were spinning elaborate webs with a confident sense of permanence. She had never ventured into the other rooms to see what he had done with them. She had a bum heart.

  Oh, kiss a dead rat if the cop wasn’t smiling. And it was not a friendly smile or a happy smile. A cat’s smile it was, a cat with a live mouse in its teeth.