Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  In the black of the stopped elevator, suspended fifteen floors above the ground, the passengers were speculating on what to do when the elevator fell. One passenger had read somewhere that it was a good idea to jump up and down. That way, the man explained to his captive audience, you had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the air when the elevator crashed.

  “And breaking your legs,” added Charles. “You’re still falling at the same rate of speed as the elevator.”

  Oddly enough, the eleven-year-old boy was the only one to grasp the principle of free-fall and gravity. The other passengers were now jumping up and down in the dark.

  On the other side of the jammed doors, a fire marshal was urging them to remain calm via a loudspeaker. “Knock that crap off, you idiots!”

  Mrs. Ortega was backing up to the wall. The cop had neatly cut off her escape route to the door.

  “No English,” she said, when, in fact, she did not speak any Spanish. She was fourth-generation American born and spoke only New-yorkese.

  After much repetition of street names, Charles and the non-English-speaking cabdriver were finally in agreement. Once under way, the driver was disappointingly law-abiding, and not at all competitive with his fellow drivers, never changing lanes once in forty-three blocks, actually slowing down for yellow lights, and carefully looking to the left and right before proceeding across the intersection on a green light.

  This was outrageous.

  Charles tightly clasped his hands in his lap, lest they act as independent culprits. There was really no need to kill the driver, not on his very first day as a cabby. The next passenger would certainly do that.

  Charles met Mrs. Ortega in the hall. She passed him by with her head lowered, not seeing anything but the carpet, determined that nothing would halt her steady progress down the corridor to the elevator, to freedom, muttering “Damn cops” in return for his cheerful “Goodbye. See you next week.”

  The office door was open. He walked through the foyer and into a perfect world of order. The windows glistened, the carpet was clear of the paper avalanche that had buried it on the very day it was put down, and the naked desk was dark wood, just as he remembered it from the Sotheby’s auction of five weeks ago. Neat file holders with price tags on them were stacked on top of the antique mahogany filing cabinet. Other file holders, sans tags, were being put in their proper drawers by hands with long red nails. Twelve years of trade journals and a small library of books now filled the shelves of one wall.

  Mallory strained to close the door of the filing cabinet and then turned on him. “You have to go to computers, Charles. This is just too much.”

  “Hello, Kathleen.” He kissed her cheek and found a comfortable chair he had forgotten buying. “Sorry, I’m not usually half a day late. Oh, this is amazing.” He was admiring the room, its antique furniture, its Tiffany lamps. He was not visualizing a computer or any other mechanical device in it, not even a typewriter or a pencil sharpener. “Simply amazing,” he said, altogether skirting the issue of computers.

  Over the two years he had known her, they’d had this conversation many times. She could never understand his resistance to the technology when he was so adept at computers and had even published an important paper on computer-mode giftedness. She had been the inspiration for that paper. Via the keyboard, she could dip her fingers into the stuffing of any software made and make it into a new animal that could sit up and bark at the moon if she wished.

  “We could outfit this place with a state-of-the-art computer system,” she said.

  “I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way.” He silently noted her use of the word we and wondered what to make of it.

  The door buzzer went off. Charles walked across the room and out of the concept of high technology. That was it. No computers. They did not go well with his beloved antiques and the Persian carpet which fit the room so well. The carpet’s weaver, a hundred years dead by now, must have envisioned this space with a mystic inner eye.

  The buzzer was nagging. Most people only tapped it once. The short burst of noise was sufficiently loud and annoying. This continuation of noise, this leaning on the button, was the buzzer style of Herbert Mandrel, the tenant in 4A.

  He opened the door to a small, wiry man with a fugitive face, eyes darting everywhere at once, suspecting every object of ill intentions. Nervous energy rose off the man in waves of contagion.

  “You got a minute?” he asked, slipping uninvited through the narrow space between Charles and the doorframe. Herbert came up short in front of Mallory, who barred the foyer and showed no signs of standing aside.

  The little man cocked his head to one side and fixed her with the intense, unwavering glare of one eye, and he did this with all the zeal of turning a cross on a vampire. Mallory, taller by six inches, looked down on Herbert with the same distaste she might show for a messy roadkill.

  “Actually, I don’t have a minute, Herbert,” said Charles, forgetting that it had not been a question but Herbert’s version of hello.

  Herbert was saying, “It’s getting dangerous. Everyone has guns.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Henrietta on the third floor. She has a gun.”

  “Well, she’s had it for quite a while, hasn’t she? Seven years, she says.”

  “I didn’t know that. If I’d known that, I would’ve acted sooner.” Though Herbert’s feet were planted on the carpet, the rest of him was in constant motion, eyebrows colliding with each other, head jerking from side to side, one pointy finger stabbing the air as he spoke. “Do you know that a bullet can travel through four floors and kill an innocent person? You get rid of that gun or I take immediate action.”

  “And what sort of action might that be?” Foolish question. Herbert had only one solution to every problem from a leaking faucet to a burnt-out bulb in the hall.

  “I’m calling a rent strike. All the tenants will back me on this. I want that gun out of this building. Now!” His finger was nearly touching Charles’s face.

  Mallory advanced a step, and Charles warned her off with a wave. He pulled the door open wider, as though that might help, as though Herbert picked up on cues less subtle than ‘GET OUT!’ He didn’t.

  “Henrietta belongs to a gun club. The gun is properly licensed and registered. There’s nothing you or I can do about it.”

  “Yeah? You think so? Suppose I get my own gun?”

  “Let’s see if I’m following your logic. In the event that Henrietta accidentally discharges her gun, you plan to deflect the bullet by firing on it as it rips up through the floorboards. Have I got it right?”

  “I’m gonna get a gun.”

  Mallory reached out and tapped him on the shoulder, smiling as she made him jump. She put one hand on her hip, drawing the side of her jacket open and exposing the .357 Smith & Wesson in her shoulder holster. It was a very big gun, and Herbert’s eyes were very wide.

  “Not a good idea, pal.” As her voice was silking along, she walked toward him, and step for step, he backed up to the door. “If I see you with a gun, if I hear a rumor that you’ve got a gun, it better have all the legal paperwork. You got that?” For emphasis, she reached out and touched his chest with one long red fingernail.

  Charles watched in awe as the little man paled and turned smartly on one heel. Remarkably, Herbert was leaving of his own accord, and so quickly, too, not even shutting the door behind him.

  Charles stared at the blessedly empty spot on the carpet where Herbert had been standing. “It’s my recurring nightmare—him with a gun.”

  “He’ll never get clearance to buy one. I’ll tag his name with a psycho profile.”

  “You’ll what?”

  “I left a coded back door in the department computer. I can go in whenever I like. Nothing to it.”

  “Kathleen, I wish you wouldn’t tell me things like that.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Markowitz.” She turned her back on him and walked over to the century-old desk. She r
an one hand across the polished surface and then sat down in the chair behind the desk as though trying it on for size.

  “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:

  When my Helen died a few years back, Kathy wanted to kill the whole world. It was all I could do to convince her it wouldn’t be civil to gut the surgeon who failed Helen. When I’m dead, Commissioner Beale will bump her out of Special Crimes Section and put her on compassionate leave. Make her understand this is department policy, and Beale is not to be found in an alley strung up by his balls.

  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:

  She never worked the field beyond her rookie days, and I don’t want her working it now, dogging my last tracks. It makes me a little crazy that I won’t always be there to keep her safe.

  She spent most of her childhood on the streets, stealing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and her shoes. She’s fearless. She thinks there isn’t a human born she
can’t outsmart or outshoot. The pity is that she’s so freaking smart and a great shot, beautifully equipped to do the job. Scary, isn’t it, Charles?

  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.