Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  “She’s like a prisoner in that apartment,” said Mallory.

  He looked fondly at the roast beef on rye with crisp lettuce and parsley garnish. “It does look that way, I know.”

  The coffeemaker, haunted by Louis Markowitz, gurgled and dripped, insinuating itself into the conversation.

  Perhaps he should give the puzzle of Edith more immediate consideration. Mallory was hideously single-minded, and her all-consuming interest was Louis’s murderer. What was the connection?

  “Do you know why she never leaves the building?” she asked.

  Mallory was not given to small talk. She couldn’t ask an offhand innocent question; it just wasn’t in her. Well, if he never learned anything from her responses, there might be something to be had from her questions.

  “She’s still in mourning for her husband.” And now he noticed the pastrami with mustard and mayonnaise, and he was torn between the two sandwiches.

  “Nobody mourns for thirty years, Charles.” One corner of Mallory’s disbelieving mouth slipped into a deep dimple of skepticism, and Louis’s coffee machine sputtered. “Maybe there’s a little more to it?” She set the plate of sandwiches on the checked tablecloth. “Something to do with her husband’s accident?”

  “She told you about that?”

  “Sit,” she said, pointing him to a chair by the kitchen table while she turned back to the coffeemaker where Louis abided.

  He had shared many meals with her, and not one of them had been in a kitchen. As he recalled, her father had been a kitchen-sitting person—but to a purpose. In Louis’s opinion, conversation was greased by a kitchen atmosphere and hampered by a more formal setting.

  It occurred to him that the poker players had steered him wrong. Her behavior might be more predictable if he concentrated on what she had learned from Markowitz and not Helen.

  “Thirty years,” said Mallory. “It’s like jail time.”

  “I guess it does seem like a penance.” He picked up a sandwich and suddenly forgot his appetite. Penance. Why had that never occurred to him before? Memories were surfacing, but still vague yet. “She might feel responsible for the accident.”

  “Because ...” Mallory prompted him.

  “I’m not sure. I was only nine when Max died.”

  “You have a memory like a computer. Now give.”

  “Eidetic memory doesn’t work that way. I can recite chapters from books and even tell you if I spilled any coffee on the pages, but I’m not good at recalling conversations that went over my head when I was a child.”

  “I don’t think much has gone by you since you left the womb, Charles. These conversations you can’t remember, did they happen close to the day your cousin died?”

  “Probably. Max lived with us for the last three days of his life.”

  “Only Max? He left his wife?”

  “Yes, I think so. Oh, right. They’d had a quarrel. It was something to do with the new act. Edith thought it was too dangerous. I think she wanted him to give it up. But he couldn’t. You see, there was a time when he’d had top billing as Maximilian the Great. Then later, he became the husband of the great Edith Candle. All of his brilliant illusions, his own gifts had gotten lost somewhere.”

  “So this was his comeback? He was taking another shot at it?”

  “Yes. He created a fantastic new set of illusions for this act. I remember all of us, Max and my parents, sitting around the table reading the reviews the morning after his opening.” His photographic memory was calling up the newspaper column that had so impressed him as a child it had remained with him for thirty years. “The New York Times called him a maestro.” Now he was on familiar ground as he called up the printed word from another newspaper column and read the lines as though he held the paper in his hand. “ ‘The master is incomparable at the height of his creative powers,’ they said. His star was on the rise again.”

  The following morning, after the second performance had ended in tragedy, the newspapers had been kept out of his sight.

  “So Max’s career was on the rise. What about Edith’s act?”

  “Well, she still had a certain stature in psychic circles, but in one night, Max had eclipsed her, quite literally with his hands tied. It was amazing. There were lots of reviews. New York had more newspapers in those days. They all used the words death-defying and dangerous to describe the act.”

  “Dangerous? It was all a sham, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, no. The new tricks were very dangerous. The finale required all his skill and mental discipline. While he stayed with us, he refused to give interviews. He wouldn’t take any phone calls or messages.”

  “Not even from Edith?”

  “Especially not from Edith.” Why had he said that?

  “Must have been quite a fight between those two.”

  “Well, the illusion required great concentration, no distractions.”

  “Like Edith predicting his death?”

  The writing on the wall. What had his mother said about that?

  “Yes, I suppose that was it. A few days before the opening of the new act, he found a message scrawled on the wall of his apartment. It was red lipstick.”

  “What did it say?”

  “No idea. I’m putting this together from what I overheard. No one ever spoke to me about it. It was odd. Trance writing had never been part of the old routine.”

  “Trance writing?”

  “Yes, something written without conscious thought, while in a trance. She never denied having written it, she only said she had no memory of doing it.”

  “Did you believe her? Whose side did you take?”

  “I don’t know. I was only nine years old then. I’m sure I loved them both.” No, that was not true. One was loved and one was adored. “Perhaps I was closer to Max. He spent a lot of time with me. He had other things to do, I know. It was a busy period for him. But he took time out to play with me. I loved him very much.”

  He picked up an olive from his plate and closed it in the palm of his hand. When he spread his fingers again, the olive was gone. He reached up and appeared to pull it from his eye socket, handing it to her with one eye closed. She laughed. Though the trick played on the simple humor of a small child, the love of all things gross and gory, she laughed as he had done all those years ago when Max was alive and beloved.

  “Max died on the second night he performed the new routine with the water tank. The next day, when my parents told me about the accident, I wouldn’t believe them. I just knew it had to be a trick. Edith went into seclusion after Max died. She didn’t even go to his funeral. I did. The services were held in the cathedral. Magicians came from all over the world. They came in uniform, but not magician’s black. They all wore white top hats, white capes and suits. The women wore white satin dresses. All the flowers were white. And later, at the cemetery, when the casket was lowered into the ground, a thousand doves flew out from under the magicians’ capes. The sky was white with doves’ wings. I will never see anything like that again.”

  “Edith must have been in pretty bad shape to miss the funeral.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “My parents never took me to visit her after that. My mother told me we were respecting her seclusion. The next time I saw Edith was after my mother’s funeral.”

  The coffeemaker spat.

  Edith Candle was staring at the wall but not seeing it. Looking beyond the twining roses on the wallpaper, she was probing old memories which predated the death of a magician. Her chair rocked with unconscious effort.

  One could always point to a time, a choice, an act that set the tone for a life and changed a personal destiny. Her moment had come in a desolate corner of the flat midwestern landscape. The sky had been deep purple, and she recalled stars like blazing cartwheels in the triangular flaps of the tent which had been pulled back to catch the breezes of a hot summer night. Maximilian had been at the back of the tent with the mark. B
y code of words, he fed her the details of the watch in his hand.

  “I can’t see anymore,” she had cried out suddenly, “The image is being drowned out by other thoughts.” The other thoughts had been gleaned by eavesdropping in the line for admission. Max had overheard a woman talking about her sister Emaline’s heart problem and how it worried at her night and day.

  “Tell us these thoughts,” said Max, cuing her to remove the blindfold and ask if the name Emaline meant anything to anyone in the audience. She removed her blindfold and looked out over the silent, tense sea of faces.

  She was transfixed by the boy in the front row, far from the mark at the back of the tent. The boy stared at her. He shivered and then looked guiltily away. His soft eyes shamed down to his shoes. She stared at him until the boy’s eyes met hers again. He had the look of a drowning animal. The sense that he was waterbound was strengthened as the boy began to rise from the wooden bench, moving in slow motion as though the atmosphere had killing weight and pressure. An older companion, wearing the same gas station uniform as the boy’s, put a hand on his shoulder to bid the boy sit down again. The boy’s terrified eyes looked back to hers. He sloughed off the old man’s hand and began to make his way down the aisle with the gait of too much drink, though she knew the boy was not intoxicated.

  She had called out to him, “You must tell the police what you’ve done.” The boy spun around, his face all agony, more pain than a child could stand.

  “You must tell them!” she shouted.

  The boy let out a strangled scream and fled up the aisle. A uniformed police officer also stood up and followed the boy out.

  That night the local sheriff dug up the body of Tammy Sue Pertwee in the yard of a shantytown shack. It made the morning paper, and it made her the headliner instead of the added attraction to Maximilian’s Traveling Magic Show.

  Henry Cathery was sitting in the park at dusk. The streetlamps were just coming on when the pretty woman arrived. He knew she would come back. He had waited for her all through the previous day into disappointing darkness. After all the days of seeing her each morning and every evening, he had felt the loss of her yesterday. Then Mrs. Siddon had died, and the pretty woman had come back to him again.

  She opened the door of the tan car and stepped out on the sidewalk. She had never done that before. He followed the graceful swing of her walk as she moved down the sidewalk and toward the building across the street. So she would not be keeping him company this time. His head remained motionless while his eyes rolled after her. Her gold hair caught the lamplight and threw it back in sparks. The electric woman had wonderfully dangerous eyes.

  She entered the near building through the great oaken door, held open by a doorman who stared at her with naked hurt that his chances were better to be struck three times by lightning than even to touch her. And granted, Henry thought, the doorman was very tall, good lightning rod material in a level cow pasture, but this was New York City.

  Henry Cathery left his bench and walked slowly to the gate. He pressed his face to the bars and stared at her little tan car. He opened the gate and moved slowly across the street, unmindful of the fast-braking car which was now skidding around him. He stood in the street staring into the tan car’s windows. The seats were much cleaner today. No trash, no coffee cups. He leaned into the narrow opening at the top of the driver-side window and inhaled deeply. So this was what she smelled like. He reached in the window, forcing the crack to widen, pushing his flesh against it until it permitted his hand to reach far enough inside to rub his palm on the upholstery of the car seat.

  When Jonathan Gaynor opened the door, Mallory was close enough to notice the light sprinkle of freckles across his nose. He was only a few years shy of forty, yet the idea of a small boy with a fake beard persisted. She held up a leather folder with her shield and photo ID. He actually read the card. Most people barely glanced at it.

  “Sergeant Mallory, you’re right on time.” He opened the door wide and stepped back as she walked in. He looked at his Rolex. “And I mean right on time, exact quartz time.”

  She watched his eyes drop to inspect the cashmere blazer she wore over her jeans, probably trying to reconcile the good cloth with the badge-and-gun salary. In the manner of an insurance appraiser, she noted the recent water rings on the antique woods, and a newspaper opened on a light brocade upholstery which was probably now smudged with print. Delicate pieces of collector’s crystal sat on every surface—nearly every surface. Her eye for symmetry filled in the gaps on the tables where other pieces had been until recently. She sat down in the large armchair that dominated the rest of the furniture. And it was she who motioned him to sit down in the opposite smaller chair.

  “You didn’t mention this appointment to anyone?”

  “Of course not, Sergeant.” He folded his body into the chair, and his arms jutted out at risky angles to the figurines on the near tables. “I can appreciate the fact that undercover work is dangerous. You can rely on my discretion.”

  “Thank you. One of your neighbors believes I’m a private detective. I’d like her to go on believing that.”

  “Of course. How can I help you?”

  “You knew Inspector Markowitz?”

  “We met once. He came by after my aunt was murdered. I liked the man. I was sorry to hear about his death.” One hand moved of its own accord and fell over the arm of his chair. The other hand rested on his thigh, though these two body parts seemed unacquainted. No interaction of his limbs ever implied that they had met before.

  “Sergeant Riker tells me Markowitz asked for your expertise, Mr. Gaynor.”

  “Yes. He was interested in the social dynamics of Gramercy Park, particularly the elderly inhabitants.”

  “There are no notes on that meeting. It might help us to follow his line of investigation if you could remember what was said.”

  “Well, that was over two months ago. I only recall the gist of it. He focused on all the ways elderly women connected with one another in Gramercy. This square is an interesting little nation unto itself.” The hand which had been dangling now joined the rest of him, rising to the arm of the chair, knocking into the small table on its way. Gaynor never seemed to notice the hand had injured itself, he and the hand were that far removed from one another.

  “Was Markowitz interested in anything more specific?”

  “Yes, but I could only give him a general picture. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help on particulars. You see, I hadn’t moved in yet, not until weeks after my aunt’s death. So at the time, I was out of touch with the square.”

  “Sergeant Riker seemed to think Markowitz got a great deal of help from you. The interview lasted what—three hours? His usual style was forty minutes at the outside. I call that interesting.”

  Gaynor appeared to be searching the ceiling for personal notes on the subject.

  “He was looking for commonalities. The only common factor I could pin down for him was the isolation of the elderly. Now, there had only been two murders at that time. I remember asking if the other woman, Mrs. Cathery, had any social network. He said no, none that they could discover. Well, neither did Aunt Estelle, and neither of them had live-in help.” One hand stumbled off the arm of the chair and landed as a dead weight on top of the other one in his lap.

  “But Mrs. Cathery didn’t live alone. There was a grandson living in the apartment. Henry Cathery. Do you know him?”

  “This is New York City. The good-neighbor thing doesn’t extend to the next apartment, let alone a building at the end of the block. My aunt knew him. She said he was a recluse. And I know he’s eccentric.” One foot walked under the coffee table, and the accompanying shin made a thud against the hard edge. The pain was not relayed back to Gaynor, who never even winced. “According to the newspapers, he didn’t even notify the police that his grandmother never came home that night. Didn’t you find that odd? I mean, from the police point of view?”

  “Odd? Well, he told the investigating
officer he was only grateful for the peace and quiet, so it never occurred to him to go looking for her.”

  That initial interview with Henry Cathery had been conducted three months ago while the first kill still belonged to Homicide and not Special Crimes. The investigating officer’s notes and a follow-up interview had decided Markowitz that Cathery had been truthful in this. Markowitz had always been charmed by blatant honesty.

  “Mr. Gaynor, you’ve never spoken to Henry Cathery?”

  “Call me Jonathan,” he said, sitting back in the chair, his elbow nudging a figurine to the edge of the table on his left. “I used to see him in the park now and then. I nodded to him a few times the first week I was here. He never nodded back—just looked right through me. He’s a constant fixture in the park, but I don’t spend much time there anymore.”

  He stood up and followed his legs to the wide picture window at the far wall. He motioned her over. “There he is,” he said, pointing down to the bench behind the black bars and directly across the street from the building. Henry Cathery’s head was bowed over a portable chessboard as she drew closer to the window and looked down on him. Cathery chose that moment to lift his head, and she could have sworn he was looking directly at her. A reflexive instinct pulled her one step back from the window. She continued to stare down at Cathery with equal parts of revulsion and fascination.

  “Bit late for him to be out,” Gaynor was saying. “He’s usually there during the day. See the game board on his lap? He was some sort of chess champion as a child, I think. Burned out rather early. Forgive me, I’m probably telling you things you already know.”

  When they turned away from the window, it was he who guided her toward the couch. “I believe your first name is Kathleen?”

  She nodded. “Did you know Pearl Whitman?”

  “Never met her. May I call you Kathy?”

  “No.”