Margot covered her eyes with one hand as she smashed the window leading into her bedroom. She cut her hand on the glass and never noticed. She slipped to the floor and into a deep sleep, not minding bare wood and the cold draft from the broken window. As she rolled in her sleep, the knife with the dried blood on it slipped from her pocket and thudded on the floor. She slept on without dreams.
Riker picked up the old woman at her Gramercy Park apartment. More detectives had been sent to pick up the other three seance ladies, per Coffey’s orders to keep them separated. Damn waste of time. The woman was silent on the ride in. Her round face was a mask of white powder. Her eyebrows had been drawn with a shaking hand. She had not asked to see a lawyer, but neither had she asked why he was dragging her into the police station. That was interesting enough to make a note at the next stoplight. He jotted down the word scared.
When they arrived at the station, he ordered a uniformed officer to round the women up from the separate corners, offices and cubbyholes of the unit and put them all in the interview room together.
“Coffey won’t like that,” said the uniformed officer, who had started shaving only the year before.
“Yeah, he will,” said Riker. “I’ll take the heat if he doesn’t.”
He stood behind the one-way glass and watched the women file in and settle into a more comfortable silence. Minutes dragged by before the stiffness passed off and the elderly women began to talk easily among themselves. The conversation did not break off when an officer brought in a tray of covered Styrofoam cups and a box of doughnuts from the deli across the street. Riker smiled and moseyed down the hall to Markowitz’s office, where Jack Coffey was waiting for him.
“You got all the old ladies from the séance?”
“Yeah.”
“Put the Penworth woman in the interview room. I’ll talk with her first.”
“She’s in there now.”
He followed Coffey to the large room at the end of the hall and counted to three as the lieutenant looked in the window of one of the doors.
“All of them together,” said a very testy Coffey on the third count. “I told you I wanted to see them separately.” Jack Coffey looked through the glass of the interview room at four old women seated around the long table, chatting among themselves, excited, laughing.
“They’re more talkative when they’re all together,” said Riker. “Make it more like a gossip session and you’ll get more out of them.”
“Riker, when I tell you—”
“Hold it, Lieutenant. You’re gonna say that was Markowitz’s style, right? Okay, so it’s not the old man’s command anymore and you’re no Markowitz. Okay. But when we picked up the old ladies, one by one, they were like clams in the car. When they met up here, it all changed. They’ve been chattering about murder nonstop for the past twenty minutes.”
“All right, Riker. We do it Markowitz’s way.” He looked back to the window. “Who’s who?”
Riker had been primed for a fight, and now he felt somewhat let down because Coffey wasn’t really such a bastard. He read off the names to match up with the woman who nodded constantly, the moon-faced woman, the one with the little head and the gigantic chest, and the skinny one with the high cheekbones who had a smart mouth and was his favorite.
They walked into the interview room and a wash of gossip running full spigot.
“Anne’s death was the most spectacular,” said the nodding woman, whose slight palsy happily agreed with her sentiments in the rankings of recent bloody murders in the neighborhood.
Coffey took his place at the head of the table, and Riker took the next chair, notebook in hand. They politely waited for a lull in the conversation, and Coffey introduced himself.
A round face beamed on Coffey and one pudgy white hand rested on his arm. “You know, Lieutenant, for a while, we thought it was one of us.”
“Oh, yes,” said the lady of the high cheekbones. “That was rather early on, of course. Pearl hadn’t died yet.”
“You mean you regularly discussed this possibility?”
Riker smiled down at his notebook. Coffey was having a hard time with that.
“That’s practically all we talked about between seances. You thought we were discussing needlepoint?” asked the woman described in Riker’s notebook as ‘small head, big jugs.’
“By the time Pearl died, we’d settled on other possibilities,” said the nodding woman.
“Such as?” Coffey prompted.
“The Cathery boy.”
Riker flipped back through the pages of his notebook. “Miss Whitman was Henry Cathery’s alibi. She said she was with the kid in the park between one-thirty and four-thirty in the afternoon of June thirtieth. They played chess for three hours. Does that sound right?”
“Yes. Pearl was quite a player when she was young. She gave it up when she turned sixty. She had more tournaments on her resume than Henry did.”
“As I recall,” said the lady of the white-powder moon face, “Henry went to some trouble to remind Pearl of the hours. Pearl had been a bit confused, but she finally decided that must have been the right time.”
“Cathery had to remind her?”
“Their games were haphazard. He took his chess set to the park every day, but sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. If Pearl was there at the same time, she’d give him a game.”
“She told us she was positive about the time,” said Coffey.
“I doubt that,” said the thin woman. “You know how it is. No, you wouldn’t, would you? When you start to get up there in years, every time you forget your keys—well, it must be senility. That’s why it was so easy to convince Pearl that she was with Henry during those particular hours.”
“Since Pearl’s murder,” said the nodding woman, “I see Henry in the park both morning and afternoon. Maybe he always went twice a day. I’m not sure. One gets so used to seeing him there.”
“Right,” said the moon. “His game with Pearl could just as easily have been in the morning.”
“We didn’t all agree on Henry, of course,” said the woman with the tiny head. “I thought the lot of them, all the heirs, hired a service to do it. Maybe they got a package rate.”
“Well, of course they’d get a package rate,” said the nodding woman, with more enthusiasm than palsy. “This is New York. Who pays retail?”
“And do you favor the conspiracy theory too, ma’am?” asked Riker of the thin woman with the cheekbones which made him think she had been hot when she was young. “Do you think all the heirs are in on it?”
“No, dear. The smart money is on Margot Siddon.”
“Margot has been so strange these past few years,” said the thoughtful moon. “Or so Samantha used to say.”
“Oh please,” said the woman of the tiny head, with a heave of her ample chest and a diva’s sigh. “Compared to whom? You don’t think of Henry as the all-American boy, do you?”
The nodding woman’s head began to wobble, attempting to contradict the affirmative nod with a negative shake.
The moon beamed on Coffey again. “Henry was really very little trouble to Anne. You know she took him in when his parents died.”
“She took Henry and a tidy allowance as guardian and executor,” said Riker’s favorite. “Henry, incidentally, is worth ten times what Anne had.”
“So, does Margot Siddon have an alibi, Lieutenant?” The little round face leaned forward, eyes bright.
“I don’t see it as a woman’s crime, ma’am,” said Coffey.
She seemed affronted by this and cocked her head toward the others, who smiled with pleasant endurance and tolerance, and the thin woman’s shrug said, ‘Men.’
“According to the testimony of Mrs. Whitman’s doorman—”
“Oh, my dear, I hope you haven’t relied too heavily on the testimony of doormen,” said the tiny-headed diva. “Pearl and I had the same doorman. He’s drunk four days out of five.”
“I have the
same doorman as Anne and Samantha,” said the moon. “He does the building football pool on Wednesdays. That was the day Anne died, wasn’t it?”
“Now Estelle’s doorman is my doorman. He’s very new and very young,” said the nodding woman. “You know these young people, they think we all look alike.”
Coffey shot a glance at Riker, who nodded in agreement. The doormen did not make great witness material.
“Did the four victims have anything else in common besides the séances?”
“Samantha and Anne went to school together. Vassar, I think.”
“Estelle and Pearl were very close,” said the thin woman. “They did stocks together.”
“Pardon?”
“They made the same investments with the same brokerage house. They put me onto quite a good thing once.”
Riker watched Coffey make the mistake of the patronizing smile. Coffey must think these women were discussing their pin money instead of the hundred-million-dollar increments they moved around the boards at the stock exchange. But Coffey had not yet read Mallory’s printout on their stock portfolios and recent transactions, which companies they held stock in and which they owned outright.
The moon leaned into the conversation. “Didn’t Pearl and Estelle go into partnership on a corporation?”
“That was twenty years ago, dear, and they unloaded it the following year. Things in common,” mused the nodder. “Estelle and Samantha are from New York Four Hundred families. Social Register, you know. Anne Cathery and Samantha are both DAR. That’s Daughters of the American Revolution.”
Riker leaned forward, tapping his pencil on the notebook. “Is there any one thing they all had in common?”
“They were old.”
“Thank you,” said Riker.
“Ladies,” said Coffey, in the same tone Riker had heard him use to address a field trip of third-graders, “do you realize that any one of you could be the next victim?”
“Well, it was something of a crapshoot at first,” said the nodding woman. “But this time, we’re fairly certain that Fabia’s next. Show him the letter, Fabia.”
The woman turned her small head down and had to lean over a bit to see beyond her large chest and into the purse on her lap. She produced a folded paper in a dramatic flourish. She was almost gleeful as Riker and Coffey read the lines that demanded her money and threatened her life.
Charles flipped through the library microfiche, rolling by the pages of thirty-year-old newspapers. Kathleen had been right. There it was on the cover of a major daily, a photograph of the hysterical widow clinging to her husband’s body.
The reporter for the Times speculated that Max might have survived, but the busboy had broken the glass of the water tank when he saw Max was in trouble, remaining in the dead float well past the safety margin, one leg still bound to the weight at the bottom of the tank. The broken glass had cut him to shreds, severing every major artery. Onlookers had watched helplessly while he bled to death.
And now he noticed a new detail in the photograph. His own father’s face stared out at him from the crowd of nightclub patrons in the background, a small cameo of horror and disbelief.
Charles understood those disbelieving eyes so well. In childhood, it had been hard to believe that Max could ever die.
Nine-year-old Charles had been uncertain of Max’s final exit from the world when he attended the funeral in the Manhattan cathedral. Holding tightly to his parents’ hands, he entered that enormous place lit by a thousand candles, filled with a throng of mourners who had come to say goodbye to the master. Cousin Max lay at peace in a white coffin, dead, so the boy had been told. But Charles had held to the hope that this too was an illusion, another exit but not the final one.
The cathedral ceiling was higher than heaven. The stained-glass windows and the candles created a brilliant spectacle of unimagined space and beauty. The candles had gone out one by one, and by no human hand. Though the windows kept their brilliance, the interior dimmed to a ghostly twilight as the first magician appeared in white top hat and tuxedo with a flowing white satin cape. Out of this cape he had pulled a glowing ball of fire. Charles had seen this done onstage. It was one of Max’s best illusions. The ball of fire left the magician’s hand and floated over the coffin where Max slept on. A parade of men and women in white satin had come forward to circle the casket, which disappeared a moment later when they broke ranks and returned to their seats.
The casket had reappeared at the cemetery. Max’s wand was broken over the open grave.
He remembered looking up to the sky, that perfect cloudless expanse of blue, as a thousand white doves took flight and blocked out the sun. He heard the thunderous rush of wings rising, and felt their wind on his face and in his hair. When he looked down again, the coffin was gone, and a scattering of white rose petals covered the earth at the bottom of the open grave. The doves soared up and up, climbing to heaven, wings working with a fury, as though they carried a weighty burden with them, up and away. The little boy followed their flight with astonished eyes.
The advantage of a prominent nose was that it missed very little. Her perfume rose up in the elevator with him. Balancing two bags of groceries and a newspaper, he followed it down the hall. At the juncture of the two apartments, he turned away from his residence to open the office door.
Mallory sat behind the desk in the front room, facing a bearded man whose gesturing put one waving arm perilously close to a delicate lampshade of glass panels. This could only be the sociologist from Gramercy Park, heir and murder suspect. He fit Mallory’s scarecrow description, but only in the looseness of his limbs and the awkward way they flew around without direction. His face was attractive, small regular features and warm engaging eyes. The beard suited him and saved him from the small nose, which bordered on pug and would have made him an aging boy forever.
“Charles Butler, Jonathan Gaynor,” said Mallory.
“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Butler.”
“Charles, please.”
“I love your windows.” said Gaynor. “Do you know the period?”
“Thank you. The architecture is circa 1935.”
This tall triptych of windows was more aesthetic than the rectangles of his apartment across the hall. Restored woodwork gleamed from the frames which arched near the ceiling. Mallory, behind the desk, was a dark silhouette in the center panel, softly backlit by the gloaming of the dinner hour.
Charles settled his grocery bags on the desk. “This room is unique. All the other windows in the building are the same period but not quite the same style.”
“It’s a remarkably quiet room,” said Gaynor. “Double-pane glass in the windows?”
Charles nodded. At times the room was so quiet Mallory swore she could hear pins crashing to the floor, and the ‘Oh shit!’s’ of spilled angels.
“You know what these windows remind me of?” Gaynor’s hand sent a pencil caddie flying to the carpet. He bent down to pick it up with a lack of self-consciousness that must come from the habit of sending things accidentally away. “This whole room could be the set for The Maltese Falcon. It’s vintage Sam Spade.”
Charles sat on the edge of the desk and looked around the room with new eyes. When he had taken over this apartment for his office, he had been working on the theory that a room was a three-dimensional metaphor for a human life, and a basic element of harmony. Once he had the room, he believed his life would take on a new shape, the right shape this time around. Now it was a bit of a shock to realize that his ideal room was the stereotypical setting of murder investigations. But it was.
“I’ve persuaded Mallory to have dinner with me,” said Gaynor. “Care to join us?”
Charles gathered up his grocery bags and moved to the door, looking back over one shoulder to say, “Oh, you’re both invited to dinner at my place.”
And the parade of three crossed the hallway.
The kitchen in his apartment was his favorite room these days. In the past year, he had
grown accustomed to people dropping by at all hours. He welcomed company after all the years he had spent isolated in his room at the think tank.
The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields played a Vivaldi mandolin concerto at a background level that facilitated conversation. Jonathan Gaynor made himself useful stirring the sauce for Swedish meatballs. Mallory perched on the countertop, sipping white wine to the left of Charles’s chopping block, and he was unreasonably happy.
“It’s wonderful,” said Gaynor, sipping from the spoon. “Did your mother teach you how to cook?”
“Oh no,” said Charles, smiling as he wept over the minced onions. “She only managed to cook one unburnt piece of toast in her entire life.”
“Oh, right,” said Mallory.
“Really, I was there that day. I remember the moment when it hit the top of the pile on the breakfast table. It was golden brown, the first I’d ever seen that wasn’t black. I reached out to grab it, but my father got it first. He handed it back to my mother and said, ‘This one isn’t burnt yet.’ She never missed a beat. She put it back in the toaster and burned it to a husk.”
“All I ever had was boarding school fare,” said Gaynor, holding his empty wineglass to Mallory, who filled it. “Burnt toast would’ve been the highlight of the meal.”
Both men looked at Mallory, who had never failed to have a well-cooked, nutritionally balanced meal in all the years she lived with Helen and Louis. Just for one flickering moment, Charles believed her competitive streak might tempt her to recall a time when she lived out of garbage cans.
She jammed the cork in the mouth of the wine bottle.
“So, Jonathan,” said Charles. “You have any theories on the Invisible Man of Gramercy Park?”
“It had to be a lunatic.”
“Why?” Done with onions, Charles moved on to tearing small bits of bread into smaller bits.
“I look out on that park every day,” said Gaynor. “I promise you, there’s no way he could have killed Anne Cathery with a hope of not being seen. Therefore, it had to be a mental incompetent without the forethought to protect himself from detection.”
Mallory's Oracle Page 21