Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  “Good reasoning, but how do you account for the fact that there were no witnesses?”

  “A fluke. And it speaks well for my theory. There was one unguarded moment when no one was looking that way.”

  “And no one noticed a blood-splattered lunatic strolling out of the park,” said Mallory dryly.

  “He could have covered his clothes with something,” said Gaynor.

  “Wouldn’t that indicate the presence of mind to protect himself from detection?” said Charles.

  Gaynor sipped his wine and looked off to that corner of the eye which Charles recognized as the place where he did his own best work.

  “In that case,” said Gaynor, “I only have to extend my unguarded moment long enough for him to leave the park. He could have been a derelict who followed her through the gate after she unlocked it. And once he was out of the park, who would take any notice of a street person? Who would look long enough or close enough to determine that his clothes were stained with blood?”

  In that same corner of the eye, Charles was reconstructing the long red dress worn by the young woman who had hailed Henry Cathery from the park gate. Gaynor might have something there. Blood, wet or dry, was not so detectable as the Technicolor paint of motion picture blood. Had the killer worn something dark or something red? Could it be that simple?

  Mallory was not so open-minded.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said.

  “Of course you can’t,” said Gaynor, stirring the sauce dutifully, and misunderstanding her. “No sane person wants to believe that anyone is sick enough to kill a helpless old woman.” Gaynor continued with his stirring and his misunderstanding of Mallory, who was not in the least sentimental about helpless old ladies. “But there are probably a lot of people who wish the Invisible Man had come to their house.”

  “That’s cold,” said Charles, crumbling raw ground beef into a bowl.

  “Yes, it is,” said Gaynor. “But true.” He looked up at Mallory. “Think about relatives who can’t afford nursing homes. Old people are living longer, into their nineties some of them, draining the resources of their children. I don’t think that series of murders enraged the public. I think it fed their fantasies. It’s no accident the Invisible Man is taking on superhero proportions in the news media.”

  “You make it sound like the freak’s performing a public service,” said Mallory.

  Charles could see this line of conversation was not sitting well with her. She would have given anything to watch Louis and Helen grow old. She filled her wineglass, dismissing them both with her downcast eyes.

  “I know you’re a sociologist,” said Charles, “but do you have any expertise in sociopaths?”

  “Only to the extent that they impact on society. We need them in times of war. If we don’t have enough, we manufacture an artificial pathology in their basic training. As long as they’re confined to a military life or a combative sport, or even a police force, we can keep them in stock. If you put them out in the civilian population, they’ll cull the weak, the stragglers and—”

  ‘The elderly,’ he would have said next, if Mallory had not cut him off.

  “How does insider trading impact on society?”

  Charles stared at her lovely face, her Irish eyes of Asian inscrutability.

  “It’s potentially devastating,” said Gaynor. “In the worst possible scenario, Wall Street loses the trust of the investors. Who wants to risk their savings in a rigged game? Think of the small investors who suffer the most when they’re cheated. Investments fall off across the board, from mutual funds to city bonds and blue-chip stock. Then the market collapses, and we all line up with a bowl at the local soup kitchen. That pack of thieves in the 1980s scandal shook a lot of people’s faith. The soup kitchen was a near thing.”

  “I suppose a lot of people just don’t realize how wrong it is,” said Mallory, swilling her wine and speaking in uncharacteristic small-talk tones, “how illegal it is.”

  “Very few people with the money to invest at any level can claim they don’t know that insider trading is wrong, and why it’s wrong.”

  “Including little old ladies?” Mallory smiled, and her eyes narrowed in Charles’s direction.

  “Oh, particularly little old ladies,” said Gaynor. “They control the lion’s share of the large-to-medium-investor capital.”

  And Charles knew that all this was for his benefit. Mallory might genuinely like Edith Candle, but Edith had not respected the law, and Mallory was the law. Apparently her code of ethics was a little more complicated than the poker players realized. Why hadn’t he seen that for himself? She could have stolen the earth with her computer skills, but she had confined her theft to whatever Markowitz might need to keep the law. Perhaps she did have the unrepentant-till-pigs-fly soul of a thief, but she drew sharp lines, Markowitz’s lines. There was more of him to her than Helen.

  Charles nodded to Mallory, and in that nod he promised to speak to Edith about her forays into the market and what she could expect to get away with in the future.

  After Gaynor said his good nights and thank-yous and closed the door behind him, after the dishes had been cleared from the table, she made herself to home on the couch, shoes kicked off, feet curling under her. When he set the tray with the coffee and liqueurs on the table before her, he saw the box with the red wrapping paper. And this was his first clue that today was his fortieth birthday.

  He sat down beside her and tore the red wrapping paper from his gift. The uncovered cardboard box bore an espresso-maker logo, but when he lifted the lid, he was staring down at an object that would never make a good cup of espresso, not in this world. Not knowing quite what to say, he resorted to the obvious. “A crystal ball?”

  “My idea of homage. You’re the only man who ever impressed me very much. I find the rest of them boringly predictable.”

  As Charles held the crystal ball up to the light, his nose elongated in a dark patch of curving reflection. He put it down on the coffee table.

  She would never guess how much this pleased him. Every sign of friendship was a reaffirmation that he was not so odd, not a complete freak, not entirely alien. If he could ask for more, it would only be that she were less beautiful or that his nose did not precede him by three minutes.

  “You like it?”

  “Very much. Not a paperweight, I take it?”

  “No, it’s the real article. Straight out of the department evidence room.”

  She was doing the service of pouring coffee and liqueurs, holding a spoon up to ask did he want sugar? No? “So, what did you think of Gaynor?”

  “I suppose I liked him well enough.” And it had been obvious that Gaynor liked Mallory quite a bit. “What do you really know about him?”

  Her father would have asked that. Louis had remarked that one day he would have to unplug her computer for a few minutes so she could meet and marry a young man while he was young enough to hope for grandchildren. Louis had been confident that it would only take a few minutes. He had seen what she’d done to his detectives in less time.

  “I’ve got a printout this long,” she said. “I know his parents are dead. He has a summer house on Fire Island, he dabbles in stocks, and he’s just inherited a few hundred million. But he wasn’t starving before the old woman died. He’s worth a hundred thousand on his own, all socked away in conservative investments. No arrests, no juvenile record.”

  So her interest in the man was all professional.

  So Gaynor dabbled in stocks.

  “He didn’t by any chance cash in on the Whitman Chemicals merger?”

  “No. I thought so at first. The timing was right. Then I backtracked the stock purchases through the computer of a financial house. He made some modest gains that year, but there was no connection. Lucky for him,” said Mallory. “Estelle Gaynor got away with it. She’s only a footnote in the investigation, but the SEC would’ve busted her nephew in a minute on sheer proximity. The government would have taken all th
e profits, fined him and jailed him. But none of his own transactions are linked to anything criminal. It’s not like he was ever hard up for money.”

  “Some people never have enough money. What about the other victims?”

  “There’s no connection to the Whitman merger beyond Gaynor’s aunt. Pearl Whitman was a principal, but she never purchased stock in the merging company. No financial history of insider trading for Samantha Siddon or Anne Cathery, but they both play the market.”

  “You know, it might be a good idea not to get too close to any of these people until you find out what the connecting link actually was.”

  “I know. The seance isn’t enough. I think something brought them together before the seances began.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What do old women do when they meet? They talk about their children. Did you think these women might have shared a secret or a confidence?”

  “Like a little lunacy in the family?”

  “I hope we’re not getting off on the Cathery boy again. He’s socially awkward—many gifted people are—but odd behavior doesn’t signify mental illness. You can’t really see him hacking up an old lady, can you?”

  “Oh, sure I can. And if it turns out that Anne Cathery was trying to get the kid locked up so she could get her hands on his money, I’d have to figure she had the knife coming to her. But I’d still bust him.”

  “All Henry Cathery seems to crave is a little solitude. He only wants to be left alone. You’re not planning to torture him, are you?” Charles stared at the pattern of the carpet.

  She touched his arm to call his eyes up to hers. “You liked Henry Cathery, didn’t you?”

  “I understood him.”

  “Were the old ladies helpful? Did they give you the new location for Redwing?”

  “No,” said Riker. “The old ladies don’t contact her. She calls them. We have to wait till the next seance and tail her. And don’t get any ideas, kid. Coffey’s already arranged for the tail.”

  Riker spent the next hour drinking Mallory’s beer and bringing her up to speed on Coffey’s progress which, according to Riker, was zip. “Dr. Slope thinks we might have a slight variation in the murders. If it’s two people, then both of them are right-handed, both used incredible violence in the slashing. But the wounds are not identical. The fourth victim is slightly off, and Slope can’t say for sure it’s the work of one man. Maybe the guy was just in a freaking hurry this time.”

  “What about a man and a woman working together?”

  “Naw. I’m going along with Coffey on that one. It crossed my mind, but I just don’t see a woman doing that kinda job on another woman. Don’t get me wrong, kid. Women can shoot and stab with the best of ‘em. And they’ re really thorough. If I see a corpse with a whole clip emptied into it, I gotta figure a woman did that. But I can’t see a woman doing these mutilations. You see something like that, it’s always a man who has a problem with women.”

  When Riker had gone, Mallory sat down by the light of the VCR and the slide projector. She began the nightly horror show of the slides and the dancing Markowitz.

  Old man, why didn’t you leave something behind, a few bread crumbs?

  And in her dreams, Louis Markowitz tried to teach her how to dance.

  When Margot opened her eyes to the light, she could not tell if it was the gray of evening or morning. What day was it? And she was thinking of food as her stomach gnawed at her like a separate animal with teeth to bite her from the inside. The bloody knife lay inches from her face. She didn’t see it for the long minutes she thought about food. She daydreamed of bakery bread. The knife was kicked to one side by blind feet on the way to the door.

  Out on the avenue, she had her choice of discarded paper cups. She selected one and primed it with three pennies and jingled them for the tourists.

  An old woman stopped and kept Margot standing in the cold wind as she dipped a thick-veined claw into her large purse and, with maddening slowness, groped around its interior, finally extracting a change purse. Margot shifted from one foot to the other as the woman worked the clasp with arthritic fingers, at last wincing out a single dime and chiming it into the paper cup.

  Margot stared at the dime keeping company with the three pennies at the bottom of her cup. A scream of outrage exploded from her mouth with force enough to push the old woman back two steps to the brick wall littered with playbills and ads and graffiti. Margot screamed at her, yelling obscenities, shrieking “Bitch, bitch, bitch” in an angry chant. She followed after the old woman, who had turned and was hurrying away with all the speed of veined and brittle legs. The woman gathered her thin coat closer about her throat, as if it might be protection from the young lunatic who was dancing alongside her, sometimes leaping in the air and screaming vile words which had the effect of physical punches and outright terror.

  The old woman tried to run, and her legs failed her, falling out from under her. She heard a snap of bone when she hit the hard cement which hates old bones and breaks them when it can. The old woman never felt the jagged edge of the broken beer bottle until she looked down and saw the blood gushing from the split in her flesh. A small noise came from her dry lips, a crack in the voice, a squeal of fear, more from the sight of her own blood than the pain. The old woman was crawling now, dragging her body along the sidewalk as the lunatic with the dirty, matted hair danced around her, ranting on and on, stomping and leaping, frightening the wide-eyed pedestrians who passed her quickly by, pretending not to see, not to hear, not to feel.

  The old woman ceased her inching escape. She lay still in the body and quiet. Tears streamed from her eyes as her life leaked out through the jagged red hole in her leg.

  8

  With food enough and sleep enough, Margot was focused once again. In her mind, she replayed the image of the knife disappearing into his ribs in a quick thrust of the blade, she watched again as he slid to the concrete of the subway platform, gasping like an air-drowned fish, blood bubbling up from his mouth. She had stared at his eyes for a very long time. He was the one. There could have been no other eyes like those.

  She would have to do something about the knife, all the knives. She wouldn’t miss them any. She didn’t need them anymore. How many knives did she own? She collected all the knives from the kitchen and bundled them in a towel and carried them out the door as if they had been babies. And they had been, but no more.

  Riker was comfortably settled into a chair by the bulletin board in Mallory’s den. He drained another beer. An empty coffee cup and a plate with the remains of Mallory’s more wholesome breakfast were on the table by her computer. It would not have surprised him if she had pulled her bed into the den so she could sleep with the board as well as eat with it.

  “Has Charles ever seen the board?”

  She shook her head as she attached the last printout to the cork. It dangled by a single pushpin.

  He wondered what Charles would think if he could see her pinning up notes and printouts in a sloppy, unMallory way. Maybe Charles would know what to do with this aspect of Mallory, this disassembling, pushpin by pushpin.

  She went to the small refrigerator, a recent addition to the den, and pulled out a bottle of beer. “Now, what have you got on Redwing?” She popped off the cap and slipped the cold bottle into his hand to replace the empty one which had disappeared without his noticing.

  “Okay.” He looked down at his open notebook. “She has three arrests for extortion and fraud. The charges were dropped in each case.”

  “I’ve got that already.”

  Of course she did. She could break into the NYPD computer system in her sleep.

  “I want the personal notes of the cops who busted her. The computer file won’t tell me why the charges were dropped.”

  “They were dropped for lack of cooperation from the complainants. You know how hard it is to prosecute this kind of fraud, even when the victims do cooperate.”

  “Any earlier records under another alias? Maybe a littl
e violence on her record? Assault charges?”

  “No, but she’s a big lady. I’d bet even money she could take you.” He slugged back his beer in a long thirsty draught.

  “No address yet?”

  “Still working on it. It’s no good backtracking any of the cabs. They all pick her up in different locations and most of them are gypsy cabs, no logs.” Riker looked down at his magical, bottomless beer bottle.

  “So, now that Coffey has the seance connection, he must be really hot on conspiracy theories again.”

  “Oh yeah, he is. He’s taking a real strong interest in Redwing. It’s got to tie in with one of her scams, right?”

  “Does Coffey understand that none of these women are going to be cheated by a small-time con artist?”

  “I don’t know. I think he sees every old lady in the image of his grandmother.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “You’re gonna love this. Here.” He handed her a typewritten note. It was still enclosed in an evidence bag.

  “Oh Jesus. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, somebody comes up with a new angle for a protection racket. Where did you get it?”

  “One of the old ladies gave it to us during the interview. Fabia Penworth. Course she passed it around to all her friends before we ever saw it. We had to fingerprint the whole pack of them for elimination prints.”

  “And she was just delighted with the letter, right?”

  “Yeah. Go figure. So now Coffey’s off on this theory that all the old ladies who went down got death threats like that one, and either they didn’t pay their own ransoms, or they were killed right after the payoffs.”

  “And the old ladies back that up?”

  “Nope. This is the first letter they’ve seen, any of them.”

  “Then it didn’t go down that way. You tell something to one of them, and you tell it to all of them. If there were other letters, they’d all know about it. Coffey’s met them. What does he use for brains?”