Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  She so seldom stopped by anymore. He understood.

  A consulting firm could not hold much allure for Mallory. The rather academic problems of quantifying, qualifying, and finding homes for the oddly gifted could hardly compare to the problems of Special Crimes Section. These days, she only stopped by to play with the computer toys she stored in her private office.

  The footsteps in the hallway stopped. Now the door was opening without the customary knock. Only two people ever did that, Mrs. Ortega and Mallory. But his cleaning woman never traveled with an entourage.

  Mallory was first into the room, carrying a large and dusty cardboard carton. She was in a black mood by her tone as she said to Riker, “I want to find that little twit, Andrew Bliss, and right now.”

  Behind the safe cover of his own carton, Riker was making facial expressions to indicate that she was a brat. He in turn was followed by a young uniformed officer with his own load of boxes, and these bore the stamp of NYPD. The parade trooped past his desk with two “Hi Charles” ‘s from Mallory and Riker. And then the door to Mallory’s private office closed behind them.

  Minutes later, the uniformed officer emerged, nodded to Charles in passing, and left him to wonder what was going on. Of course he could guess. He had read the morning paper. But most of the cartons had borne stamps from the NYPD evidence room. Now that was a problem, because they couldn’t possibly have four cartons of evidence in a brand-new case which, according to the newspaper, involved a single ice pick, no suspects and no leads.

  Riker emerged from Mallory’s office, leaving the door ajar. “Charles, I’m gonna make coffee. You want some?”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you.” He would have asked after Riker’s health, but the man was already ambling down the short hall leading to the office kitchen.

  Charles leaned far over the desk to see through the open door. Mallory’s office might as well have been in another building in an entirely different solar system, where extreme order and high technology prevailed over charm and antiquity.

  Mallory was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back turned to him as she lifted something heavy out of a carton. It was an axe wrapped in clear plastic. The axe handle was short, and the blade was no wider than the meat cleaver in his kitchen. He didn’t care to hazard a guess at the stains visible through the clear cover.

  What does an axe have to do with an ice pick murder?

  Mallory’s head turned quickly to catch him in the act of watching her.

  Of all the bizarre talents he had ever been asked to study, Mallory’s were the most convoluted. In addition to her gifts in the computer mode, she had a hyperawareness of her surroundings which he found inexplicable.

  She smiled unlike any other woman. Her expression now said, I caught you. But her smiles had a wider spectrum of meanings, which included, I’m going to get you for that, and he never wanted to be the recipient of that one. It was so seldom that she smiled for happiness. He suspected there was not much of that in her life. He had known her for years, and yet she was still a great mystery to him. He had once asked Riker what Mallory did with her off-duty hours. Riker had advanced the theory that she went into a closet at night and hung from the rod by her heels like a vampire bat.

  Now she beckoned to him. He left the room of beloved antiques and crossed over the threshold of her office and into the world of high technology. Three computers dominated the room, metallic cyclopes, each with a large gray terminal eye. Other machines kept them company in links of cables and wires. The office furnishings were metal with cruel sharp corners. Technical manuals sat in perfect order on the purely functional shelving.

  And then there was the incongruity of a bloody axe.

  Mallory pulled open the flaps of another carton. Inside was a jumble of papers in all shapes and sizes. Charles recognized the scrawled lines of Markowitz’s handwriting on napkins, matchbook covers and envelopes. Mallory brushed these papers aside to reveal an old photograph. Wordlessly, she handed it to him. He recognized his own likeness first, all six feet, four inches of himself towering above the surrounding crowd of people. And then his eyes settled on the image of a dear friend, the late Louis Markowitz. It was a younger version of the man, perhaps by ten or twelve years. Louis’s hair was only beginning to gray in this photograph. The excess of forty pounds was there, and carried with the same elan, but the lines of his face were not yet so deep.

  “That was taken at Aubry Gilette’s funeral,” said Mallory.

  Charles looked down at the photograph with wonder. If he had only been standing one place to the right, he might have had the pleasure of Louis Markowitz’s company years earlier, and his own life might have been that much richer for it. He missed Louis sorely; he missed him every day.

  And what effect had Louis’s death had on his only child? Well, no outward effect at all. He often wondered if, in the secret life of Kathleen Mallory, she didn’t spend part of her time in grief. He would never know. She was an intensely private person. There were questions one could never ask her, such as, Does it hurt you still?

  Riker entered the room, juggling three coffee cups and the morning paper. He placed one cup in Charles’s free hand, and leaning down, he gave one to Mallory. Riker drank deeply, rushing caffeine into his veins until his eyes were all the way open.

  “I don’t think you’re gonna find a money motive in this one, kid.” Riker hunkered down beside her. “That must put a real crimp in your day.”

  “It could be revenge,” said Mallory. “I like that one, too.”

  Riker held up the newspaper, folded back to the page Charles had been reading. “You wanna see your reviews?”

  The headline at the top of the column read: NYPD HUNTS ART TERRORIST. In the subheading it said: Connection to Oren Watt?

  Riker was grinning. “I think they’ve really captured your style, kid. Listen to this. ‘Detective Sergeant Kathleen Mallory would have walked over the body of the Times reporter had he not scrambled to get out of her way.’ ”

  “And it’s a good picture, too,” said Charles, bending down to admire her portrait over Riker’s shoulder. “It’s worthy of a frame. But what did you do to the reporter?”

  “I never touched that bastard.”

  “She told him to get the hell out of her way or she’d shoot him.” Riker handed the paper to Mallory. “You’re damn lucky he had a sense of humor. We don’t want any more bad press on this case.” As Mallory held the paper, Riker tapped the caption under her photograph. “ ‘The photogenic green-eyed blond detective.’ I like that line.”

  “On the next page,” said Charles, “there’s an interview with the FBI spokesman. The reporter was questioning him on the terrorist aspect of the murder- something to do with a critic’s column on art terrorism. The FBI man says they’re looking into it.”

  “Oh, terrific.” Riker slugged back the last of his coffee. “Damn that jerk Andrew Bliss. Now we got feds in the house. Commissioner Beale’s gonna have an aneurysm. A damn swarm of feds with psychiatric Ouija boards.”

  Mallory said nothing. In her own critique, she dumped the newspaper into a wastebasket. She pulled four plastic bags from the carton and read the labels. “What about all this hair and fiber evidence? Was all of this accounted for? I can’t find the forensic reports.”

  “Never developed it,” said Riker. “The gallery was a public space with heavy traffic. All of it was collected and tagged, but most of it wasn’t, worth the tests.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Markowitz. He was a detail freak.”

  “After Oren Watt confessed to the murder, we couldn’t justify the budget for any more lab work. Blakely did everything but handcuff Markowitz. The chief just wanted the case wrapped and forgotten.”

  Oren Watt? Charles stood over Mallory’s desk and looked down at the labels of other evidence bags. Each one bore Oren Watt’s name. “Why are you going back into this old murder? They have the man who did it. They caught him twelve years ago.”

  “No they
didn’t.” Mallory turned back to the carton and pulled out a paper bag. It came apart as she handled it, and a shred of stained clothing fell to the floor. “They caught a man to do the time for the murders. That’s not quite the same thing. Watt didn’t do it.”

  Riker lowered his head only a little and turned his face toward the window. Charles recognized the subtle meaning of this simple gesture. Apparently, Riker did not share her theory.

  “What about these tracks?” She held up a bundle of photographs. The first image was a pattern of red footprints on a hardwood floor. “Men’s shoes, women’s shoes.” She shuffled the photographs like a deck of cards. “There aren’t any notes on half of these prints.” By her tone of voice, she seemed to hold Riker responsible for this oversight.

  “Damn waste of time,” said Riker. “Someone called an anonymous tip to the press that night. The news crews beat a patrol car to the scene by five minutes. They contaminated the evidence before the uniforms showed up. We corralled some of the reporters to print their shoes for elimination, but we didn’t get all of them.”

  He took the photographs from her hand, riffled through them, pulled one out and turned it over to display a label. “This one has notes. It’s tagged for Oren Watt. That’s one set of footprints we had an easy match for. And his shoes were still bloody when his psychiatrist surrendered him to the police.”

  Charles had the sense that Riker was playing a game of push and shove with Mallory. She chose to let him play alone. Her voice was casual, and her face turned down to the contents of the carton. “Any idea who tipped off the newspapers?”

  “Probably Oren Watt,” said Riker, draining his coffee cup. “Watt wouldn’t be the first psychopath with a craving for publicity.”

  “Oren Watt didn’t do it.” There was a definite edge to her voice this time.

  “Both things could be true,” Charles suggested in the gentle manner of a peacemaker. “Watt could have made that call whether he did the murders or not.”

  Mallory nodded, seeming to like that idea. Riker would not look at her. He moved away to stand by the door and stare into his empty cup.

  Charles stepped between them. “What can I do to help?”

  “You’re taking me to the ball tomorrow night,” said Mallory.

  “You can’t mean the Manhattan Charities Ball. Is that tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Charles.” She stood up and walked to her desk.

  “But no one actually goes to the ball.”

  “You buy the tickets every year.” She opened the desk’s center drawer and pulled out the printed invitations and receipts. Mallory held them up to him, as though she had just caught him in a lie.

  She must have retrieved the invitations from the waste-basket in the reception room where he filed them every year. She could only have found the receipts in his private files. One day they really must sit down and discuss what his privacy meant to him, as opposed to what little it meant to her.

  For the moment, he only shrugged. “Well, of course I buy the tickets. It’s a charity event. My mother was a friend of Mrs. Quinn’s. We’ve always bought the tickets, but no one actually goes to the ball.”

  “The mayor goes,” said Riker.

  “Well, yes, but he’s not-” Here Charles stopped himself from saying that the mayor did not come from a Social Register family, that he was merely the leader of the largest city on earth. “Yes, I suppose the city’s power structure will be there. You’re quite right. But I don’t know anyone who goes.”

  “J. L. Quinn will be there, and you know him.” Mallory turned to face the rear wall. It was covered with cork and functioned as a giant bulletin board. “You were at Harvard the same time Quinn was.”

  Charles wasn’t about to ask her how she knew that. He was staring at her computers, which sometimes did double duty as cyberspace burglary tools.

  “Well, Quinn has to go,” he said somewhat defensively. “His mother hosts the ball.”

  “And Aubry’s father-the architect, Gregor Gilette?” She pinned the old photograph of Aubry’s funeral to the wall. “He’ll be at the ball. You know him, too, don’t you?”

  As if there was any doubt in her mind about any sector of his formerly private life. “Gregor also has to go. He was married to Mrs. Quinn’s daughter.”

  “Sabra?” Mallory walked back to the carton and sifted through the paperwork bundles, scanning a page in each one. She turned to Riker. “Just the one name everywhere Aubry’s mother is listed. Why isn’t it Sabra Gilette?”

  Riker shrugged. “Sabra was her full legal name, just the one name.”

  Mallory looked to Charles for enlightenment.

  “Sabra renounced the family name and walked away from the money. Then she became wildly successful on her own. She was an enormously talented painter. Later, she set a legal precedent when she married Gregor Gilette and refused to take his name. She-”

  “Do you remember seeing Sabra at Aubry’s funeral?”

  “Yes, it was the last time I ever saw her.”

  Mallory was deep in the interrogation mode now. She had reached her limit for six minutes of semicivil conversation. “Did you like Sabra?”

  “Yes, very much. I also liked her work. I have one of her early paintings.” Suddenly he wished he had not told her that. And now she would want to know-

  “Where is it?”

  Charles and Mallory walked across the hall to the apartment which was his residence. Beyond the foyer, a bank of tall windows made the front room light and airy, despite the heavy furnishings in dark woods spanning four centuries of craftsmen. All that belonged to his own era were the contemporary works of art. They should not have worked well with the older pieces, and yet they did. The colors of a splatter painting agreed with the bright details of the Persian rug and the upholstery of a George III side chair. Another abstract repeated the rococo lines of a Belter sofa.

  They walked down the wide hallway, where late twentieth-century drawings were on close hanging acquaintance with framed pages of illuminated manuscripts. At the end of the hall, he opened a linen closet and pointed to a framed canvas sitting on the floor, face to the wall. He lifted it carefully and handed it to her. The painting had a lonely, sad feel to it. One small pale worm of an element writhed in a maelstrom of powerful bold color.

  “Don’t you like it, Charles?”

  “I like it very much. It’s one of her most accessible works. I bought it at a Christie’s auction a few years ago.”

  “Why do you keep it on the floor of a closet?”

  He shifted uncomfortably, not wanting to answer her. He kept it in the closet because what it communicated was so obvious, so blatant that his cleaning woman, Mrs. Ortega, had readily understood it. That high school dropout who loved baseball and hated art, Mrs. Ortega, had understood the painting so clearly that Charles had been embarrassed when the normally hostile cleaning woman had gone out of her way to be nice to him for several weeks after she had seen the painting on the wall of his front room. So this is what your guts look like, Mrs. Ortega’s uncharacteristic kindness had said to him, you poor jerk.

  Now he wondered if Mallory was drawing the same inference.

  “Charles, can we hang this in my office for a while? Just till I wrap the case? Oh, and your collection of art catalogs? Do you have one of Sabra’s museum retrospective?”

  They returned to the office with the painting and the catalog. Mallory set the canvas against the cork wall, which Riker was littering with clippings, photographs and reports. Mallory followed behind him, straightening every sheet with machinelike precision. Finally, she slapped Riker’s hand away and forbade him to touch the board at all.

  Charles sat at Mallory’s desk. Riker looked over his shoulder as he turned the pages of the museum catalog, hunting for photographs of the elusive Sabra. Here and there, Charles would point out a turned face, the line of a cheek. A hand raised to blind the camera’s eye.

  “What’s with this broad?” said Riker. “There’s not o
ne clear photograph of her.”

  “She hated the sight of a camera,” said Charles. “Sabra was always reclusive. She very rarely appeared in public. An agent submitted her work through one gallery, and I’m not sure she ever met with the gallery director.”

  Mallory turned away from her work on the cork wall. “Was it Koozeman’s gallery?”

  “Oh, no,” said Charles. “Sabra was a major talent. She showed in the most prominent gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. In those days, Koozeman only had a small storefront gallery in the East Village-the one where Sabra’s daughter was murdered.”

  “Here’s one of Sabra’s kid.” Riker pointed to the photograph of a young woman standing by a painting. “Pretty girl. Did you know Aubry very well?”

  “No, not really,” said Charles. “Just a nodding acquaintance. These were people I ran into at weddings and funerals. I’m usually excused from christenings and graduations. I did see Aubry at the gallery shows. Sabra rarely attended her own openings, but Aubry and her father never missed one.”

  Mallory was flipping through a notebook, checking off items. Now she hovered over Charles and dropped a card on the desk in front of him. “I made a hair appointment for you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You need a haircut. My stylist will take you this afternoon. That’s your appointment card.”

  “But this salon-”

  “I know. They only do women. But I leave large tips. They’ll do you. So we have a date, Charles?”

  “For the ball? Oh, yes.”

  Oh, God, yes and absolutely.

  Since his teenage years, it had been his fantasy to walk into a grand ballroom with a beautiful woman on his arm. In earlier fantasies of childhood, he had seen himself in the bedtime story of Pinocchio, the long-nosed puppet who ached to become a real boy. Now, in his fortieth year, as he looked across the room at young Mallory, he realized he had grown up into Cyrano, another poor hapless longnose who fell in love and found it to be a bleak place where he lived by himself.