Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  Mallory’s eyes narrowed. “He was seeing her alone when she was still a child?”

  On one level, he liked this young woman tremendously, but just now he wanted to smack her. “He and Aubry would have tea in Madame Burnstien’s office after class. Does this sound like a sexual tryst with a pedophile?”

  Apparently, it did. Her expression was cynical. She sat back in her chair, unconvinced that opportunity was not synonymous with the act. He thought her too young to be so hard on the world.

  “Andrew was very kind to my daughter, nothing more. He might have been her only real friend. Their relationship was totally innocent, almost spiritual. My wife believed that Aubry and Andrew were like two lonely monks with different callings.”

  “Andrew Bliss is a materialistic little bastard,” she said, calmly, evenly. “All the papers are touting him as the fashion terrorist of New York. What do you think Sabra would say now? You think she might buy the pedophile angle?”

  “No!” The palm of his hand slapped the table hard. “And neither do I.”

  Had she been baiting him? Yes, it was in her face. She had what she wanted from him, and damn the cost. Now he understood why Jamie Quinn had gone to such pains to keep the police from his door all those years ago. The questions, the insinuations-this was a rape of memory.

  “Andrew’s friendship with Aubry was innocent kindness. Nothing can dissuade me from that.” He rose from the table, making it clear that it was time for her to go. “The suggestion of something sexual in her childhood is maddening. You have no sense of my emotions concerning my child, do you?”

  “I think you’d like to kill the man who murdered her.”

  A cockroach floated dead among the slags of cream on the surface of his coffee. Riker shook his head and set the cup down on the bedside table. The roach must have been in the pan he used to heat the water. Morning light was diffusing through the dust-gray lace of a curtain. Layers of cigarette smoke had dimmed and yellowed the windowpane to make the daylight kinder to his emaciated features.

  Now he parted the curtain and caught sight of Mary Margaret rounding the corner with her arms full of groceries and leading a parade of four children. Her body had thickened some, but her hair was the same carrot red she was born to. The children, redheads all, were laughing, and she laughed with them.

  If only they had had children together, Mary Margaret might have stuck it out with him.

  Naw, that’s not right.

  It was the drinking that drove her away, and not the dearth of babies. She was always meant for better than him, and the year after she left, she had found that better man.

  She had lived three doors away for all these years, and they never spoke. He saw her most every day of his life, passing sometimes within touching distance, never daring to touch her once in all that time. He wished she had moved away from the old neighborhood when she left him. It would have been easier for her to leave instead of him. He had stayed here on this same street because she had stayed.

  Every time he had seen her passing by his window with her brood of kids and her second husband, it had been a personal assault. In the march of children’s feet, all ducks in a row behind Mary Margaret, Riker could see generations of the life he might have had. No problem with her second husband. No sir. Not a sterile drunk like the first one.

  Perhaps he should have crawled off to die with his drunk’s liver, years ago. What kept him alive he didn’t know. He sat down on the side of the bed and opened the drawer of the nightstand. He reached to the back, hand combing through the debris until he touched the small paper envelope. Inside it was his wedding ring and a bullet with his name engraved upon it, his rainy day bullet.

  He seldom opened the envelope. It had more magic for him when he didn’t look inside. It was only important to him to heft the weight of the ring and the bullet in his hand, to know that there was one last place to go when he couldn’t live in this one anymore.

  He kicked a pizza carton out of his way as he walked to the bathroom. A nest of roaches fled the cardboard box and took refuge in another take-out container with remnants of rice and noodles. Now he stood before the mirror over the small sink where he shaved, when he shaved. He checked his eyes in the mirror. He saw dense red road maps with patches of brown where his eyes leaked through.

  By nine o’clock, bits of tissue paper with bright red centers marked all the places where he had cut himself shaving.

  Drunks should only be allowed to use electric razors.

  When he was bereft of tissue, bleeding stopped, he dressed in his best bad suit.

  “I have been given a sign that God is on my side in this,” Andrew announced to the world, via his bullhorn. And now he cast a benevolent eye on the small crowd of ant-size, badly dressed people who gathered on the sidewalk below. He had come to think of them as his parishioners, his personal flock of insects.

  “He would want you all to make the most of His gifts to the world. Why do you think He created Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf’s? Sinners, can’t you see His grand design in Tiffany’s?”

  The crowd was growing larger.

  Oh, thank you, Lord, fresh victims.

  He sized them up in the binoculars, and couldn’t get horn to mouth fast enough.

  “You! Wearing that yellow, shapeless thing that makes your skin look sallow! Most of us have to hang out at laundromats to see that peculiar shade of polyester. Sinner, you’ll find the Suit Collection on the second floor.”

  And now another. “Woman with the hideous purple tights. Don’t you realize what a steady diet of champagne and cigarettes can do to the human body? I’m dying for your sins. Get thee to Women’s Sportswear, third floor.”

  He addressed the larger gathering. “Remember, we are all God’s creations, and we must dedicate our lives to the greater glory of His works. Charge card applications are available on the first floor. You may cosign a card for the less fortunate.”

  He lowered the binoculars and bullhorn to uncork a new bottle and sip his lunch, forgoing the amenity of a glass. There were no glasses left. One blanked-out night he must have taken up the custom of smashing them against the wall each time he emptied one. Now he surveyed his plush aerie, ignoring the shards of broken glass and the growing litter of empty bottles. Even blind drunk, his taste in goods had been unerring.

  And now he flopped down on his bed of quilts and stared at the mannequin behind her altar. He wondered why God had created Aubry if He was just going to kill her that way. It was all God’s work and God’s will, wasn’t it? All of it?

  Aubry the Virginal, the perfect sacrifice. How holy.

  Oh, beautiful Aubry. God can be such a bastard, can’t He?

  Coffey stood in front of Blakely’s desk until the chief of detectives made a guttural noise and pointed to the chair.

  Now the great man deigned to lift his head and squint his small eyes at Coffey, as though trying to remember what the head of Special Crimes Section was doing here in his office.

  “Well, Jack, Commissioner Beale wanted me to pass on his compliments. He’s Mallory’s number-one fan this week. Course that makes it more difficult to take Mallory off the Dean Starr murder.”

  “I was hoping you’d reconsider that.”

  “No, Jack, I don’t think so. I want you to call Beale. Tell him it’s your idea to pull Mallory and Riker off the case. As long as the FBI is out of the picture, he probably won’t care if you have the janitor run the investigation.”

  “Mallory and Riker make a good team. I don’t want to change the assignments.”

  “This is not a good time for you to be making waves, Jack. The paperwork on your promotion is sitting on my desk. You don’t want it to park here for another year, do you?”

  Coffey sat in silence. He had learned this from Markowitz. “Let the bastard flap his mouth,” the old man had said. “Let him knock himself out, and then you’re still fresh when you move in to shut his mouth.

  “You’d be the youngest captain on the for
ce, Jack. Of course, Riker was the youngest captain we ever had. You didn’t know? Well, that’s not too surprising-he wasn’t a captain for very long. This was on someone else’s watch, before my time-remember that. He was just doing his job, and a good job, too. One night, he interviewed a twelve-year-old boy who gave him the license number of a limousine and a very detailed description of a man. So Riker ran the plates, and matched up the description of the perp with the owner of the car. Then he wrote up his report like the good cop he was. The kid was raped by a prince of the church.”

  “So that was Riker’s case? I heard the story about the arrest, but I always figured it was like one of those legends about giant alligators in the sewers. There’s no trace of the arrest report ever-”

  “You looked for it, didn’t you? All the rookies look for it. Well, Riker’s report disappeared, and as far as Riker knew, the prince went on doing little boys in the park. Riker objected to that. He received a warning from the guy who had my job-a threat’s more like it-and then he got a promotion to captain. They were hoping he would get the drift. Well, that stupid bastard didn’t have a captain’s rank for five days before he goes out and busts a prince of the church with a kid in his car. Riker brought the cardinal in handcuffed. You can guess what happened next.”

  “He was busted all the way down to sergeant.”

  “No. He went back to the rank of lieutenant. And he still wouldn’t stop. Then he was busted down to sergeant. By then his wife had left him, he was deep in the bottle and next to useless. The department would’ve eased him out, but Markowitz grabbed him off for Special Crimes Section and sent him to a clinic to dry out. Markowitz had more power around here than God Almighty. Nobody else could have saved Riker’s ass. By the time Riker dried out, the prince was gone, and a new prince was in power.”

  “Did Riker ever try to go outside the system?”

  “No, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt the department. He’s a third-generation cop, just like Markowitz was. And who was he going to go to-the cops? Maybe the newspapers? The church is a major political power in this town. He had no evidence and the kid was gone.”

  “What happened to the kid?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? You’ve got a great future, Jack. You could learn from Riker’s mistakes.”

  “This case is small-time, compared to Riker’s.”

  “Some very high-profile people could be embarrassed, Jack.”

  “A senator, for instance? And what’s the old mayor doing now, running for governor, isn’t he?”

  “If Riker couldn’t buck the system, what chance have you got? Call Mallory off.”

  “You’d never touch Mallory, would you?”

  “Of course not. Her old man and me, we had a lot of history together. I think of her as my own-”

  “You can’t touch her, can you? She’s got everything the old man had. She must know where every single body is buried. Markowitz wouldn’t have left her defenseless in the shark pool.”

  “Careful, Lieutenant. I think you’re bordering on insubordination here.”

  “Maybe there was more to it than leaving the homicide books tidy when the mayor and the old commissioner left office.” Coffey was rising out of his chair. “Maybe they were afraid the real killer was somebody in a power position.” He turned his back on Blakely.

  “That’s enough!” Blakely pounded his desk. “Come back here and sit down, Lieutenant!”

  “Just call me Sergeant,” said Coffey, closing the door behind him.

  Orwelhouse Sanitarium had been home to Oren Watt for eleven years.

  Mallory looked around at the trappings of the trendy New York asylum for the artistic and crazy. The reception-area walls were lined with cheap art in expensive frames. The furniture was chic and ugly, blending well with the loud geometric pattern of the carpet.

  Perhaps the world did need a fashion terrorist.

  In her pocket was Charles’s daunting list of all the mental institutions in the tristate area. Charles had put Orwelhouse dead last. He had reasoned that because Oren Watt was the star patient, this asylum would have been the last place Sabra would go.

  Thank you, Charles.

  Mallory had moved Orwelhouse to the top of her list. She was thinking along the lines she knew best-rage, obsession and revenge-which she believed were closer to Sabra’s mind-set in the aftermath of Aubry’s murder.

  The receptionist was quickly exiting the internet server, blanking the screen of her desktop computer. There was time enough for Mallory to note the personal code and the erotic service the receptionist subscribed to, undoubtedly without her employer’s knowledge.

  Now the pinch-faced brunette studied Mallory, eyes traveling from the expensive running shoes to the designer sunglasses. Mallory flashed a platinum credit card as identification, and now the brunette’s sudden toothy smile acknowledged her as a member of that exclusive sphere, the master class of money.

  “I need a tour,” said Mallory. “I have all the paperwork for admissions, but I want to see the place first. My mother is a wealthy woman, so I’m concerned about your security.”

  She was then introduced to a man with a used-car dealer’s smile and a Savile Row tailor. During her guided tour of the facility, Mallory checked the electronic locks on the doors, asked about the front-end system of the computers, and noted the security cameras mounted on the walls. She was not impressed. This was going to be entirely too easy. Before her guide turned her over to the director’s secretary, he had all but given her the keys to the door and the passwords for all the patient files. Best of all was the tour of the basement and access to the trunk line for the telephones.

  Now she stood in the director’s anteroom and put one hand in her pocket to depress the switch on her scrambler. The secretary’s computer screen went berserk, changing all the text to math symbols.

  “Oh, shit,” said the secretary.

  Mallory watched as the woman powered down to lose the glitch. When the screen came to light again, the scramble was still there, and there were many more “Oh, shit”s before the defeated woman beat her hand on the desk.

  “My computer does that once in a while,” said Mallory. “Do you want me to fix it for you?”

  “I’ll give you my firstborn child,” said the woman with the frazzled eyes. She stood up and pulled out her chair for Mallory. “Can I get you some coffee, hon?”

  “Thanks. Black, no sugar.” Mallory sat down at the computer station. When the woman was out of sight, she turned off her scrambler and restored the screen. Now she went into the main directory and created a back door in the system to bypass every security code. The coffee appeared beside the keyboard as she was calling up the secretary’s word-processing program.

  At the end of the afternoon, she was back in her office at Mallory and Butler, Ltd., sitting at her own computer. She waited for the trip lights to tell her she had access. The amber light glowed. The asylum’s closed system was operating on the modem now, accessing the internet, which made it an open system with a back door.

  As she tapped into the phone line for the Orwelhouse lobby, she found herself intruding on a sexual liaison. The receptionist was hooked into an internet service which catered to the erotically deprived. Mallory checked the user’s personnel file with a purloined password. The receptionist was high school graduate Sylvia Ulner, who was passing for a psychiatrist on the anonymous internet connection. At the moment, Sylvia was typing out a pornographic analysis of her body for an amorous correspondent in a private cyberspace room.

  Of course, there were no private rooms in cyberspace. Any cut-rate burglar knew there was no such thing as an inviolate system. But Sylvia and her keyboard stud were oblivious to Mallory’s intrusion as they were busy violating one another.

  Welcome to the goldfish bowl.

  Mallory stepped lightly on the information superhighway, tiptoed past the lovers in the circuit boards, and entered the hospital system to roam the patient entries of twelve years ago.

&n
bsp; There was no medication on the charts for Oren Watt or any of the other Outsider Artists, and no one was paying the bills. The accountant was reporting this group as a loss, though each had a growing trust fund for sales of insane artwork. The insurance companies of the non-artistic patients were paying the moon for drugs and counseling. She found only one female patient in Sabra’s age bracket with no insurance and no scholarship. Well, that fit. Gilette had mentioned that Sabra never used their medical policy.

  The computer called the woman Sarah, and itemized the counseling sessions and rounds of medication for depression. When Mallory called up the complete file, she was looking at the patient’s photograph, a blurred face twisting away from the lens, unrecognizable but for Sabra’s hallmark camera avoidance. The bills for her care had been paid directly by a blind account in a foreign bank until the account ran dry two years later. Her entire fortune was gone, and coincidentally, she was discharged that same month. No forwarding address.

  Did the bastards give you bus fare, Sabra?

  While the receptionist and her lover were trysting in cyberspace, taking off a hundred bytes of panties, Mallory was downloading all the patient files. The lovers were in printed throes of ecstasy as Mallory left the hospital records, closing the back door softly behind her.

  MORE, MORE, MORE, wailed Sylvia at her keyboard.

  Now Mallory scanned Sabra’s file on her own system and at a more leisurely pace. There were reams of charts which only told her Sabra’s deep sadness had never responded to drugs or counseling. The personal notes of a psychiatric nurse mentioned Sabra’s only close friendship with another inmate: Sabra and Oren Watt had been inseparable.

  Riker walked into Coffey’s office unannounced. He looked from the man to the bottle, which Coffey made no effort to conceal. That was a very bad sign. Riker pulled a chair closer to the desk and settled into it. Coffey wouldn’t meet his face. A worse sign.

  “I got ten bucks says I can guess what’s goin‘ down.” Riker put his money on the desktop next to the lieutenant’s empty glass.