Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  “Well, yeah, he did. The blows were pretty vicious, like the perp really wanted to kill her with every stroke. It wasn’t so much a drawn-out kill, not like torture. It was more like a botched kill. Aubry just wouldn’t lie down and die for the bastard. She was fighting to stay alive. That was one thing that really got to Markowitz, that and her freckles-just a light sprinkle across her nose. I think the freckles destroyed him.”

  Mallory held out the notebook and pointed to the word “cavalry” followed by a question mark. “Any idea what that means?”

  Heller smiled. “Markowitz thought the kid was probably raised on old cowboy movies. So Aubry was holding on, waiting for the bugle call and the cavalry charge to come over the hill and save her.”

  “This is what Koozeman said.” She read from the notebook. “ ‘The gallery was full of reporters when I arrived.’ You know, Koozeman could’ve come out from behind the wall when the room was packed with sightseers. The reporters would have been at the back of the room, looking at the bodies.”

  Heller shook his head. “That scenario works just as well for Oren Watt, and he was definitely on the scene that night. We took his footprints. He had blood on his shoes.”

  “Everybody had blood on their shoes. The pizza place was six blocks west of the gallery, and Watt’s apartment was three blocks east. After he picked up his check, he probably killed an hour scoring some dope and then walked home this way. All that noise, all those people. Of course he was going to go inside.” She pulled a diagram from her tote bag. “Markowitz always had a problem with the time frame. Can you remember how you reconstructed the scene?”

  “Like I’m ever gonna forget. I still have dreams about this one.” Heller walked to the back of the room and hunkered down to inspect the floor. Mallory knelt beside him. He took out a penlight and aimed the beam low. “Look close and you can still see the axe marks in the wood. This is where the artist’s body was cut. The wounds were all postmortem. There was blood, but not the same kind of flow you’d get if the heart was still pumping. Splatter patterns and blood type show all the work on the artist was done here. The girl was killed at the front of the room, and her body was dragged back here and laid three feet away from the artist.”

  Heller moved over to his right and swept the dusty floor with his hand. His penlight picked up the indentations in the wood. “These are the marks for the dancer. Dismemberment was done after death. Small mercy, huh? There was blood trapped between the floorboards to separate her site from the artist’s. I tracked blood from the artist’s body to the site of the first strike on the dancer.”

  Mallory marked the axe scars on her diagram. She pulled out the bundle of floor photographs and riffled through them. The boards were awash in blood pools, drops, smears and tracks. “And you found tracks? How?”

  “Not tracks-drops of blood from the weapon and the first splatter pattern. I followed a line of drops from the artist’s body to the first attack on the girl. The reporter’s tracks passed through it and smeared it here and there, but it was still a definite line. It was Peter Ariel’s blood. That’s how I figured the perp was working on the artist’s body when the dancer came into the room. Then he went for her and the blood dripped from the axe as he was crossing the floor.”

  Heller stood up and moved to the center of the long room, with Mallory following. “The drops were elongated, so the perp was moving fast. I figured the first blow was struck here. It was a hard blow to the neck to bring her down. She began to crawl.” He walked closer to the front of the gallery. “Bloody handprints toward the door. Then she was herded back.” He walked toward the center of the long room. “Here’s the spot where she made it to her feet, God knows how, but there were two partial prints matching her shoes. And then she was brought down again.”

  Mallory was marking the strikes, when Heller took the floor plan and the pencil from her hand. “I’m gonna teach you a trade secret, kid.” He made lines on her diagram. “This is how I knew how many times he cut her before she died. I never even had to look at the bodies. Slope agreed with my figures.”

  Now her diagram showed a march of lines moving across the floor and then changing direction and moving back. He handed it back to her. “Every time the attacker pulled the weapon back for another strike, he sent out a flying line of blood from the axe to the floor and part of the wall. That’s how you can tell where he was, what direction he was walking in. So here, you can see him walking along beside her, making the blows while she crawled.” He pointed to a change of line angles. “This is where Aubry turned and made one last try for the door.”

  He walked back to the front of the room. “She’s crawling toward the door, and this is where the killer made the fatal strike. This is where I found skull fragments in between the floorboards. And then the body was dragged to the back of the room.”

  Mallory walked back to the site of the first blow. “It doesn’t work. She didn’t have to come this far into the room to see what was happening to Peter Ariel’s body. She would have turned to run long before she got this far.”

  “She could have fainted or frozen with the-”

  “Aubry was no helpless bimbo. She was a dancer with good reflexes. She was young with good eyes. She wanted to live just like the rest of us. Maybe there were two killers.”

  “Markowitz didn’t figure it that way.” Heller’s tone was skeptical.

  “How do you know he didn’t? The old man was always holding out. He held out on everybody else-why not you? But this time, he played it too cagey. Everybody got information on a need-to-know basis. If he’d laid open all the problems with the case, Quinn might have told him about the ritual of whitewashing the gallery walls and waxing the floor the day before every opening. Peter Ariel’s show was scheduled for the next day.”

  “Oh, Christ, all the-”

  “Yeah, if you’d only known, you might’ve gotten latent prints and worked up the hair and fiber evidence. But I’m sure Koozeman never volunteered that information. And he never mentioned the door in the wall either. Not your fault, Heller.”

  But Heller didn’t agree. He stared up at the ceiling, shaking his head, his expression wafting between anger and frustration. “So, what now, Mallory?”

  “Well, Starr and Koozeman would make a neat party of two.”

  “So you’re tying their murders together with a revenge motive?”

  “Maybe. When Dean Starr was a critic, he gave Peter Ariel two rave reviews. Suppose Koozeman wasn’t the only one who owned a piece of the artist?”

  “I can still run the old physical evidence. Would that help you any?”

  “I can’t have any paperwork on a case I’m not supposed to be working.”

  “I’ll do it off the books. I can bury the cost in other investigations if I spread it around.”

  “You won’t let me break into an empty gallery, but you’ll risk your job to work evidence off the books?”

  “If I break the rules, I’ve got a good reason. You break rules because you can get away with it. It’s a game to you. Time to grow up, kid.”

  “Heller, I don’t want any-”

  “Grow up or fake it. At least try to make it look like Markowitz raised you right.”

  Blakely parked his car on Mott Street and fumbled with the childproof cap on a small medicine bottle. He dry-swallowed a pill as he looked down the street to the line of three limos along the curb. Young men, wearing dark suits and dark glasses, walked between the cars, carrying coffee containers and slips of paper. Blakely walked up to the second limousine in the parked parade. A conversation passed between a man wearing driver’s gloves and his passenger beyond the crack of the tinted-glass window. The car’s rear door opened and Blakely bent down to shift his bulk into the spacious compartment. He sat down beside an old man with yellow teeth and listless black eyes. The air smelled like a sickroom.

  After a few minutes of Blakely sweating through his story, the old man laughed.

  “She made you shit in your pant
s, Blakely.” And now the laughing man began to cough into a handkerchief, and small spots of red bled through the white linen. The handkerchief disappeared into a massive hand with bulging blue arteries, crepe flesh and a vestige of power in the clenched fist. “Markowitz did a good job raising his kid. You know, I always liked that old bastard. I even turned out for his damn funeral.”

  “She knows all about the bodega,” said Blakely, listening to the desperate notes in his own voice. “She could cause us both a lot of trouble.”

  “But she won’t. Sounds like she has Markowitz’s style. You know, if her old man had been for sale, he would have been chief of detectives, not you.”

  “But you did a deal with him on the-”

  “Not what you’re thinking, Blakely. It wasn’t a payoff. And why doesn’t it surprise me that you don’t know the details? What do you know about what’s going on with your own department?”

  “I know he backed off the-”

  “Markowitz didn’t care how you bought your job. He didn’t have any hard evidence, but I didn’t know that then. He ran a bluff on me, and it worked. But it was never about money. He only wanted that freak who was killing all the winos, and you wouldn’t give him the manpower to do the job. So he and I, we did a trade. I put a small army on the street for three days and three nights. One of my boys delivered the freak to Special Crimes, and without a scratch on him. A nice clean job, and the deal was done.”

  “He might not have had any evidence then, but the kid has something now.”

  “So? She won’t use it. Her old man made a deal, and his kid will honor it.”

  “Mallory doesn’t have a sense of honor. She’s a loose cannon. I know her.”

  “She’s a loose cannon? I think you’re confused, Blakely. Look at you. You’re sweating like a pig. You’re a man on the edge of a heart attack. You come to me to put out your fires? You have no control over your own people, and you know why? They don’t fear you.”

  “It’s more than the bodega connection. She’s going back into the Oren Watt case.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  “Senator Berman collected the ghoul art. He’s one of the-”

  “The senator? That clown is going down in the next election. You might owe him something, I don’t. I’m cutting my losses on him.” He began to cough again. “I’m thinking of getting out of politics. It’s not like the old days. If you want to buy a politician, you have to outbid all those special interest groups. There’s so many of them. They grow like cancer. This town is going down-hill, you know that? It’s one big flea market of souls for sale.”

  The old Mafia don turned his head sharply, to stare out the window, and what he saw made him angry. Then the anger resolved itself into a sigh of resignation. “Blakely, do you ever think about retirement? No? Perhaps you should. You see that?” He pointed one palsied finger at the window.

  Across the street a young Hispanic, walking at a leisurely pace, led an entourage of men all decked out in fur coats, though the day was mild. The sun glinted off the gold jewelry at the young men’s throats and the diamonds at their ears.

  “Crazy bastards,” said the old man in disgust. “They shouldn’t be here, not today. But they’ve got no sense of fear, you know? That’s what makes them dangerous. Now watch our people, see what they do.”

  Two well-dressed young men in dark suits stood at attention, faces swiveling slowly, tracking the walking men. Now they were in motion, moving in concert toward the troop of furs and jewels. The furs smiled at the suits, flashing every tooth of white mixed with crowns of gold.

  The old man turned back to Blakely. “If I don’t call the boys off, the razors and the guns come out. I don’t like a bloodbath in my neighborhood. The one up front, the Dominican punk, knows that. He’s counting on it. He’s just playin‘ with us, you see? But he doesn’t know I’m dying. So-not today-but one day soon, I won’t call my boys back.”

  Rolling down the window, he barked a short burst of commands to the men in suits and gave the fur men the finger as he closed the window again. The men in suits retreated to stand at attention beside their respective limousines. The smiling parade of fur coats and insulting hand gestures passed by, unmolested.

  “The Dominican is your future, Blakely. He’s dangerous because he’s crazy and stupid and hot. If he thinks you’re crossing him, the razor comes out and your nose is gone. Or maybe he’ll take an ear, and then he’ll make you kiss his shoe. And you will do that. After I’m dead, you will sleep in a bath of sweat every night that’s left to you. If you can’t handle a little girl, what chance do you have against the Dominican?”

  “I can get a handle on this case.”

  “No, you can’t. Let Senator Berman go down. It’s going to happen anyway, and I want him to go down for something that isn’t tied to me. In fact, I like this a lot. He’ll be turned out of the Senate, but he won’t do jail time, so he won’t be looking to make any deals with the feds. And don’t interfere with Jack Coffey. You’re too clumsy, too obvious. It’ll come back on me, so I’m telling you to let him alone. Mallory did a deal with you, and it’s in my best interests that you honor it.”

  “Coffey disobeyed a direct order. The son of a bitch gave me attitude, and then he worked around me.”

  “So? Markowitz’s kid did a lot worse. She made you eat shit. But maybe she’ll save you from the punk in the fur coat. Maybe you’ll become her dog instead. Damn Markowitz had all the luck. Mallory should have been my kid.”

  “I can’t let her get away with this.”

  “Well, you’re right about that. Never let your people muscle you. But you’ve got enough dirty cops to do any job you want. You only ask me to handle it so it won’t come back on you. Well, if you wanted to go behind my back, I suppose you could get one of these Young Turks to do it.” He gestured to the man who stood outside the car. “These boys have no respect for the old ways. They’re punks, no style, no honor, not one good brain in the pack. Yeah, one of them might do the job for you, maybe figuring I’d never find out. They’d be wrong about that. I don’t miss much. If one of them tried to touch Markowitz’s kid, it’d blow up in your face and mine. I’d have to get you for that.”

  “I need your-”

  “If you can’t control Mallory, then maybe I bought the wrong man for the job. I’ll give you my advice, and then you and I will have no more conversation on this business. We will never speak of it again. Is that understood?”

  Blakely nodded and the old man continued. “Fear works. Remember, you can’t touch her. All you can do now is teach her to fear you. But to pull that off, you’ll have to become a better man than she is.”

  Long after Heller had gone, she sat in the center of the floor with crime-scene photographs and diagrams spread on the dust. Now she cleansed the room in her mind’s eye. She painted the walls white and waxed the floors to a high shine. After looking around at her imaginary handiwork, she began the slow work of willing the room into a bloodbath, just as it was on the killing night.

  She looked down at the diagram of the crime scene, which exactly placed the spot where axe slices had been found in the floor. This is where the artist had been cut to pieces half an hour after he was dead.

  She took out a gold pocket watch and opened it. She depressed the stem to check the stopwatch function. In the facing circle of gold was the inscription of her own name, just Mallory, which followed the generations of names back to Markowitz’s grandfather.

  She imagined Peter Ariel lying on the floor and set the watch to Slope’s estimate for his time of death. Another half hour must pass before the first postmortem cut.

  What was going on? What was the killer doing, saying?-conversation? Was there more than one person in the room?

  Mallory stood up and began to pace back and forth between her mental re-creations of the artist’s body and the sculpture of iron rods and a rusted, crushed car. She went to the back room where the hanging wire was kept and brought the imaginary spool
s back to the gallery.

  She looked down at the watch and allowed a few minutes more for the time the killer might have taken to remove his clothes and pile them away from the mess of the makeshift abattoir. Only minutes had passed. What was the killer doing with the time?

  She moved the watch ahead, and knelt down beside the body that was not there. She began to cut away at Peter Ariel with the imaginary axe, a few sure blows for each of the hands and feet, a bit more work for the head. The axe blade was dulling with every cut. The meat was splaying out instead of the clean sever. It was harder work to sever the torso into two parts, to hack through the spinal column and the meat. She would need to rest periodically.

  The minute hand of the watch swept several times around the dial, allowing for the rest period. Before the mutilation was half done, her watch said it was time to bring on the dancer.

  Mallory looked toward the main entrance and created a vision of Aubry Gilette. She brought the dancer through the door with slow grace.

  “Hold it, kid.”

  She stopped the action in her mind and listened to another voice.

  “Naw, that’s all wrong, Kathy,”‘ said Markowitz. Though he was dead and in the ground, he sat beside her in the dust on the floor. “This is a critical moment. What’s Aubry thinking and feeling as she comes through that door?”

  “I don’t know,” Mallory whispered to the dead Markowitz. “I can’t go where the ballerina goes.”

  “You can do this, baby. Hell, a bright chimp could work it out. Now think. Aubry’s a young kid in a strange neighborhood after dark. She doesn’t carry a gun like you-she’s got no defenses at all. So you bring her in cautious, all tense, all eyes. She thinks something’s wrong. The message said it was an emergency, right? So she’s moving faster. Her face is all worried-she’s looking for bad news.

  Mallory turned her watch back for the next try. Now the twenty-year-old dancer came through the door with more tension and energy. If Madame Burnstien told the truth, this would be a strange place to her-she would be wary. Mallory brought young Aubry across the small reception area and into the main room. Mallory rose and moved toward her, holding the axe high. The phantom Aubry turned and ran.