Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  “Stop!” Markowitz called time out. And Mallory stopped the watch.

  She’s looking at a body hacked up in pieces and someone standing over it still hacking. Give her time to take it in, to be sure it’s not her uncle. Then give her credit for world-class reflexes and adrenaline, pure fear feeding her veins, giving her speed.

  Mallory set the watch back thirty seconds. She made another whack in Ariel’s torso and looked up to Aubry, allowing time for the shock to set in, then the fear. Mallory had already taken up the chase as the dancer was turning. Mallory ran fast, but not fast enough to overtake a dancer at physical peak and with a head start of at least twenty feet. No, Aubry would be out the door and into the street by now.

  Mallory turned back her watch. This time, when she ran at Aubry, she created a companion phantom with no face. She placed this figure near the door. As Aubry recovered her wits and turned to run, the shadowy phantom reached for her and dragged her farther into the room. The body of Peter Ariel was thirty feet from the first spill of Aubry’s blood. Mallory was halfway across the room now, swinging the axe high over her head and bringing it down on the dancer’s neck.

  Aubry would be screaming, so Mallory aimed the next blow at the front of the neck. This would have been the blow that flooded Aubry’s throat with blood, making breath near impossible. The dancer was down, rising on one arm to lock eyes with Mallory. Aubry’s young face was gone to shock and wild panic, not believing that this could be happening to her. Her hands flew up to ward off the next blow to create the defensive wounds found on her corpse.

  Mallory swung again, and again. Aubry was crawling now, clawing her way back toward the door, as the axe came down again, and again. Mallory followed her victim the length of the floor, bringing the axe down with a rhythm as she walked.

  How had Aubry managed that? She was choking on her own blood, every wound was a mortal wound.

  “Why don’t you die?” Mallory said, as she raised the axe again.

  “She thinks help is on the way,” said Markowitz, standing off to the side of her mind, watching his own child hacking up the dancer as though he were supervising Mallory’s school homework assignment.

  Mallory brought down the axe to strike the blow to Aubry’s head. Bits of the dancer’s brains leaked to the floor, near the door where the skull fragments were found.

  At last, Aubry stopped her struggles and lay dead. Mallory reached down and picked up the phantom dancer under the arms and dragged her body along the floor as though the imaginary Aubry had real weight. When she reached the body parts of Peter Ariel, she set down Aubry’s body a few feet away, where the second set of slices still marred the floor.

  Here she inflicted one last stroke to the dead body of Aubry, the only assault wound made after death. It was a listless stroke, only a drag of the axe across the body as a final token wound. And this might be more evidence of a conspirator in the room, a more withdrawn, not at all enraged conspirator.

  Then she began the work of cutting up the dancer’s body in a more businesslike fashion, the same sure strokes, the same rest periods. She pulled off the ripped clothing. The shreds came away easily, so she allotted only a small amount of time to this task.

  Now she was ready to create the sculpture of body parts. She skewered the severed head of Peter Ariel on one of the rusted upright rods. The crushed car was the level of a bench. She seated the lower male torso on the metal and bound it to the long spike with the wire which had been taken from the gallery’s storeroom. She completed this torso with the upper half of Aubry’s body, carefully binding it in place to create one body of the male’s head spiked above female breasts, and a penis below. It was close to the old Egyptian model of a god.

  She moved on to the work of the second mismatched torso, skewering Aubry’s head to the second rod. The male chest was set above the female nether regions. She mismatched the legs which required no wire, but only needed to be settled in place on the bench and then intertwined. The feet of Peter were set below the bloody stumps of Aubry’s well-muscled legs. Her dancer’s feet now supported the hairy legs of the artist. The arms were more difficult, placing them into bloody proximity of open wound sockets and forcing them to intertwine, then reinforcing positions with wire, which cut into the bloody skin. At last, she bound the woman’s hands to the man’s arms, and his to hers. Their heads faced forward, eyes open, staring at the artist turned spectator, Mallory.

  She stepped back in her mind to admire her artwork, the ghastly embrace of two crimes against nature. It was a hundredfold more intimate than sexual intercourse. Blood was everywhere, and she layered the stench of mingling body fluids and feces over this.

  It was sensational, the crime of crimes, the mother of all horrors. And yes, there was dark genius here. Koozeman might as well have signed it.

  Her next thought was that this was the kind of thing guaranteed to sell a million newspapers. Publicity savvy was Koozeman’s other signature.

  She looked down at her watch. Quinn would have shown up at the gallery to discover the murder an hour ago. So the time frame didn’t work, unless two people were working on the bodies. One person working alone could not have done it all in time. She turned around to look at the shadowy faceless one who had dragged Aubry back into the gallery. Now this one took the form and face of Dean Starr.

  She allowed time for another pair of helping hands, and turned back her watch, leaving time to clean up and get behind the door in the wall. The time was still tight. Could there have been more than two of them? She looked back to the door. Time for Quinn to show up.

  In a grisly stage direction, she brought her last known player onto the scene. She had Quinn enter slowly.

  “Kathy, ”said Markowitz, in a cautioning reminder.

  “Right.” Quinn was running late. He would be anxious to see that his niece was all right.

  She backed up the watch and made her phantom art critic enter the gallery, not running, but moving quickly. She had him freeze as he took in the horror of the back wall.

  She watched him for a moment more.

  “Quinn, do you know what you’re looking at?” she whispered.

  There was so much blood, he would not immediately recognize his niece from this distance. Mallory let him come closer, stepping slowly, disbelieving, and finally recognizing the head on the right-hand post as his niece. And now there is blood on his shoes.

  She stood up and walked over to him. “What are you thinking?” She stood beside him, watching the sudden lift of his chin, the awful realization that he was late, that if he had only come in time-

  He couldn’t know that his niece had come early to the gallery. The medical examiner would have to tell him that later.

  Mallory came back to the most nagging puzzle. It had taken a long time to kill the dancer. What had kept Aubry alive so long after the first stroke of the axe?

  “She was waiting for the cavalry,” said Markowitz.

  Mallory nodded. There might be something to that. Aubry had been a protected child. She must have been thinking that rescue would come, it would surely come. Quinn would be there any minute. A child raised on the street would have given up her life much sooner, knowing that the cavalry never came.

  Minutes ticked by on her pocket watch as Quinn took in the total horror. Finally his eyes bludgeoned his brain to accept it. Now what? Would he fall to his knees? No. According to the old reports, there had only been blood on his shoes. He remained standing. Though he had been mortally wounded in his mind, he could not fall down and die. There was no escape from this.

  “So much pain.” She bowed her head.

  Markowitz, standing in the blood and the stench of murder, was smiling. For this had been Mallory’s longest lesson, and she had finally made the breakthrough to empathy.

  The room was so quiet, she could hear the tick of Markowitz’s pocket watch, steady as a heartbeat. Five minutes had gone by since Quinn’s arrival. In another twenty-five minutes, Quinn would call the polic
e. What did he do with the time?

  She moved in front of him and looked deep into his eyes. “Did you cry?” she whispered.

  Hard to imagine those eyes with any emotion in them. She let him stand there, knowing that this was wrong. What did he do with the time? It might have been different if there was someone else in the gallery. Then there would be conversation, planning, questions asked, plans laid.

  But he had told Markowitz that he came alone.

  “Well, that wouldn’t be your only lie, would it, Quinn?”

  And now she created a shadowy figure to stand beside him. But who could it have been, and why would Quinn shield this player who had accompanied him to the gallery? She stared at this second dark form, the one made wholly of shadow. Who was it?

  And then she knew.

  She stood before the shadow figure. “I’ve seen your face before, haven’t I?”

  Now the shadow wore Sabra’s face as Mallory had constructed it on her computer.

  Suppose the brother and sister had both visited their mother that night, and both had come to the gallery. So this was what sent Sabra over the top of her mind-not just the news that her only child had died horribly, but the sight of Aubry in this horrific work of art. Perhaps it had been Sabra’s fault that they were late getting to the gallery. That would have bent her mind even more. If they had come in Sabra’s car, and if she had left by herself, then Quinn’s story about the subway would have a reason.

  Mallory closed her eyes and ended the gory art show.

  At last she understood the crime. The artist and the dancer were very different kills, for different reasons, only coming together when the body parts were assembled into a single piece of bloody sculpture.

  There was no one at home in the old house in Brooklyn, no one to hear the footsteps on the cellar stairs, squeaking under the old wood, nor the softer steps across the linoleum of the kitchen and the slam of the back door. It began in the basement. Louis Markowitz’s collection of rock’n‘roll records melted in the heat, the album covers turning brown and bursting into flames. His old recordings of the Shadow and other superheroes of radio days were consumed by fire.

  Smoke wound up the stairs, invading the kitchen, where Helen Markowitz had made meals for the small family. The flames captured Helen’s sewing basket, then raced up the stairs to the room which had been Kathy’s, a room Markowitz had preserved until the day he died, a constant reminder to him of his only child. The flames licked down the hall to Markowitz’s den and ate his letters and his books, and at the bottom of his desk drawers it ravaged the pictures of Kathy Mallory’s growing up, beauty flowering into a woman who amazed him.

  When Mallory entered the Gulag, Sandy the waitress was leaning on the counter watching the clock, probably counting off the last minutes of her shift. Sandy looked at Mallory with annoyance, her eyes saying, Go away.

  Quinn stood up and waved to Mallory from the far table. Suddenly the waitress’s attitude changed. With a tired but pleasant smile, Sandy plucked a menu from the rack on the counter and handed it to Mallory.

  Quinn was delighted to see Mallory, but even his own mother would not have noted the difference between this display of emotion and his facial arrangement for stepping on a dog turd. He was well aware of his own uncommunicative shortcomings, his limited repertoire of expressions.

  Mallory ordered the cheeseburger on his recommendation, but when it arrived, she ignored it. She was gazing at him steadily, and he was quietly coming unhinged, but he was also assured that this would never show.

  “Will you explain to me how a little weasel wakes up one morning, decides he’s going to be an art star and lands a one-man show in an important gallery?”

  “Dean Starr wasn’t really an overnight success,” said Quinn. “He used a lifetime of public relations and marketing skills to pull it off. And his timing was good. His targeted market was a generation with conversational points of reference taken from the constant repetition of fifteen-second television commercials. This was the perfect age for it.”

  “I like to keep things simple. I think he had something on Koozeman, something big-say the murders of Peter Ariel and your niece. I think he was there that night. Starr made a lot of money after those murders, but then most of it went into his arm with a heroin habit. So he was looking for another hype. So he went to Koozeman, the genius of hype. Wasn’t that what you called him?”

  “Well, I suppose that would fit rather nicely, but it’s a moot point now that they’re both dead. If you’re quite sure that Koozeman was the murderer, then you’ve finished your father’s case, haven’t you?”

  “I still have the small detail of who’s killing the killers. You didn’t think I was just going to leave that hanging, did you? Quinn, if I can prove you’re mixed up in that, I’m going to get you for it.”

  “And how can I help you toward that end?”

  “I need some background on Emma Sue Hollaran. What kind of critic was she?”

  “Are you figuring her for the next victim? I did notice a plethora of critics in this case. But I think you’re wasting your time there.”

  “Maybe the old case isn’t wrapped yet.”

  “Seriously, you’re still looking for another killer?”

  Mallory looked up as a new waitress, just starting her shift, refilled their coffee cups and then left them alone again. “She has the same name tag as the other one. Why are all the waitresses named Sandy? And why does a dive like this have real gold name tags?”

  “The owner bought the name tags from a liquidator, who bought them from a bankrupt jeweler. And you’re right, they are real gold. But since they were already engraved, he got a good price.”

  He went on to explain that the name tags had been the deluxe business cards of a prostitute named Sandy. The cards were all paid for, cash in advance, but never picked up because Sandy had died of a severe asthma attack. Her nine-year-old daughter waited an hour for the ambulance to come, not believing it would never come. Next, she called the fire department. The firemen were there in three minutes, but Sandy had stopped breathing five minutes before that. “And so, the phone number of Sandy’s answering service was covered with a pin glued to the back of the cards, and all the waitresses are called Sandy.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to find that out.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “You remind me of Charles. He’s a puzzle freak. He can’t let go of a problem until he’s worked it out. Hard to believe you ever stopped looking for Sabra-or the man who killed your niece. You had to wonder what had happened to your sister. You would have kept at it until you found her.”

  “I never said-”

  “A morgue attendant tells me you were first in line to view the body of a homeless woman, a jumper from Times Square. Did you think it was Sabra?”

  He looked down at the table. Given his limited range of expression, he knew this simple aversion of the eyes must be tantamount to a confession.

  “One more thing.” Her voice had a cold edge to it. “The night Aubry died-Sabra was in the gallery with you, wasn’t she?”

  He lifted his face, and discovered that his expressions were not so limited after all. Mallory was nodding in agreement, as if he had answered her question aloud. Apparently, pain was something she could read in his face, for her voice was softer when she said good night.

  On the bedroom bureau sat a wedding photo in a silver frame. Youthful and smiling, Louis and Helen Markowitz stared out of the frame. Two pairs of young, laughing eyes watched the flames racing toward them, consuming everything in sight, every memory of home and family until, mercifully, the glass of the picture frame was coated with soot and ash, blinding their eyes to the end of memories stored away in precious, irreplaceable things.

  Mallory stood by the open door of her apartment, taking in the damage of pulled-out drawers, overturned tables and broken glass from the bulbs of fallen lamps. The doorman followed her into the front room.

  “I swear I don’
t know how he could’ve got past me, miss.”

  “He probably walked in behind a tenant. If they want to get in, they will. There aren’t any safe places in this town.”

  She walked into the kitchen to stand amid shards of crockery. The burglar had wiped the shelves clean of dishes and cups. Canned goods lay on the floor alongside the contents of her refrigerator. A canister of sugar was spilled over the contents of the flour canister.

  Thorough little bastard.

  Her den was less damaged. Since she had moved all her computer equipment to Charles’s building, Mallory had not thought to put this room to any better use than storage. Clothes were spilled out of trunks and onto the carpet, and the few remaining computer manuals had been ripped.

  Not just a robbery.

  She picked up a winter dress of good wool and found it slashed with a razor cut. In the bedroom the carpet was littered with silk blouses slit the same way. More drawers had been pulled out, and a wide selection of running shoes were strewn all over a jumble of blue jeans and blazers, linen and nylons. The mattress had been gutted and its stuffing coated the room. The feathers from her pillows lay on every surface.

  The doorman was fidgeting beside her.

  “It’s okay, Frank. I’m fully insured. Now tell me everything that happened. Who told you about the break-in?”

  “A tenant. Mrs. Simpson. She comes down and says a cop told her to get me up here. He was waiting for me at the front door.”

  “Are you sure he was a cop?”

  “Yes, miss. He showed me a badge and his identification. And he gave me this.” The doorman put a white business card in her hand. “He said he’d get back to you for a list of what was missing, and I should tell you that you don’t have to file the report. He said he’d take care of it.”