Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  A man grabbed her by the arm. “Who do you think you’re shoving, sister?”

  She stopped to open her blazer and retrieve her shield and ID. The man let go of her arm. It was the exposed gun that spoke to him, not the badge. It was a very large gun.

  Mallory pressed on and broke through to the other side of the crowd. Sabra was turning a corner at the end of the block and disappearing down a side street. Mallory followed from a distance as they moved south across Houston.

  On Essex Street, Sabra settled her cart by the wall of a boarded-up building. Mallory watched as the woman pulled wood slats from a basement-level window. With no hesitation, Sabra lowered her cart through an exposed black hole and followed after it with the ease and confidence of long practice.

  So this was home. Well, good.

  It was best to meet on Sabra’s own turf. From what she’d been told of this woman, intimidation would not work. They had to talk on Sabra’s terms, or she would get nothing.

  Sabra’s hands reappeared at the hole between the boards. She reached out to retrieve the slats she had removed, and now she was pulling them into place, fitting them back into the nail holes.

  Mallory gave her a four-minute lead. Then she knelt on the ground and gently, soundlessly pried one board away from the basement window. She looked in on a shallow, dark space, accented by one blurred rectangle of bad light streaming in from the street. She pulled away the rest of the boards and eased herself through the opening.

  Her running shoes touched down on a surface too high to be the basement floor. Her eye adapted, but there was little to see. She was standing on a large wooden shipping crate. Directly before her was a plywood wall. On her right was a crude staircase made of smaller crates in staggered sizes. It led down to the basement level and turned a corner into perfect blackness.

  Mallory reached outside the window and pulled the boards back in place, fitting the wood to the window frame in the manner of politely closing a door behind her. When the last pinhole of light was gone, the space had become so dark, her eyes had lost their purpose- she was blind,

  Welcome home, said the darkness as it closed in all around her in the suffocating embrace of old acquaintance, and where have you been all these years, Kathy Mallory?

  One hand drifted to the gun in her holster, to the touch of something real and solid. As her hand dropped away, her mind was in free fall again, no up nor down, no compass point. She made her way down the short flight of crates which passed for stairs. Her fingers grazed the wall and trailed along its rough surface. When the wall ended, the floor became even and cement solid. She entered a space which might have been a closet or a football stadium. Picking her steps with great care, she walked forward with the sense of something looming in front of her. Her hand reached out and connected with a solid wall. Her fingertips walked along the wall, guiding her until she touched on a cluster of living, squirming things, and now one of them was crawling up her hand. She flicked her wrist and shook it off.

  The nest of roaches was not the worst thing she had ever touched in the dark. Once, on a moonless night by the river, under the piers, a ten-year-old Kathy Mallory had encountered a soft obstacle in her path. Night blind and curious, she had made out the shape of the thing on the ground by running her hands over the long hair and the cold dead face of another child. Stunned by this discovery, she had sat down beside the girl’s body and not moved for hours. But before the dawn could shape the corpse and prove its reality to the child’s eyes, young Kathy had crept away in the dark to tell herself lies: that it had not happened; it was in the dark, and so it did not count, this evidence of a child’s mortality; that it could never be herself laid out like that, killed and thrown away.

  She would survive. She would. And then Markowitz had found her, and she had gone to live with him and Helen in the old house in Brooklyn. From then on, it had been a life lived largely in the light. Stone blind now, guided only by the flat wall under her fingertips, she crept forward into black space, along a floor which might, at any footstep, turn into a great yawning hole. Her other senses were adapting to the loss of her eyes. The smell of roaches and dust mingled with urine and rotted food. She knew the crumbling sounds inside the walls were made by tiny feet, and something rat-size was slithering across the floor. Now there were high-pitched sounds, whistles and squeals-the conversations of vermin. And what of Sabra?

  Mallory could not put one sound to a human being. Had the woman found her way out of the cellar? Mallory stood dead still in the pure blackness until she lost the sense of her own body. She reached out with her hands and encountered another wall. On again, moving slowly, listening to the rats’ feet and the sound of water dripping from a leaking pipe. Her fingers found a wet stream with the rank smell of rusted plumbing. The wall turned a corner, and the next panel was made of something less substantial, she guessed plywood. Reaching out with the other hand, she discovered another partition of the same flimsy material. She was in a narrow passage. Exploring hands found the seam of a door, and farther down, the knob. She pressed her ear to the wood and knew there was nothing living on the other side of it, nothing larger than the cockroaches. The musty odor of their pollution was everywhere. She found another door on the other side of the small passage. No one home there, either.

  She stopped to listen for the larger creature, as if believing she could detect the heartbeat of a human apart from the collective life signs of rats and insects.

  But the woman was here. Mallory could feel the presence, the tension of one who waited and listened. It was guarded intuition, the awareness of a nearby animal set to spring. Mallory wandered farther down the passage, passing other doors. She guessed this basement had once been rented out for storage rooms. A good guess. She turned another corner and found herself in an identical row of facing doors.

  “Tell me what you want with me,” commanded a woman’s voice, floating free in the black space.

  There was no way to orient the sound except by the distance, which was neither near nor far. Mallory revolved slowly in the dark.

  “Tell me what you want,” said the voice.

  This time, the voice came from behind her. She turned around. “My name is Mallory.”

  “I know who you are, Detective. I asked you what you wanted.”

  The position had changed.

  “I only want to talk to you,” said Mallory. And I wonder, do you read the papers, Sabra? Or did someone tell you my name and rank?

  She had a vague direction now, and she moved toward it. A rat ran over her foot and squealed in terror as she kicked it.

  “Stay where you are, Mallory. Don’t come any closer. I wouldn’t like that. You may be younger, but I know the terrain and you don’t.”

  “All right, Sabra, we’ll do it your way,” she called into the void, moving forward with softer footfalls than any of the other creatures in the basement.

  “You have no children, do you, Detective Mallory?”

  “No, Sabra. No children, no family.”

  “You can’t know what it’s like to have your child slaughtered.”

  “I’ve seen the crime-scene photographs.” And what had Sabra seen? The real thing?

  “Photographs won’t show you the half of it, not the pain she was in, not any of the terror. Is there anything in your experience that can tell you what that was like?”

  You and the priest and the rabbi. You all want a piece of me. All right, I’ll play.

  “I saw my mother slaughtered before I was seven years old. I know exactly what it’s like.”

  She stopped moving in the silence and waited for the voice to begin again, to give her bearings and direction.

  “I’m sorry. So sorry.” The voice softened now, a mother’s voice. “It’s incomprehensible, isn’t it? You can’t quite believe that you’ll never see the one you love again. How could it be possible that this person could just cease to be? Detective Mallory, how did you feel when you finally understood that you would never kiss yo
ur mother again?”

  Was the voice farther away now? Mallory moved forward in the dark, making no sound. “That was the thing I missed the most-the kiss. For a long time, I couldn’t go to sleep without it. The dark was always difficult for me. The dark of night and no mother. I’m afraid of the dark, Sabra. Can we go somewhere in the light and talk? Can we, please?‘’ Wheedle of a child to a mother.

  “Perhaps.” Sabra’s voice was edging away.

  Mallory stepped forward again.

  “Tell me about your mother,” said Sabra.

  You and the priest and the rabbi.

  “I think I look like my mother,” said Mallory. “For years it drove me crazy because her face was slipping away from me. And then one day, there she was in the mirror. But by then I had another mother-Helen Markowitz. Helen was wonderful. I loved her, too. And then Helen died a few years ago. I was very angry with her. Does it sound strange to be angry with someone for dying?”

  She waited for Sabra’s answer. And waited.

  And now Mallory knew she had been abandoned. She had been talking to no one.

  She moved forward with speed, too reckless, and her blind feet stumbled over a crate. Her shin hit the wood, but she did not cry out. Mallory felt her way along the corridor of doors to empty rooms. She stopped and listened to the sound of the boards being pushed out to the pavement beyond the window. Moving forward again, she hit a wall in a blind corridor, a dead end. She turned back, moving faster now in her familiarity with space already covered, rounding a wall of lockers, and then another. But she realized too late that she had lost her orientation. She was heading deeper into the room, and away from the window.

  Sabra was gone by now, slipped away down some street in the invisible cloak of poverty. No one on the sidewalk would be able to point the way she’d gone, for who ever looked at the face of a bag lady?

  When Mallory rounded the storage cabinets into the next row, she saw a flickering light leaking out from the crack beneath one of the doors, and she hurried toward it, flying through the suffocating darkness.

  She pushed open the door, knowing that no one would be there. The tiny room was lit with candles. Newspapers lined one side of the room with black-and-white pictures of Oren Watt. Color photographs of a child were pinned to the opposite wall. Cracked dishes were neatly stacked in a corner. It was too familiar.

  The storage room was small and close. The photo graphs of the child gave Mallory glimpses into a background of more open spaces and graceful living, a happier time in Sabra’s life. All around this cramped space were the signs of obsession. The woman must have collected every newspaper article ever printed about the murders. Mallory understood obsession. It was a basic thing. It was important to find a place to put your hate. She understood, but it would make no difference.

  I have to get the press off my back and the feds out of NYPD or I lose my case.

  The bedding on the floor was a rotting blanket pulled over a makeshift mattress of old clothes and newspapers. One photograph lay on a tattered pillow. It was Aubry dancing. How beautiful she was. Mallory looked closely at the photograph, then turned it over facedown.

  Sabra, it’s a big mistake to get between me and a case.

  She turned to see another photograph pinned to the wall, and this one was startling. Sabra smiled for the camera as she was holding Aubry on her lap. The resemblance between mother and child was a strong one. This might be the only likeness of Sabra in existence, the single breach of her fanatic rejection of portraits. It must have meant a great deal to her. It must have been hard to leave it behind. Sabra’s eyes stared into Mallory’s.

  You lose, Sabra!

  In the shimmer of candlelight, the walls seemed to move. The candles were everywhere. Mallory walked around the tiny room, blowing them out in the familiar manner of an old ritual, until there was only one candle left to illuminate the photograph of mother and child. Aubry was perhaps four years old. Sabra was planting a kiss on her cheek, as Aubry was squirming free to mug for the camera, eyes crossing, laughter spilling out of the photograph.

  The kiss.

  Sabra would never kiss her child again.

  Mallory did understand. I was there before you, I know what you think, what you feel, I remember the kiss.

  She sank down on the floor, pulled up her knees, and bowed her head. In memory, she was a child again, sitting in the discarded refrigerator carton that had once been her home for a few days in winter. She remembered lighting a candle and casting her child-size shadow on a plywood wall. She had stolen all her candles from the churches, and she lit one each night without fail, only dimly remembering the candle had some purpose beyond the light.

  She remembered pulling the two dishes from her small store of belongings, which might be discarded the next time she had to run. Young Kathy had carefully emptied the food from her pockets onto the plate and poured the contents of a soda can into the cup. The dishes were somehow important, and whenever she lost a set on the run, she would steal another as the first order of business.

  After the meal she would wipe her face with a dry square of cloth, in vague semblance of a forgotten bedtime ritual. As a child she had pulled together these simple conventions of home, the makings of sanity. And last, it had been her habit to blow out the candle and pull a blanket of newspapers round her, tucking herself in.

  One thing that was lost to her was the kiss before sleep. But so much had been lost. The child had become resigned to this and ceased to cry over it anymore. Over time, the baby hard case had come to take some pride in the dearth of tears, and hard anger had displaced each soft and childlike thing about her.

  On the night Helen Markowitz took possession of her, that good woman had gone through all the rituals of the meal, the bath, and then the forgotten customs of the nightclothes, brushing teeth and braiding hair. Last in the order of familiar and forgotten things, Helen had turned out the light and bowed down to kiss the small child in her protection.

  After this gentle woman had left the room, the little hard case turned her face to the wall and cried in eerie silence, tears only, but so many-so important was this small act which was committed all over the world between mother and child.

  Brilliant sunlight illuminated the stained-glass windows of the cathedral. Arches curved heaven high. The priest and his altar boys were steeped in the ritual of communion, the eating of the flesh of Christ and the drinking of His blood in the form of bread and wine. One young woman listened carefully as the priest spoke to the parishioners kneeling at the railing before the altar. He offered them the flesh and then the blood wine. This woman was at attention in every part of her being, as though committing the service to memory.

  The elderly priest faltered in the words when he saw Kathy Mallory standing at the back of the church. Then the words began again, his mouth apparently not requiring his full attention, so accustomed was he to the ritual. Not one parishioner noticed his absence in spirit.

  Father Brenner watched her as she walked to an altar where a score of candles were lit beneath the statue of Saint Jude. Ten years had passed since he had seen her, but he knew her at once-that face, that incredible face. God’s grace was writ into the very shape of it. Kathy Mallory even walked in grace-while Sister Ursula still limped when it rained.

  So Kathy had come to God’s house. This was a miracle, or at the very least, he could tell an elderly nun her prayers for the born-to-stray lamb had been answered.

  He watched the prodigal child steal a handful of candles from the altar of Saint Jude. Then she slipped out the door. Well, some things never changed.

  Charles was bewildered. Mallory only slathered mustard on her sandwich and behaved as though she had just told him that the mayonnaise had gone bad. He sat down at the table, still wondering if he had heard her right.

  “Sabra is living on the street?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Pass the cheese plate, will you?”

  Sabra is homeless and pass the cheese plate.
He remembered a time when there had been a predictable and tranquil sameness to his days. Then along came Mallory, and soon the world was a jarring, unnerving place where logic ruled if she could twist it her way-otherwise not. And humanity was a weakness she tolerated in fools like himself.

  And now Sabra was homeless, and Mallory was building a triple-decker sandwich.

  “You have to find her and right now. Can’t you put out an all-points bulletin or something?”

  She reached over to grab the cheese plate herself. “No. Sabra hasn’t broken any laws.”

  “Couldn’t you make up some plausible reason for it?”

  “That would be against the rules, Charles.” She selected the Swiss cheese.

  “But under the circumstances…”

  “The end never justifies the means,” she said, throwing his own words back at him, shutting him down with his own rules. “And suppose one of Blakely’s boys turns her up before I do?” She cut her sandwich on the diagonal and paused to admire it. “I’ll never be allowed to talk to her. They’ll lock her up someplace. Is that what you want? You think Sabra wants that?”

  “Mallory, she’s obviously not in her right mind.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Perhaps he had erred here. It was never a good idea to suggest she had missed the obvious, but he was about to do it again. “She’s living in filth on the street, and her family is worth millions. That’s your idea of sane?”

  “Well, she never cared about their money, did she? That’s what you told me. Her kid is dead, and she’s living with obsession and hate. Trust me, she could care less about the surroundings.”

  “It’s madness.”

  “Maybe it is, but I understand it.”

  There was a warning edge in her voice. He chose to ignore it. “You have to find her and get her to a hospital.”

  “I’ll find her eventually. It’s going to take some time.”