Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

Her responses were crisp and growing cooler.

  “Mallory, you must find her right now. It’s your duty to find her. This poor woman-”

  “That’s enough.”

  Something in her tone of voice made him lose the place-marker in his mind. Now his face was one naked question mark, and she rose from the table to come closer to him, the better to explain all the errors of his ways.

  “I live in the real world,” she began, as though instructing an idiot child from some fraudulent planet.“All I care about is the murder of Dean Starr. It’s going to lead me to the evidence for the murders of the artist and the dancer. You must realize that nobody actually wants me to work that one out-not the commissioner, or the mayor, not the city attorney or the chief of detectives. It’s dirty laundry, big-time embarrassment and potential lawsuits.”

  “But Sabra hasn’t harmed anyone. Justice dictates that-”

  “There is no justice.” She left him to fill in her pause with the implied, but unspoken, You imbecile. “New York cops are paid to keep the city from sliding into a cesspool-that’s it! There is nothing in the job description about justice. Sabra didn’t get justice for Aubry.”

  “But you could help this woman if you-”

  “No, Charles, I can’t. I can’t fix the world for her and put everything back the way it was. Her kid will never come home again. But Sabra can help me. They all want the case buried, Charles. Do you like the idea of people getting away with a thing like that?”

  “It’s your job to-”

  “Back off!”

  He did back off, and back up, and he would have backed out of the room, but she was standing in the doorway.

  “I’m doing my job,” she said-spat. “So Sabra goes on, and I go on.”

  She stalked down the hallway, crossed the front room and slammed the door behind her to say she had not appreciated his criticism very much, not much at all.

  Charles pulled a blanket around his shoulders and surveyed the roof which overlooked Bloomingdale’s. This was penance for crossing Mallory. This was what it had taken to pacify her. His mistake was asking what he could do to help. The next thing he knew, she was handing him a blanket, a building key, binoculars and a cellular telephone. And now he was doing time on a roof, baby-sitting the lunatic Andrew Bliss.

  He turned to Henrietta Ramsharan, a good friend and a good sport, who probably had other things to do this evening. But she had come when he called. “So what do you think?”

  “Long-distance psychoanalysis isn’t in my bag of tricks, Charles.” Henrietta lowered the binoculars. “But I think you may have underestimated the case. He’s not unraveling, he’s unraveled.”

  “Perhaps I should try to convince Mallory to bring him down from the roof.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Andrew’s state of mind is Mallory’s work?”

  “No, I just assumed it was. How badly damaged is he?” And how badly damaged was Mallory? That was the question he really wanted to ask, but he didn’t really want the answer.

  “Well, Charles, talking to the mannequin is not a good sign.” She raised the binoculars again. “I’m looking at wine bottles all over the roof and no sign of food. So, the aberrant behavior might be a temporary delusion brought on by fasting and alcohol abuse. If I’m right, it’s not irreversible damage. But he’s hardly moving now. Physically, he’s in very bad shape.”

  He thanked her for coming, and walked her across the roof to the door. She was reluctant to leave him alone here, but he was even more reluctant to impose on her anymore. His good-mannered insistence won out, and she left him. It was his only clear win of the day.

  He returned to his lonely outpost at the ledge and focussed his field glasses on the hapless Andrew, who at least had the mannequin to talk to. Henrietta had been gone for an hour when he turned to the sound of footsteps.

  “Hey, Charles.” Riker leaned a rifle against the retaining wall and glanced over the side to the roof below. “So Mallory talked you into roof duty, huh?” He set a paper sack on the ledge. “You can go home now. I’ll take it from here.”

  “No, I’ll stay. Mallory’s coming to relieve me. She wanted me to tell you to go home and get some rest.”

  “Thanks, I could use a decent night’s sleep.” He handed the sack to Charles. “Here, you can have my sandwiches and beer. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Look out for Mallory?”

  Riker smiled. “Mallory will be all right. She knows the rules. She pushed Blakely too far. She saved Coffey’s ass, and she paid the bill with her house.”

  “The house? You think Blakely did that?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it. Heller jumped into the arson investigation and pulled a print from the gasoline can and another print from inside the house. We bagged the perp who set the fire. He’s one of Blakely’s men. Now we get to hold the guy for seventy-two hours without charging him. That’s gonna make Blakely real nervous, maybe nervous enough to cut a deal with Robin Duffy.”

  “Robin? He’s involved-”

  “He’s known Mallory since she was a puppy. We couldn’t keep him out of it. There was no arson coverage on the house. Duffy was pressuring the department for an investigation so he could sue somebody to cover the damage. We had to cut him in, or he would’ve blown the scam.”

  “The scam?”

  “Yeah, it’s a thing of beauty, Charles.” Riker hunkered down beside Charles and took back the paper sack. He pulled out two sandwiches and a six-pack of beer. “Blakely keeps his payoff money in a nice fat offshore account-more than enough money to pay for the kid’s house and-”

  “Just a minute. A lawyer is conspiring with police officers to blackmail the chief of detectives into paying for the arson with his bribery money. Am I following this?”

  Riker nodded, popped the tab on a beer can and handed it to him. Charles thought, yes, he would very much like a drink just now.

  “It gets better.” Riker slugged back his beer and grinned. “If everything goes well, Blakely is going down, resigning without a pension. That’s part of the deal. He’s going to walk away with no jail time, but he’ll be dead broke. Mallory only has to stay out of Blakely’s way for a few more days-just long enough for him to realize that he can’t dig his way out of this.”

  Charles took a healthy swig of beer. “You think he might go after her again?”

  “Well, she’s got him cornered, and he’s making a fight of it.”

  “So Mallory’s involved in this?”

  “Charles, do you know anyone else who could’ve put this scheme together?”

  No, of course not. What had he been thinking of? “I don’t suppose this could’ve been managed in a clean, law-abiding fashion?”

  “Naw, that almost never works.” Riker settled himself on the ground beside Charles and grabbed up a blanket from Mallory’s duffel bag. They sat together on the floor of the roof, cross-legged in the storytelling fashion of nearly forgotten summer camps.

  Riker pulled a fresh pack of cigarettes from his paper sack and began the evening’s entertainment with a metaphor which was far from a child’s campfire. “Just think of corruption as cancer in an animal. So maybe forty years ago, the cancer overtook the animal that was New York City, and then the cancer became the animal.” Riker lit a cigarette, and the ember glowed in the dark. “Ah, Charles, the city even steals from the kids. You know, by the time the money travels through the bureaucrats, the kids get damn little. Stealing from babies is pretty low.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and they watched the smoke curl up to the moon.

  “Don’t I just love this town?” Riker said this as much to himself as to Charles. “But now I’ll tell you what really scares me. Mallory fits into this system so beautifully. She plays corruption like a piano. She did make Blakely back off of Coffey. Not only that, but the paperwork for his promotion is in the hopper. He’ll make captain before the month is out. You gotta wonder what she had on Blakely to pull that off.”

&nb
sp; “You don’t know? But the payoff money in the-”

  “Oh, it’s an open secret that Blakely is a dirty cop. Naw, she made her deal with him and she stuck by it. She won’t share the details. Coffey thinks it’s a mob connection, but only Mallory knows for sure. I’d bet even money she could get the dirt on any poor bastard that gets in her way. I feel sorry for Quinn if he’s holding out on her.”

  “She won’t get any dirt on Quinn.”

  “She can get anybody, Charles.”

  “Quinn is an honorable man. His wealth comes from inheritance and a clever way with stock manipulation. He doesn’t steal, cheat or lie. I know this man.”

  “Look, if you won’t bet that Mallory can stick him with a sword, I’ll bet you that Quinn is more like Mallory than you know.”

  “No bet. I believe there is a sense of honor in Mallory. It’s a bit twisted but-”

  “Charles, that’s not exactly what I meant, but never mind.”

  “No, please go on.”

  “Twelve years ago, Quinn pulled political strings to keep the police away from the family during the murder investigation.”

  “But those people were falling apart, they couldn’t take any more.”

  “Everybody gets ripped up in a murder investigation. There’s a lot of breakage, but it’s necessary. We couldn’t do the job with Quinn’s interference. People in high places owed him favors and he called them in. He obstructed a homicide investigation-that’s a major crime, and you’ve gotta have a lot of dirt on the right people to pull it off. That’s why Markowitz brought Quinn into the case and made him part of it. You see how it works?”

  Charles shook his head. “The correct-”

  “The correct procedure would have been for Markowitz to lose his job slapping Quinn with a charge of obstruction-Quinn and every politician he knew. So instead, the old man made use of Quinn and his connections. Clever? Well, Mallory learned a lot from her old man. The kid turned out to be a natural. You know, she works the weasels better than Markowitz ever did. It cost her one house to learn how far she could go, but she’s the new master.”

  Riker said his good night as he stood up. He ambled off toward the roof door. Then he stopped and turned to face Charles. “The kid’s all grown up now. I feel like I’m out of a job.”

  Charles smiled. Riker did not.

  For another hour, Charles continued to sit on the roof with a blanket around his shoulders, staring at the lunatic on the roof of Bloomingdale’s. He looked at his watch. The minute hand was coming up on the hour when Mallory would relieve him, and she was never late.

  “Hello, Mallory.” He said this to the night air, for he had not heard her open the door, nor any footsteps. He had absolutely no sense of her presence.

  “So, how’s it going, Charles?” She settled a grocery bag on the ground beside him.

  Did she seem disappointed that he hadn’t given her a chance to sneak up and frighten him? Yes, she did, and he was delighted. Mallory had a strange and unsettling sense of gamesmanship, but he was definitely getting the hang of it.

  He lowered his binoculars. “I think Andrew might be dying.”

  She took the binoculars from his hand and stared at the thin figure of Andrew Bliss lying on the down quilts, barely moving anymore. “No, he’s okay. I just saw him twitch. Good night, Charles. Thanks for the help.”

  And now he pressed his luck. “You know this man is obviously not in his right mind.”

  “He’s hiding out from a killer. That sounds like a pretty sane game plan to me.”

  “Hiding out on the roof of Bloomingdale’s with full media coverage from dawn to dusk? This is hiding? This is sane?”

  Oh, right.

  It was, now that he thought about it, and smart too. And after dark, Andrew could be assured of a hundred voyeurs among the thousand windows that looked down on the roof. If they could count on a sane killer, and Mallory certainly did, then who would be fool enough to harm the man without cover? Yet Charles could not shake the idea that this poor lunatic was Mallory’s idea of a good piece of lean meat, a bit of bait for a serial killer.

  It was with some reservation that he made his way across the roof and left a helpless fellow human in the hands of Mallory. And now another thought occurred to him as he descended the stairs: She would always view civilians as a class of defenseless, witless sheep, and she would lay down her own life for any one of them, without hesitation. She was a cop.

  If God was not listening to Andrew’s prayers, Mallory was, and she had grown tired of the slow drone of intonations. She lowered her directional microphone, picked up her cellular phone and dialed the number of the priest. Before she could speak, she heard the old man’s voice saying, “Yes, Kathy?”

  “I want to make confession, but I don’t remember the words.”

  “There’s a good reason for that, Kathy. You never made a confession in your entire life, not in or out of the church,”

  “Tell me what to say.”

  “Do you remember the last time we discussed confession in my office? I remember your very words. That’s not the way it works,‘ you said. ’If you can’t catch me doing it, then I didn’t do it. I’ve got rights, and you can call Markowitz, he’ll tell you. I don’t ever have to confess to anything.”

  “And did you call Markowitz?”

  “Yes, Kathy, I did.”

  “And?”

  “He said, ‘The kid is absolutely right.’ Then he hung up on me.”

  “So tell me the words. I want to take communion. I can’t do that until I confess my sins, and I need the damn words.”

  “Actually, the church has loosened up a bit since you were with us. You can take communion if you-”

  “No, I want to do this right.”

  “Why don’t we just talk about it first?”

  “Is this under the seal of the confessional? You can’t tell anyone, right?”

  “That’s right. You were so young when your mother died. There is no fault attached to your actions. You were frightened, you ran away. That’s what children do. I only wish you had told me about this when you were still a child. You shouldn’t have had to carry that-”

  “You would have told the others.”

  “Still the same trusting little soul you always were.”

  “Sarcasm is unbecoming in a priest. I think you spend too much time hanging out with Rabbi Kaplan.”

  “An occasional poker game.”

  “I knew it. If you’d known, you would’ve talked. You would have told them all.”

  “No, that would never have happened. But what if they had known? Helen wanted to adopt you. If your mother was dead, that would’ve been possible. Was your father still living?”

  “This is not about my father.”

  “You witnessed your mother’s murder?”

  “I saw her after the bastard left her for dead. She was crawling toward me, covered with blood. Any one of those wounds should have killed her. You know what kept her going? She had to crawl a long ways with mortal wounds. But she thought I would get to her in time to save her. That’s why she was holding on.”

  “No, Kathy. She wanted to touch you before she died, to say goodbye. That’s what kept her going. It was for you that she kept going. She must have loved you more than her own life.”

  “No. She believed I was going to save her. But I ran away.”

  “And you survived. So she did not go through that ghastly ordeal for nothing. Do you know who killed her?”

  “No. I never saw him.”

  “You never spoke of this to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “That would explain a lot.”

  “The bruises on Sister Ursula’s shins? She had that coming.”

  “I won’t argue that. But you know, there’s a kind of innocence in insanity. Ursula still wonders what you’re up to. If she knew this about your birth mother, she would send up the flames of a thousand candles each night for the rest of her life. You tend to linger in her mem
ory. You have that effect on people.”

  “You can’t tell her or anyone.”

  “Of course not. Why are you telling me now?”

  “I’m confessing. Now what do I do with the guilt? I’ve confessed. What now?”

  “You were a blameless child.”

  “I don’t want to hear that crap, Father. So let’s say I’m guilty, and I’ve confessed. What now?”

  “God forgives you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Yeah, right.” She hung up on him.

  He walked around the roof, occasionally pausing to anchor himself by touching the corner of the table or some object, fearing he might float away if he did not hold on to something solid, something real. He picked up an empty wine bottle and set it down again. At each turn of the roof, he kept his eyes to the design of the plush rugs which carpeted the tarpaper. He avoided looking at the decorative mirror in a small art deco frame, skirting it with a tremor of terror. The last time he had looked at his reflection, it had been like viewing the remains of a familiar corpse.

  His eyes, oh his eyes.

  There were two dead flies lying on the table, sun-dried and so light, they were carried off on the next breeze. He turned away. His hand worked over his eyes and left them closed, the way that service was done for the deceased.

  He sat down on the tarmac and addressed the upholstery of the chair. “I couldn’t stop what happened.”

  There was no response from the upholstery.

  “There was nothing I could have done.”

  He took the chair’s quiet repose for agreement. He opened his eyes and leaned over to touch the brocade arm, as though to gain the chair’s confidence, and then he went on in a louder monotone. “What good would it have done to tell?”

  He stood up and walked twice around the chair in the way of a child who believes that the circle has a magical and protective charm. He came to rest beside the chair and put one arm around the back of it. “Oh, what would have been the good of it?” His voice was rising more. Hysteria came stealing up his throat, surprising him and scaring him with a shrillness in his voice. “Well, it’s crazy, that’s all-just crazy!”