Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  That was the day he had noticed the fresh bruise on the side of her face, and not asked where she had gotten it. There had been other days and other bruises-more blindness. Helen Markowitz had asked her about the bruises, and then written a note asking that Kathy be more closely supervised during rough sports. He had found the note curious at the time, for there were no rough sports at the academy. More blindness.

  Now the electric lights of the cathedral were switched off, and a score of candles flared up in the hands of the altar boys. The white flowers took on an eerie glow as the priest announced that this was a mass for a woman who had been brutally murdered-the very words Kathy had requested. He never mentioned that this woman had a beautiful child-as he had been requested to leave her out of it. But because he had known this woman’s child, he was able to summon up a passion he thought was lost to him.

  He looked back at Kathy. How young she seemed, how little changed. The last time he saw her as a student, she had been carried into his office in the arms of the janitor who had found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She was unconscious as the janitor gently laid her slight body down on the couch. But she had rallied long enough to do some damage before the ambulance came for her. And the last time Sister Ursula ever saw Kathy Mallory’s face, the old woman was lying on the floor holding on to a freshly fractured leg and screaming in pain. That had also been the last time the priest ever saw Kathy smile. At the time, he had been startled, for the girl’s smile had a touch of evil to it. And in that same moment, he realized that it was Ursula’s own smile thrown back at her. And then the blindness was ended.

  Ah, but hadn’t he always suspected?

  The young music students took up their instruments, and the music blended with the voices of the chorus, building from the delicate sweet notes of a soloist, and swelling to the full accompaniment, rising, surging with beauty and power. Above the altar, a statue of Christ hung on a cross of gold and gazed down on the bouquets at His feet. In the flickering play of candlelight, lilies and orchids seemed to move to the genius music of Mozart, an illusory resurrection of cut flowers. A spate of “Ah”s came from the pews as the music rolled through the church to its conclusion.

  Applause broke out like sudden gunfire. This was wholly inappropriate behavior for the mass, but Father Brenner never noticed, never saw the rows of clapping hands and the rapturous faces. He looked only to Kathy as the sound of applause thundered all around them.

  She nodded to him, and in that simple gesture, she managed to convey that a debt had been paid.

  He hoped she would stay to talk with him awhile, but instead she unplugged the microphone from her recording device and left the pew. Apparently, she had more pressing business elsewhere. She moved quickly toward the door, and he wondered if he would ever see her again. Would there be no more calls in the dead of night?

  She slowed her steps at the altar of Saint Jude and pocketed a few candles in passing.

  Mallory opened the door to Riker’s apartment, and flicked on the wall switch. An overhead light illuminated the whole ungodly mess. It was much worse than she had remembered. Cockroaches fled to the dark cover of the take-out cartons and into the mouths of discarded beer bottles. The crumbs embedded in the rug under her feet gave new meaning to the cliché of a floor you could eat off of. Some of the grazing roaches seemed too bloated to run very fast. There was no single uncontaminated place to set down her duffel bag.

  With the risk of a hotel room in mind, she walked to the telephone on the far wall. Her hand hovered over it for a moment, hesitating to touch the receiver, which bore every fingerprint from the day it had been installed.

  A half hour later, she was back from the corner bodega with a bag of supplies-cleaning solvents for window glass and mirrors, for porcelain fixtures and metal fixtures, linoleum and wood. She set the bag on the kitchen countertop and pulled out a roll of paper towels, a new sponge for the mop, a pair of plastic gloves, and an aerosol can with a label that promised to kill even saddle-worthy mutations of roaches.

  Her face was grim as she gathered up her arsenal. Cleaning house was not something she usually objected to. Her own condominium was spotless, dustless, without blemish of any kind, and she was near fanatical in keeping it that way. On the Saturday mornings of her childhood, she had helped Helen in the ritual of cleaning. But Helen, the world’s champion homemaker, had always begun with a perfectly clean house.

  It was late when Mallory returned from the laundromat. She put down the bag of clean towels and sheets, what must be several months’ worth of them. Leaning back against the door, she brushed a damp tendril of curls from her face. She was tired, but if she sat down, she would lose momentum.

  She dragged her bucket and mop to the bathroom, the last room to clean. And there she was confronted by the plastic Jesus glowing in the dark. She pulled the night-light out of its electrical socket and tossed it into the hamper, where she would not have to look at it.

  A white-haired man stood alone in the plaza. Behind him, the door of the wooden fencing lay in splintered pieces. He made one slow circuit of the plaza, beholding the ghostly white tarpaulins covering every bench, blanketing the fountain, and extending in a pale virus up the walls of the building facade.

  This was Gregor Gilette, whose work one critic had described as almost like a song. Critics had always floundered for the adjectives. They wanted very much to call him classical, and every instinct sought this word. It was the classic lines of nature which made the inhabitants of Gilette’s buildings feel so perfectly in accord with their environs, in the same way that classical music kept to the rhythm of the human heart. His work never recalled the classic forms of European architecture, but the motion of the river, majestic heights that eagles might inhabit, and the feminine elements of a graceful nude. This was Gilette.

  He had been elated when he finally received the portfolio of photographs. The plaza was about life, and it was good that there had been people to fill all the spaces he had lovingly created for them, as though they had not been strangers to him, but invited guests. Such was his feeling for all his creations. But this building was most special. He would end his career at the height of his powers with this, his greatest piece of art.

  He also approved of Jamie Quinn, who had visited his house tonight. Had he been planning ever to create another work, he might have stolen a line of elegance from Jamie’s face and another from the body and then incorporated the man into something of marble. Only marble would suit the critic’s cool, smooth, graceful exterior. There were no cracks or seams through which the uninvited might intrude on him.

  An hour ago, Gilette had listened as his brother-in-law explained the purpose for his visit, as he described the Public Works Committee’s choice of art for the plaza. Gilette had listened, but he had not believed. What kind of an animal would do such a thing?

  Emma Sue Hollaran. A dumb, slow-witted animal, Jamie Quinn had gently explained. The artist was Gillian, the vandal.

  Gilette had come to the plaza to see for himself. Heavily veined hands reached out for the first tarpaulin and ripped it from the mooring pins with ferocity, and then the next and the next, until the floor of the plaza was covered with the white canvas. He stood by the fountain at the center of the plaza, taking it all in. And now he believed.

  A fifteen-year-old boy, with the aimless walk of a vagrant, was making his way down the sidewalk, past the wooden fencing, adjusting the straps of his knapsack as he walked. The sack was heavy with the weight of his best pair of jeans and all the rest of his possessions.

  When he came to the small pile of boards on the sidewalk, he turned to see the splintered opening in the fence. He stepped lightly over the remnants of the wooden door and slipped quietly through the hole, wondering if this might be a good place to spend the night, perhaps to sleep through until morning without the rude awakening of a cop kicking him in the side to move him along. He was sick, flesh hanging on his bones, and he could not afford another injury. It took
so long to heal now.

  Once he was through the fence, his eyes became accustomed to the poor light leaking through the hole, and the pale light of the moon overhead. He moved cautiously under the high marble arch and into the plaza.

  Someone else was there ahead of him. It was an old man with a bowed back. The boy held his breath as the old man settled wearily to a bench that had been cracked and smeared with paint.

  Now the boy’s gaze traveled up the length of the walls to see the crude paintings of muggers and subway trains, and the big red blob in the center of it. Painted across the stone face of the building were the words “Welcome to the Big Apple.”

  The fountain was also smeared with paint and gouged with something that had left tracks of rust in the wounds. The vandal had gone too far. A delicate arm of the fountain had been broken off and lay in the water like a severed limb.

  Again, the boy read the writing on the wall. “The Big Apple.” That was what his mother called New York City, the Big Apple. And what he saw in this wreckage was so New York. It was his mother’s building one block from a soup kitchen. It was the dark man on the corner who sang, “Come kiddy come. I got crack and I got smoke, and come kiddy come kiddy come.” It was the flowers that his mother could never put in the first-floor window box without seeing them broken-stalked and stolen by the day’s end.

  He could not get out of this town fast enough.

  The old man was rising unsteadily to his feet. The boy, sensing some remainder of authority here, melted back into the dark of the broken ash trees as the old man quit the plaza.

  The boy walked over to the pile of rubble and old paint cans at the base of the wall. He knelt down and selected a can of red. He made a tentative squirt in the air, and then he froze.

  A shadow loomed on the wall alongside his own, and it was growing larger.

  He looked up to see the face of an old woman. She never spoke to him, but only extended her hand to the paint can. She wanted it and there was a look in her eyes that said, Don ‘t fool with me, boy, just give it to me.

  He had seen that look so many times. Now it was a reflex action to surrender whatever he had in his hands. He gave her the can of spray paint and stepped back.

  She turned away from him and pressed the nozzle close to the ruined wall. She walked along the stone facade, writing in a giant scrawl of red paint, “Apple, Apple, in the river, all you do is make me shiver.”

  The boy read the line and said, “Amen.”

  Gregor Gilette left the after-hours bar with a weaving walk and wandered down the street, hearing nothing, seeing only the pavement before his shoes, until he passed by another man who was walking in the opposite direction. The other man had ragged clothes draped on a stick-figure body. His arms made wide circular motions in the air, arm over arm, swimming to Fifty-seventh Street.

  This was madness Gregor felt more comfortable with. His mind did not stray back to the wreckage of the plaza, for that was dangerous ground tonight.

  Now he thought to look for a cab, but the street was deserted and it had begun to rain. He stared at the open mouth of the subway. He and Sabra had come a long way since the days when they rode the underground, unable to afford a taxi during the young years of the struggle to make it here.

  He descended into the darkness beyond the shattered bulb intended to light his way. He bought a subway token from the man behind the glass of the booth and barely registered the fact that the cost of his token had gone up 500 percent. He passed through the turnstile to stand on the platform and wait through the dregs of night ending, a drunk slowly sobering, waiting for the train which takes its own time.

  An announcement was being made on the public address system.

  Even a native New Yorker could not actually understand the individual words that came out of the subway speakers, but he knew the words would only be a variation on the same theme: Your train will never come, so go away now.

  Two stragglers on Gregor’s side of the tracks took this message to heart and exited through the turnstiles. The platform on the other side of the tracks had also emptied. One overhead bulb spread a pool of light on the far platform, creating the illusion of an abandoned stage.

  Gregor was stubborn. He would stay. He would wait to see if the announcer lied. In the old days, half the time they lied.

  He shrugged against the post and sluggishly meditated on the upside-downness of drinking through the nights and sleeping through the days, eking light and warmth from electric bulbs. He pushed cigarette stubs and wrappers with the toe of his shoe, looking for friendly omens in the dirt tracks and the trash.

  He stared over the side of the platform at the tracks below. A small brown shape scurried between the rails. Gregor remembered Sabra’s old game of making a wish on the first rat of the evening. His footing was a bit unsure; tipsy still, he moved back to sag against the tiled wall.

  He was not alone anymore. Someone spoke to him. Sabra’s voice? A hoarse, hollered whisper, calling his name. From where?

  There-across the tracks, waiting for the train that goes the other way. She was peeking at him from behind a post, coming out now, walking into the pool of light. Her wide eyes were smiling and not. Then, a grotesque, clown-face smile split her face.

  But it was not Sabra-only an old hag, almost spectral in her long rags. One hand clutched a tin and the other held on to the handle of a wire cart.

  A train passed between them on the middle rails. He stared through the lighted square windows of the cars. There were no passengers. It was a ghost train, traveling empty to some maintenance depot. It passed on, and he could see the woman once more. Poor, pathetic, broken thing. How could he have taken her for Sabra?

  His northbound train was approaching. He could hear it in the tunnel. He could see the light growing larger. There was a little moment of terror before the train pulled in and blocked her from sight. The woman’s mouth opened wide and round. The brakes of the approaching train screamed. Her arm shot up like a referee of the game. And then she was lost from sight again, the entire platform blotted out by the tons of screaming, steaming metal.

  He boarded his train, tired and shaken sober. He never looked back through the windows of the car, but as the train picked up speed, he wondered if she looked for him in these quick squares of light.

  The cellular telephone rang. Andrew opened his eyes to the dark canopy of raincoats. When at last he had the phone in his hand, he said, “Hello?”

  “This mass is for a woman who was brutally murdered,” said a man’s voice. In the litany that followed, Andrew realized it was a priest saying mass for the dead dancer.

  Mozart and a ghost choir spilled out of the magical telephone and filled his senses. Moving along on his knees, he crawled out from the cover of his canopy and looked up to the ceiling of the sky with its faint sprinkling of stars. Mozart’s Requiem filled a cathedral of his mind’s making. Hooded monks paraded past his eyes, candles became torches, and there was blood on the altar and blood on the floor, a river of it winding and washing through the belly of the church, churning beneath his feet.

  Aubry crawled down the aisle under the falling axe. Her heart still beating with seconds of life. Everything was pulsating red. The exposed organs beat out their independent lives and deaths as they failed her, each one in turn.

  He reached out his hand to her too late. Her face was gone to dark sockets and a death’s-head grin. He knelt on broken glass in shock beyond pain. And there was a new fear in his eyes, which were blurring with tears, as he stared up at the final horror of the night-the stars. In a suicide of heaven, the stars were going out.

  And now, all the brighter lights of New York City also failed him as he pitched forward in a faint.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was past two in the afternoon when Rlker walked in the door, his eyes closing to narrow slits. He set his small bag of belongings on the coffee table, and sank down on the couch in the front room. He laid the assault rifle on the floor and slid it underneat
h the skirt of the slipcover and away from his host’s sight.

  “Thanks, Charles. I really appreciate this.”

  “My pleasure.” Charles was standing at the hall closet, pulling blankets and sheets from the top shelf. He was also making rapid calculations on the toll of sleep deprivation upon a man of Riker’s age, who drank too much and smoked too much. There were slowed reflexes to consider, and then-

  “Mallory’s holed up at my place,” said Riker. “I’m looking at maybe six hours of sleep before I take the night shift with Andrew.”

  “Couldn’t someone else do it?”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  Charles wondered if he had offended Riker, for it suddenly occurred to him-he would never have made that suggestion to Mallory. Oh, and there was one more thing to worry about. He tucked the bedding under one arm and searched the mantelpiece until he found the detective’s card. He handed it to Riker. “About an hour ago, this man came by with two officers in uniform. They were looking for Mallory.”

  Riker held the card out at arm’s length. “Kinkaid? You didn’t tell this cop anything useful, did you?”

  “Certainly not,” said Charles, as though cooperating with the authorities were something a gentleman would never consider. “But why does she have to hide? You don’t think Blakely would really harm her, do you?”

  “No, not now he wouldn’t. He might want to kill her, but when he resigned this afternoon, they made him turn in his gun. And Robin Duffy didn’t leave him with enough money to hire a shooter.”

  “So it’s over?”

  “The business with Blakely? Yeah. Now she’s only in trouble with the commissioner.” Riker held up the business card. “This cop, Kinkaid? He’s attached to the commissioner’s office. Beale wants to have a little chat with her about the proper form for arresting suspects while cameras are rolling. She made the evening news last night.”