Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  “No, it didn’t happen that way. I was called there to discover the bodies because Aubry was one of the victims. The setup was planned before she even died!”

  “No, Quinn. The killers needed a critic to kick off the hype. Koozeman probably figured the police were too stupid to recognize a dead body as a work of art. So he used Aubry’s name as bait for you. But she was never meant to show up at the gallery. That was an accident. Something went wrong.”

  She was dangling the sword carelessly in her hand. Now it rose suddenly to attack position. Forgetting forty years of training which told him to wait on her advance, he stepped back too soon, his sword rising to parry. But she never left her place on the strip. Now she let her saber dangle again. And his own sword came down. She smiled, and in that smile, she told him that she owned him now.

  “Let’s go over the lies you told to Markowitz. You were late getting to the gallery that night.”

  “Yes, but I explained that.”

  “You lied to Markowitz. You’ll have to do better with me.”

  “As I explained to your father, the cab was caught in a traffic jam on a street where a film was being made. So I had to get out and take a subway. I’m no good at navigating subways. I’d never used-”

  “Markowitz knew you lied to him. I found his copy of the shooting schedule for that old movie and all the city location permits. It took me a while to work it out. The film location wasn’t between your apartment and the gallery. And that’s all the old man knew-that you lied. He never got to interview the family. He didn’t know Sabra was meeting your mother that night. But I did- after I talked to Aubry’s father. Then I noticed the shooting location was midway between your house and your mother’s. So you and your sister saw the movie crew on the way to your mother’s house. I even know you drove there in her car.”

  “Sabra was never-”

  She rushed him with long steps, a swing and a cut to the arm. His parry was too late. He looked down to the blood drops staining his sleeve. She had bloodied him, and yet he remained true to the brotherhood which refused to believe that the female could be the deadlier sex. The wound was hard evidence against her gender, and still he would only defend and retreat. His mind was coming apart; his code remained intact. He could finish her with one thrust, and yet he would not.

  And she knew it.

  “What’s the point of lying anymore?” She lowered her sword and stalked off to the far end of the strip. “You got the message at your mother’s house-you called the paper or they tracked you down. Then you and Sabra drove her car to the gallery. You were late, but not late enough to account for the delay in calling the police.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know that.”

  “Oh, no? Tell me what doesn’t fit. Sabra saw what they’d done to Aubry, and she went right over the screaming edge. You needed time to calm her down and get her safely away-time to plan. You had to keep the police and the media away from Sabra. You decided she couldn’t stand up to an interrogation-what a gentleman. You made up the subway story to explain why you were late calling the police, why there would be no record of a cab log. So they couldn’t follow the trail back to your mother’s house and Sabra. That was the first lie.”

  She left the strip to walk around him, making side circles, slow and quiet. This was no maneuver learned at school-she was playing with him. His life had been lived within parameters of form, where all the moves were familiar, almost a ballet. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for what lay beyond the boundary lines. The sight of Aubry had ruptured his mind and not taught him a thing.

  He turned to watch Mallory, moving as she moved, revolving to keep pace with her circles. All the aggression was hers, she picked the shots, began the dance and stopped it when she wished. She controlled the court, the game, himself.

  She was so sure she was going to beat him-that much, but no more, was in her face. And worse, it was in his own mind as Mallory danced up to the mark to play, ignoring his blade, she thought so little of his chances.

  His concentration was broken. He missed the parry and let her through to bloody his side. She backed away again to the center of the court. And now she broke with any pretense of form, running across the floor, her saber describing circles in the air. When she had closed the distance, she dropped to one knee and sliced low toward his unprotected thigh, a forbidden zone which no opponent ever aimed for.

  He cursed himself for not anticipating her. He had heard the rip of material, but he would not look down. If she had cut him again, it would do him no good to see the blood. He parried the next rush, doing twice the brainwork to cover his body and his legs.

  She broke off, stepping back, light as a cat, to the end of the strip. When she moved forward again, it was still on cat’s feet, an unhurried, stalking advance.

  She began this bout in slow-action time, the cadence of casual conversation, as her blade met his in easy strikes and counters. The swordplay accelerated with more rapid strikes, but still no force, light touches only- You kiss my sword, and I kiss yours. Faster now, and faster-quick reports of steel sounded on steel. The tempo was more the breathless pace of something carnal, heart pounding-

  Suddenly, Mallory broke with him and retreated to the edge of the strip.

  Sweat blurred his eyes as she came dancing back to him with short steps and a rather ordinary gambit. He parried easily, and this should have made him suspicious. Instead of answering his parry with a riposte, she let her steel slide down his sword until she closed with him, hilt to hilt, swords pointing up, only a few inches between their bodies. She pressed closer until they stood corps-a-corps, in the forbidden contact of opponents.

  Softly, she said, “I’m going to take you now.”

  And he believed her. He was staring into the long slants of her green eyes. Her sword was disengaging, lowering. And this was the moment where he lost the match, even before he felt her metal slipping into the handle of his saber. With one elegant move, she backed away and ripped the steel from his hand with the pry bar of her own sword and sent his saber flying across the court, clanging to the floor.

  He glimpsed the bright triumph of a child in her stance and in her eyes-and then the child was gone. Deadly serious now. “I won.”

  Stone silence. She stepped forward, sword rising.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “It was my job to keep score, wasn’t it? Well, would you like me to tally up the bloodings?” He looked down at the cuts, thin lines of blood on his side, his arms and one leg. “There are a few tears in the material that didn’t get through to the skin, but of course they count too.”

  “I want to collect my bet now.”

  “Suppose I sign a confession to the murders of Dean Starr and Avril Koozeman. Would that be satisfactory payment?”

  “No. You’re not the type. You won’t even make a strike to save yourself. And leaving your sister out in the rain-well, that doesn’t count as violence.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Lock her up in a maximum-security ward for the rest of her life? She’d rather be dead.”

  She moved in close to him. “I think you meant to say that she’d be better off dead.” Too late, he felt her leg hook around his own, unbalancing him as she pushed him to the floor. She stood over him with the sword to his throat. “Pay up! I want Sabra.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Liar!” She pulled the sword back only a little, slowly angling the point to his face. She thrust it into his mask again and again. “How many drives before I get your eyes? I won! Deliver what you promised.”

  “Wait!” He raised one hand, and she stopped. He removed the mask and held it out to her. “This should make it easier for you.”

  Her blade came closer. He no longer believed he understood her well enough to anticipate her. But he had well understood Louis Markowitz, and now he was betting his eyes on the man who had raised her.

  She put up the sword. “You know, there’s stabbing, and then there’s stabbin
g.”

  She backed away from him. “Aubry was never meant to die that night. I figured it out with the messages. You didn’t know about the message left at the ballet school, did you?”

  He shook his head, and she continued. “I got that from my interview with Gregor Gilette. You figured they already had her when that message was left at your paper, right?”

  He nodded and closed his eyes. Her next words came from behind him.

  “According to her father, Aubry’s message was a long one. That’s what made me think she was being sent somewhere else-so you wouldn’t be able to reach her by phone when you got your own message. Aubry’s was garbled by the clerk, too many instructions to write down in a hurry. So she killed a lot of time trying to decipher the message, and then more time trying to locate you. Finally, she called your newspaper. By then, a message had been left for you. A receptionist probably checked your message box and confirmed the meeting at the gallery. It’s the only scenario that fits the two messages. Too bad you wouldn’t let Markowitz near the family. He could’ve worked it out twelve years ago. It only took me five minutes with Gregor Gilette.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Markowitz usually went for the money motive. My father was a smart cop, but with Aubry as the primary target, he had nowhere to go with this case.”

  She was very close to his side, speaking into his ear. “If he’d only known that Aubry was there by accident, he would’ve gone after the man with the profit motive to kill Peter Ariel, someone who knew your family connections.”

  He opened his eyes. She was in front of him now, leaning down, her face close to his.

  “Everything pointed to Koozeman,” she said. “The killers would have been jailed-if you’d only stepped out of my father’s way. And Sabra? She’s been strung out on the street all these years for nothing.”

  His head lolled back, eyes rolled up to the ceiling. He felt as though he had been mortally wounded. As she had said, there was stabbing, and then there was stabbing.

  “So, Quinn, would you call this a clear win?”

  He nodded.

  She sat on the floor beside him and laid down her sword. “You knew the link between the old murders and Dean Starr. How did you know he was one of the killers? Did Sabra tell you, or did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t send that letter to Riker.”

  “I never said you did, Quinn. I know who sent that letter. I figured that one out a long time ago. How did Sabra know about Dean Starr’s connection?”

  “Sabra surfaces now and then. When she turns up, I give her walking-around money and a place to stay. I keep an apartment for her-she keeps losing the key. But there are times when she seems fairly rational. She visits old haunts, old friends. For a while, she’s almost herself, almost sane. But then in a few days, she’s back wandering the streets again, looking for-”

  “Answer the question! How did she know about Dean Starr?”

  “I’m trying to tell you she doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She has sources in the art community. Koozeman has no idea how much the gallery boys hate him-they talk about him incessantly. So she was in Godd’s Bar one night and heard something strange, just snatches of conversations among the gallery staff. Sabra thought Starr might be blackmailing Koozeman. She asked me to find out more about it.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes. It only cost me a few hundred per gallery boy to get all of it. It didn’t really sound like blackmail. Starr was only pressuring Koozeman to make him into a hot artist. Starr said he wanted to use the same scheme he used for Peter Ariel. I never heard Koozeman’s end of that conversation.”

  “Is that all you told her?”

  “That’s all there was to it.”

  “She was crazy, you knew that. You just let her draw her own conclusions?”

  “Well, they were the right conclusions, weren’t they? I gave her whatever she asked of me.”

  “And then you went down to the morgue to view the remains of the jumper, the homeless woman who died in Times Square. You thought Sabra had killed Starr and then killed herself, right?”

  He nodded.

  “But now you believe your sister killed them both, don’t you? Starr and Koozeman?”

  “We never discussed the murders.”

  “How convenient. Was that on your attorney’s advice? Were you worried about conspiracy charges?”

  “Mallory, I have an idea you know that feeling of nothing left to lose. So does Sabra. She can’t depend on the police to finish it for her, can she? Look at the way they-”

  “Are you telling me she’s not done? There’s another one on her list? You son of a bitch! Who is it? Andrew Bliss? Did you give her Andrew as a murder suspect? I told you his pathetic little confession was nothing-”

  “What does it matter? Andrew is well away from harm on the roof of Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Your own mother could make it up to that roof. Anyone who wants him can get at him.”

  “But you have people watching him, right?”

  “Yes, from the distance of the next roof and a street. If she goes near him with a weapon, she’ll be shot down. I selected that assault rifle to make a big hole. She won’t survive.”

  The rain shower had ended. Charles wiped the lenses of the binoculars and looked again. He believed he was watching a religious ceremony-a baptism or purification rite. Andrew had been on his knees in fervent prayer for a long time. Then he had removed all his clothes.

  Now he was standing in a circle of candles and pouring champagne over his head, letting the liquid run over his naked body. Andrew looked up at the mangled staircase twisting away from the roof door. He turned and stared at the storm cellar door of the second exit. The ground door was more than half covered by steel beams and large wooden crates. Andrew put his shoulder to a crate and tried to move it. No luck. He slid to the ground and banged his fist on the door handle like a tired child begging to be let back into the house. The door fell away under his hand, opening downward to expose a square of dull light.

  Charles focussed on the opening in the roof. So the heavy material blocking half the door had never been an impediment. Mallory had been right. All this time, anyone who wanted Andrew could have gotten at him by simply opening the door inward.

  Andrew was climbing down the rungs of an interior ladder, disappearing through the square of light and below the level of the roof, wearing nothing, only carrying a cellular phone.

  Charles was thinking of the cellular phone he had left behind on the coffee table by the sleeping Riker. How foolish. That was the one thing he should have brought with him. Well, at least Andrew was moving slowly. Charles’s own roof had more floors. He would have to hurry.

  When Charles emerged on the ground floor, he ran across the street to the fire exit Mallory had diagrammed on her bulletin board. He looked around in all directions. Andrew had not yet emerged.

  He began to turn around at the sound of a squeaking wheel, but he was not fast enough. He felt the blow to the back of his head, and he was falling to the sidewalk as Andrew exited by the fire door, setting off the alarm.

  Riker awakened under the cover of a toasty quilt. He looked to the clock on the end table by the couch. He was slow to register the fact that he had overslept-and there was no one watching over Andrew Bliss. He sat bolt upright.

  “Charles?”

  He knew there wouldn’t be a response. The apartment had an empty feel to it. He was alone.

  Now he saw the sheet of paper on the coffee table. It was Charles’s note to say he had taken the tour of duty on the roof. But the rifle was still under the couch, and the cellular phone was lying on the table.

  Charles would never make it as a cop.

  Riker threw off the quilt, smashed the phone into his pocket and looked for his shoes. When his laces were tied, he put on some speed, gathering up his gun and the rifle and heading out the door.

  The alarm for the department store continued to scream and wail. Cars drove by, d
rivers hazarding a quick look at the trio on the sidewalk and then driving on.

  “Is he all right?” Quinn raised his voice to be heard above the alarm.

  He knelt down beside Mallory as she ran her fingers over the back of Charles’s skull. Next she rolled the large man’s unconscious body onto his back and gently pulled back one eyelid. She moved her hand to create extremes of shadows and light. Satisfied with the reaction time of his pupils, she nodded. “He’ll be okay. It’s just a scalp wound. I’m guessing she came up behind him and hit him with a bottle.”

  “You don’t know that Sabra did this.”

  “I know Andrew didn’t do it. He couldn’t beat up a bouquet of flowers-not in the shape he’s in.”

  She pulled out the antenna of her new cellular phone and punched in the number for Riker’s. “Riker? It’s Mallory… Yeah, I’m here now… How far away are you?… Fine.” Closing the antenna, she turned back to Quinn. “I want you to stay with Charles until Riker shows up.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going hunting for Sabra. His wound is fresh, so she can’t be far away.”

  “If you take her in, you know what will happen to her. She’ll be a circus freak for the media. Just let her be. I promise you I’ll find her again, and I’ll find another hospital. She’s weak and sick, she can’t do any real damage.”

  “She did Charles in rather nicely, didn’t she? I think you know exactly what she’s capable of.”

  “You don’t know what she’s been through. You can’t. Aubry’s skull was split up the back. Her brains were falling out through the bone fragments. I watched Sabra trying to force the tissue back into Aubry’s skull. And then the back of it fell off, and it was all in her hands, a piece of the skull, the blood and the brains. She was trying to fix the skull when I pulled her away. She was trying to fix her dead child.”

  “That’s why it took you so long to call it in. You took her to a safe, quiet place and then you went back.”