Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

  Mallory lowered the gun barrel and moved her own body between Sabra and Andrew. One hand flashed out, and she was holding Sabra’s knife hand by the wrist. Something close to perfect understanding passed between them. Mallory released her grip on Sabra’s bloody wrist, and the woman backed away from her, nodding. Mallory inclined her head in homage to the pain and rage in the older woman’s eyes. She stared into Sabra’s face as though it were a looking glass, a view into the madness of long-unfinished business, obsession without end.

  “Andrew’s not a killer. Trust me to know my killers, Sabra. It’s my gift. Your brother told you about the letter that came to us with Andrew’s review?”

  She nodded, and Mallory went on. “Andrew wanted the truth to come out. That’s why he wrote that letter. He wanted everyone to know. And now you have to let him live so he can tell the story. The story is important. It’s the end of unfinished business. It’s what you’ve wanted all these years. Let Andrew tell it. How could you live without hearing it? I couldn’t.”

  Sabra sat down on the terrace flagstones.

  Mallory looked at the blood on her hands. It was Sabra’s blood, streaming from the holes in her body. The gun in Emma Sue’s frozen grip was a.22. Still, the shots were well placed. What kept this woman going she did not know, unless it was this, the end of the story.

  “I believe you, all right? I’m sure Dr. Ramsharan is a very decent person.”

  Quinn had always genuinely liked Charles Butler. But early on, he had realized that this charming man didn’t live on the same planet with the rest of them. On Charles’s homeworld, people were all good neighbors and exceedingly kind to strangers. The lions all lay down with the lambs, and discord was restricted to the screams of fresh-cut flowers. He wondered how Charles’s ideal world fared in tandem with this stroll down the hall in the company of a man who was dripping blood on the carpet.

  As they waited for the elevator, Quinn was saying, “We should agree on a story for the doctor. We’ll tell her I had an accident while I was showing you my gun collection.”

  “Do you have a gun collection?”

  “No, but it doesn’t- Oh, I see your point. Best not to clutter it up with unnecessary lies. We’ll say I slipped on a scatter rug while holding a gun. Now that’s reasonable. Most New Yorkers have at least one gun.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Yes, everybody has one.”

  “I don’t. And you were showing it to me? Henrietta knows I don’t care for the sight of guns. So it’s hardly likely that-”

  “All right. I was removing the gun from my desk drawer to get at something beneath the gun.”

  They stepped into the elevator, and Quinn slumped against the back wall, leaving a bloodstain there. As Charles pushed the button for the third floor, the large man’s face gave away his deep concern.

  Quinn closed his eyes. So tired. His left hand was slick with the blood which leaked from the hole in his arm. His eyes opened again at the prompt of a gentle tug on the sleeve of his good arm.

  “Now about the scatter rug behind the desk,” said Charles. “Odd place for a rug, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the desk chair tend to keep the rug from slipping around?”

  “All right. I was removing the gun from the drawer of a table-which has a scatter rug in front of it.”

  “Bit clumsy slipping on the rug that way. And do you usually keep loaded guns about?”

  “So I’ll admit to being slightly drunk and inexperienced with firearms.” So tired. Not thinking straight, not straight at all. “Now you’ll swear you were there and witnessed the whole thing. That might persuade her not to file a report. But if she still insists on it, I can always buy her off. You can buy anyone in New York City. Remember, Mallory’s name shouldn’t enter the conversation.”

  He had the idea that Charles was not listening to his instructions. The soft-spoken giant seemed somewhat distracted as they emerged from the elevator and walked toward the door of apartment 3A.

  “Charles, perhaps you’d better let me handle it from here on. Somehow, I don’t think guile is your forte.”

  Charles smiled gently as he nodded and pressed the doorbell. When the door was opened by a dark-haired woman in a long white robe, he pointed to Quinn’s bloody arm, saying, “Mallory shot him, and we want to hush it up, all right?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the woman. “Come in.”

  Quinn lurched forward. His last thought before he fainted was that this woman must hail from Charles Butler’s planet, for she opened her arms wide to receive his falling body and to stain her robe with the blood of a stranger.

  “No one murdered Peter Ariel,” said Andrew, as he began his story in a monotone. “He was stoned on drugs and very clumsy. I was there when the artwork fell on top of him. He was killed instantly. Koozeman was furious. All that planning and promotion for nothing. He’d done such a brilliant job launching this career, despite the lack of talent. He had Emma Sue and myself as the critics to promote Peter in newspapers. Dean Starr doubled as a critic and a publicist. That’s all his art magazine ever was, you know, a public relations plug for artists who were willing to pay for their reviews. But then it was all for nothing. The artist was killed by his own work, a potential joke of the art world.

  “By the time Emma Sue arrived, Dean had come up with the idea to make it look like murder, to sensationalize the death and try to salvage something from sales of the artwork. Well, what was the harm in that? Peter Ariel was already dead. We’d pooled a lot of money to grease a lot of hands-editors of art magazines, and a promised slot in a museum group show. It was a major investment for all of us.”

  He fell silent for a moment, losing the threads to this ramble. Mallory touched his shoulder and asked, “Was it Koozeman’s idea to butcher the body and work it into the sculpture?”

  “Yes, Koozeman’s idea… Starr loved the concept and so did Emma Sue. All they had to work with was the fire axe from the box with the extinguisher. They underestimated the time it would take to cut up the body parts. All three of them took off their clothes and went to work. I stood by the door to keep watch. It was hard work, cutting up a body with that small axe, but once they got into the rhythm of it, it went much faster. My job was to call out if anything untoward happened-say if Quinn showed early. Had we left him a message then? I can’t remember. If anything happened, if anyone came, I was to call out and give them time to get through the door in the wall. I had no blood on me. I would say I’d just discovered the body. We’d thought of everything, almost everything.

  “I could hear what they were doing in the room behind me. There was no door I could close. The noise was as sickening as the stench. Once, I turned around. It was an incredible sight, the three of them, naked and bloody, working over the body.

  “It was then, while my back was turned, that Aubry came in. I swear I believed I had locked that door. But I was drunk that night-I’ve been drunk every night since. Aubry shouldn’t have been there. We’d left a message to send her to New Jersey. It was so incredible that she should show up at the gallery. It was the last thing we expected. We’d only meant to use her name to bait Quinn into coming. We needed him, his name linked to Peter Ariel in the press. Koozeman said Quinn would not be able to resist a comment on the artwork of the butchered body. You see, Koozeman had been a promising sculptor once, and now he was determined that this was to be the best piece of work he’d ever done. But now here was Aubry, and the whole thing was coming undone.

  “I tried to stop her-to turn her around before she could see. ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. She misunderstood. We’d left a message to say it was an emergency. She thought something had happened to her uncle. I couldn’t stop her. She ran into the room. And then she stopped, frozen. Koozeman was just turning around, naked and holding the head of Peter Ariel in his hands. Aubry turned to run. Emma Sue screamed, ‘Stop her!’ I did stop her, I was even trying to explain when Dean Starr dragged her back into the room. Emma Sue was already running acros
s the floor. She brought the axe down on Aubry.

  “No one had expected that to happen. Emma Sue did it again, and again. The others stood back, and I turned away. Aubry was screaming to me to help her. I’d known her since she was a little girl. We were friends, you see. And now she was bleeding, dying, and she was asking me for help. I turned my back. Then, all I could hear was the gurgling. I closed my eyes. It went on for a long time.”

  And now he put his hands over his eyes as if it were all happening again. “She would not die. I listened to the sounds of the axe, the scrabbling on the floor. She was crawling back toward the door. Her hand was within an inch of me when I turned to see Emma Sue strike the final blow to the back of her skull.” His hands fell away from his eyes. “That ended it.”

  He turned to Sabra. “Then the others made the pact. They were all involved now and there was no way out. They each took the axe and made a cut in her body. And then they came for me. They forced me to take the axe. Starr pressed my hands around it and dragged it across her throat.

  “They sent me back to the window. Quinn was due, but Koozeman, that crazy man, he was intent on his work of art. Starr and Emma Sue left the gallery. I stayed by the window, crying, waiting for it to be over. When Koozeman was done with them, he forced me to look at what he had done with the bodies.”

  Andrew looked at Sabra. “Well, you saw what he did. You were there. When Koozeman had cleaned himself up and put on his clothes, he dragged me through the door in the wall. You and your brother were just coming in as we were leaving.”

  He bowed his head. “I remember you wore that fabulous multicolored coat. I saw you as the door was closing. You looked so much like Aubry. Koozeman watched you and your brother through the pinhole. He couldn’t resist. He wanted to see how his work would be received. You were to be his first critics. I left by the back door. I ran all the way home.”

  When the story was done, Sabra rose and walked to the back of the terrace where the fire escape ladder cropped up from the low wall. She reached out to the curled rail of the ladder.

  Mallory lifted her gun. “I can’t let you go.”

  “I don’t think I’ll get far, but I don’t want to end here.” Sabra lifted her head. “You understand?”

  Mallory nodded. “But I can’t-”

  Sabra walked back to her. She brought her face close to Mallory’s and kissed her cheek. “Yes, yes you can.” Then Sabra returned to the low wall at the edge of the terrace and lowered herself over the side and down the rungs of the fire escape.

  Mallory walked to the ladder and watched the descent. Sabra climbed down slowly; blood smeared the handholds and dripped to the rungs below her feet. She slipped and lost one foothold and then the other. She hung there for a moment, and then she was falling, screaming out as she fell past all the dark windows. She landed on a large metal trash bin parked below. She lay spread-eagled among the garbage, her head twisted at an unnatural angle.

  An ambulance was parked outside the apartment building. The screaming sirens of two police units pulled up alongside of Riker’s car, all their spinning cherry lights flashing codes of fear and urgency to all the civilians hanging from open windows and clustering on the sidewalk. The young uniformed officers moved quickly out of their cars and into the building, guns drawn. As Riker left his own car, he heard the scream. It came from the alley to one side of the building. He ran into the narrow breach between the brick walls.

  An old woman was spread out on the trash, which was piled high and overflowing the large metal bin. He didn’t need to reach out and touch her to know that she was dead. He stepped back and looked up to see Mallory leaning far out over the ledge of a terrace.

  “No!” she yelled, as though ordering him to undo this death.

  He held his breath as she swung her long legs over the side of the building and hung for a moment in the air, trying to gain a foothold on the slippery ladder, descending now to the fire escape. She skimmed the stairs with her running shoes, moving with fluid speed down the zigzag of the ironwork. When she was level with the trash bin she jumped from the fire escape and landed on her feet beside the body of the old woman.

  “She’s gone, kid,” said Riker, as she knelt down beside the corpse. “I’ll put in a call for the meatwagon.”

  Mallory eased herself off the trash bin, her running shoes slapping hard against the cement. She reached over the rim of the bin and tugged at the body.

  “Hold it, Mallory. The meatwagon will take her.”

  “No! Not like this.” She pulled Sabra’s body into a slide, passing it down the rubble of ripped plastic bags, eggshells and coffee grounds. She received the dead woman into her arms, and stood there for a moment, holding this ragged burden as though it weighed nothing. Then, slowly, so gently, Mallory laid the body down, taking great care in settling the corpse to the ground, as though afraid of causing the dead woman any more pain.

  The alley was protected from the flashing lights, the noise and energy of the street. No wind blew here, no dust stirred as Mallory arranged the body in the pose of sleep.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the dead woman, as her hand moved across the face to close Sabra’s eyes. She folded the rag doll arms across the breast. “I’m sorry.”

  Riker watched Mallory at her ministrations, gentle as a mother with a child. Deep inside of him, permanent damage was being done as the roles reversed again, and he watched the child bending down to the mother to kiss her brow and say good night.

  When Mallory stood up and moved toward him, there was no emotion in her face, and that frightened him. He reached out to catch her arm as she stalked past him. She shook him off and continued down the alley toward the street. He watched her retreat for a moment, then looked back to the corpse on the ground. Caught in that sad middleground between the living and the dead, he didn’t know his own place in the world anymore, but thought he might have overstayed his life.

  The first thing Riker noticed about his apartment was the smell of fresh air which had displaced the stale odors of garbage and ashtrays filled to overflowing.

  He turned on the light and blinked twice. He had forgotten the color of the braided area rug in the living room. Gone was the litter of pizza boxes and old newspapers which had once protected it from dust. And he could see city lights beyond the window glass for the first time in the ten years he had lived in this apartment. The two-years-dead houseplant had been replaced with a live one.

  He moved on to the bathroom. Everything was in order, every fixture sparkled and the porcelain gleamed. He pulled back the shower curtain. The garden of fungus no longer grew on the tiles of the stall.

  Oddly enough, she had not made good on her threat to toss out the plastic Jesus night-light. She had only cleaned it, and now it glowed even brighter. Perhaps she thought he might need guidance in the dark hours when his drunk’s bladder awakened him.

  It was predictable that the kitchen would be spotless, but inside the refrigerator all his beer bottles were upright glass soldiers, standing in formation. He pulled out one cold bottle and wandered into the bedroom.

  He opened the drawer by his bed to see each thing perfectly aligned and all debris cleared away. In the back of the drawer was the small yellowed envelope with his wedding ring and the rainy day bullet with his name on it. He picked up the envelope, hefted it in one hand and found it was light by a few ounces. He crushed the paper in a tight fist and felt only the hard substance of the ring.

  Mallory. She had stolen the bullet.

  He sat down on the bed, popped the cap off his beer bottle, lit a cigarette and decided to live.

  “When will you people ever learn to lock your doors? This is New York City.”

  Charles looked up as Mallory cleared the foyer of Henrietta’s apartment and entered the front room.

  Oh, God, no.

  There was blood on her face and the front of her T-shirt, and smears on the arms of her blazer. He was rising from his chair when she raised one hand to stay him.
“Charles, it’s not my blood. Sit down.” He did as he was told.

  Mallory in bloodstains and blue jeans was so at odds with delicate flowers in crystal vases, small pieces of sculpture and rose-colored afghans-all the ultrafeminine trappings of Henrietta’s front room. Mallory slung the fencing bag on the floor and knelt beside it to remove the antique sabers. He had not missed them all day.

  “Thanks for the loan, Charles.”

  The loan? You stole them.

  “Mallory!” Henrietta was standing in the hallway, her face in shock.

  “It’s not my blood,” said Mallory, weary of having to explain this simple fact to everyone.

  Henrietta came into the room as the swords were pulled from the long leather bag. “Well, that explains a lot.” She walked over to the couch where Quinn lay in his bandages, a blanket and a deep sleep.

  “Quinn didn’t tell you about the fencing match?”

  “No. I did ask him about the cuts while I was stitching him up, but he wouldn’t talk. I told him he was going to have some scars, and he didn’t seem to mind that at all. I think he was almost pleased with them. Men,” said Henrietta, as though that word encompassed the explanation for every flaw of his gender.

  Charles wondered what word she might choose to explain Mallory. No doubt it would be a long word with a psychiatric subtext.

  Henrietta was holding Quinn’s wrist and looking at her watch, timing the pulse.

  “Will he be all right?” Mallory might have been asking if Henrietta thought it would rain.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” said Henrietta, “but he’ll be fine in the morning. I pumped him up with antibiotics and gave him a strong sedative. He’ll sleep for at least another six hours. I’ll take good care of him.” Henrietta handed Mallory a wet cloth which had been intended for Quinn’s brow.

  “Thanks.” Mallory rose to her feet, and now Charles could see the day had taken a toll on her. She was tired, and moving sluggishly as she wiped the blood from her face.