Stone Angel

by Carol O’Connell

  “I hope there was a deed restriction,” said Charles. “You’re not planning to burn this place or let it rot?”

  “Mallory made those very stipulations.” Augusta grinned and went off to see to Riker’s glass, which was in danger of going empty.

  The bandaged detective was comfortably ensconced in a well-padded armchair with a footstool. The plaster cast on his arm had been autographed by pretty nurses, state troopers and the lovely Lilith Beaudare. He was enjoying the role of invalid, only needing to glance at the table to have his every wish fulfilled. Augusta had taken a liking to Riker. The rest of the company were left to fend for themselves. The sheriff and his deputy poured their own wine while Augusta and Riker shared a cloud of smoke from cigarette and cheroot.

  Charles looked through the wide doorway to see Mallory standing before the library fireplace. The wind rattled the panes all around the house. A draft found entry through an open chimney vent, and a small flurry of dust swirled about the brick hearth at her feet.

  So you’ve come home again, Mallory. Was it everything you thought it would be? You have your revenge – the thing you wanted most – and what do you think of it now? You only stand there, waiting for the dust to settle in the chimney.

  She was such a closed and private person.

  Augusta was right. He would never have answers to all his questions, and he knew better than to voice the most personal ones. So the queries went round and round his brain, blind bats every one, all doomed to fly in endless circles.

  As to why she had chosen the name Mallory, he liked his theory that it was her father’s name, but she would tell him nothing about the man. Or perhaps she cared nothing for antecedents. Louis Markowitz had been her father from the age of ten, and apparently he was father enough.

  Mallory turned to catch Charles staring at her. As she was walking back to him, she stopped by the doorway to pick up the carton of her mother’s personal possessions. She set it down near the foyer, for soon they would load it into the car. The party was almost over.

  Now that they were all together in one room. Augusta proposed a toast to the long road home. Charles turned to Mallory.

  And where is home now?

  Tomorrow morning she would drive back to New York with him, but how long would she remain there? He resolved that home was neither what nor where, but a person, and it was highly unlikely that she would ever come home to him; one only visited with friends. However, her friendship was no small thing, not something he settled for, but something -

  Yeah, right. As Mallory would say.

  Charles ceased to tell himself comfort lies and looked down at his watch. It was nearly time to pick up Riker’s bags at the hotel before dropping him off at the airport.

  The glasses were drained, the door was opening, and now one of Charles’s unsolved riddles left the formation of circling bats and flew into the room. “Will someone tell me who killed Babe Laurie?”

  Riker had not appreciated that, and did his best to pretend he had not heard it. Henry only smiled pleasantly, inscrutable, taking no sides in this matter. Tom Jessop stood with one hand on the door he had held open for Lilith, who had escaped. The sheriff was not so lucky, for Charles was looking directly at him and smiling in expectation.

  The sheriff’s face relaxed in good-natured surrender. “Off the record?”

  “If you like.”

  “It was Fred Laurie. He’s been missing ever since Kathy’s dog disappeared. The little bastard tried to kill Good Dog once before. So I figure he took care of that piece of unfinished business before he ran. I got two witnesses to put him in those woods with a rifle.”

  Well, that would neatly clear up the murder of a dog. But it wasn’t even -

  “It works for me.” Augusta was polishing an imaginary spot on her wineglass.

  Mallory was examining the floorboards, saying, “I suppose Babe’s son is the motive?”

  “Yeah, I tend to favor that one,” said the sheriff. “The boy belonged to Fred, not Babe. So one of them snapped, and they had it out on the road. I already wrote up the report and put out a warrant for Fred Laurie’s arrest.”

  A look passed between Mallory and Augusta, but Charles could not decipher it. In another minute, he found that he could, but he didn’t want to. In fact, he went to a great deal of trouble to abort an idea at the moment of creation. He managed to altogether eliminate one of the myriad questions in the bat room of his mind, and he ceased to ponder how many bodies might lie at the tip of Finger Bayou.

  All he knew for certain was that Fred Laurie had not killed his brother.

  That much he had gleaned from the tone of liars coming to agreement on the fine points.

  “What’s the evidence against Fred Laurie?” asked Charles, knowing he was alienating everyone in the room. “Don’t you need something besides suspicion to back up a warrant?”

  “I’ve got Travis’s deathbed confession,” said Jessop. “He named Fred as the killer. Riker signed a statement to back it up.”

  Charles turned to Riker, who found his pack of matches most engrossing, examining them as a strange and rare artifact he had just pulled from his pocket.

  The sheriff broke the silence. “Hey, Riker, why don’t we get back to town and pick up your bags? I’ll take you out to the airport myself.”

  Riker seemed to like this idea. Of course he did, and he was already moving out the door.

  The sheriff turned to Mallory. “Coming back for the trial? Not that we’re short of witnesses. They’re crawling all over each other to turn state’s evidence.”

  She shook her head. “I’m done with this place.” After the last goodbyes were said in the driveway, and Riker had made his getaway with the sheriff, Charles lifted the heavy carton into the backseat of the silver Mercedes.

  Something had begun to tick, and it was regular as a clock. He looked at Mallory, not suspecting that she was harboring a bomb among her mother’s things, but it did tick.

  “It’s a metronome,” she said. “The pendulum must have come loose.”

  As they slid into the front seat, he asked, “Do you remember Ira’s piano lessons at all?”

  She nodded. “We played duets. There were two pianos in the house then, my mother’s baby grand and an old player piano. Sometimes Ira and I would race each other through the music.”

  The metronome ticked off four beats in a measure. The cacophony of birdsongs in the surrounding trees refused to conform to the rhythm.

  “Mallory, why did he come to the house that day? Did your mother continue his music lessons after Ira’s father stopped the therapy?”

  “The therapy never stopped. Ira missed her. He kept showing up at the house on his regular schedule. His father was supposed to be watching him while Darlene was working, but he wasn’t much of a baby-sitter. So there was Ira, standing out in the yard. My mother couldn’t turn him away.”

  Charles sat with the ignition key in his hand. The metronome was slowing its ticks, filling each measure with a single note. The birds were singing louder, faster, in such a rush to get the music out. Tomorrow morning, when they were on the road and beyond the reach of Augusta’s sanctuary, it would be all too quiet, miles of road and -

  “You never asked me if I killed Babe Laurie,” said Mallory.

  “I didn’t need to. He was hit from behind with a rock – not your style. Now if they’d found him with a nice symmetrical bullet hole and less mess, that would’ve been quite different.” He turned back for one last look at the Shelley house as he put the car in gear. “But I had the feeling that I was the only one in that room who didn’t know the killer’s name.”

  “Not true, Charles. Riker and Augusta have their own ideas, but they’re wrong.”

  “And the sheriff?”

  She turned away from him now. “No one cares who killed Babe Laurie. It just doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m so sick of hearing that. I care.” The car moved out of the yard, and then he brought it to a sudden stop o
n the dirt road. “Are you saying the sheriff knows, and he’s not doing anything about it? You know too, don’t you?”

  Of course she did. But she kept her silence. Why had he even bothered to ask? Well, he sometimes forgot that she still followed the children’s code of not ratting on thy coconspirator.

  “Hints, Mallory? Anything at all?”

  She looked at him for a moment, perhaps weighing trust, as if that were in question after everything she had put him through. The metronome made a tick. He waited for the next beat, but the seconds dragged by. Then it ticked again.

  “There’s no proof,” she said.

  “Fine, I’m not looking to make a citizen’s arrest. But if you don’t give me a sporting chance to work this out, I’ll go stark raving mad.”

  “I told you the hospital was storing old hardcopy files on the mainframe. When the clerk scanned Ira’s first hospital record, she must have seen the old lab report for VD. She flagged his computer entry for a prior child abuse. When I hacked into the hospital computer, there was no file in the system yet, just the flag, Ira’s name and the disease.”

  “Child abuse? But he was no longer a child.” He held up one hand. “No, wait – I’ve got it. Tell me if I’m wrong. I know Ira’s diagnosis was changed from autism to profound retardation.” In the absence of a separate facility to treat autism, that was the only way to qualify him for a state therapy program. “That and his dependency on his mother gave him the legal status of a minor child. Right?”

  “Right. So when Darlene brought Ira into the emergency room with his broken hands, the abuse flag came up on the computer. The hospital was obliged to call the sheriff.”

  The metronome never ticked again.

  Riker had mastered the art of one-armed packing in ten minutes flat. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and wadded up his underwear the better to smash it into his suitcase. Normally, he never moved this quickly, but he was almost home free and not taking any chances. The metal clasps snapped shut. Done.

  But too late.

  Shit!

  “Not so fast.” Charles Butler was leaning against the doorframe, all but wearing a No Exit sign around his neck.

  Riker sank down on the bed beside his suitcase. He wished he had a drink. He had been looking forward to a comfortable chair in the airport bar and maybe swapping a few war stories with Tom Jessop.

  “About Travis’s deathbed confession.” Charles closed the door behind him. “Why did you back up the sheriff in a lie?”

  “I think you know.” But now it dawned on the detective that knowledge and belief were different things in Charles’s strange relationship with Mallory, this blind friendship which kept her cloaked in innocence despite every bit of evidence to the contrary. Riker had a more pragmatic form of loyalty. If Mallory had shot an elderly nun in a wheelchair, he would assume the nun had it coming to her.

  “So you still believe Mallory did it.”

  “The motive is pretty strong.” Riker was making an effort to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Derision was undeserved. Charles’s blindness touched him as nothing else ever had. “She also had opportunity and no alibi.”

  “Because Babe was in that mob? The logic is a bit flawed, isn’t it? Travis was there too, but she saved his life. You must realize she couldn’t have had any idea who was in that mob. She was inside the house, locked in a – ”

  “She could hear everything from her bedroom, Charles. Listen to the birds.”

  Charles turned to the closed window. The tree in the yard was indeed full of singing birds, and their voices easily penetrated the glass. And now that he paid attention, he could hear Betty on the front porch. She was greeting new guests. The voices of a man and a woman were not so clear as the birds, but he could pick out the odd word in their conversation.

  “Augusta gave me a tour of the Shelley house,” said Riker. “I saw the kid’s room. Did you notice the window near the top of the closet? I never saw a thing like that before. Augusta said the closet window was pretty common in old houses built before electric lights. Now Mallory couldn’t have seen anything. It was too high up for a little kid. But you know she heard something – maybe not Travis’s voice, but something, maybe just a few words. She wouldn’t have understood what was happening, but she put it all together when she saw her mother after they were done with her. I told you the kid had more to work with than the sheriff did.”

  “Travis only stoned a dog. Alma was there too, but she took her rock home with her. If Mallory heard – ”

  “Charles, drop it.”

  “That mob was Malcolm’s work, not Babe’s.”

  “The whole mob is accountable – that’s the law. For Christ’s sake, that’s even Mallory’s law!” Riker held his silence for a moment, calling back his temper.

  “You’re right, Charles. Malcolm had to implicate every witness at that meeting, everyone who might’ve led the sheriff back to the letter, the blue letter. But even if some of them didn’t throw rocks, they all watched that woman die. They never moved to help her, they never told. There are no innocent people here.”

  Riker walked to the window and pulled up the sash. The sheriff was leaning against his car in the street below. “Hey, Tom. Two minutes, okay?”

  “Take your time.”

  Riker closed the window again, and now he turned around to finish off Charles Butler. But gently, he cautioned himself.

  “Oh, yeah, I think she did it. That’s why I backed up the sheriff on that bullshit confession. At the time, I was just so happy that Mallory didn’t take out the whole town.”

  Oh, wait. She did take out Owltown. It was level ground now, wasn’t it? Ah, but most of the human casualties were only punctured and burned.

  Charles only stared at him with sad eyes.

  “What do you want from me?” Riker picked up his suitcase and set it near the door as a hint that Charles might move away from the room’s only exit. No good. The big man showed no signs of moving.

  “I’m not gonna recant that statement, Charles. There’s no point in it. The sheriff doesn’t care who killed Babe Laurie. Nobody does.” No one except for himself and Charles. But Mallory was well out of it now. She was going to get away with murder.

  “It wasn’t Mallory,” said Charles. “I know that for a fact – I’m not going on blind faith this time. Does it matter a bit more now?”

  Riker felt something close to that weightless moment in an elevator when the contents of his stomach rose and fell. Because he had never known Charles to run a bluff, the detective was experiencing every cop’s waking nightmare. The outlaw act, that one step across the line, was about to come back on him. He would have been more comfortable with the premonition that his plane was going to crash.

  “No, it doesn’t matter.” Riker was lying, of course. He had always been the victim’s paladin – until now. Loving Mallory had cost him a great deal. “Babe Laurie raped two kids that we know about. How many more? That murder was a public service.”

  No, murder was never that. It was the worst crime. All his feelings for Mallory had been altered by it. He was sorry and sick at -

  “Well, you only have Jimmy Simms’s statement to back that up,” said Charles. “You wrote it down as he was telling it, didn’t you? It must have been difficult to be coherent while he was crying.”

  “Are you telling me I missed something?” It was the last question he wanted answered. Charles seemed to intuit this and kept his silence.

  “Charles, why are you doing this to me?”

  “I just wanted to be sure that you weren’t playing the blind man this time around. So you don’t want to know who killed Babe? It doesn’t matter? Fine.”

  Charles turned to go.

  “Wait. Who was it?”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Riker. Either you care or you don’t. I’m surprised that you would even ask. Suppose it was the sheriff? You know, I rather like him. Oh, did I mention that he had motive, opportunity and no alibi? But I’m su
re you’d be happy to excuse him too. Isn’t that one of the perks of your job – all your friends get away with murder?”

  “The sheriff? Are you saying – ”

  “I’m not saying who did it. I know – but you don’t care.”

  “Who killed him, Charles?”

  “It doesn’t matter – your very words.” He walked to the door and opened it wide.

  “Don’t make me nuts. Who -?”

  “Have a good flight home, Riker.”

  The door was pulled shut.

  Riker ceased to hear the birds anymore. He stood by the window, looking down on the sheriff’s car. Cops could not kill their suspects, not ever – that was Riker’s law. But now he finally believed in Mallory. His suspicions of the man waiting below were a lesser sickness and easier to live with.

  Thank you, Charles.

  Ira was asleep in a soft nest of white bandages and linen sheets. His mother sat by the bed, reading a magazine. Darlene Wooley was not wearing a suit today. A simple dark skirt and blouse accentuated the pallor of her skin, and Charles wondered if she had seen the sun even once in the past four days.

  Darlene looked up at him and smiled. She folded back a page of the magazine to mark her place, then looked quickly to Ira, as though this rustle of paper could have disturbed his sleep. She motioned Charles to join her in the hall outside the room.

  Softly, she pulled the door closed behind them, saying, “It’s his first day out of the intensive care unit. His doctor says he’s going to be just fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I have some good news for you. Let me buy you a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.”

  As they walked down the corridor, he noted that Darlene did not fill out her clothes anymore, and her nails were bitten down to the quick and raw.

  “You know,” said Darlene, “when he’s awake, he lets me hold his hand. I’m sure he still hates to be touched. I think it’s sort of like he’s giving me a present.”

  Her fingers went mechanically to her mouth. Suddenly self-conscious of the ragged nails, she drove both her hands deep into the pockets of her skirt. “When Ira was little, he used to bring me flowers from Cass’s garden. I always thought she made him do that, maybe as part of his therapy. But Mallory said no. When she came by last night, she told me Ira always asked Cass if he could pick flowers for his mother.”