Shell Game

by Carol O’Connell

  „Kathy, that’s enough!“ said the rabbi, breaking the spell she had cast over the room. „This is his wife’s death you’re discussing. It’s – “

  „Very rude,“ said Dr. Slope. „And presumptuous. I can think of three fast poisons that would’ve produced froth and retinal hemorrhage.“

  „Poison is unreliable,“ said Mallory, as if she were exchanging cookie recipes with the medical examiner. „Smothering is better – no obvious marks on the throat, no chemical residue in the body.“ She spoke to the empty seat at the table. „Who killed you, Louisa?“

  Malakhai slowly turned his head toward the phantom. „She declines to answer.“

  Mallory smiled. „I thought she might. Did she tell you to call a lawyer?“ The rabbi slammed his hand flat on the table. „Kathy!“ Mallory feigned surprise, but not well. „I didn’t accuse him.“ Dr. Slope folded his arms across his chest, completely disengaged from the game. „What did the local coroner say?“

  Malakhai shrugged. „There was no autopsy, no investigation.“ Mallory nodded. „It was easier for the local police to write up the death as accidental, less paperwork – as long as no one protested the finding. And I’m betting you didn’t. What a lucky break for the killer.“ She pushed her chair back from the table. „I think I’ve made my point on accidental death.“

  „But not proved it,“ said Malakhai. „If you can prove murder more than fifty years after the fact, I’ll tell you how Max Candle did the Lost Illusion.“

  The weight of personality was dipping back toward Malakhai’s side of the table. He was calling her out.

  All eyes were turned on Mallory.

  „I told you, Malakhai – I don’t need your help. And I don’t need incentive either. Oliver dedicated his last trick to your wife. Maybe he was feeling guilty. Maybe you were angry. If I find out he’s the one who killed Louisa, you’re going to need a good criminal lawyer.“

  „The detective in charge said the matter was closed – accidental death. The key was an old one. He said it was clear – “

  She raised one hand to cut him off. „Oliver did restoration work on old buildings. Not just the woodwork – old screws, pipes, rails. The old man had a lot of experience with metal fatigue. He didn’t risk his life on a fifty-year-old cuff key.“

  „That’s your opinion.“

  „That’s a fact,“ said Mallory. „He ordered new keys from a machine shop he did business with. I checked that out three hours ago.“

  But if Charles recalled the events of the day – and he did – she was still eating pizza in his kitchen only two hours ago.

  „The new keys were a better grade of steel – stronger,“ said Mallory.

  Malakhai waved a hand to dismiss her argument – her lie. „So Oliver confused a new key with an old one.“

  „Sorry,“ said Mallory, not at all sorry. „The machinist still has the old one. He kept it for a reorder. Oliver wanted ten keys. According to the shop foreman, he used a new one for every rehearsal. Now that was a little extreme, wasn’t it? Unnecessary, even with his life on the line. I suppose you could say he was paranoid about metal fatigue.“

  Had she gone too far that time? Charles remembered Oliver as a trusting soul who had done business contracts on a handshake, hardly a paranoid personality. But a great many years had passed since Oliver and Malakhai had met. And Mallory was such a confident deceiver, the magician appeared to believe her, electing not to argue the point. „Perhaps he had more than one old key?“

  „Wrong again,“ said Mallory. „Oliver told the machinist to keep it safe. Said it was his only key, a souvenir from Faustine’s Magic Theater. You performed there, too. I’d bet even money you had a key just like it. Still got yours?“

  „You seriously – “

  „I know you’re part of this, Malakhai. You’re just too damn helpful in showing me the error of my ways.“

  Malakhai smiled with just a trace of condescension.

  „No,“ she said. „You only think I tipped my hand by accident. Wherever you go, keep looking over your shoulder. I’ll be right behind you – and that should worry you. Just ask anyone at this table how twisted I really am.“

  Robin Duffy looked up with great surprise, as though she had shot him in the heart.

  Mallory turned to the rabbi, who knew her better than all the rest of this company. Her face was an open challenge, defying David Kaplan to deny it – waiting for him to contradict her. And now she must realize that she would wait forever.

  The rabbi turned away from her.

  While Charles was casting about for words to say in her favor, it was Edward Slope who came gallantly riding to Mallory’s defense.

  The doctor put one arm around her shoulders and slowly shook his head in denial of her twistedness. Then he leaned toward Malakhai. „Watch your back. You’ve seen what she does to puppies.“

  Chapter 6

  At the back of Charles Butler’s building, the private office was sheltered from the noise and the tourist hustle of SoHo streets. It overlooked a city garden of monster weeds, trash cans and their attendant rats, but high-pitched squeals and the scrabbles of tiny nails did not penetrate the closed windows of the second floor. The room was furnished with cold metal and decorated with extreme order and death. Mallory never saw this as metaphor, but seriously believed that these environs gave no clue to her personality.

  Three computer monitors were perfectly aligned on their separate workstations, soldiers in formation, and each machine had one glowing blue eye. They reported in silent scrolls of text rolling down their screens. One wall of shelves held peripheral electronics, boxes of disks, tools and manuals. The adjacent wall was clear of obstruction from the floorboards to the ceiling molding. Tonight it served as a giant video screen for the taped homicide in Central Park, and Oliver Tree was performing his final act. Mallory set the projection to loop endlessly, to murder the old man, then resurrect him and kill him again and again.

  Charles Butler had offered her the warmth of wooden antiques to replace her steel file cabinets, desk and chairs. He had suggested drapes to kill the coldness of the institutional window blinds. And he thought a painting or two might break the monotony of the wall where Oliver Tree was bleeding from four sharp arrows, hanging dead in his chains.

  But she preferred her own simple furnishings. They could be reassembled within any set of stark white walls, and she would feel instantly at home in familiar, albeit sterile, surroundings. The surface of the metal workstation was cold to the touch. In deference to her machines, she kept the room temperature several degrees below the range of human comfort.

  In the next loop of the projected magic show, Oliver was alive again on the wall, screaming for help and only bleeding from the wound to his neck.

  Her chair rolled back from a monitor. After a few quiet hours of research, some of it legal, she had found no trace of Louisa Malakhai. One after another, archivists had lamented that there were no portraits, no certificates of birth or death, no tangible proof that the young composer had ever existed – except for the music, opus number one and only, Louisa’s Concerto.

  Mallory reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out Louisa Malakhai’s passport. She stared at the mutilated black-and-white photograph inside the cover. Around the scratched-out face were long waving tresses. The light shade must have been the color of bright fire, for Emile St. John had alluded to a red-haired woman.

  The passport was Czechoslovakian, but the Interpol connection had turned up no record of Czech citizenship. She flipped through the pages to the last customs stamp. It dated Louisa’s arrival in France to August of 1942. Mallory turned back to the previous stamps and examined them more closely.

  Fake? Yes.

  Only the final mark was reliable. So Louisa must have used this passport to enter the country. But the letters and numbers of previous stamps were made by the pen of an artist, and not a civil servant with an ink pad. Clever. A new passport might have borne closer scrutiny in wartime
Europe. Inside the cover, a circular embossing overlapped the photograph. This raised seal had very few imperfections.

  She returned the passport to the pocket of her blazer, where it kept company with Louisa’s French identity card, which had expired late in 1942.

  On to Paris?

  She looked at the clock on the wall. Just past midnight – too early to go traveling on the Internet. Her European connection would not be at his desk for hours.

  Originally, she had cultivated the Interpol man te steal from him, to raid data from his foreign network. But now, she looked forward to his conversations printing across her screen. Because English was not his first language, he was precise in his phrasing, no idiomatic speech or slang. His text was economical, clean and cold. Like the coupling of machines, their intercourse never deviated from software and hardware.

  The foreign policeman was her only friend – or the only one not passed down by her foster father, not inherited along with the old man’s pocket watch.

  One red fingernail touched the power switch, and the screen went dark. Mallory swiveled her chair toward the wall where Oliver Tree was taking another arrow into his flesh. She watched with detachment, her mind elsewhere, as the next arrow pierced the old man’s heart, and blood streamed over the white breast of his shirt. She switched him off, giving Oliver a respite from his screaming agony, his repetitive dying.

  Notebook and pen in hand, Mallory jotted down the data she would need from the platform that took up so much space in the basement. She planned to shrink it to numbers and graphics the size of a monitor screen.

  Locking the office door behind her, Mallory treaded quietly past Charles’s residence and on down the hall. Even before she cracked the stairwell door, she could hear the strains of music and a woman in deep pain. She recognized the voice at once – Billie Holiday.

  Some blues fan was playing the old record albums on the turntable stored in the cellar.

  Mallory leaned over the railing and looked down through the winding wrought-iron staircase. Harsh naked bulbs cast shadows of twisting metal all along two flights of the curved wall. Descending the spiraling stairs, she listened to the song recorded in the early years of a brief career.

  Thanks to her foster father, Mallory’s musical education was peerless. At twelve years of age, she could name every record cut by Billie Holiday. Markowitz had called her Lady Day. This song was from the thirties, the high time of the lady’s short life, cutting loose, taking no prisoners, full-out song of songs.

  Mallory pulled out her revolver.

  The music ended abruptly when she reached the next landing, one flight away from the basement, as the next song began. The intruder had changed the record and the era. Now it was 1946, and the lady’s voice had coarsened.

  Mallory paused on the stairs. The high volume of the record player did not bode well for a covert burglary. She knew it wasn’t Charles down there. He only cared for classical music. But he might have left the partition unlocked.

  She slid her revolver back into the holster.

  So which one of Charles’s tenants might be in the cellar? The third-floor psychiatrist only played rock ‘n’ roll. And the top-floor minimalist artist didn’t listen to anything but the white static between the stations on his radio.

  She touched down on the bottom step. The old song ended in the middle of a lyric, and a more recent one began. It was 1955 and Billie Holiday was near the end of her career, three years away from her death at a jazz festival.

  Mallory pushed open the stairwell door. Beyond the long field of black shadows, a tall crack of light split the accordion wall. She decided not to use the flashlight on top of the fuse box. If this turned out to be a learning-disabled burglar, she didn’t want to be an obvious target in the dark.

  The record had hardly begun when the cut changed again. Lady Day was singing in the fog of London Town as Mallory drew near the partition. She looked down at the large, old-fashioned padlock. It was closed, and the chain was still laced through holes in the joining sections of wood. There was room enough for a hand to fit through the divide, but why would the intruder close the lock behind him?

  And what recording was he searching for? Another tune began in 1958, when Billie Holiday was close to death.

  Mallory reached into the pocket of her jeans. Her fingers closed on the rod of keys she had pocketed this morning. She held it up to the long crack of light in the partition, unscrewed the metal ball at the top of the shaft and selected the key post that Charles had called a Boer War master. The old padlock fell open, and she silently guided the chain out of the wooden holes.

  She used both hands to push against the slats of the folding wall, wincing at the unwelcome noise of unoiled hinges and the wheels of sliding panels moving across the metal tracks in the floor.

  And now she was looking at the tall intruder’s back as he bent over the record player and moved the needle to the next cut on the album, a Duke Ellington classic. Lady Day sang, „If you hear a song in blue – “

  Apparently, this was the recording he had been searching for. He moved away from the old turntable and walked toward the open wardrobe trunk. His hands were busy at the drawers when she came up behind him.

  Malakhai must realize that he was not alone anymore. Her presence had been announced by loud creaking wood and grinding metal, yet he seemed unconcerned, not even bothering to turn around.

  This was insulting.

  The magician shifted his attention to the garments hanging on the other side of the wardrobe trunk. The white suit was where she had left it this morning, spread across the other clothes on the rack. The satin gleamed as it flowed over his hand.

  „I think this will fit you, Mallory.“ He slowly turned his head to show her his smiling profile. „A woman of your word. I look over my shoulder – and there you are.“ His hand brushed a lapel of the white suit. „You’re Louisa’s size. Do you want it?“

  „It’s not your property to give away.“

  „Oh, but it is. Ask Charles.“ The wave of his arm included all the surrounding stacks of cartons stamped with Faustine’s name. „Max left me all the props, the wardrobe, everything from the theater in Paris. I just never bothered to collect it.“

  Malakhai opened a drawer and pulled out a black silk disk. With a quick turn of his wrist and a snap, the full crown of a top hat sprang from its center. He set it on his head. „Faustine bought this for me. I was her apprentice.“

  Mallory nodded to the trunk. „Did Faustine buy those clothes for Louisa?“

  „No, she never met my wife. The Germans came to town one morning in 1940, and the old woman died that afternoon. Mere coincidence, of course. Faustine never met the German Army either.“

  Mallory looked up at the air-shaft window in the rear wall. The glass and the bars were intact. „How did you get in here? Did Charles let you in?“

  One hand rose in a dismissive gesture. „Oh please. I was passing through locked doors before he was born.“

  Mallory folded her arms in the posture that said, Yeah, right. She was not impressed with his criminal potential. „So you turn on all the lights and crank up the music way too loud. Then you lock the door behind you – so no one will know you’re here? Am I missing something?“

  „I’ve confused you. Sorry.“

  Not confusing at all. He had probably relocked the door so he would not be interrupted while rifling the trunk. She held up the rod of master keys. „I guess you have one of these. Makes it a lot easier, doesn’t it?“

  The music ended. Billie Holiday was gone.

  Good. She had had enough of dead women for one night.

  Malakhai lit a cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke as he sat down on a packing crate. A crowbar lay amid splinters of wood on the cement floor. A second plume of smoke rose from an ashtray atop a short stack of cardboard boxes. The filter bore the ruby imprint of a mouth.

  Malakhai was staring at her, as he removed his tweed jacket and rolled back the blue sil
k shirtsleeves. His brows were rising, eyes widening in expectation, all but commanding Mallory to speak. But she saw this form of manipulation as her own job, not his, and she turned away from him to survey the surrounding crates. Half of the lids had been pried open.

  He picked up the crowbar and set to work on another one.

  „What are you looking for?“

  „A case of wine.“ He put his weight on the crowbar, and the top of the crate lifted with the crack of breaking wood and tiny squeals of rusted nails. He looked down at the exposed contents, shaking his head. „Not here either.“

  Malakhai dropped the crowbar on the floor and sauntered back to the wardrobe trunk. He pulled out a suit of black sequins. It glittered with a million reflections of the lamplight, so dazzling, almost distracting her from Malakhai’s covert search of the pockets.

  „Now you must take this one. Louisa insists.“ He held it out to Mallory. „My wife says blondes look wonderful in black.“

  She let the garment shimmer in the air between them, dangling from the hanger in his outstretched hand.

  Malakhai nodded his understanding. „As you like.“ He returned the suit to the rack. „But later, you’ll come back for it.“ He glanced toward the space above the ashtray and its smoking cigarette, then smiled at Mallory.

  „Louisa says you won’t be able to resist her clothes.“ He watched the plume of smoke for a moment, then nodded, as if in agreement. „The sequins will call out your name. They won’t let you sleep until you give in.“