Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  “Annie.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I’m going to change my life.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Annie had her own style—minimalism. Each day, she wore the same dress, a classic black shift which never showed stains. He often wondered if she washed it out each night, or might she have a closetful. In the time he had known her, she had gone from salt and pepper to solid white hair. Her fingernails went everywhere naked, and she wore slippers around the department store. He tolerated the slippers and the lack of polish because he loved her best.

  “You know, Annie, I worry about this place when the lights go out. But I imagine the security is rather good. I suppose they just let a pack of dogs roam at will—something like that?”

  “No, the dogs go around with a guard. Employees have been here pretty late some nights.”

  “So they give the employees lots of overtime, do they?”

  “No, dear. That was in the holiday season. No one does overtime this time of year.”

  “Annie, tell me more about the store security. I find this fascinating.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Riker turned on the wall switch and an overhead light bounced off the rows of metal filing cabinets. There was no one on duty in the records room this time of night, no one to remind him that the law forbade smoking in public buildings. The antismoking activists closed in on him tighter and tighter every day—for his own good, they said. But though he coughed himself to sleep every night, and the stale smell of smoke clung to all his clothes, this dirty and unhealthy habit had become more and more attractive. Now it was a bona fide sport, a real challenge to find the odd room where he would not be caught. He reached in his pocket for the outlaw cigarettes.

  He heard the door open behind him, but had no time to turn around before a hand grasped his shoulder. It was not a warm and friendly grasp. Riker turned to face a young man with unruly blond hair and the much put-out pout of a giant five-year-old with a goatee. Dr. Daily was the newest staffer of the Medical Examiner’s Office, and the younger man was wearing a very unfriendly expression. Riker looked down at the hand riding the material of his suit. Riker’s expression said, Back off.

  Daily’s hand dropped to his side.

  Prick.

  “Well, Daily, you’re working late tonight.”

  “All right, Detective, what’s the deal? Why does NYPD want Slope to redo my autopsy?”

  “Nothing personal, Doc. We were just wondering how that ice pick could’ve ruptured the heart from the back. We only want a second opinion is all.”

  “It was an ice pick. For Christ’s sake, you found it next to the damn body.”

  “It probably was a pick. But it couldn’t have been the one we found by the body. That was the bartender’s. No blood traces.”

  “So the blood was wiped off. So what?”

  “Naw, Heller would’ve found something with his little bag of chemicals and magic dust. He’s the best forensic man in the country. The FBI’s been trying to seduce him away from the force for years. Oh, and the bartender’s pick was too short.”

  “What the hell does it matter if it was one ice pick or another one?”

  “Well, Daily, it’s always a good idea to know what the weapon looks like, just in case you trip over it while you’re making an arrest.”

  “Okay, so you know it’s a long ice pick. What does that—”

  “And it makes the case a little more interesting if the weapon was brought to the gallery. That makes it premeditation. We gotta nail these things down in case the perp tries to claim temporary insanity, crime of passion. We also thought it might be nice to have a few blood samples, stomach contents, stuff like that.”

  “I should think it would be obvious he wasn’t poisoned. So I’m being criticized for trying to save the taxpayers a little money? Is that what you’re telling me? Do you know how much it costs to run those tests?”

  “Well, my partner likes these little details.”

  Riker smiled. He had made book that Slope would fire this kid long before the probationary period was up. He had picked the early date in the office betting pool, and he was hoping this would be the autopsy that won him the big bucks.

  Mallory walked through the swinging door, followed by Dr. Edward Slope, the chief medical examiner. They walked to the far side of the records room, where Slope busied himself at a filing cabinet and spoke to Mallory in a low voice. He handed her a manila folder and disappeared down an aisle of cabinets. Riker heard the angry slam of a metal drawer from a distance of two rows of tall steel files. He wondered what Mallory had done to brighten Slope’s evening.

  Dr. Daily was staring at her now. All animosity forgotten, he punched Riker lightly on the arm in the spirit of just-us-boys.

  “Nice piece of ass,” said Daily, with a wide grin. As the young doctor swaggered off in Mallory’s direction, Riker only regretted that he had no time to place a side bet on Daily’s life expectancy.

  Riker watched the young man begin the courtship dance, strutting up and down in front of her, picking up a chart, pulling out a drawer and checking a file. When at last he came to rest beside Mallory, his height was even with hers at five feet ten, and Riker could swear the man was stretching his neck to be taller.

  Mallory continued to look at the photos. She put all but one of them into her tote and glanced at her watch. The doctor must be feeling the pressure of impending loss of opportunity. Now he was puffing out his chest and his young ego.

  Riker winced because he knew what was coming next.

  “I’m off duty now. I thought we might go out for a drink,” said Daily, as though he were offering to do her a favor.

  “Why would I want to do that?” Mallory’s face was incredulous.

  “Excuse me?”

  The words Fuck yourself were in her eyes, but she would not say them. Her foster mother had not liked such words, and Mallory continued to defer to Helen Markowitz long after the woman had died. So now she only stared at Daily for one chill moment, just long enough to shrivel his testicles with frost and drive his penis back up into his body cavity in a mad quest for warmth and survival. Satisfied that Daily was indeed self-fucked, she resumed her study of a dead body, apparently finding it a thousand times more appealing.

  The young doctor looked quickly to Riker, who refrained from laughing aloud. Daily turned back to her. “I just thought—”

  He was talking to the air. The door was swinging in her wake.

  He walked back to Riker, pointing one thumb toward the door. “Frigid little bitch, isn’t she?”

  “Naw,” said Riker. “That ain’t it.”

  “So just what is that cunt’s problem?”

  “You don’t know about Mallory? Nobody told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “She’s an escaped nun,” said Riker.

  Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope rounded a wall of filing cabinets to stand just behind Dr. Daily, the most junior member of his staff. The overhead light gave the elder doctor’s gray hair the shine of silver. Slope was a tall man, and his stony face was better suited to a general than a physician. When he cleared his throat, it had the effect of a gunshot.

  The young doctor spun around to face his superior. Daily was all startled like a bird, and less the man now.

  “She can’t have a drink with you,” said Dr. Slope, in tones of reined-in anger, “because I don’t think her mother would’ve approved of your language.” Slope bent down to bring his face level with Daily’s and to destroy all sense of personal territory. “Her parents were my oldest and dearest friends.”

  After the younger doctor had fled the room with as much decorum as fear for his job would allow, Slope turned on Riker.

  “Now what was all that crap about an escaped nun? Satan has no nuns.”

  A long string of psychiatrists had told him that depression crept up on one so slowly and with such stealth, no victim could point to the hour of its arrival or even the day. B
ut this was not true. Andrew Bliss could point out the very moment in the first whispers from the back of his own mind, which said to him, You are human garbage.

  He had thought of visiting his current psychiatrist, but they would only have gone round and round again over the lithium. The lithium made him into a contented cow with slurred speech and hand tremors for all his waking hours, and he had long ago decided he would not forgo the epiphany of his euphoric highs in order to escape the black holes of depression. He preferred to self-medicate with alcohol, but the glow of it was wearing thin, and the calming effects were dissipating now.

  The roller coaster was revving up its engine once more. The conductor of his moods was crying, All aboard, Andrew, and away we go! And he was climbing, soaring in his mind, looking toward the radiant lights of Bloomingdale’s ceiling. Gathering speed, Andrew. Never mind that safety belt, boy.

  He raced up the mechanical stairs, and two blue-haired dowagers bounced off the rail at his passing. He roughly shouldered a tall brunette who was young and a true child of New York City. But Andrew was one second gone before she thought to put her knee into his groin; he was moving that fast in the body, and his brain was fairly electrified as it sped along its single rail.

  In the late hours of the night, when the store had been swept free of consumers and staff, Andrew emerged from the shadows of Bloomingdale’s with a shopping list. He consulted his watch and then his notebook. The watch-man and his dogs should be patrolling the second floor.

  He stepped lightly on the frozen mechanical staircase, heading toward the rug department. Oh, but on his way he must rip off a dozen raincoats. He would need at least a dozen to make a canopy. A small refrigerator was copped from the employee lounge. Housewares provided the electric espresso maker. He ticked off other items on his list: satin sheets, ten down quilts for his mattress, tulip glasses, a reclining chair and a reading lamp. An hour later, he leaned against the furniture dolly which he had boosted from the stockroom. Leverage was everything. He wasn’t even sweating.

  Andrew saw motion among the clothing racks, the shadow of a lithe and graceful dancer, sleek and young. No, wait. It was not a woman, but a large security dog. He had mistimed the watchman’s rounds. He quickly sprayed his entire person with perfume, the better to smell like Bloomingdale’s.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BASEMENT WINDOW GAVE HER A GROUND-LEVEL view of the suburban backyard, with its green lawn and shade trees. This had been Louis Markowitz’s piece of the American dream.

  The glass pane was streaked with water from the lawn sprinkler, and the grass was neatly trimmed. Mallory knew this was Robin Duffy’s work. Markowitz’s old friend and neighbor did what he could to create the illusion that people still lived there. The old lawyer had raked the leaves in the fall, shoveled the walks in the winter, and brought her offers from young families who wished to buy the place and bring it to life once more. But to Robin Duffy’s consternation, Mallory always refused to sell, and she never explained her reasons for wanting to keep a house she would never live in again.

  When was she here last?

  She could not remember if it had been weeks ago or a month. She reached up and opened the window. A fresh breeze cut through the basement to kill off the musty smell of abandonment.

  Helen had been the first to abandon the house when she died under a surgeon’s knife. Then Mallory had moved out of Brooklyn and into a Manhattan condo with no reminders of home and grief. Markowitz had spent his last years working late hours to avoid coming home to empty rooms, unoccupied furniture and all the memories of Helen ganging up on him in the dark. After Mallory had put her father in the ground and finished his last case, she rarely visited the old place, though this was home and always would be.

  No, she would never sell the house, never evict the Markowitzes, or what survived of them in closets, boxes and drawers, from the attic to the basement. She could not imagine an afterlife for them—so where were they, if not here?

  Today she had one more piece of her father’s unfinished business, and she had come home again to look for answers among his personal notes in the boxes and files of his disorganized, unfinished life.

  She ran her fingers across the dust which had accumulated on the record albums of the swing bands and the cassettes of the Rolling Stones. There were also ancient reel-to-reel recordings, Markowitz’s prized collection of vintage radio programs from the late thirties and forties. She blew more dust from the elaborate recording equipment she had brought to the house a year before his death. She had used it to preserve his most precious recordings on CDs before the old-fashioned tapes could rot on their spools.

  Markowitz had been unreasonably happy when she told him he could play the CDs over and over, and never wear them out. She opened the plastic boxes now, all of them, and then she smiled. Though she had a mania for order and neatness, she was pleased to see the CD covers and discs completely mismatched to tell her he had made good use of her gift in the time that was left to him.

  Now Riker sat in Markowitz’s favorite chair. Helen had wanted to throw it out. To save it, the old man had dragged it down here to his basement sanctuary. He had never been able to throw anything away. Once she had chided him about that, but today she was counting on it.

  Riker was bent over an open cardboard carton. “Your old man’s filing system really sucks.” He reached into the box, his fingers raking through the mess of matchbook covers, notepaper, one cocktail napkin, three dinner napkins, and all the assorted materials that would take the scratch of a pen or pencil. He read some of the notes and shook his head. “I’ve known Markowitz forever, but his shorthand still throws me. It could take a year to wade through this, and another year to make sense out of it.”

  “We’ll just separate the critical notes by the dates. He dated everything.” Mallory pulled up a small wooden chair which had been her own when she and Markowitz spent the rainy Saturday afternoons of her childhood in the golden age of radio, sipping cocoa and listening to the opening lines of The Shadow—Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

  Riker held up one paper napkin, yellowed with age. “This might be worth something. The date is right. Listen to this. ‘Weight twelve pounds, four ounces with bone. Started twelve-oh-five a.m. Finished twelve forty-five a.m. Time out to rest, five minutes. Time out to send the kid back to bed, fifteen minutes. Dull now. The next one would take longer.’ Now what’s that about?”

  She took the napkin from his hand. The date was four days following the murder of the artist and the dancer. How old had she been then? Twelve? She looked at the time and the reference to the kid. Herself? It couldn’t be. She had never been allowed to stay up that late.

  Suddenly she remembered exactly when Markowitz had written that note. She looked up to the basement ceiling, as though she could see into the kitchen on the floor above them.

  All those years ago, she had left her bed and gone down the stairs, minding the steps that made the most noise. She went stealing through the rooms of the dark house, hours beyond a child’s bedtime. Young Kathy had been heading for the kitchen, tantalized by the knowledge of half a pie at the back of the refrigerator. Food was never begrudged in this house. Food was love. But being caught out of bed so late on a school night, that was another matter.

  She had come upon Markowitz standing at Helen’s chopping block and working over a leg of beef with a meat cleaver. So intent was he on his hacking, he never heard the small bare feet on the tiles as the child slipped into the kitchen behind his back. She retrieved the cordless electric meat carver from a drawer, making no sound until she switched it on and the metal came to life in her hand, motor buzzing, the serrated blade working back and forth.

  Markowitz had whirled around in a near pirouette, so graceful for a man his size, excess weight hanging around his belt as a tribute to Helen’s cooking. He had been shocked to see the child standing there in her pajamas. There were sweat stains under his arms, and his face was flushed with unaccustomed e
xertion.

  “Kathy, I swear I’m gonna hang a bell on you. ”

  And then he had thought to look at the kitchen clock, wiped his hands with a dish towel and scribbled a note on a white paper napkin. He smiled down at her and ruffled her hair. When he smiled, she smiled. It was an uncontrollable reflex, even when she was angry with him, and sometimes it drove her nuts that he could make her do that against her will. She recovered her solemnity quickly and held out the meat carver.

  He had thanked her for it, and agreed that yes, the electric knife would be a lot faster than the cleaver. Then he read her mind and pulled the pie from the refrigerator and set it on the kitchen table. He poured them each a glass of milk, and they sat down together in companionable silence for a few bites.

  “So, what’s the deal with the meat?” the child had asked, nodding toward the chopping block with some suspicion. Not counting this slice of pie, she knew all food came from Helen’s hand, not his.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, ” he said.

  When she had demolished her pie to the last crumb, Markowitz motioned her to stand, turned her around and gave her a very gentle push in the direction of bed and sleep.

  Now Detective Sergeant Mallory sat under a bare lightbulb in the basement, staring at the notes on the age-yellowed napkin. She handed it back to Riker.

  “These are the old man’s stats for the time it took to cut through the meat and bones of Peter Ariel and Aubry Gilette.”

  Morning came with rude bright light, which penetrated the tender, pink membranes of his eyelids. When Andrew Bliss opened his eyes, he wondered if the bedroom ceiling didn’t look rather like the blue sky, replete with fleecy clouds. He rejected this as impossible and closed his eyes again. But now there were car horns in his bedroom as well, and they played havoc with the fragile nerve endings behind his eyeballs, where his brain was fermenting in yesterday’s wine. Unaccountably, his hair hurt, but he would think about that later.