Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  He pushed aside a layer of down quilts, which he instantly recognized from Bloomingdale’s Domestics display. Memory was stealing up on him. He looked around at the cables and the tall pipes, the black ductwork and vents, the surrounding buildings, and the mountains of stolen goods.

  Of course.

  In a salute to recovering memory, he slapped his forehead. He instantly regretted that. Holding his poor, freshly injured head, Andrew murmured an apology to it as he began to rise.

  On your feet now, one leg next to the other. Good boy, you remembered.

  He was attired in striped silk pajamas. A matching robe was laid out on an armchair. How had he gotten that heavy chair up to the roof? Ah, well, in the manic phase nothing was impossible. The door of Blooming-dale’s roof was set high in a narrow shaft of brick standing twenty feet above the rooftop. The exit was sealed with industrial tape and bound by a heavy chain. The metal stairs leading from the door and down to the roof had been ripped away and twisted outward to hang in the sky as a staircase to nowhere. A second roof exit, resembling a storm cellar, was set into the ground. Half of this door had been barricaded with two steel beams and six large wooden cases topped by a pile of designer raincoats. The door handle was clear of debris, but useless.

  Well, haven’t I been thorough. But why?

  It was a mercy the espresso maker from Housewares was already plugged into the roof cable. He could never have found the electrical outlet this morning, certainly not before a cup of coffee. He switched it on and smiled feebly when the red light glowed.

  While the espresso machine was busy, he surveyed his new domain. Bloomingdale’s roof was an island, one city block square and bounded by heavily trafficked streets on all sides. Ah, paradise. The potted palm tree in the corner might have been some idea of homage to other island exiles with a preference for sweaty tropics.

  The espresso machine ceased its gurgling. When he looked down, he noticed the bullhorn plugged into the same outlet. What had he planned to do with that? And the binoculars? Or might this be something he had already done? He picked up the binoculars and adjusted the lenses in time to see a pigeon magnified to the proportions of Godzilla. Startled, he nearly dropped the glasses. He was unaccustomed to nature in the raw. He refocussed the lenses on the street below, and the next sighting was no less shocking.

  Oh, the clothes, the clothes these people wore. How did these idiots manage to commit so many really criminal offenses in a single outfit? Had they not eyes to see?

  It was coming back to him now.

  Right.

  He picked up the bullhorn in his free hand and cleared his throat, amplifying his phlegm a hundredfold. It worked.

  But where ... Oh, right.

  He had broken into the security office last night. This was one of the bullhorns they used for fire drills.

  Through the telescoping lenses, he scanned the sidewalk again. A heavyset woman was strolling past the store—his store. Oh, this was really too much. He raised the bullhorn and inhaled deeply. “No you don’t!” he blared in a voice so powerful it caught his hangover off guard, and the reaction time for pain to set in had a long lag. “You there! You in the black and white dress. Madam, you know damn well you’re too heavy to wear horizontal stripes. Your friends have all told you that. Might I suggest a dark rose ensemble to go with that Mediterranean coloring?”

  The woman, trapped in the twin lenses, moved her head quickly from side to side. Her mouth fell open, and her head slowly bowed. As she turned away from the store, a newspaper fell from her hand and marked the spot where Andrew had scored his first direct hit. The young woman settled into the gait of an old woman, meandering down another street which was not Andrew’s street and of no concern to him. He had already moved on to the crime in progress at the bus stop.

  “Oh, you can’t be serious!” he screamed. And now delayed reaction set in. His brain was throbbing and thrashing against the sides of his skull in a mad attempt to get free of it. In a lower pitch, and with the pathos of genuine agony, he said, “You can’t possibly take that gorgeous Armani creation on the bus.”

  The perpetrator in the Armani suit was all eyes, and his eyes went everywhere.

  “That’s right, you know what you’ve done wrong. Now go and flag down a cab. Show some dignity, for Christ’s sake. Let’s try and live up to the clothes, shall we?”

  And the man did indeed put out his hand and flagged down a cab to carry him away as quickly as possible.

  Andrew went back to his bed of ten down quilts and rested his damaged head on a pile of silk pillows. His head lolled from side to side as he took stock of his campsite. Fortuitously, he had remembered the larder of Le Train Bleu, and apparently he had removed their entire stock of premium wines. The cases were stacked in a solid wall of champagne and red wine. Cartons of imported cigarettes were strewn everywhere.

  Did Bloomingdale’s sell ... ? Oh, right.

  He had raided the locker of an executive.

  Well, here was a snag. He had not had the foresight to steal a portable toilet before sealing the exits from the roof.

  What about the fire escape?

  No escape. The emergency exits were all interior. He looked up at the metal staircase which no longer led to the roof door. Distressed and mangled steel angled oddly away from the brick structure. Had he really done that? But how? Drunks could be so ingenious. He might have to get drunk again to figure out how he had managed it.

  What else? Was that a year’s supply of espresso beans from the gourmet selection on six? It was.

  Oh, joy.

  He opened the half-size refrigerator. No cream. He was inconsolable. Ah, but two magnums of wine were cooling with companion tulip glasses. Light flooded his soul again.

  And food?

  None. Not any in the refrigerator, nor among the boxes and cartons. He counted fourteen smoking jackets, eight Dresden teacups, nine pairs of silk pajamas, two potted palm trees and no food.

  During the bender, while he was in the genius mode, he must have resolved the problem of solid-waste disposal by eliminating the solids. Quite sensible. He could piss his liquid wastes over the side of the wall.

  He returned to his post at the edge of the roof and slung the strap of the field glasses around his neck. He took up his horn just in time. There was another blight on the street. “You ... in the too-mauve-for-words pantsuit.”

  The mauve woman stopped and looked everywhere but in the right direction.

  “Up here,” he guided her. “I’m up here with the pigeons and God. Look up! Good. What are you trying to do to me? Do you want me to hurl myself into the street? You can’t get away with that pantsuit, and you know it. Give yourself up on the second floor. Surrender to Alice. She’ll know how to deal with you.”

  The woman was entering the store. So far, the pedestrian masses were rather good about taking creative direction. So he had finally found his true vocation—fashion terrorist.

  Now if only he had his personal shopper, his life would be complete. He leaned over the roof once more and screamed into the bullhorn, “Annie! Annie, where are you?”

  Charles Butler unsheathed his blade and slashed open an envelope. He was arrested for a moment by the shining surface of his antique dagger.

  Mrs. Ortega had been polishing things again.

  He would rather have the ancient piece of silver clouded with tarnish. He never cared to come upon his own reflection, or even the knife blade’s width of it, by surprise. But every now and again, he must endure a time when his housekeeper would go mad with metal cleaners, of which there were as many varieties as there were metals. And for a time, he could go nowhere in his own home without some bright piece of Mrs. Ortega’s handiwork throwing back the image of a man whose nose was too long, and whose eyes resembled heavy-lidded hen’s eggs with small blue irises.

  Now he sat quietly awaiting his visitors’ knock on the door. No doubt the people advancing down the hallway were known to him. He hadn’t buzzed anyone i
nto the building, so one of them must have a key. That narrowed the field to his tenants, his cleaning woman or his business partner. And of course the visitors were on their way to his own door, for this suite of offices and his apartment across the hall occupied the entire second floor of the SoHo building.

  This particular room was the reception area of Mallory and Butler, Ltd. Queen Anne reigned with Louis XV in period furniture with graceful curving legs, which seemed always on the verge of dancing. Each morning, Charles sat down to this antique desk, opened his mail by the light of a tall triptych of arched windows—and wondered what his partner might be up to.

  She so seldom stopped by anymore. He understood.

  A consulting firm could not hold much allure for Mallory. The rather academic problems of quantifying, qualifying, and finding homes for the oddly gifted could hardly compare to the problems of Special Crimes Section. These days, she only stopped by to play with the computer toys she stored in her private office.

  The footsteps in the hallway stopped. Now the door was opening without the customary knock. Only two people ever did that, Mrs. Ortega and Mallory. But his cleaning woman never traveled with an entourage.

  Mallory was first into the room, carrying a large and dusty cardboard carton. She was in a black mood by her tone as she said to Riker, “I want to find that little twit, Andrew Bliss, and right now.”

  Behind the safe cover of his own carton, Riker was making facial expressions to indicate that she was a brat. He in turn was followed by a young uniformed officer with his own load of boxes, and these bore the stamp of NYPD. The parade trooped past his desk with two “Hi Charles”s from Mallory and Riker. And then the door to Mallory’s private office closed behind them.

  Minutes later, the uniformed officer emerged, nodded to Charles in passing, and left him to wonder what was going on. Of course he could guess. He had read the morning paper. But most of the cartons had borne stamps from the NYPD evidence room. Now that was a problem, because they couldn’t possibly have four cartons of evidence in a brand-new case which, according to the newspaper, involved a single ice pick, no suspects and no leads.

  Riker emerged from Mallory’s office, leaving the door ajar. “Charles, I’m gonna make coffee. You want some?”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you.” He would have asked after Riker’s health, but the man was already ambling down the short hall leading to the office kitchen.

  Charles leaned far over the desk to see through the open door. Mallory’s office might as well have been in another building in an entirely different solar system, where extreme order and high technology prevailed over charm and antiquity.

  Mallory was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back turned to him as she lifted something heavy out of a carton. It was an axe wrapped in clear plastic. The axe handle was short, and the blade was no wider than the meat cleaver in his kitchen. He didn’t care to hazard a guess at the stains visible through the clear cover.

  What does an axe have to do with an ice pick murder?

  Mallory’s head turned quickly to catch him in the act of watching her.

  Of all the bizarre talents he had ever been asked to study, Mallory’s were the most convoluted. In addition to her gifts in the computer mode, she had a hyperawareness of her surroundings which he found inexplicable.

  She smiled unlike any other woman. Her expression now said, I caught you. But her smiles had a wider spectrum of meanings, which included, I’m going to get you for that, and he never wanted to be the recipient of that one. It was so seldom that she smiled for happiness. He suspected there was not much of that in her life. He had known her for years, and yet she was still a great mystery to him. He had once asked Riker what Mallory did with her off-duty hours. Riker had advanced the theory that she went into a closet at night and hung from the rod by her heels like a vampire bat.

  Now she beckoned to him. He left the room of beloved antiques and crossed over the threshold of her office and into the world of high technology. Three computers dominated the room, metallic cyclopes, each with a large gray terminal eye. Other machines kept them company in links of cables and wires. The office furnishings were metal with cruel sharp corners. Technical manuals sat in perfect order on the purely functional shelving.

  And then there was the incongruity of a bloody axe. Mallory pulled open the flaps of another carton. Inside was a jumble of papers in all shapes and sizes. Charles recognized the scrawled lines of Markowitz’s handwriting on napkins, matchbook covers and envelopes. Mallory brushed these papers aside to reveal an old photograph. Wordlessly, she handed it to him. He recognized his own likeness first, all six feet, four inches of himself towering above the surrounding crowd of people. And then his eyes settled on the image of a dear friend, the late Louis Markowitz. It was a younger version of the man, perhaps by ten or twelve years. Louis’s hair was only beginning to gray in this photograph. The excess of forty pounds was there, and carried with the same elan, but the lines of his face were not yet so deep.

  “That was taken at Aubry Gilette’s funeral,” said Mallory.

  Charles looked down at the photograph with wonder. If he had only been standing one place to the right, he might have had the pleasure of Louis Markowitz’s company years earlier, and his own life might have been that much richer for it. He missed Louis sorely; he missed him every day.

  And what effect had Louis’s death had on his only child? Well, no outward effect at all. He often wondered if, in the secret life of Kathleen Mallory, she didn’t spend part of her time in grief. He would never know. She was an intensely private person. There were questions one could never ask her, such as, Does it hurt you still?

  Riker entered the room, juggling three coffee cups and the morning paper. He placed one cup in Charles’s free hand, and leaning down, he gave one to Mallory. Riker drank deeply, rushing caffeine into his veins until his eyes were all the way open.

  “I don’t think you’re gonna find a money motive in this one, kid.” Riker hunkered down beside her. “That must put a real crimp in your day.”

  “It could be revenge,” said Mallory. “I like that one, too.”

  Riker held up the newspaper, folded back to the page Charles had been reading. “You wanna see your reviews?”

  The headline at the top of the column read: NYPD HUNTS ART TERRORIST. In the subheading it said: Connection to Oren Watt?

  Riker was grinning. “I think they’ve really captured your style, kid. Listen to this. ‘Detective Sergeant Kathleen Mallory would have walked over the body of the Times reporter had he not scrambled to get out of her way.’ ”

  “And it’s a good picture, too,” said Charles, bending down to admire her portrait over Riker’s shoulder. “It’s worthy of a frame. But what did you do to the reporter?”

  “I never touched that bastard.”

  “She told him to get the hell out of her way or she’d shoot him.” Riker handed the paper to Mallory. “You’re damn lucky he had a sense of humor. We don’t want any more bad press on this case.” As Mallory held the paper, Riker tapped the caption under her photograph. “ ‘The photogenic green-eyed blond detective.’ I like that line.”

  “On the next page,” said Charles, “there’s an interview with the FBI spokesman. The reporter was questioning him on the terrorist aspect of the murder—something to do with a critic’s column on art terrorism. The FBI man says they’re looking into it.”

  “Oh, terrific.” Riker slugged back the last of his coffee. “Damn that jerk Andrew Bliss. Now we got feds in the house. Commissioner Beale’s gonna have an aneurysm. A damn swarm of feds with psychiatric Ouija boards.”

  Mallory said nothing. In her own critique, she dumped the newspaper into a wastebasket. She pulled four plastic bags from the carton and read the labels. “What about all this hair and fiber evidence? Was all of this accounted for? I can’t find the forensic reports.”

  “Never developed it,” said Riker. “The gallery was a public space with heavy traffic. All of it was c
ollected and tagged, but most of it wasn’t worth the tests.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Markowitz. He was a detail freak.”

  “After Oren Watt confessed to the murder, we couldn’t justify the budget for any more lab work. Blakely did everything but handcuff Markowitz. The chief just wanted the case wrapped and forgotten.”

  Oren Watt? Charles stood over Mallory’s desk and looked down at the labels of other evidence bags. Each one bore Oren Watt’s name. “Why are you going back into this old murder? They have the man who did it. They caught him twelve years ago.”

  “No they didn’t.” Mallory turned back to the carton and pulled out a paper bag. It came apart as she handled it, and a shred of stained clothing fell to the floor. “They caught a man to do the time for the murders. That’s not quite the same thing. Watt didn’t do it.”

  Riker lowered his head only a little and turned his face toward the window. Charles recognized the subtle meaning of this simple gesture. Apparently, Riker did not share her theory.

  “What about these tracks?” She held up a bundle of photographs. The first image was a pattern of red footprints on a hardwood floor. “Men’s shoes, women’s shoes.” She shuffled the photographs like a deck of cards. “There aren’t any notes on half of these prints.” By her tone of voice, she seemed to hold Riker responsible for this oversight.

  “Damn waste of time,” said Riker. “Someone called an anonymous tip to the press that night. The news crews beat a patrol car to the scene by five minutes. They contaminated the evidence before the uniforms showed up. We corralled some of the reporters to print their shoes for elimination, but we didn’t get all of them.”

  He took the photographs from her hand, riffled through them, pulled one out and turned it over to display a label. “This one has notes. It’s tagged for Oren Watt. That’s one set of footprints we had an easy match for. And his shoes were still bloody when his psychiatrist surrendered him to the police.”