Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  Charles had the sense that Riker was playing a game of push and shove with Mallory. She chose to let him play alone. Her voice was casual, and her face turned down to the contents of the carton. “Any idea who tipped off the newspapers?”

  “Probably Oren Watt,” said Riker, draining his coffee cup. “Watt wouldn’t be the first psychopath with a craving for publicity.”

  “Oren Watt didn’t do it.” There was a definite edge to her voice this time.

  “Both things could be true,” Charles suggested in the gentle manner of a peacemaker. “Watt could have made that call whether he did the murders or not.”

  Mallory nodded, seeming to like that idea. Riker would not look at her. He moved away to stand by the door and stare into his empty cup.

  Charles stepped between them. “What can I do to help?”

  “You’re taking me to the ball tomorrow night,” said Mallory.

  “You can’t mean the Manhattan Charities Ball. Is that tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Charles.” She stood up and walked to her desk.

  “But no one actually goes to the ball.”

  “You buy the tickets every year.” She opened the desk’s center drawer and pulled out the printed invitations and receipts. Mallory held them up to him, as though she had just caught him in a lie.

  She must have retrieved the invitations from the wastebasket in the reception room where he filed them every year. She could only have found the receipts in his private files. One day they really must sit down and discuss what his privacy meant to him, as opposed to what little it meant to her.

  For the moment, he only shrugged. “Well, of course I buy the tickets. It’s a charity event. My mother was a friend of Mrs. Quinn’s. We’ve always bought the tickets, but no one actually goes to the ball.”

  “The mayor goes,” said Riker.

  “Well, yes, but he’s not—” Here Charles stopped himself from saying that the mayor did not come from a Social Register family, that he was merely the leader of the largest city on earth. “Yes, I suppose the city’s power structure will be there. You’re quite right. But / don’t know anyone who goes.”

  “J. L. Quinn will be there, and you know him.” Mallory turned to face the rear wall. It was covered with cork and functioned as a giant bulletin board. “You were at Harvard the same time Quinn was.”

  Charles wasn’t about to ask her how she knew that. He was staring at her computers, which sometimes did double duty as cyberspace burglary tools.

  “Well, Quinn has to go,” he said somewhat defensively. “His mother hosts the ball.”

  “And Aubry’s father—the architect, Gregor Gilette?” She pinned the old photograph of Aubry’s funeral to the wall. “He’ll be at the ball. You know him, too, don’t you?”

  As if there was any doubt in her mind about any sector of his formerly private life. “Gregor also has to go. He was married to Mrs. Quinn’s daughter.”

  “Sabra?” Mallory walked back to the carton and sifted through the paperwork bundles, scanning a page in each one. She turned to Riker. “Just the one name everywhere Aubry’s mother is listed. Why isn’t it Sabra Gilette?”

  Riker shrugged. “Sabra was her full legal name, just the one name.”

  Mallory looked to Charles for enlightenment.

  “Sabra renounced the family name and walked away from the money. Then she became wildly successful on her own. She was an enormously talented painter. Later, she set a legal precedent when she married Gregor Gilette and refused to take his name. She—”

  “Do you remember seeing Sabra at Aubry’s funeral?”

  “Yes, it was the last time I ever saw her.”

  Mallory was deep in the interrogation mode now. She had reached her limit for six minutes of semicivil conversation. “Did you like Sabra?”

  “Yes, very much. I also liked her work. I have one of her early paintings.” Suddenly he wished he had not told her that. And now she would want to know—

  “Where is it?”

  Charles and Mallory walked across the hall to the apartment which was his residence. Beyond the foyer, a bank of tall windows made the front room light and airy, despite the heavy furnishings in dark woods spanning four centuries of craftsmen. All that belonged to his own era were the contemporary works of art. They should not have worked well with the older pieces, and yet they did. The colors of a splatter painting agreed with the bright details of the Persian rug and the upholstery of a George III side chair. Another abstract repeated the rococo lines of a Belter sofa.

  They walked down the wide hallway, where late twentieth-century drawings were on close hanging acquaintance with framed pages of illuminated manuscripts. At the end of the hall, he opened a linen closet and pointed to a framed canvas sitting on the floor, face to the wall. He lifted it carefully and handed it to her. The painting had a lonely, sad feel to it. One small pale worm of an element writhed in a maelstrom of powerful bold color.

  “Don’t you like it, Charles?”

  “I like it very much. It’s one of her most accessible works. I bought it at a Christie’s auction a few years ago.”

  “Why do you keep it on the floor of a closet?”

  He shifted uncomfortably, not wanting to answer her. He kept it in the closet because what it communicated was so obvious, so blatant that his cleaning woman, Mrs. Ortega, had readily understood it. That high school dropout who loved baseball and hated art, Mrs. Ortega, had understood the painting so clearly that Charles had been embarrassed when the normally hostile cleaning woman had gone out of her way to be nice to him for several weeks after she had seen the painting on the wall of his front room. So this is what your guts look like, Mrs. Ortega’s uncharacteristic kindness had said to him, you poor jerk.

  Now he wondered if Mallory was drawing the same inference.

  “Charles, can we hang this in my office for a while? Just till I wrap the case? Oh, and your collection of art catalogs? Do you have one of Sabra’s museum retrospective?”

  They returned to the office with the painting and the catalog. Mallory set the canvas against the cork wall, which Riker was littering with clippings, photographs and reports. Mallory followed behind him, straightening every sheet with machinelike precision. Finally, she slapped Riker’s hand away and forbade him to touch the board at all.

  Charles sat at Mallory’s desk. Riker looked over his shoulder as he turned the pages of the museum catalog, hunting for photographs of the elusive Sabra. Here and there, Charles would point out a turned face, the line of a cheek. A hand raised to blind the camera’s eye.

  “What’s with this broad?” said Riker. “There’s not one clear photograph of her.”

  “She hated the sight of a camera,” said Charles. “Sabra was always reclusive. She very rarely appeared in public. An agent submitted her work through one gallery, and I’m not sure she ever met with the gallery director.”

  Mallory turned away from her work on the cork wall. “Was it Koozeman’s gallery?”

  “Oh, no,” said Charles. “Sabra was a major talent. She showed in the most prominent gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. In those days, Koozeman only had a small storefront gallery in the East Village—the one where Sabra’s daughter was murdered.”

  “Here’s one of Sabra’s kid.” Riker pointed to the photograph of a young woman standing by a painting. “Pretty girl. Did you know Aubry very well?”

  “No, not really,” said Charles. “Just a nodding acquaintance. These were people I ran into at weddings and funerals. I’m usually excused from christenings and graduations. I did see Aubry at the gallery shows. Sabra rarely attended her own openings, but Aubry and her father never missed one.”

  Mallory was flipping through a notebook, checking off items. Now she hovered over Charles and dropped a card on the desk in front of him. “I made a hair appointment for you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You need a haircut. My stylist will take you this afternoon. That’s your appointment card.”

&nbs
p; “But this salon—”

  “I know. They only do women. But I leave large tips. They’ll do you. So we have a date, Charles?”

  “For the ball? Oh, yes.”

  Oh, God, yes and absolutely.

  Since his teenage years, it had been his fantasy to walk into a grand ballroom with a beautiful woman on his arm. In earlier fantasies of childhood, he had seen himself in the bedtime story of Pinocchio, the long-nosed puppet who ached to become a real boy. Now, in his fortieth year, as he looked across the room at young Mallory, he realized he had grown up into Cyrano, another poor hapless longnose who fell in love and found it to be a bleak place where he lived by himself.

  And what of Mallory’s perceptions of this strange one-sided romance? He wondered if she didn’t see him as a large and friendly, slightly shaggy dog in a three-piece suit.

  As if in answer to his innermost thoughts and fears, she patted him on the head and told him to get out of her chair.

  He had only closed his eyes for a moment, and then he had fallen into a deep sleep. In the next moment, his head exploded.

  “ANDREW!” screamed the voice from hell.

  Emma Sue?

  Oh, no. She had her own bullhorn. If there really was a God in New York City, how did He coexist with Emma Sue Hollaran? The woman’s normal speaking voice had the unholy pitch of a cat set on fire. Now she was electrified, insanely amplified. And for the first time in years, he was not fortified to withstand it. This time, he was sober and all soft underbelly.

  Brain asloshing, moving slowly, minding the pain, he crept to the short wall at the edge of the roof.

  “GOOD MORNING, ANDREW!”

  His body jerked back, the involuntary motion of a man whose head has been struck by a grenade. He ventured a second glance over the side. Another woman was taking the bullhorn away from Emma Sue.

  Oh, thank you, thank you, whoever you are.

  She must be from the haute couture police, for Emma Sue was dressed in the most awful rag. It had to be some wardrobe relic from the days when she was allowed to dress herself without his advice. Well, if this alone did not demonstrate his indispensability. The dress was a bright pink billboard plastered on her meaty frame, advertising choice cuts of bovine flesh, thick flanks and overhanging rump. And what was she doing here? He had only wanted her to handle a simple press release.

  He picked up his bullhorn and aimed at her like a gun. Oh, would that it were a gun. “Emma Sue, go inside and have someone dress you. Now, before someone sees you.”

  She was going inside. And he knew it would be a while before she dared come back. Wasn’t he brilliant? Oh, she must be seething. How secure was the roof door?

  “Mr. Bliss,” said the more civil woman now in possession of the bullhorn. “I’m Harriet Marcan. Women’s Wear?”

  “Call me Andrew. What may I do for you?”

  “I’d like to interview you, Andrew. May I come up?”

  “Not possible, I’m afraid. The stairs are torn away from one door and the other is barricaded. You simply can’t get here from there.” Annie had joined the reporter on the sidewalk. “But of course,” he continued, “I have no objection to the interview.”

  “It’s a bit awkward, isn’t it?” With one hand, Ms. Marcan tossed off the flyaway gesture of You’re kidding, right?

  “I can fix that,” said Andrew. “Annie, have an armchair and a table brought down from Furniture on the fifth floor. And arrange a champagne brunch for our Ms. Marcan.”

  Across champagne glasses and through dueling bullhorns, Andrew explained his modus operandi to the reporter from Women’s Wear. Fashion terrorism was the only way. She could see that, couldn’t she? For terrorism was horribly effective, wasn’t it? And who could fail to notice, in a daily perusal of the Times, that it worked best when there was a base of genuine and justifiable outrage. The world might not approve the methodology, but they did sit up and pay attention. And they became, against their collective will, aware of wrongs done.

  So now there was a homeland for the beautiful people. Nothing fancy, just the one square block of Blooming-dale’s. And tomorrow? The entire island of Manhattan.

  “Sorry, I’m digressing. Terrorism will out. You’ll see.”

  J. L. Quinn followed her through the door with a few minutes’ distance between them. When he entered the Koozeman Gallery, it took him another minute to locate Detective Mallory among the bustle of art handlers, a tour group and the television crew.

  Mallory stood by the entrance of the main gallery, removing the yellow strips of tape which had marked the crime scene. The television crew poured into this room as the last tape was stripped away, and she stood aside.

  Oren Watt, confessed murderer in a dark suit, was leading the parade of cameras, women with clipboards and men with sound equipment and lights. The flesh of Watt’s head shone through the stubble of close-cropped brown hair. His dark glasses only concealed small, ordinary eyes, and could not begin to disguise him. His most prominent feature was an overlarge mouth, which made a long, thin-lipped line across the lower face, as if someone had drawn it there, and drawn it badly. The small ears were another odd feature, only half finished in their details. Perhaps his mother had pushed him out of the womb before her work was quite done. Watt’s child-size pug nose fit well with this theory.

  When the trample of feet had come to rest in this room, Oren Watt was approving the placement of his artwork. The rather bad drawing of a dismembered foot was held to the wall at different levels and locations by a young woman in the art handler’s uniform of black jersey and jeans. The confessed murderer shook his head and waved the drawing farther along the wall and higher. The art handler was quick to follow his instructions, for this was the Monster of Manhattan, wasn’t it? The gallery worker was so young—Oren Watt had probably been the bogeyman of her childhood nightmares.

  Mallory was the only one in the room who seemed bored by Watt. Quinn watched her as she turned her back on the Monster of Manhattan, and walked along the opposite wall, where the drawings were lined up awaiting the hanging process. Her face gave Quinn no clue to her thoughts as she scanned the artwork. Perhaps she was wondering which of the body parts belonged to his niece, the dancer, and which to Peter Ariel, the young artist who had died with Aubry. The sketches were all so badly drawn, there was no gender differentiation.

  The sidewalk tour gathered at the entrance to the room. Two of the party snapped photographs. None of them needed their tour guide to tell them this was Oren Watt. One man nudged another to whisper that Watt was even uglier than his television image. The entire tour group stared at the strange-looking man as though he were a zoo specimen, and by Quinn’s lights, this was close to the truth.

  Quinn kept track of Mallory as she wandered out of the main gallery and into a smaller room where the real art was hung. He followed her, wondering what he might say to make this meeting seem accidental.

  The tour group was pulled away from the spectacle of the monster and led into the smaller room by the guide-cum-art-maven, who was babbling banalities. Twelve pairs of feet trooped up to the drawing Mallory was admiring. Conversation stopped as the group’s leader rambled on about the lines of the work, the texture of the paper and the artist’s intention—as if he had a clue.

  Quinn appeared on the far side of the group. Respecting the etiquette of the docent’s lecture, he kept his distance and his silence, and never looked at Mallory directly or acknowledged that he was aware of her. The tension between them was strung across the baffle of words and a score of tourists.

  He studied her now, as she studied the minimalist piece on the gallery wall. What held her attention was a soft embossing of three delicate lines of paper. The strokes were exquisitely feminine, as were the lines of a dreaming nude. There was no frame. It was fixed to the wall with four pins. The stock was pristine ivory and the embossing was visible only in reflective light, so faintly were the lines raised. He would later return to the gallery and buy it. Later still, he woul
d put it away in a dark portfolio because it reminded him too much of Mallory.

  Her head turned slightly, and for a few minutes they did the children’s dance of the eyes, each stealing glances at the other. And so their conversation began before they ever said hello.

  Emma Sue Hollaran pulled the ball gown out of her closet. She held the hanger at arm’s length and studied the formfitting sheath, which was not intended for dancing beyond the confines of the box step. Before she even tried on the gown, she knew the long zipper would be a problem over the thighs and buttocks.

  And she was right.

  A full-length mirror of three panels afforded a global view of her body. The zipper held, but oh, what it held. The fabric was straining over large bumps and accentuating lumps.

  She reached out to the telephone and tapped out the clinic’s telephone number, a number she knew by heart. After the frustration of dealing with the receptionist, who had no time slots left to give her, she screamed, “He’ll see me, or I’ll turn him in! I’ll burn his ass!”

  And indeed she could send the plastic surgeon to jail if she chose to. He’d done procedures on her after four other surgeons had turned her down. Once he put her near death—never mind that it was at her own insistence. He had taken out more fat than her buttocks, stomach, arms and double chin could safely part with at one session with the high-tech vacuum cleaner.

  The thighs had been left undone in the doctor’s haste to change her skin color from blue to something more like live flesh. After that near-death experience, she had been wary of having her thighs done, but now she had no choice, did she? And the buttocks had grown back to their former substantial proportions. Now that was definitely a breach of contract. Liposuction promised svelte forever, and lied.

  When the receptionist returned to the phone, an opening had magically appeared in the doctor’s schedule.

  “Where is Mallory?” asked Charles, freshly barbered—styled, actually—and smiling.