Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  “You looked for it, didn’t you? All the rookies look for it. Well, Riker’s report disappeared, and as far as Riker knew, the prince went on doing little boys in the park. Riker objected to that. He received a warning from the guy who had my job—a threat’s more like it—and then he got a promotion to captain. They were hoping he would get the drift. Well, that stupid bastard didn’t have a captain’s rank for five days before he goes out and busts a prince of the church with a kid in his car. Riker brought the cardinal in handcuffed. You can guess what happened next.”

  “He was busted all the way down to sergeant.”

  “No. He went back to the rank of lieutenant. And he still wouldn’t stop. Then he was busted down to sergeant. By then his wife had left him, he was deep in the bottle and next to useless. The department would’ve eased him out, but Markowitz grabbed him off for Special Crimes Section and sent him to a clinic to dry out. Markowitz had more power around here than God Almighty. Nobody else could have saved Riker’s ass. By the time Riker dried out, the prince was gone, and a new prince was in power.”

  “Did Riker ever try to go outside the system?”

  “No, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt the department. He’s a third-generation cop, just like Markowitz was. And who was he going to go to—the cops? Maybe the newspapers? The church is a major political power in this town. He had no evidence and the kid was gone.”

  “What happened to the kid?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? You’ve got a great future, Jack. You could learn from Riker’s mistakes.”

  “This case is small-time, compared to Riker’s.”

  “Some very high-profile people could be embarrassed, Jack.”

  “A senator, for instance? And what’s the old mayor doing now, running for governor, isn’t he?”

  “If Riker couldn’t buck the system, what chance have you got? Call Mallory off.”

  “You’d never touch Mallory, would you?”

  “Of course not. Her old man and me, we had a lot of history together. I think of her as my own—”

  “You can’t touch her, can you? She’s got everything the old man had. She must know where every single body is buried. Markowitz wouldn’t have left her defenseless in the shark pool.”

  “Careful, Lieutenant. I think you’re bordering on insubordination here.”

  “Maybe there was more to it than leaving the homicide books tidy when the mayor and the old commissioner left office.” Coffey was rising out of his chair. “Maybe they were afraid the real killer was somebody in a power position.” He turned his back on Blakely.

  “That’s enough!” Blakely pounded his desk. “Come back here and sit down, Lieutenant!”

  “Just call me Sergeant,” said Coffey, closing the door behind him.

  Orwelhouse Sanitarium had been home to Oren Watt for eleven years.

  Mallory looked around at the trappings of the trendy New York asylum for the artistic and crazy. The reception-area walls were lined with cheap art in expensive frames. The furniture was chic and ugly, blending well with the loud geometric pattern of the carpet.

  Perhaps the world did need a fashion terrorist.

  In her pocket was Charles’s daunting list of all the mental institutions in the tristate area. Charles had put Orwelhouse dead last. He had reasoned that because Oren Watt was the star patient, this asylum would have been the last place Sabra would go.

  Thank you, Charles.

  Mallory had moved Orwelhouse to the top of her list. She was thinking along the lines she knew best—rage, obsession and revenge—which she believed were closer to Sabra’s mind-set in the aftermath of Aubry’s murder.

  The receptionist was quickly exiting the internet server, blanking the screen of her desktop computer. There was time enough for Mallory to note the personal code and the erotic service the receptionist subscribed to, undoubtedly without her employer’s knowledge.

  Now the pinch-faced brunette studied Mallory, eyes traveling from the expensive running shoes to the designer sunglasses. Mallory flashed a platinum credit card as identification, and now the brunette’s sudden toothy smile acknowledged her as a member of that exclusive sphere, the master class of money.

  “I need a tour,” said Mallory. “I have all the paperwork for admissions, but I want to see the place first. My mother is a wealthy woman, so I’m concerned about your security.”

  She was then introduced to a man with a used-car dealer’s smile and a Savile Row tailor. During her guided tour of the facility, Mallory checked the electronic locks on the doors, asked about the front-end system of the computers, and noted the security cameras mounted on the walls. She was not impressed. This was going to be entirely too easy. Before her guide turned her over to the director’s secretary, he had all but given her the keys to the door and the passwords for all the patient files. Best of all was the tour of the basement and access to the trunk line for the telephones.

  Now she stood in the director’s anteroom and put one hand in her pocket to depress the switch on her scrambler. The secretary’s computer screen went berserk, changing all the text to math symbols.

  “Oh, shit,” said the secretary.

  Mallory watched as the woman powered down to lose the glitch. When the screen came to light again, the scramble was still there, and there were many more “Oh, shi”s before the defeated woman beat her hand on the desk.

  “My computer does that once in a while,” said Mallory. “Do you want me to fix it for you?”

  “I’ll give you my firstborn child,” said the woman with the frazzled eyes. She stood up and pulled out her chair for Mallory. “Can I get you some coffee, hon?”

  “Thanks. Black, no sugar.” Mallory sat down at the computer station. When the woman was out of sight, she turned off her scrambler and restored the screen. Now she went into the main directory and created a back door in the system to bypass every security code. The coffee appeared beside the keyboard as she was calling up the secretary’s word-processing program.

  At the end of the afternoon, she was back in her office at Mallory and Butler, Ltd., sitting at her own computer. She waited for the trip lights to tell her she had access. The amber light glowed. The asylum’s closed system was operating on the modem now, accessing the internet, which made it an open system with a back door.

  As she tapped into the phone line for the Orwelhouse lobby, she found herself intruding on a sexual liaison. The receptionist was hooked into an internet service which catered to the erotically deprived. Mallory checked the user’s personnel file with a purloined password. The receptionist was high school graduate Sylvia Ulner, who was passing for a psychiatrist on the anonymous internet connection. At the moment, Sylvia was typing out a pornographic analysis of her body for an amorous correspondent in a private cyberspace room.

  Of course, there were no private rooms in cyberspace. Any cut-rate burglar knew there was no such thing as an inviolate system. But Sylvia and her keyboard stud were oblivious to Mallory’s intrusion as they were busy violating one another.

  Welcome to the goldfish bowl.

  Mallory stepped lightly on the information superhighway, tiptoed past the lovers in the circuit boards, and entered the hospital system to roam the patient entries of twelve years ago.

  There was no medication on the charts for Oren Watt or any of the other Outsider Artists, and no one was paying the bills. The accountant was reporting this group as a loss, though each had a growing trust fund for sales of insane artwork. The insurance companies of the non-artistic patients were paying the moon for drugs and counseling. She found only one female patient in Sabra’s age bracket with no insurance and no scholarship. Well, that fit. Gilette had mentioned that Sabra never used their medical policy.

  The computer called the woman Sarah, and itemized the counseling sessions and rounds of medication for depression. When Mallory called up the complete file, she was looking at the patient’s photograph, a blurred face twisting away from the lens, unrecognizable but for Sabr
a’s hallmark camera avoidance. The bills for her care had been paid directly by a blind account in a foreign bank until the account ran dry two years later. Her entire fortune was gone, and coincidentally, she was discharged that same month. No forwarding address.

  Did the bastards give you bus fare, Sabra?

  While the receptionist and her lover were trysting in cyberspace, taking off a hundred bytes of panties, Mallory was downloading all the patient files. The lovers were in printed throes of ecstasy as Mallory left the hospital records, closing the back door softly behind her.

  MORE, MORE, MORE, wailed Sylvia at her keyboard.

  Now Mallory scanned Sabra’s file on her own system and at a more leisurely pace. There were reams of charts which only told her Sabra’s deep sadness had never responded to drugs or counseling. The personal notes of a psychiatric nurse mentioned Sabra’s only close friendship with another inmate: Sabra and Oren Watt had been inseparable.

  Riker walked into Coffey’s office unannounced. He looked from the man to the bottle, which Coffey made no effort to conceal. That was a very bad sign. Riker pulled a chair closer to the desk and settled into it. Coffey wouldn’t meet his face. A worse sign.

  “I got ten bucks says I can guess what’s goin’ down.” Riker put his money on the desktop next to the lieutenant’s empty glass.

  Coffey gave him a grudging smile and fished a back pocket for his wallet. He laid a ten-dollar bill beside Riker’s, saying, “Go for it.”

  “You’ve been in here for less than ten minutes, and the glass is drained. Now that’s criminal, ‘cause it’s a real good grade of sipping whiskey. Your knuckles are white, and you look like a man who shouldn’t be allowed near a loaded gun. It’s Blakely, right? He’s messing with your command.”

  Coffey pushed both tens to Riker’s side of the desk. “Yeah, he wants Mallory off this case. He wants that really bad.”

  “And he threatened you, right?”

  Coffey nodded, as he reached into the drawer of his desk and produced another glass, holding it up to Riker as though he actually believed his sergeant might say no to a shot of whiskey.

  “Well, I think he’s oveneacting,” said Riker, accepting his glass and emptying it before he spoke again. “There’s worse department cover-ups to worry about. This one is really small potatoes.”

  “Blakely’s taking it pretty seriously.”

  “And I’m sure he’s taking it personally, too. He’s the one who ordered Markowitz to close out the case.”

  “But the case stayed open. Blakely never screwed around much with Markowitz, did he?”

  “Well, you have to figure Markowitz had something on Blakely—the things the old man got away with? Lieutenant, you know what your real problem is? You got your promotions on merit. You didn’t come up through the patronage system. If you had, you’d have enough dirt to fend for yourself. You remind me of my old man. That’s high praise, ‘cause the old bastard was as straight-arrow as they come.”

  “ Riker, why did you stay on the force after they busted you to sergeant?”

  “Well, my old dad was a cop. My grandfather, too. There was nothing else I ever wanted to be. So I quit the force and do what? You think I’m gonna go be a hairball private dick? Gimme a break.”

  “You’re fifty-five. You could retire with a nice pension and a few—”

  “And put a gun muzzle in my mouth after the novelty wears off? Naw. I still got Markowitz’s kid to raise. She thinks she knows it all. You can’t tell her nothin’. She’s gotta learn everything the hard way. Somebody’s gotta be there with the bandages when she falls down and skins her little knees, or gets kicked in the head.”

  Rather normal people, suited and gowned, filled the gallery and mingled with the freaks of SoHo antifashion. Among the better dressed, there were many obvious cases of plastic excess and cut-rate work. With an unerring eye for aesthetics, it was not difficult for Charles Butler to guess which of the noses and chins had come from the store.

  Charles took Mallory’s arm to escort her around a leering little man in a long fur coat which probably concealed something lewd. Among the lunatics, his instincts were seldom wrong. Whenever he smiled in public, they gravitated to him, taking him for one of their own. He held his loony smile accountable for every mad confrontation on the streets of New York.

  “Mallory, it’s not the same crowd that would have been at the last Dean Starr show. If that group was the A list, this is definitely the C list, the incompetents of art collecting.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Koozeman brought out the circus freaks to entertain them. They’ll want to tell their friends back home in the suburbs that they spent the evening with famous artists. Any freak will qualify in that role. In my experience, the real artists are fairly normal in most respects.”

  A young woman with a half-shaven head walked by in earnest conversation with a pin-striped suit.

  “So Koozeman is trying to unload the unsold work in a hurry,” said Mallory. “That fits. He put both galleries on the—”

  “Check out the metal jacket on my tooth, here,” said the small man in the fur coat, who had followed along behind them. Now the little man put himself in Mallory’s path, and she was suddenly confronted with a wide, grinning mouth. A grimy finger pointed to the shiny metal crown reflecting a small silver cameo of her face between his lips. The tiny mirror was set slightly off center in a crooked line of yellow teeth. She backed up and stared at his sweating face above the collar of the fur, taking in the spiked hair, and the gold rings which pierced both his nostrils.

  He grinned at her, all but salivating as he looked her up and down. “Would you like to see the jeweled safety pin in my dick?”

  Charles pulled her away while she was still in the fascination mode and had not yet thought to bloody the little man.

  Koozeman was advancing on them, smiling and openly appraising Mallory’s black silk dress as he extended his hand to Charles. “Mr. Butler, how good to see you again.”

  “Hello, Koozeman. I believe you’ve met Mallory.”

  “Who could forget such a face? If I had known you were coming, my dear, I would have made up a guest list with a better class of collector.”

  Charles nodded to the near corner. “I see J. L. Quinn is here.”

  “Yes, he is,” said Koozeman, as though he could not figure out why Quinn had come.

  Mallory looked around at the walls, stark and bare but for the small red bits of paper held in place with pins. “So where is the artwork?”

  “The artwork?” For a moment, Koozeman seemed baffled by the idea of art in his gallery. “Oh, the tickets. See the tickets on the walls? They all have numbers. Dean Starr did it with numbers.”

  “Pardon?” Charles knew he would regret asking for clarification.

  “Numbers. See?” Koozeman waved a small red velvet bag in front of them, grinning like a master sorcerer. He opened the bag with a small flourish and offered Mallory a peek inside, wherein lay a pile of tickets like those on the walls.

  “Every one of them matches up with an idea, just like the tickets on the walls. They all have numbers on them. Please pick one.”

  She dropped a white hand into the bag and pulled out a red ticket. It was number twenty-two.

  “All right, Dean’s idea for number twenty-two. Let’s see.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. “Oh, yes. His idea for number twenty-two is a broad steel beam that goes half a mile straight up in the air.”

  Mallory seemed skeptical. “What for?”

  “To make you uncomfortable. You can’t see the base support, it just stands there while you wait for it to fall down. It’s meant to be threatening. Not his most original theme, though. He’s building on the work of a sculptor who once wrecked the side of a government building when the plaza sculpture fell down.”

  “A half-mile beam. That’s a rather ambitious protect,” said Charles, playing the good sport. “How are you planning to fund it? With dr
awings—like Christo?”

  “Oh, no. Dean never intended to create the pieces. He just thought of them.”

  Mallory tilted her head to one side, and Charles wondered if she was listening for the audible snap of her mind, which could only be moments away.

  “Well, of course. He just thought of them.”

  Koozeman missed her sarcasm, as he took her hand and kissed it. “You do understand. I sell the artist’s thoughts, his intentions. Very pure, isn’t it?” He handed a price list to Charles.

  Charles scanned the list of numbers accompanied by prices in four and five figures. “And how are the sales going?”

  “I’ve sold four of them in the past half hour.”

  “You sell the artist’s thoughts.” Mallory gave equal weight to each word.

  “Yes. I sit over there.” Koozeman pointed to the side wall where an armchair sat on a platform. “When you see a number you like, you come and tell me the number on the ticket, and I tell you the idea Dean Starr had for that number. Simple?”

  Charles watched J. L. Quinn’s approach. “Charisma” was a word he called up easily enough, but he was also searching for something to describe an animal so much at home in its body, too graceful to be human. Now this was art, he thought, as he soon fell victim to Quinn’s talent for putting people at ease when he felt so inclined.

  And then suddenly, Charles realized he had been robbed. Mallory was walking away with the art critic.

  A matron, wearing a pearl choker, gasped audibly at the specter standing by the gallery window.

  On the sidewalk outside the gallery, face pressed up against the window, a ragged derelict was holding a tea tin to her head and staring after the retreating figures of Quinn and Mallory. The woman’s mouth was working in a furious agitation of red gums as she slowly withdrew into the darkness beyond the light of the window.