Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  “Charles,” she hissed, “stay out of it! Back off.”

  He did stop, but his face showed no signs of abating anger, and he was not backing off. So Mallory only held the giant on a string for the moment.

  Riker untangled his legs and placed them squarely on the floor. “The game is called good cop, bad cop, Charles.”

  He could almost see the mechanics of Charles’s beautiful brain rapidly processing this information, realizing what he had done, and changing his mood from rage to unbearable sadness. Charles turned and slowly walked back to his own office, pulling the door closed behind him.

  “It’s time,” said Mallory, motioning Riker toward the door.

  He entered Mallory’s office alone. Oren Watt was still shivering on the floor. Riker crossed the room to kneel down beside the man, and this made Watt drive his body deeper into the corner.

  “Oren, I’m sorry about this. Look here,” said Riker in his normal, amiable tone of voice. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I really did try to get the gun away from her. She kicked me in the balls.”

  “She’s coming back? And that big guy? Him too?”

  “Yeah, ‘fraid so. You know, she never levels with me. I really got no idea what she wants from you.”

  “She wants to know who killed the artist and the dancer. And she wants to know why, but I don’t know, I swear I don’t know.”

  “So you never killed anyone.”

  “No, I never did. She already knows that. Ask her. But I don’t know who did kill them. And I don’t know anything about Dean Starr’s murder or Koozeman’s. It’s the truth, I swear it.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Oren. If you help me, I’ll help you. And when she comes back, I promise I won’t let her hurt you. Deal?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You met a woman at the mental institution. She was very attractive, fortyish, short black hair and large blue eyes, very white skin.” He held up the photo Mallory had manipulated on her computer.

  “Yeah, I remember her. She was my friend.”

  “Suppose I told you she was a famous artist under an assumed name. Who would she remind you of?”

  “Oh, shit, there are thousands of people in the famous-artist category. Who can keep track?”

  “You remember when she left the hospital?”

  “Yeah. It was the day they took her last dollar. She was worse off when she left, and I don’t mean the money. When she first came, she was very strong. I wondered what she was doing there. She never said. So she came in larger than life, and left when she was small. It was sad.”

  “She was your friend.”

  “My only friend.”

  “You were close.”

  “I miss her. I think about her all the time.”

  “Do you know where she might have gone?”

  “No. I wish I did.”

  “Okay, you were very close to her. You confided everything to her. You told her something about the murders. What was it?”

  “I told her the truth. All I did that night was deliver the pizza and the drugs.”

  “You never heard from her again?”

  “Oh, she keeps in touch. Sometimes she calls me, but she never leaves a number. I don’t know where she is, and that’s the truth.”

  “Did you give her the connection between Koozeman and the murders?”

  “What? You’re not gonna hang anything on me. I didn’t—” And now Watt’s eyes were showing entirely too much white.

  Mallory was standing in the doorway. Riker got to his feet, dusted his pants and walked toward the door.

  “Hey, Riker,” said Watt, voice straining, breaking. “We had a deal.”

  “I lied,” said Riker, closing the door behind him and leaving Oren Watt to Mallory.

  He walked to the door of Charles’s office and knocked.

  “Come in.” Charles was slumped behind his desk, staring down at the blotter. “You’ll never forgive me, will you?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Charles. I’m really glad you tossed me around. Ah, you think I’m kidding?” He sat on a corner of the desk. His smile was wasted. Charles would not meet his eyes. “I used to worry about the kid. I mean, suppose something happened to me?” Something like his rainy day bullet, which would not wait forever. “Now I don’t have to worry anymore. I know you’ll always be there for her.”

  Riker put out his hand, but Charles only stared at it.

  “You’re just gonna leave it hanging out there in the air that way?”

  Charles grasped Riker’s hand, but his face was a long way from coming to terms with what he had done, and what he had planned to do.

  “Snap out of it, Charles. You’re breaking my heart here. I don’t need that kind of crap from you. I got Mallory for that.”

  “Oren, I already know how scum like you happen to be on such friendly terms with a senator. He buys your work. That bastard is one of the ghouls, the crime scavengers.”

  Oren Watt had recovered a bit of his emotional stability now. Mallory had trained him like a rat. As long as he answered the questions, she kept her distance.

  “No, that’s not exactly right. He’s not a collector, he’s only in it for the money, the turnover profit. He’s part of the start-up market. He makes the initial investment.”

  “Then he makes his profits in the secondary market after he and his friends drive the price up.”

  “rights”

  “So it’s a cartel?”

  “Nothing that sophisticated. He’s just an individual buyer. He bought Peter Ariel’s work, too. And then he made big bucks after the murder.”

  “Could Berman have had anything to do with the murders ?”

  “That ass? Oh, give me a break. No. Let’s just say the money he made on Peter Ariel whetted his appetite for crime art. He also bought John Wayne Gacy’s work. He held it until after the execution, and then he made a bundle. And there are eight or ten minor mass murderers who paint. Berman buys ghoul art by the carload and makes a huge profit on volume. He gets it from prisons and mental institutions. It’s just business. He unloads it as fast as he can.”

  “He used Koozeman to broker all the deals quietly, right?”

  “Lots of people went through Koozeman.”

  “I found your shrink’s name in Koozeman’s computer,” she lied. “It looks like they started doing business about twelve years ago.”

  Oren Watt was nodding his head. All she’d been able to turn up were code names and dates. Blakely probably had the Rosetta stone to break that code. If so. it was burned by now.

  “So Koozeman had a lock on the sickness market? He was the one who did the deal with the shrink for your confession, right?”

  “Yeah, he snagged me outside the gallery the night of the murder—right after the cops let me go. He told me to go to his apartment building, and he put me into a cab. That night, we all met at Koozeman’s place. I signed an agent contract with the shrink, and the shrink did a contract with Koozeman. Koozeman had the lists of people who would pay the moon for art connected to high-profile crimes. No one seemed to care that I couldn’t draw.”

  “Koozeman and the shrink I can almost understand. But it’s a funny business for a senator, making profits on murdered taxpayers. So Senator Berman must have gone nuts when there was another murder in one of Koozeman’s galleries.”

  “He went through the roof. He thought it would all come out if Koozeman was investigated. Lucky the senator has powerful friends in the same funny business.”

  “You mean the lieutenant governor?” The ex-mayor of New York.

  “Sure. Why do you think that little bastard’s so in love with the damn death penalty? Every time one of those murderers dies, the price of their work goes up.”

  Father Brenner would give Kathy Mallory a worthy performance. He was still doing penance for the sins which could not be put to Ursula, for she was truly insane, and therefore blameless. The sins of blindness were his own.

  Wha
t he had prepared was a small miracle, given the time he’d been allotted to pull it off. And throughout the day, Ursula had been invaluable in putting the fear of God into lapsed Catholics, none of whom wished to be on the bad side of a mad nun on a mission.

  This was to be his finest mass. The music would be Mozart’s Requiem, for this was the piece which the precocious young student orchestra had been rehearsing when the priest made his begging call to the music school. A former student, a somewhat lax and guilty parishioner, was now the director of that school. Father Brenner had been refused with a hail of excuses from scheduling problems to personal problems. He had been told it was quite impossible on such short notice. Sister Ursula had then taken the phone, and the school’s director learned, once again, that it was a dreadful mistake to get between Ursula and God’s work.

  And so, the holy stage was now set with the well-scrubbed faces of music students. And he had packed many pews with their proud parents. It was a good turnout for the death of a woman whose name would mean nothing to any of them.

  The young musicians’ feet shuffled and tapped with stage fright as they held fast to their bassoons and bass horns, strings and trumpets, trombones and timpani. Father Brenner had pulled out all the stops for this most special occasion. The chorus would be sung by every gifted voice of choirs past and present whom the beleaguered choirmaster had been able to corral into service.

  Both choirmaster and conductor had told him it was insane to attempt the chorus without a proper rehearsal with the orchestra. The priest had counseled faith, and counted on good memory, for the Requiem Mass was not new to any of them.

  A parishioner who owned a mortuary had been leaned on to provide the flowers which graced the altar, a profusion of lilies and orchids borrowed for a few hours from the viewing room of the uptown funeral parlor. Actually, since some bereaved family had paid for those flowers, this might be considered a theft of sorts. But that was almost fitting, considering who he had in his front pew, the thief of candles.

  He was touched that Kathy had brought a recording device, which sat on the space beside her. So she wanted to preserve her mother’s mass. He was confident that both Helen and the birth mother would have been proud to see how far their child had come in her spiritual growth.

  He remembered the day twelve year-old Kathy had stolen the communion wine from the school chapel and made herself sick on it. That day she had sat in his office, drinking strong tea and memorizing lines of scripture, preferring that to the alternative of his calling Markowitz at work to tell him his child could not hold her liquor.

  That was the day he had noticed the fresh bruise on the side of her face, and not asked where she had gotten it. There had been other days and other bruises—more blindness. Helen Markowitz had asked her about the bruises, and then written a note asking that Kathy be more closely supervised during rough sports. He had found the note curious at the time, for there were no rough sports at the academy. More blindness.

  Now the electric lights of the cathedral were switched off, and a score of candles flared up in the hands of the altar boys. The white flowers took on an eerie glow as the priest announced that this was a mass for a woman who had been brutally murdered—the very words Kathy had requested. He never mentioned that this woman had a beautiful child—as he had been requested to leave her out of it. But because he had known this woman’s child, he was able to summon up a passion he thought was lost to him.

  He looked back at Kathy. How young she seemed, how little changed. The last time he saw her as a student, she had been carried into his office in the arms of the janitor who had found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She was unconscious as the janitor gently laid her slight body down on the couch. But she had rallied long enough to do some damage before the ambulance came for her. And the last time Sister Ursula ever saw Kathy Mallory’s face, the old woman was lying on the floor holding on to a freshly fractured leg and screaming in pain. That had also been the last time the priest ever saw Kathy smile. At the time, he had been startled, for the girl’s smile had a touch of evil to it. And in that same moment, he realized that it was Ursula’s own smile thrown back at her. And then the blindness was ended.

  Ah, but hadn’t he always suspected?

  The young music students took up their instruments, and the music blended with the voices of the chorus, building from the delicate sweet notes of a soloist, and swelling to the full accompaniment, rising, surging with beauty and power. Above the altar, a statue of Christ hung on a cross of gold and gazed down on the bouquets at His feet. In the flickering play of candlelight, lilies and orchids seemed to move to the genius music of Mozart, an illusory resurrection of cut flowers. A spate of “Ah”s came from the pews as the music rolled through the church to its conclusion.

  Applause broke out like sudden gunfire. This was wholly inappropriate behavior for the mass, but Father Brenner never noticed, never saw the rows of clapping hands and the rapturous faces. He looked only to Kathy as the sound of applause thundered all around them.

  She nodded to him, and in that simple gesture, she managed to convey that a debt had been paid.

  He hoped she would stay to talk with him awhile, but instead she unplugged the microphone from her recording device and left the pew. Apparently, she had more pressing business elsewhere. She moved quickly toward the door, and he wondered if he would ever see her again. Would there be no more calls in the dead of night?

  She slowed her steps at the altar of Saint Jude and pocketed a few candles in passing.

  Mallory opened the door to Riker’s apartment, and flicked on the wall switch. An overhead light illuminated the whole ungodly mess. It was much worse than she had remembered. Cockroaches fled to the dark cover of the take-out cartons and into the mouths of discarded beer bottles. The crumbs embedded in the rug under her feet gave new meaning to the cliché of a floor you could eat off of. Some of the grazing roaches seemed too bloated to run very fast. There was no single uncontaminated place to set down her duffel bag.

  With the risk of a hotel room in mind, she walked to the telephone on the far wall. Her hand hovered over it for a moment, hesitating to touch the receiver, which bore every fingerprint from the day it had been installed.

  A half hour later, she was back from the corner bodega with a bag of supplies—cleaning solvents for window glass and mirrors, for porcelain fixtures and metal fixtures, linoleum and wood. She set the bag on the kitchen countertop and pulled out a roll of paper towels, a new sponge for the mop, a pair of plastic gloves, and an aerosol can with a label that promised to kill even saddle-worthy mutations of roaches.

  Her face was grim as she gathered up her arsenal. Cleaning house was not something she usually objected to. Her own condominium was spotless, dustless, without blemish of any kind, and she was near fanatical in keeping it that way. On the Saturday mornings of her childhood, she had helped Helen in the ritual of cleaning. But Helen, the world’s champion homemaker, had always begun with a perfectly clean house.

  It was late when Mallory returned from the laundromat. She put down the bag of clean towels and sheets, what must be several months’ worth of them. Leaning back against the door, she brushed a damp tendril of curls from her face. She was tired, but if she sat down, she would lose momentum.

  She dragged her bucket and mop to the bathroom, the last room to clean. And there she was confronted by the plastic Jesus glowing in the dark. She pulled the night-light out of its electrical socket and tossed it into the hamper, where she would not have to look at it.

  A white-haired man stood alone in the plaza. Behind him, the door of the wooden fencing lay in splintered pieces. He made one slow circuit of the plaza, beholding the ghostly white tarpaulins covering every bench, blanketing the fountain, and extending in a pale virus up the walls of the building facade.

  This was Gregor Gilette, whose work one critic had described as almost like a song. Critics had always floundered for the adjectives. They wanted very much to call him cla
ssical, and every instinct sought this word. It was the classic lines of nature which made the inhabitants of Gilette’s buildings feel so perfectly in accord with their environs, in the same way that classical music kept to the rhythm of the human heart. His work never recalled the classic forms of European architecture, but the motion of the river, majestic heights that eagles might inhabit, and the feminine elements of a graceful nude. This was Gilette.

  He had been elated when he finally received the portfolio of photographs. The plaza was about life, and it was good that there had been people to fill all the spaces he had lovingly created for them, as though they had not been strangers to him, but invited guests. Such was his feeling for all his creations. But this building was most special. He would end his career at the height of his powers with this, his greatest piece of art.

  He also approved of Jamie Quinn, who had visited his house tonight. Had he been planning ever to create another work, he might have stolen a line of elegance from Jamie’s face and another from the body and then incorporated the man into something of marble. Only marble would suit the critic’s cool, smooth, graceful exterior. There were no cracks or seams through which the uninvited might intrude on him.

  An hour ago, Gilette had listened as his brother-in-law explained the purpose for his visit, as he described the Public Works Committee’s choice of art for the plaza. Gilette had listened, but he had not believed. What kind of an animal would do such a thing?

  Emma Sue Hollaran. A dumb, slow-witted animal, Jamie Quinn had gently explained. The artist was Gillian, the vandal.

  Gilette had come to the plaza to see for himself. Heavily veined hands reached out for the first tarpaulin and ripped it from the mooring pins with ferocity, and then the next and the next, until the floor of the plaza was covered with the white canvas. He stood by the fountain at the center of the plaza, taking it all in. And now he believed.

  A fifteen-year-old boy, with the aimless walk of a vagrant, was making his way down the sidewalk, past the wooden fencing, adjusting the straps of his knapsack as he walked. The sack was heavy with the weight of his best pair of jeans and all the rest of his possessions.