Mallory's Oracle Page 13

  Once, Markowitz had caught her cutting the pieces of a picture puzzle to make them fit. ‘Kathy,’ he said, in the early days when he was still allowed to call her that, ‘you can cheat the pieces to fit, but they won’t show you the real picture. This is life’s way of getting even with you, kid.’

  She put the Gaynor notes off to one side of the board with the long shots of Henry Cathery playing chess in the park.

  She needed a new best suspect and a new angle. She stared at Markowitz’s pocket calendar. Suppose he had never made it to the BDA appointment that Tuesday night? He hadn’t been seen since Tuesday morning. Markowitz hadn’t gone to the Thursday night poker game the previous week. What if he also missed the Tuesday appointment in that week before he died? What had he been doing with his nights?

  If Markowitz had figured it out, it had to be linked to one of the first two murders. Or had he worked out a connection to the third one? What had he seen that she could not see?

  She loaded the slide carousel and sat watching the shots of Markowitz killed again and again, melding into shots of the first two murders, and finally her own shots of Gaynor and Cathery and the magic show of the medium, minion and baggage emerging from the yellow cab. ‘Pick up all the oddball things you can find,’ Markowitz had told her in her first year in crimes analysis. ‘Never throw anything away, kid.’

  ‘Don’t call me kid,’ she had shot back. And it was always Mallory after that. It had cost him something to call her Mallory after all the years she had been Kathy to him, as though he’d never had a hand in raising her.

  She watched the slides, lights playing on her face as the images changed quickly. What would the old man make of all this? Well, first he would say she was leaving tracks, big messy ones. Markowitz the dancing fool would never do that.

  So how did he get killed?

  The slide carousel looped back to the first shot of Markowitz lying in his own blood. She no longer took pride in the fact that she never cried. Dry eyes closed tightly as she switched off the projector and sat alone in the dark.

  The new order she had created for him permeated his entire life these days, extending even into the office kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to gleaming metal shelves which Mallory had stocked with ample makings and condiments for every kind of sandwich known to God and Charles Butler.

  It was an odd moment to realize how deep his feeling did go, as he was gathering ham and pickles, mustard and mayonnaise. Thieving, amoral liar that she was, he knew with a terrible finality that he would love Kathleen Mallory till he died. Where was the cheddar cheese? And it would always be the one-sided affair of a solitary man with a ridiculous face.

  His eyes avoided the expanse of yellow wall above the stove as he lit the burner and set the teakettle over the flame.

  He regretted the choice of yellow paint for the kitchen. It had been an impulse decision. Like most people, he had believed yellow to be a cheerful, happy color. Too late, he had realized his mistake and called up an item on the subject of color, mentally projecting a page from an old science journal directly onto the white refrigerator door. The article had agreed with his own feeling. Yellow made people jittery.

  But even if the walls had been the calming pink of drunk-tank experiments listed in the following paragraph, it might not have had any effect on his state of mind this late evening.

  He slathered mayonnaise on rye bread and wondered what went on in Gramercy Park. Who was she watching, and who might be watching her? Scenarios were growing in his brain like cancers. He laid down three slices of ham and wondered about the gun she carried every day. And then there was Herbert’s gun to worry about. And what had Edith to do with this?

  He added on a generous slab of yellow cheese.

  The teakettle screamed.

  5

  “So we’re back on the same pattern with this one,” said Riker, slugging down his breakfast beer and spilling a few drops on his shirt. “The Siddon woman looks different from the others, doesn’t she? Real peaceful.” He held the photograph out to her. She only shrugged as she took it from his hand. Right. What would Kathy Mallory know of peace?

  She pinned the bloody likeness of Samantha Siddon to the wall with the other on-site photos. Riker watched her all but melding into the cork, passing through the wall of it as she became absorbed by everything he had brought her.

  The exterior wall in the first photograph was splattered with blood, and only patches of Siddon’s fawn-colored suit were not soaked through with red. One bloody palm print stained the rough brick a few feet above the head. Mallory put her finger on this photo.

  “The victim’s print?”

  Riker nodded.

  She walked back to the other side of the wall, where Markowitz’s collection had been reprinted from the slides. She stared at the park photos of the first murder and moved on to the next set. “What about the second kill? Were there any prints on the car?”

  Riker leaned back against the board and paused midgulp. “Hmm?”

  “Estelle Gaynor, the one found in the limo. Were there any bloody prints?”

  “You got it all there in Markowitz’s report. One thumb and an index finger on the window, hers—no palm prints, not hers anyway. We tracked down all the latent prints. One set belongs to a garage mechanic. Some prints from the old man who owned the car. Nothing else.”

  He drained the rest of his beer with one swig and moved to the Markowitz side of the wall to stand behind her. She was staring at the detail shot of the Cathery killing in the park. It showed one bloody print of a full hand on the white trim of the shed.

  “You’re really reaching for connections, Mallory. If you’re looking for a trademark, there weren’t any bloody palm prints for the Pearl Whitman site.”

  “It’s wrong somehow,” she said, crossing back to her own side of the board to stand before the Siddon prints and the separate shot of the palm’s bloodstain.

  Riker was hearing echoes of Markowitz, who was always listening for the off notes. “Mallory, the woman was fighting for her life.” Ah, but wait. He stared at Samantha Siddon’s peaceful face. It wouldn’t agree with a battle on any scale.

  “Slope can’t say for sure it’s the work of one perp?”

  “He’s still working on it. Commissioner Beale likes that idea too. It makes him feel like we know something the newspapers don’t know.”

  “So Beale’s giving Coffey a hard time?”

  “You know the drill. The press crucifies Beale, Beale waves his little fists and squeaks, and Coffey pretends to be afraid of mice.”

  She pinned one sheet of the report to the board. “Any deviations this time? Anything odd?”

  “Yeah. That one’s crooked,” he said, pointing to the last paper she had pinned up.

  “Get serious.”

  He was serious. It was odd for her to make any departure from perfectionist neatness. He looked down at the chipped fingernail on her right hand, and he began to hunt the room in earnest for anything else out of place. The television and VCR had been pulled in from another room. The slide projector was new. But no dust gathered, that was certain. He supposed even a perfectionist could have an off day.

  “No deviation from the MO.” He shrugged. “Same old, same old. Her purse was gone. No deviations among the local corpse robbers, either.”

  She smiled, and that worried him. What was the deal here? Why did she find that so interesting?

  “What about the wounds?” she asked. “Consistent?”

  “Slope says he can’t match wounds if the bastard uses a different knife every time. But the areas and the order of the cuts are the same. He always goes for the throat first.”

  “What odds does he give for two of them?”

  “I tried that one. Slope won’t give odds, and he’s a betting man.”

  As Mallory pinned up the last photo, Riker noticed her alignment was off again. Now he stepped back from the board. Markowitz’s side of the wall was the usual mess. Kathy’s side was nea
ter, but with each addition to the board, less neat. Every time he came into the room, something new had been added, and item by item, her pushpin precision was going down the tubes. The preliminary report hung on the diagonal by one tack. So, what was going on here? The rest of the apartment was immaculate as always. He wondered how much time she spent in this room.

  She handed him a photograph of a woman dwarfing a cabdriver. “Her name is Redwing. She’s running a scam in Gramercy Park. Ever see her before?”

  “She’s on the park surveillance log, but I don’t know her face,” said Riker. Redwing was not a new element in the square, but a once-a-week pattern over more than a year. It was the shots of Jonathan Gaynor and Henry Cathery that had his full attention.

  “I’m meeting her tomorrow at a séance,” said Mallory. “I want some background on her, but she’s not on computer as Redwing. If you tripped over an alias with a rap sheet, you’d tell me, right? ... Riker?”

  Riker nodded, only half listening, preoccupied with the surveillance shots. “Kid, we gotta talk about your style, okay? You don’t get shots like this unless you’re so close the perp can see you, too.”

  She turned her back on him and tacked up Redwing’s shot. “You interviewed Gaynor with Markowitz, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Notes?”

  Riker flipped through his notebook, a dog-eared dangle of pages. “Windmill,” he said, marking the note with one finger.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s the way he moves. He makes a lot of gestures, sprawly, all arms. So, Markowitz and me, we’re walkin’ through the lobby with this guy, and his arms are wavin’ all over the place while he talks. We pass by this group of little old ladies and they scatter like crows.”

  “They were afraid of him?”

  “Naw, it wasn’t like that. You gotta be careful with old people. They break easy. So I guess he makes them a little skittish is all, arms waving in the breeze, never looking to see where he’s going.”

  “Like a scarecrow.”

  “Yeah, I like that.” He scratched out ‘windmill’ and wrote in ‘scarecrow.’

  “What did Markowitz think of Gaynor?”

  “I’m not sure. Markowitz spent the whole time pumping him for free professional advice.”

  “Gaynor’s a sociologist, not a shrink.”

  “Yeah, but he did an article or a book or something on the elderly. Markowitz was getting into the territory, you know? This was early days, only ten hours into the second kill.”

  “What did he tell Markowitz?”

  “Nothin’ I had notes on. Old people’s role in society, that kind of crap. Markowitz thought it was real interesting. I didn’t.”

  “What’s Coffey’s angle these days?”

  “He’s got me running background on the Siddon kid.” Riker pulled a videotape from his jacket pocket. “You wanna see the latest interview? I got her on tape.”

  She took the tape from his hand, fed it into the mouth of the VCR and pushed the play button.

  Margot Siddon appeared on the screen, only to be ejected ten minutes later, and before the interview concluded. Mallory tossed him the tape.

  “I’ve seen her around the park. I don’t know any more than the surveillance team would. She hangs out with Henry Cathery sometimes. Most of the time he just ignores her, won’t even unlock the park gate for her. He’d rather play chess than talk to girls.”

  Mallory stood in the fourth-floor hallway by Martin Teller’s apartment and stared down at the neat stacks of books and magazines, a vacuum cleaner, a copper teakettle, and a portable electric fan assembled outside his door. These were not castaway items to be put out with the trash; this, according to Charles, was where Martin, the minimalist artist, stored everything that was not pure white.

  She glanced at the door across the hall from Martin’s. She had been forbidden to terrorize Herbert of 4B. Reluctantly, she turned back to Martin’s door at the sound of four locks being undone. Three of the locks were shiny new metal, in contrast with the landlord’s lock, which was close to twenty years old by the make.

  The door opened, and she was silently invited into the apartment by the barely perceptible inclination of Martin’s hairless head. Minimal Martin had also done away with unnecessary eyebrows. His white shirt, bulking out around the bulletproof vest, the white pants and socks all blended him into the white walls. The front room had the look of a vacant apartment freshly broken into. The windows were bereft of curtains, and the walls were bare except for the small collection of stamp-size artwork mounted one on each wall. Each tiny bit of art was a faint pencil line.

  She preferred minimalist art over every other school; it was neat and clean and hardly there, no garish colors, nothing to think about, less work.

  The doorless closet in the front room contained the minimum amount of clothes which were also white and hence invisible in these quarters. Square white pedestals passed for chairs and were indistinguishable from the square white pedestal that was his breakfast table, laid with one white dish and a single egg. Mallory had no view into the bedroom, but she could hazard a narrow mattress on the floor, covered with one doubled-over white sheet.

  A bulletproof vest seemed like such a complicated addition to these rooms and to Martin.

  “Martin, I’m curious about the writing on the wall in Edith Candle’s apartment.”

  Martin merely stared, not at her but toward her, like a blind man listening for a clue as to her position. He showed no signs of a pending response. She moved into alignment with his gaze and smiled. A worry line made inroads in his brow, which for Martin was tantamount to an emotional outburst. Perhaps Martin had a truer perception of her than most people who took her smile for a smile.

  “The writing on the wall, Martin?” She rose up on the balls of her feet with anticipation, further prompting the man only with her eyes. If she pressed him too hard, he might walk off into some autistic dimension and close the door behind him. And so she waited on him.

  And waited on him.

  Nothing.

  Oh, of course. She hadn’t asked a solid question, had she?

  “Could you tell me what the writing was?”

  “Red,” said Martin, after she had counted off thirty seconds.

  She stopped smiling.

  Over the past month, she’d had occasion to observe this artist in the streets and the halls during his infrequent contacts with the humans who also lived on his planet. Martin made people nervous for all the minutes it took to determine that he was odd but harmless.

  “Yes, red lipstick, but what did the writing say?”

  She smiled again to worry him into a faster response. She didn’t have all damn day for this crap, did she?

  “Thick lines,” said Martin.

  The man was a badly lip-synced foreign movie with unrelated narrative. A ghost of Helen Markowitz automatically corrected the grammar of her next thought.

  You can kill him, but you may not.

  There was no more forthcoming. He was only standing there, not waiting, not anticipating, only occupying space. Well, he was still a man, wasn’t he?

  “Could you tell me what the words were?” Mallory asked gently, with a low, sultry voice that pulled his eyes into hers by invisible silk strings. Martin broke the strings abruptly and turned around to face the wall. He had spent his words, said the back of him. He had none left.

  Behind her own back, her hands were balling into fists. She kept the fists out of her words. “It’s an interesting building, isn’t it, Martin? I mean the way the tenants tuck in their heads when they slide past each other in the halls. It’s like they all know what’s in each other’s closet and under the bed. A little mutual embarrassment. A little creepy, wouldn’t you say?”

  His head dropped an inch. Considering who she was dealing with, she could read much into that inch. She sat down on one of the white pedestals and stared at his back, willing him to turn around. She was not at all surprised when he did tur
n to face her. His senses were that acute. She wove more silk into her voice.

  “There’s not much turnover in this building. That’s strange. New York is such a transient town. I wonder what keeps you all here. You were here when George Farmer attempted suicide ten years ago. The next tenant to leave was the one who used to live across the hall from Charles. He just disappeared one day, packed up and left no forwarding address. He abandoned his security deposit and fifteen years of interest on it. What makes a man do a thing like that?”

  Martin’s eyes collided with hers and rolled away in pain.

  She held up both her hands, palms up with a question. “You think he saw the writing on the wall?”

  Martin turned his back on her again. His head shook from side to side, not to a negative response, but as though he were shaking the words from his head.

  She’d gone too far.

  She rose to her feet and moved slowly to the door. As she opened it, Martin said, “Be careful. You will not know the hour nor even the minute.”

  When Charles returned to the office, he was surprised to see Mallory there during the daylight hours. She stood at the kitchen counter putting together a plate of sandwiches garnished with the finesse of a professional chef.

  “Hello, Mallory.” He never slipped and called her Kathleen anymore. She was Mallory in all his thoughts, spoken and not. She had trained him well. And she fed him well and simplified his life. Even Arthur, the accountant, had praised her for making his own life easier; no more messy shopping bags of papers with coffee and tea stains washing out the figures in the amount-due columns.

  Yet something told him life was just about to get more complicated.

  “I had a long talk with Edith Candle,” she said, ever so offhand.

  He supposed it was inevitable that she should meet Edith. Every tenant in the building was drawn to Edith’s apartment at one time or another. But that was another puzzle and low on his list of priorities.