Mallory's Oracle Read online

  His face reddened. Good. “Pearl Whitman visited spiritualists on a regular basis. She might be connected to a medium who comes here every—”

  “Redwing?”

  “You know her?”

  “Who could miss a spectacle like that? How tall is she? Six foot two? And the girth.” His hands made a wide circle, knocking into a slender porcelain figurine on a long table behind the couch and setting it to rocking slightly. “I passed her in the lobby of this building one day as I was leaving. The doorman told me her name. I asked my aunt about her the next time I came by. This was a very long time ago, but I remember the conversation very well. It ended in a very loud argument.”

  “Did your aunt attend the séances?”

  “She never said. Of course she wouldn’t have after that. So you think Redwing’s involved in this?”

  “I’m interested in everything that goes on in the square. Redwing’s been coming here every week for more than a year. When you argued with your aunt, what did you have against the medium?”

  His hand suddenly left him to wave in the air, and a scatter pillow sailed to the marble floor. “Well, it’s a bag of tricks, isn’t it? It probably wouldn’t take anything very sophisticated to fool a pack of old women who really want to believe in that nonsense. It’s a nasty business, victimizing the elderly. I really detest people like that.”

  “Would you like to take a shot at Redwing? She’s giving a seance tomorrow afternoon. You’d have to be prescreened and approved. Would you be willing to call Mrs. Penworth? She’s hosting the seance. I got my invitation through her daughter. It might be better if you called Penworth directly. Maybe you could tell her you’d like to contact your dead aunt?”

  “Seriously?” His elbow jerked back, and his startled leg connected with the low coffee table. A delicate crystal vase skittered to the edge of the table and hung there just over the wooden lip and above the unforgiving marble floor.

  “I’m very serious,” said Mallory. “If it wouldn’t be too hard on you, it might help with the investigation.”

  “But why would you want me there?”

  “I’d like to know if Redwing can tell me anything about your aunt that wouldn’t be common knowledge.”

  “So you do think she’s connected to the victims.”

  One leg intended to cross the other, but a misinformed knee made contact first with the crystal vase. The vase moved over the edge of the table on one rolling foot. Mallory’s hand shot out to catch it on its way to the floor. She set it back on the table in its original position.

  “No. If there was a connection, we would have turned it up by now. I’m only collecting information wherever I can get it. There’ll be four or five women there in your aunt’s age bracket. She might have known some of them. I need a way to get your aunt’s death on the same table with Pearl Whitman.”

  “Looking for common denominators? Very good. So you’ve passed yourself off as a bereaved survivor of Miss Whitman’s?”

  “No. I’m planning to raise Louis Markowitz from the dead. He was my father.”

  The vase fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred shards, all sharp as knives.

  When Mallory pulled into the driveway, the old house fell far short of her imaginings after six weeks of neglect. The windows were all dark, and yet there was a lived-in look to the house and yard. There was nothing about the place to tell anyone how ruthlessly she had abandoned it. The grass had been recently cut, and the walk and porch were swept. It was that time when leaves were falling, but none had landed in this yard without being raked up and disposed of. This had to be Robin Duffy’s work. She looked over to the house next door.

  It wouldn’t be the first time this neighbor had mowed the lawn for Markowitz, who was sometimes so preoccupied with a single human hair found at a crime site that he didn’t notice the grass growing in his own front yard. She wondered if Robin Duffy was also playing a game of make-believe. Did he curse Markowitz as he was mowing? Or did he break with custom this time?

  Riker must have come through the back when he was last here. The police department seal was intact around the frame of the front door. She peeled away the tape and fit her old key into the lock.

  If the yard had kept her illusions for her, the inside of the house told the truth. The door opened onto the smells of long-settled dust, stale air and the terrible empty silence of no one home. She flicked the wall switch, and the overhead light came on with a soft warm glow.

  She stood by the love seat where Helen had done her mending in the evenings. The sewing basket was in its usual place. She had long ago come to terms with reminders of Helen. But she would not look at the overstuffed reclining chair where Markowitz had sat reading his paper every night save Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  What must it have been like for him, being alone in this place? She knew she could never live here again. It had been hard enough after Helen’s death.

  She slowly gravitated to the kitchen, pulled along by memories of the only woman who had ever cared if her hair was combed and her nails were clean, if she had her milk money and a proper lunch to take to school. She remembered the kitchen as bigger. Perhaps she had always seen it through the eyes of the baby felon Markowitz had bagged.

  ‘Whaddaya think you’re doin’, kid?’ he had asked, sitting back on his heels staring at her through the low window of the Jaguar which belonged to some sucker.

  ‘Bug off, old man, or I’ll cut you,’ she had said.

  He had brought her back to this house that night. Four tons of paperwork at Juvenile Hall didn’t fit with his plans for a birthday party, he told her. Helen’s cake had been sitting in the back of his car. It had a lemon smell, and Markowitz smelled of cherry-blend pipe tobacco.

  The child in handcuffs had driven Helen wild. Poor Markowitz could not get them off fast enough to please his wife. And then young Kathy had been engulfed in the plump arms of a gentle woman who smelled of laundry soap, cleaning fluid and scouring powder. Beyond Helen were the smells of steamed vegetables and pot roast. And that night, young Kathy had smelled crisp clean sheets being pulled up around her face, and the scent of talcum powder as Helen leaned down to kiss her good night.

  Helen.

  The house didn’t smell like Helen anymore. There was dust over everything. Helen wouldn’t have liked that.

  Mallory climbed the stairs, heading toward the back bedroom Markowitz had used as a den. She passed by her own room, which contained all the furniture and belongings she had left behind. He had kept it the way she left it, against the day when she might want to come home again, she supposed. The doorframe had the last notch of her growing years. The first notch was much closer to the floor. What a runt she had been at ten. How smug she had been at lying two more years onto her age.

  Markowitz’s den was disguised as the aftermath of a messy burglary, and she found nothing out of place. Riker had been careful to leave things as he found them. The bills were in the order of due dates, although a stranger would’ve assumed they had simply been dropped on the floor by the desk. His correspondence with the Old-time Radio Network lay on top of less important correspondence with the Internal Revenue Service. She picked up the metal wastebasket where he filed his credit card receipts and his canceled checks. Riker would have been through it, looking for a lead on BDA.

  She began with the desk drawers, and an hour later, she had sifted down to the last drawer in a battered old filing cabinet to discover all her school report cards and her class photographs. She looked at the group shot from the private Manhattan day school which must have cost the old man a fortune in tuition. In that first photo, she was a standout, the only nonchild in a sea of innocence. The old man had been right; she never was a little girl.

  She was downstairs again, turning out the lights and fishing in her pockets for the car keys, when she saw the pile of envelopes lying by the door under the mail slot. She leafed through the junk mail, almost passing over the flyer for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy.
<
br />   BDA.

  Riker said he’d been through every business listing in every telephone directory for all five boroughs. Was he holding out on her?

  She walked over to the table holding the telephone and the phone books. She cradled the heavy business directory in one arm, tearing the pages as she riffled through them. There was no commercial advertising for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy. She checked the white pages—no listing. Riker was off the hook; his teeth were safe.

  She walked slowly to Markowitz’s chair and sank into it. Her hands ran over the worn leather of the arms, and she pressed her head deep into its back cushion. She was picking up a scent which had not been obscured by the layers of dust. A tobacco pouch lay open on the small table at her right. One hand drifted down to the pipe rack and her fingers grazed the smooth worn bowls of wood. She picked up the pipe with the carved face, his favorite because she had stolen it for his birthday in those early days when she still called him Hey Cop. She held the pipe tight, her knuckles whitening as she closed her eyes, trying to imagine Markowitz in his young days.

  Young Markowitz the dancing fool.

  The stem of the pipe broke between her fingers. Startled, she looked down on the ruined thing. She slowly lifted the pieces of it and tried to match the jagged shards of the stem together, as though for a moment she believed she could undo the breakage and make it whole again.

  Her hands dropped to her lap and the pieces of the pipe rolled out of her grasp and fell soundlessly to the rug. She began to rock slowly from side to side in a cradle motion dredged up from a time beyond her remembering, beyond the existence of hiding and running, stealing food and dodging flying broken bottles and the baby-flesh pimps. She rocked and rocked, deaf to the sound of the doorbell, to the loud banging on the door and the sounds of Robin Duffy turning his years-ago-given key in the lock. And for a time, she was deaf to the sounds of that little bulldog of a man with the frightened eyes who was shaking her by the shoulders and yelling, “Kathy! Kathy!”

  A man with a knife appeared in every shadow of leaves playing on the window shade. Margot Siddon pulled the blanket up over her head in the child’s conviction that blankets were protection from monsters. She had given up on sleep. She dialed Henry Cathery’s number in the dark; her fingers were that practiced in this particular order of buttons. He was not happy at being awakened.

  “What!” he said loudly in lieu of hello.

  “Henry, it’s me. Could you loan me twenty dollars?”

  “Margot, are you crazy? You’re rich. You’ve got at least a mil after taxes.”

  “Not yet I don’t, and the apartment was sealed up by the police. I can’t even get anything to pawn.”

  “Go to her bank in the morning. Make them give you an advance. I didn’t even have to ask for my advance. The bank just sent me a draft of the repayment agreement.” There was no goodbye before she heard the impersonal click of a broken connection.

  She slammed the receiver to the cradle. What a weird bastard he was, or maybe, she thought, just maybe he was onto the rings she had copped from his grandmother’s jewel box. He didn’t live in Disneyland all the time. He had his moments of clarity, and she found those moments creepy as hell. It was like coming upon someone who had been walking in his sleep and now was awake to the nth degree, awake to the entire universe, plugged in, turned on. And in those moments, he had wired up to her brain and shocked it clean of memory for days at a time, nights in succession without bad dreams. He was the only one she knew who would talk to her about the man with the knife.

  She didn’t recall one personal conversation with old Cousin Samantha in all the years she’d sucked up to the woman.

  At first, she’d been taken to Samantha’s apartment as a child. Then later, after her mother remarried and disappeared, she had gone alone. Old Samantha had been good for fifty bucks at a touch, but at the great cost of hours of monotony.

  Her mother had once talked about Samantha in the days when the old woman was young and beautiful. It was hard for Margot to imagine that old bag of bones with her hump and her trembles as a beauty. When Margot was little, the old woman had called the whole world darling, without regard to gender, or to animate or inanimate qualities. Margot was darling and so was the bow in her hair, and each had carried the same weight in the old woman’s babbling affectations and affections. Over the years Cousin Samantha’s babble had become shrill, reaching, at the last, the pitch of a scream of fear.

  After the man with the knife had done his work on Margot, the old woman had come to the hospital to visit her, but only the one time. Samantha had begged Margot to cover her face, to hide the scar, it was so upsetting. Then, fear filled them both, and every night. It was their only commonality after the rape. One woke up screaming with the fear of being alone. And twenty blocks south, the other woke with visions of the knife dancing up to her eyes and then down to her cheek, severing the nerve that had previously allowed her to smile on that side of her face.

  She stared at the wall until it lightened with the dawn, and then she scooped clothes up from the pile on the floor which was nearest the bed. As she dressed, she missed the match of buttons on her vest and never noticed. There was no food in the house. She would go shopping at the supermarket when they gave her the advance money. She would ask for all of it in cash, small bills. She would buy the whole world and meat, red meat, and a jelly roll.

  6

  The banker wished he had an office with a door he could close. The unpartitioned interior of the bank had all the privacy and the proportions of two stacked ballrooms. The expansive balcony where his desk was situated was entirely too public today. People were staring at the oddly dressed young woman seated opposite him. She had a disconcerting smirk on her face, and on one cheek was the crescent moon of a fading scar. Her clothes were dirty, and she was nodding off in her chair and catching herself awake.

  “Miss Siddon,” said the bank officer, “I have to wait on the executor’s instructions before releasing any funds. There’s no way around that. And as to the advance, you haven’t been able to answer a single personal question about your cousin. If you can’t even give me her middle name—”

  “We didn’t talk much.”

  “Perhaps if you spoke with her law firm.”

  “They keep saying they’ll get back to me. But no one ever calls.”

  “Have your own attorney look into it.”

  “I don’t have one, and you know it. Look, I need money, and I need it today. What good does a million dollars do me if I starve to death, huh? Can you answer me that?”

  It had to be a scam, he knew, and not very original. He’d heard similar requests. This ... person must be an avid reader of obituaries. But how embarrassing if she did turn out to be the heir to the Siddon trust. One couldn’t be too careful. “Do you have some form of identification? A driver’s license?”

  “I don’t drive.”

  “What sort of identification do you use when you write checks to merchants?”

  “I don’t write checks. I don’t have a damn checking account.”

  Now that had to be a lie. He knew for a fact that everyone on the planet had a checking account. “I can hardly give you money if you can’t properly identify yourself. You can see that.”

  And yes, she could see that apparently, for she was rising out of the chair, dragging her body up to a stand. The long dress hung on her bones. The floppy brocade vest could not hide the thinness of her arms and face. Did she never eat? he wondered.

  She was moving slowly toward the grand staircase leading down to the main floor. It had crossed his mind to give the creature some change from his own pocket, but he had thought better of it. Such a gesture might have led to a scene.

  While he watched Margot Siddon’s slow progress down the wide steps, he had a few spare minutes to remember he had once played lead guitar in a sixties rock band. In his wife of twenty-five years, he could find traces of the hippy girl who had sung with the band and starved with the
band. But who was this unmusical man who had just given the bum’s rush to a woman who was certainly hungry?

  He toyed with a paper clip as Margot Siddon turned at the base of the marble steps and moved, unsteady, across the wide expanse of gilded, wasted space, heading for the door. When she slipped and fell to the marble floor, he dropped his paper clip and dropped his eyes.

  Riker kept a good distance from the glass wall of the office. He checked the exits for a fast retreat should Commissioner Beale look his way and call him in to be shot alongside Coffey. The gray little man was waving a newspaper in Coffey’s face. Riker knew the headline by heart: “Invisible Man Eludes NYPD.”

  When the case was eight weeks old, when Markowitz was only dead forty-eight hours, it was Chief of Detectives Blakely who had told Beale the case might break at any moment. Six weeks had gone by and now Blakely rested his flabby haunch on the desk, smoked his cigar and left Coffey to fend for himself.

  Coffey was standing and looking down on Beale. Riker could have told him that Blakely’s was the best position. Sitting on his ass, Blakely didn’t tower over the commissioner. Coffey was entirely too tall to be a good political animal in Beale’s regime. And no one had taught Coffey the ingratiating smile, the prelude to bending over and begging to be kicked. The man just stood there, rock solid, and in that moment, Riker came near to liking him.

  Two uniformed officers joined Riker by the watercooler, feigning thirst and watching the show.

  Maybe it was time to show support for Coffey, to take his side against the commissioner. Yeah, it was time. Riker pulled out his wallet and said to the uniformed officers, “I got five dollars says Coffey’s still standing when the commissioner leaves.”

  Margot Siddon plucked a paper cup from a trash can and held it up to a man with a tear in his sweatshirt who clinked in a dime and a quarter. Twenty minutes later, she was pushing change through a slot and asking a clerk for a subway token. She fell asleep on the train and missed her stop.