Mallory's Oracle Read online

“And you want to help me? I’m calling you on that, Rabbi. You’re either all talk, or you give me what I need.”

  The cold air was creeping through the light threads of his jacket. Her eyes were narrowing—another sign of trouble. How incongruous was that incredible face with those gunslinger eyes.

  “So, what’d the old man say about the Gramercy Park murders?”

  “Louis would come back to cut out my tongue if I led you into that mess.”

  She leaned forward suddenly, and pure reflex made him pull back with his body and his mind. She was rising from the chair, standing over him, and he forgot that he was the taller of the two.

  “Fine, then I jump into it stark naked, no defenses, none of your promised help, your hot air, your—”

  “Enough.... A deal is a deal, as Louis would say. But he never told me anything concrete. He was so cryptic he could have had my job. He said the clues were false and they were not. He said it was complicated and simple, too. Does this help you, Kathy?”

  “You’re holding out on me.” She sat down again and leaned forward to bring her face close to his. “He knew who it was, didn’t he?”

  “He never told me.”

  “But he knew.”

  “He said the only way he’d get that freak, that thing, was to catch it in the act. This one was too clever, smarter than Louis himself, so he told me, and maybe even smarter than you.”

  “Why did Markowitz tell all this to you and not me?”

  “Oh, you know how parents are. They start to get independent of their children. Then they think they know it all, never need advice, never call the kids anymore. Like it would break an arm to pick up a phone. And you kids, you give them the best years of your lives, the cute years. This is how they pay you back, they take all the horrors of life and keep them from you.”

  “There’s more. Give, Rabbi. Why would he do the tail himself? Why not send detectives or uniforms to do the surveillance?”

  “This one scared him, Kathy. This was not an ordinary human. This was a freak from the night side of the mind. How could he send in one of his beautiful young boys and girls?”

  “Not good enough, Rabbi.”

  Her reflection elongated in the bright metal of the morgue locker, twisting in ugly distortions as she moved her head. He looked away.

  “Did you know Louis was a dancing fool?”

  “Rabbi.”

  “Patience, Kathy. He loved to dance. But there were no dancing Jews in his family. Very conservative they were, very pious, but not so much fun as you might think. So Louis would sneak out with the Irish kids, and they’d go dancing. One night, when we were young—when we were two other people, almost brand new—Louis took me with him to a nightclub. As memories go, it’s right up there with the night my first child was born.

  “Oh, how he could dance, Kathy. The other kids made a ring around him and his partner. They clapped, they screamed. All of us who watched on, we stamped our feet and rocked our bodies like one gigantic throbbing animal, and we made the building move with our rocking, and the band went on and on and faster and faster. And when the music did stop, the animal with two hundred mouths screamed out in this terrible, beautiful agony....

  “We took the subway back to Brooklyn as the sun was coming up. I wept. Louis didn’t understand. He thought this night would be such fun for me.”

  And now she was hearing him, not shutting him out anymore, only waiting, hanging on the end of the story.

  “Louis was always on the heavy side, but such grace you won’t find in a woman, and so light on his feet. I remember that lightness best. Boys who were all bones made more noise with their feet than Louis. He was born to dance. He was a natural. And some say he was born to be a policeman. He could sneak up behind a criminal with his good brain and—”

  “Okay, I get it. A cop with less finesse would have made too much noise.”

  “And Louis made almost no noise at all. And still, he died. Please, Kathy, you leave it to someone else to find out who this lunatic is.”

  “I think I know who it is ... now.”

  “Then give him to the department, Kathy. Let them handle it.”

  “Markowitz thought the perp was so smart. Well, that dirtbag made a big mistake his last time out.”

  “What are you going to do, Kathy?”

  “I’m gonna do it by the book. Markowitz would’ve liked that. My gift.”

  Rabbi Kaplan pulled his jacket close about his body. He was colder than he had ever been.

  2

  His body was well made, and his tailored, dark gray suit was faultless. But the shaggy brown hair was the length of three forgotten appointments with his barber, and his comical face was at odds with the day as he moved in slow procession across the grass with the others. Charles Butler was in pain, and the worse he felt, the more comical he looked. His protruding eyes, overlarge in the white spaces and small in the blue-colored bits, seemed slightly zany, and his nose might perch a New York City pigeon. He was a caricature of sadness when the few drops of rain found him alone among the mourners and splashed his face and made a hash of his real tears. At six feet four, he towered a full head above the rest of them. No place to hide. There he was, the clown at the funeral.

  Mallory walked just ahead of him. She might have been walking alone. It seemed accidental that she was surrounded by a throng of sad people on a common mission. He didn’t find it odd that there was no sheltering arm around her shoulders, no one to take her own arm and give her support.

  Charles quickened his step, and when he came abreast of her, she turned her face up to his. Her eyes were not the portals poets spoke of. They were cool green and gave away nothing. He put one arm around her. Two uniformed police officers walked alongside of them, openly marveling that he would risk that and that she did not shake him off.

  Kathleen she was in all their private conversations, and Mallory she was in the public areas of NYPD. What to call her at the funeral of Louis Markowitz? She was his inheritance, and Charles was wondering just how he was going to explain that. He hoped the letter in his pocket might help.

  Mallory put down the coffee cup and opened her letter. It began with a list of the deceased’s regrets: Louis Markowitz regretted that his wife, Helen, had died before completing the job of housebreaking Kathy. He regretted being forced to address her as Mallory when she joined the police department. He regretted not being able to teach Kathy that it was not nice to raid other people’s computers, and that he had made such good use of all her thievery and not set a better example for her.

  And now the list of what he did not regret: There were no regrets about arresting her at the age of ten, eleven, or twelve (they could never be sure about her age). He didn’t regret handing the wild child over to gentle Helen Markowitz, who startled young Kathy speechless and kickless with a hug and an outpouring of undeserved and unconditional love. He did not regret that Kathy grew up to be a beauty with an intelligence that sometimes frightened him.

  She had made Helen’s last years an unreasonable joy without boundaries. And so, he could live and die with the fact that she still had the soul of a thief. And he was glad that she had made a friend in Charles Butler, who was as decent a man as God ever made, and would she please not take shameful advantage of him, but go to him if she was in trouble, if she needed help, or in the unlikely event that she needed a little human warmth. And in his postscript, he mentioned that he had loved her.

  She folded her letter and looked up at the man with the sad foolish smile. Charles Butler sat on the other side of the room, quietly staring into his coffee cup.

  She supposed he was waiting for her to cry.

  He would wait forever.

  Commissioner Beale sat down on the couch. He noted that it was a masculine thing, all dark leather and blending well with the other furnishings, massive and solid. The only feminine touch he could find in Sergeant Mallory’s front room was the perfect order that men found so difficult to create, and he could find
no personal effects at all. He might well be sitting in a showroom display for an upscale furniture store—entirely too upscale in his opinion. And the apartment was too large for her salary. It always worried him to see an officer living beyond means, better dressed than himself, or driving a better car. The police commissioner scratched a mental note on his accountant’s soul.

  Sergeant Mallory returned with a tray which could only be silver, and on it was a good grade of sherry and fine crystal glasses. He made more notes.

  She was smiling. So much for Harry Blakely’s comment that he would have to dynamite her office before she would take compassionate leave. She had taken it rather well.

  “I think we might make this an indefinite leave, Sergeant.”

  He did respect Blakely’s advice on keeping her out of it until the case was broken, and the Chief was promising results within a few weeks. Mallory was not replaceable, Blakely had counseled. ‘So don’t antagonize her. Tell her it’s policy.’ And policy it was. Doctors did not practice on members of their families; this was no different. She had seen the wisdom of policy. She had deferred to him in everything. He liked that. He liked it a lot.

  ‘And get her badge and her gun,’ Blakely had warned him. ‘You don’t want her out there armed and working solo.’

  Commissioner Beale had mentioned the badge and gun, but she apparently had not heard him. Her eyes had gone all soft and distant. He reminded himself that she had buried her foster father only a few hours ago. She was so pretty, so vulnerable. He didn’t bring up the business of badge and gun a second time. Everything was going so well. Why spoil it? This after all was one of his most trusted officers.

  Wasn’t she?

  “Is this a rent-controlled apartment, Sergeant? Do you mind my asking the rent?”

  “No rent. I own it. Markowitz made the down payment for me when I moved out of Brooklyn. He wanted me to live in a doorman building with good security.”

  And Markowitz had probably helped with the mortgage payments and the maintenance fees. The man had certainly been on the force long enough to accumulate a nice little savings account. No, no reason to get the badge and the gun. Markowitz was as clean a cop as NYPD ever had, and this young woman had been raised by him in the best tradition of New York’s Finest. Well, good enough.

  Later in the day, when he would explain to Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely that he had left Mallory armed and dangerous, Blakely would roll his eyes but say nothing.

  Lieut. Jack Coffey closed the door behind him and slowly sank down in the overstuffed chair in Markowitz’s office. A small bald spot on the back of his head was reflected in the window behind him. The glass ran the length of the upper portion of one wall with only the interruption of the door. The window looked out on the bustle of officers and clerks in the Special Crimes Section.

  The two adjacent walls were pure Markowitz, camouflaged to blend with the mess of paperwork on his desk. Floor-to-ceiling cork panels held notes on matchbook covers, duty rosters on computer printouts, surveillance and arrest reports, memos—the paperwork collage of a command position in a growing department. The decor of clutter was very like Markowitz. The entire room had been an inside-out, flattened-out model of the man’s mind. He had been a lover of detail, a collector of images, a squirreler of bits and jots of data.

  However, it was the back wall that held Coffey’s attention. It was stark naked. Before the funeral, it had been covered with cork and papered over with photos, handwritten notes, news clippings, copies of statements and everything else pertaining to the Gramercy Park murders that would take a pin, the thousand details of the priority case.

  He could pull most of the same information off a computer disk, and all the physical evidence was under lock, available at a call, but it would not be quite the same. The back wall had been the last available repository of Markowitz’s brain. It was weird to see even one clear foot of space in the paper storm of this office, and now he was looking at a whole damn wall. He’d been raped.

  He turned to his sergeant, who was looking down at his own scruffy shoes.

  “How did she get it out, Riker?”

  “So you think it was Mallory?”

  “Cut the crap.”

  Riker said he never saw her take down the cork, and he hadn’t. But he never mentioned that he had walked behind her through the department, past twelve occupied desks at the top of a shift, down the corridor packed with uniforms, and past the garage security guard, as she carried a long, thick roll of cork under one arm and a desk blotter under the other, with a calendar wadded in her purse and God knows what else. It was a big purse. But she had not been able to manage all that and the Xerox machine, too. Riker had carried that out for her so she wouldn’t have to make two trips.

  Mallory had only stolen one wall out of three. Lieutenant Coffey should be thankful she left him the desk and chair. That was the way Riker saw it.

  Mallory walked into the room that Commissioner Beale had not seen. Her den had once housed only a PC and bare furnishings of one desk, one chair, and one bookcase with computer manuals and disks of countless raids on other computers. It was Spartan and clean. Even the glass of the wide window was spotless, invisible to the human eye, which found no streak or pock to stop its depth of field before it crashed into the traffic of the street running along the course of the Hudson River.

  She sat down, tailor fashion, in the center of the floor and began to unroll the remarkable mind of Louis Markowitz. It was important to leave the cork intact, as the order of pinning one thing over another had been part of the man’s thinking process.

  The FBI profile was among the paperwork on the first layer. It described the killer as between twenty and thirty-five years old, abandoned by his father before the age of thirteen, and raised by a woman, a mother or a grandparent. But pinned over this were inventories of the first two victims’ stock portfolios. Markowitz had always favored money motives. In the pinning and covering, he had rejected the profile of a sick mind. It was only the top layer he wanted to see each day from his desk across the room. And in time, the pieces of it had come together for him. It was all here.

  She had done the background checks for him after the second murder. The printout on her favorite suspect had pride of place on the cork. Jonathan Gaynor didn’t strictly fit the FBI profile, but he did fit the money motive as sole beneficiary of his aunt’s estate. Estelle Gaynor’s heir was thirty-seven. And he must be smart—thank you, Rabbi—because he had almost as many initials after his name as Charles Butler did. Gaynor might have been smart enough to make his aunt the second kill and not the first.

  Henry Cathery, the heir to the first kill, was represented on the cork with her raids on a bank computer. Markowitz had probably lost interest in this one when she told him the Cathery boy had more money than the victim.

  It took her two hours to xerox each scrap of paper, cut it to size and replace the copy in its exact position on the unrolled cork. The copy camera, a recent theft from the police lab, sat on the floor behind her. She lined up each glossy print of the two crime scenes with the flat board and shot them with slide film. Three-dimensional objects also went under the copy camera: matchbooks with his scribbles, a green plastic bag that was not crime-scene evidence, and a cellophane bag of beads that were evidence from the cache of a million tiny white beads found at the site of the first murder in Gramercy Park. These were Anne Cathery’s beads.

  The forensic tech with the least seniority had complained bitterly when the task of accounting for every damn bead had fallen to him. It had taken six hours of picking through the grass and the dirt of the park to collect every single one. It had been a day’s work to track down an identical necklace and more hours to match the number of found beads to the unbroken strand. All because Markowitz loved these little details.

  The doorbell chimed.

  One of the neighbors? The doorman would have announced an outsider on the house telephone. On the day she had moved into this building, Louis M
arkowitz had put the fear of God into the doorman, that and a hundred-dollar bill. And then he had gone home alone to Brooklyn, to a dark-windowed house where he had once been a part of the little family of three: himself, the wife, and the thief.

  The bell chimed again as she was crossing the front room.

  Her purse lay on the table by the door, and in it was the gun, lying over the folder of her badge. It was early yet. She hadn’t had time to leave any tracks, to make any noise. But when she opened the door, she had the gun in her right hand and hidden behind her back.

  It was Riker who filled out the doorframe, a shaggy bear in a bad suit. By the look of his graying muzzle, he hadn’t shaved since Markowitz died. A slob’s idea of tribute, she supposed. Riker was looking down toward the hand he couldn’t see. He raised his wrinkles in a smile and said, “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, Kathy?”

  He was testing the waters. If she let him call her Kathy, she probably wouldn’t shoot him. She gave him a smile. A stranger wouldn’t have guessed how little practiced she was in that expression.

  She opened the door wide and waved him inside. While she stashed her gun back in the purse, Riker was already moseying to the refrigerator where she kept the beer. He flicked off the cap of a cold bottle, and the metal top went spinning across the kitchen floor. Mallory stooped to pick it up and dropped it in the garbage can. She hated anything out of place. Helen Markowitz had always kept a neat, clean house.

  The day after Helen died, she had begun to clean the house in Brooklyn where they had all lived together before the surgeon had cut Helen away from her. When Mallory was done with that old house, there was not a cleaner attic nor cellar, nor all points in between, in all of Brooklyn. But when she took to cleaning the fireplace and then what she could reach of the chimney, Markowitz had pulled her out of there, out of the ashes which were spreading to the carpet beyond the drop cloth, and she was horrified to see the carpet smudged after half a day of scrubbing with a wire brush. She had flown into a rage as Markowitz held her tight. She had screamed and beat her fists on his chest. He let her, pretended not to notice, and held her tighter. And then she had cried. The crying had gone on for days. Then the tears were over with, and she had never cried again. It was as if Helen had taken all her tears, all at once.