Mallory's Oracle Read online

  A present.

  This had been Kathy’s longest lesson.

  The poker game had changed to a bastard version of five-card draw, with deuces wild if you held a queen, and jacks wild if you held a ten. And Charles discovered that Slope was not only a gifted medical examiner, but he could also blow smoke rings.

  Slope put up one finger and received one card in an effort to convince the others he held four of a kind. He didn’t. “It drove the kid nuts for months trying to figure out why Louis didn’t use the goods to blackmail his way to chief of detectives and a slew of payoffs.”

  Duffy chimed in, “And I’m sure Kathy was expecting a nice little cut of the action. Two cards.”

  “And we still have no idea what the kid made of that,” said Slope. “Louis thought maybe he lost face with the little brat for a while, that she had him pegged for a sucker, turning down all that great dirt.”

  “I’ll stick with these,” said Duffy. “Lousy hand that it is.”

  “I’m out.” The rabbi put down his cards. “When she was twenty years old, Louis almost had a heart attack when she told him she was quitting college to enter the police academy.”

  “A license to steal and a gun.” Duffy clinked a dime into the kitty, and as he looked up, he made his eyebrows dance. “When you see these cards, you’re gonna cry, you bastards.”

  Slope tossed in two dimes, and after the others had followed suit, he laid out a wild card jack and three tens, glancing at Duffy with a sly smile. “Louis called in a lot of favors to keep her in Special Crimes so he could protect the city of New York from Kathy.”

  Rabbi Kaplan put up his hands. “Enough, Edward. You’ll make Charles think he’s inherited a monster.”

  “He has,” said Duffy, splaying his wild card and three queens on the table. His short arms barely made the reach to gather in the kitty of nickels and dimes.

  “Louis and Helen took Kathy off the street while she still had core emotions left,” said Slope. “But she’ll never be quite socialized, never altogether civilized. It was just too late, you see.”

  “She loved Helen at first sight,” said Rabbi Kaplan, dealing out the new hand. “But it was a long road for Louis, teaching her to trust him. It was more than a year before she stopped calling Louis ‘Hey Cop.’ Then she got comfortable with ‘Hey Markowitz.’ ”

  “But she did love Louis,” said Slope. “Some kids are a lot worse off for their time on the street. You look into their eyes and there’s no one home anymore. They’re numb. They’re the stuff that serial killers are made of. Kathy’s emotions are still very much alive, but it would be a mistake to forget she’s damaged.”

  Charles rearranged his cards, and three men knew he had two pair. He looked up to smiles all around. “You think the Invisible Man might have been a damaged child?”

  Slope held up two fingers for cards. “Louis said some people were just born mean. I have to go along with that. This killer is probably just a garden-variety sociopath, nothing fancy. There are simply too many of them to categorize them as insane.”

  “Louis favored money incentives for murder.” Duffy waved one hand to say he was sticking with the cards dealt him. “Special Crimes was set up to deal with the really brutal, bizarre stuff and a fair share of loonies. But quite a few of the perps turned out to be people with money to gain and a need for stimulation.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Sociopaths need more stimulation. I imagine murder can be rather stimulating,” said Slope. “I’m in for a nickel. And the sociopath has all the ethics of an insect.”

  Three hands later, Charles was down to his last roll of dimes as the rabbi explained that Kathy was predictable in her own peculiar set of ethics. “Kathy’s code of behavior was shaped by Helen’s character.”

  Rabbi Kaplan looked at Charles over the tops of some of the worst cards he’d ever held, and he smiled like a winner.

  Charles was looking down on a better hand—in fact, a great hand—and as quickly as his face showed all of this to the other players, they laid down their own cards.

  “You do realize,” said Rabbi Kaplan, “she’s going after Louis’s killer.”

  “Louis knew who it was, didn’t he?”

  “It’s hard to say,” said Slope. “Louis knew a lot about the murderer, but it was very general stuff. He’s a clever bastard, I know that much. He uses a different knife every time. Not even a similarity of serration.”

  Charles laid down his winning hand to the surprise of no one. “What about the second murder, the car where the Gaynor woman was found? Did the killer have to pick the lock? Wouldn’t that suggest an expertise?”

  “Good try, Charles,” said Duffy, sadly watching the money drift by him and toward Charles’s end of the table. “You take any block in New York City, and you’ll find at least one unlocked car. The old man who owned that car only drove it when he went to the hospital to visit his wife. He can’t remember if he locked it. It’s easy to get careless in a neighborhood like that one. There’s never been a car theft in Gramercy during the daylight hours.”

  “Doing murder in the daylight should be a bit more difficult than car theft. You think the killer belongs to the square, just blends in with the population?”

  “There’s no shortage of suspects in Gramercy,” said Duffy. “The women left large estates. But there’s nothing to tie the heirs to the crime, nothing that wouldn’t be laughed out of court. If the heirs have alibis for at least one of the murders, and they do, the other murders would plant reasonable doubt even if you could get circumstantial evidence on one of them.”

  “This one’s so clever,” said Rabbi Kaplan, “Louis said he’d have to catch the killer in the act.”

  “Could there be two of them?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” said Slope. “It wasn’t Louis’s theory. He always referred to one killer. He never said them or they. He called the killer a thing, a freak, an it.”

  The next hand was under way and Charles dealt the last card to the rabbi. “You were saying that Kathleen’s behavior is roughly predictable?”

  “If you knew more about Helen, you’d know more about Kathy.”

  “I’ll stick with what I got,” said Duffy, declining more cards. “When Kathy was little, she used to steal all kinds of presents for Helen. God, how she loved Helen. She just couldn’t steal enough for that woman.”

  “Two cards,” said Slope. “I think it was Kathy’s way of paying Helen for loving her.”

  “Of course, the presents always made Helen cry. One card.”

  “Well, that confused the kid a lot,” said Duffy. “I mean it was free stuff, wasn’t it? So why was Helen crying? Kathy was a good kid ... in her own way. She did what Helen told her to do. But she didn’t always understand the reasons. Finally, she arrived at a set of rules she could understand. She would never do anything that made Helen cry, even if she didn’t know why Helen cried. The kid never stole another thing.”

  “Cards, Rabbi?”

  “Well, things. She never stole things. One card, please. Kathy’s moral loopholes were Helen’s blind spots. Helen knew nothing about computers. So almost anything she could do with a computer was legal by Kathy’s lights.”

  “And it never occurred to Helen that Kathy could kill,” said Slope. “So she never told her not to.”

  4

  Mallory was out the door, zipping and buttoning as she flew, and ‘oh shitting’ her damn luck as she pulled the straps of a student book bag over her shoulders. Of all the days to sleep through an alarm. Gaynor would be en route by now, but the subway could get her to the university campus ahead of him.

  It was eight-thirty rush hour when she boarded the subway car and sat in the press of cheek and thigh with the workadays who were lucky enough to find seats. Standing passengers were crushing back to the walls, already hassled and stressed by the cattle-car ambience, not wanting any trouble, yet all dressed up in their New York attitudes, up for the battle, the inevitable confrontat
ion that followed the shove, the stepped-on toe, the briefcase pressed into back or gut.

  When she got off at 117th Street, the subway’s morning ammonia smell was beginning to accumulate more legitimate odors of authentic urine as she passed by a man pissing on the wall. It had become such a common sight, she had long ago forgotten it was a crime to use the city’s walls for a toilet. She climbed up the stairs into the light of morning, cool air, and a whiff of hot pretzels and coffee from a nearby sidewalk stand.

  Limping toward her down the sloping sidewalk was a graduate of the New York School of Begging. He carried the requisite paper cup, and his foot was turned out in a convincing twisted handicap. As he approached Mallory, something in her eyes deterred him, and he veered off sharply on two good feet.

  She passed through the familiar gates of the university campus and crossed the plaza to the cover of a doorway where she could watch the street. The cab dropped Gaynor at the same place each morning and never before nine. By Markowitz’s watch, it was ten before the hour. The watch had never run when the old man carried it. Repairing it had been the topic of a decade-long conversation between the Markowitzes, a few words dropped by habit in the pie-and-coffee hour after dinner. She’d taken care of that old unfinished business for them and had the watch repaired the day it had been returned to her along with the other personal effects. When it came back from the jeweler, it had been altered in another respect. Inside the gold cover and beneath the names of Markowitz’s grandfather and father and his own name, it said Mallory.

  Her gaze wandered across the plaza to the canteen’s wall of glass. Sleepy students were slugging back coffee. Other students carrying trays were lining up to pay the cashier. Over the next ten minutes, she watched a few of them leave without paying. The canteen was staffed with student workers who hated their jobs and couldn’t care less if the other students walked off with the tables and chairs. It was easy theft, and not worthy of her respect.

  She checked the pocket watch again. Gaynor was late this morning. She pulled her notebook out of her jacket pocket and scratched a memo. Any break in a routine was noted.

  But he was not late. He was early.

  She watched him stroll out the front door of the canteen and cross the plaza. He carried a covered paper cup and the brown paper bag that, according to her notes, usually contained one chocolate doughnut, one napkin and three sugar packets for his coffee, which was on the light side.

  She followed him to his office and leaned against a wall down the hall from his door, pretending interest in a bulletin board and waiting out his twenty-minute breakfast ritual. Exactly twenty minutes later, he emerged and locked the door behind him, slinging a book bag over one shoulder. She followed at a discreet distance as he walked to his first class.

  His legs showed a decided preference for two different directions, and elbows pointed east and west. Clearly, his four limbs were only going along with the torso under duress. It was predictable that he would trip on one paving stone and stumble on one marble step before arriving at the auditorium.

  His first class was gathering as he arrived. Students straggled in by ones and twos. Gaynor arranged his notes on the podium to the sounds of young bodies hitting the seats, rustling paper, books slapping to laps, yawns and coughs, settling finally to absolute quiet as Gaynor smiled and wished them good morning.

  Mallory took her regular seat at the back of the lecture hall where she was lost in a sea of a hundred young faces. Notebook and pen in hand, she played the familiar role that had ceased to be pure role-playing from the first class she had attended. He was good. No one nodded off during his lectures.

  When he dropped his chalk for the third time, Mallory noticed the student in the next seat was drawing a short line alongside two other lines at the top of a page. This boy would round the scorekeeping off at five before the class ended.

  Gaynor was predictable in many ways, but never boring, and she was as attentive as the rest, listening to him, trying not to smile at his wry humor, trying very hard not to like him.

  After a second class, they were walking back to his office again, Gaynor and his sun-gold shadow, without more serious mishap than his dropping a book and managing to trip over it.

  She sat on a bench in the hall during the hours of student appointments. One after another, the students filed in and out. For the next two hours, he was never alone.

  She made quick notes on the time his last student arrived, and then pulled her mail out of the canvas book bag. She looked at the letter she should have opened yesterday, weighing it in one hand. She knew, without opening the envelope, it was another request from Robin Duffy, lawyer and longtime friend of the small family that wasn’t one anymore. She would have to do something about the house in Brooklyn, Duffy would say for the third time. She jammed the unopened letter into her pocket.

  Not yet.

  She wasn’t ready to walk through the front door of the old house and sit down with the hard fact that there was no one home and never would there be.

  In some dimension, Markowitz was continuing on, but not in any afterlife. Heaven would not do; it was beyond belief. She could believe in old radio heroes for an hour or more, but there were limits. Yet Markowitz had to be somewhere.

  She had never returned to the small café down the street from the station house. She avoided walking on that block in the morning hours, when he might be eating breakfast there ... continuing on. How could she go back to the old house in Brooklyn and not see him there, if Markowitz was to continue on outside the dark hole in the cemetery lawn.

  She also continued on in her own usual way, wondering what she could do to bug his eyes out and give him a new story for the Thursday night poker game, which would always begin: “Let me tell you what my kid did this time.”

  Samantha Siddon nodded her white head at the doorman and walked slowly up the street to the next block, brandishing a silver-handled cane. She hurried along the sidewalk with a trace of a limp and the fearful memory of a bad fall which had broken one hip. The bone had taken forever to mend, and the onset of arthritis had increased her agony. She would rather be quartered by four swift horses than suffer a second fall. She never went anywhere without the cane, which bore a lion’s face and lent her a little courage.

  She was soon well out of the calm of Gramercy Park and into the surrounding alien atmosphere of Manhattan, taking shallow breaths, mistrusting this air. She hailed a cab and gave the driver a midtown address. Samantha was pleased and stunned to have a traditional New York cabby, a native son with a Brooklyn dialect who took risks on every block, defying death to swerve through lane changes and beat each yellow traffic light. When she stepped out of the cab on Madison Avenue, it was well ahead of the appointed hour because she had anticipated a driver who translated addresses to the wrong side of town.

  With fifteen minutes to spare, she stood on a busy street corner near a public telephone and watched the parade of surefooted children of commerce marching on the avenue with the hard slaps and clicks of flat-soled shoes and high heels, eyes fixed with terrible purpose, prepared to trample old women, toddlers, anyone who impeded them on their lunch hour. Though she knew she could buy and sell any one of them with a day’s interest on her capital, they terrified her. One careless shove and she might spend the rest of her days in traction or a wheelchair. The days of the walking cane were numbered as it was.

  As the minutes passed by, these ideas fell away from her. When the public telephone did ring, she was ready, more than ready.

  She whispered into the receiver, though the pedestrian army of that avenue was hurrying by at a heart-attack clip not conducive to eavesdropping. Her words were lost in the noise of a passing bus followed by a police car, its siren opening with a panicky scream and then switching into the nagging mode of ‘Hey, get out of my way, come on, come on, move it, move it.’ And at last, she was screaming to be heard above the hustle of the throng which looked through her and moved around her, and never noticed if she h
ad two heads or one.

  Her step was quicker as she walked away from the pay phone. This small intrigue had made her young again, though the bank window threw back the crawl-paced reflection of an old woman with a hump on her back.

  Mallory arrived at the campus theater just behind Gaynor. She stood on the top step and casually perused the playbill set in glass to one side of the entrance. Again, she read the words she knew by heart, and gave him three minutes through the door before she followed him.

  She knew this building well from student days when she had attended Barnard College productions in its small theater. That had been another life, and when she thought back on it, it was almost as though it had happened to someone else. Some other girl had sat alone in the crowd while the babble went on around her in another language belonging to a different species of animals with bubbling mouths and the softer eyes of prey.

  She entered the shoe-box lobby as Gaynor was disappearing through the door which led into the theater. A young woman stepped between Mallory and this door. Hands on hips, the woman tossed back her long frizz of brown hair, which might pass for long waves of rusted steel wool.

  “You can’t go in there,” said the woman, in the attitude of a combative poodle which had no idea how ridiculous it looked.

  This woman might be all of twenty years old, and Mallory could not miss the fact that the frizzy brunette was smaller, lighter in the framework, and had no gun. She moved past her.

  “One more step and I call campus security.”

  Incredulous, Mallory paused and faced the poodle down. “So? You and I both know the response time for campus security is forty minutes or never.”

  A snicker came from the side, and the salvo was meant for the poodle. A baby-faced boy in a denim shirt and dungarees leaned one arm on the ticket counter. He stared at Mallory as he lit a cigarette and dangled it from his lip. He tipped the wide brim of an old felt hat to her, and then lowered the brim to a rakish angle. She approved both hat and boy with the slight inclination of her head.