Mallory's Oracle Page 8

  “We’re in dress rehearsal,” said the poodle, still glaring up at Mallory. “No one but cast.” She sniffed the air, and catching the scent of the smoke, her head whipped around, followed out of sync by her body as she turned on the boy. “Put that cigarette out immediately!” Her eyebrows smashed together. “It’s against the law to smoke in this building.”

  “But, Boo, I don’t actually mind breaking the law,” said the boy. His smile was charming, a child’s smile.

  “Put it out this minute!”

  The boy bent down to stub his cigarette out on the worn sole of his shoe, but he continued to hold on to it. The unwillingness to waste the cigarette told Mallory this was a fellow scholarship child, here on merit and not family money.

  “I’m ushering tonight,” said Mallory to the poodle who was called Boo.

  “Why didn’t you say so? Here,” she snapped. “You can start folding the programs.” She pulled a cardboard box from the ticket counter and thrust it into Mallory’s hands. When the younger woman had made her stiff exit through the stage door, Mallory turned to the boy.

  “Boo? That’s a name?”

  “No, we call her that to jerk her chain. Bending Boo out of shape is an art form around here. You weren’t half bad yourself.” He relit his cigarette and smiled. “So, since when do ushers attend dress rehearsals?”

  “I’m the overzealous type.”

  “Or crazy for punishment. I wouldn’t go through it again if I wasn’t in the cast.” He sat down on the wooden bench and motioned her to join him. “Is it me, or does it seem a little nuts to use radio scripts in a visual medium? Does this work for you?”

  “Well, it won’t work for the ‘Shadow’ script. You can only see the Shadow on the radio.” She settled the box on her lap and checked her watch. “Did I see Professor Gaynor go in there?”

  “Yeah, a few minutes ago.”

  “What’s he doing here?” She already knew. His name was on the playbill which had been posted on the cork wall in her den.

  “Old Boo snagged him for the role of the radio announcer.”

  Mallory set the box of programs to one side and stared at the double doors on the opposite wall. This, as she remembered, was the route to the balcony. There should be a staircase beyond those doors. During the daylight hours, she had never lost track of Gaynor for more than ten minutes, and she was bordering on that now. How many exits were there?

  Boo came back to the lobby. She was in a foul mood by the ugly line of her mouth. When her eyes lit on the hapless smoking boy, she was reborn.

  “You put that cigarette out this minute!”

  Boo turned on Mallory, who slowly picked up one program and folded it in half with great concentration.

  “Here.” Boo held a roll of red tickets entirely too close to Mallory’s face. “You can number the comp tickets, too.”

  The red roll and Boo’s hand hung in the air, ignored by Mallory, who showed no enthusiasm for numbering tickets. Boo opened her mouth to say something as Mallory looked up at her with narrowed eyes. Boo shut her mouth quickly, as though she had been told to do it, and sat down on the far end of the bench and began to number the tickets herself. Always better to do it yourself if there’s even the remote possibility of having your authority challenged. Or possibly she had just remembered that she was only twenty and had no authority.

  Mallory checked the pocket watch again. He’d been out of her sight for ten minutes, hardly time enough to kill an old lady and make it back for the dress rehearsal, but she didn’t like it.

  The boy took the tickets from Boo’s hand. “I’ll do it.”

  The boy was relighting his very battered cigarette as Boo was passing through the lobby door to the theater. Mallory stood up quickly and crossed the room toward the double doors on the other side of the lobby, missing the expression on the boy’s face as he looked up suddenly in the belief that she had vanished by magic.

  She ran up the wide staircase, long legs spanning three steps at a time. She had only gone this way once before. As she recalled, it was tricky without a flashlight. The stairs wound up and around for two flights, and then a small passage led her down five steps of total blackness and into the second-tier balcony. She settled into the covering dark while Boo was commanding the lights from center stage down below. Two young women were seated in the front row, ten feet from the stage, consulting over a clipboard. They were dressed like Boo in the Barnard uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. A very un-Barnard redhead was standing stage left in a dress that hemmed midcalf above stiletto heels. A young man with slicked-back hair and a forties-period suit sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his out-of-period running shoes. Boo, legs akimbo, hands on hips, screamed for the light cues, and with each call a different part of the stage was illuminated until number twenty-two blew the fuse and the theater went black.

  Samantha Siddon consulted her wristwatch. In one hand she grasped the silver lion’s head of her cane. She was aware of the person behind her before she heard the footfalls. All this day, she had had the sense of something momentous looming, an invisible behemoth. Now it was approaching, the moment was almost here. It was enormous in the felt wake of its coming. It was death.

  The pain of her arthritis made her slow to turn around, and she was even slower to focus through the thick lenses of her glasses. Confusion added to the obscuring clouds in her faded brown eyes.

  “So it’s you,” she said. “How odd, how very odd.” She stared at the knife. It occurred to her to scream, but it was a listless thought, and she had no real heart for it. Her cane was rising to feebly block the first strike, and she had a bit of time to realize this was only the reflex of life itself, which was stubborn even when its vessel was not so set on its continuing.

  Boo strode onto the stage with a toss of her frizzy mane, which would not toss nicely but only lumped to one side.

  “Where’s the lighting tech?” she called into the dark of the theater, shading her eyes with one hand and lifting her face to the second-tier balcony above Mallory’s head. “It’s getting late!”

  And where was Gaynor? Mallory wondered. Another two minutes had passed. She’d give him two more to come out from backstage, and then she would go hunting.

  Boo strutted back and forth, ordering more light cues, one through twenty this time. The lights went on and off, up and down. She screamed, “Jonathan! Where the hell are you?”

  Yes, where? Mallory wondered, going on nineteen minutes, where are you, you son of a—

  Gaynor ran onto the stage. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat. His tie was loose, and he had garters on the sleeves of his shirt. And something else was radically changed. There were no jerky thrusts to his elbows, and his feet agreed to carry him in the same direction without the usual starts and stops. He made a low bow and kissed Boo’s hand, neatly pulling off that gesture without looking the fool. He suddenly had style, thought Mallory. This must be what they called acting.

  With the easy grace of dance steps, Gaynor quickly climbed the platform’s rickety stairs which were begging for an accident, so poor was the knocked-together construction. He sat down in a straight-back chair before a desk. At the center of the desk was an old-time microphone with radio call letters crowning the top. The platform had a built-in sag toward stage right.

  Boo screamed for the next cue and the houselights went down. “Where the hell is the Shadow?”

  The lobby doors flew open, banging against the walls to either side. The actors onstage turned to stare as a young man strode into the theater and stood for a moment in the semidarkness. He had wild curls of dark hair, darker eyes and full lips. Just as Mallory was deciding that this was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, he keeled over dead drunk, making a perfect three-point landing on the back of his head, his ass and one elbow. And this, she reasoned, must be the Shadow. The look of horror on Boo’s face confirmed it.

  Gaynor descended the platform stairs, stepped lightly to the edge of the stage, and jumped down to
floor level to call the unconscious boy by name, to prod his body, checking for signs of life, and finally to lug the dead weight of him through the side door by grasping the boy under the limp arms which dragged along on the floor.

  Mallory was wondering what had possessed Boo to cast that striking boy, sexual even when passed out cold, as the Shadow. He was definitely a poor choice for the part of a character who had the power to cloud minds and render himself invisible. Certainly no woman had a libido so dulled that even blindfolded and three days dead she could fail to notice him in any crowd.

  Gaynor returned to the stage and climbed back to his mark behind the desk. The platform was so tentative, so screwy-looking, Mallory waited for it to crumble and tumble Gaynor, desk and chair to the stage. It never did, but she continued to wait, believing that it would.

  It was another hour of radio plays, an old Jack Benny routine and a sketch from “Stella Dallas,” an hour of Boo terrorizing a good-natured cast and crew before Mallory heard the line she had been waiting for.

  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

  The Shadow knows.

  Mallory’s mouth moved, silently accompanying the lines of the script. When she closed her eyes, she was back in the cellar of the old house in Brooklyn, sitting with Markowitz on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sipping cocoa in the smaller audience of two dedicated make-believers.

  There was a long pause in the dialogue where a pause shouldn’t be. The Shadow had missed his first cue.

  She opened her eyes. The star had made his entrance. With his first lines, Mallory realized that he was stone-cold sober. No hasty cup of coffee had done that for him. So the dead-fall drunk routine had been an act to torture Boo. Now the boy moved to center stage and launched into a stunning soliloquy.

  Of course, the lines belonged to another character who had escaped from an entirely different play, A Streetcar Named Desire, and had nothing at all to do with the “Shadow” script. But the heroine gamely responded to the riveting, animalistic screams, and she came running in from the wings and bounded across the stage to leap into the boy’s arms. He carried her off the stage to wild applause from cast, crew and Mallory.

  Boo’s shouted obscenities were lost in the fray.

  The houselights were coming up as Mallory made her way down from the balcony. Outside the building, she waited on the steps with her face in a book. The actors passed by, one by one, in street clothes. A boy strolled by, playing a flute which was impossibly long. Boo sailed by, still frothing. Finally after fifteen minutes, Gaynor exited the building in his own clothes—the jeans, open-necked shirt and sports coat.

  As he walked across the campus, Mallory watched the awkward gait return to his lanky legs. His elbows pointed out in sharp angles, his feet found a raised paving stone to trip over, and he was his normal self again.

  The remainder of Gaynor’s schedule was less spectacular. He would be on campus into the evening hours. She cared only about his time in the light, the killing hours.

  Tired, and back in the subway in the middle of day‘send rush hour, she was pressed against one wall of the car. Unable to reach back to her book bag, she was reduced to reading the advertising cards above the heads of other passengers. One sign said ‘Kiss warts and bunions goodbye.’ Another ad was for Right to Life proponents. If you knew an unwed mother-to-be, there was a number where you could turn her in.

  A passenger turned his face up to glare at her and opened his mouth to give her a ration of grief for stepping on his foot. When he looked into her eyes, he suddenly thought better of it, and he too found something to read on the walls.

  Charles had a few pressing questions for Mallory when she walked in the door. However, by the set of her jaw and the hardness of her eyes in wordless passing, he decided it might be worth his life to annoy her just now. He gave her a few minutes’ lead time before he followed her into the back room she had taken over as her private office. This room contained none but the most disturbing clues to her personality.

  The three stacked units of computer terminals and printers were in precise alignment with the mobile console housing more sophisticated equipment, all robotic ducks in a row. Charles thought the bulletin board at the rear of the room lacked Markowitz’s homey style of clutter; each paper was pinned at four corners and straight to within an eighth of an inch. The equipment shelved along the side wall gathered no dust, and the manuals and reference books sat solidly in the bookcase, all bindings perfectly aligned.

  Though he had offered her a selection of good pieces, she had furnished the room herself with standard office issue: one ersatz metal desk, one chair that swiveled and one that did not. A large metal file cabinet stood behind her desk, and without needing to pull out a drawer, he knew each paper therein would be matching corners with each other paper. There were no family photographs, and no wall hangings that did not convey charted information, and her desk was bare of any personal items. It was the room of an obsessively well-ordered human with inhuman precision of thought and deed.

  Somehow, the compulsively tidy environs would not square with the young woman who took wrong turns at every opportunity, and raided other people’s computers with the gusto of a Hun.

  “Kathleen, could we discuss a few practical matters?”

  “Mallory,” she corrected him automatically as she flipped the switches to light up the first computer.

  “Fine. Mallory. About my accountant? He’s very upset. Thinks I’m looking for faults in his work.”

  “Good.” She accessed a file on the accountant’s floppy disk. “He’ll think long and hard before he dicks around with the books.”

  “Arthur? He wouldn’t steal a paper clip. His whole life is dedicated to honorable accountancy.” Charles stood behind her chair, wondering how much of her attention he had, and what he was likely to get. “He laminated the first tax form where his child appeared as a dependent. Some people bronze baby shoes—with Arthur it’s tax forms. He’s a good man, and I don’t want to lose him.”

  “I didn’t accuse him of anything.”

  “No? You demanded a copy of his disk so you could run your own audit. How was he supposed to take that?”

  She was no longer listening. She stopped scrolling and stared at the entry for apartment 3B. “This one’s way behind in the rent.”

  He bent down to look over her shoulder at the entry for Edith Candle. “The woman in 3B doesn’t have to pay rent.”

  Mallory’s head lifted slowly, eyes holding just the hint of incredulity and sexuality.

  “Mallory, go wash your eyes out with soap. She’s an elderly woman and the previous owner of the building. She has a lifetime estate in that apartment. Are we done with 3B?”

  The door buzzer sounded for the third time in one hour. In the past few weeks he had come to realize that Mallory had been dead right about one thing: it had been a mistake to let the tenants know he owned the building. Though he employed a full-time superintendent, every complaint came first to his own door. His clients were less troublesome traffic, coming by appointment or conducting business by mail and telephone.

  “Not so fast,” said Mallory. “Which one is it?”

  The quick buzz was followed up by a soft knock at the door.

  “Dr. Ramsharan,” said Charles. “The psychiatrist in apartment 3A. Henrietta would never buzz twice. She thinks it’s rude.”

  Mallory followed him out to the front room and watched as he opened the door. When Henrietta Ramsharan walked in, Mallory padded off to make the coffee, payment on a standing bet that he could tell her who was at the door before he opened it. It had been weeks since he’d had to make his own coffee.

  He had been resistant to the idea of a coffee machine in the office, along with all the other machines—entirely too many mechanical devices in his view. Then he realized that it was Louis’s coffee machine, which she had purloined from the old NYPD office. Oddly enough, he took the stolen coffeemaker as a sign of progress in her social development. It h
ad been a theft of sentiment.

  Whenever he entered the office kitchen, he avoided looking directly at that machine. If it were possible for the spirit of Louis Markowitz to inhabit an object, it would be the coffeemaker. Each time Charles glanced at it, it reproached him for not figuring out how Mallory spent her days. He had not bought the story that she preferred to work nights. He was not a complete idiot, though he felt like one.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” the polite Henrietta Ramsharan was saying as he waved her over to the couch. There were touches of gray at her temples, which only glimmered as highlights in the loose fall of jet-black hair recently escaped from the pins that held it in a tight bun from nine till five. She was wearing her after-work blue jeans, which were faded and broken in for comfort, but she had not been spending her free time in any comfortably relaxing pursuit. He noted the agitation about her eyes and mouth. The first person who leapt into his mind was the tenant who agitated everyone, even the placid Henrietta.

  “Herbert, right?”

  “Yes,” said Henrietta. “How did you know?”

  “Oh, I’m getting to know Herbert rather well.”

  But Henrietta knew everyone in the building. She had lived here for more than ten years, but that alone did not explain why all the tenants knew one another’s history and business. At his former residence on the Upper East Side, he had gone four years without saying as many words to the people who shared one common wall with him. He had previously taken that experience as a reflection on his lack of social skills. Mallory had been the one to point out that cool-to-chilly neighbor relations were the norm, and that this building’s close network of tenants was the oddity. They had no tenants’ association, no focal point, no common gathering place. The small mystery nagged at him now and then. He suspected Edith Candle could explain it, but would not.