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 the eight-thirty rush hour when she boarded the subway car and sat 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 confrontation 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 towards 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 the watch had been the topic of a decade-long conversation between the Markowitzs, 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, his father and his own name, it said Mallory.
Her gaze wandered across the plaza to the canteen's wall of glass. Sleepy students were slogging 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 could not 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 of the front door of the canteen and cross the plaza. He carried a covered paper cup and the brown paper bag which, according to her notes, usually contained one chocolate donut, 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 his elbows pointed east and west. Clearly, his four limbs were only going along with his 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 which 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 cafe 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 had 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-pace reflection of an old woman with a hump on her back and white hair.
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 have passed 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 that 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 a slight inclination of her head.
"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 onto 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 over-zealous 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, judging 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 towards 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 disappeared.
She ran up the wide staircase, long legs spanning three steps at a time. She had only been 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 mid-calf 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 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 feebly to 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-brim 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 their 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 house lights went down. "Where the hell is the Shadow?"
The lobby doors flew open, banging against the walls to either side. The actors on stage turned to stare as a young man strode into the theater and stood for a moment in the semi-darkness. 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 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 deadfall 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 his arms. The boy carried her off the stage to wild applause from cast, crew and Mallory.
Boo's shouted obscenities were lost in the fray.
The house lights 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 sportcoat.
As he walked across the campus, Mallory watched the awkward gait return to his lanky legs. His elbows pointed out at 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 remained on campus into the evening hours. She only cared about his time in the light, the killing hours.
Tired, and back in the subway in the middle of day's-end 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 spaces 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 homy style of clutter; each paper was pinned at four corners and was 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 filing 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 with 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 she 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 coffee-maker as a sign of progress in her social development. It had been a theft of sentiment.
Every time 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 coffee-maker. 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 which 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.
"So, you think Herbert has a gun," he said.
"How did you know that?"
"You know Martin Teller, lives across the hall from Herbert."
She nodded. "Of course."
"When I passed Martin in the hall this morning," said Charles, "it was hard to ignore the bulletproof vest, particularly on a warm day. Mallory has one, but she doesn't wear it to go grocery shopping. Ergo – Herbert."
"Martin's terrified of Herbert, I know that. But were you aware of the lipstick on Edith Candle's wall?"
"No. Was her apartment – "
"No vandalism, nothing like that. You knew about the fugues? She told me she'd known you all your life."
"Fugues?"
"The automatic writing?"
No he hadn't known. Edith had never used automatic writing in the magic act with Cousin Max. She had done a mind-reading act, he remembered that much. Something disturbing in a childhood memory began to emerge, some overheard conversation, but it was not the stuff that eidetic memory would help him with.
"Sometimes it's called trance writing," Henrietta was saying. "Edith was trying to wash the words off the wall when Martin came down to pick up his leftovers."
"His leftovers."
"He doesn't make much money from his art, not since the recession started. Edith gives him meals three times a week. She's been doing that for a few years now. So Martin just walked in on her when she was scrubbing the wall."
"Martin has a key to Edith's apartment?"
"Her door is never locked. You didn't know? You might talk to her about that. I've spent years trying to convince her it's dangerous. Strange people can always find a way into an apartment building, even one with good security."
"So it could have been vandalism."
"The writing? Oh, no. Edith does the writing, but she never has any memory of doing it."
"It's happened before?"
"Yes, but that was a long time ago."
And by her downcast eyes and shift of position, it was not open to discussion. Curious.
"What was written on the wall this time?"
"I don't know, and Martin won't tell me. You know Martin. It's a rare day if he says three words. The three he gave me were death, here, soon. I asked him if he was frightened of Herbert. He nodded and saved a word. That's all I know. Martin is a very fragile personality. And just the idea that Herbert might have a gun is making me a little nervous, too."
Mallory was standing over them. She had just materialized by the couch with two mugs of coffee and no warning.
"I'll fix that," she said, handing one mug to Charles and the other to Henrietta.
"No you won't. I'll handle it," said Charles. Herbert's paranoid little heart would not stand up to an interview with Mallory.
Henrietta sipped her coffee and smiled her thanks to the younger woman. "It might be a bad idea to approach Herbert directly. He's ripe for an explosion. I've seen it building up for a long time. His wife is divorcing him, and it's a pretty messy lawsuit. And then he got a lay-off notice at the end of September. I don't think he can handle one more thing, not a hangnail, not anything."
Charles looked up to Mallory, who seemed skeptical. "That's clear enough?" he asked.
"Yeah. He's a squirrel," she said.
Henrietta and Charles exchanged glances, silently approving Mallory's clarity and economy of words.
The phone rang. As he was rising and reaching towards the desk, Mallory beat him to it with no apparent effort at speed. It was disconcerting the way she moved about, or rather, disappeared from one spot and reappeared in another.
She picked up the receiver of the antique telephone.
Well, it was not altogether an antique anymore, was it?
He had been dismayed to find that she had rewired it and discarded the original base for one which accommodated a plug for an answering machine. And he only discovered the job when his incoming calls were ripped out of his mouthpiece and pulled into the desk drawer.
"Mallory and Butler… Hello, Riker. Hold on a sec."
She had to open the drawer to put the phone on hold. And now they both looked down on the blinking light-of four messages glowing inside the desk. If she was annoyed with him, it never showed as she walked back to her private office and pulled the door closed behind her.
He turned back to Henrietta. "Do you want me to speak to Edith?"
"No," she said, a bit too quick, too final, and in the attitude of absolutely not as opposed to no, I don't think so.
"Mallory, where've you been all day? I musta called a hundred times."
"Four times. Charles never looks for messages. He's pretending we don't have an answering machine."
"I got something," said Riker. "Gaynor and Cathery each have alibis for two of the murders, but together, they can't alibi all the murders."
"So? I'm not big on conspiracy theories if that's where you're going with this."
"Wait. Cathery can alibi his grandmother's murder, and Gaynor can alibi his aunt's murder – "
"Riker, I saw that movie too. It doesn't fit, not if Markowitz knew who the killer was. If the old man figured two suspects, he wouldn't have done the surveillance by himself. How could he?"
"You won't like the answer to that one, kid." "Give."
"Coffey doesn't think Markowitz worked it out. He figures the perp suckered Markowitz. The old man got killed because he didn't know who it was, never saw it coming."
"Oh, great detective work. Coffey was the one who figured Whitman for a snatch when a half-bright chimp could have told him she was meeting the perp at the scene."
"Hey, kid. This is Riker, here. I'm on your side, remember?"
"Anything turn up on the BDA in Markowitz's calendar?"
"Naw," said Riker. "Coffey's off that track. I'd do it on my own, but I got no leads. I've been through the old house in Brooklyn looking through his stuff. Nothing in the credit-card bills or the checkbook, but who knows. That little den of his looks just like his office. Easy to miss something in a mess like that. Maybe if you went through it? The door seals can come off anytime you want."
"Yeah, first chance I get."
When she hung up the phone, the first computer in the row of three was still screening the file on the old recluse in 3B. Charles had contributed very little information on Edith Candle in the past two weeks. He was a great respecter of privacy, and she had been unable to break him of this good quality.
Mallory looked up to the ceiling. She felt the old woman's presence before she heard the scrape of chair legs on the bare floorboards overhead. A blinking red light on the third terminal told her that Edith Candle was active again, powering up her computer and sending something out over the modem, that box which allowed the old woman to wander the electronic net from New York to the Tokyo Exchange and back again in seconds only.
Mallory picked up her test set, a black rotary dial with a handgrip. She dialed a number the telephone company used for maintenance checks as she rolled her chair over to the third terminal. Through the wires of the phone company which led into Candle's modem, Mallory climbed up into the computer one floor above her head and watched the screen that Candle was accessing in apartment 3B. The old woman wasn't following the stock-exchange figures tonight. She had patched into a small and remote commercial information network and was requesting a credit check. This J.S. Rathbone must be another wealthy spook groupy. She turned back to the third screen and watched the names of stock issues scrolling by as the credit-check service fed Rathbone's stock portfolio into Candle's computer in the apartment upstairs.
So far, none of the stock activity had shown up in mergers or hostile takeovers. However, Candle had remarkable luck in selling off stocks just prior to devastating drops in value. One of these drops had been brought on by the recall of a defective and dangerous product. Candle had sold her stock just prior to the information being made public. And she also had a streak of luck in making stock purchases before sudden booms in product development, also non-public information. One such purchase had resulted in stock prices doubling. Scores of these instances put Candle in the realm of world-class fortune-telling or insider trading. But there was no hard evidence. No single transaction matched the huge profits on the merger of Pearl Whitman's company.
Mallory switched on the second computer and flew into cyberspace. With the tap of a key, she landed inside the Washington, DC database of the Securities and Exchange Commission. No recent filings on stock activity would coincide with Candle's recent purchases, but there was a strong link to the Todd and Remmy merger of four years ago. This deal was well inside the statute of limitations, but the SEC seemed to have lost interest in Candle since the Whitman Chemical merger in the early 1980s. Perhaps they were shy of the crystal-ball defense. Ah, gold.
She was scanning the profiteer list of the Todd and Remmy merger. She found a familiar name from Gramercy Park, Estelle Gaynor, and a footnote that tied her to an old investigation. She neatly copied the block of type with five taps of the keys and shifted it onto a floppy disk. Now she patched in Candle's own credit check from the same firm which was feeding the old lady.
Apparently, Edith Candle was a longtime subscriber to this credit-check network, and when one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food. Mallory had always avoided this by never paying for the networks" she hacked into. Candle had been less prudent. The file was bare-bones traces of financial activity. With a quick shuffle of files, she added this new data to the old US Attorney's file on the Securities and Exchange Commission action, the same document which had led her into partnership with Charles and this window on the old woman up the stairs in 3B.
Perhaps an hour had passed before she heard the door buzzer again, and sounds of the door opening and closing, then the indistinct voices in conversation. She was a few minutes more putting the file on 3B in order before she closed it.
When she walked back to the reception area, Henrietta Ramsharan was gone, and the pinch-faced woman from Gramercy Park was sitting in front of Charles's desk.
"She's the one," said the woman in a shrill voice, waving the business card in Mallory's direction. "Now, don't tell me you don't do this sort of thing, like I've asked you to do something filthy, like a divorce case or something. One can carry discretion too far."
Charles had a trapped look about him as he slouched low in the chair behind the desk.
Mallory sat down in a Queen Anne chair to one side of the desk. "My partner handles a different kind of clientele. He deals with more unusual problems."
Charles looked at her in an openly suspicious way. His face couldn't hide a thought.
To Mrs Pickering he said, "My usual clients are research institutes, universities, the occasional government commission. I explore unusual gifts, talents, different modes of intelligence. I also develop ways of applying these gifts to occupations or research projects. It's my partner here who does the investigative work." He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. "Mrs Pickering was wondering what business you had in Gramercy Park."
He was smiling but hardly meaning it.
"Client confidentiality," said Mallory to Mrs Pickering, smiling and meaning it not at all.
"Oh, back to discretion again. Why won't you take my case?"
"Did I say I wouldn't?"
"He did."
Charles leaned back in his chair and waved one hand with the attitude of oh, please. "Mrs Pickering wants us to expose her mother's pet medium as a fraud."
Mallory smiled with meaning this time. "Why not? Consider her a woman with fraudulent gifts. That puts it right in your field, Charles. Just something new and different, that's all."
"Hardly new," said Charles. "It wouldn't be the first time I had a medium for a test subject. But I look on them as empathies. Some of them really are gifted."
Mrs Pickering was rising off her chair, launching towards the ceiling. "This woman is a money-grubbing fraud!" Unspoken were the words you, fool. She settled back to earth and chair again as though the exertion of accusation was simply too much for her. "You're trying to tell me this fraud can contact my dead father?"
"I'm not so sure a gifted medium gets on all that well with the dead," said Charles. "But she may be quite good at reading the living. These people have more access to their intuition than most. They take in all the details of a human being. They analyze these details and spit them out in reorganized information which the subject can't believe a stranger could possess. It's nearly magic."
But Mrs Pickering was a typical, unmagical New Yorker. Her expression was dubious bordering on you, imbecile, and this was not lost on Charles. Mallory had noticed that very little got by him, if anything at all.
"Take you, for example," said Charles. "You're recently divorced, educated at good schools. You don't sleep well, though you take prescribed medication, and sometimes you feel depression without apparent cause."
The woman was nodding, unconscious of the gesture, eyes locking on Charles in rapt attention. Mallory noted the faint white line where the wedding ring had been. The education was in the woman's voice, and fitted well with the background of Gramercy Park. The dark bruised flesh under the eyes showed through her foundation make-up, but only on close inspection. The expertise of concealer make-up suggested the habitual loss of sleep frequently accompanied by the habitual drugs of the insomniac. And with a pinched, angry face like that, she was bound to be unhappy.
Nice going, Charles.
"You have your hair done every two weeks," said Charles.
That one was easy, thought Mallory. The roots would have to be grey; there were none showing.
"And you studied ballet in your childhood and teenage years."
Where was he getting that? Maybe she had walked in on her toes.
"You favor auctions at Christie's over Sothebys."
You gotta be kidding.
But now she took in the plethora of rings on the woman's hands. Antique settings all. Charles's freakish memory was probably calling up auction catalogs.
"You have a dog."
How did he know that wasn't cat hair on her dress? Oh wait. That magnificent nose of his. It was a drizzly evening, and Pickering had probably walked the dog before she came. Wet fur. Cats were not walked in the rain.
"You dressed in a hurry."
Mallory found no flaws in the woman's fashionable outfit until she reached the tag showing at the nape of the neck, and just a smudge of unblended rouge on one cheek. A vain woman who doesn't scrutinize the mirror to death before she walks out the door? That was a hurry and a half.
"There are no large events in your own life these days," said Charles. "In fact, your days have a maddening sameness to them, and you're looking ahead to an endless succession of days like these. Your mother's duplicity annoys you, maybe angers you, but your own life saddens you and frightens you… But all this is very crude. A gifted medium could look into your feelings, note the waver of your eyes when you insisted this was for your mother's good. A gifted medium might have taken the fact that you showed anger, not concern, and done much more with that than I could."
Than you would, Mallory corrected him silently. Charles always behaved like a gentleman. She counted on that and used it against him every chance she got. It was the only edge she had on his genius IQ. But she would have to be sharper from now on. She had never planned to drag Charles into something dangerous. Use him, sure, but harm him, no. That might be unavoidable if she telegraphed her intentions by taking this case which he had just reduced to ashes.
However, the Pickering woman was offering her access to Gramercy Park and that strata of old money. It was a better entree than she could have hoped for. And then there was the fascinating giantess to consider.
"We'll take the case," said Mallory, all things considered at lightning speed. "That's fifteen hundred up front, and we'll bill time and expenses against the retainer."
Mrs Pickering sat erect in her chair, not shrinking back or shrinking down, and yet, she no longer seemed to take up the same space in this room. The woman was subdued to a tired nod as she fumbled in her purse for her checkbook. So Mrs Pickering was all facade, and not the makings of the blue-ribbon bitch Mallory had first taken her for.
"My mother's name is Fabia Penwofth," she said as she signed the check with the weak stroke of a gold pen, and then drew a small white card from her purse. "This is her address."
Mallory accepted the check and the card. She gave the woman her hand to say that a deal was done, a gesture any stranger might have mistaken for warmth. "Thank you, Mrs Pickering."
Mrs Pickering smiled in near shyness, stripped now to the mere human bones of a middle-aged matron out of her depth.
"Call me Marion, dear. And you are…?"
"Mallory."
Mrs Pickering rose from her chair and walked to the door with a slow deep grace. And now Mallory guessed the ballet background. Mrs Pickering's toes were turned out, and her carriage came from training. Her mood should have bowed her head or slumped her shoulders, had not some fiend of a dancing master with a big staff beaten that body language out of her at an early age. A similar experiment had failed with Mallory.
Charles looked rather unhappy. As the door closed, he swiveled his chair to face her. "What are you doing in Gramercy Park every day?"
She rounded her killer-green eyes ringed with thick lashes that now dropped slowly to veil seductively, and when her eyes widened again, it was a striptease. All that protected him from her was the fact that she was twenty-five and wonderful to look at, while he was thirty-nine and could not imagine why she would have any but a platonic interest in him. He was logical to a fault.
Sensing the seduction had no effect, she looked down at her red fingernails as if they might not be perfectly aligned.
"Talk to me."
"I'm working on spec. It's something related."
"Kathleen." In those two syllables, there was only a gentle suggestion that she might be lying through her teeth.
"Mallory," she corrected him. "There is a con game going on in Gramercy," she said in the tone of "I am not lying". Though they both knew she was. But Charles was such a gentleman, wasn't he. "I recognized the medium from a rap-sheet description."
"And it's nothing to do with Louis's murder." And the sun came up twice this morning, said his eyes.
"No."
"I'm worried about you. You would tell me if you were mixed up in that business, wouldn't you?" And the earth might altogether stop revolving around the sun for an hour or so when that happened.
"Oh sure. Why not?"
Why not? She was genuinely fond of him. If a lie would make him feel better, she wouldn't hesitate. She liked him that much.
"So you're only interested in the medium." And I, Charles Butler, am Queen of the May, said the shrug of his shoulders.
"The medium is into computer scams. Not a genius programmer, but she knows her way around the information networks. Just like the old con artist in 3B."
"What?"
"Edith Candle, the old woman upstairs in 3B. She has the same setup. Computer services for news clippings and research, magazines from all over the planet, a credit-check service."
"So you ran a background check on Edith. Please leave the tenants alone from now on. I'd rather you didn't invade their privacy. And there's nothing suspicious about Edith's information network."
"Sure."
"She hasn't left this building in more than thirty years, not since the year her husband died."
"I never said she wasn't nuts. I just said it's the same setup Pickering's medium had the last time she was arrested."
"Edith is a recluse, but she hasn't left the race. She uses information networks to stay in contact with the world. She can probably tell you more about what's going on out there than people who live out of doors. And the credit-check service goes with the territory of being a landlord. It's all quite harmless."
"But she's not a landlord anymore, and her subscription is up to date. It's been – what? – a year since you bought the building? And why would a multimillionaire want to hole up in a Soho apartment?"
"Edith made a reasonable fortune but nothing in the multimillions. There wasn't even a quarter-million profit in the building. It was refinanced a few years – Sorry, I forget who I'm talking to. I assume you do know the exact amount of the mortgage?"
Of course she did.
"Charles, she's got more money than God. She's a stock-market freak. Did you know she had a rap sheet with the Securities and Exchange Commission?"
"What? No, scratch that. I don't want to know."
"Insider trading. I've got all the documentation on it."
"Oh, well then, it must be true if you've seen it in black and white." He threw up his hands and stared at the ceiling for a moment. His sarcasm lacked acidity, and she sometimes had to strain to catch the false notes. He went into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out his wallet.
"Let me shake your faith in all-holy documentation." He fished out his driver's license and dropped it on the desk in front of her. "Look at that. It says I was born on the twenty-sixth. My birth certificate says the same thing. The doctor was tired after sixteen hours of a difficult delivery. He put down the wrong date. So much for documentation."
"She was served with a subpoena. The SEC filed a formal order of investigation."
"I don't want to hear any more of this."
"Why not? I pulled this stuff out of the US Attorney's office. That makes it credible. You want to see the printouts?"
"No!"
She had only meant to sidetrack him and now she had gone too far. It was rare to see him angry. Once before, they'd had a conversation on his aversion to invasion of privacy. She hadn't been able to make sense of it then, either, thought him deficient and handicapped, offered to straighten him out. And she could do that, she had implied then. He had come to the right place -
"I didn't mean to yell." His voice softened. "Let's try it again, shall we? Everything you learn about people redefines your relationship with them. I've known Edith since I was a child. Her husband was my father's cousin. She's all the family I have left. I don't need to know any more about her than I do."
"So you don't want to know about the insider trading." 'No!… Sorry… Suppose someone came to you and told you something unpleasant about Louis or Helen?"
"Okay. Enough," she said.
No, he didn't think so. That much was in his eyes. Too pat an answer, entirely too easy. She would have to watch that in the future.
They said their strained good-nights to one another in the hall. She walked to the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened on the startled face of Herbert Mandrel. His small head jerked in the way of a bird startled by the sudden display of Mallory's perfect teeth. He looked to the ceiling and walls, evaluating the limited number of exits in an elevator, and then moved as far to the rear as he could go without leaving an indent on the back wall. As the doors closed and the elevator began its slow ascent, he was puffing out his bird's chest and standing a little straighter, as though this might buy him the inches he needed to look her in the eye.
She noted the army fatigue jacket and a familiar bulge at his side. His hand moved to cover it, but too late. She was smiling down on him as she reached out to tap the red button to stop the elevator at the third floor.
The cords in his neck were bulging. He would not meet her eyes when she brought her face very close to his and said softly, "You watch a lot of television, don't you, Herbert? Cop shows, things like that? If I told you to assume the position, would you know what I meant?" Now he did meet her eyes, and the little bird's chest was deflating. He rallied, puffing out once more, eyebrows knitting together, preamble to a New York attitude of get out of my face. "You have no authority to – "
She grabbed him by one arm, spun him around and slammed him back against the wall of the elevator. With one foot, she knocked his legs apart. When he was spread-eagle and somewhere between surprise and soiling his pants, she said, "If you move, I'm going to hurt you. You got that?"
He nodded and then froze. She padded him down, and then her free hand moved around to the front of his belt and unhooked the heavy metal object.
"You can turn around now, Herbert."
He was still for a moment longer in the attitude of a specimen mounted on a collector's wall. He slowly straightened up and turned to face her, looking up and clearly hating her for being tall, amongst her other crimes against him.
"What's this?" She dangled the speedloader by its strap.
"I bought it from a guy at my gun club."
"Where's the gun?"
"I don't have one."
"That doesn't work for me, Herbert. A speedloader and no gun?"
"I don't have a gun. The city's jerking me around on the license. My lawyer's working on it. Ask Edith Candle. She knows. I asked her for the name of a lawyer. I only practise shooting with the guns at the club."
"Where's the gun club?"
"West Fourteenth Street."
"Barry Allen's place?"
"Yes. He'll tell you the same thing. Check it out. Ask Barry, ask Edith."
"I will."
She pressed the button to open the doors to the third-floor hallway. She stepped out of the elevator, turned and tossed the speedloader back to him. He reached out for it and clutched air as it fell between his outstretched hands and rolled to the back of the elevator. He was on his knees when the doors closed on him.
It made sense to her. Herbert wasn't the type to have connections to buy stolen, unregistered guns. Barry Allen was an ex-cop with a good reputation – no worries there. But how long would it be before a buddy at the gun club sold the little jerk a gun?
She dismissed the little man and turned her thoughts back to the argument with Charles. She had understood him well enough. She would have done serious damage to anyone who had maligned Helen or Markowitz. So she would let the stock scam go by. But damned if she would let slide the mention of Pearl Whitman of Whitman Chemicals in the SEC reports. Markowitz had once told her half of police work was tracking down the linkages of persons known to those unknown. Pearl Whitman had known her killer. Perhaps Edidi Candle knew him too. This was her thought as she pressed the buzzer of apartment 3B.
There were muffled interior sounds of footsteps approaching, but no metallic clicks of locks being undone. The door opened on a comfortably rounded woman with white hair and the whitest skin Mallory had ever seen on a living human. It was luminous. Edith Candle smiled as though she were facing a long-anticipated friend, and not an unannounced, total stranger. Mallory found this attitude far from the basic New York religion of security which mandated one deadbolt and two sturdy Yale locks, a Dobermann, a pit bull, and a peephole in the door. "I'm a friend of Charles Butler."
"Well, any friend of Charles is welcome in my home." She stood to one side, inviting Mallory to pass through the door. As they walked into the brighter light of the living room, Edith Candle failed all of Mallory's expectations for a stock-swindler. She was small in stature. Her head was disproportionately large, and a neat bun gathered at the nape of her neck. The lace collar of her wildly out-of-date dress disappeared under three chins. Her hands were knots of arthritis, and she wore glasses with thick lenses which made her eyes into expectant blue saucers.
Mallory was being pulled into the room by the gentle touch of a warm pudgy white hand on her arm. "Sit down, – dear. I'll put on the coffee pot. Or would you rather have wine?"
"Coffee is fine, thanks."
She had learned enough from Charles to know the antique furniture was not a collection of cheap knock-offs. The room also housed a clutter of pricey bric-a-brac, porcelain figurines and silver candy dishes, frilly lampshades, small clusters of photographs on each broad window-sill, everything designed to catch and trap dust, yet nothing did. The air smelled of pine scent and furniture wax, all the sensory cues of Helen Markowitz, world's foremost homemaker. Another familiar aroma was emanating from the kitchen, lingering after-dinner traces of pot roast from a thousand Sunday dinners and Monday-morning lunch boxes.
"Who was she?"
Mallory spun on the woman suddenly and startled Edith Candle backward a step to collide with a chair and set it to rocking. The old woman adjusted her balance and her glasses. The chair continued to rock as though inhabited.
"There are memories of a woman here, aren't there?" The old woman sat down on the couch and automatically readjusted a doily on the padded arm. "There's certainly nothing in this room to say a man lived here. Was it your mother you were thinking of?"
"I never knew my mother."
"You breathed deep. There are no flowers in the air, only the smell of a good cleaning. And you approved the order of things. That was in your face. Apparently, you were raised right. Someone loved you. Who was she?"
"Helen. You say was. How did you know she was dead?"
"You were looking at a memory."
Oh Christ. So this is where Charles got it from.
"Yes, dear," she was saying when they were seated in the spacious kitchen and sipping their coffee. Edith Candle pushed a plate of brownies across the table. "His parents used to visit quite often when Charles was a child. Did you know his mother gave birth at the outrageous age of fifty-six? The Butlers were lovely people. Max and I took care of little Charles when his parents attended university conferences out of town. I used to take him to the park and watch him make false starts with the other children. He was always so hopeful and always being crushed to death. His IQ alone was enough to set him apart, but then his appearance didn't help. He was born with that nose, you know. The only newborn I ever saw with a big nose. I also spent a lot of time with him when he was doing post-doc research. He used me as a test subject. I used to be a psychic, you know."
"I know. We're working on a case with a fake medium now."
There was a humorous glint in the woman's eye at the drop of the word fake.
"Oh well, you came to the right person. I probably know every scam there is. But you should be a bit more open-minded. Charles can tell you that some of them have genuine gifts, an aptitude for reading souls. What I read in yours, my dear, is pain… killer pain."
Two cups of coffee later, Edith Candle was opening the door at the end of the hallway. Mallory followed the old woman onto the small platform which joined the wrought-iron staircase in the progress of its winding. The railing spiraled down and around in a pattern of stark white walls and black metal. Spindle shadows slanted against the rounding stairwell, and naked light bulbs radiated from the doors of the lower platforms leading to each level of the building.
Mallory descended the stairs in the wake of Edith Candle's foray into the world beyond her five rooms. They walked down and around the circling stairs, passing the doors marked for the second and first floors, on down to the basement level and the last door. This had to be the only door without a lock in all of New York City. She put out one hand to gently restrain the old woman. She was aware of the heavy gun in her shoulder holster as she pushed through the door and into the darkness. One hand felt along the wall left of the door, seeking and rinding the light switch. It didn't work.
"There's a flashlight on top of the fuse box, dear," said the old woman behind her.
Mallory opened the door wide to admit more light from the stairwell. A fuse box was mounted on the wall to the left of the door frame. She reached up and touched the flashlight on the top of the box. It lit up at the press of the button and she turned it on the fuse box. All the fuses were good. She tested a fuse connection, turning the glass knob.
"It's not a fuse, dear," said Edith, blinking up at her. "That light switch hasn't worked since Max and I bought the building. It was a mystery to three generations of electricians." She took the flashlight from Mallory. "If I recall, there's another light by that wall. Yes, there." She picked her way across the floor, skirting boxes and trunks, to an old standing lamp with a frilled shade. She turned the switch and it lit a small area of the cellar with a soft warm glow. "I know where there's a much brighter lamp," she said, smiling. "Follow me."
Mallory walked behind her as shadows loomed up on all sides, in a makeshift corridor of shipping trunks piled high with boxes and crates. Old furniture sat under dust covers, and at the end of the aisle, a headless tailor's dummy stood off on its own.
"All of Max's illusions are down here," said Edith. "We built this storage room. It takes up half the basement." She fitted a key into a lock and the wall began to accordion, panels shifting, opening onto a cavernous space, illuminated only by the light from the wide window at the sidewalk level and above her head. The source of the light was a first-floor window on the other side of the air shaft. There was light enough to see the quick movement of a rat among the garbage cans lined up near the glass. At the basement level, Mallory could make out the edges of crates and a tall section screen standing on three panels.
"It's been a long time since I was down here," said Edith, walking in ahead of Mallory and touching a globe which came to light and glowed dully. Within the small radiant circle of this lamp, light invaded a clear plastic garment bag, rippling through the folds of silks and bouncing off sequins.
"Other magicians have stopped by to offer condolences and ask if they could buy the mechanical devices. But I would never sell Max's secrets. It's a point of honor. Would you like to see one of his most famous illusions? Do you have a strong heart? We only performed this act one time. Too much blood, the theater-owner said. Are you frightened easily?"
Mallory looked down on the old woman. "Give it your best shot."
Edith switched on a footlight at the base of the section screen which nearly touched the high ceiling of the basement. A dragon, mouth full of fire, was illuminated on three panels of delicate rice paper.
"Wait here," said the old woman. Til just be a moment. I have to test the equipment. It hasn't been used in more than thirty years." She handed the flashlight to Mallory and disappeared behind the screen.
Mallory felt a prickling sensation on the backs of her hands. All her good instincts made her wary. She took inventory of the shadows on the periphery of the globe lamp. The beam of the flashlight found the eyes she had only felt at her back the moment before. Charles?
No. She was staring into the eyes of a disembodied head. The flesh had to be wax, she knew, but something icy was leaving a slick trail down her spine as she drew closer. The thing sat on a trunk at her own eye level and stared back at her with eyes entirely too real. The irises had more normal proportions of blue to white, but the wide-eyed stare of a Christmas-morning nine-year-old was definitely genetic. This was Charles's cousin.
Hello, Max.
Mallory heard her name called. She rounded the screen and walked through a passageway of wardrobe racks, stopping ten feet short of the old woman who was kneeling at the base of a guillotine fifteen feet high. The white hair was covered by a red turban, and her neck lay between the posts and locked in place by wooden braces with three openings to accommodate head and hands. Above her neck was a wide and wickedly sharp blade hanging high and waiting.
Edith smiled up at Mallory. "Pull on that, dear." She nodded to an ornate golden lever at the side of the guillotine.
Mallory only shook her head from side to side with rare wonder. Had the old woman gone crazy? This was no waxwork dummy. Edith spoke to her and the body moved, both were real, and the blade was sharp. This was not the work of mirrors.
Mallory heard the sound of metal grinding, and her eyes flashed up. Had the mechanism slipped a gear? Her stomach flipped over. She watched the blade with dark fascination. Was the blade closer now? Was the angle of the blade changed?
The blade slipped a notch.
Edith screamed as a bright light washed out the tableau and lit the entire basement with a blazing ball of sun mounted atop the guillotine. Mallory was in motion moving towards her, eyes blinded by the light, hands reaching out, nearly there, when the blade fell and the turbaned head with its bloody stump of a neck fell from the wooden brace and rolled across the floor, awash in brilliant white light. The old woman's feet spasmodically kicked out and then went limp.
Mallory froze. She was shot through with ice and her throat was paralyzed.
The head at her feet was laughing. No, it was not. Her eyes were adapting, and she could see the head more clearly. It was only another wax mock-up, a younger version of Edith Candle's head. There was no blood. An intact Edith Candle was rising off the floor. "Oh, your face, your face," said Edith, breasts heaving, belly shaking. "That's what made the trick so powerful." She wiped tears from her laughing eyes. "People were convinced that the gears had slipped, that they were witnessing an accident. It was an amazing effect. They screamed and screamed. Most of Max's illusions were life-and-death affairs. It was his trademark."
Mallory sat down on the floor before her knees could fail and dump her there. "Christ, I hope that was your best shot."
Edith pulled a low stool out of the clutter of props and sat down beside Mallory. "I can't tell you much about Max's illusions. The magician's code, you know. But the light is the most important element of this trick. You don't see clearly while the eye is adjusting. You see what you expect to see – an accident. I can't tell you more than that. I can't even show you the mechanism that works the light. Trade secret."
Mallory grappled with previous conceptions of elderly women and made rapid adjustments in her thinking. When she looked up at Edith perched on the stool a head above her, it was with new respect. Yes, she had come to the right place.
"What kind of tricks do mediums do?"
"Well, there's quite a difference between magic and spiritualism, but illusions are all related by the same principles – misdirection, sleight of hand. A client once told me about a medium she visited on Forty-second Street who made things float through the air. I could show you something like that."
"Wires?"
"No, it's done with black art."
"Black art?"
"Nothing to do with the occult, dear. Black art is the camouflage of black on black. You need a hand-held mirror and a very dark room. The object only has to levitate a few inches. Too much is ostentatious and smacks of fakery. A few inches of levitation in an angled mirror is more believable and frightening for some reason. Your medium would need an accomplice for that, someone free to move about the room."
"She has one, a little boy."
"Well, that widens the field a bit. With a helper she can do quite a number of illusions."
"She's the high-technology type."
"Well, don't expect anything too exotic, no holographic imaging, anything like that. The simpler the illusion, the better it works. This medium wouldn't want to take any high-tech devices to a mark's home."
"She uses her computer to research the victims."
"Say mark, dear. Victim makes it sound so sorted, as if the audience isn't having a good time. Max and I created the mind-reading act while he was recuperating from an injury. A dangerous illusion had gone wrong… But I'm digressing. You wanted to hear about the tricks. Well, I used to guess the object in the mark's hand while wearing a blindfold."
"How? Microphones?"
"No, dear. Most tricks are very simple. If you give too much credit to complexity, you'll never work them out." She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and her eyes were looking at some middle ground of memory. "Max would cue me with first words. If he said, "Concentrate," it was made of metal. The next word would tell me if it was a coin, a watch, whatever. If he said, "Please," it was paper, money or a photograph. Then, when I took off the blindfold, I would read their faces and all their secrets and worries."
"You researched the marks?"
"No, dear. Max waited in line with them. We always kept them waiting a long time. People in lines can be very chatty. The audience participation was never by random selection. I know it sounds like a cheat, but every one of those people got full value for the price of admission. It was quite a show." Her smile ended in a serious afterthought.
"Then I found my true gift. A sheriff caught up with us in another town when one of my visions came true. I had seen a body and the sheriff had found it. My name was made. We went on a new world tour, and this time out, I was the headliner instead of Max. I regretted that gift after Max died. I foresaw his death, you know. You don't believe that. I can feel it. Yet it did happen to me, this terrible gift."
"Did you foresee Pearl Whitman's death?"
"No, dear. The fugue comes on a few days before the death of someone who's been recently close to me. I haven't seen Pearl in years and years."
"You don't mind talking about her?"
"No, not at all. Oh, her death was a sad business, wasn't it? She was only sixty-five when I met her. Her father had recently died. He was in his nineties I believe. She asked me to contact his spirit. I told her I didn't do such things. I'm a clairvoyant. Lumped into the same bag with mediums, I'm afraid, but not quite the same thing."
"So, what did you do for her?"
"I advised her on stocks and business matters. That's what she wanted to talk to her father about."
"You advised her by way of a crystal ball?"
"No, dear. May I call you Kathy? Good. I'm quite adept at playing the market. I do it with research, I have quite a database, but I also depend on instinct. I advised Pearl on a merger that made her twice as rich as she had been before."
"And did you invest, based on that merger?"
"Oh, yes. I'd already amassed quite a bit of money on tour. And then Max and I had made a nice profit on the sale of another property. I built that sum into a rather impressive stock portfolio. I liquidated the lot and put it into Whitman Chemical stocks. After the merger, my fortune doubled."
"Did anyone ever suggest that might be illegal?"
"Insider trading, you mean. I did get into a bit of trouble with the government people. They called me an arbitrager because I also had a slender connection to a principal in the other company. They said I was using insider information illegally. They served me with papers and questioned me for hours. In the end, they just tore up the papers. I never heard any more on it. Perhaps the US Attorney would have felt a bit foolish putting an elderly psychic on the witness stand. Then Mr Milken and the others got all that publicity, and the government people were off on another tangent. I think they just forgot all about me. It's staggering what you can get away with when you're old."
Mallory smiled, and the old woman brightened, barely suppressing a laugh over her own good joke. Gift or no gift, Mallory decided, this woman could not read her mind, nor even read her smile for what it was.
I gotcha, said Mallory's smile.
"So, Edith – May I call you Edith?"
"Of course, dear."
"Did Pearl Whitman give up the idea of contacting her father? Or did she try someone else?"
"I don't know, Kathy. She never came back again. There was nothing more I could do for her."
"How common is it to consult a medium or a psychic about stocks and bonds?"
"Very common. If it isn't love, it's money. And the older one is, the more likely it'll be money."
"So finance is stock and trade with the psychic business."
"No, dear. It does require a bit of expertise. Most of the con artists are small-time. They eke out a living, but nothing fancy. And there are truly gifted people who take no money. They work with the police department for free.
But a good stock analyst is difficult to find in this world or the next."
"And you were good. The merger paid off well. Why didn't she come back?"
"Perhaps she thought she had made enough money." 'You have a quite a bit of money, don't you?" 'Between us and the walls, I'm stinking rich." 'Why do you stay here? Inside, I mean, locked up?" 'What's the need of going out? The world comes here, you see. I have my services for news and research. I have television and a video service and my book clubs. I have a good relationship with all the tenants. What's the need?" 'But there's a little more to it, right? Is it something to do with your husband's death?"
"Very good, Kathy. Yes, in a way. I foresaw the death of my husband, and I was unable to prevent it. After he died, I only wanted to retire. But people will seek me out. There isn't a day without at least one caller. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a failure as recluse. I suppose I might as well go into the world again. Lately, I have thought about it more and more."
"How much do you know about mediums? You said it wasn't really your field."
"You mean the mechanics? After all my years with Max, I guess I can figure out how a trick is pulled off. But the tricks don't always indicate fraud. More a sign of showmanship, really. They've all gone to modern conveniences like the computer for research, but the old parlor tricks are still necessary. You can't bewitch a mark with circuit boards."
"How would you like to go to a seance?"
Jack Coffey would not have believed there could be so many privately owned video cams in one square block. And it seemed odd, in this one little patch of town saved off from the twentieth century, that residents should be dangling from windows and balconies, making home movies of a homicide investigation. He would have had his own film on the murder itself, but the perp had found the one blind spot in Gramercy Park. The camera had seen nothing within ten feet on either side of this basement-level janitor's apartment.
His men were doing their best, superhumanly polite crowd control, but the upscale residents were vociferous in their misunderstanding of their constitutional rights to attend the dog and pony show of a bloody crime scene. He would not be seeing Beak's limousine tonight. Nor would Harry Blakely be stopping by to answer the inevitable reporter's question: how did this happen under your nose?
Floodlights lit up the building and made the sidewalk bright as day. The photographer, Gerry Pepper, was working without a flash as he leaned over the railing and aimed his camera down into the submerged enclosure outside the basement-level door. Pepper walked down the short flight of stairs leading below the sidewalk, the better to shoot the old woman. She was up against the wall which was red with one of her own bloody palm prints. He shot her again and again. She looked up at him in utter calm, unprotesting, quite beyond that now. The photographer shot her face, and then, suddenly stepped back as though she had just said something unpleasant.
"Hey, Gerry!" Coflfey called down to the photographer. "Get me extra shots of the palm print."
The man looked up, and Coffey saw something not quite right with Gerry Pepper. Something had unsettled this seasoned pro with fifteen years of shooting corpses, every damned thing that could be done to a human, from butchered infants to overdosed junkies. Gerry had seen far worse mutilations than this opened throat and hacked breast. Coffey waved him up the stairs and over to the wall.
"What's the problem, Gerry?"
The photographer spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though anything could be heard above the babble of one hundred independent conversations in the square tonight. "It's gonna be a suicide portrait. It's crazy, I know. But, Jack, you got no idea how many suicides I've shot." He ran one hand through his hair, and looked back over his shoulder before he spoke again. "I could paper my apartment with the suicide shots. And I got ten times as many murder victims, so I damn well know the difference."
Coffey had known Gerry for a long time. He wasn't about to say anything close to 'You moron, you think she mutilated herself?" It wasn't his job to demoralize the troops, that's what God created a chief of detectives for, and Blakely was never going hear about this.
"It's crazy," said Pepper. "But you asked."
The medical examiner's techs were moving slowly up the stairs from the basement level, carrying out the body in a bag, as Dr Edward Slope removed his rubber gloves and nodded to Coffey. In that nod he managed to convey that it was the same pattern, and that it was an insane world they lived in.
Coffey put one hand on Slope's arm. "When did this one go down? Can you give me a best guess?"
Slope closed up his bag and looked squarely at Coffey. He nearly smiled. "Well, Jack," said Slope, "I see Markowitz raised you right. It's not too difficult with this one, given the body temperature, state of the wounds and rigidity. Unless something bizarre turns up in the autopsy, I'd put it between eleven and two this afternoon. I can narrow that down a bit tomorrow."
With no "good-night", Slope turned and walked away, moving slow. The man's gait and posture made him years older than the last time Coffey had seen him. They had to stop meeting like this.
Riker was flipping back through the pages of his notebook. "The doorman doesn't remember when Samantha Siddon left the building. Thought it might be in the afternoon. The cleaning lady, Mrs Fayette, saw the old woman at noon. That's when Fayette finished up for the day. She said Siddon was wearing a housecoat and slippers. Give the old lady some time to change into street clothes and that puts her in the lobby around 12:15 at the earliest. She had arthritis in both hands and legs. Takes longer to do the buttons. Might make it closer to 12:30."
"You talked to the janitor?"
"Yeah, he's pretty shaken up. He has another job, and wants us to be cool about that if we ever meet up with the management company that runs the building. Anyway, he gets home from the second job around 11:15 and walks down the stairs to the door. And it's dark. The light bulb burnt out a while ago. But there's plenty of light from the street, so he takes his time about replacing it. Anyway, he sees the pile of canvas in one corner of the stairwell while he's turning his door key. So he's all ready to get bent out of shape 'cause he figures a tenant tossed something there for him to get rid of, like his doorway is the local dump. He picks up the canvas, and at first, he doesn't know what he's looking at."
Coffey looked down on the same notebook that Riker was reading from. There were four words on the page.
"Was there anything in the apartment to give us a line on next of kin?"
"There's only one relative, a cousin. You want me to send a squad car to pick her up?"
"What's the woman's name, again?" Coffey asked.
"Margot Siddon," said young Officer Michael Ohara, last of three generations of uniformed policemen. "She's a second cousin of the victim."
"Where'd you put her?"
"She's in Markowitz's office."
"Ohara, Markowitz doesn't have an office here anymore."
"Right," said Ohara, but without conviction. "She's in your office, Lieutenant."
Sergeant Riker moseyed after Jack Coffey, who was doing a slow burn that showed in a red stripe between his hairline and the white strip of his shirt collar. Riker smiled at his shoes as he followed Coffey into Markowitz's office.
Riker didn't believe he would ever get used to the redecorating. The walls were hung with one normal-size bulletin board and two prints of the racehorses which were Coffey's only passion in life – outside of good-looking babes.
Margot Siddon was no babe, in Biker's estimation. She sat in a chair by the desk and sipped coffee from a paper cup. She drank as though half her face was shot with Novocaine. The muscles on the left side of her mouth were frozen. She could make no expression that was not a smirk. The scar on her cheek was a faint marker for the nerves which must have been severed with the flesh.
According to Biker's notes on the law firm of Jasper and Biggs, she was about to inherit a fortune, but Horace Biggs, the executor, was on vacation in Rome. Morton Jasper, pissed off to distraction at being disturbed so late, could not or would not say with any certainty that she was the sole heir.
Margot Siddon didn't look the part of an heiress. Her hair was stringy and her shoes were scuffed imitation leather. Even with the layers of clothing, the black dress, the faded tapestry vest and the flimsy shawl, she was slender by her silhouette. Legs with well-defined calves thrust out in front of her. However small her body mass, Riker would bet it was solid muscle. He guessed that dancers worked out everyday. Her real weakness was in her face: the small eyes, the chin that almost wasn't there.
Coffey was making introductions.
"We've met," said Biker. "Miss Siddon's a friend of Henry Cathery, grandson of the first victim. She was in Cathery's apartment when Markowitz interviewed him."
The exasperation on Coffey's face said, "It might have been nice if you'd mentioned that earlier."
Riker took his chair at the back of the office. He was positioned to one side, facing Coffey and a bit behind Margot Siddon. He pulled a leather notebook out of his pocket and flipped back to the interview notes made at the Cathery apartment.
"So you and Mr Cathery are friends," said Coffey.
"We knew each other," she said, making a distinction there. "I visited Cousin Samantha once a week. The Catherys lived in the same building. After Henry's grandmother died, I used to drop in now and then. He was devastated by her murder. He depended on her for everything. He wasn't managing very well after her death."
Riker nodded to Coffey. That much was true. At the top of his interview notes for that date, he had underscored the words 'victim/nanny'. The grandmother had obviously been Henry Cathery's caretaker. Without her ministrations, the boy's flesh and laundry had gone unwashed. He had been on his own for a full month before Markowitz had interviewed him. His grandmother's homicide had only become the property of Special Crimes after the second death made it the work of a serial killer. As he recalled, the apartment the kid had once shared with Anne Cathery had the smell of a cleaning woman's recent visit, but the woman's chores had not involved cleaning the boy. Body odor had been noticeable despite the floral air-freshener.
"I helped out with small things," Margot Siddon was saying to Coffey. "I made sure he was eating regularly, things like that."
Riker nodded again when Coffey glanced his way. The next words underlined in his notes were 'Margot Siddon – new nanny'. The day the girl had opened the door to Markowitz, she had a clean pair of jeans and a man's shirt draped over one arm. There had been no doubt about who was in charge. Henry Cathery had never answered a question from Markowitz without looking first to the girl. And when the answers were slow in coming, she had answered for him. She was not only the dominant one, but Henry even gave the impression of being the frailer of the pair, though he was above average height and weight, fleshy in the face and gut.
"I'm not even sure that Henry knew where the groceries came from," Margot Siddon explained to Jack Coffey. "I suppose he wondered why the refrigerator wasn't full anymore, but he didn't know what to do about it."
Riker scanned the word groceries. Right, the groceries had been delivered to the apartment ten minutes into the interview. Henry Cathery had given her a wad of cash to pay the delivery boy, and then she had left them for a few minutes to put the perishables in the refrigerator. Acts of charity, Riker had supposed at the time, though he didn't take the girl for the good-mother type. But they were two lonely kids, both outside the mainstream in their quirks.
He looked at the last note he had made on the day of the Cathery interview. It was written in the car after the interview was over and they were heading back. Markowitz had mentioned that the girl never gave Henry Cathery the change for the groceries. Riker had written 'Parasite' and underscored it.
The lighting in the Cathery apartment had been subdued. Under these brighter fluorescent lights of NYPD, Riker noted that Margot Siddon's clothes were not fashionable grunge dressing, but merely old. The elderly and wealthy cousin had not been generous with the girl.
Done with her coffee, she set the cup on the desk and folded her hands in her lap. There was a pressure on the fingers to keep them there, behaving themselves. Her less disciplined legs crossed and recrossed at the ankles.
Coffey was extending his condolences on the death of Margot Siddon's cousin. The interview went on for another twenty minutes, and Coffey glanced Riker's way several times to let him know he hadn't missed the detail that half an hour passed before Riker thought anything had been said that was worth writing down. There were those impatient looks of 'Don't needle me' in Coffey's eyes. But Riker's pen only hovered over the page.
"No, she didn't have any enemies," said Margot, accepting the photograph from Coffey's hand and nodding. "Yes, that's Samantha. Was it a serrated knife?"
"What?" Lieutenant Coffey leaned forward as though he hadn't heard her right.
"The knife that killed her. Was it serrated?"
She set the photograph down on the desk. It was a head shot for identification purposes. A white towel had covered the wound to the throat. The face was unmarred and seemed at peace, only sleeping.
"Ah, we're not sure," said Coffey. "The autopsy is in progress right now."
"I can probably tell if I see the photographs of the wounds."
"We don't expect that of you, Miss Siddon. The identification is sufficient."
"Is there some reason why I shouldn't see them?"
"We'd like to keep some of the details out of the press for now."
Big mistake, thought Riker. The kid's eyes were gleaming.
"I insist on seeing the wounds," said Siddon.
And then it was the kid's mistake to try and smile with half her face. The result was a smirk that was obviously irritating Coffey as he pulled out the envelope with the glossy prints and handed her the shot that showed only the wound to the throat.
"A long knife," she said, holding the photo close to her eyes in the way of a near-sighted person. "And not a serrated edge."
Coffey stood up and straightened his tie. He'd had enough of this, that much was in his face and the stiffness of his stance.
"Sergeant Riker will have a few questions for you, and then he'll see that you're taken home."
The lieutenant left the room.
Riker made a few notes and then looked up. Her face was all accommodation.
"Miss Siddon, do you remember where you were between eleven this morning and two o'clock this afternoon?"
TriBeCa, in a rehearsal loft." Anticipating his next question from a childhood based on television, she said, "There were a hundred other people there for try-outs. The director will remember me. He said I was very good."
But she and Riker both knew she'd be remembered for the left side of her face.
"They told me they'd call," she said, smiling on one side, as the opposite cheek crinkled the scar into a hideous waning moon.
Sure they would.
"I'll drive you home, Miss Siddon."
The East Village was filled with kids from good families who affected the look of starving-artist poverty. But this young dancer with the cheap shoes was the genuine article, legitimately hungry. He had remained in the background of their first and second meetings. Now in the closeness of the car, he detected the smell of the thrift shop, a distinct odor of secondhand clothes. And the girl also exuded a palpable energy, waves of it.
He turned off of Houston and rode north for three blocks before he pulled up in front of her apartment building. A small clutch of teenagers were gathered on the near corner, taking an interest in the unmarked car. Rats scrabbled in and out of the garbage cans. The shattered bits of a syringe sparkled amid the trash on the sidewalk.
"I'll see you upstairs," he said, removing his key from the ignition.
"No, don't," she said, too quickly. "I don't want to be any trouble."
A drunk was relieving himself on the wall across the street.
"No trouble at all."
"No, I insist," she said, half-smiling and no sincerity in even half of her face. She was out of the car and leaning in the window before he could open his door.
"Good-night, Sergeant Riker."
He nodded and started up the car, pulling slowly away into traffic. She stayed a while on the sidewalk to see him off and gone. In his rear-view mirror, he watched her growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared in the dangerous landscape of Avenue C.
He tried Mallory's home number on the car phone. He let it ring, knowing that she took her own sweet time about answering.
Before the interview with Margot Siddon, he had pointed out to Coffey that the girl would probably inherit everything the old woman had in the bank, and Markowitz had always leaned towards money motives. Coffey had pointed out, for the second time in one night, that Markowitz was dead, as if the old rummy cop could not get that one simple thing through his head. And, said Coffey, this was not a woman's crime – for the tenth time, for Christ's sake.
At the next stop light, he made his last note of the evening: Why not a woman?
Margot Siddon turned on the light in her apartment, and a roach scurried across the floor underfoot. She walked through the galley kitchen and passed a rack of knives, more knives than a professional cook could find uses for. And in the alcove which passed for a bedroom, there were other kinds of knives, Swiss Army knives, common penknives, switchblade knives.
Sometimes she forgot that the rest of the world was not so preoccupied with cutlery. She had gone too far tonight. The cops had both been looking at her as though she had just dropped in from the dark side of the moon.
She thought the younger cop, Coffey, was going to drop his teeth when she asked what kind of knife had killed Cousin Samantha.
Dear, dead Samantha. All that lovely money.
She would inherit more than enough money to buy back her old smile, the smile she used to go around in. Her eyes gleamed and glassed as she grinned with half her face. And she began to dance. Her arms and legs were a celebration of leaps and rippling movements as she danced through the room of her dingy walk-up, kissing every wall goodbye.
Mallory passed a walking woman on the dark Soho street. The woman gasped, not with fear but with surprise. There had been no footfalls, no noise at all. Mallory had suddenly materialized at her side and then walked beyond her.
Without turning to look back, Mallory knew by which doorway the woman behind her had left the street, that the woman had used her own key drawn from a snap-lock purse, and by the quick steps, that the woman was suddenly afraid. Good. Civilians should be afraid. They would live longer, and longer still if they were more aware of their surroundings.
She walked north to the parking garage which held her car. A block short of Houston, she stopped. She listened. She turned to stare at the space of sidewalk behind her, eyes narrowing, the better to search the empty air for traces of a human who had recently been standing there.
Nothing. No one.
She was alone on the street, said her eyes, reporting back with the facts. But she could feel that other pair of eyes on her.
A memory came jumping with light's speed to the front of her brain, all decked with flashing red warning lights. "Most people never look up," Markowitz had told her in her rookie days. She pulled back and looked up as a black shape was falling towards her, rushing to meet her and send her to a better world than New York City. With the married reflexes of forked lightning and quick city rats, she jumped clear as the large block of concrete crashed into the pavement beside her and left a web of cracks in its wake.
She scanned the long line of the roof and caught the movement of a dark shape against the night sky, only a shadow moving across the edge of the roof. Her gun was clear of its holster and in her hand. But she had lost that fraction of a second between here and gone. The shadow had pulled in.
She moved to the side of the building and jumped for a handhold on the ledge of the fire escape. She was shot through with adrenaline and never felt the strain of the muscles which pulled her body straight up to the first grated landing. She took the stairs of the six-storey building at a dead run, rubber soles touching to metal on every third step.
On the roof, without a moon and only the glow of city lights, she saw the fast receding shadow was rooftops ahead of her. She jumped the barriers between one roof and another, and then she was airborne in the wider gulf where two buildings did not join. The shadow was not so quick but had the advantage of time and space. Its dark coat was flapping in the high wind like the wings of a bat, and then it was flown. Gone into air.
All her senses told her she was alone in the dark. Both feet touched to ground at one time, and her gun hand came to rest at her side. She stepped lightly across the tar surfaces of the rooftops, checking fire escapes and roof doors. One door had been left open. She stared down into the dark of the stairwell, looking for disturbances in the air, the trail of body heat, the sound and sensation of a fugitive life form. Nothing came back to her but the stillness of those nine-to-fivers sleeping therein, and she knew the thing had not gone this way. She checked the door of the roof beyond and the metal stairs of its fire escape.
Finally, she pulled her eyes back from the street below, drew back from the edge of the roof and stared out at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the panorama of the night owls' lighted windows, all the eyes that never saw anything when the cops came knocking at the door.
Jack Coftey sat alone in his office which was still called Markowitz's office. Margot Siddon had gotten to him. All that talk of knives, her lips curling into a smirk. He had pegged her then as another punk kid from the village, another copbaiter. Screw that.
Now he looked down on the file Biker had placed on his desk. Stapled to it was the requisition slip Markowitz had signed. Markowitz, the lover of details, must have ordered it after the interview in the Cathery apartment. The two-year-old account of the assault on Margot Siddon included the knife wound to the face, the cutting of the facial nerves. And the scar had been there for all to see, and all he had seen was the smirking insolence which only the knife could be accountable for and not the girl, the victim.
Oh, all the damned victims.
What else had he missed? Christ, he was tired.
Riker's own notes had been added to Margot Siddon's old file. The sergeant had tracked down the case officer for personal comments. Coffey was looking down on a school photograph of a nice-looking kid with a normal smile, taken shortly before that cruel bastard had said, "Now watch the dancing knife, little girl." And according to the case officer's statement, Margot had actually watched the blade cutting into her skin, watched the blood flow, in shock from the violence he had already done to her, stark-naked by then, covered only with blood.
All the damned victims.
He turned off the overhead lights, ready to leave but too tired to get in motion. He flicked on the desk lamp, and the softer glow illuminated the walls repainted and denuded of Markowitz-style clutter. But Markowitz had come stealing back to reclaim the place. The floor was littered with folders tonight. Another stack of case files filled the two chairs on the other side of the desk, and on the new, unmarred blotter next to his new computer terminal sat a stack of letters and diaries to read and handle in the old-fashioned way.
It troubled him that the writings of the old women had tapered off more than a year ago. Either they had ceased to have anything of interest to write about, or they had all become so fascinated by some thing or event that the writing of letters and the keeping of journals had been displaced by another, more interesting occupation. This nagged at him. In one case, all the writing he could find had been in a storage trunk. No letters of any kind had been found in the apartment. Yet the woman had the history of a dedicated diarist, not missing a day for the ten years of leather-bound books he had recovered.
All the victims had been one-dimensional before he began reading their private thoughts. None of the heirs had been able to give him even the most routine aspects of an old woman's life. Who were their friends, what interests might the victims have in common? The relatives could tell him nothing. And the day-hire women told him only the most mundane habits of their elderly employers. Tonight, he had invaded the victims' minds in search of who they had been, and also rounded out the profiles of the heirs. The victims' fears had centered on losing touch with the only relations they had, their touchstones with the world, the continuity of blood.
In a fluid, old-fashioned script, one old woman berated herself for all the irrational questions asked just to keep conversation going, to prevent the rare visit from ending all too soon. And there were sometimes tear-blind rages for the lack of understanding, the inability to communicate with a generation she had nothing in common with. The crying jags, the terrible giving-up to the futility of putting up any fight. The anger at being treated as a child – as though crying robbed her of her maturity. The frustration of misunderstandings that came about because the young only half-listened and never did grasp the simplest fact that arthritic hands couldn't open child-proof caps. The common thread which ran through the women's lives was the need to be touched.
Samantha Siddon had that need. The page open before him was the last entry in the diary of the fourth victim, dated one year ago:
She tolerates the hugs at meetings and partings. It must seem to her, in those moments, that I am clinging to my very life, and so I am. She is all the warm flesh that I may touch and be touched by. One dies without the touch. What if she should never return?
He left the light burning when he walked out of the office and moved down the hall to the incident room where they kept all the things which Biker had retrieved from Mallory and all the physical evidence. It was a chaos of bloody carnage in full-color prints and bits of paper which must somehow chain together. Too many clues, Markowitz had said. And now there were too many suspects. Two of them could be working in tandem. The Cathery boy who fitted the FBI profile was just too perfect in every respect but motive. Jonathan Gaynor, the sociology professor, had inherited the largest fortune of all. Margot Siddon was the neediest heir.
Markowitz and his damn money motives. Ah, but the old man had something. This killer was a sick bastard, no doubt about it, but not crazy. Markowitz had tipped to something. Why hadn't the old man given him a sporting chance, just a note in the dust, any damn thing at all.
"No, nothing new on my end. Thanks for calling, Biker. Yeah, see you tomorrow."
Nothing new? Well, she was still alive. That hadn't changed.
Mallory put down the telephone and walked into the den. She pinned her last surveillance notes on Gaynor to the wall. So the fourth victim had gone down between noon and two. With the best transportation, all the right connections of subway cars or traffic lights, it would take nearly an hour to make the round trip from the edge of Harlem to Gramercy Square if she only threw in a few minutes to do murder. Except for the hours of his student interviews, he had not been out of her sight for that length of time. The hall was the only exit from his office.
Could Gaynor have slipped by? As Mrs Pickering had pointed out, surveillance was not her forte. She had wanted it to be Gaynor. It would have fitted so nicely.
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 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 tea kettle 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 tea kettle screamed.