Mallory's Oracle

CHAPTER 1

The boy's stringy brown hair fell over one eye. The other eye was fever-bright. His T-shirt was grime gray and yellow in the rings of stale sweat beneath the arms. Bony knees pushed through the strained and faded threads of his jeans as he crossed the room to the pawnbroker's cage.

Safely locked behind wire and glass, the old man in the cage only feared the pain in his mind might bleed from his eyes, and so he kept them cast down as he examined again what the boy had brought him.

The police station was only minutes away. How much time had passed, he wondered. Where was Kathy? Had he been right to call her? The old man's hand trembled as he wiped his face. What would the boy make of tremors and tears?

"What's taking so long, old man?" asked the boy. "Gold is gold."

Well, no, it was not.

The pocket watch bore the name of Louis Markowitz's grandfather. And the engraved initials inside the heavy gold ring told him this was the wedding band that Helen had given to Louis. The old man had attended that wedding. And twenty years later, when Helen died, he had been at the grave with Louis and Kathy. The watch and ring were more than gold to Louis, and he would not have given them up while he lived.

The boy hovered close to the cage and then flitted across the room. He spun around, levitating off the floor.

He was so thin, made all of wire, coursing with manic energy, sweat pouring off what little flesh he had, heat rising off his cooking brain, only wanting money to fill his veins with magic and fly away.

There was a light tap at the pawnbroker's window. Kathy Mallory had come. He buzzed her through the lock, and she walked in slow, stalking on long legs in dungarees. A black blazer over her T-shirt hid the gun. All the old man's compliments to her were made of hard but precious substance: her eyes were cold green jewels set in ivory and framed in an aureole of gold.

She moved on the boy in the shutter blink of the old man's eyes. It looked to him as though she had disappeared from the shaft of light by the window and then reappeared behind the boy on the other side of the room. Her lips parted, and just the tip of her tongue showed between her teeth. It must be his old eyes or his imagination – she seemed to be tasting the moment. Her hands were rising, curling.

The boy was quickly turning, and he had not faced her yet when she grabbed him by one arm and pulled it up high behind his back. The boy screamed with pain as she slammed him into the wall. And there was fear in that scream, too. He seemed younger now, a wild-eyed child caught in the claws of his nursery-closet monster. This could not be happening, said the boy's eyes.

Where did you get the watch? she was asking him with another slam into the wall. Where? she asked, and never raised her voice, but tufts of the boy's hair came away in her hand when she had to ask him again.

Jack Coffey's mind was breaking with the exhaustion of nights without sleep. The question was endlessly looping back on itself: why had Markowitz gone in there alone? Why?

It made no damn sense at all, not for a smart cop with thirty years on the force. Raw recruits, still damp at the bib with mother's milk, were not so dumb and loved their skins more.

Lieut. Jack Coffey held his suit jacket slung over one arm. The wet stains on his pin-stripe shirt were darkest at the shoulder holster. His lean and sun-brown face was slack at the jaw, and his eyes were closing to slits.

Oh, talk about rookie cops. Maybe if he'd had a decent night's sleep he might not have behaved like one himself, stumbling out to the sidewalk to lose his last meal on the pavement. And now his knees were foiling him. He covered himself by leaning casually against one of the black-and-white units.

The street was crawling with black-and-whites and a few of the department's less conspicuous tan cars. The meat wagon was waiting patiently, doors hanging open. The two men from the medical examiner's office stubbed out their cigarettes and walked back inside. Nothing would get Jack Coffey back in there, nothing but the possibility of losing face in front of Kathy Mallory.

A siren cut the thick humid air, screaming like a woman. Some fool had called an ambulance, and it was rushing toward them as though there was still time for Louis Markowitz, as though the man had not been dead for two days.

And what a place to die. The windows of the six-storey building were all cracked glass and black holes. Chunks of concrete lay on the sidewalk, having fallen from the once-elaborate facade. In the past few weeks, this abandoned East Village tenement had done some service as a crack house. The addicts had left a trail of works winding from the sidewalk to the door.

The car dipped as another, heavier man joined him on the car's fender.

"Hello, Coffey," said Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely who was all gone to gray hair and not so lean as the younger man by forty pounds, nor so beautiful by twenty years of drink which put veins in his eyes and sallowed his flesh.

"Chief," Coffey nodded. "Riker filled you in?"

"Much as he could. It's the same freak? You're positive?"

"It's the same pattern with the wounds."

"Oh, God," said Blakely, as if God could find him in this section of lower Manhattan. Not likely, yet he wiped his face with a handkerchief and squinted up to where heaven would be if not for the crumbling brick of the tenement building. "You got a preliminary yet?"

"Yeah, but it's half-assed. Slope hasn't shown up yet. The techs figure they died maybe forty to fifty hours ago. There's plastic in the woman's wounds."

"You got an ID on her?"

"Miss Pearl Whitman, age seventy-five. She's from Gramercy Park, same as the first two."

"No shit. You know who that is? Pearl Whitman of Whitman Chemicals. You got any idea how much she's worth?"

It was like the Chief to give a credit line to a corpse. He was a good political animal.

"Look who's here." Blakely was nodding in the direction of a van with a TV-news logo on the side. He gestured thumb down to a uniformed officer who moved quickly to direct the van and its cargo of reporters and cameramen onto the cross street and away from the crime scene. "Speaking of freaks. Those bastards can smell blood before jackals can."

Jack Coffey closed his eyes, but it did him no good. He could see the Post's headlines on the inside of his eyelids: "Invisible Man's Third Kill". A rival newspaper had favored the name Graylady Killer, but the public had taken more of a fancy to the supernatural aspect of the first murder.

That first old woman had been a daylight kill in the park at the center of Gramercy Square. Anne Cathery had died in full view of every window that looked out onto that square, and every bench-sitter, every passer-by. Yet no one had witnessed it. Her corpse had lain in anonymity among the shrubs, ignored by blase, incurious New Yorkers. In the early morning hours of the following day, flies had attracted the curiosity of a resident.

The second victim, Estelle Gaynor, had also been found in the square. But now Pearl Whitman had broken the pattern by dying at an unfashionable Manhattan address, twenty blocks south by geographic standards and miles farther down by economics. Another deviation from the pattern was the death of a cop, the head of Special Crimes Section no less.

Harry Blakely lit up a cheap cigar, and Coffey bit down on his lower lip to offset a new wave of nausea and stop the onset of dry heaves. He was only hoping to keep some of his dignity, for he had nothing left of his lunch to give to the sidewalk.

"How do you suppose the perp got the old lady down here, Coffey? Any ideas?"

"Had to have a car," said Coffey, his mind working on automatic pilot now, only really concentrating on his innards. "Probably snatched her off the street in Gramercy. No rich old broad is gonna be out for a stroll in this neighborhood."

"Well, now." Blakely smiled. "He has a private car. That's more than we had yesterday. So Markowitz wasn't a total loss."

What would they do to him, Coffey wondered, for punching out the chief of detectives? Well, he would have free beers for the rest of his natural life, but no pension.

"You're the senior man in the section, Coffey. You do right, you'll make captain before the year is out. It's your baby now."

Yeah, right. And who was going to explain that to Mallory?

Coffey was facing the long black limousine slowly pulling to the curb, but he was not really seeing it, not registering that this must be Police Commissioner Beak's limo.

"Aw, Markowitz," Blakely was saying, as much to himself as to Coffey. "This was a real bonehead mistake. He should've pulled the pin years ago."

Coffey's hand clenched wrinkles into the wilted material of his suit jacket. So all the times Lou Markowitz made the department shine had counted for nothing. He would be remembered for this last mistake. Maybe the perp was just smarter than Markowitz. Coffey had never met anyone that smart. And if and when he did? Would Blakely be sitting with someone else and remembering Lieut. Jack Coffey for his last mistake?

"Has anyone told Mallory?" asked Blakely.

"She's in there now with forensic."

"Oh Jesus – "

"She was the first officer on the scene. You were figuring to keep her out of it?"

"She's in there with Markowitz's body?"

"Yeah, and she's pissed off."

He was only vaguely aware of another man standing close by his shoulder and putting one bloodless, bony hand on the fender of the car. Coffey winced as the man leaned close to his ear and yelled, "Are you telling me Sergeant Mallory is in there!"

Where had Beale come from on his little ferret's feet?

Still a bit slow and slightly stupid with shock, Jack Coffey turned to look down at the little man's watery gray eyes. He thought the commissioner had a very big voice for a little jerk.

Dr Edward Slope had come straight from a pool-side barbecue at his suburban Westchester home. Actually, he had escaped from his in-laws and neighbors, running from their screaming children, ducking the flying frisbees, keeping a blind eye to the smoking hamburgers and franks on the grill, not stopping to change his clothes but only grabbing up his bag. His apologies, on the fly, had been profuse, but when he last saw his wife, she had been holding a long, sharp skewer and miming the words, "I'll get you for this," as he backed his car down the driveway and left her to the whirlwind.

In his practice as medical examiner for the county of Manhattan, Dr Slope usually came to his patients in a more somber suit of clothes and not the garish splashes of Hawaiian color which competed with the blood of the crime scene. In a further, unintended rudeness, the exotic flowers of his shirt muted the dead woman's more fashionable blue dress, and drabbed the dead man's brown suit.

And he usually tended to strangers and not to a man he had known for half his life. He had walked quickly from the car to the door marked by a guard of uniformed officers. No one had caught up with him to tell him it was Louis in there. He had walked into this room and met his old friend as a corpse. Now, as he sagged against the bare brick wall, the bright floodlights deepened his wrinkles and made him seventy instead of sixty.

He had to ask himself, what was wrong with this picture? Oh, just everything. Louis should be issuing orders to forensic and the photographer, and pumping him for early details and best guesses. In no scenario could Louis be one of the bodies.

And why was Kathy Mallory here? She should be sitting at a computer console back at the station, and not on her knees in the dirt and the dried blood, flies lighting on the curls of her hair and crawling over her hands and face.

The photographer and the forensic crew were standing by the door, waiting on a go-ahead from Mallory. She was kneeling on the floor, pushing a gold wedding band up the pudgy third finger on the left hand of the corpse which had been her father.

Dr Slope turned his attention to the boy in the handcuffs. It seemed unnecessary to have such a large policeman restraining the kid. In that weakened condition he could not have outrun one of the dead bodies. The boy's head was bleeding, and half his face was swollen. Slope thought of practising on a living patient for distraction, but then he figured he would see this one in his regular practice soon enough. The skeletal junkie was a day away from dying. Were the wounds Mallory's work? It was obvious the boy was Mallory's creature. He was tied to her by his eyes.

Mallory looked up at the boy. "You moved the body, didn't you?"

Apparently, she had trained the boy rather well in the short time they had known one another, perhaps a half-hour by the recent blooding. The boy responded quick as a starving lab rat.

"Yes, ma'am. I rolled him over on his back."

"Tell me when I've got it right," she said, rolling the heavy body of Louis Markowitz over on his face.

Slope wondered if she had ever been on a homicide crime site before. He thought not. From her earliest days on the force, she had always been more at home with the NYPD computers than people, living or dead. A bizarre linkage of memory called up a fine spring day in Kathy's childhood when Louis had taught her the rudiments of baseball.

In a somewhat different spirit, Dr Slope strode over to Louis's body and hunkered down beside her. He pointed to the darkened splotches on the face. "Line up the places where the blood's pooled under the skin. Line 'em up flat with the floor."

She nodded and leaned down, nose to nose with the white face of the corpse, her hands working at the dead flesh which was deceptively warm in the August heat. When she was done, she looked up to the boy who nodded.

Slope was checking Mallory's pretty face for signs of traumatic shock, and he was disconcerted at not finding any. She was all business, lining up the dark blood pools on the white left hand now, and looking back to the boy again. The boy nodded once more. Satisfied, she stood up and crossed the room to stand over the corpse of the old woman.

The woman's throat bore a wound resembling a second mouth. The front of the blood-crusted dress had been cut away, and the brassiere as well. One breast hung deflated against the ribcage. The other had been laid open by the knife and was covered with flies. The buzzing was nearly a roar, and the medical examiner regarded the black cluster of insects as a single feeding organism. The corpse's ancient face was a study in horror as the flies crawled in and out of the open mouths of her face and throat.

Mallory stared at the old woman with as much compassion as she would give to furniture. She looked back to the boy.

"And now this one," she said.

"No," said the boy. "She was that way when I got here."

"Anything else? Did you touch anything, move anything?"

"No. I went through the dead guy's pockets and ran. I threw the wallet back there." He pointed to a loose pile of bricks and garbage in one corner of the room. The wallet lay on a torn, green garbage bag.

Slope caught the eye of a forensic technician. He nodded at the bag and then made a few jots in his notebook.

"You!" said Mallory, calling the man over. "You got the kid's prints?"

The technician held up the card with the splotches of ink in neat squares which identified each printed digit.

She turned to Martin, the uniformed officer who held the handcuffed boy by one bone-thin arm.

"I don't need him anymore. Kick him loose."

Slope stopped his medical examination and watched Martin's young face and saw the patrolman's mistake in the making.

"Mallory, he robbed a corpse," said Martin. "Markowitz's corpse, for Christ's sake. You're gonna let him walk?"

"A deal is a deal. Now kick him loose," said Mallory in a voice, low and even, that said with restrained, under-the-surface violence, "Don't you push your luck with me, not ever." As she walked towards Martin, she seemed to grow in size and power. It was an unsettling illusion, and Slope wondered if she was even aware of it. He thought she might be.

Martin was quick to fish out the cuff key. His reddening face was turned down to the work of unlocking the irons. A moment later, the junkie was gone.

Very practical, Kathy. Why waste time on a trial?

He guessed she hadn't wasted much time on the boy's constitutional right to a lawyer, and he knew she had wasted no time at all in discouraging his right to remain silent.

Now she turned on the photographer. "Okay, it's in prime condition. Shoot."

The peripheral brightness of repeating flashes made spots in Slope's vision as he moved to the second body. He slipped plastic bags over the hands of the woman's corpse, and then, looked up to Mallory. "I'll get to work on it as soon as you release them."

"The old woman's the same pattern as the other two?"

"The same."

"Do Markowitz first," she said. "I'm not gonna learn anything new from her."

"You got it."

"What can you give me now? How long have they been dead?"

Like father, like daughter. He knew there was no tie of blood between them, but there was much of Louis in her.

"Two days, give or take. With the heat and the decomposition, I won't be able to pin it to within five or six hours. But, I can fix a few hours of daylight on either side. Same pattern there."

"How long did Markowitz live?"

"Maybe thirty minutes to an hour. I'm guessing by the blood loss. I'd say the wound was enough to kill him without medical attention, but he died of a massive coronary." Markowitz had had some practice surviving mild attacks. This one must have had the force and effect of a slow train wreck.

"So he knew he was dying."

"Yes." And that hurt her, he knew. He discerned it in the slow deadening of her eyes. So Louis Markowitz had spent his last hour in pain and fear.

Wasn't life crappy that way, Kathy?

"The killer didn't take much time with him," he said. "He was more interested in the woman. Markowitz has defensive wounds on his arms. By the position of the first blood splatter, he put himself between her and the killer." And now he detected the first signs of mild shock with the slight loss of focus in her eyes. "Can I do anything for you, Kathy?"

His first error was using her Christian name on the job, and his second gross presumption was kindness. He was rewarded with universal contempt throughout the crowded tenement room. He should've known better, said the frozen silence of the uniforms, the technicians and the photographer.

"You're done with the body?" she asked, focussed again, all cold to him now, all business.

He nodded.

"Okay," she said, turning to the medical examiner's men. "Bag him and take him out." Now she looked to the far corner where the old woman's body was. "And that one? How long?"

"She only lived a few minutes."

"Bag her."

Her next order cleared out all the unnecessary personnel and that included old friends of the family. Dr Slope left in advance of his team. The way out of the building and into the light was much longer than the way in had been.

Sergeant Kathleen Mallory sat on the only chair in the room while the forensic team crawled on hands and knees, looking for fibers and hairs, the minutiae of evidence. She traced the pattern of blood. He fell there, near the door.

How could you be dead?

And he had gotten up and dragged himself along that blood-smeared wall to the window.

Did you scream for help in this neighborhood of "I didn't see nothin', I didn't hear nothin'."

And there by the window, where the blood had spread around his body in a wide stain in the dust, he had collapsed and died. But it had taken some time. He'd had time to think.

What did you do with the time? What did you leave behind?… Nothing?

She looked up as they were carrying him out in a black plastic body bag.

A small notebook lay open on her lap. She drew a quick slash through the notes on Markowitz's car. It must have been stolen. Nothing had turned up on the impound lots in the two days she'd been hunting for him. It was probably in Jersey by now and painted a different color.

Why did you go in alone?

"Defensive wounds", she wrote on a clean page. So he had tailed the perp to the crime scene and gone in without backup. Why? "Because the woman was about to die", she wrote in a clear neat hand. She could assume he was on foot – no car radio, or he would have called for backup. That was something. So the perp was also on foot.

Her pen scratched across the paper again. "No drive-by snatch". She was certain of that much. The killer had arranged to meet the old woman well away from Gramercy Park – a break in the pattern of the other two murders. There had to be a record on some cabby's log. A rich old woman doesn't ride the subway or the bus. And she wouldn't have come here alone to meet a stranger. She knew her killer.

So, she could also assume that Markowitz had figured out how the park murder was done. Smart old bastard. But if he was so smart, why did he keep it to himself? And since when did a cop with Markowitz's rank do surveillance detail?

One of the forensic techs looked her way and then nervously looked everywhere else.

Was he checking for tears, she wondered, for signs of dissembling? No way. No compassionate leave for Mallory. But Commissioner Beale was such a twit, he might order it. Then what?

The worst of the stench from the old woman's corpse still lingered. Pearl Whitman had not been such a neat kill as Markowitz. The butcher had punctured the intestine. In the absence of food, the cloud of flies was dwindling to a few annoying strafers. There were no windows that were not broken, no barriers to contain them. They whined past her ear, buzzing and black, fat with blood. Gone. All quiet now, only the sound of the brush in the hand of the man at her feet who was looking for omens in the dust and the dried blood.

"I shouldn't have called you so late."

"No, Mr Lugar, you did the right thing." The sleepy rabbi and the night watchman were both in their late fifties, and both were balding, but there they parted in countenance. The watchman was furtive in all his movements and shaped like a beer keg on toothpick legs. The rabbi was a tall man and comfortable in his slender body. His face was catlike and tranquil in the half-closed lids of lost sleep.

The watchman jerked his head up to look at the taller man. "Wait till you see her. She looks like a little kid, just sitting there in the cold. We have to keep it cold, you understand." 'I understand."

"It's so peculiar. I worked here maybe two years now, and nobody ever wanted to sit up all night with the body. It's so peculiar. I didn't know who to call. Well then, I seen your name on the manifest for the funeral arrangements. So I gotta figure you know the family, you know?" 'I know."

He led him to the door, and pointed to the square window.

"Don't she look just like a little kid?" The watchman moved his head slowly and sadly from side to side as he unlocked the door and stepped back. "I gotta go on my rounds now, Rabbi."

"Thank you for all your trouble, Mr Lugar. It was very kind of you."

The smaller man smiled and ducked his head under the rare burden of a compliment. He turned and walked down the dimly lit hall, stiff and disjointed as though he had borrowed this body for the night and had not quite got the hang of walking around in it.

The rabbi pushed through the swinging doors and into a bright cold room painted antiseptic green. She was sitting on a metal folding chair by the wall of lockers, each one home to a body, and one of those bodies was very important to Kathy Mallory. Her blazer collar was pulled up against the cold, and her hands were tucked into the fold of her arms. She was hugging herself, it seemed, for lack of anyone to hold her.

She was twenty-five years old, he knew, but she was also the child who stared defiantly from the old photograph in Louis's wallet. She was not much changed since that day, fourteen years ago, when he first saw her walk into the front room of the Markowitz house, following along in Helen's wake, never going very far from Helen's side. Of course, she was taller now.

"Kathy, why are you here? Mr Lugar was concerned about you."

"Someone's supposed to sit with the body. A relative."

"No Kathy. That's not necessary. Louis was not so orthodox a Jew. He was only religious about our Thursday-night poker games. And he missed last Thursday's game."

He bent his knees, and his body folded down in the neat illusion of shrinking until he was sitting on the backs of his shoes. It was his custom to speak to children at eye level.

"Louis was so unorthodox I caught him buying a Christmas tree one night. That would have been the first year you lived with Louis and Helen. Louis tried to fob it off as a Hanukkah bush."

"Did you ream him out?"

"Of course I did. As we were carrying it home. I was merciless."

"It was a twelve-footer. I remember that tree. It went up to the ceiling."

"So, can you picture an orthodox Jew putting up Christmas trees and raising a little Gentile? You don't have to sit up with him."

"Helen would've liked it."

"You got me there." He shrugged and smiled. "She would've liked it. Louis would've liked it, too."

Mallory looked down at her hands.

"It's all right to cry, Kathy."

"Don't get your hopes up, Rabbi."

Rabbi David Kaplan seemed to be growing taller instead of merely standing up. He walked over to the rear wall where three more folding chairs rested near the door. He carried one back to the wall of lockers and dragged out the mechanics of unfolding it and settling himself into it.

"I think I'll stay, too," he said.

"What for?"

"Helen would have liked it."

"I'm okay."

"Me too, Kathy. I'm okay. How long have I known you now? Since you were a little girl."

"I was never a little girl. Markowitz said so."

"Since you were a short person. I've known you that long. If you need me, I'm here."

"I'm not Jewish."

"You're telling me? But there's so much of Helen invested in you. I got to protect her investment, keep it alive, you know?" He looked up to the fluorescent lights.

"It's Thursday. When I knew I would never play poker with Louis again, I cried."

"Not me."

"I believe you. Louis used to tell me – when you were very short – that you had principle. Tears were for suckers in your lights, he said. I'm a sucker, Kathy. You can take from me what you want, you can tap me for lunch every now and then, for advice. Are you very angry with Louis?"

Well, that got her attention. And yes, she was very angry.

"He was a good cop," she said. "When a cop gets killed it's because he got careless. How could he do that?"

"How could he do that to you? Louis used to worry about you working in Special Crimes. Ah, you didn't know that? Well, you spent more time with computers than criminals. He was so proud of you. She's so smart, he would say. But these people he dealt with were so dangerous. He always knew the risks. I believe he knew it would end this way."

"I'm going after the dirtbag that did this to him."

"Your expertise is in the computer, Kathy, not fieldwork. Leave it to the others. He only wanted you to be safe. Give him that much. He wouldn't want you involved in this. Promise me you'll let go of it now. Make this promise a last gift to Louis."

She sat well back in the chair and folded her arms across her chest in the attitude of now it begins. "So Markowitz spilled all of this to you. That's interesting."

"We talked. So?" He found her slow widening smile disturbing. Louis had called it the Armageddon grin. "I was more than his rabbi. I was his oldest friend."

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

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

"So, what'd the old man say about the Gramercy Park murders?"

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

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

"Fine, then I jump into it stark-naked, no defenses, none of your promised help, your hot air, your – "

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

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

"He never told me."

"But he knew."

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

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

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

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

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

"Not good enough, Rabbi."

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

"Did you know Louis was a dancing fool?"

"Rabbi."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think I know who it is… now."

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

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

"What are you going to do, Kathy?"

"I'm gonna do it by the book. Markowitz would've liked that. My gift."

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