Mallory's Oracle

CHAPTER 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She supposed he was waiting for her to cry.

He would wait for ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wasn't she?

"Is this a rent-control apartment, Sergeant? Do you mind my asking the rent?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How did she get it out, Riker?"

"So you think it was Mallory?"

"Cut the crap."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doorbell chimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riker made himself at home on the couch.

"Coffey sent me to pick up all the stuff you pinched. But not the Xerox machine. He hasn't missed that yet." He started to drape one leg over the arm of the couch but checked himself, remembering where he was and who he was dealing with.

"You can have the Xerox, too," she said. "I'm done with it."

"Naw. I'm the sentimental type. It was Markowitz's Xerox. You hold on to it." He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and held it up with a question.

She nodded and pushed the ashtray across the low table.

Before he set the silver cigarette lighter back on the table, it was marred with his paw prints. "So, are you hanging in there, kid? We didn't get much chance to talk during the great precinct robbery. Jeez, the way Coffey carried on. I thought the poor bastard was gonna cry… So, how are you, Kathy?"

"Just fine."

"Anything I can do for you?"

"Yes."

One hour later, the cork roll was flattened out on the back wall of the den. It only took up half of the wall; the other half was newly covered with fresh cork. She walked up to the dividing line to approve the joining of the old and new surfaces with a carpenter's plumb line and pronounced it perfect. Biker struck in the last nail. She stepped back to the door and took in the entire room and its new character. There were snips of cut-away Xerox paper all over the floor, and empty film boxes. Two empty beer bottles had rolled to the far corner, and Biker was in the act of spilling much of the third bottle on her polished hardwood floor.

The collage of paper on the wall was a disorganized layer of trash to anyone who hadn't known Markowitz. The room was no longer a reflection of neat perfectionist Kathy Mallory. It was more like Markowitz now, as though he had recently inhabited it.

She was holding the copy of Markowitz's pocket calendar when Riker walked over to spill beer at her feet.

"You got any ideas on the Tuesday-night appointments?" he asked, reading over her shoulder. "It's driving Coffey nuts."

Scrawled in black ink on each entry for Tuesday were the initials BDA, and the time, 9:00 p.m. According to older calendars, this habit of Markowitz's Tuesday nights had begun a year ago, after she had moved out of the old house in Brooklyn.

"I asked the guys in his poker game and the neighbors. They don't know where he went on Tuesday nights. Can you get me a list of the cross-offs?"

"Sure thing, kid. Just cross off every business in the phone book with those initials. And we don't have any prior arrests with those initials either."

When Riker was gone with his bag of looted paperwork and the copy camera, she went back to the den to admire the new corking stretched over the wall alongside of Markowitz's collection. This half of the wall was pristine in its emptiness, a painter's canvas in the moment before the first stroke. She stepped up to the wall and added the reports and photos from the double kill in the East Village. For this murder, she had her own glossy prints of the crime site.

There was more than an absence of paper dividing the wall between Markowitz and Mallory. Markowitz's thumbtack style was haphazard. Out of the hundreds of bits of paper, in positions she had duplicated exactly, only one was straight, and this was by accident and the law of averages. On her own side of the wall, each sheet of paper and glossy print was machine-precision straight. The spaces between the statements and reports, the prints on the corpse robber, the photographs of Markowitz and the woman, each page of the medical examiner's preliminary report, all these spaces were exactly the same.

She looked at the most recent crime-site photos. There were ten. She walked down the length of the wall and studied Markowitz and Pearl Whitman killed ten times over. Below these photos, she tacked up a new print-out on the Whitman Chemical Corporation, courtesy of the raided computer in the US Attorney's Manhattan office. One party listed in the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation was Edith Candle, described by the SEC investigator as a psychic financial advisor. She resided in Charles Buder's Soho apartment building.

This slender case connection to Charles wouldn't have starded Markowitz. He had told her more than once that they were all only a few people removed from everyone else on the planet. The core of good police work was ferreting out those connections. "There are no dead ends, kid. Everybody knows somebody who knows something."

"Don't call me kid," she had said to him then.

She had only one sheet of scant information on Edith Candle. She used the last tack and centered it at the top so the paper would hang perfectly straight. As she walked away from the cork wall, the page on Edith Candle defied the laws of perfect paper balance and dipped to hang at an odd angle, as though a hand had done it. And it was odd, too, that she did not notice this as she took one last look at the wall and closed the door behind her, car keys jingling in her jeans pocket.

In the last hours before dusk, she made a left turn on Twentieth Street, and her compact brown car left the noise of horns and sirens, street confrontations and the loud static of heavy traffic to roll quietly into another century.

Gramercy Square had lost its cobblestones and gas lights, but little else had changed in the past hundred years. It was all sedate mansions of red brick and brown-stone, marble and granite, mahogany and brass. And there was an island quality to its tranquility. Though New York traffic drove through the square and walked through it, the formidable buildings, giant overlords with watching windows, managed to subdue what little those entered there on foot, and to intimidate those feet to a respectful march.

The grand design of the place made it clear that one who did not belong could not tarry here. The park at the heart of the square was enclosed in spiked wrought iron. Each of the residents had their own key, and all other New Yorkers did not. For outsiders, there was no place to pause, to rest. Each street of the square led the interloper straight out, and quickly. Only walkers of dogs might occasionally come to a halt. All others marched through and away and left no imprint in passing.

There was only an hour of good daylight left when she pulled close to the curb, well behind the cab which had carried the suspect from his last class at Columbia University. The streets were quiet around the park's iron bars which only caged Gramercy's own. Inside the bars, women in summer dresses and winter-white hair sat on the wooden benches, talking with their hands, and a young mother walked the gravel paths with a small child. An old man sat alone but for the company of pigeons. The perfume of flowers drifted through the open window of her car.

While the suspect paid his driver, she opened her glove compartment and pulled out the folder containing the print-out of his class schedule, an unwitting contribution of the university's computer, and the playbill of a student production which bore Gaynor's name on the cast listing. The murders always occurred in the daylight hours. There were gaps between his classes and the student-counseling appointments. With a fast car, and some luck with the traffic lights, there was time enough for a hundred-block dash to the square and a little murder. It was only a question of when.

It didn't actually bother her that Professor Jonathan Gaynor had an alibi for the time of his aunt's death. Anyone smart enough to pull off these murders was smart enough to convince a pack of students that they had seen him when they had not. That was the core of a magic act, wasn't it – convincing the audience they had seen what they had not. The daylight killing had the aspect of magic, but she was an unbeliever. It was a trick, and she would work it out.

She looked past the bars of the fence and the well-tended shrubbery and flowers, across the green grass to the murder site of the first victim. The Cathery woman had been found beside one of the small brown sheds constructed as toy houses at one end of the park.

It was a maddening puzzle: so simple in its brutality, so convoluted in its accomplishment. Twenty-eight of the square's residents had admitted to being in the park at various hours of that day. Not one of them remembered any stranger entering the park, luring an old woman to the shed, cutting her up, and scattering her beads and her blood with surprisingly little cover. Well, there wouldn't have been any noise to speak of, no screaming. In Slope's opinion the first thrust of the knife to the victim's throat had prevented that. Maybe a gurgle had come up with the blood, nothing more.

She knew she was missing something simple here, but she was damned if she could see it. There had to be a logical explanation. Smart the freak might be, but not invisible, not supernatural.

The playbill from the university theater slipped from the folder and wafted to the floor of the car. She stared down onto the bold-face type. Radio Days was the name of the production by students from Barnard College. The only segment that interested her was the title of an old program from the Shadow series. She knew all the scripts by heart. In the basement of the house in Brooklyn was a space for Markowitz's old records. He had collected the gamut of popular music from Artie Shaw to Elvis, but his best-loved albums were the recordings of the Shadow. There were others he had liked well enough, the Lone Ranger and Johnny Dollar, but he dearly loved the Shadow. She had sat beside him on countless Saturdays, listening to recordings of the old broadcasts from the Forties and Fifties.

Most of the fathers in the neighborhood had workshops in the basement where they built furniture which their wives would not allow on the upper levels. In Markowitz's workshop, he was building an imagination for a child who had lived too real a life, eating out of garbage cans and holing up for the night in doorways and discarded cartons.

The hero of the old radio series had the ability to cloud men's minds and render himself invisible.

No, she was not buying it, she had told Markowitz then. "No way could anyone pull that off," said the child she had been.

"Make believe he can, Kathy," Markowitz had said to her, looking down at her in the days when she was much shorter than he was.

"No. Only suckers believe in crap like that."

"Don't say crap, dear," said Helen who had suddenly appeared at the foot of the basement stairs to wrap a sweater around the child who was sitting within four feet of the furnace. "She can't possibly be cold," Markowitz had protested. So Kathy had shivered to please Helen, and Markowitz had said, "Now you've got it, kid."

Mallory had parked her car near the doorway of the Players' Club. She shrank down in the seat when she spotted Jack Coffey chatting up the doorman. Now he was going in. This was the building the stake-out team had selected for the department's watchers on the square. This was also the spot where the second victim, Jonathan Gaynor's aunt, had been found inside a private car with tinted windows. The second murder had been daring, but not quite the stunning trick of a kill in full view of every living thing in the square.

Estelle Gaynor had also been a brutal daylight kill. Impossible, but it had happened in this place of Social Register old money and new-wealth rock stars. Pearl Whitman, the third victim, had broken the pattern by dying in low-rent environs. Why? And what had the old man seen that she was missing? Pearl Whitman was a tantalizing snag because she had left no heirs. The old SEC connection to Edith Candle, the woman who lived in Charles's building, was also nagging at her. Perhaps it was the scarcity of information on Candle that made her suspicious. This woman knew how to keep her private business underground.

Another cab pulled up to the curb on the adjacent street. The rear windows of the car were blocked by shopping bags and cloth of bright colors, and, here and there, a white face and a brown one. The rear doors on both sides of the cab opened, and an endless stream of goods spilled out onto the sidewalk with the cab driver, a small boy and a Dobermann puppy. The shopping bags were every color of the rainbow, and bulged to rips at the paper seams. A flimsy circular table with folded legs leaned against the car. Boxes were being stacked precariously by the driver while the boy grappled with an antique gramophone with a large horn.

What now piled up on the sidewalk was greater than the interior volume of the cab. The magic show went on. The front passenger door opened, and an immense woman stepped out. She was at least six feet tall and simply too wide in the girth to have come out of that cab.

Now the cabby launched into a screaming match with this woman who had crossed his palm with too few dollars. He was an Arab, not too long in the country, judging by the barely comprehensible English and the inability to deal with American women without going ballistic. He was making fisted hand gestures to go with the inarticulate screams. All Mallory could understand of the bad hollered English was 'You don't rob me, you bitch!"

He looked up at her from his height of one foot smaller. Looming over the driver, the woman seemed less the fat lady and more a regal presence. She leaned down, put her face in his face, and spoke in tones that did not carry.

The cabby nearly ripped the door off the hinges in his haste to open it. He jumped into the cab and laid a squealing strip of burning rubber all the way out of the square.

Mallory nodded in rare approval of the giantess.