Mallory's Oracle

CHAPTER 3

Charles Butler tapped his toes and willed the elevator to move faster. He would be ten minutes late if he was lucky, if the elevator made no more stops. He looked down at his shorter fellow passengers who had conspired to slow his descent by stopping the elevator on every other floor.

Of course, Mallory would be on time for their appointment sixty blocks south and as many flights down. She would be knocking on the door of his empty office on the hour, not a second before or after. She was as compulsive about time as she was about neatness.

And now he remembered he had two things to be anxious about. His new office, a recently vacated apartment across the hall from his residence, would be best described as an Escher maze of tall stacks of paperwork and books, an unholy gathering of spiders and dust.

The elevator stopped again, and he glared at the boarding passenger. He was taking every stop quite personally now. These people had had all morning to ride the elevator up and down as much as they liked. However, on the upside of slowing down, Mallory might decide not to wait around. There might be a reprieve long enough to give the office a proper cleaning.

This morning, he had made a stab at straightening up, but correspondence still littered every surface. Quarterly tax forms, state and federal, bulged out of desk drawers and cardboard boxes, all waiting on a day when he was in the filing mode. And then there was all the added paperwork that went along with owning an apartment building. The hundred-odd books and a few years' worth of journals were only in proximity to the new bookshelves.

How would she react to the mess? She might assume he'd been vandalized. He could walk in behind her and feign shock.

Mrs Ortega, his cleaning woman, had arrived while he was scrambling around on the floor, trying desperately to clear a few square feet of the carpet. Putting his head out of the office door as she was turning her key in the lock of his apartment, he had smiled at her, his eyes filled with hope. Her own eyes had turned hard. Fat chance I'm going in there, said the back of her as she had disappeared into his residence which was her territory and all that she might be held accountable for.

He knew Mrs Ortega believed him to be a visitor from somewhere else, perhaps some point straight up, miles out, but nowhere on the surface of her own earth which was square, shaped by the streets of a Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn.

And he supposed he was a bit alien. He had grown up in the sheltered community of academia and then transferred to the closer-knit community of a research institute without stopping off in real life until very recently. A year ago, when he had given Mrs Ortega the new address, she never asked why he would leave the luxurious boulevards of the Upper East Side for the narrower, dirty streets of Soho. She had always known the ways of out-worlders were not the ways of Brooklynites.

In the last few minutes before he'd had to leave off the cleaning up and straightening up to keep his uptown appointment sixty stories in the sky, he had considered reaming the office out with a blow torch.

Now, his stomach was rising, independent of the rest of him, as the elevator stopped again. A woman and a child got on. As the doors were closing, the child reached out and pushed ten buttons.

Mrs Ortega's mother was Irish and had the same green eyes and red-gold hair as this stranger at the door. But Ma had not been a cop. Mrs Ortega smelled cop when the woman ordered her to open the door of Mr Butler's office across the hall. There was never a question of cop, or not a cop.

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door on a room in hell for cleaning women who had been sinners while they lived. She didn't like having the key to the office. Mr Butler might get the idea that she would one day clean here, too. No way, not Shannon Ortega. She knew her rights. He couldn't make her clean it, not this mess.

She had been happy enough when he took this apartment over for his office, sweeping the whole nasty mess of papers and books across the hall. And it gave him another place to be, not underfoot while she was vacuuming and scrubbing. But no way was she going to deal with this pit, this mother of all dust-collectors. All that she approved of were the freshly painted walls. The windows were at least a bucket of ammonia's worth of grime on each pane, and in the spaces between the tall stacks of paper, spiders were spinning elaborate webs with a confident sense of permanence. She had never ventured into the other rooms to see what he had done with them. She had a bum heart.

Oh, kiss a dead rat if the cop wasn't smiling. And it was not a friendly smile or a happy smile. A cat's smile it was, a cat with a live mouse in its teeth.

In the black of the stopped elevator, suspended fifteen floors above the ground, the passengers were speculating on what to do when the elevator fell. One passenger had read somewhere that it was a good idea to jump up and down. That way, the man explained to his captive audience, you had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the air when the elevator crashed.

"And breaking your legs," added Charles. "You're still falling at the same rate of speed as the elevator."

Oddly enough, the eleven-year-old boy was the only one to grasp the principle of free-fall and gravity. The other passengers were now jumping up and down in the dark.

On the other side of the jammed doors, a fire marshal was urging them to remain calm via a loudspeaker. "Knock that crap off, you idiots!"

Mrs Ortega was backing up to the wall. The cop had neatly cut off her escape route to the door.

"No English," she said, when, in fact, she did not speak any Spanish. She was fourth-generation American born and spoke only Newyorkese.

After much repetition of street names, Charles and the non-English-speaking cab driver were finally in agreement. Once under way, the cab driver was disappointingly law-abiding, and not at all competitive with his fellow drivers, never changing lanes once in forty-three blocks, actually slowing down for yellow lights, and carefully looking to the left and right before proceeding across the intersection on a green light.

This was outrageous.

Charles tightly clasped his hands in his lap, lest they act as independent culprits. There was really no need to kill the driver, not on his very first day as a cabby. The next passenger would certainly do that.

Charles met Mrs Ortega in the hall. She passed him by with her head lowered, not seeing anything but the carpet, determined that nothing would halt her steady progress down the corridor to the elevator, to freedom, muttering "Damn cops", in return for his cheerful "Goodbye. See you next week."

The office door was open. He walked through the foyer and into a perfect world of order. The windows glistened, the carpet was clear of the paper avalanche which had buried it on the very day it was put down, and the naked desk was dark wood, just as he remembered it from the Sotheby's auction of five weeks ago. Neat file-holders with price tags on them were stacked on top of the antique mahogany filing cabinet. Other file-holders, sans tags, were being put in their proper drawers by hands with long red nails. Twelve years of trade journals and a small library of books now filled the shelves of one wall.

Mallory strained to close the door of the filing cabinet and then turned on him. "You have to go to computers, Charles. This is just too much."

"Hello, Kathleen." He kissed her cheek and found a comfortable chair he had forgotten buying. "Sorry, I'm not usually half a day late. Oh, this is amazing." He was admiring the room, its antique furniture, its Tiffany lamps. He was not visualizing a computer or any other mechanical device in it, not even a typewriter or a pencil sharpener. "Simply amazing," he said, altogether skirting the issue of computers.

Over the two years he had known her, they'd had this conversation many times. She could never understand his resistance to the technology when he was so adept at computers and had even published an important paper on computer-mode giftedness. She had been the inspiration for that paper. Via the keyboard, she could dip her ringers into the stuffing of any software made and make it into a new animal that could sit up and bark at the moon if she wished.

"We could outfit this place with a state-of-the-art computer system," she said.

"I'd rather do it the old-fashioned way." He silently noted her use of the word we and wondered what to make of it.

The door buzzer went off. Charles walked across the room and out of the concept of high technology. That was it. No computers. They did not go well with his beloved antiques and the Persian carpet which fitted the room so well. The carpet's weaver, a hundred years dead by now, must have envisioned this space with a mystic inner eye.

The buzzer was nagging. Most people only tapped it once. The short burst of noise was sufficiently loud and annoying. This continuation of noise, this leaning on the button was the buzzer style of Herbert Mandrel, the tenant in 4A.

He opened the door to a small, wiry man with a fugitive face, eyes darting everywhere at once, suspecting every object of ill intentions. Nervous energy rose off the man in waves of contagion.

"You got a minute?" he asked, slipping, uninvited, through the narrow space between Charles and the door frame. Herbert came up short in front of Mallory who barred the foyer and showed no signs of standing aside.

The little man cocked his head to one side and fixed her with the intense, unwavering glare of one eye, and he did this with all the zeal of turning a cross on a vampire. Mallory, taller by six inches, looked down on Herbert with the same distaste she might show for a messy road-kill.

"Actually, I don't have a minute, Herbert," said Charles, forgetting that it had not been a question but Herbert's version of hello.

Herbert was saying, "It's getting dangerous. Everyone has guns."

"Everyone?"

"Henrietta on the third floor. She has a gun."

"Well, she's had it for quite a while, hasn't she? Seven years she says."

"I didn't know that. If I'd known that, I would've acted sooner." Though his feet were planted on the carpet, the rest of him was in constant motion, eyebrows colliding with one another, head jerking from side to side, one pointy ringer stabbing the air as he spoke. "Do you know that a bullet can travel through four floors and kill an innocent person? You get rid of that gun or I take immediate action."

"And what sort of action might that be?" Foolish question. Herbert had only one solution to every problem from a leaking faucet to a burnt-out bulb in the hall.

"I'm calling a rent strike. All the tenants will back me on this. I want that gun out of this building. Now!" His finger was nearly touching Charles's face.

Mallory advanced a step, and Charles warned her off with a wave. He pulled the door open wider, as though that might help, as though Herbert picked up on cues less subtle than GET OUT! He didn't.

"Henrietta belongs to a gun club. The gun is properly licensed and registered. There's nothing you or I can do about it."

"Yeah? You think so? Suppose I get my own gun?"

"Let's see if I'm following your logic. In the event that Henrietta accidentally discharges her gun, you plan to deflect the bullet by firing on it as it rips up through the floorboards. Have I got it right?"

"I'm gonna get a gun."

Mallory reached out and tapped him on the shoulder, smiling as she made him jump. She put one hand on her hip, drawing one side of her jacket open and exposing the.357 Smith & Wesson in her shoulder holster. It was a very big gun, and Herbert's eyes were very wide.

"Not a good idea, pal." As her voice was silking along, she walked towards the little man, and step for step, he backed up to the door. "If I see you with a gun, if I hear a rumor that you've got gun, it'd better have all the legal paperwork. You got that?" For emphasis, she reached out and touched his chest with one long red fingernail.

Charles watched in awe as the little man paled and turned smartly on one heel. Remarkably, Herbert was leaving of his own accord, and so quickly, too, not even shutting the door behind him.

Charles stared at the blessedly empty spot on the carpet where Herbert had been standing.

"It's my recurring nightmare – him with a gun."

"He'll never get clearance to buy one. I'll tag his name with a psycho profile."

"You'll what?"

"I left a coded backdoor in the department computer. I can go in whenever I like. Nothing to it."

"Kathleen, I wish you wouldn't tell me things like that."

"You're beginning to sound like Markowitz." She turned her back on him and walked over to the century-old desk. She ran one hand across the polished surface and then sat down in the chair behind the desk as though trying it on for size.

"I stacked up the tenant paperwork in the next room, along with all the research material and the reports. You've got close to six square feet of paper in there. I can put all of that on disks with a scanner. When I'm done, it'll take up five square inches of space."

Oh, back to that again. "I prefer the idea of papers I can hold in my hand. Seems more real somehow."

"You can't do that anymore, Charles. You're being buried alive by paper."

"My accountant comes by once a month and takes a bag of it off my hands."

She was not amused. "So, next month, you can send him a disk over the modem – save him a trip and a hernia."

"Ah, now, you see, Kathleen, that's the problem with computers. One day there won't be any human transactions left. We'll all socialize by computer networks."

And her eyes said, "Nice try."

She was right; he knew that. He lacked Louis Markowitz's gift for creating order that passed for chaos. The more clutter Louis had added to his surroundings, the more details and data, the more efficiently his brain had worked. Charles's own clutter was mere confusion. He looked over the office and the perfect order she had created for him and wondered how many days would pass before he slipped beneath the snow line of the paperwork once more.

She was already reading the I-give-up signs in his face. She smiled slow and wide. "You need me. I'll start tomorrow. I can use one of the back rooms for my office."

"What? Work here? Kathleen, why would you want to work for me?"

"With you. I'm talking partnership." Purse and car keys in hand, she stood up and crossed the room to set a check on the cherrywood table by his chair.

The check bore the name of a major life-insurance company. The claim on Markowitz's death should have taken two months not two weeks. He wondered if she had facilitated the speed of the check with her computer-hacking skills or her gun.

"That'll buy a lot of computer equipment," she said. "So, do we have a deal?"

It was hard to picture her even in temporary tandem with another human being, let alone a partnership. She hardly acknowledged that there might be one or two other officers on the same police force.

She was always such a loner, said Louis Markowitz's letter which Charles had opened on the day the body was found. She never hung out in cop bars, never saw the sad, mean side of burn-out. She keeps company with machines.

When Louis Markowitz had given him the letter to hold against that day, Charles had felt honored, but curious, too. Why him, why not Rabbi Kaplan or someone else he had known longer?

Louis had said then, "Kathy's a special case. You deal with special cases all the time."

Indeed. Kaplan or any other man of the cloth would be a poor match for what Louis had described in his letter as an amoral savage:

When my Helen died a few years back, Kathy wanted to kill the whole world. It was all I could do to convince her it wouldn't be civil to gut the surgeon who failed Helen. When I'm dead, Commissioner Beak will bump her out of Special Crimes Section and put her on compassionate leave. Make her understand this is department policy, and Beale is not to be found in an alley strung up by his balls.

As he recalled, she had been very civilized about the forced leave. She had taken his advice on that matter with no argument, no protest at all. Why hadn't that made him suspicious? Well, obviously because he was an idiot.

He could only wonder what else had gone by him. He supposed there wasn't much point in asking her a direct question. He believed she really did like him well enough to count him as a friend, to confide in him at times, but there were limits. He would have to settle for damage control.

He looked around this perfectly ordered room. It was obvious to both of them that he needed her, even if she didn't need him, not him or any other creature on this planet. But her proposal of a partnership would cost him sleep. The things she did with other people's computers, and without their knowledge or consent.

She had a gift that would have gone begging in an era without computer technology. He marveled over the far-sighted genetic blueprint. Each encounter with a human born to a specific talent, applied or not, gave him a window on the future of all mankind. But his limited window on Kathleen Mallory was frightening. The partnership was an insane idea to be considered with the same careful thought he might give to walking through a minefield or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. And Louis would have been the first to tell him so.

In a far corner of his compartmentalized brain, he could see the specter of Louis Markowitz rolling his eyes and saying sardonically, "Ah, Charles?" and shaking his head from side to side with the sentiment of "No. Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all."

"All right, Kathleen, a partnership." He extended his hand and she shook it with a firm grip. "Call me Mallory, now that it's business."

"And you'll call me Butler, I suppose? No, I don't think so. I know you too well for that. It would seem unnatural."

"All right. I'll call you Charles. When the stuff shows up, just sign for it. Here," she said, handing him a business card. "Just a sample. You like it?"

Business cards? Hardly samples, they were printed on good stock in two colors, maroon and gray. She had to have ordered them at least two weeks ago, perhaps on the very day of the funeral.

"Kathleen – "

"Mallory."

"Sorry. I'm just a little curious about the wording. Discreet investigations? As in private investigations?"

"What's the problem, Charles?"

"We're a consulting firm."

"What does a consultant do, Charles?"

"Well, someone comes to me with a problem, and I look into it and come up with a solution for them."

She kissed the top of his head and walked to the door as if his own answer were answer enough. And it probably would be if his field was not finding practical applications for new modes of intelligence and odd gifts. And she was not even going to deal with the little matter that her own name preceded his in Mallory and Butler, Ltd.

"Wait," he called to her as she was pulling the door closed behind her. "Wouldn't I need a special license for this kind of thing?"

"You have one," she said.

"How -?" He aborted this stupid question. Of course, she had simply arranged it with a midnight computer requisition. Willing or no, he was in the computer system as a properly licensed private investigator… while she remained a police officer on compassionate leave, and with certain restrictions on her behavior.

Their partnership was minutes old, and already he'd been had. This could not possibly be legal. There were rules and regulations and -

She smiled. The door closed.

He was feeling a sense of loss when she had been gone only a few seconds. She always had that effect on him. When she left a room, she left a vacuum, a hole in the air which smelled faintly of Chanel.

Only in daydreams had he considered that they might ever be more than friends. She was a beauty, while he was… a man with a prominent nose, a beak actually. And when he smiled, he had the aspect of a happy lunatic. And there were other stand-out qualities which some called freakish.

His eidetic memory called up the last page of Markowitz's letter. He projected it onto a clear space of the wall. The mental image was perfect to the details of the folds in the paper and the black ink blots of the fountain pen Louis favored over the ballpoint:

She never worked the field beyond her rookie days, and I don't want her working it now, dogging my last tracks. It makes me a little crazy that I won't always be there to keep her safe. She spent most of her childhood on the streets, stealing breakfast, lunch and dinner, and her shoes. She's fearless. She thinks there isn't a human born she can't outsmart or outshoot. The pity is that she's so freaking smart and a great shot, beautifully equipped to do the job. Scary, isn't it, Charles?

He missed Louis sorely. The day he had been given the letter was his last memory of the man. Louis had handled his sherry glass delicately. He had been graceful in all his gestures and in the way he carried himself and his excess poundage. Yet, at rest, the first creature the inspector called to mind was a fat basset hound. Then, the fleshy folds of Louis's face would gather up into a smile, dispatching the hound and exposing the great personal charm of the man. One tended to smile back, willing or no. People in handcuffs tended to smile back.

Had Louis known whom his killer would be? Was it the man who killed the elderly women? He supposed he could assume it was a man. This was not the sort of violence a woman would do. And he could assume great intelligence. If Louis thought the killer was not a fair match for Mallory, that put him in the upper two percentile.

But he was thinking out the wrong puzzle. Louis had not asked him to find his murderer, he had asked him to look after his daughter, a more convoluted problem and the greater challenge of the two.

Mallory switched off the car ignition and settled back to watch Jonathan Gaynor pay off the cab and enter his apartment building. Monday through Friday his routine seldom varied. She would stay on him until dusk. The daylight timing was a constant in the killing.

A shift in the late September breeze carried the pungent smell of new-cut grass. She approved of Gramercy's clean streets, well-tended park and perfect order. It was so quiet here, and while the flowers bloomed, so unlike the rest of the town in the way it soothed all her senses and brought her a kind of peace unknown in her normal workaholic existence. She stared at the small park maintenance building where Anne Cathery had lain beneath a garbage bag on the blood-soaked ground amid her scattered beads. And there, seated on a bench only a few yards from the building, was the victim's grandson, Henry Cathery.

He looked much younger than his twenty-one years. He might have been a giant twelve-year-old. He was another one who lived a somewhat routine life. Cathery's hours in the park might vary, but he was there each day, always sitting on the same bench. He must have been sitting there, only yards away from the murder site, during some part of the day his grandmother was murdered, Cathery was working at his portable chessboard, oblivious to other life forms on the planet. Two months ago, NYPD investigators had discovered that this oblivion worked both ways. The doormen and residents of the square were so accustomed to his presence, Cathery had become invisible to them. They could no more swear to his comings and goings than they could swear the fire hydrants had not been missing for a morning and then restored to their accustomed places in the afternoon.

The deceased Pearl Whitman had been Cathery's only alibi for the time of his grandmother's murder. Mallory wondered what Markowitz would have made of that. He had been no believer in coincidence. He might have wondered if Pearl Whitman had wavered in her testimony. Or was it just Cathery's hard luck that his alibi was the last victim?

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow knows.

Mallory smiled at the memory of the old radio program's opening line. Markowitz had never given up his lesson plans to inculcate her with a creative vision that could see around corners and beyond normal parameters. Her latest exercise in imagining was the thought that, if there were aliens among us, Henry Cathery would be one of them. His eyebrows were permanently surprised, and contradicted by his half-lidded lethargic eyes which rolled around in their sockets in a listless fashion. The mouth was small and fixed in the permanent moue of one who had recently stepped on a dog turd. He was also odd in his reclusive habits. There was a strange little relationship with a badly-dressed young woman who sometimes came to sit beside him and hold one-way conversations while he ignored her, but he had no real friends.

And neither did Mallory have any friends, not now that she and Charles were business partners.

If Markowitz had abandoned the FBI profile which Cathery fitted so well, he had not abandoned Cathery, but only saved him off to one side of the cork board in a class by himself. Cathery would have come into a large trust from his parents' estate whether the grandmother lived or died. He didn't fit the money motive quite so well as Gaynor.

She had fixed the blind spot for the NYPD surveillance team and parked closer to Jonathan Gaynor's building; A cab pulled to the curb four cars in front of her, and she made a note that the giantess and her small entourage had arrived an hour earlier this week. The boy was first to alight from the cab. Now the Dobermann puppy barked as a doorman joined the cabby in unloading the paraphernalia of bags and table, gramophone and boxes. When the giantess emerged from the back seat of the cab, Mallory matched the woman, stat for stat, against the computer-raided rap sheet of a high-tech con artist whose description listed height and weight, companions of boy and Dobermann. But not the same Dobermann. The rap sheets went back for years; this dog was not six months old.

So far, her only inroad on Gramercy Park was Charles's connection to Edith Candle, the woman in the SEC investigation on Whitman Chemicals, the woman who proved Markowitz's theory on the relatedness of every living being. Now, if she could only cultivate or terrorize the giantess, it could be her entree to the community. Perhaps with a light threat, the mere twist of an enormous arm, she could leave the car, the sidewalk, and move freely among the old women of old money.

She raised up the telescoping lens of her camera and focussed on the face of the giantess. This woman was not the fair mulatto Mallory had taken her for from the distance of the last sighting. The irises were dark with the cast of blue gunmetal, and sliding like oiled bearings within the Asian folds of her eyes. Her complexion was the olive tone of the Mediterranean. Her nostrils and lips were classic African. Today, her hair, long and reddish brown, was hanging in a straight fall below the cap of the scarf. How many races lived under that immense skin? She was the whole earth.

The giantess lit a black cheroot and called to the little boy, who moved towards her, walking as though his feet weighed twenty pounds, each one. The boy's hands hung at his sides, and his head lolled on his chest. What was wrong with him?

The giantess headed for the door to the apartment building. Beneath the long bright print of the dress, her impossibly tiny feet moved quickly along the sidewalk. The woman spoke Spanish to the cabby, French to the boy, and then chattered with the doorman in English. The babble ceased abruptly behind the glass door.

The warm sun on Mallory's face was suddenly blocked by shadow.

"Officer, I want you to arrest that person!"

What? Oh Christ, where had this woman come from?

Mallory looked up through the open car window at a pinch-faced matron in her middle fifties. The woman's hair was dark brown and unnatural for the lack of white strands to go with the sagging jowls and the puffy, lined eyes. The linen suit was Lord and Taylor, and the pearls were real.

"I said, I want that person arrested. Now!"

The woman pointed to the door which had enveloped the small troop of woman, boy and dog.

"Go get her," said the well-dressed matron in an authoritative voice accustomed to charging vicious dogs to eat delivery boys.

"I'm not a cop, lady."

"Oh, yes you are."

"Lady, I'm – "

"I did wonder at first. Your car used to be so neat. But those are take-out containers on the back seat, aren't they?"

Mallory turned around to look at the seat behind her. Newspapers and sandwich wrappers mingled with notebooks and cardboard deli containers, straws and sugar cubes, catsup and mustard packets, empty cartridge boxes and white plastic bags with the logo of the drugstore where she bought her film. A half-eaten sandwich showed dully through a layer of wax paper. How had it happened? she wondered, as if she had lost the memory of filling her car with the trash of the typical stake-out vehicle.

Why hadn't she just painted a damn sign on the side of the car? If this ever got back to Jack Coffey, he'd laugh his ass off. And then, he'd change her compassionate leave status to a fall suspension without pay, without badge and gun.

"I'm not a cop."

"And all those coffee cups. And your car is tan, isn't it? You're a cop, and if you don't arrest that woman, I'm going to report you. I know Commissioner Beale very well. We have the same dentist."

"I'm not a cop."

"So, you haven't been on stake-out every day this week and last week, too?"

Tm a private cop."

"Pardon?"

Mallory handed her a business card.

"See? Not a real cop. The commissioner wouldn't like it if I arrested somebody."

The woman stared at the card, and then her mouth hurried over to one side of her face in the slant line of the skeptic as she read the lines of maroon print.

"Discreet investigations? You call this discreet?"

Jonathan Gaynor, nephew of the late Estelle Gaynor, had just stepped out onto the sidewalk. Mallory switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. He had changed his clothes and donned a baseball cap, but from any distance, she could pick him out by the body language. He had the long-legged, no-bones gait of a scarecrow, and as he moved on down the sidewalk, he seemed blown along by the wind.

He was awkward but not unattractive. She favored fall beards and dark hair, and she would have found the lean, ruddy face very appealing if not for the possibility that Gaynor had gutted her old man and left him to die alone.

Gaynor waved down a cab and Mallory rolled.

She could see the pinch-faced matron in her rear-view mirror. The woman's mouth was hanging open as she stood in the street, staring after Mallory and waving the business card like a small warning flag.

Rabbi David Kaplan struggled with the legs of the card table. They were supposed to unfold from the table top, but perversely, they would not.

"My wife usually does this. She wasn't expecting anyone to come."

"Good thing I brought the beer," said Dr Edward Slope. "Anything in the fridge?"

It would have been Louis Markowitz's turn to bring the sandwiches tonight. The doctor's own wife, Donna, had set that policy, saying, "Don't you expect Anna to cook for you", knowing that Anna would never have settled for cold sandwiches. It would have been a spread worthy of the Second Coming.

"I've lived with that woman for thirty-five years," said the rabbi, "and never have I seen an empty refrigerator. That's the least of my worries." One leg of the table dropped down, but he had no way to know he had accidentally moved the latch which held it in place. When his wife did this, it took three seconds. He supposed she just willed it to unfold itself and stand up on four legs. And for all he knew, it walked to the center of the room of its own accord.

Slope wandered into the kitchen to stand at the open door of the refrigerator. Louis Markowitz's refrigerator had been much like this one, as he recalled. Not so long ago, Louis's shelves had been filled with real food, built from a woman's blueprint of shopping lists and recipes, the makings of meals past and meals to come, warm colors of fruit and cool green vegetables, condiments and mysterious, unlabeled jars of liquids. When the last woman had gone from Louis's house, the refrigerator had changed its character, becoming shabby in its accumulation of deli bags and frozen dinners. Everything to the rear of the shelves had resembled small furry animals which had sickened and then crawled back there to die.

Now Slope stared at Anna Kaplan's well stocked shelves. Food is love, said this refrigerator.

He was assessing bowls and pots and checking under the lids of Tupperware when the doorbell rang. The new arrival could only be Robin Duffy. The lawyer had a hearty voice, usually upbeat. Tonight, it sounded through the walls like a mourning bell in the low octaves. Robin had known Louis Markowitz for many years, and he would be a long time getting over the death.

Dr Slope added mustard to the tray.

Now they were three.

Two weeks had passed since the funeral. Tonight, by some connectedness of spirit, the three of them had gathered together in this place where the fourth player, Louis Markowitz, had been loved by a close circle of men.

He clutched a Tupperware container to his chest and made the contorted face of a man who would rather not cry. He set the plastic container on the tray. What was missing? he wondered as he picked up the tray. When the bell rang again, announcing a fourth person, the tray fell from his hands.

He sank to the floor and slowly reached out for the heavy mustard jar, sturdy thing, unbroken. He crawled about the tiles, blindly groping for each dropped item, finding the butter and the knife with his eyes screwed shut, watertight.

When he was again in full possession of everything he had lost, he carried the tray down the narrow hall and into the rabbi's den which was lined with four walls of books and two old friends, and one very large stranger, the fourth man, who was unfolding the last leg of the card table. He was six-four but non-threatening in his size, perhaps because his face was so wonderfully appealing. What a nose. And those eyes. Even with the heavy eyelids, the irises were so small they left a generous margin of white on all sides, giving him a look of wide-eyed astonishment at just everything in the world.

Slope liked this man immediately. He looked at the faces of his friends, and, like himself, they were unconsciously, accidentally smiling.

"Pull up a chair, Mr Butler."

"Charles."

"Edward."

"Let me give you the ground rules, Charles," said Robin Duffy, a small and compact bulldog of a man introduced as Louis's lawyer and neighbor of twenty years.

"Louis explained the rules to him," said Rabbi Kaplan, pulling his own chair up to the table. "Charles came with twelve pounds of nickel and dime rolls."

The strained silence was broken by Robin Duffy. "I like a man who comes prepared to lose big."

"So Louis invited you to join the game?" Slope dealt out the cards, and immediately went to work on building a pastrami sandwich.

"I inherited his chair." Charles eyed the tray of sandwich makings with the discrimination of a connoisseur, and passed over the Cheddar cheese for the Swiss, so as not to overpower the more delicate slices of cold chicken. He pulled the letter out of his jacket pocket and exchanged it for the jar of mayonnaise in Slope's hand.

The doctor stared down at the handwriting which had become so familiar to him over his years with the medical examiner's office. Louis's friend was pointing to the third paragraph which indeed spelled out a legacy. The letter was silently passed from man to man as the dealt cards lay where they landed. It seemed Louis's friend had been left more than the chair.

"Well, that fits," said Duffy when he folded the letter and handed it back across the table. "I always figured the poker game was just a front for raising Kathy." He popped the cap from a bottle of beer and picked up his cards. "Did Lou ever tell you where he found her?"

"No. No, he didn't."

"She was maybe eleven. He caught the little brat breaking into a Jag. Well, he's holding her out by the collar of her jacket, and she's swinging away, little fists pounding the crap out of air. So it was take the kid home with him, or spend what's left of the wife's birthday hassling with Juvenile Hall."

"But Helen didn't understand," said Slope, picking up his cards. "She thought Kathy was a present. She wouldn't let go of the kid for twelve years."

Charles smiled down at a clear space on the table where his photographic memory projected the pages of Hoyle which dealt with the rules of poker, a game he had never played. Nowhere in the rules did it list Doomsday Stud with deuces wild. "Louis must have been pleased that she turned out so well, becoming a policewoman and all."

The other three men looked up from their cards, their faces all asking the same silent question: Are you nuts?

"Helen Markowitz did teach Kathy table manners." Duffy examined the card which had been laid down faceup. "I'll bet a nickel. But the kid never really changed. She likes being a cop 'cause she can steal more interesting stuff with her computer. And she gets clean away with it."

"Yeah," said Slope, lighting a cigar and pushing his own coins to the center of the table. "I'll see that nickel and raise you a dime. Whatever Louis needed, Kathy could get for him. I guess he had a few occasions to worry about his pension. After she broke into the FBI computer, I saw him make the sign of the cross – sorry, Rabbi."

"The things she's done," said Duffy, picking at his cards and trying to give the appearance that this was not a potential world-class poker hand. His dime grudgingly pushed into the small pile of coins.

"Remember when she was a little kid," said Slope, "and Helen enrolled her in the NYU computer courses for children?"

"Yeah," said the lawyer. "Helen was so happy that day. Kathy had finally taken an interest in something legal. Do you remember the way Helen cried when the kid gave her that present? You know, the one she made at computer school?"

"That transfer from the savings and loan?" Slope pushed another nickel into the pot as the next card hit the table, faceup.

"Yeah." Robin Duffy smiled and then his mouth wobbled as he tried to take the expression back before it tipped his hand, which was somewhat improved by the card dealt him. "Kathy just couldn't understand why Helen was crying. She figured anybody'd be thrilled to have an extra twenty thou in the checking account three weeks before Christmas."

"Then", said Rabbi Kaplan, "Kathy figured, well Helen is Jewish. Maybe different customs."

In the next four hours, Charles discovered that the game of poker could not be learned from a book, and that Helen had worked miracles with Kathy's behavior. Within six months of foster-care, the Markowitzs had been able to take the child into a store with them, and even turn their backs on her for whole minutes at a time – all because theft, petty or grand, made Helen cry. Helen had done so good a job that Kathy could now pass for a young lady in any company but this one. These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hardcase with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet, of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.

After the fiasco with Helen's present, Louis had taken Kathy out of the computer course. The NYU instructor had been sorry to lose such a dazzling student. The bank transfer had been fixed, said the pale little man with the thick glasses. The bank didn't even know the money was ever missing. So why pull the child out? he had asked, genuinely puzzled. It seemed to be upsetting the little girl, he said. Look, she's going to cry.

How could Louis have explained to that kind, soft-spoken, endlessly patient little man that this was not a real kid he had by the hand. You could stick pins in Kathy all damn day long and she'd never, never cry. She had no soft spots.

Later, she would cry for Helen and not stop crying for days, but that was still years and years away. These were the early days of life with the baby felon.

Determined never to stick Kathy on civilians again, Louis brought her into work with him in the after-school hours and pointed at a row of computer terminals in the Special Crimes office. This is crap, he explained to the skinny kid who didn't even come up to his lapel pin in those days. We don't have genius programmers, he told her then, no decent equipment. What we got won't work half the time. And now I've got a PC that won't work at all. You're so smart? Fix it, he told her, and you can play with that one.

One night, when she was only an inch taller, she crept into his office with a strange little smile. She dumped a load of printouts on his desk and crept silently away. Long after Helen had come to take the little angel home, Louis was still at his desk reading all the department dirt he ever imagined possible. The thief had cracked every high-echelon code in existence and raided Internal Affairs.

A present.

This had been Kathy's longest lesson.

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

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

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

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

"I'll stick with these," said Duffy. "Lousy hand that it is."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pardon?"

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

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

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

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

"You do realize", said Rabbi Kaplan, "she's going after Louis's killer."

"Louis knew who it was, didn't he?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Could there be two of them?"

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

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

"If you knew more about Helen, you'd know more about Kathy."

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

"Two cards," said Slope. "I think it was Kathy's way of paying Helen for loving her."

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

"Well, that confused the kid a lot," said Duffy. "I mean, it was free stuff, wasn't it? So why was Helen crying? Kathy was a good kid… in her own way. She did what Helen told her to do. But she didn't always understand the reasons. Finally, she arrived at a set of rules she could understand. She would never do anything that made

Helen cry, even if she didn't know why Helen cried. The kid never stole another thing."

"Cards, Rabbi?"

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

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