Mallory's Oracle

CHAPTER 5

"So we're back on the same pattern with this one," said Riker, slugging down his breakfast beer and spilling a few drops on his shirt. "The Siddon woman looks different from the others, doesn't she? Real peaceful." He held the photograph out to her. She only shrugged as she took it from his hand. Right. What would Kathy Mallory know of peace?

She pinned the bloody likeness of Samantha Siddon to the wall with the other on-site photos. Riker watched her all but melding into the cork, passing through the wall of it as she became absorbed by everything he had brought her.

The exterior wall in the first photograph was splattered with blood, and only patches of Siddon's fawn-colored suit were not soaked through with red. One bloody palm print stained the rough brick a few feet above the head. Mallory put her finger on this photo.

"The victim's print?"

Riker nodded.

She walked back to the other side of die wall where Markowitz's collection had been reprinted from the slides. She stared at the Park photos of the first murder and moved on to the next set. "What about the second kill? Were there any prints on the car?"

Riker leaned back against the board and paused mid-gulp. "Hmm?"

"Estelle Gaynor, the one found in the limo. Were there any bloody prints?"

"You got it all there in Markowitz's report. One thumb and an index finger on the window, hers – no palm prints, not hers anyway. We tracked down all the latent prints. One set belongs to a garage mechanic. Some prints from the old man who owned the car. Nothing else."

He drained the rest of his beer with one swig and moved to the Markowitz side of the wall to stand behind her. She was staring at the detail print of the Cathery killing in the park which showed one bloody print of a full hand on the white trim of the shed.

"You're really reaching for connections, Mallory. If you're looking for a trademark, there weren't any bloody palm prints for the Pearl Whitman site."

"It's wrong somehow," she said, crossing back to her own side of the board to stand before the Siddon prints and the separate shot of the palm's bloodstain.

Riker was hearing echoes of Markowitz who was always listening for the off notes. "Mallory, the woman was fighting for her life." Ah, but wait. He stared at Samantha Siddon's peaceful face. It wouldn't agree with a battle on any scale.

"Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one perp?"

"He's still working on it. Commissioner Beale likes that idea, too. It makes him feel like we know something the newspapers don't know."

"So Beale's giving Coffey a hard time?"

"You know the drill. The press crucifies Beale, Beale waves his little fists and squeaks, and Coffey pretends to be afraid of mice."

She pinned one sheet of the report to the board. "Any deviations this time? Anything odd?"

"Yeah. That one's crooked," he said, pointing to the last paper she had pinned up.

"Get serious."

He was serious. It was odd for her to make any departure from perfectionist neatness. He looked down at the chipped fingernail on her right hand, and he began to hunt the room in earnest for anything else out of place. The television and VCR had been pulled in from another room. The slide-projector was new. But no dust gathered, that was certain. He supposed even a perfectionist could have an off day.

"No deviation from the MO." He shrugged. "Same old, same old. Her purse was gone. No deviations among the local corpse-robbers, either."

She smiled, and that worried him. What was the deal here? Why did she find that so interesting?

"What about the wounds?" she asked. "Consistent?"

"Slope says he can't match wounds if the bastard uses a different knife every time. But the areas and the order of the cuts are the same. He always goes for the throat first."

"What odds does he give for two of them?"

"I tried that one. Slope won't give odds, and he's a betting man."

As Mallory pinned up the last photo, Riker noticed her alignment was off again. Now he stepped back from the board. Markowitz's side of the wall was the usual mess. Kathy's side was neater, but with each addition to the board, less neat. Every time he came into the room, something new had been added, and item by item, her pushpin precision was going down the tubes. The preliminary report hung on the diagonal by one tack. So, what was going on here? The rest of the apartment was immaculate as always. He wondered how much time she spent in this room.

She handed him a photograph of a woman dwarfing a cab driver. "Her name is Redwing. She's running a scam in Gramercy Park. Ever see her before?"

"She's on the park surveillance log, but I don't know her face," said Riker. Redwing was not a new element in the square, but a once-a-week pattern over more than a year. It was the shots of Jonathan Gaynor and Henry Cathery which had his full attention.

"I'm meeting her tomorrow at a seance," said Mallory.

"I want some background on her, but she's not on computer as Redwing. If you tripped over an alias with a rap sheet, you'd tell me, right?… Riker?"

Riker nodded, only half-listening, preoccupied with the surveillance shots. "Kid, we gotta talk about your style, okay? You don't get shots like this unless you're so close the perp can see you, too."

She turned her back on him and tacked up Redwing's shot. "You interviewed Gaynor with Markowitz, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"Notes?"

Riker flipped through his notebook, a dog-eared dangle of pages. "Windmill," he said, marking the note with one finger.

"Huh?"

"It's the way he moves. He makes a lot of gestures, sprawly, all arms. So, Markowitz and me, we're walkin' through the lobby with this guy, and his arms are wavin' all over the place while he talks. We pass by this group of little old ladies and they scatter like crows."

"They were afraid of him?"

"Naw, it wasn't like that. You gotta be careful with old people. They break easy. So I guess he makes them a little skittish is all, arms waving in the breeze, never looking to see where he's going."

"Like a scarecrow."

"Yeah, I like that." He scratched out windmill and wrote in scarecrow.

"What did Markowitz think of Gaynor?"

"I'm not sure. Markowitz spent the whole time pumping him for free professional advice."

"Gaynor's a sociologist not a shrink."

"Yeah, but he did an article or a book or something on the elderly. Markowitz was getting into the territory, you know? This was early days, only ten hours into the second kill."

"What did he tell Markowitz?"

"Nothin' I had notes on. Old people's role in society, that kind of crap. Markowitz thought it was real interesting. I didn't."

"What's Coffey's angle these days?"

"He's got me running background on the Siddon kid." He pulled a videotape from his jacket pocket. "You wanna see the latest interview? I got her on tape."

She took the tape from his hand, fed it into the mouth of the VCR and pushed the play button.

Margot Siddon appeared on the screen only to be ejected ten minutes later, and before the interview concluded. Mallory tossed him the tape.

"I've seen her around the park. I don't know any more than the surveillance team would. She hangs out with Henry Cathery sometimes. Most of the time he just ignores her, won't even unlock the park gate for her. He'd rather play chess than talk to girls."

Mallory stood in the fourth-floor hallway by Martin Teller's apartment and stared down at the neat stacks of books and magazines, a vacuum cleaner, a copper tea kettle, and a portable electric fan assembled outside his door. These were not castaway items to be put out with the trash; this, according to Charles, was where Martin, the minimalist artist, stored everything which was not pure white.

She glanced at the door across the hall from Martin's. She had been forbidden to terrorize Herbert of 4B. Reluctantly, she turned back to Martin's door at the sound of four locks being undone. Three of the locks were shiny new metal in contrast with the landlord's lock which was close to twenty years old by the make.

The door opened, and she was silently invited into the apartment by the barely perceptible inclination of Martin's hairless head. Minimal Martin had also done away with unnecessary eyebrows. His white shirt, bulking out around the bulletproof vest, the white pants and socks all blended him into the white walls. The front room had the look of a vacant apartment freshly broken into. The windows were bereft of curtains, and the walls were bare except for the small collection of stamp-size artwork mounted one on each wall. Each tiny bit of art was a faint pencil line.

She preferred minimalist art over every other school; it was neat and clean and hardly there, no garish colors, nothing to think about, less work.

The doorless closet in the front room contained the minimum amount of clothes which were also white and, hence, invisible in these quarters. Square white pedestals passed for chairs and were indistinguishable from the square white pedestal which was his breakfast table laid with one white dish and a single egg. Mallory had no view into the bedroom, but she could hazard a narrow mattress on the floor, covered with one doubled-over white sheet.

A bulletproof vest seemed like such a complicated addition to these rooms and to Martin.

"Martin, I'm curious about the writing on the wall in Edith Candle's apartment."

Martin merely stared, not at her but towards her, like a blind man listening for a clue as to her position. He showed no signs of a pending response. She moved into alignment with his gaze and smiled. A worry line made inroads in his brow which, for Martin, was tantamount to an emotional outburst. Perhaps Martin had a truer perception of her than most people, who took her smile for a smile.

"The writing on the wall, Martin?" She rose up on the balls of her feet with anticipation, further prompting the man only with her eyes. If she pressed him too hard, he might walk off into some autistic dimension and close the door behind him. And so she waited on him.

And waited on him.

Nothing.

Oh, of course. She hadn't asked a solid question, had she?

"Could you tell me what the writing was?"

"Red," said Martin, after she had counted off thirty seconds.

She stopped smiling.

Over the past month, she'd had occasion to observe this artist in the streets and the halls during his infrequent contacts with the humans who also lived on his planet. Martin made people nervous for all the minutes it took to determine that he was odd, but harmless.

"Yes, red lipstick, but what did the writing say?"

She smiled again to worry him into a faster response. She didn't have all damn day for this crap, did she?

"Thick lines," said Martin.

The man was a badly lip-synced foreign movie with unrelated narrative. A ghost of Helen Markowitz automatically corrected the grammar of her next thought.

You can kill him, but you may not.

There was no more forthcoming. He was only standing there, not waiting, not anticipating, only occupying space. Well, he was still a man, wasn't he?

"Could you tell me what the words were?" Mallory asked gently with a low sultry voice that pulled his eyes into hers by invisible silk strings. Martin broke the strings abruptly and turned around to face the wall. He had spent his words, said the back of him. He had none left.

Behind her own back, her hands were balling into fists. She kept the fists out of her words. "It's an interesting building, isn't it, Martin? I mean the way the tenants tuck in their heads when they slide past each other in the halls. It's like they all know what's in each other's closet and under the bed. A little mutual embarrassment. A little creepy, wouldn't you say?"

His head dropped an inch. Considering who she was dealing with, she could read much into that inch. She sat down on one of the white pedestals and stared at his back, willing him to turn around. She was not at all surprised when he did turn to face her. His senses were that acute. She weaved more silk into her voice.

"There's not much turnover in this building. That's strange. New York is such a transient town. I wonder what keeps you all here. You were here when George Farmer attempted suicide ten years ago. The next tenant to leave was the one who used to live across the hall from Charles. He just disappeared one day, packed up and left no forwarding address. He abandoned his security deposit and fifteen years of interest on it. What makes a man do a thing like that?"

Martin's eyes collided with hers and rolled away in pain.

She held up both her hands, palms-up with a question.

"You think he saw the writing on the wall?"

Martin turned his back on her again. His head shook from side to side, not to a negative response, but as though he were shaking the words from his head.

She'd gone too far.

She rose to her feet and moved slowly to the door. As she opened it, Martin said, "Be careful. You will not know the hour nor even the minute."

When Charles returned to the office, he was surprised to see Mallory there during daylight hours. She stood at the kitchen counter putting together a plate of sandwiches garnished with the finesse of a professional chef.

"Hello, Mallory." He never slipped and called her Kathleen anymore. She was Mallory in all his thoughts, spoken and not. She had trained him well. And she fed him well and simplified his life. Even Arthur, the accountant, had praised her for making his own life easier; no more messy shopping bags of papers with coffee and tea stains washing out the figures in the amount-due columns.

Yet something told him life was just about to get more complicated.

"I had a long talk with Edith Candle," she said, ever so offhand.

He supposed it was inevitable that she should meet Edith. Every tenant in the building was drawn to that apartment at one time or another. But that was another puzzle and low on his list of priorities.

"She's like a prisoner in that apartment," said Mallory. He looked fondly at the roast beef on rye with crisp lettuce and parsley garnish. "It does look that way, I know." The coffee-maker, haunted by Louis Markowitz, gurgled and dripped, insinuating itself into the conversation.

Perhaps he should give the puzzle of Edith more immediate consideration. Mallory was hideously single-minded, and her all-consuming interest was Louis's murderer. What was the connection?

"Do you know why she never leaves the building?" she asked.

Mallory was not given to small talk. She couldn't ask an offhand innocent question; it just wasn't in her. Well, if he never learned anything from her responses, there might be something to be had from her questions.

"She's still in mourning for her husband." And now he noticed the pastrami with mustard and mayonnaise, and he was torn between the two sandwiches.

"Nobody mourns for thirty years, Charles." One corner of Mallory's disbelieving mouth slipped into a deep dimple of skepticism, and Louis's coffee machine sputtered. "Maybe there's a little more to it?" She set the plate of sandwiches on the checked tablecloth. "Something to do with her husband's accident?" 'She told you about that?"

"Sit," she said, pointing him to a chair by the kitchen table while she turned back to the coffee-maker where Louis abided.

He had shared many meals with her, and not one of them had been in a kitchen. As he recalled, her father had been a kitchen-sitting person – but to a purpose. In Louis's opinion, conversation was greased by a kitchen atmosphere and hampered by a more formal setting.

It occurred to him that the poker-players had steered him wrong. Her behavior might be more predictable if he concentrated on what she had learned from Markowitz and not Helen.

"Thirty years," said Mallory. "It's like jail time."

"I guess it does seem like a penance." He picked up a sandwich and suddenly forgot his appetite. Penance. Why had that never occurred to him before? Memories were surfacing, but still vague yet. "She might feel responsible for the accident."

"Because…" Mallory prompted him.

"I'm not sure. I was only nine when Max died."

"You have a memory like a computer. Now give."

"Eidetic memory doesn't work that way. I can recite chapters from books and even tell you if I spilled any coffee on the pages, but I'm not good at recalling conversations that went over my head when I was a child."

"I don't think much has gone by you since you left the womb, Charles. These conversations you can't remember, did they happen close to the day your cousin died?"

"Probably. Max lived with us for the last three days of his life."

"Only Max? He left his wife?"

"Yes, I think so. Oh, right. They'd had a quarrel. It was something to do with the new act. Edith thought it was too dangerous. I think she wanted him to give it up. But he couldn't. You see, the're was a time when he'd had top billing as Maximilian the Great. Then later, he became the husband of the great Edith Candle. All of his brilliant illusions, his own gifts had gotten lost somewhere."

"So this was his comeback? He was taking another shot at it?"

"Yes. He created a fantastic new set of illusions for this act. I remember all of us, Max and my parents, sitting around the table reading the reviews the morning after his opening." His photographic memory was calling up the newspaper column which had so impressed him as a child, it had remained with him for thirty years. "The New York Times called him a maestro." Now he was on familiar ground as he called up the printed word from another newspaper column and read the lines as though he held the paper in his hand." "The master is incomparable at the height of his creative powers", they said. His star was on the rise again."

The following morning, after the second performance had ended in tragedy, the newspapers had been kept out of his sight.

"So Max's career was on the rise. What about Edith's act?"

"Well, she still had a certain stature in psychic circles, but in one night, Max had eclipsed her, quite literally with his hands tied. It was amazing. There were lots of reviews. New York had more newspapers in those days. They all used the words death-defying and dangerous to describe the act."

"Dangerous? It was all a sham, wasn't it?"

"Oh, no. The new tricks were very dangerous. The finale required all his skill and mental discipline. While he stayed with us, he refused to give interviews. He wouldn't take any phone calls or messages."

"Not even from Edith?"

"Especially not from Edith." Why had he said that?

"Must have been quite a fight between those two."

"Well, the illusion required great concentration, no distractions."

"Like Edith predicting his death?"

The writing on the wall. What had his mother said about that?

"Yes, I suppose that was it. A few days before the opening of the new act, he found a message scrawled on the wall of his apartment. It was red lipstick."

"What did it say?"

"No idea. I'm putting this together from what I overheard. No one ever spoke to me about it. It was odd. Trance writing had never been part of the old routine."

"Trance writing?"

"Yes, something written without conscious thought, while in a trance. She never denied having written it, she only said she had no memory of doing it."

"Did you believe her? Whose side did you take?"

"I don't know. I was only nine years old then. I'm sure I loved them both." No, that was not true. One was loved and one was adored. "Perhaps I was closer to Max. He spent a lot of time with me. He had other things to do, I know. It was a busy period for him. But he took time out to play with me. I loved him very much."

He picked up an olive from his plate and closed it in the palm of his hand. When he spread his fingers again the olive was gone. He reached up and appeared to pull the olive from his eye socket, handing it to her with one eye closed. She laughed. Though the trick played on the simple humor of a small child, the love of all things gross and gory, she laughed as he had done all those years ago when Max was alive and beloved.

"Max died on the second night he performed the new routine with the water tank. The next day, when my parents told me about the accident, I wouldn't believe them. I just knew it had to be a trick. Edith went into seclusion after Max died. She didn't even go to his funeral. I did. The services were held in the cathedral. Magicians came from all over the world. They came in uniform, but not magician's black. They all wore white top hats, white capes and suits. The women wore white satin dresses. All the flowers were white. And later, at the cemetery, when the casket was lowered into the ground, a thousand doves flew out from under the magicians' capes. The sky was white with doves' wings. I will never see anything like that again."

"Edith must have been in pretty bad shape to miss the funeral."

"I'm sure she was."

"You don't know?"

"My parents never took me to visit her after that. My mother told me we were respecting her seclusion. The next time I saw Edith was after my mother's funeral."

The coffee-maker spat.

Edith Candle was staring at the wall but not seeing it. Looking beyond the twining roses on the wallpaper, she was probing old memories which predated the death of a magician. Her chair rocked with unconscious effort.

One could always point to a time, a choice, an act that set the tone for a life and changed a personal destiny. Her moment had come in a desolate corner of the flat Midwestern landscape. The sky had been deep purple, and she recalled stars like blazing cartwheels in the triangular flaps of the tent which had been pulled back to catch the breezes of a hot summer night. Maximilian had been at the back of the tent with the mark. By code of words, he fed her the details of the watch in his hand.

"I can't see anymore," she had cried out suddenly, "the image is being drowned out by other thoughts." The other thoughts had been gleaned by eavesdropping in the line for admission. Max had overheard a woman talking about her sister Emaline's heart problem and how it worried her night and day.

"Tell us these thoughts," said Max, cuing her to remove the blindfold and ask if the name Emaline meant anything to anyone in the audience. She removed her blindfold and looked out over the silent, tense sea of faces.

She was transfixed by the boy in the front row, far from the mark at the back of the tent. The boy stared at her. He shivered and then looked away. His soft eyes shamed down to his shoes. She stared at him until the boy's eyes met hers again. He had the look of a drowning animal. The sense that he was waterbound was strengthened as the boy began to rise from the wooden bench, moving in slow motion as though the atmosphere had killing weight and pressure. An older companion, wearing the same gas-station uniform as the boy's, put a hand on his shoulder to bid the boy sit down again. The boy's terrified eyes looked back to hers. He sloughed off the old man's hand and began to make his way down the aisle with the gait of too much drink, though she knew the boy was not intoxicated.

She had called out to him, "You must tell the police what you've done." The boy spun around, his face all agony, more pain than a child could stand.

"You must tell them!" she shouted.

The boy let out a strangled scream and fled up the aisle. A uniformed police officer also stood up and followed the boy out.

That night, the local sheriff dug up the body of Tammy Sue Pertwee in the yard of a shanty-town shack. It made the morning paper, and it made her the headliner instead of the added attraction to Maximilian's Traveling Magic Show.

Henry Cathery was sitting in the park at dusk. The street-lamps were just coming on when the pretty woman arrived. He knew she would come back. He had waited for her all through the previous day into disappointing darkness. After all the days of seeing her each morning and every evening, he had felt the loss of her yesterday. Then Mrs Siddon had died, and the pretty woman had come back to him again.

She opened the door of the tan car and stepped out onto the sidewalk. She had never done that before. He followed the graceful swing of her walk as she moved down the sidewalk and towards the building across the street. So she would not be keeping him company this time. His head remained motionless while his eyes rolled after her. Her gold hair caught the lamplight and threw it back in sparks. The electric woman had wonderfully dangerous eyes.

She entered the near building through the great oaken door, held open by a doorman who stared at her with naked hurt that his chances were better to be struck three times by lightning than even to touch her. The doorman was very tall, good lightning-rod material in a level cow pasture, Henry thought, but this was New York City.

Henry Cathery left his bench and walked slowly to the gate. He pressed his face to the bars and stared at her little tan car. He opened the gate and moved slowly across the street, unmindful of the fast-braking car which was now skidding around him. He stood in the street staring into the car's windows. The seats were much cleaner today. No trash, no coffee cups. He leaned into the narrow opening at the top of the driver-side window and inhaled deeply. So this was what she smelled like. He reached in the window, forcing the crack to widen, pushing his flesh against it until it permitted his hand to reach far enough inside to rub his palm on the upholstery of the car seat.

When Jonathan Gaynor opened the door, Mallory was close enough to notice the light sprinkle of freckles across his nose. He was only a few years shy of forty, yet the idea of a small boy with a fake beard persisted. She held up a leather folder with her shield and photo ID. He actually read the card. Most people barely glanced at it.

"Sergeant Mallory, you're right on time." He opened the door wide and stepped back as she walked in. He looked at his Rolex. "And I mean right on time, exact quartz time."

She watched his eyes drop to inspect the cashmere blazer she wore over her jeans, probably trying to reconcile the good cloth with the badge-and-gun salary. In the manner of an insurance-appraiser, she noted the recent water rings on the antique woods, and a newspaper opened on light brocade upholstery which was probably now smudged with print. Delicate pieces of collector's crystal sat on every surface – nearly every surface. Her eye for symmetry filled in the gaps on the tables where other pieces had been until recently. She sat down in the large armchair which dominated the rest of the furniture. And it was she who motioned him to sit down in the opposite smaller chair.

"You didn't mention this appointment to anyone?"

"Of course not, Sergeant." He folded his body into the chair, and his arms jutted out at risky angles to the figurines on the near tables. "I can appreciate the fact that undercover work is dangerous. You can rely on my discretion."

"Thank you. One of your neighbors believes I'm a private detective. I'd like her to go on believing that."

"Of course. How can I help you?"

"You knew Inspector Markowitz?"

"We met once. He came by after my aunt was murdered. I liked the man. I was sorry to hear about his death." One hand moved of its own accord and fell over the arm of his chair. The other hand rested on his thigh, though these two body parts seemed unacquainted. No interaction of his limbs ever implied that they had met before.

"Sergeant Riker tells me Markowitz asked for your expertise, Mr Gaynor."

"Yes. He was interested in the social dynamics of Gramercy Park, particularly the elderly inhabitants."

"There are no notes on that meeting. It might help us to follow his line of investigation if you could remember what was said."

"Well, that was over two months ago. I only recall the gist of it. He focussed on all the ways elderly women connected with one another in Gramercy. This square is an interesting little nation unto itself." The hand which had been dangling now joined the rest of him, rising to the arm of the chair, knocking into the small table on its way. Gaynor never seemed to notice the hand had injured itself, he and the hand were that far removed from one another.

"Was Markowitz interested in anything more specific?"

"Yes, but I could only give him a general picture. I'm afraid I wasn't much help on particulars. You see, I hadn't moved in yet, not until weeks after my aunt's death. So, at the time, I was out of touch with the square."

"Sergeant Riker seemed to think Markowitz got a great deal of help from you. The interview lasted what – three hours? His usual style was forty minutes at the outside. I call that interesting."

Gaynor appeared to be searching the ceiling for personal notes on the subject.

"He was looking for commonalities. The only common factor I could pin down for him was the isolation of the elderly. Now there had only been two murders at that time. I remember asking if the other woman, Mrs Cathery, had any social network. He said no, none that they could discover. Well, neither did Aunt Estelle, and neither of them had live-in help." One hand stumbled off the arm of the chair and landed as a dead weight on top of the other one in his lap.

"But Mrs Cathery didn't live alone. There was a grandson living in the apartment. Henry Cathery. Do you know him?"

"This is New York City. The good-neighbor thing doesn't extend to the next apartment, let alone a building at the end of the block. My aunt knew him. She said he was a recluse. And I know he's eccentric." One foot walked under the coffee table and the accompanying shin made a thud against the hard edge. The pain was not relayed back to Gaynor who never even winced. "According to the newspapers, he didn't even notify the police that his grandmother never came home that night. Didn't you find that odd? I mean, from the police point of view?"

"Odd? Well, he told the investigating officer he was only grateful for the peace and quiet, so it never occurred to him to go looking for her."

That initial interview with Henry Cathery had been conducted three months ago while the first kill still belonged to Homicide and not Special Crimes. The investigating officer's notes and a follow-up interview had decided Markowitz that Cathery had been truthful in this. Markowitz had always been charmed by blatant honesty.

"Mr Gaynor, you've never spoken to Henry Cathery?"

"Call me Jonathan," he said, sitting back in the chair, his elbow nudging a figurine to the edge of the table on his left. "I used to see him in the park now and then. I nodded to him a few times the first week I was here. He never nodded back – just looked right through me. He's a constant fixture in the park, but I don't spend much time there anymore."

He stood up and followed his legs to the wide picture window at the far wall. He motioned her over. "There he is," he said, pointing down to the bench behind the black bars and directly across the street from the building. Henry Cathery's head was bowed over a portable chessboard as she drew closer to the window and looked down on him. Cathery chose that moment to lift his head, and she could have sworn he was looking directly at her. A reflexive instinct pulled her one step back from the window. She continued to stare down at Cathery with equal parts of revulsion and fascination.

"Bit late for him to be out," Gaynor was saying. "He's usually there during the day. See the game board on his lap? He was some sort of chess champion as a child, I think. Burned out rather early. Forgive me, I'm probably telling you things you already know."

When they turned away from the window, it was he who guided her toward the couch. "I believe your first name is Kathleen?"

She nodded. "Did you know Pearl Whitman?"

"Never met her. May I call you Kathy?"

"No."

His face reddened. Good. "Pearl Whitman visited spiritualists on a regular basis. She might be connected to a medium who comes here every – '

"Redwing?"

"You know her?"

"Who could miss a spectacle like that? How tall is she? Six-two? And the girth." His hands made a wide circle, knocking into a slender porcelain figurine on a long table behind the couch and setting it to rocking slightly. "I passed her in the lobby of this building one day as I was leaving. The doorman told me her name. I asked my aunt about her the next time I came by. This was a very long time ago, but I remember the conversation very well. It ended in a very loud argument."

"Did your aunt attend the seances?"

"She never said. Of course she wouldn't have after that. So you think Redwing's involved in this?"

"I'm interested in everything that goes on in the square. Redwing's been coming here every week for more than a year. When you argued with your aunt, what did you have against the medium?"

His hand suddenly left him to wave in the air, and a scatter pillow sailed to the marble floor. "Well, it's a bag of tricks, isn't it? It probably wouldn't take anything very sophisticated to fool a pack of old women who really want to believe in that nonsense. It's a nasty business, victimizing the elderly. I really detest people like that."

"Would you like to take a shot at Redwing? She's giving a seance tomorrow afternoon. You'd have to be pre-screened and approved. Would you be willing to call Mrs Penworth? She's hosting the seance. I got my invitation through her daughter. It might be better if you called Penworth directly. Maybe you could tell her you'd like to contact your dead aunt?"

"Seriously?" His elbow jerked back, and his startled leg connected with the low coffee table. A delicate crystal vase skittered to the edge of the table and hung there just over the wooden lip and above the unforgiving marble floor.

"I'm very serious," said Mallory. "If it wouldn't be too hard on you, it might help with the investigation."

"But why would you want me there?"

"I'd like to know if Redwing can tell me anything about your aunt that wouldn't be common knowledge."

"So you do think she's connected to the victims."

One leg intended to cross the other, but a misinformed knee made contact first with the crystal vase. The vase moved over the edge of the table on one rolling foot.

Mallory's hand shot out to catch it on its way to the floor. She set it back on the table in its original position.

"No. If there was a connection, we would have turned it up by now. I'm only collecting information wherever I can get it. There'll be four or five women there in your aunt's age bracket. She might have known some of them. I need a way to get your aunt's death on the same table with Pearl Whitman."

"Looking for common denominators? Very good. So you've passed yourself off as a bereaved survivor of Miss Whitman's?"

"No. I'm planning to raise Louis Markowitz from the dead. He was my father."

The vase fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred shards, all sharp as knives.

When Mallory pulled into the driveway, the old house fell far short of her imaginings after six weeks of neglect. The windows were all dark, and yet there was a lived-in look to the house and yard. There was nothing about the place to tell anyone how ruthlessly she had abandoned it. The grass had been recently cut, and the walk and porch were swept. It was that time when leaves were falling, but none had landed in this yard without being raked up and disposed of. This had to be Robin Duffy's work. She looked over to the house next door.

It wouldn't be the first time this neighbor had mowed the lawn for Markowitz who was sometimes so preoccupied with a single human hair found at a crime site that he didn't notice the grass growing in his own front yard. She wondered if Robin Duffy was also playing a game of make-believe. Did he curse Markowitz as he was mowing? Or did he break with custom this time?

Riker must have come through the back when he was last here. The police-department seal was intact around the frame of the front door. She peeled away the tape and fitted her old key into the lock.

If the yard had kept her illusions for her, the inside of the house told the truth. The door opened onto the smells of long-settled dust, stale air and the terrible empty silence of no one home. She flicked the wall switch, and the overhead light came on with a soft warm glow.

She stood by the love seat where Helen had done her mending in the evenings. The sewing basket was in its usual place. She had long ago come to terms with reminders of Helen. But she would not look at the overstuffed reclining chair where Markowitz had sat reading his paper every night save Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What must it have been like for him, being alone in this place. She knew she could never live here again. It had been hard enough after Helen's death.

She slowly gravitated to the kitchen, pulled along by memories of the only woman who had ever cared if her hair was combed and her nails were clean, if she had her milk money and a proper lunch to take to school. She remembered the kitchen as bigger. Perhaps she had always seen it through the eyes of the baby felon Markowitz had bagged.

"Whadaya think you're doin' kid?" he had asked, sitting back on his heels staring at her through the low window of the Jaguar which belonged to some sucker.

"Bug off old man, or I'll cut you," she had said.

He had brought her back to this house that night. Four tons of paperwork at Juvenile Hall didn't fit with his plans for a birthday party, he told her. Helen's cake had been sitting in the back of his car. It had a lemon smell, and Markowitz smelled of cherry-blend pipe tobacco.

The child in handcuffs had driven Helen wild. Poor Markowitz could not get them off fast enough to please his wife. And then young Kathy had been engulfed in the plump arms of a gentle woman who smelled of laundry soap, cleaning fluid and scouring powder. Beyond Helen were the smells of steamed vegetables and pot roast. And that night, young Kathy had smelled crisp clean sheets being pulled up around her face, and the smell of talcum powder as Helen leaned down to kiss her good-night.

Helen.

The house didn't smell like Helen anymore. There was dust over everything. Helen wouldn't have liked that.

Mallory climbed the stairs, heading toward the back bedroom which Markowitz had used as a den. She passed by her own room which contained all the furniture and belongings she had left behind. He had kept it the way she left it, against the day when she might want to come home again, she supposed. The door frame had the last notch of her growing years. The first notch was much closer to the floor. What a runt she had been at ten. How smug she had been at lying two more years onto her age.

Markowitz's den was disguised as the aftermath of a messy burglary, and she found nothing out of place. Riker had been careful to leave things as he found them. The bills were in the order of due dates, although a stranger would've assumed they had simply been dropped on the floor by the desk. His correspondence with the Old-time Radio Network lay on top of less important correspondence with the Internal Revenue Service. She picked up the metal waste-basket where he filed his credit-card receipts and his cancelled checks. Riker would have been through it, looking for a lead on BDA.

She began with the desk drawers, and an hour later, she had sifted down to the last drawer in a battered old filing cabinet to discover all her school report cards and her class photographs. She looked at the group shot from the private Manhattan day school which must have cost the old man a fortune in tuition. In that first photo, she was a stand-out, the only non-child in a sea of innocence. The old man had been right; she never was a little girl.

She was downstairs again, turning out the lights and fishing in her pockets for the car keys when she saw the pile of envelopes lying by the door under the mail slot. She leafed through the junk mail, almost passing over the flyer for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy.

BDA.

Riker said he'd been through every business listing in every telephone directory for all eight boroughs. Was he holding out on her?

She walked over to the table which held the telephone and the phone books. She held the heavy business directory cradled in one arm, tearing the pages as she riffled through them. There was no commercial advertising for the Brooklyn Dancing Academy. She checked the white pages – no listing. Riker was off the hook; his teeth were safe.

She walked slowly to Markowitz's chair and sank into it. Her hands ran over the worn leather of the arms, and she pressed her head deep into its back cushion. She was picking up a scent which had not been obscured by the layers of dust. A tobacco pouch lay open on the small table at her right. One hand drifted down to the pipe rack and her fingers grazed the smooth worn bowls of wood. She picked up the pipe with the carved face, his favorite because she had stolen it for his birthday in those early days when she still called him "'Hey, Cop". She held the pipe tight, her knuckles whitening as she closed her eyes, trying to imagine Markowitz in his young days.

Young Markowitz the dancing fool.

The stem of the pipe broke between her fingers. She looked down on the ruined thing, incredulous. She slowly lifted the pieces of it and tried to match the jagged shards of the stem together as though for a moment she believed she could undo the breakage and make it whole again.

Her hands dropped to her lap and the pieces of the pipe rolled out of her grasp and fell soundlessly to the rug. She began to rock slowly from side to side in a cradle motion dredged up from a time beyond her remembering, beyond the existence of hiding and running, stealing food and dodging flying broken bottles and the baby-flesh pimps. She rocked and rocked, deaf to the sound of the doorbell, to the loud banging on the door and the sounds of Robin Duffy turning his years-ago-given key in the lock. And for a time, she was deaf to the sounds of that little bulldog of a man with the frightened eyes who was shaking her by the shoulders and yelling, "Kathy! Kathy!"

A man with a knife appeared in every shadow of leaves playing on the window shade. Margot Siddon pulled the blanket up over her head in the child's conviction that blankets were protection from monsters. She had given up on sleep. She dialed Henry Cathery's number in the dark; her fingers were that practised in this particular order of buttons. He was not happy at being awakened.

"What!" he said loudly in lieu of hello.

"Henry, it's me. Could you loan me twenty dollars?"

"Margot, are you crazy? You're rich. You've got at least a mill after taxes."

"Not yet I don't, and the apartment was sealed up by the police. I can't even get anything to pawn."

"Go to her bank in the morning. Make them give you an advance. I didn't even have to ask for my advance. The bank just sent me a draft of the repayment agreement." There was no "goodbye" before she heard the impersonal click of a broken connection.

She slammed the receiver to the cradle. What a weird bastard he was, or maybe, she thought, just maybe he was onto the rings she had copped from his grandmother's jewel box. He didn't live in Disneyland all the time. He had his moments of clarity, and she found those moments creepy as hell. It was like coming upon someone who had been walking in his sleep and now was awake to the nth degree, awake to the entire universe, plugged in, turned on. And in those moments, he had wired up to her brain and shocked it clean of memory for days at a time, nights in succession without bad dreams. He was the only one she knew who would talk to her about the man with the knife.

She didn't recall one personal conversation with old Cousin Samantha in all the years she'd sucked up to the woman.

At first, she'd been taken to Samantha's apartment as a child. Then later, after her mother remarried and disappeared, she had gone alone. Old Samantha had been good for fifty bucks at a touch, but at the great cost of hours of monotony.

Her mother had once talked about Samantha in the days when the old woman was young and beautiful. It was hard for Margot to imagine that old bag of bones with her hump and her trembles as a beauty. When Margot was little, the old woman had called the whole world Darling, without regard to gender, or to animate or inanimate qualities. Margot was darling and so was the bow in her hair, and each had carried the same weight in the old woman's babbling affectations and affections. Over the passing years Cousin Samantha's babble had become shrill, reaching, at the last, the pitch of a scream of fear.

After the man with the knife had done his work on Margot, the old woman had come to the hospital to visit her, but only the one time. Samantha had begged Margot to cover her face, to hide the scar, it was so upsetting. Then, fear filled them both, and every night. It was their only commonality after the rape. One woke up screaming with the fear of being alone. And twenty blocks south, the other woke with visions of the knife dancing up to her eyes and then down to her cheek, severing the nerve which had previously allowed her to smile on that side of her face.

She stared at the wall until it lightened with the dawn, and then she scooped clothes up from the pile on the floor which was nearest the bed. As she dressed, she missed the match of buttons on her vest and never noticed. There was no food in the house. She would go shopping at the supermarket when they gave her the advance money. She would ask for all of it in cash, small bills. She would buy the whole world and meat, red meat, and a jelly roll.