Winter House

Chapter 8

CHARLES BUTLER CRACKED THE DOOR TO HIS APARTMENT AND watched the heavy foot traffic of policemen marching down the hall, their arms laden with boxes. Last in line, Riker set down his own carton to say „Hello,“ and, „Sorry about the commotion. We got the trust documents.“ So I see.

„But we couldn’t cart them back to Special Crimes,“ said Riker. „The boss would’ve freaked.“

Mallory walked by with a carton. She never turned her head in their direction, and Charles gave no indication that he had even seen her. He nodded his good-bye to Riker, then closed the door – and locked it. Riker heard the sound of a second deadbolt, and then a chain guard falling into place. And Mallory heard this, too. She turned back to the door, as if the sound of three locks might be a message just for her.

Trouble? Oh, absolutely.

Riker would never have believed that Charles Butler had the willpower to hold a grudge for six minutes, and that would be a feud with a total stranger. With Mallory, the poor bastard had no shot at all.

Until today.

The uniformed officers were making their escape to the elevator when Riker carried the last of the haul into Mallory’s private office at the back of Butler and Company. He set it down at her feet, saying, „What are the odds Charles is gonna give us a hand with this? You got another speed reader in your pocket?“

„Better than that,“ she said. „I’ve got a lawyer on the way.“

„Oh, well that’s just great. Lawyers read at two hundred dollars an hour – real slow.“ He turned to the cork wall. It had been cleared in preparation for their autopsy on a trust fund.

„We don’t need Charles.“ Mallory opened a folder and held up a sheet with columns of words and numbers. „The documents are indexed, and all the boxes are clearly marked.“ She pinned up the first page of her document list in perfect alignment with the walls. Two pushpins.

Riker could see their first problem in the making. Was his little neatness freak even capable of doing this without her usual time-consuming perfection? He decided to experiment. Taking a handful of sheets from her index folder, he plopped them on the cork wall in haphazard fashion, one pin a piece and every sheet dangling at a different angle. One glance over his shoulder told him that it actually hurt her to look at his mess.

„Mallory, we don’t have years for this.“ He walked off to the reception room to answer a knock. When he reached the end of the hall, the door was flung open, and he was assaulted by a little man with the jowls of a bulldog. Riker was forced to endure a bear hug from the only lawyer he could abide. Robin Duffy had lived across the street from Lou and Helen Markowitz since forever. And now, in his retirement years with both his old friends in the ground, Robin looked upon every connection to them as his extended family. He released his hold on the detective and stepped back. His eyes were lit up and manic. He was just so happy to be here. „Where’s my Kathy?“

The old lawyer was in that small circle of friends allowed to address his partner by her given name and get away with it unscarred.

Bitty Smyth’s eyelids weighed ten pounds each. She sat bolt upright on the bed to keep from falling asleep. When would Aunt Nedda come home?

She poured another glass of water from the pitcher by her bed. The edge of the glass blurred as she lifted it to her lips. She returned the glass to the night table and knocked the alarm clock to the floor, leaving the time of day a mystery.

Or was it night?

She fumbled in the pockets of her skirt and found the business card that Charles Butler had given her. Fortunately, she had memorized the office number, for it would have been difficult to focus on the small print of the card.

Bitty stared at the telephone, as if the large numbers on the dial might be equally difficult. No, she would not call, not yet. She would give it a few more hours. Aunt Nedda would surely come home for dinner without any prompting. She had promised.

It was such a fight to stay awake.

Robin Duffy stood among the cartons, trying to make sense of the numbers stenciled on the cardboard. Lowering his reading glasses, he said, „Give it up, Kathy. The document index has no relationship to the documents. All I can tell you at this point is that Smyth’s firm is hiding something.“ His eyes traveled over the towers of boxes, each containing thousands of documents. „This is an old lawyer’s trick – bury the sins in a ton of paperwork.“ He glanced at his wristwatch. „It’s time to get Charles.“

Riker listened for the sound of the reception room door closing on the lawyer. He stepped up behind his partner. „We’re never gonna find the will without Charles. You think he’ll come?“

Mallory sat at her computer, checking financial data she had raided from the law firm, still following the money. Riker was at the point of repeating himself when she said, „He’ll come… for Robin.“

From his turtleneck jersey to his formal evening shoes, Rabbi David Kaplan had dressed all in black. This was the proper attire in his understanding of the criminal underworld. This evening, he played the role of lookout man and loved it. He leaned into the hallway, then quickly withdrew to the elevator and spoke to Edward Slope in a stage whisper. „Charles is leaving with Robin.“ He poked his head out again. „Now they’re going into the office across the hall. The coast is clear.“

„You’ve been waiting all day to say that line, haven’t you?“

„Please, Edward, no noise.“

Together, the chief medical examiner and the rabbi moved their heavy burden along on its rolling pallet, out of the elevator and down the hallway, as Edward Slope said once again, „There’s no such thing as a surprise poker game.“

„Shhh.“ The rabbi was reveling in this crime of backward burglary. He turned the knob of the door to Charles Butler’s apartment. As promised, it opened easily. Pointing to a piece of tape that covered the bolt, he said, „Robin’s idea.“

And that made this crime of breaking and entering a conspiracy of three. The doctor and the rabbi wheeled the game table in the door, snagging its padded cover on a hinge and tearing it. Had the table not been turned on its side, it would never have fit through the door frame.

At the end of the foyer, they stopped in heart-clutching guilty surprise, as if they had been caught in the act of removing something instead of depositing a gift. Before them stood a tall, stately woman rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her hair was snow white, and her smile was bemused. She clearly recognized Edward Slope as the doctor who had written her Valium prescription earlier in the day. She studied the bulky object on the pallet.

„It’s a table,“ said Edward Slope, as if the furniture padding might have disguised that fact.

„Ah,“ she said. „I know just the place for it.“

Following Nedda Winter, they wheeled the table into the library. With no mention of the Winter House Massacre and the lady’s celebrity status, introductions were made to Rabbi Kaplan as the two men shifted the table off the pallet and placed it in the center of a ring of club chairs. And now the rabbi began to explain what had happened to Charles Butler’s last table.

„Burned in a warehouse fire,“ said Nedda. „Yes, I know. But I’ve never heard of a surprise poker game.“

The doctor consulted his watch. „Should we unwrap it now or wait for Robin?“

„You dropped something,“ said Nedda. „It fell out of that tear in the padding.“

David Kaplan bent down and retrieved the paper. „Oh, it’s the provenance. Kathy mentioned that it was an antique.“ The rabbi scanned the text, then abruptly sank into a club chair. „Edward, you won’t believe where this table has been.“

The job in Mallory’s office did not actually require a speed reader. It had taken Charles Butler only a few minutes to break the index code – childishly simple – a few minutes more to locate the correct carton, the correct folder and to hand over the original will to Robin Duffy.

„It’s really quite easy.“ Charles looked down at the file inventory in his hand. „The last three digits of the listed items correspond to the first three digits on the cartons. For the actual documents listed in the index, disregard the first and last two digits of the index number, and everything in the middle will match up with the numbers on the file holders.“ He never saw their startled faces. His head was deep in a carton as he fished out the folder that gave up the basic structure of the Winter family trust fund. Done with this chore, he asked, „What else am I looking for?“

„Something incriminating,“ said Riker.

„Well, I’ve got that right here.“ Robin Duffy sat behind Mallory’s steel desk, poring over papers covered with handwritten lines of faded blue ink. „I’m not surprised that you couldn’t find a copy of this will in the public record. Back in the thirties, you could buy off a clerk for pocket change. And I can tell you right now that Sheldon Smyth’s father bought a judge. That’s the only way he could’ve rammed this will through probate.“

Mallory stood behind Robin’s chair and read over his shoulder. „So it’s a fake?“

„Worse than that. It’s what I call hysteric form, confused and flawed. Edwina Winter was angry when she wrote this, and she wasn’t thinking straight. Her husband was cut off. That’s like an invitation to contest a will. Everything was left to Nedda and her siblings, but the kids only get a draw from a family trust. And there’s nothing here to say that Nedda’s siblings have to be Edwina’s children. Any sibling can benefit from the trust.“

„Well,“ said Riker, „I guess the lady didn’t count on Quentin having eight more kids with another wife.“

„But here’s the catch,“ said Robin. „She writes, ‘When my last child is dead, the trust passes on to the New-York Historical Society.’“

„Sounds smart to me,“ said Mallory. „According to Bitty Smyth, Edwina’s husband was the one who killed her. Maybe she saw it coming. She wanted to take the money motive out of murdering her children to inherit.“

„Makes sense,“ said Riker. „That’s why Nedda could never be legally declared dead.“

Charles thought of a more likely scenario: Edwina was preventing her husband from spending the money before the children were properly launched into the world, but he kept this to himself.

„With this wording,“ said Robin, „any judge would know it wasn’t Edwina’s intention to support another woman’s children by a future marriage. But that’s a moot point. The trust should never have been drawn up in the first place. It was created from the instructions of a flawed will. An honest judge would’ve set the will aside and divided the money between the infant Nedda and her father, Quentin Winter.“ He looked up at Charles. „I need to see the previous will.“

Charles flipped through the document index. „Sorry. There’s only one.“

„Then the law firm destroyed a preexisting will,“ said Robin Duffy. „Once you get past the hysterics, the rest of it, codicils, gifts to friends and servants, things like that, it’s all in correct legal form. She must’ve copied it from her earlier will.“

„Then we got ‘em,“ said Riker. „The old man told me that Edwina changed her will every time she had a fight with her husband.“

„In that case,“ said Robin, pausing to look over the mass of cartons, „the earlier wills were misplaced. You won’t find them on the index. You won’t find them at all. But they’re here.“

Charles Butler stood at the center of the room, sifting through another carton. „Why didn’t Quentin Winter hire a lawyer to break the will?“

„That’s an easy one,“ said Riker. „The Winter family’s lawyers have always been Smyths. Now I got a question. Why would the law firm keep all this stuff. If it incriminates them, why not destroy it?“

„Lessons of Nixon,“ said Robin. „The cover-up is always worse than the crime. They’d rather look incompetent than go to jail for fraud.“ He waved one hand to include every carton in the room. „I don’t have to look at their Financials. I know you’ll find a penny-perfect accounting for every fee and payout. It might not be honest, but it’ll look good on paper and it’ll pass an audit.“

„All right,“ said Mallory. „So the firm had to convince Quentin Winter that it wasn’t in his best interests to contest the will.“

„Right,“ said Robin. „If they couldn’t create the trust from the will instructions, then they’d lose a huge administration fee.“

„And it’s not like Quentin was left out in the cold.“ Charles placed a folder on the desk. „That’s a summary sheet for payouts in the first year. He had more income than he could spend. There’s a generous housekeeping allowance, a maintenance allotment for each child and a guardian’s draw.“

Robin studied the file, then nodded. „The firm padded out his monthly draw. My God, this trust fund was worth twenty-five million dollars. You know what that is in today’s dollars? Maybe a quarter-billion.“

„More,“ said Mallory, whose gift was calculation.

Walking had become a great effort for Bitty Smyth. When was Aunt Nedda coming home? She undid the bolt and slumped to the floor. One ear pressed against the door, she listened to the loud conversation downstairs. Her father’s voice joined the cacophony of invectives and blame flying back and forth across the wide front room below. Sheldon Smyth was slurring his words. She knew her aunt had not yet arrived. Aunt Nedda would not be privy to this conversation of family matters. On hands and knees, Bitty crawled back toward her bed and pulled the telephone off the nightstand by its cord.

Rags awoke with a start and flapped his wings. „What?“ He came out of his cage on the run and squawking. Even the bird could see that something was wrong with his mistress.

Charles Butler and Robin Duffy had retired to the more comfortable furnishings of the private office across the hall, where the furniture was not made of cold steel, where a humidor was stocked with Havanas and the whiskey was single malt.

When Riker returned with a take-out meal, his partner was standing before her cork wall, studying the yellowed papers of financials from an era of filing cabinets.

„For the first twelve years, the trust fund outlay should never have exceeded the interest earnings.“ She glanced back at her glowing monitor screen and its display of more recent data. „Today the trust is only worth forty thousand dollars.“

Riker lit a cigarette and took a long contemplative drag. He did his best thinking when he smoked. „Figure cost-of-living increases, more money for each new kid, and you still can’t spend it all, not with a cap on the draw.“ And now he dealt with the greater problem of finding something to pass for an ashtray. He settled on a metal cup, dumping its stash of paper clips out on the desk blotter. Experimentally, he dropped in his burnt match, and his partner did not hurt him.

He exhaled.

Mallory walked half the length of the wall, then stopped to tap one sheet of pinned-up paper. „Here, right after the massacre. This is when it starts.“ She moved on down the wall, then paused again. „Twenty percent of the money was drained in a period of two years. The firm wrote it off as poor investment of capital.“

„You mean they stole it. I’m betting the guardian helped with that,“ said Riker. „Good old Uncle James. I say he hired Stick Man for the massacre.“

„Him or Sheldon Smyth’s father. My guess is collusion. Nedda went to brunch with the Smyth family on the day of the massacre – conveniently out of harm’s way.“ Mallory walked back to her computer and tapped the keys to change the document on the monitor’s screen. „I found the money, only now it’s well over a hundred million, all in personal brokerage accounts for Cleo and Lionel.“ She printed out a sheet. „This is their investment history. They took a bath in the nineties and again with the tech-stock fiasco. Now their holdings are zero risk, hardly any growth. But they show a deposit income of one million a year that doesn’t derive from stocks and bonds. And I know where it came from.“ She split her screens to pick up an item she had flagged on the law firm’s financial data. „The law firm has a payout of one million every year. It’s listed under client settlements.“

„Lawyers paying clients?“

„Not that simple.“ Mallory spent a few quiet minutes following the money through cyberspace, switching screens, diddling keys, and robbing banks via their databases. „I’ve got a memo to purchase bearer bonds. The dates and the amounts add up on both sides. Lionel and Cleo cashed in those bonds to make their yearly deposits.“

The screen changed again, and Riker turned away the moment he saw the logo for Mallory’s latest invasion, bypassing lockouts to enter Internal Revenue files. It always made him uncomfortable to witness a crime in progress.

„They don’t pay any taxes on the yearly million,“ said Mallory. „The tax is paid to the IRS by a check drawn on an offshore account for a bogus corporation.“

„I feel a headache coming on,“ said Riker. „Who’s doing who?“

„Best guess? It looks like Lionel and Cleo busted the Smyth firm for embezzlement. But simple restitution wouldn’t require money laundering on this scale. What if they nailed Sheldon Smyth’s father for hiring a mass murder?“

Bitty had left the bolt undone, and it had taken some time for this little horror to settle in. Her mind was slipping.

So sleepy.

And her limbs felt like cement. She struggled to make the short trip from her bed to the door, shuffling, unable to lift her heavy feet from the carpet. She slid the bolt home so no one would intrude upon her, not until her aunt returned. Bitty sat on the floor, her back propped up against the door, listening, waiting for rescue. Aunt Nedda should have been here by now. She must come very soon. She must. Bitty called Charles Butler’s office number again.

Mallory continued to scroll down the lists of investments. Riker watched her run calculations of large figures on a split screen. She was so good with the math of money motives. The assistance of a forensic accountant would only have slowed her down.

„I can access trades back to the early eighties,“ she said. „Allowing for dividends paid out and reinvested, market booms and dives, I’d say this stock portfolio was built up from the law firm’s yearly payouts over at least forty years. The Smyth firm is paying back the stolen money, but not to the trust fund. It all goes into Lionel and Cleo’s personal accounts.“

„Proof of embezzlement,“ said Riker, „motive for a massacre. And people ask me why I hate lawyers. I guess murder runs in the family, first the father and now the son. Sheldon’s gotta be the one who hired Willy Roy Boyd. He had to kill Nedda before she started asking questions about the trust fund.“ The detective crushed out his cigarette. „I love this case more and more every minute.“

„This financial arrangement works better for Lionel and Cleo. Instead of a lifetime draw on the trust fund, they have access to all of the money. And now, they’re part of the embezzlement. The restitution money should’ve gone back into the trust.“

„If Nedda dies, they get to keep it.“ And now he understood the elaborate money laundering. „Those two still don’t know that the will and the trust were never valid.“

Mallory nodded. „Because the Winters’ attorneys have always been Smyths.“

Charles poured a drink for Robin Duffy and ignored the telephone on his office desk. One of Mallory’s machines would pick up the call at the reception desk. Before entering into a business partnership with her, he had never been an answering-machine sort of person. If calls had gone astray, he had always assumed that people would call back. So simple. And, in case of emergency, they would send a telegram to the door. Should he be out of town when people called, well, that was their hard luck and one less hassle to deal with.

Now he could not escape his callers. The machine seemed to work for their convenience and not his own. Machines were always conspiring to strip all the charm from his life. Once, he had tried to disconnect the device, and all of the phones had gone dead. Mallory’s wiring was not to be trifled with. He had never attempted another such insurrection.

The phone stopped ringing.

Riker sat on the floor with the emptied-out contents of another carton, searching for a lost child among the papers. „You’re right, Mallory.

Sally Winter never attended a private school, either. No tuition payments.“

„I don’t think she lived long enough for kindergarten,“ said Mallory, leafing through her own stack of files. „There’s no record of payouts for nannies after the toddler years. Lots of medical bills. There was a live-in nurse. After Sally Winter turned four, the nurse’s paychecks stopped.“

„So the kid was sick,“ said Riker. „Maybe she died of natural causes. I can’t see any motive to kill Sally.“

„Then why would Lionel say she’d run away when she was ten years old? You know that was a lie. And why isn’t there a death certificate on file with the city?“

„Sally could’ve died somewhere else. Maybe it was a case of neglect. Uncle James wouldn’t want anyone to know he was an unfit guardian, not before he’d finished milking his cut from the trust fund.“ Riker turned to the open doorway to see Charles and Robin walking down the hall toward the reception room. A moment later, that distant door opened and closed. He guessed that they were making a deli run for food and wondered if they would remember to bring him a beer.

Mallory was sifting through the smallest carton, the one that had belonged to his grandfather. She began to pin the old man’s diagrams of the massacre to the wall.

„Hey,“ said Riker, „you don’t want Charles and Robin to see that stuff.“

„They won’t be back. They’ll be playing poker all night.“

Charles Butler entered his apartment behind Robin Duffy, who headed straight for the library, and now he heard Edward Slope call out, „It’s about time!“

Upon entering the book-lined room, he could hardly fail to notice an old gaming table surrounded by his new club chairs, and three of those chairs were filled by the charter members of the weekly floating poker game.

„Oh, it’s a beauty,“ said Robin, admiring the ornate carving and the touches of gilt and inlays.

Indeed, it was a good piece of furniture, in the sense of being solid and made of good hardwood, but it was too ornate, not the graceful antique of Charles’s dreams. This table had obviously been constructed in the twentieth century, and one might even call it gaudy.

„The provenance,“ said Edward, handing a sheet of paper to Robin, whose eyes went round. The doctor turned to Charles, saying, „It’s a gift from Mallory. It once belonged to Bugsy Siegel.“

A mobster and a brutal killer, but Charles let this slide, for it was so rare to receive a present from Mallory that did not require an electronics manual to operate.

„Oh, Bugsy.“ Robin Duffy ran one hand over the tabletop, caressing it with real love in his eyes. „Bugsy Siegel, the man who invented Las Vegas. It just doesn’t get any better than this.“

Indeed, there were smiles all around the room. Even the rabbi approved. And now Charles realized that the other table, the one linked to a former president, would never have made them so happy. Mallory had found the magic that he had been searching for, a history of smoke-filled-rooms and high-stakes players, a table with a provenance on the wild side.

He sat down in a chair and smiled at this company of friends. He had inherited all of them from Kathy Mallory’s foster father. Charles’s other bequest, a seat in this poker game, was also an ongoing treasure. But the game had represented so much more to the late Louis Markowitz, that crafty, manipulative good man – that stellar card shark.

Charles had heard all the players’ war stories of watching Kathy Mallory grow up in the Markowitz household, and he had heard all the theories for why Louis Markowitz had taken a young child to the weekly poker game. Edward Slope had once espoused the idea that Louis was teaching his semireformed street thief to steal in a more socially acceptable manner – rather than going straight for a victim’s wallet or ripping off cars. David Kaplan had been closest to the truth with the theory of playtime, for young Kathy had never had friends her own age. She had always frightened normal children.

But these three men had never understood how truly devious their late, great friend had been. The policeman’s profession was prone to sudden death, and Louis had been a farsighted man. He had forced these men to love his only child over the years when she was learning to cheat them and beat them all at cards.

And they loved her still.

Though she had long ago outgrown their company and deserted their game of penny-ante stakes and wild cards, these men would never desert Kathy Mallory. They were family now.

Canny Louis.

„Lionel and Cleo were in the park that day.“ Mallory had pinned up all the old diagrams of Winter House. „But Stick Man didn’t know they were missing. I think the original plan was to kill everyone in the house but the baby and Nedda. It had to look like a psycho on a killing spree instead of a hired murder.“

„But, as long as they had Nedda, why would they need the baby?“

„The draw on the fortune goes to Nedda and her siblings. That’s a lot of money to ride on the life of one child. Suppose they always planned to stash Nedda somewhere else?“

„Like an asylum?“

„Right. They can produce her if they have to. But, even if she dies in a hospital under an assumed name, the lawyers can still keep her alive on paper, and the money rolls on. But James Winter has to be established as the legal guardian of a surviving child. This was what I got from the DA’s office. They say the court would’ve assumed guardianship for a missing child, and the court could’ve declared Nedda dead after seven years. So this is the only way that James can get his share of the money. Even if he’d had the brains to contest the original will – “

„He would’ve been a murder suspect with a huge money motive,“ said Riker. „Okay, but Sally was a bad choice. The kid was sick.“

„She was a baby, no friends, no school connections. If Sally had been the only survivor, they probably would’ve replaced her with another kid when she died. I don’t think anyone minded that Cleo and Lionel weren’t in the house that day. That was an accidental bonus. Two spares.“

Nedda Winter carried a plate of sandwiches into the library and set them on the game table amid the beer bottles and ashtrays filled with smoking cigars. Charles held a chair for her. „You’ll play, of course.“

„I might watch for a while, but I’m not much good at card games.“

„Good.“ Edward Slope opened a fresh deck. „At last, Charles has someone he can beat at poker.“

„You’re one to talk,“ said Robin Duffy. „When Kathy was eleven years old, she cleaned you out once a week.“ He turned his wide smile on Nedda. „Poor litde kid. She used to list to one side with the weight of all of Edward’s money in her pockets. And Lou laughed so hard he cried.“

The doctor ignored this. „Charles, did you know that Nedda’s father saw the shoot-out between the cops and Two-Gun Crowly on West Ninetieth Street?“

„My father and thousands of other West Siders,“ said Nedda. „My grandfather was with him that day. He said the shoot-out went on for three hours. When Two-Gun Crowly gave up the fight, he still had a pistol stuffed in each sock.“

Rabbi Kaplan picked up the deck and dealt out the cards. „My father only took me to baseball games. I had no idea the Upper West Side could be so exciting.“

Nedda, Charles, Edward and Robin fell silent.

„What if the massacre started at the top of Winter House?“

„That’s not the way the cops figured it at the time.“ Riker stepped back from the cork wall to take in the reconstruction of his grandfather’s work. „But I think they got a lot of things wrong.“

He added more pages from the old man’s files. „Check this out. Granddad made these notes in an interview with the lead detective. This was right before Fitzgerald died of cancer. Now this was maybe ten, fifteen years after the murders. It helps if you know that Fitzgerald ruled out murder for hire. The lawyers told him that the uncle knew the terms of Edwina’s will twelve years before the massacre. James Winter always knew that he could never inherit. Well, that killed the only money motive. If there’s no adult who stands to gain, then who hired the hitman? That’s why the cops settled for a lunatic on a killing spree. Fitzgerald figured it this way. Stick Man starts on the first floor and works his way up. Then he runs out of steam when he gets to the nursery. Or maybe something scares him off before he can finish the job and kill the baby.“

„But your grandfather always figured it was a pro. Why?“

„Fitzgerald’s theory hung on what the lawyers said. They’re the ones who killed the money motive. But Granddad never trusted lawyers.“

„Nine people. That’s a lot of killing, a lot of risk. Maybe Stick Man wasn’t working alone. Three generations of hitmen. What if there was a fourth – an up-and-comer?“

„A fledgling killer?“

Most of the poker chips were in neat stacks in front of Nedda Winter. „This is so embarrassing.“

Her comment was met with a chorus of encouragement. The other players had been so eager to teach her the game that they had helped her to beat them at every hand. Eventually she did manage to lose all the money back to them, but she had to fight them for the privilege.

The telephone rang, and Nedda glanced at her watch. „I’ll get it. I’m sure it’s forme.“

Four gentlemen rose to their feet as she left the room.

David Kaplan turned to Charles. „She’s a charming woman. How did you meet?“

Charles made a slight stumble in his mind. So many confidences to keep. „She sat next to me at a dinner party.“ That was the truth, was it not? Well, no. And now, he could feel the heat rising to his face, and how would the rabbi read this sudden blush?

David Kaplan’s head tilted to one side. He must find it odd and disconcerting to catch a friend in a lie. His beard framed a sweet smile, and his eyes were both forgiving and more, telling his host that he could only believe the best of him. David, the master of cryptic logic, had apparently deduced that honor must lie in the direction of falsehood – and the new player was not what she seemed.

Nedda returned to the table, saying with regret, „I have a hired car waiting for me downstairs. I’ll have to say good night. And thank you all. This was the most fun I’ve had in years.“

„Send the car away,“ said Charles, rising from his chair. „I’ll take you home.“

„No, no. You stay right where you are. I’ll be fine. We always use this driver. My niece has a car service.“

„Then I can at least walk you down to the street. I insist.“

When the apartment door had closed behind them, Charles said, „Maybe it’s unwise right now. I mean – hashing this out with your brother and sister. After what you’ve been through in the past few days – “

„I should’ve done this the day I came home. Don’t worry about me.“

Charles opened the door to the waiting car and handed Nedda into the backseat. And then he gave her a set of his house keys. „Promise you’ll come back tonight – no matter how late.“

He watched the taillights of the car disappear as it rounded the corner onto Houston, then turned back to see Mallory in shadow, leaning against the wall of the building.

„This is getting out of hand, Charles. Suppose you gave your house keys to a mass murderer?“

„You don’t expect me to believe that,“ he said. „You don’t.“

„I know she’s killed before.“

„Self-defense,“ he said. „And that man was a serial killer.“

„Nedda didn’t know that. And he wasn’t holding a weapon when he died. Could you stab an unarmed man in the heart? Could you even imagine it? I don’t think you could ever kill another human being. You’re just not made that way.“ She followed him inside the building, close on his heels, saying, „What’s Nedda made of? Don’t you wonder? Imagine her sticking that ice pick into a man’s chest. She ‘d have to be fast – no hesitation, one clean strike. No fear.“

„That’s enough.“ He walked past the elevator and opened the door to the stairwell.

„And she did it in the dark.“ Mallory climbed the stairs behind him, chasing words with pictures she planted in his head. „He never saw her coming for him.“ She followed him through the stairwell door and down the hall to his apartment. „And what about that man in the park last night? What if she’d killed him, too? Would we still be talking about self-defense?“ They stopped outside his door, but the poisoning went on relentlessly. „When we found her in the park, she had an ice pick in her pocket. Remember that, Charles.“

How could he forget – ever?

„Nedda will always be welcome in my house.“

Mallory looked as if he had struck her. „And I’m not. I’m just annoying you.“

Oh, no, on the contrary. He could never encounter Mallory without feeling a sudden lightness of the head, a fullness of the heart and a gang of birds fluttering inside his rib cage. He reached out to touch her, but his hand dropped back to his side. Never did they truly connect, and they never would, for his nature had made him incapable of two things for a certainty: he could never kill a human being, and he could not tell this woman that he would love her until he died.

How sad was that?

The door to his apartment opened.

„Finally!“ A grinning Robin Duffy took Mallory by the arm and pulled her inside. „Edward’s winning streak is back. You have to stop him, Kathy. He’s murdering us.“

Lying on the floor, her head pressed to the wood, Bitty awakened to a shrill sound from the telephone receiver, an alarm to remind her that the phone was off the hook. Rags was running about in circles, shrieking to hold up his end of the conversation with this mechanical noise.

Bitty struggled to raise herself up to a sitting position, then cracked the bedroom door to listen for the sound of Aunt Nedda’s voice, but she was not there, not home yet. The other voices were growing more distant, fading off to another room with a door they could close for privacy.

Aunt Nedda, where are you?

Any more delay could cost dearly. If she closed her eyes one more time, she might never wake again.

Robin Duffy had found the only flaw in Mallory’s gift, a hole in one of the struts that branched out from the table’s pedestal. It had been drilled by the previous owner, a ship’s captain, so he could run a chain through the wood and secure the table in rough weather.

However, given the original owner, a renowned gangster, Robin had hopes of a more exciting explanation. His eyes were wide with great expectation. „Is that a bullet hole?“

„Yes,“ said Mallory, „that’s exactly what it is.“ She dealt the cards out all around. „And away we go. The name of the game is five card stud. No wild cards. No nickels and dimes in the pot. Sky’s the limit. This is not your grandmother’s poker game.“

Four men mentally fastened their seat belts.

She had to smile at Charles. He was looking down at the best hand he had ever held, and she knew he was pondering a problem of ethics, one he could not solve. If his cards had been dealt from the bottom of the deck, a little gift from herself, it would not be right to play the hand, and he should fold. What a gentleman.

It was too easy for her to read his thoughts.

Now he was worried. Since she knew he held a world-class hand, if he folded his cards instead of playing them, it would be like accusing her of cheating. Oh, but if he won and had to show his hand, then everyone would know she had cheated. The hand was that good.

She should know.

Kathy Mallory was not only a master of palming cards; she could also tie a fair Gordian knot. This one had been designed with no possibility of an honest resolution. He would have to settle for the least damage – just as she did every day.

Charles played the hand he was dealt. She knew he would. Fortunately for him, he could never run a bluff. The other players read victory all over his giveaway face and they folded. No one called him on his hand and asked to see his cards. Of course, she had predicted that outcome – just as he had. His winning pot was small, but so was his guilt.

Mallory fell a bit short of tradition by not taking all of the medical examiner’s money within half an hour of play. She had left him a short stack, and Edward Slope eyed his dwindled chips with ill-disguised dismay. She folded her own cards, and that seemed to give him a glimmer of hope. The doctor won this hand, but that was pure mercy on her part.

„I’ve got a problem,“ she said, addressing the doctor. „How does a man move through a mansion, killing floor by floor, stabbing nine people with an ice pick, and there’s not one scream to give him away?“

While Edward Slope was pondering this, Mallory watched the rabbi. David Kaplan had that look of trying to recall an elusive dream. The nightmare of the Winter House Massacre? And now he let it go and looked down at his cards. This settled her mind on the problem of the other players keeping her confidences.

The doctor sipped his beer, then leaned back in his chair. „If the murderer had chased his victims through the house, there would ‘ve been lots of noise. So, obviously, it didn’t happen that way. More than likely, the victims weren’t expecting to be stabbed.“

Like Nedda’s dead burglar. Are you listening, Charles?

Edward Slope studied the hand she had dealt him. „The first reaction would be stunned surprise. The heart is shredded, blood draining. Shock sets in. I’ll take two cards.“

She dealt them out, and they were good ones.

Happier now, the doctor continued. „Next, the sensation of cold is followed by sudden weakness throughout the body, then loss of consciousness. A quiet death.“

Charles would be wondering if Nedda’s burglar had died quietly. And now he must realize that she had never needed to ask these questions of the doctor. Who knew more about violent death than she did? Yes, at last, he understood that she was maligning Nedda Winter for his own sake.

Their eyes met across the table. Almost imperceptibly, he moved his head from side to side to tell her that this was not working.

The rabbi folded his cards, saying, „I’m out.“ He then went off to the kitchen in search of another cold beer.

Mallory leaned toward the medical examiner, saying, „So the hitman wasn’t a stranger to that family.“

„And that narrows it down,“ said Charles, „to a hundred gangland types who attended parties at Winter House.“

„Yeah,“ said Robin. „Nedda told us that Lucky Luciano came to dinner one night. Can you imagine that? But you can cross that bum off the list. His murders were messy.“

Mallory was thinking about a little boy, just four years old, and his drawing of a stick figure. She pictured a bit of blood and one tiny hole where the ice pick had pierced the paper and a child’s heart in one strike. There was only one scenario. In the moment before his death, the boy had been holding up that drawing, showing it to someone he knew, maybe someone he loved, saying a child’s ritual line, „Look what I did.“

The front windows were dark as Nedda climbed the stairs to the front door of Winter House.

Her hopes died.

Lionel and Cleo had no doubt bolted for the summer house in the Hamptons. There would be no family gathering, no reconciliation tonight.

She unlocked the door and opened it onto a dark foyer, calling out, „Bitty? Are you home?“

Upon crossing the threshold, she saw a dim light coming from the hallway that led to the kitchen, but the front room was pitch black. She was turning round with the intention of finding the wall switch for the chandelier when she heard the sound of footsteps rushing up behind her.

She could hear the voice of Uncle James coming from a long ways off and many years ago, yelling, „Nedda, drop the ice pick! Drop it now!“