Mallory's Oracle (12 page)

She picked up the receiver of the antique telephone.

Well, it was not altogether an antique anymore, was it?

He had been dismayed to find that she had rewired it and discarded the original base for one that accommodated a plug for an answering machine. And he only discovered the job when his incoming calls were ripped out of his mouthpiece and pulled into the desk drawer.

“Mallory and Butler.... Hello, Riker. Hold on a sec.” She had to open the drawer to put the phone on hold. And now they both looked down on the blinking light of four messages glowing inside the desk. If she was annoyed with him, it never showed as she walked back to her private office and pulled the door closed behind her.

He turned back to Henrietta. “Do you want me to speak to Edith?”

“No,” she said, a bit too quick, too final, and in the attitude of “absolutely not” as opposed to “no, I don't think so.”

 

“Mallory, where've you been all day? I musta called a hundred times.”

“Four times. Charles never looks for messages. He's pretending we don't have an answering machine.”

“I got something,” said Riker. “Gaynor and Cathery each have alibis for two of the murders, but together, they can't alibi all the murders.”

“So? I'm not big on conspiracy theories if that's where you're going with this.”

“Wait. Cathery can alibi his grandmother's murder, and Gaynor can alibi his aunt's murder—”

“Riker, I saw that movie too. It doesn't fit, not if Markowitz knew who the killer was. If the old man figured two suspects, he wouldn't have done the surveillance by himself. How could he?”

“You won't like the answer to that one, kid.”

“Give.”

“Coffey doesn't think Markowitz worked it out. He figures the perp suckered Markowitz. The old man got killed because he didn't know who it was, never saw it coming.”

“Oh, great detective work. Coffey was the one who figured Whitman for a snatch when a half-bright chimp could have told him she was meeting the perp at the scene.”

“Hey, kid. This is Riker here. I'm on your side, remember?

“Anything turn up on the BDA in Markowitz's calendar?”

“Naw,” said Riker. “Coffey's off that track. I'd do it on my own, but I got no leads. I've been through the old house in Brooklyn looking through his stuff. Nothing in the credit card bills or the checkbook, but who knows. That little den of his looks just like his office. Easy to miss something in a mess like that. Maybe if you went through it? The door seals can come off anytime you want.”

“Yeah, first chance I get.”

When she hung up the phone, the first computer in the row of three was still screening the file on the old recluse in 3B. Charles had contributed very little information on Edith Candle in the past two weeks. He was a great respecter of privacy, and she had been unable to break him of this good quality.

Mallory looked up to the ceiling. She felt the old woman's presence before she heard the scrape of chair legs on the bare floorboards overhead. A blinking red light on the third terminal told her that Edith Candle was active again, powering up her computer and sending something out over the modem, that box which allowed the old woman to wander the electronic net from New York to the Tokyo Exchange and back again in seconds only.

Mallory picked up her test set, a black rotary dial with a handgrip. She dialed a number the telephone company used for maintenance checks as she rolled her chair over to the third terminal. Through the wires of the phone company, which led into Candle's modem, Mallory climbed up into the computer one floor above her head and watched the screen that Candle was accessing in apartment 3B. The old woman wasn't following the stock exchange figures tonight. She had patched into a small and remote commercial information network and was requesting a credit check. This J. S. Rathbone must be another wealthy spook groupie. Mallory turned back to the third screen and watched the names of stock issues scrolling by as the credit-check service fed Rathbone's stock portfolio into Candle's computer in the apartment upstairs.

So far, none of the stock activity had shown up in mergers or hostile takeovers. However, Candle had remarkable luck in selling off stocks just prior to devastating drops in value. One of these drops had been brought on by the recall of a defective and dangerous product. Candle had sold her stock just prior to the information being made public. And she also had a streak of luck in making stock purchases before sudden booms in product development—also non-public information. One such purchase had resulted in stock prices doubling. Scores of these instances put Candle in the realm of world-class fortune-telling or insider trading. But there was no hard evidence. No single transaction matched the huge profits on the merger of Pearl Whitman's company.

Mallory switched on the second computer and flew into cyberspace. With the tap of a key, she landed inside the Washington, D.C., data base of the Securities and Exchange Commission. No recent filings on stock activity would coincide with Candle's recent purchases, but there was a strong link to the Todd and Remmy merger of four years ago. This deal was well inside the statute of limitations, but the SEC seemed to have lost interest in Candle since the Whitman Chemicals merger in the early 1980s. Perhaps they were shy of the crystal ball defense.

Scanning the profiteer list of the Todd and Remmy merger, she found a familiar name from Gramercy Park, Estelle Gaynor, and a footnote that tied her to an old investigation. She neatly copied the block of type with five taps of the keys and shifted it onto a floppy disk. Now she patched in Candle's own credit check from the same firm that was feeding the old lady.

Apparently, Edith Candle was a longtime subscriber to this credit-check network, and when one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food. Mallory had always avoided this by never paying for the networks she hacked into. Candle had been less prudent. The file was bare-bones traces of financial activity. With a quick shuffle of files, she added these new data to the old U.S. Attorney's file on the Securities and Exchange Commission action, the same document that had led her into partnership with Charles and this window on the old woman up the stairs in 3B.

Perhaps an hour had passed before she heard the door buzzer again and sounds of the door opening and closing, then the indistinct voices in conversation. She was a few minutes more putting the file on 3B in order before she closed it.

When she walked back to the reception area, Henrietta Ramsharan was gone, and the pinch-faced woman from Gramercy Park was sitting in front of Charles's desk.

“She's the one,” said the woman in a shrill voice, waving the business card in Mallory's direction. “Now don't tell me you don't do this sort of thing, like I've asked you to do something filthy, like a divorce case or something. One can carry discretion too far.”

Charles had a trapped look about him as he slouched low in the chair behind the desk.

Mallory sat down in a Queen Anne chair to one side of the desk. “My partner handles a different kind of clientele. He deals with more unusual problems.”

Charles looked at her in an openly suspicious way. His face couldn't hide a thought.

To Mrs. Pickering he said, “My usual clients are research institutes, universities, the occasional government commission. I explore unusual gifts, talents, different modes of intelligence. I also develop ways of applying these gifts to occupations or research projects. It's my partner here who does the investigative work.” He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. “Mrs. Pickering was wondering what business you had in Gramercy Park.”

He was smiling but hardly meaning it.

“Client confidentiality,” said Mallory to Mrs. Pickering, smiling and meaning it not at all.

“Oh, back to discretion again. Why won't you take my case?”

“Did I say I wouldn't?”

“He did.”

Charles leaned back in his chair and waved one hand with the attitude of ‘oh, please.' “Mrs. Pickering wants us to expose her mother's pet medium as a fraud.”

Mallory smiled with meaning this time. “Why not? Consider her a woman with fraudulent gifts. That puts it right in your field, Charles. Just something new and different, that's all.”

“Hardly new,” said Charles. “It wouldn't be the first time I had a medium for a test subject. But I look on them as empathics. Some of them really are gifted.”

Mrs. Pickering was rising off her chair, launching toward the ceiling. “This woman is a money-grubbing fraud!” Unspoken were the words ‘you fool.' She settled back to earth and chair again, as though the exertion of accusation was simply too much for her. “You're trying to tell me this fraud can contact my dead father?”

“I'm not so sure a gifted medium gets on all that well with the dead,” said Charles. “But she may be quite good at reading the living. These people have more access to their intuition than most. They take in all the details of a human being. They analyze these details and spit them out in reorganized information which the subject can't believe a stranger could possess. It's nearly magic.”

But Mrs. Pickering was a typical, unmagical New Yorker. Her expression was dubious, bordering on ‘you imbecile,' and this was not lost on Charles. Mallory had noticed that very little got by him, if anything at all.

“Take you, for example,” said Charles. “You're recently divorced, educated at good schools. You don't sleep well, though you take prescribed medication, and sometimes you feel depression without apparent cause.”

The woman was nodding, unconscious of the gesture, eyes locking on Charles in rapt attention. Mallory noted the faint white line where the wedding ring had been. The education was in the woman's voice, and fit well with the background of Gramercy Park. The dark, bruised flesh under the eyes showed through her makeup, but only on close inspection. The expertise of concealment suggested the habitual loss of sleep frequently accompanied by the habitual drugs of the insomniac. And with a pinched, angry face like that, she was bound to be unhappy.

“You have your hair done every two weeks,” said Charles.

That one was easy, thought Mallory. The roots would have to be gray; there were none showing.

“And you studied ballet in your childhood and teenage years.”

Where was he getting that? Maybe she had walked in on her toes.

“You favor auctions at Christie's over Sothebys.”

But now she took in the plethora of rings on the woman's hands. Antique settings all. Charles's freakish memory was probably calling up auction catalogs.

“You have a dog.”

How did he know that wasn't cat hair on her dress? Oh, wait. That magnificent nose of his. It was a drizzly evening, and Pickering had probably walked the dog before she came. Wet fur. Cats were not walked in the rain.

“You dressed in a hurry.”

Mallory found no flaws in the woman's fashionable outfit until she reached the tag showing at the nape of the neck, and just a smudge of unblended rouge on one cheek. A vain woman who doesn't scrutinize the mirror to death before she walks out the door? That was a hurry and a half.

“There are no large events in your own life these days,” said Charles. “In fact, your days have a maddening sameness to them, and you're looking ahead to an endless succession of days like these. Your mother's duplicity annoys you, maybe angers you, but your own life saddens you and frightens you.... But all this is very crude. A gifted medium could look into your feelings, note the waver of your eyes when you insisted this was for your mother's good. A gifted medium might have taken the fact that you showed anger, not concern, and done much more with that than I could.”

Than you would,
Mallory corrected him silently. Charles always behaved like a gentleman. She counted on that and and used it against him every chance she got. It was the only edge she had on his genius IQ. But she would have to be sharper from now on. She had never planned to drag Charles into something dangerous. Use him, sure, but harm him, no. That might be unavoidable if she telegraphed her intentions by taking this case which he had just reduced to ashes.

However, the Pickering woman was offering her access to Gramercy Park and that stratum of old money. It was a better entrée than she could have hoped for. And then there was the fascinating giantess to consider.

“We'll take the case,” said Mallory, all things considered at lightning speed. “That's fifteen hundred up front, and we'll bill time and expenses against the retainer.”

Mrs. Pickering sat erect in her chair, not shrinking back or shrinking down, and yet she no longer seemed to take up the same space in this room. The woman was subdued to a tired nod as she fumbled in her purse for her checkbook. So Mrs. Pickering was all facade, and not the makings of the blue-ribbon bitch Mallory had first taken her for.

“My mother's name is Fabia Penworth,” she said as she signed the check with the weak stroke of a gold pen and then drew a small white card from her purse. “This is her address.”

Mallory accepted the check and the card. She gave the woman her hand to say that a deal was done, a gesture any stranger might have mistaken for warmth. “Thank you, Mrs. Pickering.”

Mrs. Pickering smiled in near shyness, stripped now to the mere human bones of a middle-aged matron out of her depth.

“Call me Marion, dear. And you are ... ?”

“Mallory.”

Mrs. Pickering rose from her chair and walked to the door with a slow, deep grace. And now Mallory guessed the ballet background. Mrs. Pickering's toes were turned out, and her carriage came from training. Her mood should have bowed her head or slumped her shoulders, had not some fiend of a dancing master with a big staff beaten that body language out of her at an early age. A similar experiment had failed with Mallory.