Mallory's Oracle (17 page)

In a fluid, old-fashioned script, one old woman berated herself for all the irrational questions asked just to keep conversation going, to prevent the rare visit from ending all too soon. And there were sometimes tear-blind rages for the lack of understanding, the inability to communicate with a generation she had nothing in common with. The crying jags, the terrible giving in to the futility of putting up any fight. The anger at being treated as a child—as though crying robbed her of her maturity. The frustration of misunderstandings that came about because the young only half listened and never did grasp the simplest fact that arthritic hands couldn't open childproof caps. The common thread that ran through the women's lives was the need to be touched.

Samantha Siddon had that need. The page open before him was the last entry in the diary of the fourth victim, dated one year ago:

He left the light burning when he walked out of the office and moved down the hall to the incident room where they kept all the things Riker had retrieved from Mallory and all the physical evidence. It was a chaos of bloody carnage in full-color prints and bits of paper that must somehow chain together. Too many clues, Markowitz had said. And now there were too many suspects. Two of them could be working in tandem. The Cathery boy, who fit the FBI profile, was just too perfect in every respect but motive. Jonathan Gaynor, the sociology professor, had inherited the largest fortune of all. Margot Siddon was the neediest heir.

Markowitz and his damn money motives. Ah, but the old man had something. This killer was a sick bastard, no doubt about it, but not crazy. Markowitz had tipped to something. Why hadn't the old man given him a sporting chance, just a note in the dust, any damn thing at all.

 

“No, nothing new on my end. Thanks for calling, Riker. Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

Nothing new? Well, she was still alive. That hadn't changed.

Mallory put down the telephone and walked into the den. She pinned her last surveillance notes on Gaynor to the wall. So the fourth victim had gone down between noon and two. With the best transportation, all the right connections of subway cars or traffic lights, it would take nearly an hour to make the round trip from the edge of Harlem to Gramercy Park if she only threw in a few minutes to do murder. Except for the hours of his student interviews, he had not been out of her sight for that length of time. The hall was the only exit from his office. Could Gaynor have slipped by? As Mrs. Pickering had pointed out, surveillance was not her forte. She had wanted it to be Gaynor. It would have fit so nicely.

Once, Markowitz had caught her cutting the pieces of a picture puzzle to make them fit. ‘Kathy,' he said, in the early days when he was still allowed to call her that, ‘you can cheat the pieces to fit, but they won't show you the real picture. This is life's way of getting even with you, kid.'

She put the Gaynor notes off to one side of the board with the long shots of Henry Cathery playing chess in the park.

She needed a new best suspect and a new angle. She stared at Markowitz's pocket calendar. Suppose he had never made it to the BDA appointment that Tuesday night? He hadn't been seen since Tuesday morning. Markowitz hadn't gone to the Thursday night poker game the previous week. What if he also missed the Tuesday appointment in that week before he died? What had he been doing with his nights?

If Markowitz had figured it out, it had to be linked to one of the first two murders. Or had he worked out a connection to the third one? What had he seen that she could not see?

She loaded the slide carousel and sat watching the shots of Markowitz killed again and again, melding into shots of the first two murders, and finally her own shots of Gaynor and Cathery and the magic show of the medium, minion and baggage emerging from the yellow cab. ‘Pick up all the oddball things you can find,' Markowitz had told her in her first year in crimes analysis. ‘Never throw anything away, kid.'

‘Don't call me kid,' she had shot back. And it was always
Mallory
after that. It had cost him something to call her Mallory after all the years she had been Kathy to him, as though he'd never had a hand in raising her.

She watched the slides, lights playing on her face as the images changed quickly. What would the old man make of all this? Well, first he would say she was leaving tracks, big messy ones. Markowitz the dancing fool would never do that.

The slide carousel looped back to the first shot of Markowitz lying in his own blood. She no longer took pride in the fact that she never cried. Dry eyes closed tightly as she switched off the projector and sat alone in the dark.

 

The new order she had created for him permeated his entire life these days, extending even into the office kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to gleaming metal shelves which Mallory had stocked with ample makings and condiments for every kind of sandwich known to God and Charles Butler.

It was an odd moment to realize how deep his feeling did go, as he was gathering ham and pickles, mustard and mayonnaise. Thieving, amoral liar that she was, he knew with a terrible finality that he would love Kathleen Mallory till he died. Where was the cheddar cheese? And it would always be the one-sided affair of a solitary man with a ridiculous face.

His eyes avoided the expanse of yellow wall above the stove as he lit the burner and set the teakettle over the flame.

He regretted the choice of yellow paint for the kitchen. It had been an impulse decision. Like most people, he had believed yellow to be a cheerful, happy color. Too late, he had realized his mistake and called up an item on the subject of color, mentally projecting a page from an old science journal directly onto the white refrigerator door. The article had agreed with his own feeling. Yellow made people jittery.

But even if the walls had been the calming pink of drunk-tank experiments listed in the following paragraph, it might not have had any effect on his state of mind this late evening.

He slathered mayonnaise on rye bread and wondered what went on in Gramercy Park. Who was she watching, and who might be watching her? Scenarios were growing in his brain like cancers. He laid down three slices of ham and wondered about the gun she carried every day. And then there was Herbert's gun to worry about. And what had Edith to do with this?

He added on a generous slab of yellow cheese.

The teakettle screamed.

“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 the 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 midgulp. “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 shot of the Cathery killing in the park. It 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 cabdriver. “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 that had his full attention.

“I'm meeting her tomorrow at a séance,” 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.” Riker pulled a videotape from his jacket pocket. “You wanna see the latest interview? I got her on tape.”