Mallory's Oracle (18 page)

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 teakettle, 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 that 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 that 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 toward 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 wove 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 the 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 Edith's 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 coffeemaker, 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 coffeemaker 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, there 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 that 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.”