Mallory's Oracle (39 page)

She turned off the flashlight and watched in silence as Edith approached Gaynor's body. The old woman was holding the Long Colt that was Mallory's own. Mallory pulled back behind the trunk which held Max's head.

Edith turned slowly, eyes searching, the gun barrel following the sights of her eyes. Mallory silently circled a stack of boxes and came up behind her, grabbing the old woman's wrist with enough force to leave prints on the flesh. She twisted the gun from Edith's hand with one swift motion.

Edith gasped, turning to face Mallory, her lined face illuminated by the poor light of the back window. The old woman smiled too quickly, too wide.

“Oh, Kathy, thank God. I thought you were dead. Oh, thank God.”

“Yeah, right.”

Mallory clicked on the flashlight and knelt down by Gaynor's body, wholly dissatisfied with the man's continued breathing. His head had struck the wall. He was unconscious but not dead, and the wound was not life-threatening.

And a gun was in her hand.

“Kill him,” said Edith, standing over Gaynor. Kneeling down now, coming closer, her lips near to Mallory's ear, “Finish it,” she whispered softly, her magnified blue eyes growing even wider. “No one will know.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you, Edith?”

Markowitz would not have liked that at all.

Mallory stared at Gaynor. Markowitz's killer was in her hands. The rain ran into her eyes as she turned to Edith. “I don't suppose I could trust you to go upstairs and call the ambulance.... No, I suppose not.” She picked up the fallen snub-nose revolver. Plastic still clung to the metal by a fusion of heat. Gaynor had not fired fast enough. There was one bullet left in the chamber. She pulled the plastic loose and handed the gun to Edith, using two fingers on the rough side-grip of the handle. The old woman looked down on the weapon in her hand, eyes glistening.

Mallory checked Gaynor's pulse and then pulled back the lid of one eye. He showed no signs of coming around. “I'm going for the ambulance. I don't think you'll need to use the gun.”

She wadded up the plastic bag, which had fallen away from the gun, and slipped it under her jacket.

“I understand,” said Edith, nodding slowly. “I do understand.” She was smiling as Mallory turned her back and headed for the way out.

After passing through the cellar doorway, she reached up to turn the overhead light bulb in its socket. When she was standing in the light again, she thought to turn around, to go back and undo this thing. She lost this thought as she stared up the winding metal of the staircase and into the eyes of Jack Coffey standing on the level above her. Beyond Coffey, a uniformed officer was motioning Henrietta Ramsharan back into the hallway and closing the door.

“Mallory?” Coffey was staring from the blackened hole in her shirt to the gun dangling from her hand. Now he looked into her eyes and one hand tightened on the railing and there it froze.

She continued to hold him, to pin him to the landing with her eyes. Only a second longer.

A gunshot exploded in the room behind her.

Jack Coffey and the uniformed officer were pounding down the staircase, guns drawn, pushing past her on the way through the cellar door.

Mallory slumped against the wall of the stairwell. Later, she would have trouble remembering how much of this she had planned.

Yeah, right.

She started up the steep stairs. First her mind stumbled and then her feet. Yet she did not pick her way more carefully as she continued up and up. She was in that moment when the guts flutter and rise, the heart pounds, the brain waffles between belief and disbelief, and she did not care if she fell, nor how far.

Mrs. Ortega scanned the hospital room with the all-encompassing eye of a career cleaning woman as she settled the pink geraniums into an empty water glass on the bedside table. She pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed and as far from Mallory as she could get.

“That was thoughtful of you,” said Charles. “They're lovely flowers.”

“They're plastic,” said Mrs. Ortega. “They live longer.”

Charles gave her his widest, looniest smile and the legs of her chair scraped away from him. He turned his smile on Mallory who seemed less unnerved by lunacy.

“So, I'm assuming it was a traffic accident,” said Charles. “How many accidents around the house could lodge a piece of metal so close to the heart? Am I right?”

Mrs. Ortega shifted in her chair and rolled her eyes.

“Sounds reasonable,” said Mallory.

“You're not even going to give me a hint?”

“Dr. Ramsharan said it would be better if the events came back naturally. She says you may never get it all back. A lot of trauma victims never recall the last fifteen minutes of consciousness.”

“And how many trauma victims have policemen posted outside the hospital room door?”

“You're a material witness in the insider trading scam.”

“A witness? All the data I had was pulled off your computer.”

“Memory can come back too fast, Charles. Take it easy. The SEC investigator is coming by for a statement this afternoon. If you can't remember where you got the files, that would be okay with me.”

“Understood. But will you at least tell me what's been going on in the world these past two weeks? They won't let me read the newspaper or watch television.”

“We locked up the case on the insider trading racket. The evidence is so tight, most of them are plea-bargaining. There's only a few holdouts for the grand jury.”

“And what about Edith? Did she—”

“She made bail,” said Mrs. Ortega helpfully.

“What?”

Mrs. Ortega fell silent under the icy hex of Mallory's eyes.

“People are climbing all over themselves to turn in their friends and relatives,” said Mallory. “Edith didn't jump on the wagon in time to get immunity for testimony.”

Mrs. Ortega looked at the floor as the headline murder charge slid under the carpet.

“What will they do with her?”

“I'm told she has the best lawyer money can buy. You're tired, Charles. We'll be leaving now. I'll be back this evening with your journals.”

Mallory stood up and glanced at Mrs. Ortega. The cleaning woman jumped up from her chair and followed Mallory out of the room and into the long white corridor. She hurried along on her shorter legs to catch up with Mallory. Not that she wanted to be this near a cop, particularly not this cop, but there was something she had to know.

“Why can't he remember getting shot? How does a person forget a thing like that? If I'd been shot, I would remember a thing like that.”

“Charles has soft spots and you don't,” said Mallory. “You're tougher than he is.”

Mrs. Ortega's dark head raised up half an inch, and she remained half an inch taller as she kept pace with Mallory's long stride.

“It's better this way,” said Mallory. “The soft people always prefer the accident. They never like the version where they can be deliberately ripped open with bullets fired at ninety miles a second.”

“But what happens when he reads a newspaper and finds out who shot him?”

“I'm taking him away for a few months, maybe a long cruise. While we're gone, the grand jury will convene and indict, and there'll be a plea bargain to waive the trial for a lesser sentence. The whole thing will be over before we get back. Maybe I'll tell him then.”

Mrs. Ortega slowed her steps and watched Mallory walk on alone. As Mallory receded in the distance of the empty corridor, she seemed to grow larger instead of smaller.

“And that one's another Martian,” said Mrs. Ortega.

 

“Kathy, you can't leave.”

“Mallory, call me Mallory.”

Edith Candle stood at her back as Mallory unfurled the white sheet and watched it settle as a ghost with the outline of the couch. The room was filled with such ghosts. Dust covers lay across each piece of furniture in Charles's apartment.

“The grand jury is meeting tomorrow,” said Edith. “You have to testify for me.”

“I haven't been asked.”

Mallory walked into the kitchen. Edith followed close behind, her face wrinkled into anxious knots. Mallory opened the refrigerator. Mrs. Ortega had cleaned it out. Good. Nothing left to spoil.

“You see, Edith, I was unable to give a coherent statement to the police or the district attorney. Whenever they tried to talk to me, I would begin to cry. After a while, they decided I was bad witness material. Your own attorney came to the same conclusion.”

“But I killed him to save you. You saw the writing on the wall. You have to tell them about it.”

“I don't believe the grand jury is allowed to hear occult evidence. They only get the solid, worldly stuff to work with. The bullet in Gaynor's shoulder came from my gun, the same gun they pried out of my hand while I was in shock. The bullet that killed him came from the unregistered gun in your possession. And so did the bullets they took out of Charles and the bullet lodged in my vest.”

“Herbert's gun. But he won't—”

“Given your gift, I'm surprised you didn't foresee that Herbert would never own up to an illegally purchased gun. And Henrietta never saw the gun, did she? Well, there's Martin. But I imagine the district attorney got rather tired of trying to get three words out of Martin.”

“They're going after a first-degree murder indictment and two counts of attempted murder. You know Gaynor was the killer. You know I couldn't have shot you or Charles. Gaynor had the gun in his hand. You saw it.”

“I came from darkness into blinding light, and I don't remember what happened after I was shot. I'm told traumatic shock can do that. Gaynor wasn't holding a weapon when Coffey found him. You were. His hands had no trace of residue from a gun. Yours did.”

No one had noticed the detail of the plastic bag which had been carried out of the cellar before the final shot, the plastic bag bearing prints and residue. Perhaps it had fallen in the street as they were loading her into the ambulance with Charles.

“You know Gaynor was the murderer. You have to tell them I shot in fear for my life.”

“That's a tough one, Edith. According to the bullet trajectories for the entry wound, you shot him in the head at close range and while he was lying on the ground.”

“He was a murderer!” Edith's voice was climbing to the high notes where fear was.

“The law doesn't recognize him as a murderer,” said Mallory as she opened her notebook and jotted a memo to cancel Charles's newspaper subscription. “There was no evidence against him. But they did find those computer printouts with insider-trading activity on Charles's body—everything they needed to connect you to Gaynor's aunt. And then there's the note they found in Gaynor's pocket—your invitation. It doesn't look good for you, Edith.”

“Help me! Do you want to see me spend the rest of my life in prison?”

Mallory smiled, and psychic Edith did not understand the meaning of it and even began to take heart from this sign of humanity in Mallory.

“Edith, there's something I've always wanted to ask you. When your husband Max was in the water tank, who ordered the busboy to break the glass, the glass that severed every artery and bled him to death? I found that busboy in a retirement home upstate. It took me a long time to hunt him down. His memory of the night was very clear. It was the biggest event in his entire life. He said he didn't see the face of the person who called out the order, but it was a woman's voice, and a woman who put the fire axe into his hand.”

Edith said nothing, and the last loose end was tied by silence.

“There's no justice, Edith, but it is a balanced universe after all.”

“You have to help me. You're a civilized woman.”

“I am?”

 

A carton of Charles's journals stood on the sidewalk by her feet. Her hand was rising to flag a passing cab when a familiar face caught her attention by the light of a street-lamp.

She dropped coins into the newspaper dispenser, plucked out a paper and looked into the eyes of Maximilian Candle. It was an old photo of Charles's cousin in his prime. The front-page article spoke of an overdue tribute to a master. Celebrity magicians from round the world planned to recreate his old routines for a charity event. Max was a headliner once more.

She found a larger photograph on the inside page, with a description of Max's magnificent funeral of thirty years ago. In the foreground of the photo, she could pick out the little figure of a child with a large nose, the small version of Charles.

When Markowitz died, the account of his less spectacular, unmagical funeral had been buried on page 15. That small column of type had been accompanied by a photograph of herself, her face dry of any of the normal signs of grief.

Of all the tears she had recently cried for Coffey who knew her better than to believe in them, and all the tears she cried for the more easily gulled district attorney who knew her not, not one drop had been the genuine article. Conversely and perversely, on principle, she had never shed one false drop for Markowitz on that day when they laid his coffin in the ground. None of the words spoken over the grave had reached her when the rabbi cast his eyes up to the sky where the God of Sunday school was hiding out, laying low, behaving like a good New Yorker who didn't want to get involved.

She had kept the integrity of the hard case, one who believed that a stiff was a stiff and dead was dead, a dedicated unbeliever in the flight of souls.