Mallory's Oracle (8 page)

The giantess lit a black cheroot and called to the little boy, who moved toward her, walking as though his feet weighed twenty pounds, each one. The boy's hands hung at his sides, and his head lolled on his chest. What was wrong with him?

The giantess headed for the door to the apartment building. Beneath the long bright print of the dress, her impossibly tiny feet moved quickly along the sidewalk. The woman spoke Spanish to the cabby, French to the boy, and then chattered with the doorman in English. The babble ceased abruptly behind the glass door.

The warm sun on Mallory's face was suddenly blocked by shadow.

“Officer, I want you to arrest that person!”

What? Oh Christ, where had this woman come from?

Mallory looked up through the open car window at a pinch-faced matron in her middle fifties. The woman's hair was dark brown and unnatural for the lack of white strands to go with the sagging jowls and the puffy, lined eyes. The linen suit was Lord & Taylor, and the pearls were real.

“I said, I want that person arrested. Now!”

The woman pointed to the door which had enveloped the small troop of woman, boy and dog.

“Go get her,” said the well-dressed matron in an authoritative voice accustomed to charging vicious dogs to eat delivery boys.

“I'm not a cop, lady.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

“Lady, I'm—”

“I did wonder at first. Your car used to be so neat. But those are take-out containers on the back seat, aren't they?”

Mallory turned around to look at the seat behind her. Newspapers and sandwich wrappers mingled with notebooks and cardboard deli containers, straws and sugar cubes, catsup and mustard packets, empty cartridge boxes and white plastic bags with the logo of the drugstore where she bought her film. A half-eaten sandwich showed dully through a layer of wax paper. How had it happened? she wondered, as if she had lost the memory of filling her car with the trash of the typical stakeout vehicle.

Why hadn't she just painted a damn sign on the side of the car? If this ever got back to Jack Coffey, he'd laugh his ass off. And then he'd change her compassionate leave status to a full suspension without pay, without badge and gun.

“I'm not a cop.”

“And all those coffee cups. And your car is tan, isn't it? You're a cop, and if you don't arrest that woman, I'm going to report you. I know Commissioner Beale very well. We have the same dentist.”

“I'm not a cop.”

“So you haven't been on stakeout every day this week and last week, too?”

“I'm a private cop.”

“Pardon?”

Mallory handed her a business card. “See? Not a real cop. The commissioner wouldn't like it if I arrested somebody.”

The woman stared at the card, and then her mouth hurried over to one side of her face in the slant line of the skeptic as she read the lines of maroon print. “Discreet investigations? You call this discreet?”

Jonathan Gaynor, nephew of the late Estelle Gaynor, had just stepped out onto the sidewalk. Mallory switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. He had changed his clothes and donned a baseball cap, but from any distance, she could pick him out by the body language. He had the long-legged, no-bones gait of a scarecrow, and as he moved on down the sidewalk, he seemed blown along by the wind.

He was awkward but not unattractive. She favored full beards and dark hair, and she would have found the lean, ruddy face very appealing if not for the possibility that Gaynor had gutted her old man and left him to die alone.

Gaynor waved down a cab and Mallory rolled.

She could see the pinch-faced matron in her rearview mirror, waving the business card like a small warning flag.

Rabbi David Kaplan struggled with the legs of the card table. They were supposed to unfold from the table top, but perversely, they would not.

“My wife usually does this. She wasn't expecting anyone to come.”

“Good thing I brought the beer,” said Dr. Edward Slope. “Anything in the fridge?”

It would have been Louis Markowitz's turn to bring the sandwiches tonight. The doctor's own wife, Donna, had set that policy, saying, ‘Don't you expect Anna to cook for you,' knowing that Anna would never have settled for cold sandwiches. It would have been a spread worthy of the Second Coming.

“I've lived with that woman for thirty-five years,” said the rabbi, “and never have I seen an empty refrigerator. That's the least of my worries.” One leg of the table dropped down, but he had no way to know he had accidentally moved the latch that held it in place. When his wife did this, it took three seconds. He supposed she just willed it to unfold itself and stand up on four legs. And for all he knew, it walked to the center of the room of its own accord.

Slope wandered into the kitchen to stand at the open door of the refrigerator. Louis Markowitz's refrigerator had been much like this one, as he recalled. Not so long ago, Louis's shelves had been filled with real food, built from a woman's blueprint of shopping lists and recipes, the makings of meals past and meals to come, warm colors of fruit and cool green vegetables, condiments and mysterious unlabeled jars of liquids. When the last woman had gone from Louis's house, the refrigerator had changed its character, becoming shabby in its accumulation of deli bags and frozen dinners. Everything to the rear of the shelves had resembled small furry animals which had sickened and then crawled back there to die.

Now Slope stared at Anna Kaplan's well-stocked shelves. Food is love, said this refrigerator.

He was assessing bowls and pots and checking under the lids of Tupperware when the doorbell rang. The new arrival could only be Robin Duffy. The lawyer had a hearty voice, usually upbeat. Tonight, it sounded through the walls like a mourning bell in the low octaves. Robin had known Louis Markowitz for many years, and he would be a long time getting over the death.

Dr. Slope added mustard to the tray.

Now they were three.

Two weeks had passed since the funeral. Tonight, by some connectedness of spirit, the three of them had gathered together in this place where the fourth player, Louis Markowitz, had been loved by a close circle of men.

Slope clutched a Tupperware container to his chest and made the contorted face of a man who would rather not cry. He set the plastic container on the tray. What was missing? he wondered as he picked up the tray. When the bell rang again, announcing a fourth person, the tray fell from his hands.

He sank to the floor and slowly reached out for the heavy mustard jar, sturdy thing, unbroken. He crawled about the tiles, blindly groping for each dropped item, finding the butter and the knife with his eyes screwed shut, watertight.

When he was again in full possession of everything he had lost, he carried the tray down the narrow hall and into the rabbi's den, which was lined with four walls of books and two old friends, and one very large stranger, the fourth man, who was unfolding the last leg of the card table. He was well over six feet but nonthreatening in his size, perhaps because his face was so wonderfully appealing. What a nose. And those eyes. Even with the heavy eyelids, the irises were so small they left a generous margin of white on all sides, giving him the look of wide-eyed astonishment at just everything in the world.

Slope liked this man immediately. He looked at the faces of his friends, and like himself, they were unconsciously, accidentally smiling.

“Pull up a chair, Mr. Butler.”

“Charles.”

“Edward.”

“Let me give you the ground rules, Charles,” said Robin Duffy, a small and compact bulldog of a man introduced as Louis's lawyer and neighbor of twenty years.

“Louis explained the rules to him,” said Rabbi Kaplan, pulling his own chair up to the table. “Charles came with twelve pounds of nickel and dime rolls.”

The strained silence was broken by Robin Duffy. “I like a man who comes prepared to lose big.”

“So Louis invited you to join the game?” Slope dealt out the cards, and immediately went to work on building a pastrami sandwich.

“I inherited his chair.” Charles eyed the tray of sandwich makings with the discrimination of a connoisseur, and passed over the cheddar cheese for the Swiss, so as not to overpower the more delicate slices of cold chicken. He pulled the letter out of his jacket pocket and exchanged it for the jar of mayonnaise in Slope's hand.

The doctor stared down at the handwriting that had become so familiar to him over his years with the medical examiner's office. Louis's friend was pointing to the third paragraph, which indeed spelled out a legacy. The letter was silently passed from man to man as the dealt cards lay where they landed. It seemed Louis's friend had been left more than the chair.

“Well, that fits,” said Duffy when he folded the letter and handed it back across the table. “I always figured the poker game was just a front for raising Kathy.” He popped the cap from a bottle of beer and picked up his cards. “Did Lou ever tell you where he found her?”

“No. No, he didn't.”

“She was maybe eleven. He caught the little brat breaking into a Jag. Well, he's holding her out by the collar of her jacket, and she's swinging away, little fists pounding the crap out of air. So it was take the kid home with him, or spend what's left of the wife's birthday hassling with Juvenile Hall.”

“But Helen didn't understand,” said Slope, picking up his cards. “She thought Kathy was a present. She wouldn't let go of the kid for twelve years.”

Charles smiled down at a clear space on the table where his photographic memory projected the pages of Hoyle which dealt with the rules of poker, a game he had never played. Nowhere in the rules did it list doomsday stud with deuces wild. “Louis must have been pleased that she turned out so well, becoming a policewoman and all.”

The other three men looked up from their cards, their faces all asking the same silent question: ‘Are you nuts?'

“Helen Markowitz did teach Kathy table manners.” Duffy examined the card which had been laid down faceup. “I'll bet a nickel. But the kid never really changed. She likes being a cop 'cause she can steal more interesting stuff with her computer. And she gets clean away with it.”

“Yeah,” said Slope, lighting a cigar and pushing his own coins to the center of the table. “I'll see that nickel and raise you a dime. Whatever Louis needed, Kathy could get for him. I guess he had a few occasions to worry about his pension. After she broke into the FBI computer, I saw him make the sign of the cross—Sorry, Rabbi.”

“The things she's done,” said Duffy, picking at his cards and trying to give the appearance that this was not a potential world-class poker hand. His dime grudgingly pushed into the small pile of coins.

“Remember when she was a little kid,” said Slope. “And Helen enrolled her in the NYU computer courses for children?”

“Yeah,” said the lawyer. “Helen was so happy that day. Kathy had finally taken an interest in something legal. Do you remember the way Helen cried when the kid gave her that present? You know, the one she made at computer school?”

“That transfer from the savings and loan?” Slope pushed another nickel into the pot as the next card hit the table, faceup.

“Yeah.” Robin Duffy smiled, and then his mouth wobbled as he tried to take the expression back before it tipped his hand, which was somewhat improved by the card dealt him. “Kathy just couldn't understand why Helen was crying. She figured anybody'd be thrilled to have an extra twenty thou in the checking account three weeks before Christmas.”

“Then,” said Rabbi Kaplan, “Kathy figured, well, Helen is Jewish. Maybe different customs.”

In the next four hours, Charles discovered that the game of poker could not be learned from a book, and that Helen had worked miracles with Kathy's behavior. Within six months of foster care, the Markowitzes had been able to take the child into a store with them, and even turn their backs on her for whole minutes at a time—all because theft, petty or grand, made Helen cry. Helen had done so good a job that Kathy could now pass for a young lady in any company but this one. These men knew what she was: a born thief, a hard case with no intrinsic sense of right and wrong. Yet, of all the five billion on the planet, Louis Markowitz had loved her best.

After the fiasco with Helen's present, Louis had taken Kathy out of the computer course. The NYU instructor had been sorry to lose such a dazzling student. The bank transfer had been fixed, said the pale little man with the thick glasses. The bank didn't even know the money was ever missing. So why pull the child out? he had asked, genuinely puzzled. It seemed to be upsetting the little girl, he said. ‘Look, she's going to cry.'