Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  In his practice as medical examiner for the city of New York, Dr. Slope usually came to his patients in a more somber suit of clothes, and not the garish splashes of Hawaiian color which competed with the blood of the crime scene. In a further, unintended rudeness, the exotic flowers of his shirt muted the dead woman’s more fashionable blue dress, and drabbed the dead man’s brown suit.

  And he usually tended to strangers and not to a man he had known for half his life. He had walked quickly from the car to the door marked by a guard of uniformed officers. No one had caught up with him to tell him it was Louis in there. He had walked into this room and met his old friend as a corpse. Now, as he sagged against the bare brick wall, the bright floodlights deepened his wrinkles and made him seventy instead of sixty.

  He had to ask himself, what was wrong with this picture? Oh, just everything. Louis should be issuing orders to forensics and the photographer, and pumping him for early details and best guesses. In no scenario could Louis be one of the bodies.

  And why was Kathy Mallory here? She should be sitting at a computer console back at the station, and not on her knees in the dirt and the dried blood, flies lighting on the curls of her hair and crawling over her hands and face.

  The photographer and the forensic crew were standing by the door, waiting on a go-ahead from Mallory. She was kneeling on the floor, pushing a gold wedding band up the pudgy third finger on the left hand of the corpse which had been her father.

  Dr. Slope turned his attention to the boy in the handcuffs. It seemed unnecessary to have such a large policeman restraining the kid. In that weakened condition he could not have outrun one of the dead bodies. The boy’s head was bleeding, and half his face was swollen. Slope thought of practicing on a living patient for distraction, but then he figured he would see this one in his regular practice soon enough. The skeletal junkie was a day away from dying. Were the wounds Mallory’s work? It was obvious the boy was Mallory’s creature. He was tied to her by his eyes.

  Mallory looked up at the boy. “You moved the body, didn’t you?”

  Apparently, she had trained the boy rather well in the short time they had known one another, perhaps a half hour by the recent blooding. The boy responded quick as a starving lab rat.

  “Yes, ma’am. I rolled him over on his back.”

  “Tell me when I’ve got it right,” she said, rolling the heavy body of Louis Markowitz over on his face.

  Slope wondered if she had ever been on a homicide crime site before. He thought not. From her earliest days on the force, she had always been more at home with the NYPD computers than people, living or dead. A bizarre linkage of memory called up a fine spring day in Kathy’s childhood when Louis had taught her the rudiments of baseball.

  In a somewhat different spirit, Dr. Slope strode over to Louis’s body and hunkered down beside her. He pointed to the darkened splotches on the face. “Line up the places where the blood’s pooled under the skin. Line ’em up flat with the floor.”

  She nodded and leaned down, nose to nose with the white face of the corpse, her hands working at the dead flesh, which was deceptively warm in the August heat. When she was done, she looked up to the boy, who nodded.

  Slope was checking Mallory’s pretty face for signs of traumatic shock, and he was disconcerted at not finding any. She was all business, lining up the dark blood pools on the white left hand now, and looking back to the boy again. The boy nodded once more. Satisfied, she stood up and crossed the room to stand over the corpse of the old woman.

  The woman’s throat bore a wound resembling a second mouth. The front of the blood-crusted dress had been cut away, and the brassiere as well. One breast hung deflated against the rib cage. The other had been laid open by the knife and was covered with flies. The buzzing was nearly a roar, and the medical examiner regarded the black cluster of insects as a single feeding organism. The corpse’s ancient face was a study in horror as the flies crawled in and out of the open mouths of her face and throat.

  Mallory stared at the old woman with as much compassion as she would give to furniture. She looked back to the boy.

  “And now this one,” she said.

  “No,” said the boy. “She was that way when I got here.”

  “Anything else? Did you touch anything, move anything?”

  “No. I went through the dead guy’s pockets and ran. I threw the wallet back there.” He pointed to a loose pile of bricks and garbage in one corner of the room. The wallet lay on a torn green garbage bag.

  Slope caught the eye of a forensic technician. He nodded at the bag and then made a few jots in his notebook.

  “You!” said Mallory, calling the man over. “You got the kid’s prints?”

  The technician held up the card with the splotches of ink in neat squares which identified each printed digit.

  She turned to Martin, the uniformed officer who held the handcuffed boy by one bone-thin arm.

  “I don’t need him anymore. Kick him loose.”

  Slope stopped his medical examination and watched Martin’s young face and saw the patrolman’s mistake in the making.

  “Mallory, he robbed a corpse,” said Martin. “Markowitz’s corpse, for Christ’s sake. You’re gonna let him walk?”

  “A deal is a deal. Now kick him loose,” said Mallory in a voice, low and even, that said with restrained, under-the-surface violence, ‘Don’t you push your luck with me, not ever.’ As she walked toward Martin, she seemed to grow in size and power. It was an unsettling illusion, and Slope wondered if she was even aware of it. He thought she might be.

  Martin was quick to fish out the cuff key. His reddening face was turned down to the work of unlocking the irons. A moment later, the junkie was gone.

  Very practical, Kathy. Why waste time on a trial?

  He guessed she hadn’t wasted much time on the boy’s constitutional right to a lawyer, and he knew she had wasted no time at all in discouraging his right to remain silent.

  Now she turned on the photographer. “Okay, it’s in prime condition. Shoot.”

  The peripheral brightness of repeating flashes made spots in Slope’s vision as he moved to the second body. He slipped plastic bags over the hands of the woman’s corpse and then looked up to Mallory. “I’ll get to work on it as soon as you release them.”

  “The old woman’s the same pattern as the other two?”

  “The same.”

  “Do Markowitz first,” she said. “I’m not gonna learn anything new from her.”

  “You got it.”

  “What can you give me now? How long have they been dead?”

  Like father, like daughter. He knew there was no tie of blood between them, but there was much of Louis in her.

  “Two days, give or take. With the heat and the decomposition, I won’t be able to pin it to within five or six hours. But I can fix a few hours of daylight on either side. Same pattern there.”

  “How long did Markowitz live?”

  “Maybe thirty minutes to an hour. I’m guessing by the blood loss. I’d say the wound was enough to kill him without medical attention, but he died of a massive coronary.” Markowitz had had some practice surviving mild attacks. This one must have had the force and effect of a slow train wreck.

  “So he knew he was dying.”

  “Yes.” And that hurt her, he knew. He discerned it in the slow deadening of her eyes. So Louis Markowitz had spent his last hour in pain and fear.

  Wasn’t life crappy that way, Kathy?

  “The killer didn’t take much time with him,” he said. “He was more interested in the woman. Markowitz has defensive wounds on his arms. By the position of the first blood splatter, he put himself between her and the killer.” And now he detected the first signs of mild shock with the slight loss of focus in her eyes. “Can I do anything for you, Kathy?”

  His first error was using her Christian name on the job, and his second gross presumption was kindness. He was rewarded with universal contempt throughout the cr
owded tenement room. He should’ve known better, said the frozen silence of the uniforms, the technicians and the photographer.

  “You’re done with the body?” she asked, focused again, all cold to him now, all business.

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to the medical examiner’s men. “Bag him and take him out.” Now she looked to the far corner where the old woman’s body was. “And that one? How long?”

  “She only lived a few minutes.”

  “Bag her.”

  Her next order cleared out all the unnecessary personnel, and that included old friends of the family. Dr. Slope left in advance of his team. The way out of the building and into the light was much longer than the way in had been.

  Sergeant Kathleen Mallory sat on the only chair in the room while the forensic team crawled on hands and knees, looking for fibers and hairs, the minutiae of evidence. She traced the pattern of blood. He fell there, near the door.

  How could you be dead?

  And he had gotten up and dragged himself along that blood-smeared wall to the window.

  Did you scream for help in this neighborhood of ‘I didn’t see nothin’, I didn’t hear nothin’ ’?

  And there by the window, where the blood had spread around his body in a wide stain in the dust, he had collapsed and died. But it had taken some time. He’d had time to think.

  What did you do with the time? What did you leave behind? ... Nothing?

  She looked up as they were carrying him out in a black plastic body bag.

  A small notebook lay open on her lap. She drew a quick slash through the notes on Markowitz’s car. It must have been stolen. Nothing had turned up on the impound lots in the two days she’d been hunting for him. It was probably in Jersey by now and painted a different color.

  Why did you go in alone?

  ‘Defensive wounds’ she wrote on a clean page. So he had tailed the perp to the crime scene and gone in without backup. Why? ‘Because the woman was about to die,’ she wrote in a clear, neat hand. She could assume he was on foot—no car radio, or he would have called for backup. That was something. So the perp was also on foot.

  Her pen scratched across the paper again. ‘No drive-by snatch.’ She was certain of that much. The killer had arranged to meet the old woman well away from Gramercy Park—a break in the pattern of the other two murders. There had to be a record on some cabby’s log. A rich old woman doesn’t ride the subway or the bus. And she wouldn’t have come here alone to meet a stranger. ‘She knew her killer.’

  So she could also assume that Markowitz had figured out how the park murder was done. Smart old bastard. But if he was so smart, why did he keep it to himself? And since when did a cop with Markowitz’s rank do surveillance detail?

  One of the forensic techs looked her way and then nervously looked everywhere else.

  Was he checking for tears, she wondered, for signs of disassembling? No way. No compassionate leave for Mallory. But Commissioner Beale was such a twit, he might order it. Then what?

  The worst of the stench from the old woman’s corpse still lingered. Pearl Whitman had not been such a neat kill as Markowitz. The butcher had punctured the intestine. In the absence of food, the cloud of flies was dwindling to a few annoying strafers. There were no windows that were not broken, no barriers to contain them. They whined past her ear, buzzing and black, fat with blood. Gone. All quiet now, only the sound of the brush in the hand of the man at her feet who was looking for omens in the dust and the dried blood.

  “I shouldn’t have called you so late.”

  “No, Mr. Lugar, you did the right thing.”

  The sleepy rabbi and the night watchman were both in their late fifties, and both were balding, but there they parted in likeness. The watchman was furtive in all his movements and shaped like a beer keg on toothpick legs. The rabbi was a tall man and comfortable in his slender body. His face was catlike and tranquil in the half-closed lids of lost sleep.

  The watchman jerked his head up to look at the taller man. “Wait till you see her. She looks like a little kid, just sitting there in the cold. We have to keep it cold, you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s so peculiar. I worked here maybe two years now, and nobody ever wanted to sit up all night with the body. It’s so peculiar. I didn’t know who to call. Well then, I seen your name on the manifest for the funeral arrangements. So I gotta figure you know the family, you know?”

  “I know.”

  He led him to the door and pointed to the square window.

  “Don’t she look just like a little kid?” The watchman moved his head slowly and sadly from side to side as he unlocked the door and stepped back. “I gotta go on my rounds now, Rabbi.”

  “Thank you for all your trouble, Mr. Lugar. It was very kind of you.”

  The smaller man smiled and ducked his head under the rare burden of a compliment. He turned and walked down the dimly lit hall, stiff and disjointed as though he had borrowed this body for the night and had not quite gotten the hang of walking around in it.

  The rabbi pushed through the swinging doors and into a bright, cold room painted antiseptic green. She was sitting on a metal folding chair by the wall of lockers, each one home to a body, and one of those bodies was very important to Kathy Mallory. Her blazer collar was pulled up against the cold, and her hands were tucked into the fold of her arms. She was hugging herself, it seemed, for lack of anyone to hold her.

  She was twenty-five years old, he knew, but she was also the child who stared defiantly from the old photograph in Louis’s wallet. She was not much changed since that day, fourteen years ago, when he first saw her walk into the front room of the Markowitz house, following along in Helen’s wake, never going very far from Helen’s side. Of course, she was taller now.

  “Kathy, why are you here? Mr. Lugar was concerned about you.”

  “Someone’s supposed to sit with the body. A relative.”

  “No, Kathy. That’s not necessary. Louis was not so orthodox a Jew. He was only religious about our Thursday night poker games. And he missed last Thursday’s game.”

  He bent his knees, and his body folded down in the neat illusion of shrinking until he was sitting on the backs of his shoes. It was his custom to speak to children at eye level.

  “Louis was so unorthodox I caught him buying a Christmas tree one night. That would have been the first year you lived with Louis and Helen. Louis tried to fob it off as a Hanukkah bush.”

  “Did you ream him out?”

  “Of course I did. As we were carrying it home. I was merciless.”

  “It was a twelve-footer. I remember that tree. It went up to the ceiling.”

  “So can you picture an orthodox Jew putting up Christmas trees and raising a little Gentile? You don’t have to sit up with him.”

  “Helen would’ve liked it.”

  “You got me there.” He shrugged and smiled. “She would’ve liked it. Louis would’ve liked it too.”

  Mallory looked down at her hands.

  “It’s all right to cry, Kathy.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Rabbi.”

  Rabbi David Kaplan seemed to be growing taller instead of merely standing up. He walked over to the rear wall, where three more folding chairs rested near the door. He carried one back to the wall of lockers and dragged out the mechanics of unfolding it and settling himself into it.

  “I think I’ll stay too,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Helen would have liked it.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Me too, Kathy. I’m okay. How long have I known you now? Since you were a little girl.”

  “I was never a little girl. Markowitz said so.”

  “Since you were a short person. I’ve known you that long. If you need me, I’m here.”

  “I’m not Jewish.”

  “You’re telling me? But there’s so much of Helen invested in you. I got to protect her investme
nt, keep it alive, you know?” He looked up to the fluorescent lights. “It’s Thursday. When I knew I would never play poker with Louis again, I cried.”

  “Not me.”

  “I believe you. Louis used to tell me—when you were very short—that you had principle. ‘Tears were for suckers, by her lights,’ he said. I’m a sucker, Kathy. You can take from me what you want, you can tap me for lunch every now and then, for advice. Are you very angry with Louis?”

  Well, that got her attention. And yes, she was very angry.

  “He was a good cop,” she said. “When a cop gets killed, it’s because he got careless. How could he do that?”

  “How could he do that to you? Louis used to worry about you working in Special Crimes.... Ah, you didn’t know that? Well, you spent more time with computers than criminals. He was so proud of you. She’s so smart, he would say. But these people he dealt with were so dangerous. He always knew the risks. I believe he knew it would end this way.”

  “I’m going after the dirtbag that did this to him.”

  “Your expertise is in the computer, Kathy, not fieldwork. Leave it to the others. He only wanted you to be safe. Give him that much. He wouldn’t want you involved in this. Promise me you’ll let go of it now. Make this promise a last gift to Louis.”

  She sat well back in the chair and folded her arms across her chest in the attitude of ‘now it begins.’ “So Markowitz spilled all of this to you. That’s interesting.”

  “We talked. So?” He found her slow widening smile disturbing. Louis had called it the Armageddon grin. “I was more than his rabbi. I was his oldest friend.”