Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  Mallory only shook her head from side to side with rare wonder. Had the old woman gone crazy? This was no waxwork dummy. Edith spoke to her and the body moved, both were real, and the blade was sharp. This was not the work of mirrors.

  Mallory heard the sound of metal grinding, and her eyes flashed up. Had the mechanism slipped a gear? Her stomach flipped over. She watched the blade with dark fascination. Was the blade closer now? Was the angle changed?

  The blade slipped a notch.

  Edith screamed as a bright light washed out the tableau and lit the entire basement with a blazing ball of sun mounted atop the guillotine. Mallory was in motion, moving toward her, eyes blinded by the light, hands reaching out, nearly there, when the blade fell and the turbaned head with its bloody stump of a neck fell from the wooden brace and rolled across the floor awash in brilliant white light. The old woman’s feet spasmodically kicked out and then went limp.

  Mallory froze. She was shot through with ice and her throat was paralyzed.

  The head at her feet was laughing.

  No, it was not. Her eyes were adapting, and she could see the head more clearly. It was only another wax mock-up, a younger version of Edith Candle’s head. There was no blood. An intact Edith Candle was rising off the floor.

  “Oh, your face, your face,” said Edith, breasts heaving, belly shaking. “That’s what made the trick so powerful.” She wiped tears from her laughing eyes. “People were convinced that the gears had slipped, that they were witnessing an accident. It was an amazing effect. They screamed and screamed. Most of Max’s illusions were life-and-death affairs. It was his trademark.”

  Mallory sat down on the floor before her knees could fail and dump her there. “Christ, I hope that was your best shot.”

  Edith pulled a low stool out of the clutter of props and sat down beside Mallory. “I can’t tell you much about Max’s illusions. The magician’s code, you know. But the light is the most important element of this trick. You don’t see clearly while the eye is adjusting. You see what you expect to see—an accident. I can’t tell you more than that. I can’t even show you the mechanism that works the light. Trade secret.”

  Mallory grappled with previous conceptions of elderly women and made rapid adjustments in her thinking. When she looked up at Edith perched on the stool a head above her, it was with new respect. Yes, she had come to the right place.

  “What kind of tricks do mediums do?”

  “Well, there’s quite a difference between magic and spiritualism, but illusions are all related by the same principles—misdirection, sleight of hand. A client once told me about a medium she visited on Forty-second Street who made things float through the air. I could show you something like that.”

  “Wires?”

  “No, it’s done with black art.”

  “Black art?”

  “Nothing to do with the occult, dear. Black art is the camouflage of black on black. You need a hand-held mirror and a very dark room. The object only has to levitate a few inches. Too much is ostentatious and smacks of fakery. A few inches of levitation in an angled mirror is more believable and frightening for some reason. Your medium would need an accomplice for that, someone free to move about the room.”

  “She has one, a little boy.”

  “Well, that widens the field a bit. With a helper she can do quite a number of illusions.”

  “She’s the high-technology type.”

  “Well, don’t expect anything too exotic—no holographic imaging, anything like that. The simpler the illusion, the better it works. This medium wouldn’t want to take any high-tech devices to a mark’s home.”

  “She uses her computer to research the victims.”

  “Say mark, dear. Victim makes it sound so sordid, as if the audience isn’t having a good time. Max and I created the mind-reading act while he was recuperating from an injury. A dangerous illusion had gone wrong.... But I’m digressing. You wanted to hear about the tricks. Well, I used to guess the object in the mark’s hand while wearing a blindfold.”

  “How? Microphones?”

  “No, dear. Most tricks are very simple. If you put too much credit to complexity, you’ll never work them out.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were looking at some middle ground of memory. “Max would cue me with first words. If he said, ‘Concentrate,’ it was made of metal. The next word would tell me if it was a coin, a watch, whatever. If he said, ‘Please,’ it was paper, money or a photograph. Then, when I took off the blindfold, I would read their faces and all their secrets and worries.”

  “You researched the marks?”

  “No, dear. Max waited in line with them. We always kept them waiting a long time. People in lines can be very chatty. The audience participation was never by random selection. I know it sounds like a cheat, but every one of those people got full value for the price of admission. It was quite a show.” Her smile ended in a serious afterthought.

  “Then I found my true gift. A sheriff caught up to us in another town when one of my visions came true. I had seen a body and the sheriff had found it. My name was made. We went on a new world tour, and this time out, I was the headliner instead of Max. I regretted that gift after Max died. I foresaw his death, you know. You don’t believe that. I can feel it. Yet it did happen to me, this terrible gift.”

  “Did you foresee Pearl Whitman’s death?”

  “No, dear. The fugue comes on a few days before the death of someone who’s been recently close to me. I haven’t seen Pearl in years and years.”

  “You don’t mind talking about her?”

  “No, not at all. Oh, her death was a sad business, wasn’t it? She was only sixty-five when I met her. Her father had recently died. He was in his nineties, I believe. She asked me to contact his spirit. I told her I didn’t do such things. I’m a clairvoyant. Lumped into the same bag with mediums, I’m afraid, but not quite the same thing.”

  “So, what did you do for her?”

  “I advised her on stocks and business matters. That’s what she wanted to talk to her father about.”

  “You advised her by way of a crystal ball?”

  “No, dear. May I call you Kathy? ... Good. I’m quite adept at playing the market. I do it with research—I have quite a data base—but I also depend on instinct. I advised Pearl on a merger that made her twice as rich as she had been before.”

  “And did you invest, based on that merger?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d already amassed quite a bit of money on tour. And then Max and I had made a nice profit on the sale of another property. I built that sum into a rather impressive stock portfolio. I liquidated the lot and put it into Whitman Chemicals stocks. After the merger, my fortune doubled.”

  “Did anyone ever suggest that might be illegal?”

  “Insider trading, you mean. I did get into a bit of trouble with the government people. They called me an arbitrager because I also had a slender connection to a principal in the other company. They said I was using insider information illegally. They served me with papers and questioned me for hours. In the end, they just tore up the papers. I never heard any more on it. Perhaps the U.S. Attorney would have felt a bit foolish putting an elderly psychic on the witness stand. Then Mr. Milken and the others got all that publicity, and the government people were off on another tangent. I think they just forgot all about me. It’s staggering what you can get away with when you’re old.”

  Mallory smiled, and the old woman brightened, barely suppressing a laugh over her own good joke. Gift or no gift, Mallory decided, this woman could not read her mind, or even read her smile for what it was.

  ‘I gotcha,’ said Mallory’s smile.

  “So, Edith ... May I call you Edith?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  “Did Pearl Whitman give up the idea of contacting her father? Or did she try someone else?”

  “I don’t know, Kathy. She never came back again. There was nothing more I could do for her.”
/>   “How common is it to consult a medium or a psychic about stocks and bonds?”

  “Very common. If it isn’t love, it’s money. And the older one is, the more likely it’ll be money.”

  “So finance is a stock-in-trade with the psychic business.”

  “No, dear. It does require a bit of expertise. Most of the con artists are small-time. They eke out a living, but nothing fancy. And there are truly gifted people who take no money. They work with the police department for free. But a good stock analyst is difficult to find in this world or the next.”

  “And you were good. The merger paid off well. Why didn’t she come back?”

  “Perhaps she thought she had made enough money.”

  “You have quite a bit of money, don’t you?”

  “Between us and the walls, I’m stinking rich.”

  “Why do you stay here? Inside, I mean, locked up?”

  “What’s the need of going out? The world comes here, you see. I have my services for news and research, I have television and a video service and my book clubs. I have a good relationship with all the tenants. What’s the need?”

  “But there’s a little more to it, right? Is it something to do with your husband’s death?”

  “Very good, Kathy. Yes, in a way. I foresaw the death of my husband, and I was unable to prevent it. After he died, I only wanted to retire. But people will seek me out. There isn’t a day without at least one caller. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a failure as a recluse. I suppose I might as well go into the world again. Lately, I have thought about it more and more.”

  “How much do you know about mediums? You said it wasn’t really your field.”

  “You mean the mechanics? After all my years with Max, I guess I can figure out how a trick is pulled off. But the tricks don’t always indicate fraud. More a sign of showmanship, really. They’ve all gone to modern conveniences like the computer for research, but the old parlor tricks are still necessary. You can’t bewitch a mark with circuit boards.”

  “How would you like to go to a séance?”

  Jack Coffey would not have believed there could be so many privately owned videocams in one square block. And it seemed odd, in this one little patch of town saved off from the twentieth century, that residents should be dangling from windows and balconies, making home movies of a homicide investigation. He would have had his own film on the murder itself, but the perp had found the one blind spot in Gramercy Park. The camera had seen nothing within ten feet on either side of this basement-level janitor’s apartment.

  His men were doing their best superhumanly polite crowd control, but the upscale residents were vociferous in their misunderstanding of their constitutional right to attend the dog-and-pony show of a bloody crime scene. He would not be seeing Beale’s limousine tonight. Nor would Harry Blakely be stopping by to answer the inevitable reporter’s question: How did this happen under your nose?

  Floodlights lit up the building and made the sidewalk bright as day. The photographer, Gerry Pepper, was working without a flash as he leaned over the railing and aimed his camera down into the submerged enclosure outside the basement-level door. Pepper walked down the short flight of stairs leading below the sidewalk, the better to shoot the old woman. She was up against the wall, which was red with one of her own bloody palm prints. He shot her again and again. She looked up at him in utter calm, unprotesting, quite beyond that now. The photographer shot her face, and then suddenly stepped back as though she had just said something unpleasant.

  “Hey, Gerry!” Coffey called down to the photographer. “Get me extra shots of the palm print.”

  The man looked up, and Coffey saw something not quite right with Gerry Pepper. Something had unsettled this seasoned pro with fifteen years of shooting corpses, every damned thing that could be done to a human, from butchered infants to overdosed junkies. Gerry had seen far worse mutilations than this opened throat and hacked breast. Coffey waved him up the stairs and over to the wall.

  “What’s the problem, Gerry?”

  The photographer spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though anything could be heard above the babble of one hundred independent conversations in the square tonight. “It’s gonna be a suicide portrait. It’s crazy, I know. But, Jack, you got no idea how many suicides I’ve shot.” He ran one hand through his hair and looked back over his shoulder before he spoke again. “I could paper my apartment with the suicide shots. And I got ten times as many murder victims, so I damn well know the difference.”

  Coffey had known Gerry for a long time. He wasn’t about to say anything close to ‘You moron, you think she mutilated herself?’ It wasn’t his job to demoralize the troops, that’s what God created a chief of detectives for, and Blakely was never going to hear about this.

  “It’s crazy,” said Pepper. “But you asked.”

  The medical examiner’s techs were moving slowly up the stairs from the basement level, carrying out the body in a bag, as Dr. Edward Slope removed his rubber gloves and nodded to Coffey. In that nod he managed to convey that it was the same pattern, and that it was an insane world they lived in.

  Coffey put one hand on Slope’s arm. “When did this one go down? Can you give me a best guess?”

  Slope closed up his bag and looked squarely at Coffey. He nearly smiled. “Well, Jack,” said Slope, “I see Markowitz raised you right. It’s not too difficult with this one, given the body temperature, state of the wounds and rigidity. Unless something bizarre turns up in the autopsy, I’d put it between eleven and two this afternoon. I can narrow that down a bit tomorrow.”

  With no good night, Slope turned and walked away, moving slow. The man’s gait and posture made him years older than the last time Coffey had seen him. They had to stop meeting like this.

  Riker was flipping back through the pages of his notebook. “The doorman doesn’t remember when Samantha Siddon left the building. Thought it might be in the afternoon. The cleaning lady, Mrs. Fayette, saw the old woman at noon. That’s when Fayette finished up for the day. She said Siddon was wearing a housecoat and slippers. Give the old lady some time to change into street clothes and that puts her in the lobby around twelve-fifteen at the earliest. She had arthritis in both hands and legs. Takes longer to do the buttons. Might make it closer to twelve-thirty.”

  “You talked to the janitor?”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty shaken up. He has another job, and wants us to be cool about that if we ever meet up with the management company that runs the building. Anyway, he gets home from the second job around eleven-fifteen and walks down the stairs to the door. And it’s dark. The light bulb burned out a while ago. But there’s plenty of light from the street, so he takes his time about replacing it. Anyway, he sees the pile of canvas in one corner of the stairwell while he’s turning his door key. So he’s all ready to get bent out of shape ’cause he figures a tenant tossed something there for him to get rid of, like his doorway is the local dump. He picks up the canvas, and at first, he doesn’t know what he’s looking at.”

  Coffey looked down on the same notebook that Riker was reading from. There were four words on the page.

  “Was there anything in the apartment to give us a line on next of kin?”

  “There’s only one relative, a cousin. You want me to send a squad car to pick her up?”

  “What’s the woman’s name, again?” Coffey asked.

  “Margot Siddon,” said young Officer Michael Ohara, last of three generations of uniformed policemen. “She’s a second cousin of the victim.”

  “Where’d you put her?”

  “She’s in Markowitz’s office.”

  “Ohara, Markowitz doesn’t have an office here anymore.”

  “Right,” said Ohara, but without conviction. “She’s in your office, Lieutenant.”

  Sergeant Riker moseyed after Jack Coffey, who was doing a slow burn that showed in a red stripe between his hairline and the white strip of his shirt collar. Riker smiled at his shoes as he followed Coffey int
o Markowitz’s office.

  Riker didn’t believe he would ever get used to the redecorating. The walls were hung with one normal-size bulletin board and two prints of the racehorses which were Coffey’s only passion in life—outside of good-looking babes.

  Margot Siddon was no babe, in Riker’s estimation. She sat in a chair by the desk and sipped coffee from a paper cup. She drank as though half her face were shot with novocaine. The muscles on the left side of her mouth were frozen; she could make no expression that was not a smirk. The scar on her cheek was a faint marker for the nerves that must have been severed with the flesh.

  According to Riker’s notes on the law firm of Jasper and Biggs, she was about to inherit a fortune, but Horace Biggs, the executor, was on vacation in Rome. Morton Jasper, pissed off to distraction at being disturbed so late, could not or would not say with any certainty that she was the sole heir.

  Margot Siddon didn’t look the part of an heiress. Her hair was stringy and her shoes were scuffed imitation leather. Even with the layers of clothing—the black dress, the faded tapestry vest and the flimsy shawl—she was slender by her silhouette. Legs with well-defined calves thrust out in front of her. However small her body mass, Riker would bet it was solid muscle. He guessed that dancers worked out every day. Her real weakness was in her face: the small eyes, the chin that almost wasn’t there.

  Coffey was making introductions.

  “We’ve met,” said Riker. “Miss Siddon’s a friend of Henry Cathery, grandson of the first victim. She was in Cathery’s apartment when Markowitz interviewed him.”

  The exasperation on Coffey’s face said, ‘It might have been nice if you’d mentioned that earlier.’

  Riker took his chair at the back of the office. He was positioned to one side, facing Coffey and a bit behind Margot Siddon. He pulled a leather notebook out of his pocket and flipped back to the interview notes made at the Cathery apartment.

  “So you and Mr. Cathery are friends,” said Coffey.

  “We knew each other,” she said, making a distinction there. “I visited Cousin Samantha once a week. The Catherys lived in the same building. After Henry’s grandmother died, I used to drop in now and then. He was devastated by her murder. He depended on her for everything. He wasn’t managing very well after her death.”