Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  “I was trying to tell him what he meant to me. When I took that stupid job at the Brooklyn Dancing Academy, it was all I could get. It was that or hit the streets like my roommate. She was a prossie. But the dancing turned my life around. First I did it for the money, and then he taught me to love it, and then I couldn’t live without it. I told him that. I told him it was like it was meant to happen, my meeting him, one thing leading to another. It was like that meeting put everything else in motion. And then he left. So fast. Does that help? I really want to help.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  No, it didn’t. It only told her what she already knew, what she already had to work with. No, wait. It told her what Markowitz knew before he died. Maybe it was time to step to the side instead of following him into the hole he had died in.

  “God, I loved that old man,” said Brenda, drained, exhausted, as though she had danced a hundred miles. She brought her hand up to cover her face. She cried.

  And Mallory didn’t.

  It was a video extravaganza. The VCR sat in the far corner of the room playing the tape of Louis dancing with young Helen. And on the clear wall she projected slides of murder scenes, old ladies cut to pieces. Washes of blood flowed across the screen and covered Mallory’s face with the ricochet of colored light from the projected images of death. Click: victim number one. And Chuck Berry sang to the dancers. Click: victim number two. The hard beat of the music was moving Mallory’s head, manipulating the foot that tapped in rhythm.

  She rigged the VCR to loop the tape for continuous play and the partners danced on through the night without tiring ever. Mallory focused on the slides, looking for something that would not jibe, something out of whack, not belonging. She knew it was there. Markowitz had seen it. It had nagged her awake, night after night. What was she missing?

  No, that was a mistake. She could see that now. She was also stuck in the loop with the dancing Markowitz and young Helen. Markowitz, had he been there, would have told her to look beyond the parameters of what he knew. She had more to work with now than he had ever had.

  The sky, what Margot could see of it, was the deep violet of the hours before sunrise. She watched the man saying his goodbyes to the security guard, and then pushing his way around the revolving door and into the street.

  Oh, yes. He was the one.

  She crawled out of the torn and discarded mattress box, out onto the sidewalk where the rats were still dancing, still brave while the dark lingered. One rat, bolder than the rest, ran across the back of her spread hand. She pulled it into her chest and then looked at it as though the rat might have left prints.

  The man was walking slowly, heading back for the subway station. She stood up on two feet. And only now the rats took notice of her and left the sidewalk with slithering quickness. On feet not so fast as a rat, Margot followed after the man.

  7

  They advanced across the flat stones, quick jerking shapes of light and dark, and some were spotted with brown and gray, uniform only in their forward motion, and one of them was insane.

  Feet of red and red rings around the bright mad eyes, he was otherwise coal black until he passed into a dapple of sun, and iridescent flecks of green shimmered in the light. The feathers of his head were not smoothed back and rounded. Spiky they were, and dirty, as though a great fear had put them that way, and the fear had lasted such a long time, a season or more, and the dirt of no bathing or rain had pomaded them into stick-out fright, though the bird was long past fear now and all the way crazy. No fear of the human foot. A pedestrian waded through the flock, which parted for her in a wave, all but the crazy one, and it was kicked, startling the pedestrian more than the bird.

  The woman shrieked and stiff-walked down Seventh Avenue. The insane pigeon followed after her, listing to one side with some damage from the kick, until he forgot his purpose.

  Margot Siddon did not know how many hours she had gone without sleep. She followed the man down St. Lukes Place heading toward Seventh Avenue under a slow-brightening sky. Streetlamps still glowed and cast her shadow slipping down into the underground. Fluorescent lights washed her face to white as she passed through the turnstile. The station was deserted at this hour but for the two of them. To be sure of this, she walked the length of the platform, checking behind each thick post.

  By all the laws that governed the universe and New York City, there should be a cop here at this moment when she least wanted to see one. Apparently, even this ancient rule had crumbled in the general breakdown of law and order. They were alone.

  She walked toward him, only wanting to see his eyes one more time.

  He turned when she touched his sleeve. As he shook off her dirty hand, the last sound he heard was the click. He was a good New Yorker, he knew what that sound must be, and he was given part of a second, that much time to be afraid, before she slipped eight inches of steel into his ribs. By his eyes, he was surprised to be falling, dying, with no time left to ask why.

  Edith Candle woke in the ghostly gray hours before sunrise. Her bare feet touched to the carpet as she pulled a woolen robe around her shoulders and plotted out the day’s schedule between her bed and the bathroom. She was drawing her bathwater and had not yet looked into the kitchen. On the far wall of that room, just above the sink, a childish scrawl spread in a thick line of lipstick: THE PALADIN WILL DIE.

  He approached the park with a small anxiety. More than thirty years had passed since he had last been here. To him it would always be a place of menace. All memories fashioned at the level of a child’s eye were unreliable in scale, but Gramercy Park was otherwise unchanged. And so perfect was the memory of his sixth birthday party, Charles Butler winced.

  Edith had invited all the children in the square to that party, all the children who’d had nothing to do with him on previous visits. And he made no new friends that afternoon, but had once or twice been the cause of uproarious laughter which made him want to sink into the earth, to be anywhere but there.

  While Cousin Max had loomed over the children, making objects go up in flames and birds go up in flight, six-year-old Charles had shrunk as much as possible, scrunching down in his chair, aiming for invisibility. For the magic show’s grand finale, Max had given Charles his fondest wish. First, he made the boy the center of attention, and then, mercifully, Max made him disappear, something Charles’s large nose had hitherto made impossible in any company of children.

  After the show was over, Charles had reappeared against his will. The children with smaller noses and more modest brains had surrounded him and demanded to know how the trick was done. But he was honor bound not to betray Max’s secrets. In slow steps, and of one mind, the children were closing the ranks of small menacing bodies while Edith and Max were packing up the magic act and trundling boxes and bags through the gates, across the street and back into the house. He was alone in the circle of faces all filled with hate, small eyes bright with anger.

  The first punch to his stomach put him into shock, so startling it was to be hurt for no reason he could understand. He covered his stomach to protect it from the next blow, and he was kicked from behind. An open hand shot out to slap his face, and he thwarted it with raised arms. The same hand came back to him again as a fist in the side.

  And now he understood them.

  He dropped his hands to his sides and smiled at them, stretching his mouth to its widest, its looniest. They stood back half a step, still of one mind, and that mind was confused. What was this? asked their eyes which were one pair. In their base understanding of anger and fear, this smiling was against the rules. The tentative shot of a fist hit the back of Charles’s head, but there was no real force to it. Their energy was draining off for lack of anything to feed it. There were no more blows before Edith entered the children’s circle, put one hand on his shoulder and disappeared him back into the house.

  During subsequent stays with Edith and Max, he had remained on the sidewalk side of the bars, where he stood now, looking in.


  He opened the gate with Mallory’s key and found himself a bench in a nice broad patch of October sun.

  The boy at the gate must be Henry Cathery. Kathleen had supplied a more detailed description than Charles needed. The small traveler’s chess set would have been sufficient to identify the boy. She hadn’t needed to add the part about the visitor from another solar system. Charles, fellow alien, had a painful idea of what this boy’s life must be like among the earth people.

  He brought out his own traveler’s set in the minutes while Cathery was settling into his own patch of sun. Charles’s ancient wooden board was inlaid with squares of mahogany and cedar. The chess pieces were made of ivory and jade. The carving had surely driven the craftsman blind with the incredible detailing of each miniature. At the bases of the figures were the pegs to correspond with holes in the board.

  From a distance of park benches, he noticed that Cathery was now sliding his own chess pieces across a metal board on magnets. Cathery’s concentration made him impervious to the discomfort of being stared at. The boy was alone in his own universe, and Charles, a universe away, was not likely to catch his eye in anything approaching a natural encounter. Nothing in childhood had prepared Charles for any pleasant encounter with a stranger. He had missed that stage of socialization which other people found so natural. He was not at all given to spontaneous conversation. Ah, but then they were countrymen of sorts, this fellow Martian and he. He folded his set and walked slowly across that chasm which separates strangers and their very personal territory of park benches.

  When he was standing over Cathery and blocking his sun, he said, “I see you favor magnets over pegs.”

  Cathery nodded, never taking his eyes from the board. If Charles had spoken from a burning bush, it would not have impressed Cathery sufficiently to break his concentration. Charles unfolded his own set and held it out between the boy and the metal board. Cathery looked at it and began the slow smile of a child within grabbing distance of candy.

  Well, that was better.

  “I’ve seen one like that before,” said Cathery, not looking up, eyes fixed on the board and its figurines. “It’s a museum piece, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where could I get one?”

  “You couldn’t. There are only three of them, and two are in museums.”

  “You want to sell it? I don’t care what it costs.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Care for a game?”

  Cathery never answered him, but put his own set to one side and looked up with the apprehension of one unaccustomed to this little social dance, unfamiliar with the steps. In that moment, Charles understood him with an insider’s knowledge. This brilliant young chess master had all the socialization skills of a very small child. Charles smiled and sat down, placing the peg board on the bench between them. He held up the white to Cathery. The boy nodded. Their conversation had begun, though more than twenty minutes would pass before any more words were exchanged.

  A glance at the magnet set allowed him to predict Cathery’s opening, a classic game from a championship match.

  Yes, that was it. Three moves later, it was apparent that Cathery was extending the chess problem to the new game. Charles called up the playing field from a page in a chess book and moved accordingly. And accordingly, Cathery’s every move was predictable. If he continued to play with all the original moves, Cathery might catch on. The boy probably had no eidetic memory—that was rare—but he would certainly have committed these particular moves to what memory storage he had.

  While Cathery’s eyes were fastened to the board, Charles ran through the possibilities of more obscure games to match the opening. It was dishonest in a way, he supposed—Mallory had her influences on him—but if he didn’t provide a master game, he might not be able to hold Cathery for long in a conversation about the weather.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” said the boy, tossing a bishop into harm’s way in a mad rush for a new queen. “You just moved in?”

  “No, I don’t live here.” Charles spared the bishop and plotted to take down the would-be queen. “My cousin used to live in that house.” He nodded to the other side of the park. “I expect it’s been divided up into apartments now. It was a wonderful old place. I used to play in this park when I was a child. It hasn’t changed. Peaceful, isn’t it?”

  Cathery nodded. “I’ll never leave here.”

  Charles believed him. Now that Cathery was grown and beyond the torture of children, he would find this place a perfect environment for a solitary chess player. No street people, no panhandlers to interrupt his game, to break his concentration with acts of supplication or acts of insanity. Henry Cathery would thrive on simplicity. There was nothing about his person to say he went to any trouble about his clothing or his hair. The spotty beard was an obvious growth of neglect. The boy would always opt for extreme simplicity, less distraction from the game.

  “Henry!”

  But just now, a distraction in the form of a thin young woman was calling to Cathery from the gate. Her hair was matted and her long, dark red dress was torn. An overlarge vest of faded brocade was her only cover against the chill morning. He found it interesting that she called Cathery by his given name.

  Charles waited for Cathery to move his piece and lift his eyes. He nodded toward the girl at the gate. Cathery looked at her and, never changing his expression, said, “Ignore her. She’ll go away in a while. Your move.”

  “Isn’t she a friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  Such a friendship did seem unlikely. Henry Cathery had grown up with money in a protected environment, while this one at the gate had the look of the homeless, a young woman with nowhere to be.

  “I have no friends,” said Cathery.

  And Charles believed that, too. Again, less distraction.

  “And no family?”

  “Not now.”

  Less distraction.

  The young woman paced back and forth in front of the gate. Panic was jerking and twitching in every muscle of her body. Then, suddenly, she stopped her walking to and fro. She held tightly to the bars and pressed her face to the iron. Relaxing with a gradual sag and a slant of her body, her hands dropped away from the bars. The spasmodic agitation was gone now. She slowly moved off down the sidewalk and carried herself away from the park with a poignant grace. Charles stared after her until she was out of sight. He felt an unaccountable sadness.

  Cathery looked up at him with only a shading of impatience. Charles brought down Cathery’s would-be queen, and that set the boy back a bit. In the time the old master’s stroke had bought him, Charles turned to stare at the little buildings at the east end of the park.

  “So that’s where the first murder happened. I should think that would be a more interesting problem than a chess game.”

  Cathery had put out one fleshy hand to castle his king. The hand hovered, concentration broken, as his eyes turned to the shed.

  “I don’t see the problem,” he said.

  “A daylight murder with all these witnesses? I call that interesting.”

  “Nothing to it,” said Cathery. “He laid her down quick, cut her throat to shut her up, and then he cut her some more. The shrubs could hide that much. She was old. She couldn’t have put up much of a fight.”

  “How do you know her throat was cut?”

  “Everyone knows her throat was cut. Ten people must have come out to look at the body before the cops showed up.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you notice anything else besides the cut throat?”

  “No. She was partly covered by a garbage bag. No one touched her before the police came. They only wanted to look at a dead body.”

  There was no pain in the recollection of his grandmother’s brutal killing. It was a sterile subject and an annoying distraction.

  “But those benches face the building. Not much between the benches and the s
pot where she died. And no one noticed a stranger in the park that day.”

  “Then it wasn’t a stranger.” Cathery shrugged. “Easier.”

  “No. Think it through. You’re too accustomed to dealing with the flat of a board. See the face at that window?” He pointed up to a second-floor apartment window set in red brick.

  Cathery squinted up. A head of white hair was bobbing behind the window glass.

  “Now, look over there,” said Charles.

  Another face, this one much younger, looked down on them from the other side of the street.

  “The police love people like that. There’s at least one professional watcher in every neighborhood. How many windows in this square? Someone had to be watching, but no one came forward. Perhaps the witnesses didn’t know what they were witnessing. Is that possible? That doorman faces the murder site. Maybe he was inside when it happened. But what are the odds that no one was looking at the spot at any given minute of the day? The shrubs would cover a prone body. But how do you do a violent bloody murder like that one with no real cover? And what fool would take that risk?”

  “It would be the ultimate high, wouldn’t it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You saw that girl at the gate. When she was in high school, she used to steal things from stores. What she stole was stuff she couldn’t use half the time. She said it was a rush. It was exciting.”

  When their game was ended in a stalemate, Charles quit the park and closed the gate behind him. He looked back to see Cathery staring up to the watcher with the white head. The watcher withdrew from the window—quickly.

  Mallory had her old man’s brains—Jack Coffey would admit that much. All the damn interview notes NYPD had collected in the past three months, reams and reams of notes, and no one had made the seance connection.

  He looked at her sitting quietly on the other side of his desk and wished he had her back on duty again. Until this morning, he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her in the past two months. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had kept track of her off-duty hours, and felt the lack of her in the way he dragged himself to work on the days when she would not be there, driving him nuts with sarcasm and just a trace of perfume. Two months was a long time to be missing her perfume.