Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  Coffey looked up to see Charles Butler filling the doorway of his office. Butler moved across the room and folded his long self into the chair next to Mallory. While he was apologizing for being late, the man was suddenly caught short by the changes in the office. He was staring at the denuded walls, which no one, cop or civilian, had seen in Markowitz’s lifetime.

  “You haven’t missed much,” said Mallory to Charles.

  Coffey wondered what he was missing here. Butler shows up thirty minutes late, and Mallory, the punctuality freak, lets it go by? Where was the venom, the sarcasm, the glare of ‘come hither, I want to hurt you’? He faced Charles Butler, who had recovered from the mild shock of the redecorating.

  “So, Charles. Wouldn’t you think one of those old women would’ve come forward?”

  “Oh, the seance ladies? I suppose it’s possible they each assumed someone else would call. That’s common group behavior.”

  “No,” said Mallory. “They were playing Russian roulette.”

  Coffey nodded, but he wasn’t buying it. It didn’t fit the image formed by the elderly women in his own life, and a little old lady was a little old lady. No, something else had frightened those women, scared them off the police, and he intended to find out what it was.

  “I’m arranging police protection for all of them.” The better to interrogate them without lawyers intervening.

  “Turning into a real horse race, isn’t it?” said Charles. “How often do you get such a plethora of suspects?”

  “Well,” said Coffey, smiling, “we usually begin with the entire population of Manhattan and then whittle it down. Right now, I got Redwing.”

  “What about Henry Cathery?”

  “We checked him out.”

  “I’m just curious. If he fit the FBI profile so well, why didn’t you concentrate on him?”

  “I like money motives,” said Mallory.

  “So do I,” said Coffey. “Every single one of those old women was loaded with blue-chip stocks. But then, so is Henry Cathery. He’s worth a hell of a lot more than the dead grandmother.”

  “But you’re dealing with a serial killer. Surely there’s a mental disorder to consider, a pathology to the crimes.”

  “Hey,” said Coffey. “If FBI headquarters were in New York, they’d have an entirely different set of profiles. New York City is another country.”

  “Coffey’s right,” said Mallory. “Now take cannibals, for example. Our last cannibal wasn’t really hard-core.”

  “Yeah,” said Coffey. “He was nothing at all like the Minnesota cannibal. The death was accidental. He just didn’t know what to do with the body.”

  “Disposing of the head is always going to be a snag,” said Mallory. “When we found a half-eaten head, the FBI sent us down the garden path with their psych profile.”

  “They never once suggested looking for a bank teller who was once a Boy Scout,” said Coffey. “And as far as we knew, his parents were never cruel to him, and he had the standard complement of chromosomes.”

  In the attitude of only wanting to beat the dead horse one more time, Charles tried again. “But pure profit motive? No one would profit from all four killings. You think a sane murderer would kill four women if he only wanted one of them dead? Would a jury believe it?”

  “A jury of New Yorkers?” said Coffey. “Oh, sure.”

  Mallory nodded in agreement.

  “But don’t you think the four-week cycles fit nicely with the pathology of a lunatic?” He looked from Coffey to Mallory. “No? But if you only considered the element of madness, it would still be an open field. I understand that Margot Siddon’s alibi for the death of her cousin is a theater full of people who can’t agree on the right year, much less the hour. No alibi for the Gaynor or Cathery murders. Her alibi for Pearl Whitman’s death is Cathery, and he’s not too committal. He’s got his own alibi problems since Miss Whitman died. The medium we don’t know about yet, but that’s reaching. And Gaynor—”

  “Gaynor? Charles, even if Gaynor didn’t have Mallory for an alibi, I’m sure he could account for his time. His students make great alibis—they live on schedules, they’re always watching clocks. We’ve got to check out his appointments for the office hours, but I don’t think we’re going to find gaps in his day.”

  “Didn’t Henry Cathery also have a witness to account for his time? Pearl Whitman? How reliable was she?”

  “So? What’s the connection? You’re not suggesting that Mallory is unreliable?” No, he could see that Charles wasn’t about to suggest anything like that. Mallory was already tensing. Coffey could feel it across the desk without even looking at her.

  “No, of course not,” said Charles, who probably loved his life as much as the next man, “but Gaynor was saved by a time constraint. No one would have an alibi for any of the murders if the women didn’t die where they were found. Then it could be any of them.”

  “Nice try,” said Coffey with no sarcasm. He really did like Charles. “But we have a lock on the crime sites. A forensic pathologist estimates the quantity of blood loss based on the victim’s height and weight and the type of wound—if it’s a quick kill, there’s less blood loss. Then a forensic technician accounts for the blood at the crime site. The areas where the blood pools under the flesh line up with the position of the body. The first thrust gets a major artery. There’s an awful lot of blood. No particles found on any of the bodies that were foreign to the site. Not even microscopic evidence to suggest they’d fallen elsewhere. So Gaynor’s out of the woods.”

  “I’m not ruling Gaynor out,” said Mallory. “Not him, not any of them.”

  “You’re kidding,” Coffey said. “What do you know that I don’t?” Even as he asked the question, he knew he was being suckered. She was playing with him.

  “And what have you got, Coffey? Any little thing you want to share with me?” Her eyes were guns. They made him nervous, and he looked everywhere for something else to be looking at. When his eyes settled on Charles Butler, the man was smiling, and there was just a hint of sympathy.

  “Fair enough,” he said. Though he would not characterize any dealing with her as fair. She’d been born to the advantages of a quicker mind and a paralyzing beauty that had done something terrible and wonderful to him the first time they met. Only Mallory could not see what a standout she was. That was the sad way of damaged kids. They grew up with distorted mirrors.

  “We might have a new angle,” he said, “now that Redwing links up to the victims. You’ll like this one, Mallory, it’s a money scam. When we started the surveillance on the square, we matched her description up with a rap sheet. We’ve got her under the aliases of Cassandra, Mai Fong, and—”

  “And Mary Grayling.” Mallory was examining her nails. “And she’s changed her base of operations. Your man has been watching an empty apartment all morning.”

  Coffey slumped back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. If he killed her now, everyone would know.

  He lowered his gaze to stare at her, always a mistake, and he got lost for a second in her pretty eyes. In the early days of working with Mallory, she’d given him stomach flutters each time he saw her. It took him years to realize that she was all stone—no heart and nothing but contempt for a man who could be reduced to a puddle of jelly at her feet. Not that he cared. Jelly had no self-respect.

  “What else have you been holding out, Mallory? Any more bombs you’d like to drop on me?”

  “Play nice,” she said. “You give, I give.”

  “You give me everything you got, and right now, or I bust you for obstruction.”

  Well, that certainly made her yawn.

  “Mallory, I’ve already got you cold for working a case off the books, violating conditions of leave, interfering with police business—”

  “It’s my business,” she said, giving each word equal weight. There was no emotion to her when she was angry, only a narrowing of the eyes to warn the poor bastard in her sights. �
��He was my old man, not yours.”

  “This case is NYPD property. I can put you on suspension, and take the badge and the gun.”

  “Oh damn. I left them in my other jacket.”

  “You hold out on me, and I swear I’m gonna nail your bleeding hide to the wall. You can’t win with me, Mallory,” he lied.

  When jelly met stone, the outcome could not be good for jelly. He knew it and she knew it.

  “You think Coffey has a line on how the first murder was pulled off?” Mallory stood at the window facing the street—the dirty, daylight life of SoHo: the trash whipping in the wind on the sidewalk below, the ragged people who had no better clothes, and the ragged people who were making fashion statements. The sash was raised to admit the aroma of refuse from another garbage collectors’ strike which piled up on the sidewalk one flight below.

  “Could be.” Charles poured out a glass of sherry for her and watched her down it in one healthy swig. A good grade of sipping sherry was pretty much wasted on her. He sighed. “If we have to work with the parameters given, Jack Coffey has no more idea how the thing was done than you do. If the parameters are wrong—who knows?”

  “You mean if he lied, if he held out on me. Count on it. You’re crushed by the unmovable crime sites, aren’t you?”

  “Well, no. There are other possibilities. Do you know what was going on in that park every hour of the day? Might there have been a distraction?”

  “The homicide detectives did interviews with all the residents who were in the park that day. Nothing stands out in the reports.”

  “My cousin Max could distract an entire audience with one hand. The magician’s buzz word is misdirection, sending the eye elsewhere while you work the trick. The misdirection could have been a small thing, something common, a noise or an argument.”

  “I’ll check it out. What else have you got?”

  “Did the park murder have to be planned? Couldn’t it have been a crime of opportunity? A fluke of timing? Something simple?”

  “No. Too methodical. The weapon was a common kitchen knife. It was brought to the park. So what did you think of Henry Cathery? Could he have pulled off something like that?”

  He forgot himself and downed his sherry. “I think he’s brilliant, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t know that he’d go to any trouble for money.”

  “Neither do I. Suppose he had a reason to hate his grandmother?”

  “Such as?”

  She handed him a folder with a recent batch of printouts. One was a psychiatrist’s recommendation for short-term commitment in a sanitarium. Henry Cathery must have been twelve years old, by the date.

  He read the sheets at the speed of a normal human being. Although he could easily have devoured content and sense in a fraction of the time, he hesitated in front of Mallory. He was always trying to pass as a native of normal. Henry Cathery, however, had not tried hard enough, or not cared enough, and that was his only mistake.

  The case psychiatrist’s name was familiar. He stared at the wall and projected the page of a psychiatric journal dealing with papers on gifted children.

  This reading from blank walls was one of the traits which had unsettled and alienated his cleaning woman. Once, Mrs. Ortega had hovered in his peripheral vision, watching his eyes moving rapidly back and forth, scanning lines of a text only he could see. She had jumped up on a kitchen chair and tried to pry his mouth open, having only the best intentions of pulling his tongue clear of his air passage in the belief that he was having a fit. Humiliation had taught him to be more careful in his public behaviors. But Mallory had long ago uncovered this gift. She would understand and not try to pry his mouth open.

  According to the critical article re-created on the wall, Dr. Glencome was a famous popularist. He’d written several books on the socialization stages of children, forgetting ever to mention that each child was a special case, an individual. Apparently, he had diagnosed the gifted and reclusive young Henry Cathery as socially unbalanced and had committed the child.

  The records detailed each passing month of the boy’s imprisonment in the private hospital. Henry had gradually become more introverted, spirit all but killed and threatening the body. He had been wasting away on forced feedings until Glencome had no choice but to let Henry go free or see him wither and die, thus killing the ungifted doctor’s reputation for being so very good with children. After the incarceration, the child chess master had entered no more matches.

  Charles closed the folder. Mallory was getting more ruthless in her computer raids. This invasion of a child’s life was too intrusive. But he could not forget what he had read. So the old woman had inherited the boy when his mother died. First Henry had grief to deal with. Then this gifted child had to contend with a grandparent’s perception of normal, coupled with the authoritative opinion of an ass with a Ph.D.

  “This isn’t a valid diagnosis. It doesn’t mean Henry Cathery was mentally unbalanced, that he’d be dangerous to himself or others.”

  “I think I guessed that,” she said. “But the old lady and the shrink couldn’t leave him alone, right? Suppose he held a grudge all these years? Suppose he snapped? So first he kills his grandmother, and then he learns to like it and he can’t stop.”

  He was trying to imagine what it had been like for the Cathery boy, to be locked away from his chessboard, forced into a different mold, thwarted like a bonsai tree.

  “I thought you liked money motives,” he said. “Hated mental disorders.”

  “I’m trying to be open-minded. Here, look at this.”

  He took a sheaf of papers from her hand. Telephone company records of calls between Anne Cathery and the private clinic the boy had escaped from nine years ago.

  “Maybe she was going to commit him before he hit his twenty-first birthday and came into his trust fund. His birthday was two weeks after his grandmother’s death. Interesting, huh?”

  “You’re not going to give these records to Coffey, are you? This is so brutal. I can’t see him standing up to Coffey, not in the face of this, a history he had every right to believe was private.”

  “No. I’m not turning the files over to Coffey.”

  “Good.” He was looking at her with new hope. She might eventually become altogether civilized.

  “What’s Coffey ever done for me?”

  The buzzer went off in a short burst, the minimum intrusion, and Charles opened his door to the ever polite Dr. Ramsharan. It must be urgent. She had not changed into the soft, worn blue jeans. She stood on his threshold dressed for the office in a crisp white shirt and a linen suit of pale blue. When he stood back to allow her to enter the room, Mallory had disappeared.

  “Herbert again?”

  She smiled and nodded as she walked into the front room of Charles’s apartment. She sat down in the chair closest to the door.

  “I’m sorry to bother you with this. I suppose I could’ve gone to Edith. She’s known Martin and Herbert for such a long time. But she’s getting up in years. I’m sure you don’t want her exposed to this nonsense, and neither do I.”

  “Wise,” said Charles. “How can I help you?”

  “Herbert definitely has a gun. It makes quite a bulge under his jacket. Did I tell you he’s taken to dressing in an army fatigue jacket? Scary, isn’t it?”

  “Did you have any better luck with Martin?”

  “You know how chatty Martin is.”

  “Hmm. I’m not sure anymore which one of them set the other one off. Maybe Martin got the vest when he saw the writing on Edith’s wall. And it could have been just the sight of Martin’s vest that set Herbert off. That’s all it would take.”

  “I haven’t been able to find out who mentioned my gun to him. Some of the tenants are out of town. I’ve had that gun such a long time, I thought Herbert knew. He makes it his business to know everything that goes on in this building. Once, I caught him going through the trash.”

  “That seems a bit paranoid, doesn’t it?”

/>   “No. He’s just a garden-variety control freak. He’s something very common in any community of humans. There’s one of Herbert in every crowd. And all of us have some weak point, some fracture. Herbert’s fracture is widening. I need to know why.”

  She sank back in the upholstery and looked up to the ceiling. With added focus, she seemed to be staring through the plaster and into Edith Candle’s apartment on the third floor. Her next words were predictable. “I wish I knew what was written on the wall in Edith’s apartment.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Edith.”

  “Not a good idea. She was the house mother for all the years she owned the building. Old habits die hard. She’d want to take care of it herself. I don’t even want her in the same room with Herbert. I told you, he’s ripe for an explosion. You can trust me to know my explosives.”

  Charles tilted his head to one side as he listened to what Henrietta was not saying. She was not saying it might be dangerous to bring Edith into the problem; she was tap-dancing all around it. Dance was not her forte. She was not saying that Edith was the source of the problem. She knew the relationship of family and danced wide of it, and danced badly. It spoke well of Henrietta that she was no good at subterfuge. She didn’t have the face to hide a boldface lie, and neither did she have the dishonest agility to lie by omission.

  He was surprised. He had always believed he knew Edith Candle so well.

  “All right,” he said. “I won’t mention anything to Edith.”

  The tension about her mouth relaxed into an easy smile. Henrietta was her straightforward self again, done with dancing.

  When he had closed the door on Henrietta, he turned to face Mallory, who was inches away from him. He’d never heard her coming up behind him. He wished he could put a bell on her neck.