Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  He was talking to the air. She was staring at the screen of her computer. “So what kind of setup does Redwing have? Is she stealing money by computer hacking?”

  “She wouldn’t know how. Redwing is an adequate technician. She can run a computer program, but she could never design one. The past few days I’ve watched her scanning message centers. She’s waiting for something. I’m guessing they use different message centers every time she talks to whoever’s running the scam. That gives me at least one player above Redwing’s level.”

  He looked down at the screen of her laptop computer. “Okay, what’re we looking at?”

  “The same thing Redwing’s looking at. It’s an electronic bulletin board system. Anyone in the world with a telephone can log on and leave a message. The one she’s lifting off the board is in code. Kid stuff. I’ll break it down in another minute.”

  Riker looked back to the old man’s window. Whatever Redwing was into, it didn’t pay well. Not that the interior of one apartment was a sure indication of a bad neighborhood. And it wasn’t the rats dancing on the garbage can lid; he’d seen them uptown and down. But the condoms on the sidewalk told him it was a hooker block. The next block over might be straight middle-class working stiffs. That was New York. Turn any corner and the atmosphere changed. On the next street over, a storefront window displayed toys; on this block, it was adult books and peep shows.

  “I like this,” said Mallory. “I like it a lot. She’s not picking up background checks on victims. She’s gathering stock information on mergers and takeovers. If this is non-public, if it doesn’t tally with SEC filings, it’s insider trading.”

  “Mallory, can you break this into simple English? I’m not a stocks-and-bonds kinda guy. I guess you didn’t know that.”

  “Your niece works for a law firm, right?”

  “Gloria, yeah. She’s a paralegal.”

  “Let’s say Gloria is working up the contract for a merger between two companies. She has a little lead time before the paperwork on the merger is filed with the SEC. Now she knows the stock will go up in value the minute the merger is made public. Suppose Gloria gives that information to a friend before it goes public? The friend makes a fortune on stock purchases and gives your niece a cut of the profits. The original stockholders are cheated because they’ve sold their shares to Gloria’s friend, and sold them for a song. The feds really hate that.”

  “It’s like a rigged horse race?”

  “You got it. You see these numbers and letters?” She pointed to the first column of type on the screen. “These are stocks. I’m guessing they’re identified by current market quotations. I’ll have to check the paper when we get back. The numbers following the stock IDs are purchase orders. It doesn’t fit with any seance scam. She’s into something too big for any one person. A medium-size bank couldn’t handle these transactions.”

  “Suppose we get a warrant to pick up her computer?”

  “No good without a direct link to the player who feeds her the information. She has a legal loophole. This bulletin board qualifies as public access, same as printing stock information in a newspaper. Now that’s smart, very smart, and not Redwing’s idea. You’re looking for somebody with a brain, access to trading activity and organization skills.”

  “Coffey’s gonna love this.”

  “Yeah, right. Tell him it’s a gift from the rookie. So, what have you got for me?”

  “Kid, I gave you my wad,” he said, and that was the truth. She turned away from him, not believing in him anymore.

  Margot held the switchblade in her hand as she listened to the phone ringing endlessly, twenty, thirty times. She knew how to wait. He would answer. The switchblade had been cleaned for the tenth time and the blade gleamed, throwing its light on the walls. No answer. She continued to wait. It was what she did best. She had waited years for the man with the dancing knife. She looked down at the blade as it caught the light in a sliver of metal.

  She had decided to keep the switchblade. The blood had been boiled away on the stove. It was safe. She would keep it. It might bring her luck. It hadn’t been so lucky when it tumbled to the desk in the bank, but that was before she killed the bogeyman. Maybe she’d take it back to the bank. What was she going to do about the bank? Henry would know.

  The phone continued to ring.

  Maybe Henry would let her use his lawyer to get the advance money. Maybe she would just go back with the knife in her pocket. She was luckier today. A tourist had put a dollar bill in her cup and now there was enough in the cup for a slice of pizza and a subway token. It amazed her how easily money could be had when one looked as she did and smelled as she did.

  Thirty minutes later, she rounded the corner to Avenue C in that section of the East Village called Alphabet City. It was also called the war zone. This was where the law was not. And so it startled her to see a cop on the sidewalk talking to another cop in the car parked in front of her building.

  So the banker had turned her in. Bastard. She would get the little twit for that.

  She turned around and headed back to the subway, picking a cup from a trash can as she walked along the sidewalk. Don’t run, she told herself, running is a dead giveaway. She panhandled her way down the street in the security that no one, cop or civilian, looked into the face of poverty if they didn’t have to.

  The VCR was set to loop endlessly, and so, Markowitz danced through the night. Mallory fell asleep to the lullabies of the fifties, and he rock ‘n’ rolled into her dreams. The dancing detective held Mallory in his arms. She was unconscious, and he was trying desperately to wake her. The dream ended with the dip. He bowed her body down until she lay upon the floor at the base of the cork wall. He was yelling at her. What was he saying? Why couldn’t she understand?

  She woke, lifting her head from the desk, eyes slowly adjusting to the images on the video. Markowitz danced off with young Helen, twirling away from the camera’s eye, leaving Mallory alone in the dark. Her hands slowly rose above her head, curled into fists and came back to the desk as hammers.

  Why had they left her all alone?

  9

  Was it night? Was it day? Margot read the time off the passenger’s watch but there was no way to know if it was eleven in the morning or eleven at night. How long had she been asleep, rolling along on the subway line, back and forth, uptown and down. The subway car door opened and a passenger got on.

  She watched him, her eyes doing a slow roll as he took the seat opposite hers. She stared at his mouth. It was distinctive in its cruelty, a harsh line that dipped low and mean on either side. She was not likely to forget it, ever. That mouth, that cruel twisted mouth. She had dreams about that mouth and the dancing knife. The train stopped. The man got off, and she followed after him from a small distance. It was him. He was the one. She followed him into the tunnel leading up to the next level. The knife danced out of her pocket. The blade clicked into the light.

  He was the one.

  Charles, a well-known figure at the public library, was on a first-name basis with the reference librarian in the periodicals section. John helloed him in passing. Library regulars from bums to academics recognized his nose from a distance of ten shelves, and smiled in anticipation of the inadvertently comical return smile. This time, he was hunting Fanny Evenroe instead of a book. He might have gone to the section of Who’s Who books, but Fanny knew his quarry personally.

  He found her standing at the shelves, lost in the pages of a thick volume. He approached her slowly, giving her all the time in the world to finish her perusal, and there was time to imagine the seventy-something dowager as she had once been. The remarkable bones were splendid and her back had not been bent in the least by age.

  He always thought of her in the context of the first memory she had ever shared with him—her Washington, D.C., debut as a seventeen-year-old girl in long white gloves and a ball gown, waltzing in a ballroom’s soft glow of gaslight globes. Like all romantics of his own generation, he had
missed his place in time, arriving too late for chivalry, too late for a waltz.

  Fanny’s face crinkled into a smile as she returned her book to the shelf and greeted him. She had the gift of making anyone believe they might be the center of her personal universe. She held out both her hands to be grasped in his, and she kissed his face on both cheeks, having to reach only a little. She was over six feet tall, but would not be exact about her height any more than her date of birth.

  “It’s been ages, Charles. Who is she?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Something new has been added to your life, and it shows.”

  “Well, a new problem certainly.”

  “And what do you call this problem?”

  “I used to call it Kathleen. Just lately, I have to call it Mallory.”

  He brought her up to date on his new partnership as they lined up for coffee and croissants on the stone concourse between the flights of steps leading up to the formidable doors of the reference library. By the time they were seated under the shade of the table umbrella in view of the stone lions and the street traffic of Fifth Avenue, he had just broached the subject of his investigation.

  “Yes, it’s the same man,” she said. “I knew him well. He was very handsome when he was young, a senator’s aide when I met him. I danced with him more times than I can say. He was one of the few men taller than I was. I was heartbroken when he returned to his home state to practice law.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Oh yes, years later, and neither of us had married. There were other dances. He came back to Washington as a congressman this time. He was in the House of Representatives for two terms before he ran for senator.”

  “Did he win?”

  “Not the first time out or even the second, but finally he did. Then after he’d returned to private practice for a time, he was appointed to the Court. It was an excellent appointment. He’s a remarkable man. I follow his career with great interest.”

  “Did he ever discuss the boy with you?”

  “Yes. That child was always with him.”

  “The case isn’t mentioned in any of his published papers. I wondered if he’d simply put it behind him.”

  “Would you like to speak with him?”

  “It’s possible?”

  “You’re not suggesting he might have forgotten me, are you, Charles?”

  “Certainly not.” For she was one woman who could not be undone by time and the faultiest memory. When her name would be mentioned to the Supreme Court justice by his law clerk this afternoon, there would be no fumbling through history for her face.

  When they parted company, he handed her into a cab and returned to the library to hunt down the third photograph on Edith Candle’s mantelpiece.

  He guessed at the rough date. He was within a year of her coverage, turning the dials on the microfiche reader as quickly as most people flipped pancakes, missing nothing on the pages. It would have happened during the years of his sabbatical in Europe.

  Ah, there she was, the bride, smiling out at him, never guessing she would soon be shot to death by her fiance on the eve of her wedding. How the devil was he going to get the particulars? Oh, foolish question. What could Mallory not get for him in the way of information? But no, it was better to bypass her on this one.

  Sergeant Riker was a decent sort. He would help and not rat him out to Mallory.

  Henry Cathery had a moment of utter clarity brought on by the appearance of Redwing in the street below. Wasn’t it too soon for another seance? He stood by the window and his eyes cleansed of abstraction, a moment he seldom achieved away from the chessboard.

  The phone was ringing behind him and had been doing so all day. Normal people were not so persistent, even annoying salespeople and policemen. It could only be Margot wanting money. She would bleed him dry if he allowed it.

  He stared down at the player on the sidewalk at the edge of the flat plain of Gramercy Park. At last he saw it all in utter clarity—past, present and future. And then it was gone and he was left with the decision of whether or not to end the ringing of the telephone. He walked over to the instrument and turned off the bell. Then he wandered out to the kitchen with a thought of food, but with no idea in hell how to get it out of the cans. His IQ was 187.

  “I appreciate your getting back to me, sir,” said Charles. Though he was not surprised, considering his conduit.

  “Well, the message intrigued me. I had no idea anyone would ever give that boy another thought. Hard to lose a case that way, whether the state sets the rope or the boy hangs himself.”

  The man’s voice twanged in the dialect of the heartland. And there were other taut strings to the man’s mood. This was no distant memory, but one oft recalled.

  “The boy was guilty, wasn’t he?”

  “You know what that child was guilty of? He was guilty of doing the right thing by Tammy Sue Pertwee. He married her across the state line, and then that fifteen-year-old boy spent the next six months working at bad jobs, night and day, to provide for her and the baby that was coming.”

  “A baby?”

  “She died in childbirth. No one could have saved her. But that came out much later, after the boy died. The county coroner really dragged his feet on that one, the son of a bitch. They found the baby in the grave with Tammy Sue. They were lying in a crude, knocked-together box. I saw the photographs before they were destroyed. It was a heartbreaker—a dead child holding on to a dead child.”

  “There’s no mention of a baby in any of the newspapers.”

  “The girl’s family had that hushed. Supposedly, the photographs were lost. The boy told me they were planning to go home again when the baby’s age wasn’t so noticeable. Tammy Sue had been beaten by her daddy a few times, and the boy didn’t think she’d stand up to another blow. The boy’s family didn’t even come for the body. Didn’t want to acknowledge him as one of their own. It was a real circus here, midnight torch parades with signs that said ‘Kill the Monster’ and ‘Justice for Tammy Sue.’ The local merchants sold beer and hot dogs outside the jail. The boy had a clear view of the whole sideshow from his cell window.

  “He cried himself to sleep every night. He was just a kid, remember. Twelve nights went by that way, till one fine summer morning, the sheriff found him dangling from the light fixture. He’d made a rope of his bedding. And then there were three dead children.”

  “Did Edith Candle know the whole story?”

  “I told her husband, Max Candle, the magician. I expect he mentioned it to her, or maybe not. I did ask him to. I thought it might help the boy’s case if she made a statement to the press. But it was too late to do any good. It was the next day the boy killed himself. Max Candle sent me money to bury him, quite a lot of money. I bought that child the biggest monument in all of Claire County and buried him on the hill with the quality, and didn’t the townsfolk just love that.”

  Before Mallory left the house, she slipped a quarter into the watch pocket of her jeans in the unconscious habit of fifteen years of telephone change. All that varied in this ritual of the coin was that it no longer came from Helen’s hand. “So you can call home if you’re in trouble,” Helen had said each morning, whether packing little Kathy off to school or tall Kathy off to college classes, and then later, the police academy. “You only have to call, and we’ll be there. We’ll come for you,” Helen would say as she handed Kathy her lunch box and her telephone change.

  Mallory had never minded being the only one among the sophisticated Barnard women to carry a lunch box with a cartoon mouse painted on the side. She had no friends in that set, nor had she sought any.

  From the age of twelve, her companions had been the computers at NYPD where she spent her after-school hours, three days a week, when Helen had committee meetings and charity work and could not pick her up at the Manhattan day school. Even in the college years, she had spent her free time among those computers, fast becoming an asset to Markowitz. But she was
still a child when she hacked her way into the requisition department, and shortly thereafter, the computers became more up-to-date. Packages began to arrive, containing computer components which little Kathy, and later, tall Kathy assembled into a state-of-the-art system. Markowitz had learned to avert his eyes each time he passed her computer monitor.

  She fingered the quarter in her pocket. She had been such a cared-for, watched-over child, she had never needed to use that quarter. And they could not come for her now. Telephones were not so advanced. Yet the quarter rested in the pocket, connecting her by memory if not by the telephone company.

  On her way to the door, she noticed the blinking light on her answering machine. She depressed the play button. Her single message was from Riker. Redwing had moved again in the night. He had neglected to tell her where.

  10

  Edith Candle peered through her thick glass lenses with a child’s magnified eyes. “Best that you stay clear of her, Kathy.”

  “How did you get Redwing’s address?”

  Edith removed her glasses and went through the time-stalling machinations of cleaning the lenses. Her naked eyes took on their real and rather ordinary proportions.

  Just another illusion, thought Mallory.

  “She gave me the address,” said Edith, restoring her magnified eyes and pushing the glasses up the bridge of her nose. “She called this morning. We had a rather long talk.”

  “Did she ask you to come and see her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she tell you not to mention it to anyone?”

  “She did ask me to keep her confidence, but I don’t remember the exact wording.”

  “Give me the address.”

  “Did you want to come with me? I don’t think she’d like that, dear. She asked that I come alone.”