Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  “It must have been something heinous.”

  “Not necessarily. People in love are only one step away from psychosis, and you can quote me on that. It wouldn’t have taken anything blatant. Edith had time enough to tear him down.”

  “That was years ago. Has she done any more recent damage?”

  “I’ve watched other things happen on a smaller scale, one tenant pitted against another. I have my suspicions about Herbert’s divorce. I didn’t tell you because Edith was part of your family. I’m sorry. Poor judgment on my part. Can you tell me any more about these people, these suspects? Do you have a sense that one might be more dangerous to Mallory than the rest?”

  “It’s a crapshoot,” said Charles. “Unless you want to rule out the women. People keep telling me it’s not a woman’s crime.”

  “No, I wouldn’t rule them out. Is Edith on familiar terms with any of them?”

  “She’s met Gaynor once, and Redwing the medium, but none of the others that I know of.”

  “Then I’d go with the medium. Edith would work in her own territory, the surest ground, and Gaynor’s probably a more stable personality. Do you have the woman’s address?”

  “Well, there’s nothing in the telephone book under Redwing. Somehow I didn’t think there would be. I have an idea Sergeant Riker might be able to get it for me.”

  “Good. But let’s try to suppress the white knight syndrome, okay? Better to just send the police. Think of Mallory. You want someone with a gun to get there first.”

  “Right, and if she’s not in trouble, the worst thing that can happen is that she wipes up the floor with me for interfering.”

  He dialed the phone and listened to it ring at the police station. After the fourteenth ring, to discourage those who were not seriously robbed, beaten or raped, the phone was answered.

  “Sergeant Riker, please.”

  A recording advised him that all lines were busy, and would he please hold on.

  Could he? It had been a long day, and no, he didn’t think he could hold on any longer.

  The cup was half empty when Redwing closed her eyes and began to sway back and forth. Mallory swayed with her, spilling a bit of tea in the motion. She sipped from her cup and listened to the heavy breathing. It seemed natural that the walls should move in and out as they breathed. She could feel the heartbeat of the house keeping time, beat for tick, with the clock on the wall.

  Redwing crooned nonsense words. Mallory rocked with her in the same thick sea of boiling air.

  The boy ceased his own swaying. Eyes rolled back to whites, he was going through the motions of making invisible tea, pouring the water into each cup, dipping each bag, unscrewing the cap of a bottle and pouring the contents into one cup but not the other.

  Mallory ceased to sway. She slowly looked down at the dark liquid sloshing to the sides of her cup. A yellow residue made a ring above the rich sweet tea.

  Drugged.

  She smashed her cup to the floor. The linoleum rolled under her in waves. She fell twice before she stumble-walked through the kitchen door and into the front room where the television was pouring out the stink of sound and sight that seared her eyes and hurt her ears. She fell again and moved forward on all fours. Redwing walked placidly beside her as Mallory crawled along the dirty carpet to the door, dragging the carpet’s store of matted hair and crumbs snagged in her broken fingernails. Redwing opened the door wide and smiled.

  Mallory stumbled to her feet and fled into the hallway, running now for the stairs. The hall telescoped, elongating with every step. And then she was falling, head hitting hard corners of the stairs, then a shoulder, a leg, assaulted by the unforgiving stone steps. She smelled her own blood on her hands. It poured out of every wound and filled the narrow lobby, spilling into the street as she opened the door and swam through it, an ocean of blood.

  Out on the street, swirling stars were flying past her, and then the stars screamed at her with horns and shrieks. She listened to louder noises of the blood rushing in her veins. She could taste the color red as it ran from her eyes and flowed in rivulets into her mouth. The flying stars pulsed with color and grew fat and exploded like bloated pimples of pyrotechnics.

  Markowitz was calling her. What was he saying? She smelled baking soda and floral air freshener.

  “I’m dying,” she screamed at him inside her brain where he lived in a corner of her gray matter that looked much like the old house in Brooklyn. Markowitz smiled. ‘Don’t be a sucker, Kathy.’

  ‘You listen to your father,’ said Helen, coming in from the kitchen of Mallory’s mind, wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, holding out a lunch box. ‘Do you have your quarter, Kathy?’ And then Mallory was crying and wiping blood from her eyes to feed coins into a silver slot.

  “I’m dying! She’s killed me! Redwing killed me with the tea!” she screamed into the phone, over the wire, to terrify a gentle man, eight city blocks away, who never bothered to hang up the telephone nor lock his door behind him.

  The fluorescent hospital lights made everyone look ill, but Charles thought Jack Coffey looked much worse than Mallory. By the eyes shot with red, the condition of the man’s clothes and the stubble of beard, he guessed it had been at least twenty-four hours since the policeman had last seen his bed. With Sergeant Riker, it was more difficult to tell.

  Mallory, asleep, achieved a look of innocence she could never have managed with her green eyes open. A bandage at the back of her head covered the worst of the cuts. But for the fresh bruises flowering on her bare arms, she was a study in white on white, palest skin showing above the crisp sheets. A white bandage covered the place on the inside of one arm where a tube joined her to a bottle suspended on a T-bar and dripping fluid into her vein. A machine by her bedside kept track of her life signs with low blips of sound and light.

  Riker sat in the only bedside chair, eyes trained on the blips as though he were wired into them. And perhaps he was.

  “Redwing’s shrewd, but not too bright,” Jack Coffey was saying as he leaned back against the wall by the bed. “Just for openers, we got her on possession of drugs. She had enough stuff in that apartment to open a store. It was all lying around in the open, like she didn’t think we’d come looking.”

  Coffey was staring down on the sleeping Mallory, and Charles detected something between tenderness and aggravation in the man’s expression.

  “We’re gonna push for dealing, too.”

  “What about the little boy?” asked Charles.

  She had ranted on and on about the boy, even when she believed that she was bleeding from every pore and dying. The drug had ripped her mind to shreds, and yet she had fought for words to tell him about a damaged child. Mallory, the hard case. No one had ever known her, not really, except maybe Helen Markowitz who had only suspected the best of her.

  Unpolished grace, unlikely paladin, thy name is Mallory.

  “The kid’s in custody,” Coffey was saying. “There’s more than enough evidence of child abuse. Redwing’s going away for a long time. In my sleep, I could nail her on five counts, good for five years each. And that’s without the stock scam. The U.S. Attorney can try her for that one from a prison cell.”

  “No murder charge,” said Charles. “So, you don’t believe she killed Louis Markowitz?”

  “Naw. I talked the DA out of it. He only liked the idea ’cause she has the size for it. But she hasn’t got the brains to sucker Markowitz. Maybe we’ll get something on conspiracy with the bastard she was working for.”

  “Redwing gave you a name?”

  “She doesn’t know it. She calls the head of the operation the Director. Before the surveillance team lost her, they’d tracked her through five neighborhoods, one seance for every day of the week. We figure there’s more than forty people in the network. We’re gonna start rounding them up this morning.”

  Riker was looking down on his notebook. “Mallory told me they had more action going than a medium-size bank could handle. Betw
een all the seance groupies, there was enough capital to run a small country.”

  “We can count on half of them climbing over each other in a race to turn state’s evidence in exchange for immunity,” said Coffey. “It was one of the craziest scams I’ve ever seen.”

  “Let me guess, it’s more fun that way,” said Charles. “The Director used Redwing to collect insider tips from a pool of majority stockholders. Then, instructions for sales and purchases were spread over this large client base—no single transaction large enough to merit investigation. Redwing provides all the clients with the crystal ball defense should the SEC ask questions. Redwing and the Director split their cut of the profits.”

  “Nicely done,” said Coffey. “But it wasn’t a split. The Director paid Redwing a very small commission. We had an SEC investigator explain it to her, just the scope of the single transaction Mallory gave us. Redwing went crazy. She had no idea that much money was changing hands. So now she’s willing to cooperate, but she can’t tell us much.”

  “If she doesn’t know the Director’s name, how did the two of them come together?”

  “Pearl Whitman set it up. She went out shopping for mediums. She interviewed quite a few of them, Redwing says, before she found one who was reliably dishonest.”

  “How did the Director receive payment?”

  “No idea. We assume Miss Whitman handled that.”

  “But the seances continued after Whitman’s death. Not likely the Director would continue funneling the stock information without payment.”

  “The SEC man figures we’ll find a foreign account set up for deposit. We won’t know until we bring in the whole cartel.”

  “So why the attack on Mallory? It’s not too bright, is it? Calling attention to herself by trying to kill a police officer?”

  “She said she thought Mallory was going to expose the whole operation.”

  “Did she say where she got that idea? Did someone suggest it to her?”

  “Dumb as Redwing is, it would’ve been hard to miss Mallory’s brains. And then her pretty face was in the paper on the day of Markowitz’s funeral, along with a nice little bio on the cop’s daughter the cop. Mallory probably scared the shit out of Redwing when she had herself invited to the séance.”

  Mallory stirred in the white sheets, and three tired men turned to look at her. The gray window light of morning was humanizing the fluorescent lighting.

  “Hey, what did the doctor say?” asked Coffey, nudging Riker’s chair with one foot.

  Riker looked down to his notebook again and read from the page which was blank but for the word okay. “It’s a new designer drug. Nasty stuff. The doctor who pumped her stomach says he got three deaths put down to this junk in the last year, all from self-inflicted wounds. Victims put their eyes out, rip their veins out. There’s no permanent damage to Mallory. She’s got a few bruises and cuts. That’s it. She’ll be okay, but her reaction time’s gonna be a little slow for a few days.”

  “She thought she was bleeding to death when Riker and I brought her in,” said Charles. “But there was no blood on her except for that cut on her head and the dried blood from the dog-bite victim.”

  “It’s a lot like LSD,” said Riker. “She probably did see the wounds. Even Mallory’s got to believe what she sees with her own eyes.”

  Charles wondered if Mallory had seen the writing on Edith’s wall and believed that, too. No, not likely. Not Mallory. She had a first-rate mind. She had probably seen Edith rather clearly then.

  So, she was forewarned, and yet she walked into it.

  Coffey put his hand on Riker’s shoulder. “You’re on baby-sitting detail again. Mallory doesn’t go anywhere. You got that?”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant. I can handle it.”

  “If you need to get some sleep, have the doctor sedate the shit out of her first. You got that, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could I have her house keys?” asked Charles. “If she’s going to be here for a few days, she’ll need some things from home. The nurse gave me a list.”

  “No problem. And thanks for the help, Charles,” Smiling, he shook Charles’s hand and held on to it a fraction of a second too long. “Was that old bio on the SoHo murder any use to you?” Coffey was not smiling now.

  So Riker had thought it worth mentioning to Coffey. And now Coffey was waiting on Charles to give him an explanation.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Charles.

  The young policeman’s brain was not so quick as Mallory’s, but worked as well in its own time. Suppose he did give Coffey his explanation? What could Coffey do about it?

  Nothing.

  What Edith had done he could never prove. But one day soon, he and Coffey must talk. It had to end.

  11

  Charles dropped the duffel bag, spilling out Mallory’s toothbrush, hairbrush, robe and slippers onto the hall carpet. He wore the slack-jaw expression of a man who had just seen a ghost. And he had.

  He walked through the open doorway into the den and met Louis Markowitz. The man inhabited this room as surely as if Charles could see him in the body. Louis was at work all over the back wall, and he was as messy as he had been in life.

  Charles’s memory re-created one section of the den’s cork wall as it had appeared in Louis’s office before he was murdered. The mental photograph agreed with half this wall. The second half of the wall was also pure Louis Markowitz in style, but the man had been two days dead when the first of these photographs had been taken.

  He pulled aside an overlay of paper on the right side of the cork. Photos and papers were more neatly aligned on the next layer. On the bottom layer, every bit of paper was machine-precision straight. Layer by layer, the beautiful machine had gone awry until she had captured her father’s method of order passing for chaos.

  On Mallory’s side of the wall, an early layer of clutter held the background check on Margot Siddon. She had rejected Margot in favor of the medium on the next layer. Henry Cathery and Jonathan Gaynor were off to one side in separate categories. He pulled the photographs of Redwing off the board, eliminating the clutter of the red herring.

  “Louis, talk to me,” he whispered to the other side of the wall.

  The bulletin board began to speak. A handwritten note jumped out at him, and credit reports, early 1980s stock transactions, and bank records. This was all Louis had to work with when he tailed the murderer to the scene of Pearl Whitman’s death in the East Village. Was it the murderer he was trailing? Why had they all assumed that?

  Mallory’s side of the board had more financial data on the top layer, including the U.S. Attorney’s probe of Edith Candle and Mallory’s probe of Edith’s computer. Financial statements dominated both sides of the wall with the money motive. Father and daughter were holding to the same portrait of a killer: sane but evil.

  At horrific speed, he read Mallory’s neatly typed and incredibly detailed surveillance notes. The medical examiner’s reports he took no time with, ripping them from both sides. He knocked loose the pin which held a plastic bag to Markowitz’s section. It drifted to the floor to cover the pile of rejects. The beads from Anne Cathery’s necklace were also sent to the floor.

  Now, with all the extraneous clutter gone, he knew why and how, but not who. Pearl Whitman tantalized him, as she must have done to Markowitz before him. But it was Samantha Siddon who finally gave up the killer’s name.

  Riker was the first thing Mallory saw when she opened her eyes. In her estimation, he was not a pretty sight. She thought his eyes were redder if that was possible.

  His gray, unshaven face collapsed into a smile of relief.

  “Hi, kid. How’re you doin’?”

  “Mallory to you. I feel like I’ve got a hangover.”

  “You know, this reminds me of the time you had appendicitis. You were just a little squirt.”

  “Riker, what’s—”

  “I went down to the hospital to sweat out your operation with Lou and Helen. Lou said
I’d missed the best part. When the emergency room nurse pressed down on your appendix, you kicked her in the gut, he said. I laughed till I cried.”

  “What’s going on, Riker?”

  “You remember anything about last night?”

  “Redwing.” She sat up quickly, too quickly. “Oh Christ, my head hurts. You got her?”

  “We got her for assault and five or ten other counts. Coffey adds on a new one every time something occurs to him. The last thing I saw on his list was ‘no dog tags.’ He’s on a damn mission.”

  “Where’s the boy?” She pulled off the bandage which covered the needle dripping fluid into her arm.

  “He’s in Juvenile Hall. Don’t mess with that needle or I’ll call the nurse. You won’t like that. She’s bigger than you and meaner.”

  “I have to get out of here.” She pulled out the needle and rubbed the hole in her arm. “Where’s my stuff?”

  “Not so fast, kid. You don’t go anywhere, you got that? Don’t give me any grief, Kathy.”

  “Mallory.”

  “This is personal, kid, not business. But I can make it business. You stay put, or I book you.”

  “What charge?”

  “A stolen Xerox machine.”

  “Okay, you will.”

  “Naw. That was too easy, kid. You forget who you’re talking to.”

  “I only want to go home.”

  “You stay here for the duration.”

  “I’ll stay home for the duration. I’ll go nuts if I have to stay here. At least at home I’ve got my computer.”

  “And Lou’s bulletin board.”

  “That too.”

  “You’re too weak to go anywhere.”

  She threw back the covers and swung her bare feet over the edge of the high hospital bed. She landed on the floor, sitting unceremoniously on her backside with a new pain to contend with.

  “I told you so,” said Riker.

  Three women had chimed the warning bells, but they had charitably overestimated him. Bells or no bells, the village idiot was always the last to know his house was on fire.