Mallory's Oracle

by Carol O'Connell

  “One might take the view that Pearl had changed her mind about giving Henry a solid alibi for the time of his grandmother’s death.”

  “I wouldn’t. Four murders would be too complex for a young man who thrives on simplicity and lack of distraction. He wouldn’t bother to go to all that trouble—certainly not for money. I gather you didn’t know he was coming into a personal fortune of his own. You seemed surprised. That’s a snag, isn’t it?”

  “You keep digressing. How does Samantha Siddon give me away?”

  “Samantha Siddon was an interesting departure from the pattern. Everyone was so busy with patterns and common motives. And that place where Louis died with Pearl Whitman, that made another interesting departure. Then I realized it wasn’t a departure at all. It was business as usual with an unexpected interruption.”

  “You’re wandering off the path again, Charles.”

  “Sorry. Well, the order of the murders is important. You killed Anne Cathery first to put suspicion on Henry Cathery. He was perfect, wasn’t he? A strange boy, reclusive. But even if he had been arrested, there were no witnesses, no physical evidence. All that Cathery money, what were the odds he couldn’t make bail? So you didn’t have to worry about his confinement while you were killing your aunt. You didn’t count on Henry intimidating Pearl Whitman into an alibi after the police came around a second time. Then Miss Whitman was the third victim. That would have been predictable for Markowitz, once he sized Henry Cathery up for a frame. That would have occurred to him shortly after your aunt died. He was following the money motive.”

  Gaynor kicked the lamp, and the shifting light made his shadow smaller. “It couldn’t have been that simple.”

  “Did it rattle you when he followed Pearl Whitman into the building? Yes, I suppose it did. You must have thought it was all over at that point. You left the plastic bag behind. Very sloppy. It was photographed at the site.”

  “Siddon,” said Gaynor, bringing the knife close and then drawing it back. “Samantha Siddon.”

  “Right. The last one. It followed Markowitz’s logic for the framing of the Cathery boy. You knew about that odd little symbiotic relationship between Henry and Margot. You’d lived in the square for several months by then. I expect you’d seen them together quite a few times. You would have been interested in every aspect of Henry’s routine. You couldn’t count on Henry not having an alibi for all the murders, so you implicated the only other human he had any ties to. It would destroy her credibility as an alibi and lead the police down the path of a conspiracy.”

  “I have an unbreakable alibi for the Siddon murder.”

  “Well, no you don’t, not if you’re counting on Mallory. I’m sure you noticed her staking out Gramercy Park and following you on campus. Her tragic flaw is beauty, or rather, the fact that she’s unaware of it. She actually believes she can blend into her surroundings. So you were aware of her, and you made her your alibi.”

  “I was never out of her sight for more than twenty minutes.”

  “Nineteen minutes. She’s obsessive about her notes. Do you know, she even has a note about the change in your physical characteristics during the play? You do have a distinctively awkward body language, but you can lose it when you want to. Onstage, you were even graceful.”

  “Nineteen minutes isn’t enough time to go to Gramercy Park, kill the old woman and get back to the theater again.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe any of them were killed in Gramercy Park. The university borders a seedy area with lots of places to do a murder unobserved.”

  “The police have no reason to believe she wasn’t killed in the park.”

  “You mean because of the blood at the supposed crime sites? I liked the detail of the beads spread out all over creation. You arranged the bodies as they were when you killed the women. Once the bodies stiffened, it would have been easy to leave them in the same positions at another site, even working in the dark. Originally, the police believed the plastic bag was used to prevent the blood from splattering the killer. But the bags were used to retain all the blood necessary for a convincing crime scene. Excellent idea. The bag would keep it nice and moist so it would saturate the surroundings instead of lying caked on the surface. The bloody palm prints were another nice touch.”

  “They’ll never prove it.”

  “No? But you’ve made so many errors. Shall I tell you what I believe tipped off Edith Candle? You mentioned the slashed breast from the seance. Blood and gore are not the mainstays of a medium’s routine. Edith knew you’d filled the gaps in that performance from memory. You couldn’t have seen it.”

  The knife had dropped away from his eye by a bare inch, and then another.

  “It was more than money, wasn’t it? I always thought that was a flaw in the police logic. You took an unnecessary risk planting the first body in the park. You craved the excitement, didn’t you? How did it start?”

  The lamp on the floor created the illusion of footlights and the drama of contrast. Gaynor’s grin had a ghoulish aspect.

  “It started with Anne Cathery’s dog. He got away from her and led her out of the park. We were looking for him by the trash bins when I saw the monkey puzzle worked out for me.”

  “The monkey puzzle. That sounds familiar.”

  “When you were a schoolboy, did you have the paradigm of the monkey, the chair, the pole and the banana?”

  “I think so. The banana is suspended from the ceiling by a thread?”

  “Right,” said Gaynor. “Just out of reach. And this very hungry monkey is given the tools to retrieve the banana—a chair and a pole. But the monkey doesn’t know how to use them. So he paces back and forth until he gives up and sits in the corner, beaten. Suddenly, everything falls into line. From where he sits, he can see the pole leaning on the chair and pointing up to the banana. He grabs up the pole, leaps on the chair and swats the banana down.”

  “So it was spontaneous?”

  “Yes. She was looking for the dog by a row of trash cans. Some building super had left half a box of large plastic bags by the cans. The garbage was bagged, just waiting to be put out on the street in the morning. There was a kitchen knife on the ground—someone had discarded it for a broken handle. The hilt of the knife was touching the box of trash bags and the blade was pointing at Anne Cathery. Beyond that silly woman, on the next street, was Henry Cathery, sitting in the park playing chess with himself. I picked up one of the bags and punctured it with the knife. That gave me cover from the blood. I used another bag to put over her as soon as I’d put the knife in her throat. They were all small women. It wasn’t difficult to bag her, so to speak. With the cover of a plastic bag around the body, I had all the leisure to make it look like the work of a lunatic.”

  “As if it wasn’t.”

  “A profit of hundreds of millions of dollars is not the goal of the average lunatic.”

  “But you did like it, didn’t you?”

  Gaynor ignored this.

  “Later, I came back for her. She was stiff by then. You were right, it was easy to arrange the body in the park so no one would know she’d been moved. Then I broke her beads and sent them flying everywhere.”

  Gaynor was smiling, and it was hardly an engaging smile. The man was enjoying his exposition. Of course, the downside of the perfect murder would be the lack of an appreciative audience.

  “That was risky, even in the small hours of the morning,” said Charles, hoping for the ring of appreciation in his own voice.

  “I admit that part was exciting. But what were the odds of anyone watching at four in the morning? No one’s very alert at that hour. I wore jeans and a baseball cap to pass as a maintenance man. I threw a bowlegged gait into the role. I was only carrying a large garbage bag. Nothing too sinister in that. Maintenance drones are invisible in that neighborhood. If it hadn’t worked, if anyone had come forward with a description of a maintenance man with a garbage bag, it would never have come back on me. No motive. This was Henry’s grandm
other, not mine.”

  “It never occurred to you that Henry would report his grandmother missing during the night?”

  “The police won’t take a missing person report until forty-eight hours go by. I was hardly worried about Henry getting a posse together to beat the bushes for her. You’ve met him—I saw you in the park with him. It wasn’t much of a risk. The worst thing that could happen was that she’d be found somewhere else.”

  “Where did you kill your aunt?”

  “I invited her to lunch and met her on a side street near the campus. She never mentioned the appointment to anyone. I had to volunteer the information to the police so they could verify my alibi for either side of the half hour when I didn’t have one. I told them she stood me up.”

  “I suppose that was quite understandable to them, since she was being murdered at that time. And Pearl Whitman? How did you get her into that East Village neighborhood?”

  “I told her I was a broker with information to give the U.S. Attorney’s office about the cartel. She offered me a bribe. I told her she’d have to meet with me to work out the details. By public telephones, I led her from block to block, sort of eased her into the neighborhood by degrees.”

  “So, the fear of notoriety, prison and poverty overcame her fear of a bad neighborhood.”

  “Exactly. Samantha Siddon was only a little different. I had the impression she was looking forward to our meeting. I used a series of public phones to bring her to the theater by three different cabs. I had her walk the last few blocks and met her at the back of the building. I killed her behind a trash bin. That only took a few minutes. It took me longer to dress for the play rehearsal.”

  “How did you transport the body to Gramercy?”

  “I usually go everywhere by cab. That day I hired a rental car for the occasion. I had to leave early, before Mallory’s usual arrival time. I didn’t want her to see the car.”

  The knife backed away another inch. He braced his arm on the arm of the chair. “But you still haven’t delivered, Charles. You didn’t have anything that would stick, unless there’s something else you’ve left out.”

  “Only this.” Charles pushed the knife away and blinded Gaynor with Edith’s unfurled shawl. He pulled the gun from the chair cushion and leveled it at Gaynor’s head as the man ripped the shawl away from his face.

  “Put down the knife. The police should be here any minute now. I expect they’re on the way up in the elevator.”

  Gaynor smiled, and it was Charles’s turn to play ‘What’s going on here?’ A child’s game flashed through his brain.

  Paper covers stone, scissors cut paper, stone breaks scissors.

  A gun could not be outdone by a knife. So, why was Gaynor smiling?

  “The police? No, I don’t think so, Charles. You couldn’t have known I would come—you only hoped I would. You’re bluffing.”

  “I can’t bluff. God knows I’ve tried. I just don’t have the face for it.”

  The knife fell from Gaynor’s hand and thudded to the carpet. “I believe you.”

  Well, that was more like it. Logic reigned.

  Illogically, Gaynor lunged for the gun.

  They were locked together, hands grappling for control of the weapon, limbs writhing, faces contorted. They were turning now, gun pointing to the ceiling, hands sweating and sliding over one another’s flesh, legs kicking out, turning, turning into the dark hallway, knocking against the narrow walls and falling into the front room. They went to the floor and rolled, man over man, across the rug. The room was too dark to see the gun clearly. It was only a vague shape and cold metal, and the barrel was changing position, pointing lower. It was still in Charles’s hands when it fired.

  It was an explosion to crack the world. Charles reached for his side, his face all in agony. Gaynor rose to his feet, sole owner of the gun. He took a handkerchief from one pocket. A plastic bag from the same pocket fell to the floor.

  “You couldn’t have shot me, Charles. You’re much too sane and civilized.” He methodically wiped the gun’s barrel and then its revolving chamber and handle. “It was predictable that you’d hesitate before you took a human life. That half second has killed you.” He bent down to retrieve the plastic bag from the floor and wrapped it around the handle of the gun. “And to answer your question honestly, yes, I did love it. I do love it. I’m exhilarated.”

  Pain was giving way to shock as he watched Gaynor ease down on the back of his heels, well out of the stream of light from the open door which now shone on Charles’s face. The better to see the fear? Was Gaynor waiting for that? Yes. No killing could be complete without it.

  Charles could feel the blood on his hand. The barrel of the gun was pointing to his heart, and there was no doubt that death was coming. Fear was crowded out of his mind by the approach of death, its loud footfalls, its enormity. A moment stretched out for an eternity. He was at his mother’s bedside again. She had not been frightened. She had heard it coming and succumbed to the wonder of it. She had died with an expression of amazement.

  He smiled at Gaynor, and the man’s face clouded up with anger. The gun barrel was pressed to Charles’s heart.

  Soon.

  He heard the bell for the elevator. So Jack Coffey had come, but not in time. There was not the space of a second to call out. He heard the shot and felt the bone-shattering assault on his chest. His muscles jerked and then he lay motionless in the dark with only the light of the hall to show the outline of his body on the carpet. The higher orders of his beautiful brain were shutting down, memory was collapsing in on itself. The most primitive portion of his mind, where passion was seated, was the last repository of consciousness. The last thing in this world that his senses could reach was the voice of Henrietta Ramsharan, followed close by the sudden rush of Mallory’s perfume.

  Mallory shot out of Edith Candle’s apartment and ran for the exit door, which was closing on its slow hydraulic. She was murderous in the eyes and the grip of her gun. She stood on the stairwell landing.

  Which way? Up or down?

  The noise from below was faint. Breaking glass? She looked down through the winding metal stairs to the basement door, which stood ajar. He could only be seconds through that door. But wait, something was off. Instinct kept her still. Breaking glass? The only window in the cellar was on the other side of the accordion partition where Max Candle’s illusions were stored. Was Edith in the cellar? Had she opened that partition?

  Now she stood in Markowitz’s shoes. No backup, no time to call for help. She was going into the dark all alone.

  She moved down the stairs with the silence of tennis shoes and the inherent stealth of a born thief. At each landing, she unscrewed the bulbs. When she put out the basement door’s bulb, she was standing in the dark. She opened the cellar door and closed it quickly behind her. One blind hand reached up to the top of the fuse box and felt around for the flashlight.

  It was gone.

  The thunder made a dull sound in the basement. The glow from a streak of lightning bent its way down the sides of buildings to light up the garbage cans in the wide high window of the far wall. The window glass was broken, but not enough to allow a body to pass through the shards. He was still here.

  She made her way by memory and touch, around a packing trunk, down the aisle of boxes and crates and into the wider area where Max Candle’s illusions were stored, stepping softly toward the bad light from the back window. Lightning flashed and lit the guillotine, and then the thunder came crashing after it. An anticlimactic soft rain pinged off the garbage cans beyond the broken glass, and wind shears drove stray droplets through the cracked window.

  She tensed every muscle in her body, watching indistinct shadows, listening for footfalls. Her eyes hardened, blind to the flight of one raindrop. It touched the sleeve of her coat and disappeared on the rough tweed, without the substance to leave a wetness or any other sign that it had ever existed. Mallory focused on the infinitely more subtle nuances in the shad
ows of black on black.

  ‘The hell of Christianity is not eternal fire,’ Rabbi Kaplan had told her when she had become confused by the Christian Sunday school. (Helen had felt compelled to give the Christians equal time in Kathy’s education.) ‘Hell is the absence of the beloved.’ The rabbi had this on the word of a Jesuit, he told her, and so it must be true. And so it was. The people she loved were killed. She wanted to kill back.

  A dull globe light came on from behind the box she was rounding. She froze. Her eyes fixed on a single shadow sliding out from behind the Chinese screen, gliding just ahead of her and to the right. She raised her gun to the level of the head which would appear in her sights any second. She planned a head shot despite the training that taught her to shoot for the widest part of the body. She licked her lips as she waited for the shadow to emerge. The rain was drumming now, harder, louder, and the wind was in a fury, sending the rain wide and far into the room.

  There was a crunch of broken glass, and the head of another shadow appeared near the feet of her own. She could hear the rush of footsteps. She turned around to see the second shadow. And now the room filled with brilliant, blinding light. The silhouette moving between her and the light was small and rounded, plump arms reaching out for her.

  The wrong shadow.

  And now Mallory heard the sound of the shadow behind her. She spun around, too slow in her reaction time. Yet, in the split of a second, there was time to note all the details of the man as she was still turning, as the gun was rising to point the barrel. Only a few feet away. Good shot or bad, she knew Gaynor was not likely to miss at this range.

  Edith Candle watched on, dispassionately. Gaynor’s finger jerked the trigger, and the blue-black muzzle flashed with the explosion. It was done in a moment. And while it was being done, the rain continued to fly through the cracked glass, but for the few drops sacrificed to the heat of the gun.

  In the white light of the sun-bright room, Gaynor was a chimera in Mallory’s adapting eye as the bullet tore its hole in the front of her shirt. Her gold hair was flying in the wet and chill October wind whipping through the window. She was falling, falling, eyes closing before she went to the ground. She heard the soft shuffle of running footsteps and the slower heavy footfalls following after.