Mallory and the nurse walked down a hallway of tall windows. The glass sparkled with a recent cleaning and gave them a clear view of the dead garden. This long gallery was lined with chairs of wicker and chairs on wheels, each one only marginally occupied by an elderly person in a green robe and paper slippers. Their faces were devoid of expression, not enjoying the vista of bare trees and brown grass, their only activity, for they seemed to have been parked here and abandoned.
And now Mallory better understood the old man she had yet to meet. „You humor Mr. Roland, don’t you?“
„Oh, yeah, everybody does,“ said the nurse. „My grandfather was in World War II. He’d flay me alive if I didn’t show the old man some respect. So I call him ‘General,’ and sometimes I even salute. He likes that.“
Perhaps Mr. Roland was not deluded, but merely cagey. She turned back to look at the chair-bound people in a holding pattern at the windows, disengaged from life and unattended. Yes, Mr. Roland had been wise to elevate his rank in the world.
„You’ll be two minutes late for your appointment, ma’am. My fault – sorry. He might make you pay for that.“ The nurse stopped by a door at the end of the corridor and opened it for her. „He’s all yours.“
When she entered the private room, she found a withered little man with stray wisps of white hair sprouting in soft horns on either side of his balding head. He seemed lost in the network of technology. A plastic bag hung on the arm of a metal pole and dripped liquid into his veins. She could see the bruises on his arms from many other needles. A cable from his bedside monitor wove between the buttons of his red pajamas and stood out in a bold line to his heart. More tubes carried oxygen from the wall unit to the plastic device under his nostrils.
„So you’re Detective Mallory.“ Mr. Roland’s voice was the last remnant of strength, and it carried the authority of his falsely escalated rank. He looked her up and down, as if he were indeed a general reviewing his troops. His eyes came to rest on a bulge in the line of her blazer. He pointed to it with one gnarly finger. „Is that a gun? Now who’d give a gun to a little girl like you? Show me your identification.“ This was an order.
Mallory reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out her shield and ID. She held it up to him, and he squinted to read her name and rank.
„Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,“ she said, stepping back out of range from any spittle that might come her way.
„The police are all children now.“ The old man shook his head. „But girls with guns. If that ain’t the limit.“
Mallory settled into a chair beside the bed. „I need information about a man under your command in World War II.“
„Oh, the real war. Now that was a time and a half. I was career army, you know. In my first command – mostly sabotage details – damn few came back alive, and that’s a fact. That’s how much action my battalion saw.“
By Mallory’s count, it was hardly a battalion, and only two men out of twenty had come back alive. The U.S. Army had been less than satisfied with Roland’s explanation for this carelessness. „You could save me some time, sir. You know how long it takes to get anything out of the military.“
Actually, it had taken very little time. Hacking into the Pentagon computer was a rite of passage for the high-technology generation. A child could do it, and many children did. The military system suffered thousands of hits every year. But her time inside the files was limited by the bells and whistles of electronic watchdogs. „The soldier was Private Malakhai. Do you – “
„Do I remember him? Hell yes, I do. I did my level best to kill that son of a bitch.“ He paused to gauge the effect on her, and he was clearly disappointed that she was neither shocked nor impressed. „On his last mission, I made him jump from a plane in a daylight run. Damn fluke. The German gunners on the ground must’ve been napping when the boy’s parachute opened.“
„You wanted him dead – one of your own men.“
„Oh, yeah.“ He seemed more pleased with himself now that she had recognized his godhood. „The corporal – Edwards was his name. Damn kid, younger than you are. Well, that pissant tried to keep Malakhai in the plane. I had to pistol-whip the little bastard to keep him from blocking the door. Then I ordered Malakhai out of the plane. I should’ve pushed Edwards out too. But he wasn’t wearing a chute. I like to give a man a sporting chance.“
Mallory nodded. Edwards was the one who had chased down the lost medals belonging to his unit. Among the decorations he had secured for Private Malakhai, there were too many Purple Hearts, each one standing for a wound. She could not get them out of her mind.
„Oh, yeah,“ said the old man. „I saw it as my responsibility to make sure Malakhai never went home from the war. That boy wasn’t something you could turn loose on a peacetime population – not in good conscience.“
„He won a lot of medals.“ Her voice was soft but obstinate.
„Mostly shrapnel.“ The old man waved his hand in the air to say this was of no consequence. „It was a mistake to give him medals. He didn’t assassinate his targets one at a time, you know. He blew up troops by the dozen, by the damn truckload. And sometimes he forgot to make distinctions between soldiers and civilians. That kind of butchery never makes it into the permanent record.“
Covert missions. That would explain the lack of detail on Malakhai’s records and the alarms going off each time she had peeled back another layer of security codes.
The old man raised one clenched fist. „We took all the risks and got damn little glory.“
We? „So Malakhai did a lot of high-risk missions.“
„Mostly suicide runs. But he kept finding his way home again, turning up at field camp, torn up like a damn alley cat. And all the time, his eyes were getting colder and colder.“ Roland smiled, warming to his subject. „Hollow Boy – that’s what I named him. After a while, he even answered to it. Toward the end, he wasn’t human anymore. I should have done it right – just taken out my gun and shot him the way you’d put down a dog. I had the sweetest little pistol, a gift from General Patton.“
Yeah, right.
„Did you know his wife died two days before he enlisted?“
„That’s what the British said. Malakhai did basic training with their boys. Damn doctors wanted to sedate the shit out of him and put him in a hospital. In 1942, they were taking kids and old men, but they didn’t want any part of Malakhai. Said he was out of touch with reality. They didn’t think he’d stand the chance of a child in battle. Yeah, he was sick all right, but such a useful kind of crazy – no sense of fear. You could fire a rifle right next to that kid’s head – no reaction. So I figured, why waste him? I had a clerk fiddle his papers for repatriation and reassignment. He was born a Polish bastard, so we gave him an American father. Pulled him out of basic training before the Brits could ship him off to the funny farm. Now that was a neat piece of work.“
„You fiddled a lot of paperwork for your unit. Weren’t you supposed to send your men home after they’d been shot to pieces? Wasn’t anyone counting Malakhai’s Hearts? He was wounded seven times, seven Purple Hearts.“
„The paperwork was delayed. Wartime bureaucracy.“
„And there were other medals for valor. They caught up to Malakhai five years after the war. You never wanted him to have them, did you?“
„Not while he was still useful. If I’d reported every little piece of metal in his hide, they would’ve shipped him Stateside.“
„And you wanted him dead.“
„Well, I couldn’t ship him home, could I? Private Malakhai was a damn murder machine. And it’s not like he was a real American.“
„He wore the uniform.“
The old man was clearly exasperated. „You still don’t get it, little girl. You know why Hitler used gas chambers? He wasn’t being efficient. He mechanized death to lessen the shock on the troops. That bastard knew what hands-on mass murder would do to them. They’d all be like Malakhai. It would gut their so
uls. A whole generation of hollow boys would never be able to go home again. It would poison the seed of a whole damn country. And Hitler would be the king of nothing.“
„All those medals.“ She was taking more pride in Malakhai as an opponent. „Medals for wounds, medals for valor.“
„The boy was insane!“ The old man made a weak fist, frustrated that she could not grasp this simple fact. „And pathetic. Sometimes tears would roll down his face at the damnedest times. He wasn’t crying – no emotion in that one. It was a mechanical thing. The tears would just come and go with no reason – like the machine was broken. Even then, his eyes were so cold, so – “
„Were you jealous of him?“
That made the faux general angry. He turned away, and now she was sure of it. She leaned closer to his bed. „Were you afraid of Private Malakhai? Is that why you wanted him dead?“
„I was never afraid of anyone. And I’m sure as hell not afraid of you, girlie.“ He raised his head and aimed the spittle well.
Mallory started. A glob of mucus was sliding down her cheek. In stone-cold anger, she moved her hand toward him. He cringed, eyes rounding with surprise and fear. The little tyrant of the nursing home was not accustomed to reprisal. Her hand slowly dropped to pick up the corner of the bedsheet. She used it to wipe the slime from her face.
Braver now, assured that she didn’t intend to harm him, he shook his head in mock disappointment. „You’ve got the same cold, empty eyes, little girl. But you’re not in Malakhai’s class.“ More spittle flew from his mouth with the sputter of words. „I bet you’d like to take a turn at me.“ One hand rose in a defiant claw. „You wanna pull out all my tubes and wires, bring down the old general, right? Well, you just – “
„Wrong,“ she whispered, leaning close to his ear as she reached into the breast pocket of her blazer. He was staring at her hand, his face full of dread. Did he think she was going for her gun? Now that truly was a delusion of grandeur.
„One more question.“ She pulled out a computer printout and unfolded it. „I have your service record here – from the telephone company.“ She held it up for him to see. „In 1950, when you were repairing a phone line, you were bitten by a dog – a little dog. Did they give you a medal for that?“ She rose from the chair and looked down at him. „No?“
Whatever Roland had been about to say, it was forgotten. She had finally shut his mouth. Getting the last word was her art, and getting even was wonderfully satisfying – but not today.
Mallory watched the old man shrink back from her, burrowing in the bedsheets, growing smaller in every way. Was he frightened? Yes. Perhaps he believed she would rat him out to the hospital staff – that his days as an esteemed general were over.
He was terrified.
And yet she took no joy in this. There was only a vague feeling that she could not readily identify as pity, for she had little experience with that emotion; it did not fit into her philosophy. She had less personal experience with guilt, and felt none as she turned her back on the soft weeping from the old man’s bed. Roland was forgotten by the time she passed through the front door and walked toward the parking lot.
Well, it had not been a total waste of her time. She understood Malakhai a little better. According to Emile St. John, Louisa’s violin concerto had become part of the magic act after World War II. But that was only a prelude to the real insanity. The fully formed delusion of Louisa had been created in the next war.
And now she knew why he had signed up for the North Korean conflict of the fifties. It was yet another opportunity for an interesting death. But instead, he had been taken prisoner. His war records for that period had been more complete, detailing the year of solitary confinement in a cell – no, a box – five feet wide by five tall. After his release, he had passed the following six months in a veterans hospital, recovering from the trauma of torture – and playing cards with a woman who wasn’t there.
Detective Sergeant Riker stood by the wall of steel drawers, where corpses were tagged by toes and filed away. He watched Mallory slip the.357 revolver into her holster. The less satisfying weight of her police issue.38 was now resting in the knapsack at her feet. It had not occurred to her to thank him for retrieving her favorite gun from Lieutenant Coffey – along with her winnings from the suckered cops in uniform.
Well, she was smiling. That was something. And she had not counted the bet money, which might imply some measure of renewed trust.
Chief Medical Examiner Slope put on his reading glasses and consulted a clipboard as he moved down the length of the steel wall in company with a morgue attendant. They stopped in front of a locker, and the attendant opened a door to roll out the body Mallory liked best.
Riker buttoned his coat as he walked toward the corpse on the locker bed. The cold air lessened the odor of dead meat and chlorine. And now he was looking down at all the signs of a full autopsy. Cruel cuts ran the length of the gutted torso. Each organ had been probed and weighed. The chemistry of fluid and tissue had been checked. Even the skull had been violated to get at the brain, and every orifice had been savaged – royal treatment for a dead junkie. It had been this corpse’s great good luck to belong to Detective Mallory.
The unflayed sections of skin mapped out a small, mean life. Riker could count all the ribs of this addict who had loved heroin more than food. The hands were marked with crude drawings of snakes made with ink and pinpricks. This self-mutilation spoke of extended time in a lockup, perhaps one of the many drug treatment centers his uncle had paid for. The face was frozen in the interrupted whine of a pulled-back upper lip. A more professional tattoo emblazoned the dead boy’s complaint on one shoulder in capital letters, LIFE SUCKS.
Dr. Slope dismissed the morgue technician with a curt nod. Lowering his glasses, he turned to Mallory. „Back from your little vacation?“
Mallory shook her head. „If the reporters ask, you never saw me.“
Riker looked down at the late Richard Tree, better known in broadcasting and print as Crossbow Man. He had been misnamed, for he was closer to a boy. Though his age was listed at twenty-two, the face had failed to grow a beard, only stray hairs here and there, and the pug nose made him more childlike. „So the kid OD’d, right?“
Dr. Slope nodded. „The test results won’t be in for a while. But I don’t think there’ll be any surprises.“
„The arrow wound was made after death,“ said Mallory.
„If you’re going to do your own autopsies, why bother me?“ Dr. Slope handed her the clipboard. „Cause of death – overdose of a longtime user. But you knew that too, didn’t you?“ He turned the corpse’s arm to show her the needle marks inside the elbows. „I found older tracks on the soles of his feet and behind his knees. He was probably hiding the addiction until those veins gave out. I’d say he’s been a needle away from dying for a long time.“
„So there’s no way this could be murder.“ Riker pulled out his notebook.
„Definitely not.“ Slope was somewhat irritated, perhaps because this was also something that Mallory already knew. „No sign of a struggle, no bruising or defensive wounds. And his last needle puncture is consistent with injection by his own hand. He’s probably the only one who could’ve found a good vein in that arm.“
„What about AIDS?“ Riker’s pen hovered over a clean page, though he doubted there would be anything worth writing down. „Maybe a suicidal overdose?“
„No,“ said Slope. „I’m guessing he came into money recently. The heroin was a good grade. He was probably accustomed to cut-down drugs laced with crap. Help me roll him.“
Riker pocketed his useless pen and notebook, then pulled on a pair of plastic gloves, not wanting to touch the dead flesh. He had levels of squeamishness that depended on the freshness of a corpse, and this one was way past ripe. Why couldn’t Mallory do this? It was her damn junkie.
When the corpse lay facedown, the marking on the upper back was exposed. It was a uniform pattern of crisscrossing lines with
in the hard edge of a rectangle.
„Now these marks are postmortem,“ said Slope. „But made close to the time of death and before the body was moved. Might be a metal grate for a floor vent. You match that pattern and you’ll know where he died. I figure the body was moved at least twenty-four hours after death.“
„So the only criminal charge would be mutilation of a corpse,“ said Riker. „That’s it?“
„That’s the one odd note.“ Slope handed Mallory the arrow, bagged and tagged as evidence. „The chest was punctured days after the boy died. An accidental death staged as a murder – I call that interesting.“
„I call it misdirection,“ said Mallory. „Why don’t we sit on the autopsy findings for a few days?“
„Fine. You get me some paperwork to make that legal, and we’ll talk about it.“
„It might take a few days to get the paperwork.“
„Right.“ Slope threw up his hands. „So, is this at all helpful? Or was I wasting my time here?“
„Nothing I can really use,“ said Mallory. „But you might help me with something else. What can you tell me about cluster strokes?“
„Save me some time,“ said Slope. „What don’t you already know?“
„It’s Malakhai.“
And now she had the doctor’s attention. He was as startled as Riker.
„It’s been going on for a year,“ she said. „Every time he has a stroke, a little piece of his brain dies, memories are destroyed. I know they’re happening faster now. I need to know how much time I’ve got before he dies or his brain is wiped.“
„I’m sorry to hear that.“ The doctor pushed the steel bed back into the wall and closed the door. „If he’s on medication, he might last awhile without dramatic impairment. I can’t tell you the date when any man is going to die. Could be tomorrow or next year. But one day, there’ll be a massive stroke. What he’s going through now probably isn’t that debilitating – missing time, minutes or hours. Dexterity and motor skills won’t be affected. Not his intellect either – no dementia. Dates and specific memories are most susceptible to loss.“
Shell Game Page 21
