Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

  Riker had no sooner recovered from the shock of an emotional Edward Slope than he wandered into the front room and met another unannounced visitor.

  Trouble.

  He should have told Johanna to bolt the door against the cops.

  The commander of Special Crimes Unit was definitely not here on any sentimental errand, not a well-wisher or a cheerleader, not a happy man. Jack Coffey was holding a thick bundle of papers. This could only be Mallory’s form to appeal the separation from NYPD. Yes, he could see that now as the lieutenant held up the paperwork within four inches of his senior detective’s face, saying, “Don’t fuck with me, Riker. Just sign it.”

  And sign it he did.

  Jack Coffey departed without another word said, and Riker closed the door behind him—gently—no slamming.

  “So you’re a cop again.” Jo sat on the couch by the dim light of a single lamp, her body sunk deep in the cushions. She seemed tired and pleased. When he sat down beside her, she rested her head on his shoulder, and they passed a little time this way in companionable silence.

  Peace—perfect peace. That was Jo’s present to him.

  He wished he had something to give to her, and perhaps it was natural to be thinking of flowers, though she deserved something more exotic than the bloom he had settled upon.

  “My old man was tough,” said Riker. “It took years to get him to talk, but he finally gave up the whole story. My mother was dying the night I was born, or that’s what Dad thought. She was only nineteen, and he wasn’t much older. They were dirt poor in those days. They had nothing. Well, Mom wanted to leave me something—something just grand. That’s the way my dad put it. So she made him promise to—” He glanced at Jo’s upturned face and smiled. “It helps if you know she was really drugged up that night, lots of heavy medication. So Mom was stoned when she made him promise to put Pimpernel on my birth certificate.”

  “My God. She named you after a flower?”

  “Yeah. Cruel, isn’t it? But it could’ve been worse. The Scarlet Pimpernel was Mom’s all-time favorite movie. But, crazy as she was that night, she knew she couldn’t name me Scarlet Pimpernel. Everybody would’ve called me Scarlet, right? And that was a girl from Gone With the Wind—wrong sex and a whole different movie. So she settled for Pimpernel. But you can’t raise a little boy with a name like that, not in Brooklyn. My old man argued with her for hours, even though he thought she was dying. Finally, the poor bastard caved in when she cried. One damn tear. That’s all it took to break him, and he swore he’d name me Pimpernel.”

  “And then your father saved you by only putting the initial on the birth certificate.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I forget how much I owe him for that. Well, Mom didn’t die, not for another fifty years. When she got home from the hospital, her brain was good as new—almost. She agreed with Dad. It would’ve been a rotten thing to do to a kid growing up in a rough neighborhood. But she wouldn’t let him change the initial on my birth certificate. Now my old man won the second round. When the next baby came along, they named him Ned. Nothing fancy—just plain old Ned.”

  “A pimpernel,” said Jo. “I don’t think I’d recognize that flower.”

  “I would.” He still had the lieutenant’s pen in his hand, but now that all the clutter was gone, there was no scrap of paper within easy reach. “Half the house was wallpapered in damn pimpernels. My bedroom, too—now that was child abuse.” He took her right hand in his. “I still have dreams about that wallpaper.” Riker drew a little flower on her open palm. “It’s small, not much to look at. I’d rather give you roses.”

  He loved her smile.

  The door was kicked open, breaking the chain before Victor could bolt it again. He was crying when they entered his apartment.

  “Victor Patchock?” asked a large man with a thug’s face and an incongruously soft voice.

  He nodded, believing that he was about to die. When the pair advanced on him, he reached out to the umbrella stand and plucked out a white cane. He waved it high and wide. This was the last stand of a righteous man, whose eyes were scrunched shut. All he could hear was the swish of his cane slicing the air and hitting nothing.

  He dared to open his eyes again.

  The large man seemed astonished, and the tall blonde at his side was also taken by surprise. She had a gun in her hand, but the barrel was pointed toward the floor. Tilting her head to one side, she seemed genuinely curious when she asked, “How stupid are you?”

  Earlier, upon opening his front door, Charles Butler had been pleased to see the chief medical examiner standing in the hall, for this was an opportunity to smooth out the ragged edges of their friendship. Edward Slope had announced that he was making the second house call of his career. What an honor.

  Charles’s mood was more somber now that he had come to understand the true purpose of the doctor’s visit. He placed a drink in his guest’s hand, then joined him at the kitchen table and continued his perusal of the crime-scene photographs. The corpse depicted here was no longer recognizable as a seventeen-year-old boy. “I see most of the shots are to the head.”

  Edward Slope nodded. “That would’ve been enough to make Riker suspicious.” His eyes were less focused now that he was feeling the anesthetic benefit of twelve-year-old single-malt whiskey, but he was not finding sufficient solace in his glass. “You probably noticed. The shots to the torso seem almost . . .”

  “Like an afterthought? Yes, I agree.” It appeared that the detectives of Special Crimes Unit had thought it unseemly to blow the boy’s face away. And so they had added more shots to the torso for the sake of decency.

  Dr. Slope set down his empty glass and pushed it away. “They’re not trained to make head shots, you know. Cops usually aim for the widest part of the body. Less chance of bullets going wild . . . and their targets frequently survive.”

  “No chance of that here,” said Charles. He examined the last photograph, then quickly scanned the postmortem report. “But it was self-defense? The newspapers all—”

  “If that’s what it said in the newspapers, then it must be true.” The pathologist covered his tired eyes. “Sorry. That was unfair. The boy fired on them first—one shot before they killed him. I was on the scene when the techs dug his bullet out of the wall. It was a justified shooting. No question.”

  No question? Ah, but the doctor’s face was saying something entirely different.

  Charles pulled the X rays from the envelope of autopsy materials. These pictures of naked bone told him so much more than the boy’s blown-away flesh could reveal. And he would undoubtedly have to fetch Edward Slope a new whiskey bottle before the evening ended.

  “All these bullets.” Charles turned to his friend. “I imagine you found it impossible to determine which one killed the boy.”

  “That’s what it said in my report.” The doctor emptied the bottle into his glass, then quickly drained it. “None of the police bullets went wild. That was the truly odd part. A shoot-out is a terrifying experience for cops. Fear gets in the way of their aim—but not on this occasion.” And now, fortified by alcohol, he found that he could look at the photographs one more time as he replaced each one in the envelope. “What a mess. All those bullets. All on target.”

  Charles held the X ray up to the light, fascinated and horrified. Among the massive damage of shattered facial bones was the one remarkably symmetrical hole in the boy’s skull. It lay between the orbits of the eyes, not one hair off center.

  Symmetry, thy name is Mallory.

  She might as well have signed her work. Other, later holes and grooves at the top and sides of the skull told the rest of the story. He envisioned the other detectives firing shots at a falling target—a dead one—to obliterate the evidence of Mallory’s remarkably cold and steady aim, until the final effect appeared less like an execution.

  “I suppose it’s better for all of the detectives,” said Charles, “if none of them knows which shot was fatal.”

  The
doctor’s sudden relief betrayed him. Obviously he was assuming that the omissions in his report were less transparent than he had supposed. Edward Slope could not fail to believe that his secret was safe. His proof of this was sitting right there on the other side of the kitchen table. Charles Butler’s face showed no signs of a tell-all blush; he had learned how to lie.

  Riker stepped out of the shower as a new man and donned his best suit, the one least stained. When he walked into the living room, he found Mrs. Ortega surveying the new-and-improved state of his apartment. He lightly kicked her rolling cart of supplies. “Get this thing out of here, okay? It’s ruining the damn ambiance.”

  She ignored this, turning her back on him to inspect the rug and run one finger over the surfaces of tables and chairs, checking for dust. “So this is what you’ve been doing all day?”

  “Yeah. Not bad, huh?”

  “Amateurs, the both of you. I’ll take it from here. Just stay out of my way.” The intrepid cleaning woman marched toward the tall windows that bore the streaks of his own attempted washing.

  “I love you, too,” said Riker, but he said it low, almost a whisper, so she would not feel obligated to insult him in return. “Where’s Jo?”

  “Gone. She said she had to go feed some cat.” Mrs. Ortega spat out this last word with great contempt. In her philosophy, the only good fur-shedder was a dead one.

  Riker stood before his desk, staring down at the small drawer where he kept his weapon. It had been opened, though the key was still hidden in a crack behind one wooden leg.

  And the gun was gone.

  He wasted no time on this little mystery. The perp who had broken his bathroom window would not have known how to finesse this excellent lock, and there was no sign of forcing the wood. Mallory was the only thief who had recently visited his apartment, and she traveled everywhere with lock picks in her pocket.

  So the brat had not trusted him with his own gun.

  Regulations required him to report a missing weapon, but that would only create more trouble for both of them. And now he wondered if he should demand its return. Or should he wait for Mallory to break into his apartment and put the revolver back in the drawer?

  Yeah.

  That would be the polite solution.

  All but the cat’s head was swaddled in a white cloth binding so that he could not win this fight to stay alive. The veterinarian’s hand hesitated with the needle. All the pity in the doctor’s eyes was for the woman and not the animal. “You know it’s the best thing for him, Johanna.”

  But not for your reasons.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Yes, I do.” She held Mugs gingerly, minding the phantom nerve that so agonized him. “Now, please.”

  The needle was injected into Mugs’s neck, and minutes passed before it had any effect. His personality was still intact when he met her eyes, looking there for mercy and asking, Why? She cradled him until he was lulled into a drowsy stupor by her slow rocking motion and the sedative. At last he was well beyond pain in real or imagined realms. She wanted to believe that he was not beyond love, that he could luxuriate in the feeling of her arms about him now that it did not hurt him anymore, not in his body or his mind. She kissed him, then held him close until he went limp. Though the poison would come later, this was not like sleep; this was good-bye.

  “He’s at peace, Johanna,” said the doctor. “He’ll never feel the next one.” The second shot would wrack the cat’s body with a violent seizure, a prelude to death. “It’s for the best.”

  “I know that,” she said, but a long time passed before she would cease her rocking and open her arms to release Mugs.

  19

  JOHANNA APOLLO HAD TAKEN THE LONG WAY home from the law ffirm on Madison Avenue. The zigzag journey had led her from evening into dead of night as she revisited the favorite streets of her adopted city.

  She was hungry and cold, and she needed her meds to ease the pains of the day. One of her watchdogs awaited her in the hotel lobby. The young FBI man’s face was washed with relief that she was still alive and his job was secure. Now he backed away from her, maintaining the discreet distance of a court order. She felt guilty, though she had never consented to this bodyguard service. No matter how the night might end, this young man and his partner would have some explaining to do come the morning. Too bad. Not their fault. They must wonder how she always managed to evade them, when she should be so easy to follow in any crowd of normal upright people. During the brief elevator ride, she consulted her wristwatch twice.

  Less than an hour to go.

  It was a short walk from the elevator to the door of her room, but the hallway elongated in a side effect of weariness. She had a pill for that, but nothing to cure the dread of this homecoming, the awaiting quiet and the sense of no one home anymore, no Mugs. She put her mind to other things, arrangements still to be made, preparations for the night ahead. She entered the hotel room and flicked on the wall switch. Everything was as she had left it. Mugs’s pillow still held the impression of his small body, and the object inside remained hidden. The suite was perfectly quiet for the first time since she had moved in, and yet she knew that she was not alone. The bedroom door was wide open. It had been closed when she left, and the hotel maids did no cleaning in the evening hours. Every detail of the room beyond the door was lost in the dark, and this moment would have held less terror if she had seen the sudden flash of a knife. She might have welcomed that. Instead, she heard the cat cry out.

  The dead cat.

  Mallory slowly emerged from the darkness, cradling Mugs’s limp body in her arms. The cat lifted his head a bare inch, softly mewling, so enfeebled by heavy sedation.

  “You followed me to the animal hospital.”

  “And I saw you run out of there crying,” said Mallory. “Took me six seconds to work it out.”

  “So you intercepted the second shot.”

  “The deadly one.” The detective walked into the front room and sat down in an armchair. The cat, reduced to a rag of fur, was now casually draped over her crossed legs. Mugs lifted his head once more, and his half-closed eyes struggled to focus on the one he loved, Johanna.

  Mallory’s slow smile was disturbing. “You think the cat knows you tried to kill him?” Her long red fingernails absently grazed Mugs’s fur. “You’re very good at ditching your FBI bodyguards, Dr. Apollo. That has to stop. I think we understand each other.”

  Oh, yes, Johanna understood terrorism, small scale and large. Mind games were her stock-in-trade. Mallory would have done well to remember that.

  “And how much does Riker understand?” She was mentally squaring off against the young police. “Does he know how you manipulated him, calculated his every move—nearly cost him his sanity? Does he understand any of the damage you’ve done? Suppose he’d died that night in the parking garage.” “So you were there.” Mallory’s composure was eerie; she had missed the implication of some fault within herself—or dismissed it. Her voice was a cold monotone when she said, “Riker always knew what I was doing, but it didn’t matter to him. He played the game for your sake—not mine—not his.” The silence was filled with awe and wonder, for Mallory had successfully transferred the blame for all that had gone before and whatever might happen before this night was done. She had neatly shifted past and future blood onto other hands, Johanna’s. The psychiatrist, out of her depth, sank down on the couch and merely watched, helpless to do otherwise, as the younger woman, the ruthless one, reached behind the chair and pulled out the plastic pet carrier. Mugs was placed inside with only slightly more care than might be given to a stuffed toy. However, Johanna made no protest, for the box would hold no fears for Mugs while he was sedated.

  “Putting the cat to sleep,” said the detective, “that fits with the last meeting of your little therapy group in Tribeca.”

  “You bugged that room?” There could be no other explanation, for she had given that news to the group this evening.

  Mal
lory ignored the accusation as her eyes roved over the furnishings. “This hotel room—so temporary, such an easy loose end to tie up. I know your type, Dr. Apollo. If you were going to kill yourself, you’d be one of those nice polite people who slit their wrists in the bathtub—so they won’t leave a mess behind. But you’d never have the guts to do it. You can’t even kill a cat. I’ve seen your drug cabinet. You’ve got enough stuff right here to put down a hundred cats, but you had to pay someone else to do it to him. So I know you’re not planning suicide. You just can’t count on living through the night.” Mallory picked up the carrier and walked to the door. “Well, I can’t force you into protective custody.” “Where are you taking my cat?”

  The detective silently stepped into the outer hallway, heading for the elevator, and Johanna followed, saying, pleading, “You won’t like Mugs when he’s fully awake.”

  Mallory stood before the elevator, one red fingernail on the call button, when she turned her head with the slow swivel of a machine, and that disturbing smile was back. “Are you afraid I won’t be nice to the cat?”

  Johanna hurried to board the elevator as the doors opened and the detective stepped inside with her living cargo stirring, faintly crying inside the box. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Nothing personal,” said Mallory. “The last two jurors have to survive. It’s my game now, my rules. I’m the law.” She watched digital numbers changing, numerals descending as they sank through all the floors of the hotel. “Riker thinks the feds are using you for bait. He hasn’t put it all together yet. He can’t. He’s too close to you. Oh, I found the gun.”

  Johanna was so unsettled that she nearly asked which gun. She looked down at the small silver twenty-two in Mallory’s hand. It was a lady’s pistol, purse size, and that description alone would explain the look of derision on the detective’s face.