Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

  The doors slid open, and the two women crossed the lobby in tandem. Johanna was pulled along by invisible strings, lured by the pet carrier in the detective’s tight grip. Mallory paused at the cluster of armchairs by the window, then nodded to the FBI agent standing on the far side of the room. She turned on Johanna, saying, commanding, “Sit down.”

  And Johanna obediently sank into a chair.

  “Stay here,” said Mallory, “where that fed can see you. Stay until I come back for you. And then I’ll give you the cat.”

  The surprise visitors just kept on coming, but at least Charles Butler had brought a six-pack of imported beer. Riker had no theories on what Mallory might be up to. She had yet to divulge anything about the night she had followed the fake blind man from the cop bar on Green Street.

  “Damn, Mallory.”

  Speak of the devil, and she will come.

  When he responded to the next knock at his door, Mallory stood in the hallway, holding Jo’s pet carrier with all the familiar scratch marks. He could see the cat’s fur behind the wire opening, but Mugs was not in his usual bloodcurdling voice tonight. Riker bent low to open the small door, suddenly concerned that Mallory might have killed the poor critter. “Hey, Mugs, buddy.” No claws, no hissing or threats of any kind. Well, this was a bad sign. He withdrew the small limp body and checked it for bullet holes.

  Riker looked up at Mallory, but before he could ask what was wrong with the cat, she said, “I didn’t do it.”

  Charles Butler entered the room from the kitchen with two cold bottles of beer in hand. “Ah, the famous Mugs. What’s wrong with him?” And now he also turned to Mallory.

  She was definitely on the defensive when she said, “Dr. Apollo’s vet drugged him.”

  Riker smiled at Charles. “You don’t want to be around when this cat wakes up. He’ll take an arm off you.” He stroked the cat’s head, enjoying the novelty of getting this close to the animal who maimed him on the day they first met.

  “You like that cat.” Mallory’s tone of voice said that this could not be a good thing, not a normal thing.

  “You could say I admire his style.” Riker folded the animal into his arms. Mugs lifted his head, saw a familiar face and closed his eyes again. “So what’s the deal?”

  “Just keep him here for a while.” She looked around the room, appraising the gleaming surfaces of furniture. The windowpanes were so clean that the glass had virtually disappeared. This was the trademark of a little cleaning woman from Brooklyn. “Put him in the bathroom. If Mrs. Ortega spots one cat hair, you’ll never see her again.” Mallory walked toward the door, saying, “I’ll be back. I’ve got a litter box out in the car.”

  She had one hand on the doorknob, but Charles’s larger hand pressed flat against the wood to delay her. He glanced back at the cat when he said, “Still taking hostages, I see.”

  Mallory glared at him, angry and biting down on her lower lip until sympathy pains forced him to step aside.

  Johanna doubled over, as if the pain were sudden and not something that had been building for hours. Predictably, one of her bodyguards came on the run, defying the court order to keep his distance.

  “My meds,” said Johanna. “They’re upstairs in my room.”

  “All right, Dr. Apollo, hold on.” The agent pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll get my partner. He’s watching the rear exit.”

  “No need to bother him,” she said. “I can walk.” She rose from the couch. “Perhaps if you’d help me.” She took his arm as they moved toward the elevator and rode up to her floor without exchanging another word until they entered her hotel suite.

  “I have to take the pills on a full stomach,” she said, “but I can’t wait for room service. It takes too long. There’s a restaurant across the street. I’ll just get a warmer coat, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  A minute later, she emerged from her bedroom wearing a hooded black poncho over her down jacket. While crossing the street with her escort following at the usual unobtrusive distance, she had a change of plans and led him instead to the subway. It was a simple matter to separate from him, hiding herself behind a staircase, but only for a few moments, time enough to hand off the poncho to an old woman bent with age, a fixture in this place. The elderly vagrant accepted the customary twenty-dollar bill. Johanna boarded a train and watched from a window as the agent spotted the black-hooded figure and followed the old beggar to the lower level and a southbound train. Johanna traveled north, unmolested.

  “The feds are watching her right now,” said Mallory. “They won’t screw up again.” She carried the litter box into the bathroom where Riker was making a nest of towels for the cat.

  He was wondering what Charles had meant by hostages. “So keeping the cat here—that was Jo’s idea?”

  “Yes.” With that single word trailing off to a hiss, she managed to upbraid him for doubting her. And when that failed to work, she added, “The cat’s sedative should wear off in another hour, and the doctor needs a good night’s sleep.” Unspoken were the words, And that’s the truth.

  There was a distinct ring of truth in there somewhere, though he was still planning to call Jo’s hotel—but not just this minute. He could see that Mallory had something else in mind.

  She shifted into attack posture, hands on hips—confrontation time. “I know Dr. Apollo was at the parking garage the night Zachary was ambushed. You lied to me about that.”

  “Mallory, don’t get me started on the subject of lies.”

  “Did you know the doctor had a gun? A little twenty-two.” She read his face and smiled. “You did know. You held out on me.” She hunkered down beside him. Her voice was almost taunting. “And you never asked her what she was doing at the garage that night, did you?” Hands braced on the floor, as if set to spring, Mallory leaned over the body of the sleeping, helpless cat, saying, “I’ve got a fake blind man in custody.” She pulled back. “You know the one I mean. And he’s another little detail you forgot to mention.”

  Riker was staring at the bathroom tiles, wondering how she had managed that turnaround when she was the one who had—

  “Time for the interview.” Mallory rose to her feet and left the bathroom. He could hear her voice drifting down the hall. “Coming, Riker? Or don’t you want to know what happened in that jury room?”

  Johanna was admitted to a studio with the configuration of a large dark cave. Ian Zachary stood beside a tall Japanese folding screen that partially hid a console of light and dials. He waved her to a chair.

  “Good to see you again, Doctor. It’s been a long time since the trial. I can’t talk you into waiting another hour?”

  “It’s now or never,” she said.

  “If you wish.” He raised one hand to the young woman in the lighted window and spoke into the microphone of his headset. “Crazy Bitch? Rack it up.” He turned back to his guest. “I can’t change your mind?”

  “No, I have other plans for later.” She watched his eyes travel back and forth between herself and a square pane of glass, a dark twin to the brightly lit window of the sound engineer’s booth. If this had been a police station in Chicago, there would be a watcher behind that glass.

  When Ian Zachary sat down at his console, the Japanese screen cut off his view of the dark window, but the sound engineer’s booth was still visible to him, and the girl held up one finger to indicate one more minute to go, though it was the middle finger.

  Interesting.

  “So, Doctor, what name are we using tonight? Johanna Apollo or the alias?”

  “My own name.” And now she was also captivated by the dark window, for the screen did not cut off her own line of sight; it only hid Ian Zachary from a watcher who might or might not be there. She tried to gauge his level of paranoia, a key element for every player in the game.

  20

  THE SQUAD ROOM OF SPECIAL CRIMES UNIT WAS ghosty and quiet tonight. All the action would be in the back rooms used for interviews and lockup. By the dim lig
hts burning at vacant desks, Riker could count three detectives working late, and another light burned in Lieutenant Coffey’s office. Mallory switched on Riker’s own lamp, then stood to one side so that he could see how ruthlessly she had taken advantage of his absence. The old desk gleamed like a brand-new one. Gone were the familiar landmarks of grimy smudges, fossilized coffee spills and the scorch marks of abandoned cigarettes. Riker was also suspicious of the chair and its unrecognizable upholstery, but when he flopped down on the cushion, he was happy to discover that it still conformed to the shape of his rear end, though it reeked of the chemicals used to restore the leather.

  Raising his eyes to Mallory’s, he picked up the threads of their interrupted conversation—more like a confession. “I thought I was being followed around by cops.” He swiveled his chair to face the window and looked down on the dark SoHo street. “Everywhere I went, I could swear I saw a cop behind me. Nuts, huh?”

  “No,” said Mallory. “That was real. Some of them were Zachary’s rent-a-cops, but the rest were from Internal Affairs.”

  “IA was on my tail?” Slowly, his chair spun round to face her. “What the hell for?”

  “They got an anonymous tip.” Mallory examined her perfectly manicured fingernails, as if one of them might be flawed or chipped—as if his desk could sprout wings and fly. “Some citizen told them you were doing a lot of heavy lifting for a cop on full disability. They followed you for months with cameras. They wanted something incriminating on video. Nobody told them you never cashed the city’s checks.”

  “But you knew, didn’t you?” Mrs. Ortega could have supplied her with that information, but long before the cleaning woman’s discovery of the checks, Mallory had known that he was not opening his mail. Her invasion of his private life was tabled, for he had a larger issue with her just now. “So it was an anonymous tip?”

  Something in his voice—oh, perhaps the heavy sarcasm—gave away his disbelief, and he could see that old look in her eye. She was getting ready for the grand denial. And this told him that his own partner had turned him in to Internal Affairs. It fitted so well with her stealing his gun tonight. Mallory had not trusted him to stay alive, and so she had sicced the IA watchdogs on him, cops to keep an eye on him when she could not be there. In his alternate theory, she had used the Internal Affairs fumble to embarrass the commissioner, just a dab of blackmail to grease the forms for Riker’s appeal. It had taken less than the usual ninety days for his reinstatement; it had taken one hour. And now it occurred to him that his partner had also diddled a computer to send out those bogus disability checks, for he had never asked for any assistance from the city of New York.

  He lit a cigarette and waited for her to lie her way out of this—and he waited.

  Unpredictable brat, she sat on the edge of his desk, legs dangling in the old familiar manner of Kathy the child. And, though a clock hung on every wall, she pulled out her pocket watch and pretended interest in the hour. It was Lou Markowitz’s gold watch, handed down through four generations of police. Mallory was reminding him that she was Markowitz’s daughter, the only child of his oldest friend. This was such a clumsy tactic, for she had little understanding of sentiment or sympathy; she had none of her own. Offense was her best game. Her crippled idea of defense only saddened him. He had no more heart for this. Thus wounded, he pocketed all his questions and accusations. An hour would pass before he realized that Mallory’s inept ploy had been a roaring success, that she had expertly distracted him by creeping up on his sentimental blind side and slaying him with sympathy.

  “We should get moving.” She slid off the desk and turned her back on him. Heading toward the hallway, she said, “Your friend Agent Hennessey is waiting in the interview room. I picked him for the token fed.”

  “Good job.” As Riker rose from his desk and followed her down the narrow hall, he was only beginning to appreciate Mallory’s long-range planning. Her best scheme had begun with Agent Hennessey following a doppelgänger while Ian Zachary was ambushed in the parking garage. The next piece of FBI incompetence, MacPherson’s murder, had only sweetened her deal. In exchange for files on the Reaper and a clear field for NYPD, all federal foul-ups would be overlooked during press conferences, and New York agents would share the spotlight at endgame, hence the “token fed.”

  Riker knew that Lou Markowitz would have approved of his foster child’s work. She was manipulating the system even better than her old man. Lou, in his prime, had outwitted the FBI—but never actually extorted them.

  The partners talked as they walked, and now he learned that the fake blind man was undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue Hospital at the insistence of a lawyer. The public defender would not believe that his client could competently waive the right to representation. And while they awaited the return of Victor Patchock, another interview subject was being held in the lockup cage. This one was an elderly attorney named Horace Fairlamb.

  “So you busted a lawyer,” said Riker.

  That’s my girl.

  They entered the larger of the two interview rooms, the formal one with the long table and a one-way glass for covert observation. Riker shook hands with Agent Hennessey, then suffered a bear hug from Janos. The detective had just heard the news of Riker’s reinstatement and greeted him like a returning prisoner of war. While Janos made the introductions to Horace Fairlamb, retired attorney at law, only Riker was positioned to see his partner pirating paperwork from cartons piled at one end of the table. Each box bore the stamp of the FBI. Thick documents and manila folders from the Reaper file were now disappearing underneath Mallory’s blazer.

  Suspicious brat.

  Riker had no doubt that Hennessey would honor the deal of full disclosure, but Mallory trusted no one. And now she excused herself from the room after stealing all that she could covertly carry.

  The men took their seats at the table, law enforcement on one side and Horace Fairlamb on the other. The old man was asked to repeat his story, what he had told of it so far. Detective Janos, showing the wear of this baby-sitting detail, pleaded with the elderly lawyer to stick with the pertinent facts, then rolled his eyes as Fairlamb insisted on beginning his story at the beginning. And so they all listened to the drawn-out details of a beloved wife’s death, culminating with the funeral. “That was the day I gave my New York law practice to my son.” The old man had then traveled to Chicago to live with his daughter and grandchildren.

  And now three men with grim smiles admired his wallet photographs as they were passed around the table.

  “But after a few days,” said Horace Fairlamb, “I could see that it wasn’t working out. I spent most of that time staring at the walls and crying—quite a burden for my family. So one day, I left my daughter’s house, checked into a hotel and stepped out on a ledge.”

  Janos raised his head, interest renewed. Evidently, he had not heard this part before. “A jumper.”

  “A would-be jumper,” the attorney corrected him. “One of the hotel residents was a psychiatrist, and that was the day I met Dr. Apollo.”

  Riker leaned forward. “So she always lived in hotels, even in Chicago?”

  “As long as I’ve known her—three years. Anyway, I became her patient. She treated me for depression. Part of my therapy was studying for the state bar exam. At my age—imagine if you will. But I passed the exam. Well, I was back at work and somewhat useful again. Then one day, I had a breakthrough in therapy. I finally admitted to myself that I had never cared for the practice of law.” He sighed. “Half a century wasted in utter boredom. And probate is about as boring as you can—”

  “So that’s when you took on the little freak with the red wig?” Riker was not quite so patient as Detective Janos. “Then life got interesting, right?” And this was his euphemism for Speed it up, old man, or I’ll shoot you.

  The lawyer was mildly surprised. “I never had an attorney-client relationship with Victor Patchock. Is that what you thought? Oh, my word, no. I performed other
services for Victor—things of a covert nature. I arranged for his move from Chicago to New York, him and another fellow.”

  “MacPherson?”

  “I never knew the other man’s real name. He was even more distrustful than Victor. So I got them both credentials with fake names, credit cards, passports and the like. Lodging them in New York was simple enough since I own several buildings here. Then there were the disguises and running around as a decoy in the middle of the night. Oh, I must say it was miles more fun than lawyering. Then I procured firearms for them, and that’s not as easy as you might think. You can’t just walk into a gun store, you know. There are forms to fill out, serial numbers that can be traced. So there was no legal way to proceed. I went through a dozen bar-tenders before I found—”

  “Wait.” Riker had a sixth sense for lawyerly fiddles, and this attorney had already confessed to several crimes. “Janos? You read him his rights?”

  Detective Janos held up the signed Miranda card that listed every constitutional perk, including the fact that anything said could be used against the old man in court. “Mr. Fairlamb’s representing himself. He did his own plea bargain with the DA’s office.”

  “Indeed,” said Horace Fairlamb. “I have complete immunity in exchange for cooperation. So there won’t be any charges for procuring firearms, document fraud or obstruction of justice. Oh, and all those other charges? Bribery, littering and such—all gone. Now, I want to make it perfectly clear that getting weapons for Victor and his friend—well, that was not Johanna’s idea. In fact, she was horrified when I told her—somewhat after the fact, I’m afraid.”

  All heads turned in the direction of an irritating rapping noise. It came from the other side of the one-way mirror that concealed a viewing room. Riker stared at the glass. “Who’s in the box tonight?”