Dead Famous

by Carol O'Connell

  “You’re making everything too complicated. That’s how they’ll catch you.”

  “You’ll never know, Doctor. You’ll be dead. Or . . . one phone call to Victor Patchock and you get to live.” He perused the bottle’s label. “So Timothy Kidd put you onto this wine. That night in the liquor store—was he following me?”

  She sipped from the glass. “That’s been driving you crazy, hasn’t it? How did Timothy know it was you? What did you do wrong?”

  “He found me in the neighborhood of a fresh corpse.”

  “That wasn’t it. The body hadn’t been found yet. No, the odd note was when you recognized him. In hindsight, it’s so simple. You haunted your crime scenes. That’s part of the kick, isn’t it? The police activity, the media frenzy. That’s how you knew Timothy was FBI. Forgive me—I’m digressing. Of course he recognized you. Your face was on the news every night. But he had to wonder why you’d be surprised to see him, a man you’d never met. And then you disappeared so quickly. Details like this are food for a paranoid personality. He was only suspicious that night. When another juror turned up dead the next day, that’s when he—”

  “Still trying to buy time? You really think the cavalry is coming over the hill to save you. Now, that’s odd, because you’re the one with the rescuer complex.” He yawned. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?” He aimed the gun at her face.

  “Actually, I was just about to pay you a compliment.”

  He lowered the gun. She knew he would.

  “The idea was brilliant,” she said. “And you almost pulled it off. You nearly disemboweled the justice system.”

  “With a little help from the ACLU.”

  “Yes, a nice touch.” She watched the rise and fall of Riker’s chest, and found comfort in this.

  “I don’t have to kill him, Doctor. Choose. Riker or Victor.” His gun hand warred a moment with the hand that held the wine. The revolver was left to rest on the couch cushion. He drained his glass, then filled it again. “Perhaps I shouldn’t rush you. As victims go, you’re miles more entertaining than the rest of them.”

  “Even my friend Timothy?”

  “Oh, absolutely boring. Though, to be fair, I suppose it’s difficult to be scintillating company once your throat is slashed and you’re bleeding to death.” Zachary lifted his wineglass again, then watched, surprised and helpless to prevent it from tipping forward. His fingers could not close around the crystal. The wine spilled across the couch cushions in a wide red stain.

  Johanna was reminded of Timothy Kidd quietly bleeding his life away in an armchair.

  Zachary gave her a foolish smile. “I’m drunk.”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s not it.” Johanna looked down at her glass. “Such a poor wine. That’s all you had in common with Timothy—neither one of you had a discriminating palate. I think my chemicals actually improved the taste.”

  It was a struggle for him to keep his eyes open. There was a high color in his cheeks and his eyes were those of a dullard, slow to focus. But now, as he began to understand what she had done, he made a clumsy attempt to rise from the couch. Panic worked against him. “You drugged me.” His fingers wormed around the handle of the gun, but he could not lift it from the cushion. “You put me to sleep.”

  “I considered that option,” she said. “I have a high tolerance for these drugs, but you have greater body mass. So I couldn’t count on outlasting you. And you might’ve been the first to wake up. No, I didn’t sedate you . . . I killed you. A syringe in the cork. It’s the simple plans that work best.”

  “But you drank—”

  “I killed us both. There was no other way.” Johanna sat quietly, finally coming to terms with Timothy Kidd’s last moments and sharing them. She sipped air and life, what measure was left.

  The more Ian Zachary struggled, the faster he died. The red wine stain spread across the upholstery, just like the bloodstains on Timothy’s chair. She had not anticipated the justice of this tableau. She had not dared to think so far ahead, lest she falter with the syringe while poisoning the wine.

  Zachary’s head rolled to one side, and he stared at her in dumb surprise. The muscle spasm, a preview of her own death, made his body go suddenly rigid. Then came the violent shakes, and then nothing at all. He had ceased to exist.

  And she was alone.

  There was no euphoria to numb her own panic while she separated from the solid earth. Johanna Apollo, the recalcitrant suicide, grieved for her lost life as she careened away from it. This was the moment after the leap from a mountain, the knowledge that she could not scratch her way back to the ledge, and the experience of free fall was intense. There was such cruelty in this long descent from grace—so much time for regret.

  The final spasm came. The wineglass fell from her hand. And, in the ether of her dying brain starved of oxygen and blood, regret, tenacious thing, remained.

  Riker was bleeding from a head wound, always a good indication of ongoing life, and his pulse was strong. Mallory was still holding on to his wrist as she spoke to the 911 operator, saying the words guaranteed to get the best service, “Officer down.”

  His limp hand fell back to the floor. Mallory rose to a stand and moved on to examine other elements of her new crime scene: Riker’s blood on the wine bottle, his stolen revolver in the loose grip of Zachary’s gloved hand. So the doctor had lost the gun to this man before she could get off one round; no surprise there. The Reaper’s trademark, a honed penknife, lay at Zachary’s feet, and one case was closed. What else? Spilled wine on the couch and a shattered glass on the floor by the doctor’s chair. In the absence of visible wounds, poison was such an easy call—a murder-suicide.

  No, it was not quite that simple. There were a few outstanding details.

  And now the scene was all too easily read, and here her mind made a bruising stumble, slamming up against her own mistake: she had underestimated the doctor’s feelings for Riker.

  He moaned, and she turned around to see other signs of Riker’s awakening, subtle movements of his face and limbs. Before the real horror show could begin, she turned out the light so he would not open his eyes to see the dead white face of Johanna Apollo.

  After dragging his body into the hallway, the young detective returned to tamper with the crime scene. In her limited rule book for a cop’s life, this was an act of heresy.

  She could not remove Riker’s stolen gun from the premises; Jack Coffey knew who had taken it, and he would expect to find it listed on the crime-scene inventory. She settled for hiding the revolver in a drawer of the armoire, and now it was less clear that suicide had been Dr. Apollo’s second option. Next, with one hand, Mallory wiped the wet face of a corpse, formerly a woman who had loved her life and proved it, leaving behind the irrefutable evidence of tears.

  All gone now, perfectly dry.

  Riker would never know and never blame himself.

  When the ambulance arrived, Mallory was on her knees, holding Riker tightly in her arms, rocking him and lying to him, telling him that everything was fine—just fine.

  EPILOGUE

  “A WAKE FOR A DEAD CAT.” RIKER’S FATHER SHOOK his head, mystified that he should be invited here on such a foolish pretext. The old man had been the first guest to arrive. Mugs’s real friends would come later to view the remains, possibly to spit upon them, and be reassured that the cat from hell was finally out of their lives. The ever skeptical Mrs. Ortega would prefer to see the dead body, but ashes would do.

  Riker lifted his beer can in a toast. “To a great scrapper.”

  Over the months since Jo’s death, the cat had declined, day by tail-dragging day, finally succumbing to old age and grief, but not without one last fight, a good one by Riker’s account. Though Mugs now resided in an urn on the fireplace, Riker still bore the scabs of long scratches. His own fault; he had tried to cradle the dying animal in his arms, though he always omitted that part from the story of the cat’s final brawl.

  However,
he had invited his father for another reason. He wanted to tie up one last loose end. A question had nagged at him every day since Jo had been gone. Without being asked, the old man had taken charge of her funeral arrangements, and Riker’s gratitude ran deep. Had the matter been left to himself, the turnout would have been pathetic, not filling one pew of a small church. Dad had called in a lifetime of stored-up favors to fill a cathedral with cops, a grand affair that had made the front page of the New York Times. What power the old man had. Even high command officers had come out that day in dress blues as a tribute to the lady, a stranger to them all.

  Father and son so rarely spoke, it was difficult to ask how Dad had known about this woman’s terrible importance to him. No one could have mentioned it to the old man. Riker had not even told Jo. And so he had to ask.

  Dad’s reply was predictably brief. “I read your statement and the police report.” He glowered at his son, for this evidence was so obvious. Why was he being asked to waste words upon it? That was not his way, and his own son should know better than to expect this of him. All of that was in the old man’s eyes, but no more words were forthcoming.

  “Not good enough, Dad.” Riker slugged back his beer, then crumpled the can in one fist to tell the old bastard that he was dead serious. “Now, why did you go to all that trouble for a woman you’ve never met?”

  “I told you. It was all in the paperwork and her fingerprints. When she clubbed you with that wine bottle—well—what that woman did—” This was a strain on him, so many words and all in a row. He paused to read his son’s expression, which said, with quiet resolve, that there must be more. And so his dry cracked lips pressed into a line of resignation, for Dad wanted it known that he spoke under duress.

  “You went in there that night—without your gun. You loved her.” He tilted his head to one side to ask his son if this was clear, the connection between these two things, or had he not raised a detective after all. “She died for you,” the old man said. And thus he owed an enormous debt to Johanna Apollo, for his son was precious to him; that was also in his eyes, and he lowered them lest any more nonsense should leak out in this manner.

  Rising from his chair, Dad reached out one bone-dry hand and let it rest a moment on his son’s shoulder, just a light tap that stood for a kiss. And now he took his leave of this ridiculous party for a dead cat. That last sentiment was conveyed by the subtle shake of the head as he walked toward the door. His hand was on the knob when he spoke again without turning around, and this was one of his longest speeches. “The day of the funeral, you asked me about Johanna’s gravestone. Well, it was finally installed. I went out there this morning to make sure they did a right job of it. They followed the attorney’s instructions—the ones she gave him the day she died.” And now he quickly departed, sparing himself the emotional response of a simple thank you from his son.

  The stone had not yet been carved on the day when Jo had gone into the ground. A wooden marker had sufficed for the burial. Riker had been told that a more permanent monument had been ordered by the recent codicil to her will. And this had been more evidence of a suicide planned in advance of the Reaper knocking on Jo’s door.

  He kissed his last hope good-bye.

  Thanks to the concussion, his memory of that night had ended on the wrong side of Jo’s door. He could not recall breaking it down. And now he knew that his father had not been privy to any more evidence beyond the reports and statements.

  Riker could not stop thinking like a cop, even on this his day off. Why had his father, the miser of words, found it necessary to repeat the gravestone story? And why did the old man prefer his own fable to the truth? Both father and son had reviewed the same evidence.

  But only his father had seen the instructions for the stone-cutter.

  Had Jo left a sentimental passage on her tombstone, some message the old man had mistaken for Riker’s but actually meant for another man? On his black days, Riker believed that Jo had died for the love of Timothy Kidd, that she had always planned to kill herself to end the grief and buy a little justice for a dead man.

  On his good days, all he had left was pain.

  Mallory slumped down behind the wheel of her car and waited for Riker to emerge from the apartment building. She knew it would not be long. He had been too eager to end the only party he had ever given, the dead-cat celebration.

  She passed some time studying the pocket watch handed down from her foster father. The cover bore a gold engraving of an open field beneath a heaven of roiling clouds; a lone figure, bent and bowed, was walking against the wind. Once it had conjured up memories of home and the people who had loved her. That old connection was lost to her now, for every time she looked at the watch, she thought of Johanna Apollo.

  Everything had changed.

  Mallory looked up to see Riker standing at the curb, waving one hand to stop a taxicab. She put her tan sedan in gear and edged out into the street, following at a distance of several car lengths. When the yellow cab stopped at an intersection, she saw Riker’s arm extend from the rolled-down rear window, holding out money to buy a bouquet of flowers from a sidewalk vendor. The red roses could only be intended for a woman.

  She followed his cab across the bridge to Brooklyn, and now she knew where he was heading, for that way lay the cemetery. Twenty minutes later, the cabbie left his passenger at the gate. Mallory took her own time finding a parking space some distance away. She had no fear of losing him among the many paths that wound through acres of grave sites.

  When she found him again, his body blocked her view of the tombstone. From her hiding place behind a larger monument, Mallory could only tell that the grave marker had been recently installed. The workmen’s tracks had disturbed a light covering of this morning’s snow.

  Riker’s felt hat went flying off in a strong gust of frigid air. When he dropped his bouquet, the wind took his roses, too, nudging them along the cold ground, picking at their petals—destroying them. And what damage had Dr. Apollo done to Riker? Had the woman left some little bomb of words engraved in granite? He was bending, folding, as if the doctor had reached out from the frozen ground and gutted him.

  Mallory had said nothing to alter his theory of the murder-suicide as a long-planned event, nor had she discouraged him from casting himself in the role of an unwanted intruder on that scene. In her rationale, Riker would not grieve if Johanna Apollo had never been his to lose. But now that plan was unraveling, and her frustration was escalating by the second, for there was no way to get even with the dead.

  She need not have worried that Riker would catch her watching over him. When he finally turned around, he was as good as blind, tears blurring his eyes and streaming down his face. After he had disappeared over the rise of the gravel path, an angry Mallory approached the gravestone to see what the dead woman had done to him. But there was nothing written there that could break a man in half, no words at all beyond the doctor’s name and the dates of her life and death.

  Understanding came swiftly as a hammerfall.

  The man had come to a boneyard, of all places, looking for love, and he had gone away without it. Johanna Apollo had died for him, and, for a little while, something very rare had belonged to Riker—until Mallory had destroyed the only evidence.

  In her own inimical, violent style, her own version of remorse, she slammed one closed fist down on the gravestone, wanting the pain, wanting to feel something. Mallory turned toward the path, intending to hunt Riker down before he reached the gate. She planned to hurt him with the certain knowledge that Johanna Apollo had loved him more than her own life. This fresh agony would be her gift to him—all the details of the altered crime scene.

  But she could not move.

  It was as if a wall had suddenly sprung up about her, surrounding her with invisible bricks of irony. Riker would never believe her—not her, a liar and a manipulator extraordinaire, though he would nod and smile, thanking her for her trouble. Then he would pour himself a shot of bour
bon, dismissing her gift as some new trick to fix him one last time.

  Riker had lost everything.

  A family of four came along the path, crunching gravel underfoot and bearing flowers for a nearby grave. They gave a wide berth to the young woman who stood there so quietly, all of them believing that her sorrow must be recent and profound. The mourners departed. Night fell. And Kathy Mallory was left in the cold company of stone.

  The marker was a plain one of deep red granite, and its only ornament was modest. The flower carved within a heart was not a rose, nor any bloom that one could readily identify. It was small, not much to look at—a common pimpernel.

  If you enjoyed Dead Famous,

  you won’t want to miss Mallory in

  Winter House

  Available in paperback from Berkley Books!

  THE HOUR WAS LATE. THE TRAFFIC WAS SCARCE. A few cars crawled by at the pace of bugs attracted by house lights, five flights of electric-yellow windows.

  The narrow mansion was not a rarity in New York City, home to millionaires and billionaires. However, its nineteenth-century facade was an anachronism on this particular block of Central Park West. The steep-pitched roof was split by a skylight dome, and attendant gargoyles were carved in stone. Wedged in tight between two condominium behemoths, this dwelling was in the wrong place at the wrong time and regally unrepentant, though the police were at the door.

  And in the parlor, up the stairs and down in the cellar.

  So many police.

  Nedda Winter sat quietly and watched them pass her by on their way to other rooms—and they watched her for a while. Soon they came to regard her as furniture, but she took no offense. She turned on the antique radio that stood beside her chair. No one reprimanded her, and so she turned up the volume.