Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  It was dark, but she could follow the changes in his face as he digested this. This was news to him. Had he been lied to or sheltered? “How well did you know the gallery owner, Avril Koozeman?”

  “We crossed paths at a few art functions. And once or twice we’ve bid against one another at auctions, usually charity affairs.”

  “How well did Sabra know him?”

  “They knew each other quite well in their younger days. They exhibited in the same gallery.”

  “Koozeman was an artist?”

  “Oh, yes, and a good one.”

  “So he’s been a gallery owner, a critic and an artist?”

  “It’s not so strange. People often float among related fields. A police officer might become a security expert or a criminal, or both, yes?”

  “It’s been done,” said Mallory. “So you thought Koozeman was a good artist. And what did Sabra think of him?”

  “She had a very high opinion of his work. She said there was a dark genius to it. But Koozeman wasn’t willing to pay the dues, so he applied his genius to promoting others. He tried to lure Sabra into his stable of artists, but by then she was established, a rising star. She was quite beyond him.”

  “Did he hold a grudge?”

  “No. I wouldn’t think so. He was always a driven man, too fixated on his own life. He’s made quite a success of his gallery over the past ten years or so.”

  Mallory looked around the plaza. “It’s too bad your wife can’t be here to see this. You haven’t seen her in a long time, have you?”

  “No. Sabra disappeared soon after Aubry died. I blame myself. I was so deep in grief, I didn’t see the changes in her, until she cut off her beautiful hair. She left me. She didn’t stop to pack a bag. I found all the cut strands of her hair lying on the floor of our bedroom. She didn’t even take that.”

  “Did you try to find her?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you never saw her again?”

  “No.”

  She wondered if she believed everything this man told her. And what of Quinn? He behaved like a man with a reason to lie, to cover, but for what reason? Who was Quinn shielding? Not Gilette.

  “You really have no idea where she is?”

  “None. If I knew, I would be with her now. I’m still very much in love with my wife.”

  And there was truth in this. His eyes were looking at a memory, and it was beloved. He turned to face her now, back in the present and curious. “Why are you so interested in Sabra? Do you think she might be able to tell you something about that night?”

  “Maybe. I’ll never know. The police weren’t allowed to question her after Aubry died.”

  “She could not have stood up to any stress.”

  “Maybe she could stand it now. I’d like to talk to Sabra, but she’s sunk below my radar. She’s living under an alias, or she’s—”

  “Dead? Yes, I’ve thought of that possibility, but she would never commit suicide. It’s against her religion. Would it help you to know that she was in an institution for a few years? It was a voluntary commitment.”

  “What institution?”

  “If I had known the name, I would have settled the bill. She never used our insurance policy. She had to be there under an assumed name. My detectives couldn’t find her.”

  “So how did you find out she was hospitalized?”

  “Word got back to me. I won’t say from whom. It was a private affair, and I am a great respecter of privacy.” He looked away, and then his face came back to her, smiling with a change of subject.

  “The man you came with, Charles Butler? I can’t say I know him well. I only saw him at family gatherings, but I did watch him grow up from wedding to wedding, funeral to funeral. I’m sure I remember him far better than he remembers me. He was so remarkable in any company—and I’m not referring to that magnificent nose. I gather he’s not a close friend of yours?”

  “He’s a very close friend.” He was her only friend. “Why did you say that?”

  “Well, he must be devastated now. I don’t imagine he enjoyed losing you that way.”

  “Charles? He understood why I had to leave.”

  “You think he understood why he was left to look like a fool in front of all those people?” He put up one hand to silence her, to stop her from denying she had done that. “When Charles was a little boy, his freak intellect made him a thing apart from other children, a different species. The things the normal children did to him—just following their nature, never missing an opportunity to be cruel. But you’re not a child, and you say you’re his friend.”

  “I am his friend.”

  “I wonder, Mallory. Would he have left you behind?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Oh, but it was. I’ve seen it before, at every wedding and funeral. His mother would shoo him into a crowd of children. The little monsters would torture him for a while, and then they’d run off. He would just stand there, very quiet, with this stunned look in his eyes. I think the cruelty always baffled him. That’s what I saw in his face tonight as we were leaving the ball—he really didn’t understand.”

  Gregor Gilette was searching her face, probing her with his eyes. He seemed surprised by what he had just found. “Mallory, you don’t comprehend any of this, do you?” He brought his face closer to hers. “No, I can see that you don’t.”

  Mallory looked down at her watch. “I have to leave now—I’ve got work to do. I’d like to talk to you again. Can I call you?”

  “Yes, of course.” He pulled a pen and a card from his pocket and scribbled a telephone number on the back. “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Charles stirred in the night, rising to half-consciousness with the light pepper of pebbles on glass. With mild annoyance, he rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. He came rudely awake to the sound of a breaking windowpane, and his eyes snapped open in time to see a dark object fly into the room and land on the carpet amid a sparkling shower of glass.

  Well, now he was wide awake. He rushed to the window and threw up the sash, ready with a small store of words Riker had taught him to relieve the angst of just such a moment. He leaned out the window, prepared with an opening gambit to cast aspersions on the parenthood of the rock thrower.

  In the street below was a beautiful woman in a shimmering green ball gown. She was standing in the soft rain and staring up at him. The drops pocked her gown with dots of a darker green. Her face was misted and shining, her white skin luminous. Her hair glistened with rain and lamplight. She blew him a kiss, and in the next moment, she was gone, hurrying up the narrow street toward the wide busy lanes and bright lights of Houston. He leaned far out the window and watched until the last bit of her gown had disappeared into a yellow taxi.

  When he finally stood back from the window, he wore the most foolish grin a human could wear outside of captivity. His hair was soaked through, and now he realized he was standing on broken glass. It had just dawned on him that his soles were bleeding, when he noticed the object at his feet—masonry which he hoped was a chunk off someone else’s building. A bit of paper was bound to it by string. He knelt down and untied the wet knot, carefully unfolding the limp paper as though it were a precious relic. He lifted his message to the window. By this poor light, he read the words, “I’m sorry.”

  When he considered the source, this was nearly poetic. And to think, he had once criticized her for not having a jot of romance in her soul, or for that matter, a soul. And who but Mallory would have come up with the original idea of tendering an apology by rock?

  In its original form, the newspaper clipping had been Sabra and Gregor Gilette’s wedding portrait from the society pages. It had shown only a small part of the bride’s face, only one eye unobscured by her flowers. Half that photograph stared back at Emma Sue each night from the ornate picture frame on the bedside table. She had cut off Sabra’s side of it in the way of a jealous lover. How she had hated Gregor’s wife. And yet, pe
rversely, her most prized possession was one of Sabra’s paintings.

  In her young years, before she had become a mover and shaker in the New York art world, Emma Sue Hollaran’s taste in art had always run contentedly with reproductions of Americana by the painter from Maine. His work was as quiet and unchallenging as wallpaper in the portraiture of neighbor folk and peaceful landscapes of an America that she never lived in, a made-up place that she might visit for a moment before turning out the lights.

  All those years ago when she had seen the first of Sabra’s paintings, she had physically recoiled. It was the shock of cold water and the disorientation of a sleepwalker called rudely awake. It thrilled her. Sabra had painted a place that Emma Sue had known in her fantasies. The work was done in vibrant reds. The upper portion was a jagged raging violence and the lower part, a rolling, bleeding passivity. She stared into the painting, believing for one full second that she might actually enter it.

  Untutored in abstract art, she had forced representation onto the canvas, and reorganized the atmosphere of raw sex, until the violence became a tumultuous fiery sky, roaring over the gently sloping earth below. Rushing across the red plain in the distance, coming ever close, was a churning blood storm. This, too, was another country. It was young, and it was passionate. She remembered it well from dark rooms where she had sat alone with imaginary men who really loved her.

  The painting had been hung on her bedroom wall all those years ago. Even when she had come to hate Sabra, Emma Sue could never bring herself to destroy the painting. All these years later, she still found herself staring at it for hours, her head pressed into the pillows, hand hesitating on the lamp switch, watching, waiting for the passionate blood storm to come, in the delusion that, for her, it had not already passed her by.

  She turned off the lamp and plotted in the dark.

  Gregor would be sorry, very sorry.

  Mallory had doffed her ball gown and her yellow taxi cab. Long after midnight, she had returned to what she was, a cop in blue jeans, carrying a large gun in a shoulder holster and striding across a rooftop on the east side of town, ten flights in the air.

  Riker waved one arm to say hello. He had his binoculars trained down on the roof of Bloomingdale’s across the street. He was focussed on the thing beneath the makeshift canopy of raincoats. The wind whipped at the canopy, and a coat flapped up to expose the mannequin in the silver ball gown. Andrew Bliss was tenderly draping the plastic figure with a raincoat, as though he thought she might be cold.

  “Strange little guy,” said Riker.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I think he’s starting a new religion. Right now he’s lighting a candle in front of a giant Barbie doll.”

  Mallory took the binoculars, and watched Andrew light the tall formal candles of a silver candelabra set on a table before the mannequin. “It does look like an altar, doesn’t it?”

  She had been schooled in two religions, Jewish and Catholic. Both lit candles, but this little rite of Andrew’s was closer to the church than the temple. Now Andrew was making the sign of the cross. It was this very act, performed unconsciously as a child, which had tipped Helen Markowitz off to her real mother’s religion, and the foster mother had felt an obligation to condemn Kathy Mallory to four years of parochial school.

  “Riker, how much food do you think he has in that little fridge?”

  “No food. I saw him open it an hour ago. It’s packed with wine and one bottle of water. There’s no sign of food anywhere.”

  “Take off, Riker. Get some sleep.”

  “G’night, Mallory.”

  After the rooftop door had closed on Riker, Mallory plugged in her directional microphone and scanned the roof, counting up wine bottles. When she focussed on Andrew again, he was stumbling to his bedding of quilts. He must be tired and weak from the dearth of food and the glut of wine. Yet he did not sleep except in starting fits. He was having nightmares, if Mallory understood those screams. She could remember a childhood of screaming herself awake in the night as Andrew did all the night long, until the candles failed, burning to the nubs and going out.

  When he woke again, an hour shy of daylight, he discovered his melted candles, and he went ballistic. She watched him tearing through his entire stock of goods until he found another candle. He lit it and went back to sleep.

  Curious.

  It wasn’t fear of the dark. Electric light bloomed everywhere on the roof. She counted ten lamps tied by a network of extension cords. The candles must mean something more to him.

  Just before daybreak, he fell into an exhausted sleep with no more screams, and he did not wake again before Mallory left him.

  Gregor Gilette remained in Godd’s Bar until closing time. Then he sat in an after-hours bar until near sunup, pondering the possibilities of dark genius.

  When he did go home to his Fifth Avenue residence, he was weary in so many ways. He went to the large kitchen at the back of the apartment. He selected a bottle of red from the wine rack and carried it through the rooms, slowly working the screw into the cork.

  Gregor unlocked the door of the only room in the apartment which his housekeeper was not obliged to clean. He entered his den and sat down in a chair opposite the enlarged image of a bloody severed head. He casually fumbled in a drawer for his cigar cutter. Behind his chair, Aubry’s murdered face, in full color with open, staring dead eyes, seemed to watch as he struck a match to a Cuban cigar, and then poured his wine into a goblet.

  He turned to his left, seeking an ashtray. He was so accustomed to the wall covering on that side of the room, he never even glanced at it. From the baseboard to the ceiling molding, the wall was splashed with a collage of photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings, held in place by nails driven into plaster. Four of the photographs were large and glossy, in full color, and the predominant color was the blood of wounds.

  The young woman in the photographs was more recognizably human in the newspaper clippings below. Each clipping told much the same story. Each said, in much the same wording, that here was a wildly talented young dancer who was going somewhere in this world.

  There were retractions printed in articles at the base of the wall, which said in varied garish tabloid headlines that they had lied; she had died; she would never go anywhere now.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE KITCHEN WAS RIKER’S FAVORITE ROOM AT MALLORY and Butler, Ltd. It was a bright and airy space, a proper sit-down kitchen, where the best of conversations took place in the company of people he cared for, and the coffee was always first-rate.

  Riker slumped low in his chair and came to grips with the early morning. His daily routine had been so completely upset that he did not even have the continuity of his customary hangover. Mallory had taken the late shift on the roof, and yet she looked fresh and new. When did she ever sleep?

  She set a platter of croissants and cheeses on the table. There was also a side dish of jelly doughnuts as a special concession to himself.

  Charles stood at the counter, bending down to read a light display on the coffee machine. In the kitchen of Charles’s apartment across the hall, he still used a manual bean grinder, and brewed the coffee, drop by drop, into a carafe. Here he dealt with a computer which organized the grinding and brewing, set the richness of the flavor, and all but fetched the mugs from the cupboard after announcing that the coffee was ready. This room was the middle ground between Charles the lover of all things antique, and Mallory the machine. Now Riker noticed the recent addition of a microwave oven sitting on the counter in company with a small television set and a radio with a CD player.

  So Mallory was dragging Charles, appliance by appliance, into the twentieth century.

  “I would think Oren Watt was still the most likely suspect,” Charles was saying.

  “No one saw him there.” Mallory laid the silverware on the table.

  Sunlight slanted through the squares of the kitchen curtain and made a bright chessboard on the gleaming hardwood flo
or. The cleaning woman, Mrs. Ortega, owned the credit for the polished woodwork and all the odors of cleaning solvents that lingered for a day after her visits. Riker envied Charles the services of Mrs. Ortega. His own place had not had much of the dust disturbed in all the time he had lived there.

  Charles turned to Mallory as he was pouring coffee into generous mugs. “If you took more of an interest in the fine arts and attended a few gallery openings, you would know that no one has any idea what’s going on in the room. They stand in front of the artwork in little clusters and gossip. It’s not like anyone is watching the room or even looking at the art. Actually, Oren Watt could’ve done it.”

  “No, Charles, he couldn’t.”

  Riker noticed that her attitude in dealing with Charles was the same one she might use to housebreak a pet. Of course, she had no pet but Charles. Her voice was softer as she went on. “I watched him at the gallery installation for the television film. People stared at him everywhere he went. His face is a standout, and they all knew who he was, even though he’d cut off his hair and wore dark glasses. It was creepy. I don’t care how crowded the room was, or how preoccupied the guests were. Whoever was there and not dead would’ve noticed him.”

  “I’ll make a bet with you.” Charles carried the mugs to the table. “If I can prove that Oren Watt could’ve done it, you pay for lunch. Deal?”

  Riker grinned. “I didn’t think you were much of a betting man, Charles.”

  “It’s a science experiment with him.” Mallory sat down at the table and selected a golden croissant. “He can never win at poker, and he doesn’t know why. So he’ll keep doing experiments until he figures it out.”

  “What’s to figure out?” Riker reached for a doughnut and studied it with grave suspicion, wondering if he could eat it without a beer to wash it down. “You play poker with sharks, Charles. Doc Slope was born with a poker face. Rabbi Kaplan is a walking book of knowledge on human nature, and Duffy’s a goddamn lawyer. A genius IQ won’t save you in a game with that crew.”