Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  Madame Burnstien said nothing. But that was something. There was no convenient, polite lie to fill the gap. This woman might be capable of deception, but the outright lie was not Madame’s style. So Sabra was alive. She backed off now, to give the woman space.

  “All right, then tell me about Aubry and the artist she died with. Was Peter Ariel really her boyfriend? Or was there someone else?”

  “She had no lovers.”

  “She was a very attractive woman, and these days, twenty is old for a virgin.”

  “The world changed, the ballet did not. It’s a grueling, demanding profession. Aubry had great ambition. She had no time for friends or lovers. This is what she loved.” Madame Burnstien pointed to a large photograph of a dancer’s ruined feet, half-healed sores and open wounds, all the punishment of the cruel shoes. “When Aubry was not performing in her ballet company, she was here, taking classes. The classes never end, you know, not for your entire life span as a ballerina.”

  “She had some connection to that gallery she died in. There was something going on in her life. She could have been meeting her boyfriend in the hours after the lessons and performances.”

  “No, she couldn’t!” The cane beat the floor with a thud and left a round impression in the rug. There were many such impressions about the room.

  “You can’t know that, not for sure.” Mallory leaned back against the red door. “You weren’t with her every minute.” Her words were taunting, to lead the old woman into the fray. She had learned a great deal from the rabbi. “You were only her teacher. She could have had a hundred boyfriends.”

  And now the old woman sat up a little straighter, head lifting, rising to the bait. “Aubry could not have been carrying on an affair, not without my knowing. Dancing takes tremendous strength, great care with one’s health. I myself was overtrained. My arthritis began when I was only a little older than Aubry. A dancer needs rest above all things. Aubry retired as early as her evening performances would permit, and she was here every morning taking class. There were no late-hour bruises to her eyes. Aubry only danced!” Lower and less emphatic now, “She never had a life.”

  Mallory folded her arms in the skeptic’s pose which the rabbi used when he thought she might be lying.

  Madame Burnstien rose from her chair. The pain of movement was concealed well, but not completely. There was evidence enough for Mallory to know the arthritis had taken over the entire body of this former prima ballerina.

  The old woman stood by the window, her back turned to Mallory when she spoke. “You saw all the children downstairs? Out of the hundred, perhaps one will make it, perhaps not. And all the children who are not chosen—I like to think they have escaped.”

  Mallory moved behind her, coming upon her so quietly that the old woman started at her first words. “According to the newspapers, Aubry and the artist had an affair. An art critic named Andrew Bliss said—”

  “A pack of lies.”

  “People who knew them both were quoted—”

  “All lies!”

  “Or maybe you’re lying to me now.” But she knew that Madame Burnstien was not. When the old woman spoke next there was no confrontation, no defense, only the simple facts of Aubry’s time on earth.

  “She only danced. She never really lived. And then she died.”

  “More blackmail, Mallory?” Edward Slope made two notations on a chart and set it down on the table by the gutted male cadaver and former taxpayer. “What do you want now, the pink slip on my car?”

  He pulled off his gloves and slapped them down on the body which had done nothing to offend him. She held her ground. No emotion whatsoever, and that never failed to disturb him. He suspected this was her method of getting a rise out of him, forcing him to fill the emotional void from his own store of frustration.

  “Just a few questions,” she said. “Did Markowitz ever ask you how much time it would take to cut up the two bodies?”

  How in hell did she know that? He turned away from her as he pulled off the bloody surgical gown. “Yes, he did ask. But I was angry with him. I told him to buy a leg of beef and figure it out for himself.”

  “That’s just what he did.” She pulled a yellow napkin out of her pocket. “It took him a long time to cut through that leg. That gave him a lot of trouble with the time frame of the murder. It looks like there had to be more than one person working on the bodies. I think that was another reason he wouldn’t close out the case, another thing that wouldn’t fit.”

  He took the napkin from her hand and read the log of cutting meat and bone. “Poor bastard. I could have helped him with that. But you were right, we weren’t speaking then.” He handed the napkin back to her. “The killer worked the limbs at the joint. Easier that way, though I couldn’t tell you how much time was saved.”

  “Can you think of anything else that might help?”

  “I suppose you could say the joint cuts were an oddity, and I should have told him that, too. In most dismemberment cases, the fool takes the leg off at the bottom of the torso, not the hip joint—cuts through the bone when he doesn’t have to. The bones at the joints weren’t cut, but I did report the damage from the axe. He might have misread that. And I suppose I misled him with that leg of beef.”

  “So would the joint cuts indicate some knowledge of anatomy? Like art school anatomy?”

  “It might.”

  “Oren Watt never went to art school.”

  Slope thought she delivered that line with entirely too much smugness. He could fix that. “It might also indicate that the killer had simply carved his share of Thanksgiving turkeys. Nobody cuts the bone of the drumstick. But Helen always served a roast for Thanksgiving, didn’t she? So I can understand how that one got by you. But you’re so stubborn. I have to worry about what else you might be missing. You just can’t admit that Oren Watt could’ve—”

  “One more question,” she said. “Why did you back up Quinn? You told him Aubry was the most likely target.”

  “Yes, I did. I also told him I thought Oren Watt was the most likely suspect. I still believe that little bastard did it. Why must you go back into that case again?”

  “Why did you support the idea that the girl was the real target?”

  “Because she was the only one to suffer. The other one was hacked up postmortem. I know you read the report. You could probably recite it by heart. But it’s only a collection of data to you, isn’t it? Try to imagine it. She was crawling when the attacker followed her along the length of the floor, inflicting blow after blow. That was something that bothered Markowitz a lot. The girl was the victim of unmistakable savage rage.”

  “It’s a pity you and Markowitz weren’t on speaking terms after the autopsy. Markowitz questioned Watt on Aubry. Watt didn’t know her at all, not the first thing about her.”

  “So he didn’t know her. So? Perhaps he hated all women. It was a lunatic act and a crime of rage. You have the evidence of madness in my original report. He took a damn souvenir, her brain, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? It was the brain that Markowitz used to rule out Watt’s confession.”

  “You don’t know that.” He knew she was running a bluff. Sometimes she forgot he had been playing poker for decades before she was ever born. “You’re only guessing.”

  “Yeah, but I’m real good at that. Call it a gift. And I know my old man’s style. You weren’t talking to Markowitz. You were angry with him. You never talked about the case again. It would have been a bad subject after what he asked you to do. Now suppose Peter Ariel was the primary target. What then? If Markowitz was alive, standing here right now, would you have anything else to tell him? Would you change anything?”

  In a way, Slope felt that Markowitz was alive. He sensed the man’s presence every time she was near. She was a living reminder of a lifelong friendship. Even in death, Markowitz stubbornly refused to abandon her, forcing everyone who had loved him, to love his daughter too.

&n
bsp; “No, Kathy, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “Mallory,” she said with insistence.

  “Kathy,” he said with great deliberation. “One day your father’s friends will all be dead, and there’ll be no one to call you Kathy. That’s my biggest fear for you. Terrible thing being loved, isn’t it? It’s like a debt hanging over your head, and it pisses you off, doesn’t it? Well, good.”

  She was angry now, and that was good too. Her anger was his only method of ferreting out her humanity in what limited range of emotion she possessed. She returned his broad smile with an icy glare. She advanced on him, gathering size as she closed in on his person, one hand rising to within striking distance of his face.

  After she had gone, and the door was closing behind her on its slow hydraulic, he muttered, “Perverse little monster.” For she had touched his face so gently and kissed his cheek. She had left him disoriented, flailing for understanding in her disturbing wake, and she had done that to a purpose. He knew it—for he truly believed it was her mission in life to confuse him.

  The photographer set up the tripod on the sidewalk, facing the plaza of Gregor Gilette’s new building. Workmen were pulling down the last section of the wooden wall to reveal the graceful stone arch. This gateway to the plaza mimicked the shape of the building’s lower windows.

  When the photographer was done, the workmen would replace the wooden panels, and they would remain in place until the plaza sculpture was installed for the dedication ceremony.

  Emma Sue Hollaran stood by the pile of wood sections, her face red and pinched, railing at the workmen, who only shrugged their shoulders and said they had their orders. Emma Sue, mover and shaker of the Public Works Committee, turned ungainly and charged on the young photographer, who took her for an infuriated bull, cleverly disguised as a smaller, dumber animal.

  “I never authorized any of this!” she yelled.

  The photographer screwed a filter onto a lens and bent over the camera, making adjustments that didn’t need to be made, hoping that she would simply go away. Stupid idea. Looking down at the camera, he could also see her legs, sturdy little fireplugs rooted firmly to the pavement.

  “Young man, I’m talking to you.”

  Gilette waved the photographer back, and now the architect stepped forward to loom over her. Gilette smiled as he looked into the angry slits of her eyes, with an intensity that forced her to step back a pace. “The photographer takes his orders from me.”

  She had been planning to say something to him. What was it? She could only stare. He was so close. She couldn’t think.

  Emma Sue had always been protected from her own mirror by a doting father who had insisted that she was truly beautiful. She was protected also by her father’s land and money, never suffering the plight of the homely girl at the school dance. Considered by every farmer in the county to be a good catch, landwise and moneywise, she was sought after by every landowner who had a son of marriageable age. She had always danced every dance and happily trod on the feet of the handsome, wild boys who feared their matchmaking fathers.

  And money had protected her from her own dullwittedness, with a generous endowment to an Ivy League college. Money could do anything. With money enough, black could become white and a bleating barnyard animal could become a peer of the art community in the art center of the world.

  And yet, with all her protective armor, she was pinned like an insect and hadn’t a grasshopper’s wit to get loose. She could only stare at Gilette. He was so much more than just a man. There was something else in play here. He knocked the wind out of her by merely looking into her eyes and showing her something she couldn’t buy.

  There was sex going on here, on the sidewalk in the daylight, in public view, and it was indecent and raw and—she could only stare. Would you care to dance, Gregor?

  No, his eyes said, not with you.

  Ugly and lonely and witless, she turned and walked away with slow agonizing steps, size nine shoes clattering on the sidewalk, lost now in the sounds of Manhattan traffic.

  People had begun to drift through the arch and into the plaza. A policeman asked Gilette if he wanted them cleared out. Some of them sat on the benches in the open light, some took the shade under the ash trees that formed the plaza walls, and two children dipped their hands in the water of the fountain. Gilette shook his head.

  “No. Let them be.”

  He looked into the photographer’s lens to see the fountain through the camera’s eyes, bringing it into sharp focus. A young Spanish sculptor had won an international competition with this design to match Gilette’s own skill for making marble flow like water. The lines of the fountain carried the eye along with a fluid grace that defeated its own hard substance, echoing the lines of the building’s facade, and stone called out to stone across the plaza.

  Reflections of the water played over the faces of two boys, and the camera’s shutter clicked.

  An old man flung one brittle arm across the back of a bench, which curved to fit the contour of his body. He lifted his face to the light and smiled peacefully, and a shutter clicked.

  A young woman in a yellow dress stood in the lush green shadows of the young stand of trees, starting as a flock of birds settled in the branches overhead.

  A derelict hesitated at the arch and turned to the place where Gilette stood. The man’s face, with five days’ dust and beard, was washed new with dazzling light, and a shutter clicked.

  The television crew was unloading equipment from the large trucks. All about him was the hustle of people passing to and fro, laying cables and checking sound equipment and cameras, a babble of orders and questions.

  Oren Watt stood at the outer edge of the fray, with the sun on his face. Perhaps that was why she just seemed to appear there. One moment the sidewalk across the street had been empty, and now she stood there, smiling at him. He remembered her from the Koozeman shoot. She was the one who had removed the tapes on the gallery where Dean Starr had died. The young woman had smiled at him then, too, though not exactly a smile, more like bared teeth.

  Now she pulled a black wallet out of her blazer and opened it to display a badge. The sun hit the metal and shot his eyes with gold. A truck lumbered between them, and when it had passed by, she was gone.

  “I thought you were the technical advisor, Oren.”

  He spun around to see her standing behind him. She was looking down at a clipboard.

  “Did you tell them they were shooting in the wrong place?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I once asked a nun that same question, same words. You know what she said? ‘I want your soul.’ ” And now she was walking away from him, making a check mark on her clipboard as she left him.

  “Well this is wonderful,” said Charles, as he stood at the desk in Mallory’s office and pored through the contents of the brown bag. He held up a brand of mustard he had never seen before. And a full complement of foreign beers filled out the bottom of the sack.

  “Sorry about lunch,” said Mallory. She was sitting at one of the three computer terminals which dominated the room.

  “Have you given any thought to how Quinn knew you’d be at the gallery today? Perhaps you don’t know much about his habits. New York is overcrowded with galleries. What are the odds he was just passing by? He’s stalking you. He’s not dangerous of course, but still.”

  “He’s tied to my money motive for the old murders. Maybe he’s worried that I’m making connections he wouldn’t like.”

  “You’re wrong, Mallory. Quinn’s presence kills your money motive.”

  “Like hell it does. Having Quinn view the bodies fits very nicely with money. He’s an important critic. It all fits.”

  “No, Mallory, the fact that Quinn was called in is an oddity. It doesn’t fit at all. He couldn’t have been called there for publicity value. The murderer would have called in a hack critic for that.”

  “A review from Quinn is gold.”

  “Well, n
o it isn’t, not for a bad artist. There was a time when a critic could launch a career. But not anymore. Today, the artist is promoted with media hype and a gimmick, not a critique. To have Quinn see the murder as artwork, well, that would only be important to a really talented artist. That description doesn’t fit Peter Ariel, Dean Starr or Oren Watt. It only makes sense as revenge against Quinn. You may have to accept his idea that Aubry was the primary target. The only other reasonable theory is a random act of insane violence.”

  “I’m swimming in people who made money on those deaths. I’m right about this.”

  “Why are you so stubborn about the money motive?”

  “I need it for the Dean Starr murder. Without it I’ve got nothing. If it’s a random act of violence, then the killer disappears into the crowd, and there’s no trail.”

  She wasn’t with him anymore, she was so intent on her computer screen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m breaking into an artist’s network through an internet server.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. He must have found her smile disquieting, because now he was leaving her, softly closing the door behind him, not wanting to witness any breaking and entry.

  She had taken quite an interest in the artnets over the past few days. Once into the system, she proceeded immediately to the forum under the heading of Bliss’s Last Column. She passed over the familiar two-day-old comments of artists and interested parties, and happened on a conversation taking place in real time. Two of the players were opting out to a private room. She went into the data base and plucked the passwords to diddle the cyberspace lock so she could follow after them. Invisible to the screens of the others, she stole up on the more intimate conversation printing out before her eyes and learned that Andrew Bliss had spent two years in a seminary, studying for the priesthood.