Killing Critics

by Carol O'Connell

  He was startled for a moment. For she had been the child voted most likely to send the crayons outside the lines of her coloring books. Sometimes he forgot that she did have rules. Markowitz had given them to her, but they were the rules of sport. Markowitz had been ingenious at fashioning games for her, games to keep her alive, to help her pass for normal. She was a born competitor, and this had been the only way to reach her.

  Now Riker almost felt sorry for the nameless, faceless perp who got between Mallory and what she wanted most—to win.

  He watched Andrew gathering up the last crumbs of his loaf, then handed the binoculars to Mallory as he pulled back from the edge of the roof. “You know the little guy is totally nuts.”

  “No he’s not. That’s just the booze working on him,” she said to the alcoholic standing beside her, “and the guilt. I see he found another candle. What’s the deal with the candles? Any ideas?”

  “It’s gotta be religion,” said Riker. “That altar with the mannequin is giving me the creeps. I say he’s nuts, but I can’t see him hacking up those bodies or slipping a pick into Starr’s back.”

  “He did something.”

  CHAPTER 5

  GREGOR GILETTE CARRIED A STEAMING CUP OF COFFEE to the kitchen table and set it down beside the morning newspaper. By lowering the window shade only a little, he demolished every tall building above the tree line of Central Park. Five flights above Fifth Avenue traffic, it was almost possible to believe that he was no longer in Manhattan.

  He glanced across the table at an empty chair and an empty space where Sabra might have been, if their only child had not been slaughtered. At some point in the past decade, acknowledging Sabra’s absence had become a part of his daily routine, and once more, he sat down to breakfast without her.

  As he unfolded his newspaper, the jewel of his ring flashed a dazzle of blue light, calling for his attention as it often did. The stone was cheap. He wore it because it was the very color of Sabra’s eyes.

  The doorbell rang precisely on the appointed hour, and that would be Detective Mallory.

  Gregor ushered his young guest into the kitchen and poured her a generous portion of coffee. Visually, she had lost nothing in the transition from ball gown to blue jeans. But her manner had altered. He thought she seemed somewhat mechanical in the small civilized comments of “How are you, sir?” and “Sorry to bother you so early.” Of course, he realized she was not at all sorry to bother him, and now, done with courtesy, she launched into the business of her visit.

  She settled a laptop computer on the kitchen table by her cup. “I need more information on the night your daughter died.” She opened the computer, and then reached into her blazer pocket to draw out a plastic device with a ball at its center, which she plugged into her machine. “You were planning to have dinner with Aubry that night?”

  “Yes. I was to meet her at a cafe in the West Village.” He felt a vague disquiet. The night of the ball there had been conversation. This was interrogation, cold and impersonal.

  “You brought her roses.” She began to tap on the keyboard, not meeting his eyes, almost disconnected from him.

  “Yes, the roses were red.”

  “Was it a special occasion?” Now she did look at him, and he wished she had not, for she might as well have been regarding his chair and not the man who sat close to her, sharing coffee.

  “No. The flowers were to brighten Aubry’s apartment—a gift from her mother. Sabra was a woman of extreme color, and Aubry was very austere. So, every time we saw our daughter, Sabra would give her a gift of color—a scarf, a bright ceramic bowl. Sabra believed one could die for lack of color, so she continued to feed color to her child.”

  “Where was your wife the night of the murders?”

  “Sabra was visiting her mother, Ellen Quinn.”

  For a moment, he thought Mallory was going to challenge that statement, but her voice was casual as she said, “I had the idea Sabra and her family didn’t get along very well.”

  “They didn’t. But my mother-in-law was getting on in years, and Sabra was too big a person to hold a grudge against a lonely old woman.”

  “Do you know why Aubry wanted to meet Quinn at the gallery that night?”

  “No, Detective, you have it wrong. It was Jamie who chose the meeting place. Aubry called me to say she would be late for dinner, because her Uncle Jamie wanted to see her.”

  And now he saw suspicion in her face, as though she had caught him in a lie, and he was puzzled over this. But as quickly as he put this together, the trouble in her eyes had resolved itself.

  “You’re sure she didn’t ask to meet him?”

  “Quite sure. She said Jamie wanted her to meet him at the gallery.”

  “She spoke to him?”

  “No. He left her a message at the ballet school. When I couldn’t reach Jamie by phone, I called the school’s director. Aubry had used Madame Burnstien’s phone to call her uncle at the newspaper. Her message had been garbled—too many instructions for the school receptionist to write down in a hurry. It was a clerk at the newspaper who told Aubry to meet her uncle at the gallery. When I spoke to that clerk, she looked up the name of the gallery on the message carbon.”

  “Did you and Quinn ever speak about this?”

  “I honestly don’t remember. There were so many things to distract me from the small details. My only child was dead, my wife was falling apart ... there was the funeral to deal with.”

  “Who broke the news to Sabra?”

  “Jamie did. He took care of everything. He made the funeral arrangements and hired security men to keep people away from us. Sabra was going to pieces. Then, as I told you, she left me and checked herself into an institution.”

  “You left for Europe after that?”

  “Perhaps nine months later—only after it was made very clear to me that Sabra wouldn’t see me. The breakup of a marriage is a common piece of damage when two people lose a child. I had been in Paris for only a year when I heard she left the institution and disappeared. I did what I could to find her, but I failed.”

  “Would you like me to find Sabra for you?” She looked up from her computer.

  “The best private investigators in New York are still looking for her. I never stopped trying to find my wife. So, I thank you for—”

  “The best PIs are ex-cops. They get most of their information from old buddies on the force. Now I’m a cop, and I’m better than the best you’ve got. And the service is free.”

  He liked arrogance, but he mistrusted youth. “My people have been working the case for years. They’re familiar with every—”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t have one decent photograph to give them.”

  “No, I didn’t.” He smiled at this reminder of Sabra’s eccentric camera hatred. “I gave the investigators a photograph of my daughter. Aubry bore a strong resemblance to her mother.”

  “Sabra was in her forties when she disappeared. Now she’s twelve years older. Your detectives are looking for a family resemblance to a twenty-year-old girl.” She tapped the laptop computer with one long red fingernail, and then turned it so he could see the full screen. “This is an identity kit.”

  He leaned closer to examine a photograph of Aubry. “It is a strong resemblance to Sabra.”

  “But the daughter wasn’t an exact copy of the mother, was she?”

  “No. Aubry was very pretty, but Sabra was striking, dramatic. My wife was a great presence in every room she entered.... But the day of the funeral she seemed small and tired. The ordeal added years to her face. Grief is an exhausting thing.”

  Mallory revolved the ball device wired into her computer. “I’m aging the photo of Aubry.” A moment later she said, “Here, take a look at this.”

  He left his seat at the table to stand behind her chair. And now he was looking at the woman his daughter might have become. Mallory was adding wrinkles to the brow. It was cruel, this aging process, but fascinating. She had taken away the soft
ness of Aubry’s face and created lines around the mouth. The delicate nose was slightly enlarged, and the eyes were given their own lines. The black hair had been lightened with strokes of gray.

  “That’s very good,” said Gilette. “Sabra’s eyes were a bit larger and more expressive.”

  Mallory enlarged the eyes.

  “Sadder,” said Gilette.

  She dragged down the corners of the eyes.

  “And the mouth was wider, the chin a little stronger.”

  When she was done, he said, “That’s what Sabra looked like on the day of the funeral.”

  Mallory folded down the top of her computer and picked up her car keys, preparing to leave him. Now she put the keys down again. “One more thing—how well did Andrew Bliss know your daughter? I have an old newspaper article that quotes him as a personal friend.”

  “Andrew? Well, he saw Aubry at her mother’s art shows. He always made a fuss over her when she was a child. He even went to her recitals when she was a student at Madame Burnstien’s school. I like him for that. My daughter was a lonely little girl. There was a quality in Andrew that could speak to her, child to child.”

  “You were there every time they met?”

  “No. They sometimes saw one another when he visited the ballet school—Andrew was a generous patron. Sometimes he met with Aubry after her dancing class. When she was a little girl, Andrew would insist that she call home to tell us she’d be late.”

  Mallory’s eyes narrowed. “He was seeing her alone when she was still a child?”

  On one level, he liked this young woman tremendously, but just now he wanted to smack her. “He and Aubry would have tea in Madame Burnstien’s office after class. Does this sound like a sexual tryst with a pedophile?”

  Apparently, it did. Her expression was cynical. She sat back in her chair, unconvinced that opportunity was not synonymous with the act. He thought her too young to be so hard on the world.

  “Andrew was very kind to my daughter, nothing more. He might have been her only real friend. Their relationship was totally innocent, almost spiritual. My wife believed that Aubry and Andrew were like two lonely monks with different callings.”

  “Andrew Bliss is a materialistic little bastard,” she said, calmly, evenly. “All the papers are touting him as the fashion terrorist of New York. What do you think Sabra would say now? You think she might buy the pedophile angle?”

  “No!” The palm of his hand slapped the table hard. “And neither do I.”

  Had she been baiting him? Yes, it was in her face. She had what she wanted from him, and damn the cost. Now he understood why Jamie Quinn had gone to such pains to keep the police from his door all those years ago. The questions, the insinuations—this was a rape of memory.

  “Andrew’s friendship with Aubry was innocent kindness. Nothing can dissuade me from that.” He rose from the table, making it clear that it was time for her to go. “The suggestion of something sexual in her childhood is maddening. You have no sense of my emotions concerning my child, do you?”

  “I think you’d like to kill the man who murdered her.”

  A cockroach floated dead among the slags of cream on the surface of his coffee. Riker shook his head and set the cup down on the bedside table. The roach must have been in the pan he used to heat the water. Morning light was diffusing through the dust-gray lace of a curtain. Layers of cigarette smoke had dimmed and yellowed the windowpane to make the daylight kinder to his emaciated features.

  Now he parted the curtain and caught sight of Mary Margaret rounding the corner with her arms full of groceries and leading a parade of four children. Her body had thickened some, but her hair was the same carrot red she was born to. The children, redheads all, were laughing, and she laughed with them.

  If only they had had children together, Mary Margaret might have stuck it out with him.

  Naw, that’s not right.

  It was the drinking that drove her away, and not the dearth of babies. She was always meant for better than him, and the year after she left, she had found that better man.

  She had lived three doors away for all these years, and they never spoke. He saw her most every day of his life, passing sometimes within touching distance, never daring to touch her once in all that time. He wished she had moved away from the old neighborhood when she left him. It would have been easier for her to leave instead of him. He had stayed here on this same street because she had stayed.

  Every time he had seen her passing by his window with her brood of kids and her second husband, it had been a personal assault. In the march of children’s feet, all ducks in a row behind Mary Margaret, Riker could see generations of the life he might have had. No problem with her second husband. No sir. Not a sterile drunk like the first one.

  Perhaps he should have crawled off to die with his drunk’s liver, years ago. What kept him alive he didn’t know. He sat down on the side of the bed and opened the drawer of the nightstand. He reached to the back, hand combing through the debris until he touched the small paper envelope. Inside it was his wedding ring and a bullet with his name engraved upon it, his rainy day bullet.

  He seldom opened the envelope. It had more magic for him when he didn’t look inside. It was only important to him to heft the weight of the ring and the bullet in his hand, to know that there was one last place to go when he couldn’t live in this one anymore.

  He kicked a pizza carton out of his way as he walked to the bathroom. A nest of roaches fled the cardboard box and took refuge in another take-out container with remnants of rice and noodles. Now he stood before the mirror over the small sink where he shaved, when he shaved. He checked his eyes in the mirror. He saw dense red road maps with patches of brown where his eyes leaked through.

  By nine o’clock, bits of tissue paper with bright red centers marked all the places where he had cut himself shaving.

  Drunks should only be allowed to use electric razors.

  When he was bereft of tissue, bleeding stopped, he dressed in his best bad suit.

  “I have been given a sign that God is on my side in this,” Andrew announced to the world, via his bullhorn. And now he cast a benevolent eye on the small crowd of ant-size, badly dressed people who gathered on the sidewalk below. He had come to think of them as his parishioners, his personal flock of insects.

  “He would want you all to make the most of His gifts to the world. Why do you think He created Blooming-dale’s and Bergdorf’s? Sinners, can’t you see His grand design in Tiffany’s?”

  The crowd was growing larger.

  Oh, thank you, Lord, fresh victims.

  He sized them up in the binoculars, and couldn’t get horn to mouth fast enough.

  “You! Wearing that yellow, shapeless thing that makes your skin look sallow! Most of us have to hang out at laundromats to see that peculiar shade of polyester. Sinner, you’ll find the Suit Collection on the second floor.”

  And now another. “Woman with the hideous purple tights. Don’t you realize what a steady diet of champagne and cigarettes can do to the human body? I’m dying for your sins. Get thee to Women’s Sportswear, third floor.”

  He addressed the larger gathering. “Remember, we are all God’s creations, and we must dedicate our lives to the greater glory of His works. Charge card applications are available on the first floor. You may cosign a card for the less fortunate.”

  He lowered the binoculars and bullhorn to uncork a new bottle and sip his lunch, forgoing the amenity of a glass. There were no glasses left. One blanked-out night he must have taken up the custom of smashing them against the wall each time he emptied one. Now he surveyed his plush aerie, ignoring the shards of broken glass and the growing litter of empty bottles. Even blind drunk, his taste in goods had been unerring.

  And now he flopped down on his bed of quilts and stared at the mannequin behind her altar. He wondered why God had created Aubry if He was just going to kill her that way. It was all God’s work and God’s will, wasn’t it? All of
it?

  Aubry the Virginal, the perfect sacrifice. How holy.

  Oh, beautiful Aubry. God can be such a bastard, can’t He?

  Coffey stood in front of Blakely’s desk until the chief of detectives made a guttural noise and pointed to the chair.

  Now the great man deigned to lift his head and squint his small eyes at Coffey, as though trying to remember what the head of Special Crimes Section was doing here in his office.

  “Well, Jack, Commissioner Beale wanted me to pass on his compliments. He’s Mallory’s number-one fan this week. Course that makes it more difficult to take Mallory off the Dean Starr murder.”

  “I was hoping you’d reconsider that.”

  “No, Jack, I don’t think so. I want you to call Beale. Tell him it’s your idea to pull Mallory and Riker off the case. As long as the FBI is out of the picture, he probably won’t care if you have the janitor run the investigation.”

  “Mallory and Riker make a good team. I don’t want to change the assignments.”

  “This is not a good time for you to be making waves, Jack. The paperwork on your promotion is sitting on my desk. You don’t want it to park here for another year, do you?”

  Coffey sat in silence. He had learned this from Markowitz. “Let the bastard flap his mouth,” the old man had said. “Let him knock himself out, and then you’re still fresh when you move in to shut his mouth. ”

  “You’d be the youngest captain on the force, Jack. Of course, Riker was the youngest captain we ever had. You didn’t know? Well, that’s not too surprising—he wasn’t a captain for very long. This was on someone else’s watch, before my time—remember that. He was just doing his job, and a good job, too. One night, he interviewed a twelve-year-old boy who gave him the license number of a limousine and a very detailed description of a man. So Riker ran the plates, and matched up the description of the perp with the owner of the car. Then he wrote up his report like the good cop he was. The kid was raped by a prince of the church.”

  “So that was Riker’s case? I heard the story about the arrest, but I always figured it was like one of those legends about giant alligators in the sewers. There’s no trace of the arrest report ever—”