“Yes, Charles, it’s very close.” Quinn pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “But why not carry it just a bit further?”
“Somebody makes it, somebody else sells it, and some other somebody buys it.”
“Yes, go on.” Quinn lit his cigarette, disregarding the laws against smoking in public buildings.
“So the sellers and the buyers are cutting out the middleman. They’re cutting out the artists.”
“And so a new order replaces the old, entrepreneurial talent supersedes artistic talent. Superb reasoning, Charles, as always. My compliments.”
The hidden door in the wall opened a crack, and a hand deposited a standing ashtray on the floor next to Quinn. The door had closed again before Quinn looked down at the ashtray. He seemed to take its presence for granted as he deposited an ash. So Quinn knew about the door and never thought it worth mentioning to Mallory.
“If this movement ever caught on, what would happen to the real artists?”
“You mean,” Quinn corrected, “the artists of the old order.”
Charles sensed that roads of deep feeling and roads of conversation were merging here. Perhaps in Quinn’s mind the farce was already a sad fait accompli.
“Some will drown and some will be absorbed,” said Quinn. “Others will become accountants, perceiving accountancy as a related field. And it is.”
“Is that woman sucking on a rat?”
“Yes.”
The performance artist nibbled on the rat’s ear, basking for three seconds in J. L. Quinn’s glance as he turned around to confirm that she was indeed sucking vermin. Then the performance artist jammed the rat back into her sleeve and hoped it would suffocate. Nasty creature. It gave her the creeps.
She turned her attention back to the blind portrait artist. He had misplaced his white-tipped cane and was currently at her mercy in his quest for directions to a drink. He was a sour man, not at all the cheerful cliché she had anticipated.
“I think it’s so brave of you to go into portraiture without being able to see the model.” She stretched out one foot to nudge his fallen cane against the wall. “It’s a new frontier, isn’t it? I mean, working with color you can’t even—”
“Could you point me toward the bar?” His voice was plaintive, whining.
“I give you so much credit for being blind.”
“Being blind is a pain in the ass. Could you—”
“And all that corporate grant money. I was wondering how you pulled that off. I had a double mastectomy. Do you think I could use that as a—”
“Point me toward the bar, you moron.”
She obligingly turned him around and gave him a push in the direction of a blank wall, and the blind portrait artist promptly smashed into it.
Koozeman leaned against the back wall, eyes trance-gazing on the line of Mallory’s cheek. His mind was completing a pratfall that had begun twelve years ago. If she turned now, if she saw what she had done to him.
He took his seat on the platform. A woman was standing before his chair, inquiring about a ticket.
“What? Number fourteen? Just a moment.” Koozeman squinted at the sheet of paper in his hand and simultaneously appraised the value of the diamond bracelet on the woman’s arm. “Oh, yes, fourteen. Mr. Starr’s idea for that one is a big red wheel a quarter mile across. It’s being airlifted by a blimp, you see? And it’s absolutely useless because it has no reason to be there, but there it is.”
Off to one side, Mallory suddenly appeared. She was watching him sweat. Now she came closer, walking slow. What beautiful green eyes, eyes of an assassin. A muscle in his chest constricted. Her voice was soft in the mode of casual conversation.
“I understand you still write art reviews. Charles gives you a lot of credit for never reviewing your own stable of artists.”
“I try not to be obvious.”
“Now that artist who died with Aubry Gilette—Peter Ariel? Before Ariel was one of your artists, you trashed his work in a review. I read it. Pretty brutal stuff.”
“Peter’s work improved considerably over the next season.”
“Then it’s lucky you didn’t kill him earlier.”
“What?”
“Quinn tells me your reviews were better at killing emerging talent than nurturing it. I suppose it’s wise to stick with what you know best—the butchery.”
And now she looked down at her empty hand. She turned around, head bowed, searching the ground for something lost. She slowly walked away from him, her eyes scanning the floorboards.
Sweating profusely, Koozeman rose from his chair and walked around to the back of the platform. He pressed his hand to a place on the wall, and the hidden door swung open.
A minute after he had closed the door behind him, two muffled, angry voices were bleeding through the wall.
Mallory kept her eyes to the floor, looking everywhere for the lost red ticket, her gift from Charles. He would be hurt if he thought it meant so little to her that she could lose it so easily. Though this was true.
She drifted near a small cluster of people and glanced up to see a blind man delivering a lecture to a stone pillar, as the surrounding people, including Charles, politely watched on.
“You’re showing your ignorance, Mr. Butler,” said the blind man to the pillar. “Sabra was overrated. Women will always hold an auxiliary place in the art world. They haven’t sufficient power of personality to create meaningful work.”
Mallory backed up a few steps to the spot where she had seen a dead fly. She scooped it up and pitched it into the blind man’s wineglass and continued scanning the floor for her lost ticket.
The small group surrounding the blind man wondered, each one, if it might be rude or, worse, politically incorrect to mention the dead bug in his glass. Wouldn’t that call attention to his blindness?
Ah, too late.
A small group of prospective ticket buyers had collected around the chair on the platform. Koozeman was unresponsive to any of their questions. He had a red ticket in his teeth, and the number was just visible. When the matron from Ridgewood, New Jersey, consulted the sheets in Koozeman’s lap, she found the line giving the artist’s idea for that number. The original description had been a reconstruction of elephant jokes, using dead elephants. How amusing. All but the heavily underscored word “dead” had been crossed out with the line of a pen.
Dead?
She stared into Avril Koozeman’s unblinking eyes for a full minute more. Then her own eyes drifted down to the small spot of blood on his chest, and she began to shriek. Four gallery boys converged upon her with the mistaken idea that she had run out of wine.
Her hands fluttered, and she nearly dropped her glass. She turned in time to see a young blond girl disappear into a solid white wall. The matron put her glass on the floor, and then she put herself down beside it.
Behind the wall, Mallory ran down a narrow corridor and collided with a gallery boy, knocking him to the floor. “Did anyone come this way?”
“No, ma’am.” On hands and knees he scrambled after a rolling wine bottle. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“Could anyone have gotten past you?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” He got to his feet and slapped at the dust on his black pants. “I just came back from the main room.” He was staring at the wine bottle in his hand. “Damn, the label is torn.”
Mallory turned back the way she had come. With the brightness of the gallery behind the seamless door, one shining point of light stood out from the rough boards. She put her eye to the pinhole. It gave her a view of gallery patrons gathered near the wall.
“This hole?” she prompted the boy, who had come to stand beside her.
“The peephole. Yes, ma’am, that’s so we don’t open the door and jostle a wineglass in someone’s hand. You could get fired for that.”
She reentered the main gallery and grabbed a cellular phone from the hand of a collector, disconnecting his call and giving curt instructions
to the operator. As she came closer to Koozeman’s body, she noticed the ticket number was forty-four. Her lost ticket.
Koozeman left the gallery in a zippered body bag. Heller and his forensic team stood with Jack Coffey and Mallory at the far end of the room.
“Well,” said Heller, “the wound is from the front. That usually means it’s someone the victim knew, but under these circumstances, anyone could have gotten close enough to kill him.”
Charles Butler joined them. “Actually it could—”
Mallory took his arm and walked him away. “Charles is a little drunk,” she said over one shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m not drunk, and you know it. I was just going—”
“You were going to tell them about the door in the wall. I don’t want you to do that.”
“But you know it could have been Oren Watt.”
“No, Charles. It couldn’t. Don’t muddy up the water, okay? I want you to go home now. It’s going to take a few hours to clean up loose ends and do paperwork.”
“But you must—”
“Good night, Charles.”
This time Riker heard her coming up behind him with the tap of high heels. He turned around to the rare sight of his partner stalking across the roof in the soft rustle of black silk. An ancient schoolboy’s drill of lines crowded his mind with images of the tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night.”
He smiled. “Mallory, I wish I’d memorized more poetry when I was in school. ‘Dynamite’ just doesn’t do you justice.”
She ignored him, letting his words go by with no nod or thank-you. He knew she distrusted every compliment on her beauty. If only Markowitz had found Kathy the child before the damage was done. What twisted thing did Mallory see when she looked into the mirror every morning?
She glanced over the edge of the roof, and quickly ducked her head back. Andrew Bliss was looking skyward in all directions.
She turned to Riker. “Quiet night?”
“A lot quieter than yours, kid. Did Coffey ream you out?”
“No, he was even sympathetic when I told him Koozeman was murdered right under my nose.” She seemed almost disappointed in Coffey.
“Wait till the press gets onto this.” Riker made a mental note to caution Coffey never to go easy on her again; it was costing him respect. “Too bad you’re so damn photogenic. You know the newspapers are gonna run a picture.”
“Maybe after Coffey sees the morning paper he’ll decide to pull me off the case.”
“No, I don’t think so. When they turn on the heat downtown, Coffey will tell them you had a good instinct in going to the gallery. He’ll hint around that you were following a lead. He knows how to work the brass and the press.” But that didn’t seem to cheer her up at all. “Mallory, don’t worry about it. Go get some sleep.”
“No, I’ll take the late shift,” she said. “I’m just going home to change clothes, okay?”
“Take your time, kid. Andrew’s not going anywhere. Oh, he’s run out of candles again. And I was right about him developing a new religion.” Riker pointed down to the late edition of the newspaper lying over the rifle at his feet. “The press is off the fashion terrorist angle. Now they’re calling him the messiah of Bloomingdale’s. Fits nicely with the altar, doesn’t it? That mannequin is really weirding me out.”
“Yeah, but think of what it’s doing to Andrew.”
He didn’t really want to think about that. He worried about the little man on the roof below, and the slow disintegration of Andrew’s body and his mind.
And what was this case doing to Mallory? “You know the FBI is gonna love the Koozeman murder. It’s a bona fide serial killing, and that’s where they shine—if you believe their own quotes to the press. We have to come up with our own profile to keep that idiot Cartland locked out of the case. You got any ideas?”
“Well, this killing was different,” she said. “I don’t think it was planned. This time it was the bartender’s pick. We found blood traces, but the pick was too short to reach the heart. Slope thinks the assault brought on a massive coronary. When he cracked Koozeman’s chest he found evidence of heart disease and a valve—”
“Hold it, Mallory. Slope did the autopsy tonight? How’d you get him to do that?”
“He owes me a favor.”
“Slope might owe Markowitz, but he doesn’t owe you anything. You’re not shaking him down, are you, kid?”
Now why had he said that? Slope was the last honest man in New York City. What could she have on him? Well, maybe the scenario just fit so well with Mallory’s own character.
She turned away from him. “Something happened in that gallery tonight, and it set the perp off. I told Slope I didn’t have time to sit around waiting on him—I might lose another taxpayer. There was a lot of thought behind the first kill, if this one was done in anger—”
“A copycat killing?”
“No, it’s the same perp.”
He bit back the impulse to argue the difference between what she knew and what she wanted to believe. It was all the same to her. She was leaving now, crossing the roof, when she turned around with one last detail. “Oh, and now I’ve got Quinn on the site of three murders.”
Mallory locked her apartment door and headed for the bedroom, unzipping as she walked. After stepping out of the black sheath and stripping off the nylons, she opened a dresser drawer to stacks of expensive, but identical blue jeans. In the next drawer, her T-shirts only varied in the selection of color, and the materials of cotton and silk. Her everyday wardrobe had been designed for efficiency—no time lost in deciding what to wear. White running shoes were for daytime, black for formal wear. It had never taken her more than three minutes to dress—until tonight.
She pulled on the blue jeans, but left them unzipped. Her reason to hurry was forgotten as she stared at the candle on her bedside table.
When she was only ten, she had asked Helen Markowitz for candles, and Helen had bought her a night-light, believing the child must be afraid of the dark. Young Kathy had insisted on candles, and then Helen bought them in every color of the spectrum, and candle holders for every surface of the bedroom. When the child lay in her bed, between waking and sleeping, Helen would steal into the room and blow the flames out. And so her foster mother had become intertwined with this nightly ritual.
Now Mallory could not light one candle without thinking of her. But this candle habit had begun years before life with the Markowitzes. She had lost the origin of the ritual somewhere on the road. Why had she ever lit the candles? It had all slipped away from her.
Early on, Helen had tried to uncover her past. Forays into this area had been gentle, never pressing, but the child had only folded into herself. Don’t touch me there, said her posture and her eyes. It hurts. Every memory had hurt her.
Mallory sat down on the bed and lit the candle now, as she did each night without fail. She stared into the flame, searching for a memory, yet fearing if she concentrated, it would come and catch her in the dark.
Confront your demons, the priest had counseled her when she was fourteen years old. And she had done just that. She had hunted through the halls of the private school for girls, stalking the nun. And when she had found her, she made the woman scream. The priest was startled when she told him she had only followed his advice.
She never saw Father Brenner again.
The candle had burned down some before she found Helen’s old address book in the wooden box at the back of her closet. Mallory had never completed the task of clearing precious things from the old house in Brooklyn. And why should she? It was home, and it would always be there waiting for her. Home was where memories of Helen and Louis Markowitz were piled from the basement record collection to the store of school uniforms in the attic.
But in this wooden box, she had the personal things, papers which had belonged to Markowitz and might be dangerous, and small pieces of Helen—a thimble, her reading glasses. And now she held Helen�
��s address book, a connection to all people and things past. She flipped through the pages of the B section, and dialed the number. She finished dressing before the third ring was answered.
“Hello,” said the old priest, roused from sleep. “Hello, is anyone there?”
“It’s Kathy,” she said, in the presumption that he might recognize her name and voice out of all the students who had passed through the private school.
After a moment of silence, Father Brenner said, “Sister Ursula misses you. She tells me her shin still smarts on rainy days, and this reminds her to light a candle for you.”
“Why does she light the candle?”
“I believe the thrust of her prayers is that you’ll be better-behaved in the future.... Kathy? Are you still there?”
But what do I light the candle for?
“Yes, I’m here.”
And who was Andrew praying for? The dead Aubry? There was no one in life he cared for. No parents. He’d been raised by a trust fund since birth. Who was he praying for? Or what?
“Kathy, may I tell Sister Ursula that her candles have had some good effect?”
“Tell me all the reasons for lighting the candles. What about guilt? Forgiveness for your sins?”
“No, that’s the province of the confessional. What sort of sin?”
“Suppose you’re a witness to murder and you never tell. Is that a mortal sin or a venial sin?”
“I’ m so pleased that you remember all the buzzwords. Now, what murder did you witness, Kathy?”
“A woman. Let’s say it was my mother.”
“Oh, no, let’s not say it was Helen.”
“My mother before Helen. So what’s the payoff if I tell, and what’s the penalty if I don’t?”
“That neatly sums up your childhood philosophy of ‘What’s in it for me?’ Oh, and there was the companion tenet, ‘What’ll you do to me if I don’t?’ I believe those were your two guiding principles while you were with us.”
Killing Critics Page 21
