Blind Sight
Page 22
—
MALLORY PRESSED THE PHOTOGRAPH of a tortured child to the one-way window. On the other side of the glass, Charles Butler could not look away as Lieutenant Coffey said, “The day it happened, Angie reported her mother. That picture was taken a few years before she went into the monastery.”
“Why didn’t Mrs. Quill go to jail?”
“The police never saw a complaint on Jonah. It was investigated by Child Protective Services. Maybe they figured the kid’s grandmother was just too crazy to stand trial.”
The door opened and Mallory walked in to sit down beside Charles, and he said to her, “Angie Quill probably saved her nephew’s life.”
“Don’t.” Her tone was a warning to pick his words carefully.
What had he done now?
“Angie was no saint, no hero,” said Mallory. “She ran away to save her own life, and I don’t blame her for that. But don’t build her up, not to me.” That was an order. “Angie was the family meal ticket. Mrs. Quill and Harry always knew where the money came from. The crazy mother’s just more open about it.”
Mallory stared at the window on the interrogation room, where mother and son sat in testy silence. “They might as well have pimped her out on a street corner. You think Angie’s brother went up to that monastery because he was worried about her? No. He hadn’t made his big pile yet—just a working stiff wage. His sister was probably paying the rent right up to the day she left town. That’s what worried him—losing the meal ticket.”
“His feelings for his nephew are genuine,” said Charles. “All the pictures he took of Jonah—that’s what doting parents do.”
“Right,” said Mallory. “The hell with Angie. I’m talking to myself here.” And now, she only spoke to the glass window on the room next door. “That weasel knew his sister was hiding from a hit man. That’s why he’s been sticking close to the police. Not because he wanted updates on the nephew he loves so much. . . . He was scared, but he left his own mother hanging out in plain sight on St. Marks Place. What a good man. What a decent—”
“I only meant that not everyone has a money motive for—”
“Not your buddy, Father DuPont. He only wanted access to Angie. He should have had the kids taken away from that old bitch.” She leaned toward the window and stared at the Quills. “Those two and the priest, I’d put them all away if I could.”
“Father DuPont told you why he—”
“Yeah, he wanted to save the poor kids from the horrors of foster care.”
“A very reasonable—”
“Angie had two living parents! . . . I knew that five minutes into my first interview with Mrs. Quill. Then I ran a trace on her ex-husband.”
“The background check,” said Jack Coffey. “That’s standard. When a kid goes missing, we always look at family, the whole family. But the uptown cops didn’t even know about the mother. Harry told them he was an orphan. He was afraid they’d give the old lady his address.”
Mallory was accurately reading Charles’s stricken face when she said, “You wonder if Angie’s dad would’ve been a fit parent. . . . I’ll never know. DuPont didn’t even try to contact him when the kids were young—when the sane parent was still alive and sending support checks. You see . . . the father lived in Canada.”
And DuPont would have lost his access to a little girl, the object of his obsession.
One bit of knowledge could be so—
Charles’s head moved slowly side to side. What a sorry fool he had been. He well understood why Mallory had not trusted him with that detail, not after sensing his past association with DuPont. That night in the restaurant, he had played the role of the priest’s apologist and defender. He had unwittingly taken up sides with a man who had once been infatuated with a thirteen-year-old child—obsessed to the point of sabotaging any measure of childhood that might have remained to her.
And Mallory was the only paladin that Angie Quill ever had.
There were just a few moments to absorb all of this before Detective Lonahan entered the room to announce, “The investors are here.”
“Good.” Jack Coffey clapped Charles on the back. “More sick bastards. Ready?”
Charles turned his sad eyes to Mallory, but he only saw the back of her as the door was closing.
Well, what could he have said?
—
MALLORY HAD NOT been at her desk to receive a cry for help from an airport bar. She played the message left on her landline and listened to a recording of the priest’s slurred words, his plaintive question, “Who was Angie Quill? You know, don’t you?”
Yes, she did. And now she had DuPont’s confession that he put no faith in the Sister Michael façade. The now famous portrait of the nun was still on the front page of every newspaper. Angie did seem at peace in that pose, but the same could be said of the dead.
The detective pulled an envelope from a drawer and addressed it in care of the New York Archdiocese so that it could be forwarded to the land of the buffalo. She slipped in a photograph that Harold Quill had saved from his mother’s knives and scissors. Next, she penned a brief note to answer the priest’s question.
The subject of the enclosed snapshot was a child, only twelve years old, laughing for her photographer in the year before her life ceased to be worth living. Why Mallory had stolen it, she could not say. She was not inclined to keep souvenirs. But now there was a get-even use for it—even better than spending a bullet. This would only work on a man of conscience, schooled in guilt and drowning in it—drunk with it. And she was going to kill him with it. This was a version of Angie Quill that DuPont had never seen. It was a picture of a little girl who believed that she had something to look forward to.
The companion note in Mallory’s neat script said, “This is who she was.” No need to add a closing line to say, Have fun in purgatory. Send postcards.
After licking the seal of the envelope, she laughed. And Detective Janos, in passing, seemed to find that odd, but he was in the camp of those who believed that Mallory had no sense of humor.
17
The cobblestone street took on the flash and the bling of a red-carpet event with reporters and photographers, stretch limousines and town cars. As each luxury vehicle pulled up in front of the SoHo police station to disgorge passengers, the camera crews acted like lovesick groupies, and uniformed officers kept them from mobbing the murder suspects and their attorneys.
Once inside the station house, the lawyers were separated from their clients and herded into a waiting area on the ground floor. There they passed the time outshouting each other to be heard on cell phones. All of them remained standing, eschewing the hard wooden bench, where two felons sat handcuffed and scratching themselves, putting the uptown attorneys in fear of bedbugs and lice. Windows and doors were penetrated by screams of reporters demanding quotes from the officers outside as more news vans arrived to block traffic and drive a dozen horn-honkers wild. And this cacophony of street noise was chorus music for a naked schizophrenic, who slipped his keepers to run about the room, shouting Bible verses for the coming apocalypse.
Just another day at the zoo.
—
UPSTAIRS, THE ERSTWHILE CLIENTELE of Andrew Polk’s defunct brokerage firm congregated in the more luxurious lunchroom, which boasted a vending machine, a half-size refrigerator and a microwave oven. More chairs were brought in for the investors and their spouses, but some preferred to stand in small conspiracies of twos and threes. A few of them stood by a window, pretending not to know one another as they whispered to the grimy glass. Others were seated around the small tables, and Charles Butler had one to himself. He could follow conversations on the other side of the room by expressions of puzzlement and hands raised in the gesture for asking, Why? And he could pin the moment when they discovered the common denominator of Andrew Polk. Discourse quickly died, and faces turned sour.
These old friends of the family crossed the room to speak with him, to ask if he thought their former broker, Andrew Polk, was under some new investigation. Charles stood up to pull out a chair for Amanda, saying, “I’d rather not discuss it . . . if you don’t mind.” Even if he could lie without a blush, he would not deceive them.
“I don’t blame you.” Jonathan Wright sat down beside his wife. “Who wants to admit to losses like that, eh? So, tell me, Charles, how are your parents?”
Jonathan’s wife gently rested one hand on the old man’s arm. “Charles’s parents died a long time ago, dear.” And her husband had attended both funerals. A moment later, Jonathan had also forgotten about his stock-market losses. He asked why they were all here—and where exactly were they? He was astonished to learn that this was a police station.
No doubt these symptoms of dementia had set in before Jonathan’s introduction to Andrew Polk. Previously, this man had been an ultraconservative investor and a wealthy one, but now his wife informed Charles that they had been forced to decamp from their old apartment. With a promise to stop by for drinks one evening, Charles wrote down their new address, still a good address. “But we’re renters now,” said Amanda.
He already knew that their fortune, generations in the making, had been decimated in a single day of trading. Dotty old Jonathan must have been such easy prey for a con artist like Polk. But Charles’s greatest concern was for Amanda, still so clear of mind, so aware of what had been done to them—and fearful of how this day might end. She wore a false smile. He thought she might cry.
Another Social Register blueblood sat down at the table. The atmosphere changed. The flesh crawled. Zelda Oxly’s coal-black eyes fixed on Jonathan Wright, who retained enough of his sensibilities to recoil. And his wife, a woman of grace and good manners, refrained from making the sign of the cross as she led the old man away.
Now they were two, Charles and the Vampire of East Sixty-ninth Street.
Zelda did her best to live up to this legend begun on a playground when they were both ten years old. All these years later, at the age of forty, she was as unwrinkled as the undead; her lipstick and summer frock were her favorite color, that of freshly let blood; and her eyes still mesmerized in the sense that one dare not look away for fear of fangs to the neck. Still scary as hell.
Early into their conversation, she recalled the funerals of Charles’s parents. “Lovely people.” Zelda Oxly was not. Malicious lawsuits were the source of half her wealth. She seldom had legal grounds for litigation, but she always won. She had staying power for the drawn-out court battles and a knack for tying people’s guts into knots. It was rumored that more than one of her victims had been killed by the stress.
In an all too obvious ploy to seek common ground with him, Zelda confessed to fantasies of a slow death for Mayor Polk, though she had less reason for spite than most of these people. According to Mallory, this woman was hardly down to her last million or two, and definitely not feeling the pinch of last season’s designer shoes. Her detractors claimed that her handmade stilettos were fashioned to conceal cloven hooves, but Charles stuck with the bloodsucker analogy, a better fit.
However, she would not fit in with this crowd of bilked investors—not if he believed in Mallory’s theory of hush money, and he did. He could never envision Zelda settling for restitution of losses at nickels and dimes to the dollar, not when she could sue. Litigation for a bad investment had not been an option for others, the ones who had ensnared themselves in a conspiracy of silence. But a lack of corroboration would never have stopped the vampire. Might a test of this idea raise a blush in his face to give up a bluff? No, he thought not. He was on sure ground when he looked about him, and then turned back to her. “Do the rest of them know about your out-of-court settlement with Polk? They only got a pittance. But you—”
When Zelda abruptly stood up, he had his answer. She must have signed her own agreement of silence. Only the forfeiture of a great deal of undeclared money would trump this opportunity to gloat. She left the table without another word, leaving no doubt that she had recovered all her stock losses. And so, though she met the standard for a sociopath who could cheerfully sanction the murder of innocents, Charles eliminated her as a suspect.
And now for the rest of this group, rather than weed out the least likely, one by one, Charles did his gardening en masse, cutting out those who showed anxiety. These people had broken federal laws and taken terrible risks to do it, but not all of them were comfortable with the risk of criminal acts.
He pulled out his pen to make a few notations and then folded his newspaper just before Riker entered the room. The detective paused at Charles’s table, glanced at the names scrawled above the front-page headline and walked away.
Ten minutes later, the best candidates were called. Charles and three others were led down the hall to the interrogation room, where they were directed to take seats beneath sputtering tubes of fluorescent light and facing the wide mirror on the wall. Mallory sat alone on the other side of the table, her eyes cast down as she opened one of four manila file holders.
Among those voted most likely to hire out murder and mutilation was Susan Chase. The brunette had switched to a less expensive hair salon, so said Mallory’s notes on this woman, and Ms. Chase was doing her own nails these days, but she was otherwise keeping up appearances at charity functions and other important network sites for investment bankers. She nodded to him, for that was the sum of their relationship, their only mode of congress in passing one another’s tables in the dining room of the Harvard Club. He had intuited enough about her psyche to avoid any closer association. The banker had a bit of a slither to her walk, and his feelings for her were akin to a phobia of snakes.
The man seated next to her was Charles’s age, but he looked ten years older, a side effect of excess in all things. Martin Gross’s source of money was tied to his extreme good looks and the art of fleecing wealthy women, though his boyish charm had begun to sag at the jawline. But narcissism would never allow Gross to see any flaws as he admired himself in the mirror, a looking glass for him and a window for the watchers in the next room. The man straightened a tie that had gone out of fashion.
One thing Charles shared with Mallory was an eye for the sartorial faux pas.
In a bizarre psychological twist to financial reversals, those who still held multimillionaire status had made cutbacks in small areas of personal spending, which did not extend to limousine service. None of these people had arrived on a bus. And Mallory had ascertained that, like Susan Chase, Gross’s credit rating was still triple A.
The third suspect was the anomaly. The heir to the Brox Mills fortune was two years out of Yale and still unemployed. He lived on credit, lacking sufficient funds to pay outstanding debts, never mind the cost of murder for hire. Yet he was spending freely and cutting back on nothing. He wore a suit of fine white linen with lines in the style of the season, and he owed his blond highlights to the salon where Mallory said he had bought his suntan as well.
Charles, a devout pacifist, wanted to smack this young man. But they had met before, and this was nothing new.
Only an urge. It would pass.
Dwayne Brox’s head was held a bit higher than need be, and so he could not help but literally look down his aquiline nose at everyone present. And last, he took notice of Charles, an acquaintance of his late parents’. Brox nodded an acknowledgment and stared at the psychologist for too long with eyes that had ceased to recognize him anymore.
Unsettling? Oh, yes. Way past that.
Dress up an insect and style its hair, and t
here you are.
All three had a look of boredom about them, and this was not affectation; it fit their pathology, the need to fill time with stimulation. Quiet minutes dragged by as fingers fussed with items of clothing and hair. In a collective breach of self-absorption, furtive glances were cast in Mallory’s direction.
The detective ignored them, only showing interest in the paperwork on the table. The suspects were invisible to her. And when two of them voiced grievances, she was deaf to them, outclassing them in utter disregard for her fellow man. Next came their silent appraisals and nodding approvals of her costly attire and tailoring. How confused this gang of sociopaths must be, for she was so obviously one of them—and not.
—
THOSE WHO HAD NOT been singled out for interrogation, the lunchroom escapees, stepped into limousines. Only Zelda Oxly waved off her own driver. She lingered on the sidewalk steps away from the entrance to the SoHo police station, waiting for the chosen four to emerge. Charles Butler was the first to come through the door. Ah, he saw her. His head inclined a bare inch in his idea of a bow, and then he turned toward the curb, maybe hoping to get away from her with that minor courtesy.
“Not so fast, Charles!”
He stopped on command. Such a gentleman. Even as a little boy he had always displayed good manners under torture. He turned around to show her a sad face of resignation.
“They let you go—and so quickly.” She made a wide show of bared teeth, not exactly a smile, when she asked, “Were you the police mole . . . or the Judas goat?” As if she had already caught him in a lie, he blushed. “I pick . . . the mole,” she said. “I’d bet my portfolio that you never invested with Andrew Polk. That firm was strictly for high-risk players, the kind who were hoping that Andrew was dirty. That’s so not you, Charles.” He walked away from her, and she called after him, “I’m insulted that I didn’t make your list!”