Mallory's Oracle (29 page)

The casket had reappeared at the cemetery. Max's wand was broken over the open grave.

He remembered looking up to the sky, that perfect cloudless expanse of blue, as a thousand white doves took flight and blocked out the sun. He heard the thunderous rush of wings rising, and felt their wind on his face and in his hair. When he looked down again, the coffin was gone, and a scattering of white rose petals covered the earth at the bottom of the open grave. The doves soared up and up, climbing to heaven, wings working with a fury, as though they carried a weighty burden with them, up and away. The little boy followed their flight with astonished eyes.

 

The advantage of a prominent nose was that it missed very little. Her perfume rose up in the elevator with him. Balancing two bags of groceries and a newspaper, he followed it down the hall. At the juncture of the two apartments, he turned away from his residence to open the office door.

Mallory sat behind the desk in the front room, facing a bearded man whose gesturing put one waving arm perilously close to a delicate lampshade of glass panels. This could only be the sociologist from Gramercy Park, heir and murder suspect. He fit Mallory's scarecrow description, but only in the looseness of his limbs and the awkward way they flew around without direction. His face was attractive, small regular features and warm engaging eyes. The beard suited him and saved him from the small nose, which bordered on pug and would have made him an aging boy forever.

“Charles Butler, Jonathan Gaynor,” said Mallory.

“It's a pleasure, Mr. Butler.”

“Charles, please.”

“I love your windows.” said Gaynor. “Do you know the period?”

“Thank you. The architecture is circa 1935.”

This tall triptych of windows was more aesthetic than the rectangles of his apartment across the hall. Restored woodwork gleamed from the frames which arched near the ceiling. Mallory, behind the desk, was a dark silhouette in the center panel, softly backlit by the gloaming of the dinner hour.

Charles settled his grocery bags on the desk. “This room is unique. All the other windows in the building are the same period but not quite the same style.”

“It's a remarkably quiet room,” said Gaynor. “Double-pane glass in the windows?”

Charles nodded. At times the room was so quiet Mallory swore she could hear pins crashing to the floor, and the
‘Oh shit!'
s' of spilled angels.

“You know what these windows remind me of?” Gaynor's hand sent a pencil caddie flying to the carpet. He bent down to pick it up with a lack of self-consciousness that must come from the habit of sending things accidentally away. “This whole room could be the set for
The Maltese Falcon.
It's vintage Sam Spade.”

Charles sat on the edge of the desk and looked around the room with new eyes. When he had taken over this apartment for his office, he had been working on the theory that a room was a three-dimensional metaphor for a human life, and a basic element of harmony. Once he had the room, he believed his life would take on a new shape, the right shape this time around. Now it was a bit of a shock to realize that his ideal room was the stereotypical setting of murder investigations. But it was.

“I've persuaded Mallory to have dinner with me,” said Gaynor. “Care to join us?”

Charles gathered up his grocery bags and moved to the door, looking back over one shoulder to say, “Oh, you're both invited to dinner at my place.”

And the parade of three crossed the hallway.

The kitchen in his apartment was his favorite room these days. In the past year, he had grown accustomed to people dropping by at all hours. He welcomed company after all the years he had spent isolated in his room at the think tank.

The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields played a Vivaldi mandolin concerto at a background level that facilitated conversation. Jonathan Gaynor made himself useful stirring the sauce for Swedish meatballs. Mallory perched on the countertop, sipping white wine to the left of Charles's chopping block, and he was unreasonably happy.

“It's wonderful,” said Gaynor, sipping from the spoon. “Did your mother teach you how to cook?”

“Oh no,” said Charles, smiling as he wept over the minced onions. “She only managed to cook one unburnt piece of toast in her entire life.”

“Oh, right,” said Mallory.

“Really, I was there that day. I remember the moment when it hit the top of the pile on the breakfast table. It was golden brown, the first I'd ever seen that wasn't black. I reached out to grab it, but my father got it first. He handed it back to my mother and said, ‘This one isn't burnt yet.' She never missed a beat. She put it back in the toaster and burned it to a husk.”

“All I ever had was boarding school fare,” said Gaynor, holding his empty wineglass to Mallory, who filled it. “Burnt toast would've been the highlight of the meal.”

Both men looked at Mallory, who had never failed to have a well-cooked, nutritionally balanced meal in all the years she lived with Helen and Louis. Just for one flickering moment, Charles believed her competitive streak might tempt her to recall a time when she lived out of garbage cans.

She jammed the cork in the mouth of the wine bottle.

“So, Jonathan,” said Charles. “You have any theories on the Invisible Man of Gramercy Park?”

“It had to be a lunatic.”

“Why?” Done with onions, Charles moved on to tearing small bits of bread into smaller bits.

“I look out on that park every day,” said Gaynor. “I promise you, there's no way he could have killed Anne Cathery with a hope of not being seen. Therefore, it had to be a mental incompetent without the forethought to protect himself from detection.”

“Good reasoning, but how do you account for the fact that there were no witnesses?”

“A fluke. And it speaks well for my theory. There was one unguarded moment when no one was looking that way.”

“And no one noticed a blood-splattered lunatic strolling out of the park,” said Mallory dryly.

“He could have covered his clothes with something,” said Gaynor.

“Wouldn't that indicate the presence of mind to protect himself from detection?” said Charles.

Gaynor sipped his wine and looked off to that corner of the eye which Charles recognized as the place where he did his own best work.

“In that case,” said Gaynor, “I only have to extend my unguarded moment long enough for him to leave the park. He could have been a derelict who followed her through the gate after she unlocked it. And once he was out of the park, who would take any notice of a street person? Who would look long enough or close enough to determine that his clothes were stained with blood?”

In that same corner of the eye, Charles was reconstructing the long red dress worn by the young woman who had hailed Henry Cathery from the park gate. Gaynor might have something there. Blood, wet or dry, was not so detectable as the Technicolor paint of motion picture blood. Had the killer worn something dark or something red? Could it be that simple?

Mallory was not so open-minded.

“I can't believe it,” she said.

“Of course you can't,” said Gaynor, stirring the sauce dutifully, and misunderstanding her. “No sane person wants to believe that anyone is sick enough to kill a helpless old woman.” Gaynor continued with his stirring and his misunderstanding of Mallory, who was not in the least sentimental about helpless old ladies. “But there are probably a lot of people who wish the Invisible Man had come to their house.”

“That's cold,” said Charles, crumbling raw ground beef into a bowl.

“Yes, it is,” said Gaynor. “But true.” He looked up at Mallory. “Think about relatives who can't afford nursing homes. Old people are living longer, into their nineties some of them, draining the resources of their children. I don't think that series of murders enraged the public. I think it fed their fantasies. It's no accident the Invisible Man is taking on superhero proportions in the news media.”

“You make it sound like the freak's performing a public service,” said Mallory.

Charles could see this line of conversation was not sitting well with her. She would have given anything to watch Louis and Helen grow old. She filled her wineglass, dismissing them both with her downcast eyes.

“I know you're a sociologist,” said Charles, “but do you have any expertise in sociopaths?”

“Only to the extent that they impact on society. We need them in times of war. If we don't have enough, we manufacture an artificial pathology in their basic training. As long as they're confined to a military life or a combative sport, or even a police force, we can keep them in stock. If you put them out in the civilian population, they'll cull the weak, the stragglers and—”

‘The elderly,' he would have said next, if Mallory had not cut him off.

“How does insider trading impact on society?”

Charles stared at her lovely face, her Irish eyes of Asian inscrutability.

“It's potentially devastating,” said Gaynor. “In the worst possible scenario, Wall Street loses the trust of the investors. Who wants to risk their savings in a rigged game? Think of the small investors who suffer the most when they're cheated. Investments fall off across the board, from mutual funds to city bonds and blue-chip stock. Then the market collapses, and we all line up with a bowl at the local soup kitchen. That pack of thieves in the 1980s scandal shook a lot of people's faith. The soup kitchen was a near thing.”

“I suppose a lot of people just don't realize how wrong it is,” said Mallory, swilling her wine and speaking in uncharacteristic small-talk tones, “how illegal it is.”

“Very few people with the money to invest at any level can claim they don't know that insider trading is wrong, and why it's wrong.”

“Including little old ladies?” Mallory smiled, and her eyes narrowed in Charles's direction.

“Oh, particularly little old ladies,” said Gaynor. “They control the lion's share of the large-to-medium-investor capital.”

And Charles knew that all this was for his benefit. Mallory might genuinely like Edith Candle, but Edith had not respected the law, and Mallory was the law. Apparently her code of ethics was a little more complicated than the poker players realized. Why hadn't he seen that for himself? She could have stolen the earth with her computer skills, but she had confined her theft to whatever Markowitz might need to keep the law. Perhaps she did have the unrepentant-till-pigs-fly soul of a thief, but she drew sharp lines, Markowitz's lines. There was more of him to her than Helen.

Charles nodded to Mallory, and in that nod he promised to speak to Edith about her forays into the market and what she could expect to get away with in the future.

After Gaynor said his good nights and thank-yous and closed the door behind him, after the dishes had been cleared from the table, she made herself to home on the couch, shoes kicked off, feet curling under her. When he set the tray with the coffee and liqueurs on the table before her, he saw the box with the red wrapping paper. And this was his first clue that today was his fortieth birthday.

He sat down beside her and tore the red wrapping paper from his gift. The uncovered cardboard box bore an espresso-maker logo, but when he lifted the lid, he was staring down at an object that would never make a good cup of espresso, not in this world. Not knowing quite what to say, he resorted to the obvious. “A crystal ball?”

“My idea of homage. You're the only man who ever impressed me very much. I find the rest of them boringly predictable.”

As Charles held the crystal ball up to the light, his nose elongated in a dark patch of curving reflection. He put it down on the coffee table.

She would never guess how much this pleased him. Every sign of friendship was a reaffirmation that he was not so odd, not a complete freak, not entirely alien. If he could ask for more, it would only be that she were less beautiful or that his nose did not precede him by three minutes.

“You like it?”

“Very much. Not a paperweight, I take it?”

“No, it's the real article. Straight out of the department evidence room.”

She was doing the service of pouring coffee and liqueurs, holding a spoon up to ask did he want sugar? No? “So, what did you think of Gaynor?”

“I suppose I liked him well enough.” And it had been obvious that Gaynor liked Mallory quite a bit. “What do you really know about him?”

Her father would have asked that. Louis had remarked that one day he would have to unplug her computer for a few minutes so she could meet and marry a young man while he was young enough to hope for grandchildren. Louis had been confident that it would only take a few minutes. He had seen what she'd done to his detectives in less time.

“I've got a printout this long,” she said. “I know his parents are dead. He has a summer house on Fire Island, he dabbles in stocks, and he's just inherited a few hundred million. But he wasn't starving before the old woman died. He's worth a hundred thousand on his own, all socked away in conservative investments. No arrests, no juvenile record.”

So her interest in the man was all professional.

So Gaynor dabbled in stocks.

“He didn't by any chance cash in on the Whitman Chemicals merger?”

“No. I thought so at first. The timing was right. Then I backtracked the stock purchases through the computer of a financial house. He made some modest gains that year, but there was no connection. Lucky for him,” said Mallory. “Estelle Gaynor got away with it. She's only a footnote in the investigation, but the SEC would've busted her nephew in a minute on sheer proximity. The government would have taken all the profits, fined him and jailed him. But none of his own transactions are linked to anything criminal. It's not like he was ever hard up for money.”