Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (29 page)

“Never mind that,” said Mallory, all her anger switched off as a reward. “What else can you tell us about Angie’s—”

“Did my son tell you she was a
whore?”

Harold Quill turned to the door as Riker escorted his mother into the room. “Shut your goddamn mouth! She put
food
on your
table!”

“And she earned the money on her
back,
legs in the
air.”
The harpy’s
loud laughter finally tapered off into giggles and coughs. “Oh, Lord,” she said. Out of breath now, Mrs. Quill graced her son with a malevolent smile. “My
daughter
 . . . the
nun.”

Her laughter erupted again. The fun just went on and on.

—

JACK COFFEY
turned to Charles Butler, who sat beside him in the watchers’ room. “Mallory says Mrs. Quill is bat-shit crazy.”

“Based on what? A lack of maternal instinct? Did you know that researchers believe they’ve isolated a mommy gene? It’s triggered by ER alpha waves in the preoptic area of the brain. A genetic marker for good parenting—in
mice.”

“Okay, Mrs. Quill has no mommy gene.” The lieutenant made a rolling motion with one hand, silently begging this man to get
on
with it. “And?”

“And neither is she a mouse. So far, I’d say she’s just . . . ugly mother material.”

—

“
HELLO
,
DEARIE
.” Mrs. Quill sat down in the chair beside Mallory’s, singling out the young detective as the one best liked in this company, which included her son. “What can I do for you?”

“We have some pictures for you to look at.” Mallory arranged a slew of old sidewalk photographs into a neat display,
too
neat, each one perfectly aligned and equidistant from surrounding shots. She did this as fast as her partner could deal from a deck of cards.

Riker knew a ruler would tell him that the first row of photos were lined up exactly an inch from the edge of the table. Was Mallory even aware of doing things like this? At times, he thought it might be a parlor trick, played to a purpose—like now. He could see that Detective Janos was suppressing an urge to applaud, but he was also spooked by her, and so was the crazy lady’s son.

Mallory invited Mrs. Quill to look over these old pictures in a spread of years on St. Marks Place. “Tell me what you can about the faces in the background. Just the boys and men.”

Mrs. Quill’s hand moved across the display, fingers spider-walking, and then she clutched one photo. “This boy—he
wanted
her. You can see it in his eyes.” She pointed an accusing finger at another snapshot. “And that man there? Pervert. You
know
what he was thinking. Angie, too. That
slut
. That
whore.”
Her son laid down his head on folded arms, and she said to him, “Oh, poor thing. Tell the nice police lady you had no idea how Angie bought you that fancy education. Spreading her legs for every damn—”

“Enough!” Harold Quill stood up too fast, knocking over his chair and jolting the table. “Okay, Mom. Why don’t I tell them what you did to Jonah.” He turned to Riker. “Mom favored old-fashioned diapers. She liked the
pins—
the
screams.
Angie and me, we couldn’t watch the baby every minute.”

Riker nodded. “So you needed somebody else to change Jonah’s diapers when your kids were in school.” And Angie had worked the streets to pay for it. Was that how it started?

“You’re a smoker, Mrs. Quill?” Mallory opened a dog-eared file, and a photograph lay on top of the city paperwork. Riker and Janos stared at the five-by-ten image of a little boy with marks on his back in the shape of a cross. Each angry red sore was the size of a lit cigarette. “That’s your work?” By Mallory’s tone of voice, she might be asking about the evil old bat’s prowess in needlepoint.

Harold Quill answered for his mother. “Damn right. A social worker took that picture . . . so I could get custody of my nephew.”

His mother leaned toward Mallory, speaking low, confidentially. “Nobody’d give little Jonah to Angie . . . ’cause she was a
whore.”
Grinning, she lowered her head to more closely admire the photograph—her handiwork on the skin of a five-year-old child. “Ah, Gabby’s boy. The son of
another
godless slut.” One finger traced the cross of
cigarette burns in the picture, and her voice was so maddeningly reasonable when she said, “It had to be done.”

Previously, it had never occurred to Riker that he might come to a point in life where he wanted to break a woman’s teeth with his foot. He smiled at the monster and gently covered one of her hands with his own. “Take another look at the pictures, ma’am. See any more faces you know?”

—

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.

Between his own knowledge of personal acquaintances and Mallory’s notes on the predilections of others, the majority of these people were hardly of good character, and so he was disturbed by the presence of Jonathan and Amanda Wright, who were deep into their retirement years. How had they landed here in such bad company?

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.