Mallory's Oracle (15 page)

“Why do you stay here? Inside, I mean, locked up?”

“What's the need of going out? The world comes here, you see. I have my services for news and research, I have television and a video service and my book clubs. I have a good relationship with all the tenants. What's the need?”

“But there's a little more to it, right? Is it something to do with your husband's death?”

“Very good, Kathy. Yes, in a way. I foresaw the death of my husband, and I was unable to prevent it. After he died, I only wanted to retire. But people will seek me out. There isn't a day without at least one caller. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a failure as a recluse. I suppose I might as well go into the world again. Lately, I have thought about it more and more.”

“How much do you know about mediums? You said it wasn't really your field.”

“You mean the mechanics? After all my years with Max, I guess I can figure out how a trick is pulled off. But the tricks don't always indicate fraud. More a sign of showmanship, really. They've all gone to modern conveniences like the computer for research, but the old parlor tricks are still necessary. You can't bewitch a mark with circuit boards.”

“How would you like to go to a séance?”

Jack Coffey would not have believed there could be so many privately owned videocams in one square block. And it seemed odd, in this one little patch of town saved off from the twentieth century, that residents should be dangling from windows and balconies, making home movies of a homicide investigation. He would have had his own film on the murder itself, but the perp had found the one blind spot in Gramercy Park. The camera had seen nothing within ten feet on either side of this basement-level janitor's apartment.

His men were doing their best superhumanly polite crowd control, but the upscale residents were vociferous in their misunderstanding of their constitutional right to attend the dog-and-pony show of a bloody crime scene. He would not be seeing Beale's limousine tonight. Nor would Harry Blakely be stopping by to answer the inevitable reporter's question: How did this happen under your nose?

Floodlights lit up the building and made the sidewalk bright as day. The photographer, Gerry Pepper, was working without a flash as he leaned over the railing and aimed his camera down into the submerged enclosure outside the basement-level door. Pepper walked down the short flight of stairs leading below the sidewalk, the better to shoot the old woman. She was up against the wall, which was red with one of her own bloody palm prints. He shot her again and again. She looked up at him in utter calm, unprotesting, quite beyond that now. The photographer shot her face, and then suddenly stepped back as though she had just said something unpleasant.

“Hey, Gerry!” Coffey called down to the photographer. “Get me extra shots of the palm print.”

The man looked up, and Coffey saw something not quite right with Gerry Pepper. Something had unsettled this seasoned pro with fifteen years of shooting corpses, every damned thing that could be done to a human, from butchered infants to overdosed junkies. Gerry had seen far worse mutilations than this opened throat and hacked breast. Coffey waved him up the stairs and over to the wall.

“What's the problem, Gerry?”

The photographer spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though anything could be heard above the babble of one hundred independent conversations in the square tonight. “It's gonna be a suicide portrait. It's crazy, I know. But, Jack, you got no idea how many suicides I've shot.” He ran one hand through his hair and looked back over his shoulder before he spoke again. “I could paper my apartment with the suicide shots. And I got ten times as many murder victims, so I damn well know the difference.”

Coffey had known Gerry for a long time. He wasn't about to say anything close to ‘You moron, you think she mutilated herself?' It wasn't his job to demoralize the troops, that's what God created a chief of detectives for, and Blakely was never going to hear about this.

“It's crazy,” said Pepper. “But you asked.”

The medical examiner's techs were moving slowly up the stairs from the basement level, carrying out the body in a bag, as Dr. Edward Slope removed his rubber gloves and nodded to Coffey. In that nod he managed to convey that it was the same pattern, and that it was an insane world they lived in.

Coffey put one hand on Slope's arm. “When did this one go down? Can you give me a best guess?”

Slope closed up his bag and looked squarely at Coffey. He nearly smiled. “Well, Jack,” said Slope, “I see Markowitz raised you right. It's not too difficult with this one, given the body temperature, state of the wounds and rigidity. Unless something bizarre turns up in the autopsy, I'd put it between eleven and two this afternoon. I can narrow that down a bit tomorrow.”

With no good night, Slope turned and walked away, moving slow. The man's gait and posture made him years older than the last time Coffey had seen him. They had to stop meeting like this.

Riker was flipping back through the pages of his notebook. “The doorman doesn't remember when Samantha Siddon left the building. Thought it might be in the afternoon. The cleaning lady, Mrs. Fayette, saw the old woman at noon. That's when Fayette finished up for the day. She said Siddon was wearing a housecoat and slippers. Give the old lady some time to change into street clothes and that puts her in the lobby around twelve-fifteen at the earliest. She had arthritis in both hands and legs. Takes longer to do the buttons. Might make it closer to twelve-thirty.”

“You talked to the janitor?”

“Yeah, he's pretty shaken up. He has another job, and wants us to be cool about that if we ever meet up with the management company that runs the building. Anyway, he gets home from the second job around eleven-fifteen and walks down the stairs to the door. And it's dark. The light bulb burned out a while ago. But there's plenty of light from the street, so he takes his time about replacing it. Anyway, he sees the pile of canvas in one corner of the stairwell while he's turning his door key. So he's all ready to get bent out of shape 'cause he figures a tenant tossed something there for him to get rid of, like his doorway is the local dump. He picks up the canvas, and at first, he doesn't know what he's looking at.”

Coffey looked down on the same notebook that Riker was reading from. There were four words on the page.

“Was there anything in the apartment to give us a line on next of kin?”

“There's only one relative, a cousin. You want me to send a squad car to pick her up?”

 

“What's the woman's name, again?” Coffey asked.

“Margot Siddon,” said young Officer Michael Ohara, last of three generations of uniformed policemen. “She's a second cousin of the victim.”

“Where'd you put her?”

“She's in Markowitz's office.”

“Ohara, Markowitz doesn't have an office here anymore.”

“Right,” said Ohara, but without conviction. “She's in your office, Lieutenant.”

Sergeant Riker moseyed after Jack Coffey, who was doing a slow burn that showed in a red stripe between his hairline and the white strip of his shirt collar. Riker smiled at his shoes as he followed Coffey into Markowitz's office.

Riker didn't believe he would ever get used to the redecorating. The walls were hung with one normal-size bulletin board and two prints of the racehorses which were Coffey's only passion in life—outside of good-looking babes.

Margot Siddon was no babe, in Riker's estimation. She sat in a chair by the desk and sipped coffee from a paper cup. She drank as though half her face were shot with novocaine. The muscles on the left side of her mouth were frozen; she could make no expression that was not a smirk. The scar on her cheek was a faint marker for the nerves that must have been severed with the flesh.

According to Riker's notes on the law firm of Jasper and Biggs, she was about to inherit a fortune, but Horace Biggs, the executor, was on vacation in Rome. Morton Jasper, pissed off to distraction at being disturbed so late, could not or would not say with any certainty that she was the sole heir.

Margot Siddon didn't look the part of an heiress. Her hair was stringy and her shoes were scuffed imitation leather. Even with the layers of clothing—the black dress, the faded tapestry vest and the flimsy shawl—she was slender by her silhouette. Legs with well-defined calves thrust out in front of her. However small her body mass, Riker would bet it was solid muscle. He guessed that dancers worked out every day. Her real weakness was in her face: the small eyes, the chin that almost wasn't there.

Coffey was making introductions.

“We've met,” said Riker. “Miss Siddon's a friend of Henry Cathery, grandson of the first victim. She was in Cathery's apartment when Markowitz interviewed him.”

The exasperation on Coffey's face said, ‘It might have been nice if you'd mentioned that earlier.'

Riker took his chair at the back of the office. He was positioned to one side, facing Coffey and a bit behind Margot Siddon. He pulled a leather notebook out of his pocket and flipped back to the interview notes made at the Cathery apartment.

“So you and Mr. Cathery are friends,” said Coffey.

“We knew each other,” she said, making a distinction there. “I visited Cousin Samantha once a week. The Catherys lived in the same building. After Henry's grandmother died, I used to drop in now and then. He was devastated by her murder. He depended on her for everything. He wasn't managing very well after her death.”

Riker nodded to Coffey. That much was true. At the top of his interview notes for that date, he had underscored the words ‘victim/nanny.' The grandmother had obviously been Henry Cathery's caretaker. Without her ministrations, the boy's flesh and laundry had gone unwashed. He had been on his own for a full month before Markowitz interviewed him. His grandmother's homicide had become the property of Special Crimes only after the second death made it the work of a serial killer. As he recalled, the apartment the kid had once shared with Anne Cathery had the smell of a cleaning woman's recent visit, but the woman's chores had not involved cleaning the boy. Body odor had been noticeable despite the floral air freshener.

“I helped out with small things,” Margot Siddon was saying to Coffey. “I made sure he was eating regularly, things like that.”

Riker nodded again when Coffey glanced his way. The next words underlined in his notes were ‘Margot Siddon—new nanny.' The day the girl had opened the door to Markowitz, she had a clean pair of jeans and a man's shirt draped over one arm. There had been no doubt about who was in charge. Henry Cathery had never answered a question from Markowitz without looking first to the girl. And when the answers were slow in coming, she had answered for him. Not only was she the dominant one, but Henry even gave the impression of being the frailer of the pair, though he was of above-average height and weight, fleshy in the face and gut.

“I'm not even sure that Henry knew where the groceries came from,” Margot Siddon explained to Jack Coffey. “I suppose he wondered why the refrigerator wasn't full anymore, but he didn't know what to do about it.”

Riker scanned the word
groceries.
Right, the groceries had been delivered to the apartment ten minutes into the interview. Henry Cathery had given her a wad of cash to pay the delivery boy, and then she had left them for a few minutes to put the perishables in the refrigerator. Acts of charity, Riker had supposed at the time, though he didn't take the girl for the good-mother type. But they were two lonely kids, both outside the mainstream in their quirks.

He looked at the last note he had made on the day of the Cathery interview. It was written in the car after the interview was over and they were heading back. Markowitz had mentioned that the girl never gave Henry Cathery the change for the groceries. Riker had written ‘parasite' and underscored it.

The lighting in the Cathery apartment had been subdued. Under these brighter fluorescent lights of NYPD, Riker noted that Margot Siddon's clothes were not fashionable grunge dressing, but merely old. The elderly and wealthy cousin had not been generous with the girl.

Done with her coffee, she set the cup on the desk and folded her hands in her lap. There was a pressure on the fingers to keep them there, behaving themselves. Her less disciplined legs crossed and recrossed at the ankles.

Coffey was extending his condolences on the death of Margot Siddon's cousin. The interview went on for another twenty minutes, and Coffey glanced Riker's way several times to let him know he hadn't missed the detail that half an hour passed before Riker thought anything had been said that was worth writing down. There were those impatient looks of ‘Don't needle me' in Coffey's eyes. But Riker's pen only hovered over the page.