Mallory's Oracle (38 page)

“The police won't take a missing person report until forty-eight hours go by. I was hardly worried about Henry getting a posse together to beat the bushes for her. You've met him—I saw you in the park with him. It wasn't much of a risk. The worst thing that could happen was that she'd be found somewhere else.”

“Where did you kill your aunt?”

“I invited her to lunch and met her on a side street near the campus. She never mentioned the appointment to anyone. I had to volunteer the information to the police so they could verify my alibi for either side of the half hour when I didn't have one. I told them she stood me up.”

“I suppose that was quite understandable to them, since she was being murdered at that time. And Pearl Whitman? How did you get her into that East Village neighborhood?”

“I told her I was a broker with information to give the U.S. Attorney's office about the cartel. She offered me a bribe. I told her she'd have to meet with me to work out the details. By public telephones, I led her from block to block, sort of eased her into the neighborhood by degrees.”

“So, the fear of notoriety, prison and poverty overcame her fear of a bad neighborhood.”

“Exactly. Samantha Siddon was only a little different. I had the impression she was looking forward to our meeting. I used a series of public phones to bring her to the theater by three different cabs. I had her walk the last few blocks and met her at the back of the building. I killed her behind a trash bin. That only took a few minutes. It took me longer to dress for the play rehearsal.”

“How did you transport the body to Gramercy?”

“I usually go everywhere by cab. That day I hired a rental car for the occasion. I had to leave early, before Mallory's usual arrival time. I didn't want her to see the car.”

The knife backed away another inch. He braced his arm on the arm of the chair. “But you still haven't delivered, Charles. You didn't have anything that would stick, unless there's something else you've left out.”

“Only this.” Charles pushed the knife away and blinded Gaynor with Edith's unfurled shawl. He pulled the gun from the chair cushion and leveled it at Gaynor's head as the man ripped the shawl away from his face.

“Put down the knife. The police should be here any minute now. I expect they're on the way up in the elevator.”

Gaynor smiled, and it was Charles's turn to play ‘What's going on here?' A child's game flashed through his brain.

A gun could not be outdone by a knife. So, why was Gaynor smiling?

“The police? No, I don't think so, Charles. You couldn't have known I would come—you only hoped I would. You're bluffing.”

“I can't bluff. God knows I've tried. I just don't have the face for it.”

The knife fell from Gaynor's hand and thudded to the carpet. “I believe you.”

Well, that was more like it. Logic reigned.

Illogically, Gaynor lunged for the gun.

They were locked together, hands grappling for control of the weapon, limbs writhing, faces contorted. They were turning now, gun pointing to the ceiling, hands sweating and sliding over one another's flesh, legs kicking out, turning, turning into the dark hallway, knocking against the narrow walls and falling into the front room. They went to the floor and rolled, man over man, across the rug. The room was too dark to see the gun clearly. It was only a vague shape and cold metal, and the barrel was changing position, pointing lower. It was still in Charles's hands when it fired.

It was an explosion to crack the world. Charles reached for his side, his face all in agony. Gaynor rose to his feet, sole owner of the gun. He took a handkerchief from one pocket. A plastic bag from the same pocket fell to the floor.

“You couldn't have shot me, Charles. You're much too sane and civilized.” He methodically wiped the gun's barrel and then its revolving chamber and handle. “It was predictable that you'd hesitate before you took a human life. That half second has killed you.” He bent down to retrieve the plastic bag from the floor and wrapped it around the handle of the gun. “And to answer your question honestly, yes, I did love it. I do love it. I'm exhilarated.”

Pain was giving way to shock as he watched Gaynor ease down on the back of his heels, well out of the stream of light from the open door which now shone on Charles's face. The better to see the fear? Was Gaynor waiting for that? Yes. No killing could be complete without it.

Charles could feel the blood on his hand. The barrel of the gun was pointing to his heart, and there was no doubt that death was coming. Fear was crowded out of his mind by the approach of death, its loud footfalls, its enormity. A moment stretched out for an eternity. He was at his mother's bedside again. She had not been frightened. She had heard it coming and succumbed to the wonder of it. She had died with an expression of amazement.

He smiled at Gaynor, and the man's face clouded up with anger. The gun barrel was pressed to Charles's heart.

Soon.

He heard the bell for the elevator. So Jack Coffey had come, but not in time. There was not the space of a second to call out. He heard the shot and felt the bone-shattering assault on his chest. His muscles jerked and then he lay motionless in the dark with only the light of the hall to show the outline of his body on the carpet. The higher orders of his beautiful brain were shutting down, memory was collapsing in on itself. The most primitive portion of his mind, where passion was seated, was the last repository of consciousness. The last thing in this world that his senses could reach was the voice of Henrietta Ramsharan, followed close by the sudden rush of Mallory's perfume.

 

Mallory shot out of Edith Candle's apartment and ran for the exit door, which was closing on its slow hydraulic. She was murderous in the eyes and the grip of her gun. She stood on the stairwell landing.

Which way? Up or down?

The noise from below was faint. Breaking glass? She looked down through the winding metal stairs to the basement door, which stood ajar. He could only be seconds through that door. But wait, something was off. Instinct kept her still. Breaking glass? The only window in the cellar was on the other side of the accordion partition where Max Candle's illusions were stored. Was Edith in the cellar? Had she opened that partition?

Now she stood in Markowitz's shoes. No backup, no time to call for help. She was going into the dark all alone.

She moved down the stairs with the silence of tennis shoes and the inherent stealth of a born thief. At each landing, she unscrewed the bulbs. When she put out the basement door's bulb, she was standing in the dark. She opened the cellar door and closed it quickly behind her. One blind hand reached up to the top of the fuse box and felt around for the flashlight.

It was gone.

The thunder made a dull sound in the basement. The glow from a streak of lightning bent its way down the sides of buildings to light up the garbage cans in the wide high window of the far wall. The window glass was broken, but not enough to allow a body to pass through the shards. He was still here.

She made her way by memory and touch, around a packing trunk, down the aisle of boxes and crates and into the wider area where Max Candle's illusions were stored, stepping softly toward the bad light from the back window. Lightning flashed and lit the guillotine, and then the thunder came crashing after it. An anticlimactic soft rain pinged off the garbage cans beyond the broken glass, and wind shears drove stray droplets through the cracked window.

She tensed every muscle in her body, watching indistinct shadows, listening for footfalls. Her eyes hardened, blind to the flight of one raindrop. It touched the sleeve of her coat and disappeared on the rough tweed, without the substance to leave a wetness or any other sign that it had ever existed. Mallory focused on the infinitely more subtle nuances in the shadows of black on black.

‘The hell of Christianity is not eternal fire,' Rabbi Kaplan had told her when she had become confused by the Christian Sunday school. (Helen had felt compelled to give the Christians equal time in Kathy's education.) ‘Hell is the absence of the beloved.' The rabbi had this on the word of a Jesuit, he told her, and so it must be true. And so it was. The people she loved were killed. She wanted to kill back.

A dull globe light came on from behind the box she was rounding. She froze. Her eyes fixed on a single shadow sliding out from behind the Chinese screen, gliding just ahead of her and to the right. She raised her gun to the level of the head which would appear in her sights any second. She planned a head shot despite the training that taught her to shoot for the widest part of the body. She licked her lips as she waited for the shadow to emerge. The rain was drumming now, harder, louder, and the wind was in a fury, sending the rain wide and far into the room.

There was a crunch of broken glass, and the head of another shadow appeared near the feet of her own. She could hear the rush of footsteps. She turned around to see the second shadow. And now the room filled with brilliant, blinding light. The silhouette moving between her and the light was small and rounded, plump arms reaching out for her.

The wrong shadow.

And now Mallory heard the sound of the shadow behind her. She spun around, too slow in her reaction time. Yet, in the split of a second, there was time to note all the details of the man as she was still turning, as the gun was rising to point the barrel. Only a few feet away. Good shot or bad, she knew Gaynor was not likely to miss at this range.

Edith Candle watched on, dispassionately. Gaynor's finger jerked the trigger, and the blue-black muzzle flashed with the explosion. It was done in a moment. And while it was being done, the rain continued to fly through the cracked glass, but for the few drops sacrificed to the heat of the gun.

In the white light of the sun-bright room, Gaynor was a chimera in Mallory's adapting eye as the bullet tore its hole in the front of her shirt. Her gold hair was flying in the wet and chill October wind whipping through the window. She was falling, falling, eyes closing before she went to the ground. She heard the soft shuffle of running footsteps and the slower heavy footfalls following after.

She was slow to open her eyes. Shielding her face from the spotlight at the top of the guillotine, she sat up with the idea that bulletproof vests were overrated. She wished she had died. Bones had been cracked by the concussion of the bullet. The vest had saved her from penetration but not from the force of the projectile fired at how many miles per second? She felt for and found the rib that was broken. Now her breath came in tears. Had she punctured a lung?

An overturned trunk lay by her side. The disembodied head of the Max Candle waxwork was lying just behind it. The resemblance to Charles was lying on its side and staring up at her.

The gun. Gaynor had taken her gun.

The rear window was still a mass of dangerous shards. He had not gone that way. And Edith—where had she gone? She must know a hundred hiding places in this cellar.

She stared up at the blazing sun atop the guillotine. Only Edith knew where the light was tripped.

There was a sharp pain in her chest as she rose to a stand. She turned off the switch for the globe lamp and then walked to the guillotine. The flashlight lay on the floor by the wooden hand locks. Edith's hands had been in the locks when the trick was done the first time. She knelt down and felt for the light switch. A small block of wood gave way under her exploring fingers. She pressed on the button, plunging the basement into the equalizer of darkness. Flashlight in hand and wax head under her arm, she went hunting.

The lightning lit the window again and she saw the silhouette of Gaynor flash into brilliant tabloid detail for an instant. The gun was wrapped in a wad of shiny plastic. It was a snub-nose revolver and not the Long Colt he was holding. How many bullets? she wondered. She had stopped in Edith's apartment long enough to count two bullets in Charles's body. And then there was the second gun, hers, with a full load of ammo. She set Max Candle's head on the top of a steamer trunk, pulled loose change from her pocket, and stepping back, she tossed the coins at the trunk. She pressed the button on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the wax face which so resembled Charles.

A shot cracked in the darkness. The flashlight clicked off. The bullet had gone wild of the head. So, Gaynor's reaction time was slow, and he was a poor shot at any distance. She dropped a coin to the floor and held the beam of the light to her own face. The light clicked off and a bullet fired into the air where she had been standing.

Her foot connected with something hard. She reached down to the floor and touched a length of pipe. She picked it up and felt the solid weight of the iron in her hand. She would have to get within swinging distance before he could switch to the second gun. Now she was living intensely in the moment, excitement rising as though she were going to meet a lover and not to beat a man senseless, to let his blood, to drag out the pain, and last to kill him. She walked on through the spray of rain.

She turned the flashlight on her face and clicked on the beam.

Gaynor leveled the gun and pulled the trigger. The gun only clicked with the sound of no bullet in the chamber. The second click was lost in the roar of a gunshot followed up by the flash of lightning. For a moment, Mallory could almost believe in magic. It seemed as though his bullet had doubled back and struck him, making a bloody hole in his body. Gaynor was turning and twisting as he fell backward with the force of the bullet in his shoulder, arms waving loose and disjointed. And the surprise on his face was the dumb look of the straw man twisting in a cornfield. The gun fell from his hand and skittered across the floor.