Mallory's Oracle (11 page)

Gaynor descended the platform stairs, stepped lightly to the edge of the stage, and jumped down to floor level to call the unconscious boy by name, to prod his body, checking for signs of life, and finally to lug the dead weight of him through the side door by grasping the boy under the limp arms which dragged along on the floor.

Mallory was wondering what had possessed Boo to cast that striking boy, sexual even when passed out cold, as the Shadow. He was definitely a poor choice for the part of a character who had the power to cloud minds and render himself invisible. Certainly no woman had a libido so dulled that even blindfolded and three days dead she could fail to notice him in any crowd.

Gaynor returned to the stage and climbed back to his mark behind the desk. The platform was so tentative, so screwy-looking, Mallory waited for it to crumble and tumble Gaynor, desk and chair to the stage. It never did, but she continued to wait, believing that it would.

It was another hour of radio plays, an old Jack Benny routine and a sketch from “Stella Dallas,” an hour of Boo terrorizing a good-natured cast and crew before Mallory heard the line she had been waiting for.

The Shadow knows.

Mallory's mouth moved, silently accompanying the lines of the script. When she closed her eyes, she was back in the cellar of the old house in Brooklyn, sitting with Markowitz on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sipping cocoa in the smaller audience of two dedicated make-believers.

There was a long pause in the dialogue where a pause shouldn't be. The Shadow had missed his first cue.

She opened her eyes. The star had made his entrance. With his first lines, Mallory realized that he was stone-cold sober. No hasty cup of coffee had done that for him. So the dead-fall drunk routine had been an act to torture Boo. Now the boy moved to center stage and launched into a stunning soliloquy.

Of course, the lines belonged to another character who had escaped from an entirely different play, A Streetcar
Named Desire,
and had nothing at all to do with the “Shadow” script. But the heroine gamely responded to the riveting, animalistic screams, and she came running in from the wings and bounded across the stage to leap into the boy's arms. He carried her off the stage to wild applause from cast, crew and Mallory.

Boo's shouted obscenities were lost in the fray.

The houselights were coming up as Mallory made her way down from the balcony. Outside the building, she waited on the steps with her face in a book. The actors passed by, one by one, in street clothes. A boy strolled by, playing a flute which was impossibly long. Boo sailed by, still frothing. Finally after fifteen minutes, Gaynor exited the building in his own clothes—the jeans, open-necked shirt and sports coat.

As he walked across the campus, Mallory watched the awkward gait return to his lanky legs. His elbows pointed out in sharp angles, his feet found a raised paving stone to trip over, and he was his normal self again.

The remainder of Gaynor's schedule was less spectacular. He would be on campus into the evening hours. She cared only about his time in the light, the killing hours.

Tired, and back in the subway in the middle of day‘send rush hour, she was pressed against one wall of the car. Unable to reach back to her book bag, she was reduced to reading the advertising cards above the heads of other passengers. One sign said ‘Kiss warts and bunions goodbye.' Another ad was for Right to Life proponents. If you knew an unwed mother-to-be, there was a number where you could turn her in.

A passenger turned his face up to glare at her and opened his mouth to give her a ration of grief for stepping on his foot. When he looked into her eyes, he suddenly thought better of it, and he too found something to read on the walls.

 

Charles had a few pressing questions for Mallory when she walked in the door. However, by the set of her jaw and the hardness of her eyes in wordless passing, he decided it might be worth his life to annoy her just now. He gave her a few minutes' lead time before he followed her into the back room she had taken over as her private office. This room contained none but the most disturbing clues to her personality.

The three stacked units of computer terminals and printers were in precise alignment with the mobile console housing more sophisticated equipment, all robotic ducks in a row. Charles thought the bulletin board at the rear of the room lacked Markowitz's homey style of clutter; each paper was pinned at four corners and straight to within an eighth of an inch. The equipment shelved along the side wall gathered no dust, and the manuals and reference books sat solidly in the bookcase, all bindings perfectly aligned.

Though he had offered her a selection of good pieces, she had furnished the room herself with standard office issue: one ersatz metal desk, one chair that swiveled and one that did not. A large metal file cabinet stood behind her desk, and without needing to pull out a drawer, he knew each paper therein would be matching corners with each other paper. There were no family photographs, and no wall hangings that did not convey charted information, and her desk was bare of any personal items. It was the room of an obsessively well-ordered human with inhuman precision of thought and deed.

Somehow, the compulsively tidy environs would not square with the young woman who took wrong turns at every opportunity, and raided other people's computers with the gusto of a Hun.

“Kathleen, could we discuss a few practical matters?”

“Mallory,” she corrected him automatically as she flipped the switches to light up the first computer.

“Fine. Mallory. About my accountant? He's very upset. Thinks I'm looking for faults in his work.”

“Good.” She accessed a file on the accountant's floppy disk. “He'll think long and hard before he dicks around with the books.”

“Arthur? He wouldn't steal a paper clip. His whole life is dedicated to honorable accountancy.” Charles stood behind her chair, wondering how much of her attention he had, and what he was likely to get. “He laminated the first tax form where his child appeared as a dependent. Some people bronze baby shoes—with Arthur it's tax forms. He's a good man, and I don't want to lose him.”

“I didn't accuse him of anything.”

“No? You demanded a copy of his disk so you could run your own audit. How was he supposed to take that?”

She was no longer listening. She stopped scrolling and stared at the entry for apartment 3B. “This one's way behind in the rent.”

He bent down to look over her shoulder at the entry for Edith Candle. “The woman in 3B doesn't have to pay rent.”

Mallory's head lifted slowly, eyes holding just the hint of incredulity and sexuality.

“Mallory, go wash your eyes out with soap. She's an elderly woman and the previous owner of the building. She has a lifetime estate in that apartment. Are we done with 3B?”

The door buzzer sounded for the third time in one hour. In the past few weeks he had come to realize that Mallory had been dead right about one thing: it had been a mistake to let the tenants know he owned the building. Though he employed a full-time superintendent, every complaint came first to his own door. His clients were less troublesome traffic, coming by appointment or conducting business by mail and telephone.

“Not so fast,” said Mallory. “Which one is it?”

The quick buzz was followed up by a soft knock at the door.

“Dr. Ramsharan,” said Charles. “The psychiatrist in apartment 3A. Henrietta would never buzz twice. She thinks it's rude.”

Mallory followed him out to the front room and watched as he opened the door. When Henrietta Ramsharan walked in, Mallory padded off to make the coffee, payment on a standing bet that he could tell her who was at the door before he opened it. It had been weeks since he'd had to make his own coffee.

He had been resistant to the idea of a coffee machine in the office, along with all the other machines—entirely too many mechanical devices in his view. Then he realized that it was Louis's coffee machine, which she had purloined from the old NYPD office. Oddly enough, he took the stolen coffeemaker as a sign of progress in her social development. It had been a theft of sentiment.

Whenever he entered the office kitchen, he avoided looking directly at that machine. If it were possible for the spirit of Louis Markowitz to inhabit an object, it would be the coffeemaker. Each time Charles glanced at it, it reproached him for not figuring out how Mallory spent her days. He had not bought the story that she preferred to work nights. He was not a complete idiot, though he felt like one.

“I'm sorry to disturb you,” the polite Henrietta Ramsharan was saying as he waved her over to the couch. There were touches of gray at her temples, which only glimmered as highlights in the loose fall of jet-black hair recently escaped from the pins that held it in a tight bun from nine till five. She was wearing her after-work blue jeans, which were faded and broken in for comfort, but she had not been spending her free time in any comfortably relaxing pursuit. He noted the agitation about her eyes and mouth. The first person who leapt into his mind was the tenant who agitated everyone, even the placid Henrietta.

“Herbert, right?”

“Yes,” said Henrietta. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I'm getting to know Herbert rather well.”

But Henrietta knew everyone in the building. She had lived here for more than ten years, but that alone did not explain why all the tenants knew one another's history and business. At his former residence on the Upper East Side, he had gone four years without saying as many words to the people who shared one common wall with him. He had previously taken that experience as a reflection on his lack of social skills. Mallory had been the one to point out that cool-to-chilly neighbor relations were the norm, and that this building's close network of tenants was the oddity. They had no tenants' association, no focal point, no common gathering place. The small mystery nagged at him now and then. He suspected Edith Candle could explain it, but would not.

“So you think Herbert has a gun,” he said.

“How did you know that?”

“You know Martin Teller, lives across the hall from Herbert.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“When I passed Martin in the hall this morning,” said Charles, “it was hard to ignore the bulletproof vest, particularly on a warm day. Mallory has one, but she doesn't wear it to go grocery shopping. Ergo—Herbert.”

“Martin's terrified of Herbert, I know that. But were you aware of the lipstick on Edith Candle's wall?”

“No. Was her apartment—”

“No vandalism, nothing like that. You knew about the fugues? She told me she'd known you all your life.”

“Fugues?”

“The automatic writing?”

No, he hadn't known. Edith had never used automatic writing in the magic act with Cousin Max. She had done a mind-reading act, he remembered that much. Something disturbing in a childhood memory began to emerge, some overheard conversation, but it was not the stuff that eidetic memory would help him with.

“Sometimes it's called trance writing,” Henrietta was saying. “Edith was trying to wash the words off the wall when Martin came down to pick up his leftovers.”

“His leftovers.”

“He doesn't make much money from his art, not since the recession started. Edith gives him meals three times a week. She's been doing that for a few years now. So Martin just walked in on her when she was scrubbing the wall.”

“Martin has a key to Edith's apartment?”

“Her door is never locked. You didn't know? You might talk to her about that. I've spent years trying to convince her it's dangerous. Strange people can always find a way into an apartment building, even one with good security.”

“So it could have been vandalism.”

“The writing? Oh, no. Edith does the writing, but she never has any memory of doing it.”

“It's happened before?”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago.”

And by her downcast eyes and shift of position, it was not open to discussion. Curious.

“What was written on the wall this time?”

“I don't know, and Martin won't tell me. You know Martin. It's a rare day if he says three words. The three he gave me were
death, here, soon.
I asked him if he was frightened of Herbert. He nodded and saved a word. That's all I know. Martin is a very fragile personality. And just the idea that Herbert might have a gun is making me a little nervous too.”

Mallory was standing over them. She had just materialized by the couch with two mugs of coffee and no warning.

“I'll fix that,” she said, handing one mug to Charles and the other to Henrietta.

“No you won't. I'll handle it,” said Charles. Herbert's paranoid little heart would not stand up to an interview with Mallory.

Henrietta sipped her coffee and smiled her thanks to the younger woman. “It might be a bad idea to approach Herbert directly. He's ripe for an explosion. I've seen it building up for a long time. His wife is divorcing him, and it's a pretty messy lawsuit. And then he got a layoff notice at the end of September. I don't think he can handle one more thing, not a hangnail, not anything.”

Charles looked up to Mallory, who seemed skeptical. “That's clear enough?” he asked.

“Yeah. He's a squirrel,” she said.

Henrietta and Charles exchanged glances, silently approving Mallory's clarity and economy of words.

The phone rang. As he was rising and reaching toward the desk, Mallory beat him to it with no apparent effort at speed. It was disconcerting the way she moved about, or rather, disappeared from one spot and reappeared in another.