Killing Critics Page 9

  “This was the most brutal homicide you ever worked on. Don’t tell me the details just slipped your mind. You know what I remember about that year?”

  “You were only a little kid, and you lived inside a computer. Don’t go telling me that Markowitz discussed this case with you. He wouldn’t-he didn’t.”

  Slope was right about that. The old man had only given her shopping lists of things he needed from other people’s computers. And Mallory had never cared to ask what the information was for. She had been perfectly focussed on the wonderful novelty of sitting at a computer terminal in a police station and raiding cyberspace for all the data she could steal, stealing until she was sated with theft. And getting away with it-that was the best-licensed to steal. It had been one great year.

  “I’ll tell you what I remember best,” she said. “It was the weekly poker games. You missed three games in a row that year. Everybody knew you’d had a falling out with Markowitz. But I’m the only one who knows why. You were a long time forgiving him for asking you to bend the law and hide the facts.”

  “You’re blowing smoke, young lady.”

  Slope had been the best poker player among Markowitz’s old cronies. His face was always a model of composure, defying even God to guess what cards he held.

  She reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out a sheaf of yellowed pages bearing the seal and signature of Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope. She set the papers down on the desk in front of him and tapped them with one long red fingernail. “This is the first autopsy report on Aubry Gilette. It’s dated two days earlier than the report on file.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  Slope reached out for the papers. Mallory was faster, picking up the report and casually turning it over in her hands.

  “I found it in the basement of the old house in Brooklyn. That’s where Markowitz kept his personal case notes.”

  She leafed through the pages. “It’s much more interesting than your amended report. I think Aubry Gilette’s brain weight is a bit light. I have a weight of three pounds, one ounce for Peter Ariel’s brain-that’s standard, right? But there’s barely six ounces left of Aubry Gilette’s brain. I didn’t see any mention of missing organ parts in your second report, the official report.” As though she were merely confirming the time of day, she asked, “Now falsifying an autopsy on a homicide- that’s a felony, isn’t it?”

  Edward Slope stared at the pages in her hand, his head shaking slowly from side to side. “Why on earth would Louis have kept it?”

  “He probably wanted to protect you. If anything had gone wrong, he could have substituted this original for the one on file. The signature copy is the only one that could come back on you. None of the duplicate copies would be admissible in court.”

  She understood the shock in Slope’s eyes. In her hand was damning proof of the worst crime in his profession- the collusion of police and ME to falsify and suppress evidence. “If you remember any other irregularities in the old case, call me.”

  She slipped the papers back into her pocket.

  “I think you can trust me with this,” she said softly, with only a suggestion of sarcasm, “because you know how well I can keep a dirty secret. You can trust me because you know I wouldn’t rat on you if you broke a hundred laws.” Her eyebrows lifted with the afterthought of a third reason for his trust. “Oh, and I’m a cop.”

  Night and dark came on. Andrew Bliss settled down with a new bottle and looked up at the stars. There were hardly any. He had to hunt them down with his binoculars. They were faint, pathetic things, washed out by the glittering cityscape, only pinholes in the ceiling. He believed the poetry of stars would be more deservedly dedicated to the dazzle of city lights. The traffic of headlights and turn signals kept to the rhythm of classical symphonies. Great buildings loomed as shimmering behemoths footed in concrete. Poetry was here in every physical metaphor. An aureole of light crowned the city.

  God lived here. Screw the cowboy lore of the western Big Sky Country. Mere stars could not compete with this.

  CHAPTER 3

  Emma sue Hollaran had awakened on a bed of pain. Now she lay nude under the four-poster’s canopy of red velvet, which matched the flocked red-on-gold wallpaper. The carpets and curtains were deep purple, the sheets were shocking-pink satin, and every red lampshade was rimmed with black tassels. A player piano was all that was needed to complete the cliche of an antebellum brothel.

  As the plastic surgeon examined Emma Sue’s swollen thighs, her maid of the week paced the length of the bedroom, eyes cast up to heaven and muttering prayers or curses in a language her employer had not yet been able to identify. The succession of maids had all been illegal aliens, the cheapest labor to be found. Some had done only a single day in hell, and others, like this one, had lasted an entire fortnight in Emma Sue’s employ. She could not remember the maids’ names from day to day, week to week, and so had taken to calling all of them Alien.

  “Alien, stop that damn pacing!” she screamed.

  This week’s Alien stepped quickly to the bed, having recognized only her own new name in the spate of words. She looked down at Emma Sue’s bare body and turned away in disgust to resume her pacing and muttering.

  Emma Sue was a mass of red splotches from hips to knees. The swelling made her legs twice as big as they had been before the fat was suctioned out. She stared down at the offensive limbs.

  “Drain that crap out!” she screamed, more outraged than pained.

  “I warned you,” said the surgeon. “This was entirely too much to-”

  “Make it go away!”

  “Don’t you remember when we did your abs and buttocks? You were swollen then, too.”

  “Don’t you remember? My stomach and butt were swollen because you nearly killed me, you idiot! You drained me then. Do it now.”

  “I drained an infection. This is just the normal post-op swelling.” He was writing on his prescription pad. “I want you to take these pills. The swelling will go down in two to three weeks. Try to-”

  “Weeks? You moron, I haven’t got two to three days. The ball is tonight!”

  “You can’t possibly go anywhere.”

  “Watch me.”

  Within the hour she was attached to the medical apparatus. She did not seem to mind the sight of fluid draining into her veins from a plastic bag attached to a long pole, nor the other fluid coming out through the series of drains plugged into her legs. The maid fled the room, as the doctor monitored the cortisone IV. The air was foul. The doctor’s face was going to that pale vomit shade of green, and then he too left the room in search of a toilet.

  The bad drawings of body parts had been taken down, and gone was the babble and the crush of television people and tourists who had wandered in off the street. The last cable for the camera equipment was pulled out of the wall and rolled up by a crew grip.

  His back turned on the door, Sergeant Riker stood alone in the quiet emptiness of the high white walls. The room was all too familiar, a long rectangle, coffinlike in the convergence of parallels toward the end of the room. Though this space was vast, there was the feeling of walls closing in, the coffin lid coming down on him. Koozeman’s new location was upscale, high-rent SoHo, but it was only a larger version of the old gallery in the East Village, the site of a crime so brutal, the photographs had never been published.

  Twelve years ago, in the blood and butchery of a double homicide, Riker had come close to understanding art. Never had he seen anything so compelling. The image of the bodies would never leave him.

  On that long-ago night, he had reported to the crime scene, pressed through the crowd and past the guards at the door. Two rookie officers had been standing in the room with the bodies. The young cops were statues, struck silent and still by shock. Flashbulbs had gone off from every angle, and everyone was blinded by the light. The dark shadowy bodies were the stuff of bad dreams, but they took on a terrible clarity with each blast of light, intermittently
real and illusory.

  The forensic technicians had gone about the night’s work with only the exchange of necessary words. Orders were issued in the low tones of talking in church. There had been no black humor that night. The youngest officer had looked on the bloody face of the dancer and cried. Riker had gently wiped the boy’s face and sent him away.

  Now his reverie was broken. He was aware of Mallory standing beside him, waiting.

  “The room in Koozeman’s old East Village gallery was smaller,” said Riker. “But it’s the same layout. The killer didn’t do them at the same time. Peter Ariel died first. Markowitz figured the perp laid in wait for Aubry.”

  Mallory moved to the center of the room. She was reading from a yellowed sheet of paper. “Quinn had blood on his shoes.”

  “Yeah, we all did,” said Riker, pulling out a cigarette to kill the phantom smell of blood and spoiled meat, urine and feces. “You had to be there. You can’t tell what that scene was like from the paperwork and the shots. Then Aubry’s father shows up. He’d been waiting for her in a coffeehouse three blocks west of here. Aubry was hours late. Her father called everyone she knew to track her down. She was supposed to meet Quinn at the gallery earlier that night.”

  The sudden appearance of Gregor Gilette had been the last heartbreak of the night. The artist, Peter Ariel, had been bagged and placed in the meatwagon. They had put the parts of the dancer into another bag and were loading her onto the gurney. Turning away from the ambulance, Riker had seen the damnedest thing, a man running toward him, stumble-running, strewing red roses everywhere. They were lifting the gurney into the ambulance. The doors were closing as Gregor Gilette reached the vehicle, and he was pounding on the doors even as they closed, pounding to be let in, yelling, “Aubry, Aubry!” Markowitz had pulled the man away from the ambulance doors, pinning his arms and holding him close. And then Edward Slope had tried his hand on a living patient with a merciful hypodermic to kill the father’s pain.

  Mallory was only a little older than the rookie officer who had cried for Aubry Gilette. What would Markowitz think if he knew his kid was going into this black hole to finish what he had begun?

  “I still want to talk to Andrew Bliss,” said Mallory. “What about fire code violations? He botched the roof staircase-that’s a legal fire exit.”

  “I already thought of that. Somebody with influence got the commissioner of the fire department to look the other way. A lawyer from the Public Works Committee has a restraining order to prevent any interference with his free speech, so we can’t bring him down. And we can’t go up to the roof with a copter either. Blakely would find out you’re working the old case.”

  “Well, there’s ways and ways.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got that damn press conference in an hour. Did you make any progress on Sabra? Any idea where she might be?”

  The woman was lying under a blanket of newspapers in an abandoned building on Essex Street. She had crawled through a basement window the night before and now lay dreaming late into the morning. It might as well have been night, for no daylight penetrated the window after she had replaced the boards, fitting nails to holes. A candle sat dark in a dish, burned to the end of its wick.

  In dreams, her child stood on point in satin toe shoes, reaching up to a soft golden glow just above her straining fingertips. Suddenly, her soft red mouth formed the oval of a scream as the ghouls came dancing by her. Greedy mouths with yellow teeth sucked the wind from her throat. Clutching at the poisoned air, hand to her mouth, the child went reeling and running. And as she ran, she heard the sounds behind her of feet slapping floor, and sickly mucus noises. Phlegmy voices sang to her in a hellish choir. To her side the ghouls came dancing, eyes sewn shut, hands locked in prayer and grown together, skin merging into skin. Their mouths moved as one, making foul wind and words, weaving chains of obscenities. Then the child had lost her shoes, and through her tears, she could see her legs were gone.

  The child’s mother opened her eyes in that dark and airless place, believing she was blind. Her hands were clenched together on her breast and she screamed out curses, damning God and all His minions, until the dead child’s brains said, “Hush, now. It’s only a dream is all.”

  She slowly made out the dim contours of the tea tin on the top of the cart. The dead child’s brains crooned on, “It isn’t real, only dreaming.”

  Sabra rose to a weary stand in sleep smells of used linen and dried urine.

  Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely lit up a cigar in the close space of the hallway. His pasty white jowls jiggled as he rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Draping flesh closed his eyes to gun slits, and the rolls of his chin obscured the knot of his tie. “The commissioner’s in a really pissy mood today, Jack.”

  Lieutenant Jack Coffey could well understand that. He was looking through the glass window of the pressroom door. “I still can’t believe that FBI agent is here. Beale hates those bastards.”

  “You know the routine, Jack,” said Blakely. “They need a little good press after that last hostage situation blew up in their faces. So we’re gonna let them put on a little dog-and-pony show for the reporters. The press just loves all that psychiatric bullshit on the killer profile.”

  “The profile of a psycho, right? Christ, I can see the headlines now. ‘Crazed killer loose in Manhattan.’ They’re gonna blow the case all out of proportion, and you know it. I thought you wanted a quiet investigation.”

  “Doesn’t matter now.”

  Blakely exhaled a cloud of smoke, and Coffey stepped back to the wall, his usual position in all his dealings with this man. He could feel Blakely’s smoke all around him, stealing into his hair, his clothes, his skin. He knew the smell of Blakely would hang on him for the rest of the day.

  “I think we might give this case to the feds,” said Blakely. “They really want it, and we have enough bodies to go around. They’re so pumped up on this profile, they tell me they can wrap the case in two weeks.”

  “Why not give your own people two weeks? The Bureau has no jurisdiction.”

  “Oh, officially the case will stay with NYPD. I thought I’d assign it to Harriman and let him work with the feds.”

  “Harriman’s a worthless idiot. He’s just treading water waiting for his pension to kick in.” It was a fight for Coffey to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  “Who cares?” Blakely’s smile was unsettling. “He only needs to show up for the collar and the closing press conference. The feds promised to kill the Oren Watt connection. So I did a little deal with ‘em. I’m gonna put Mallory on something else.”

  “I’ll bet this isn’t Beale’s idea,” said Jack Coffey. “He hates feds with a passion.”

  “Commissioner Beale has all the political savvy of a twelve-year-old girl. I hope you’re not suggesting that we actually let him run the police department.”

  “He specifically asked for Mallory at this press conference. He wants her on this case. What’s he gonna say when he finds out you climbed into bed with the FBI?”

  “How would he find out, Jack? All he knows about his own police department is what he reads in the papers and what I tell him. Beale promised to play nice with the feds today ‘cause I told him it might save the city a few million in lawsuits if they took the heat off Oren Watt.”

  “How are you gonna tell Beale we’re giving the whole case to the feds?”

  “I know how to handle him. I’m not worried about it. Now we’ve got another case we need Mallory on-computer fraud. We’re sending her out to Boston to follow up on a similar case. Boston’s cooperating. So tell her to pack her bags and drop off her case notes on my desk tomorrow morning.”

  “I want Mallory to stay on this case.”

  “That’s tough, Jack. I don’t think I owe you any favors this week. Here she comes now. Don’t tell her she’s being reassigned until after the press conference.”

  Mallory walked up to Coffey as Blakely turned and headed down the hall
at a faster pace than his usual rolling mosey. She stared after his retreating dark bulk. “I guess he’s pissed off about the article in yesterday’s paper.”

  “No, Mallory, that’s been smoothed over. Blakely understands how it happened. He’s been misquoted often enough.” He motioned her to look through the glass of the pressroom door. “You see that guy at the end of the platform? He’s FBI. It’s going to be a joint press conference.”

  “Why would the feds want in?”

  “The art world makes sexy press. Blakely only wants them to support the idea that Oren Watt is not a suspect. The feds agreed, so Blakely did a deal.”

  She turned away from the window. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Commissioner Beale wouldn’t like it either if he had any idea what was going on.” He stared through the window, eyes on the far door beyond the dais. “If the feds get a piece of this case, they’ll go for a quick and dirty wrap. They’ll pick up all the neighborhood freaks, and nail the one with no alibi.” The back door of the pressroom was opening to admit Commissioner Beale and his entourage. “It’s time, Mallory.”

  They pushed through the door and into a loud room, filled to capacity with television crews, photographers and reporters. Bright, white-hot camera lights were trained on the long table which spanned the dais. Clusters of microphones in nests of wires were set before each of the three chairs. The short gray police commissioner was climbing the two steps of the platform. As he moved toward the center chair, flashbulbs went off, and thirty mouths closed simultaneously.

  Coffey took her arm and pulled her back into the reach of intimate conversation. “Mallory, I don’t care how you do it. Just go up there and dazzle the shit out of them. Do whatever it takes to make Beale and the department shine. NYPD is in control of this case. You got that?‘’

  “Right.”

  “You smoke over the old case and concentrate on the new one. The feds’ interference is driving Beale nuts. He’s the one you need on your side, so do all the damage you can.”