Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

And neither did Mallory have any friends, not now that she and Charles were business partners.

If Markowitz had abandoned the FBI profile which Cathery fitted so well, he had not abandoned Cathery, but only saved him off to one side of the cork board in a class by himself. Cathery would have come into a large trust from his parents' estate whether the grandmother lived or died. He didn't fit the money motive quite so well as Gaynor.

She had fixed the blind spot for the NYPD surveillance team and parked closer to Jonathan Gaynor's building; A cab pulled to the curb four cars in front of her, and she made a note that the giantess and her small entourage had arrived an hour earlier this week. The boy was first to alight from the cab. Now the Dobermann puppy barked as a doorman joined the cabby in unloading the paraphernalia of bags and table, gramophone and boxes. When the giantess emerged from the back seat of the cab, Mallory matched the woman, stat for stat, against the computer-raided rap sheet of a high-tech con artist whose description listed height and weight, companions of boy and Dobermann. But not the same Dobermann. The rap sheets went back for years; this dog was not six months old.

So far, her only inroad on Gramercy Park was Charles's connection to Edith Candle, the woman in the SEC investigation on Whitman Chemicals, the woman who proved Markowitz's theory on the relatedness of every living being. Now, if she could only cultivate or terrorize the giantess, it could be her entree to the community. Perhaps with a light threat, the mere twist of an enormous arm, she could leave the car, the sidewalk, and move freely among the old women of old money.

She raised up the telescoping lens of her camera and focussed on the face of the giantess. This woman was not the fair mulatto Mallory had taken her for from the distance of the last sighting. The irises were dark with the cast of blue gunmetal, and sliding like oiled bearings within the Asian folds of her eyes. Her complexion was the olive tone of the Mediterranean. Her nostrils and lips were classic African. Today, her hair, long and reddish brown, was hanging in a straight fall below the cap of the scarf. How many races lived under that immense skin? She was the whole earth.

The giantess lit a black cheroot and called to the little boy, who moved towards her, walking as though his feet weighed twenty pounds, each one. The boy's hands hung at his sides, and his head lolled on his chest. What was wrong with him?

The giantess headed for the door to the apartment building. Beneath the long bright print of the dress, her impossibly tiny feet moved quickly along the sidewalk. The woman spoke Spanish to the cabby, French to the boy, and then chattered with the doorman in English. The babble ceased abruptly behind the glass door.

The warm sun on Mallory's face was suddenly blocked by shadow.

"Officer, I want you to arrest that person!"

What? Oh Christ, where had this woman come from?

Mallory looked up through the open car window at a pinch-faced matron in her middle fifties. The woman's hair was dark brown and unnatural for the lack of white strands to go with the sagging jowls and the puffy, lined eyes. The linen suit was Lord and Taylor, and the pearls were real.

"I said, I want that person arrested. Now!"

The woman pointed to the door which had enveloped the small troop of woman, boy and dog.

"Go get her," said the well-dressed matron in an authoritative voice accustomed to charging vicious dogs to eat delivery boys.

"I'm not a cop, lady."

"Oh, yes you are."

"Lady, I'm – "

"I did wonder at first. Your car used to be so neat. But those are take-out containers on the back seat, aren't they?"

Mallory turned around to look at the seat behind her. Newspapers and sandwich wrappers mingled with notebooks and cardboard deli containers, straws and sugar cubes, catsup and mustard packets, empty cartridge boxes and white plastic bags with the logo of the drugstore where she bought her film. A half-eaten sandwich showed dully through a layer of wax paper. How had it happened? she wondered, as if she had lost the memory of filling her car with the trash of the typical stake-out vehicle.

Why hadn't she just painted a damn sign on the side of the car? If this ever got back to Jack Coffey, he'd laugh his ass off. And then, he'd change her compassionate leave status to a fall suspension without pay, without badge and gun.

"I'm not a cop."

"And all those coffee cups. And your car is tan, isn't it? You're a cop, and if you don't arrest that woman, I'm going to report you. I know Commissioner Beale very well. We have the same dentist."

"I'm not a cop."

"So, you haven't been on stake-out every day this week and last week, too?"

Tm a private cop."

"Pardon?"

Mallory handed her a business card.

"See? Not a real cop. The commissioner wouldn't like it if I arrested somebody."

The woman stared at the card, and then her mouth hurried over to one side of her face in the slant line of the skeptic as she read the lines of maroon print.

"Discreet investigations? You call this discreet?"

Jonathan Gaynor, nephew of the late Estelle Gaynor, had just stepped out onto the sidewalk. Mallory switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. He had changed his clothes and donned a baseball cap, but from any distance, she could pick him out by the body language. He had the long-legged, no-bones gait of a scarecrow, and as he moved on down the sidewalk, he seemed blown along by the wind.

He was awkward but not unattractive. She favored fall beards and dark hair, and she would have found the lean, ruddy face very appealing if not for the possibility that Gaynor had gutted her old man and left him to die alone.

Gaynor waved down a cab and Mallory rolled.

She could see the pinch-faced matron in her rear-view mirror. The woman's mouth was hanging open as she stood in the street, staring after Mallory and waving the business card like a small warning flag.

Rabbi David Kaplan struggled with the legs of the card table. They were supposed to unfold from the table top, but perversely, they would not.

"My wife usually does this. She wasn't expecting anyone to come."

"Good thing I brought the beer," said Dr Edward Slope. "Anything in the fridge?"

It would have been Louis Markowitz's turn to bring the sandwiches tonight. The doctor's own wife, Donna, had set that policy, saying, "Don't you expect Anna to cook for you", knowing that Anna would never have settled for cold sandwiches. It would have been a spread worthy of the Second Coming.

"I've lived with that woman for thirty-five years," said the rabbi, "and never have I seen an empty refrigerator. That's the least of my worries." One leg of the table dropped down, but he had no way to know he had accidentally moved the latch which held it in place. When his wife did this, it took three seconds. He supposed she just willed it to unfold itself and stand up on four legs. And for all he knew, it walked to the center of the room of its own accord.

Slope wandered into the kitchen to stand at the open door of the refrigerator. Louis Markowitz's refrigerator had been much like this one, as he recalled. Not so long ago, Louis's shelves had been filled with real food, built from a woman's blueprint of shopping lists and recipes, the makings of meals past and meals to come, warm colors of fruit and cool green vegetables, condiments and mysterious, unlabeled jars of liquids. When the last woman had gone from Louis's house, the refrigerator had changed its character, becoming shabby in its accumulation of deli bags and frozen dinners. Everything to the rear of the shelves had resembled small furry animals which had sickened and then crawled back there to die.