Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

To Mrs Pickering he said, "My usual clients are research institutes, universities, the occasional government commission. I explore unusual gifts, talents, different modes of intelligence. I also develop ways of applying these gifts to occupations or research projects. It's my partner here who does the investigative work." He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. "Mrs Pickering was wondering what business you had in Gramercy Park."

He was smiling but hardly meaning it.

"Client confidentiality," said Mallory to Mrs Pickering, smiling and meaning it not at all.

"Oh, back to discretion again. Why won't you take my case?"

"Did I say I wouldn't?"

"He did."

Charles leaned back in his chair and waved one hand with the attitude of oh, please. "Mrs Pickering wants us to expose her mother's pet medium as a fraud."

Mallory smiled with meaning this time. "Why not? Consider her a woman with fraudulent gifts. That puts it right in your field, Charles. Just something new and different, that's all."

"Hardly new," said Charles. "It wouldn't be the first time I had a medium for a test subject. But I look on them as empathies. Some of them really are gifted."

Mrs Pickering was rising off her chair, launching towards the ceiling. "This woman is a money-grubbing fraud!" Unspoken were the words you, fool. She settled back to earth and chair again as though the exertion of accusation was simply too much for her. "You're trying to tell me this fraud can contact my dead father?"

"I'm not so sure a gifted medium gets on all that well with the dead," said Charles. "But she may be quite good at reading the living. These people have more access to their intuition than most. They take in all the details of a human being. They analyze these details and spit them out in reorganized information which the subject can't believe a stranger could possess. It's nearly magic."

But Mrs Pickering was a typical, unmagical New Yorker. Her expression was dubious bordering on you, imbecile, and this was not lost on Charles. Mallory had noticed that very little got by him, if anything at all.

"Take you, for example," said Charles. "You're recently divorced, educated at good schools. You don't sleep well, though you take prescribed medication, and sometimes you feel depression without apparent cause."

The woman was nodding, unconscious of the gesture, eyes locking on Charles in rapt attention. Mallory noted the faint white line where the wedding ring had been. The education was in the woman's voice, and fitted well with the background of Gramercy Park. The dark bruised flesh under the eyes showed through her foundation make-up, but only on close inspection. The expertise of concealer make-up suggested the habitual loss of sleep frequently accompanied by the habitual drugs of the insomniac. And with a pinched, angry face like that, she was bound to be unhappy.

Nice going, Charles.

"You have your hair done every two weeks," said Charles.

That one was easy, thought Mallory. The roots would have to be grey; there were none showing.

"And you studied ballet in your childhood and teenage years."

Where was he getting that? Maybe she had walked in on her toes.

"You favor auctions at Christie's over Sothebys."

You gotta be kidding.

But now she took in the plethora of rings on the woman's hands. Antique settings all. Charles's freakish memory was probably calling up auction catalogs.

"You have a dog."

How did he know that wasn't cat hair on her dress? Oh wait. That magnificent nose of his. It was a drizzly evening, and Pickering had probably walked the dog before she came. Wet fur. Cats were not walked in the rain.

"You dressed in a hurry."

Mallory found no flaws in the woman's fashionable outfit until she reached the tag showing at the nape of the neck, and just a smudge of unblended rouge on one cheek. A vain woman who doesn't scrutinize the mirror to death before she walks out the door? That was a hurry and a half.

"There are no large events in your own life these days," said Charles. "In fact, your days have a maddening sameness to them, and you're looking ahead to an endless succession of days like these. Your mother's duplicity annoys you, maybe angers you, but your own life saddens you and frightens you… But all this is very crude. A gifted medium could look into your feelings, note the waver of your eyes when you insisted this was for your mother's good. A gifted medium might have taken the fact that you showed anger, not concern, and done much more with that than I could."

Than you would, Mallory corrected him silently. Charles always behaved like a gentleman. She counted on that and used it against him every chance she got. It was the only edge she had on his genius IQ. But she would have to be sharper from now on. She had never planned to drag Charles into something dangerous. Use him, sure, but harm him, no. That might be unavoidable if she telegraphed her intentions by taking this case which he had just reduced to ashes.

However, the Pickering woman was offering her access to Gramercy Park and that strata of old money. It was a better entree than she could have hoped for. And then there was the fascinating giantess to consider.

"We'll take the case," said Mallory, all things considered at lightning speed. "That's fifteen hundred up front, and we'll bill time and expenses against the retainer."

Mrs Pickering sat erect in her chair, not shrinking back or shrinking down, and yet, she no longer seemed to take up the same space in this room. The woman was subdued to a tired nod as she fumbled in her purse for her checkbook. So Mrs Pickering was all facade, and not the makings of the blue-ribbon bitch Mallory had first taken her for.

"My mother's name is Fabia Penwofth," she said as she signed the check with the weak stroke of a gold pen, and then drew a small white card from her purse. "This is her address."

Mallory accepted the check and the card. She gave the woman her hand to say that a deal was done, a gesture any stranger might have mistaken for warmth. "Thank you, Mrs Pickering."

Mrs Pickering smiled in near shyness, stripped now to the mere human bones of a middle-aged matron out of her depth.

"Call me Marion, dear. And you are…?"

"Mallory."

Mrs Pickering rose from her chair and walked to the door with a slow deep grace. And now Mallory guessed the ballet background. Mrs Pickering's toes were turned out, and her carriage came from training. Her mood should have bowed her head or slumped her shoulders, had not some fiend of a dancing master with a big staff beaten that body language out of her at an early age. A similar experiment had failed with Mallory.

Charles looked rather unhappy. As the door closed, he swiveled his chair to face her. "What are you doing in Gramercy Park every day?"

She rounded her killer-green eyes ringed with thick lashes that now dropped slowly to veil seductively, and when her eyes widened again, it was a striptease. All that protected him from her was the fact that she was twenty-five and wonderful to look at, while he was thirty-nine and could not imagine why she would have any but a platonic interest in him. He was logical to a fault.

Sensing the seduction had no effect, she looked down at her red fingernails as if they might not be perfectly aligned.

"Talk to me."

"I'm working on spec. It's something related."

"Kathleen." In those two syllables, there was only a gentle suggestion that she might be lying through her teeth.

"Mallory," she corrected him. "There is a con game going on in Gramercy," she said in the tone of "I am not lying". Though they both knew she was. But Charles was such a gentleman, wasn't he. "I recognized the medium from a rap-sheet description."