Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"And did you invest, based on that merger?"

"Oh, yes. I'd already amassed quite a bit of money on tour. And then Max and I had made a nice profit on the sale of another property. I built that sum into a rather impressive stock portfolio. I liquidated the lot and put it into Whitman Chemical stocks. After the merger, my fortune doubled."

"Did anyone ever suggest that might be illegal?"

"Insider trading, you mean. I did get into a bit of trouble with the government people. They called me an arbitrager because I also had a slender connection to a principal in the other company. They said I was using insider information illegally. They served me with papers and questioned me for hours. In the end, they just tore up the papers. I never heard any more on it. Perhaps the US Attorney would have felt a bit foolish putting an elderly psychic on the witness stand. Then Mr Milken and the others got all that publicity, and the government people were off on another tangent. I think they just forgot all about me. It's staggering what you can get away with when you're old."

Mallory smiled, and the old woman brightened, barely suppressing a laugh over her own good joke. Gift or no gift, Mallory decided, this woman could not read her mind, nor even read her smile for what it was.

I gotcha, said Mallory's smile.

"So, Edith – May I call you Edith?"

"Of course, dear."

"Did Pearl Whitman give up the idea of contacting her father? Or did she try someone else?"

"I don't know, Kathy. She never came back again. There was nothing more I could do for her."

"How common is it to consult a medium or a psychic about stocks and bonds?"

"Very common. If it isn't love, it's money. And the older one is, the more likely it'll be money."

"So finance is stock and trade with the psychic business."

"No, dear. It does require a bit of expertise. Most of the con artists are small-time. They eke out a living, but nothing fancy. And there are truly gifted people who take no money. They work with the police department for free.

But a good stock analyst is difficult to find in this world or the next."

"And you were good. The merger paid off well. Why didn't she come back?"

"Perhaps she thought she had made enough money." 'You have a quite a bit of money, don't you?" 'Between us and the walls, I'm stinking rich." 'Why do you stay here? Inside, I mean, locked up?" 'What's the need of going out? The world comes here, you see. I have my services for news and research. I have television and a video service and my book clubs. I have a good relationship with all the tenants. What's the need?" 'But there's a little more to it, right? Is it something to do with your husband's death?"

"Very good, Kathy. Yes, in a way. I foresaw the death of my husband, and I was unable to prevent it. After he died, I only wanted to retire. But people will seek me out. There isn't a day without at least one caller. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a failure as recluse. I suppose I might as well go into the world again. Lately, I have thought about it more and more."

"How much do you know about mediums? You said it wasn't really your field."

"You mean the mechanics? After all my years with Max, I guess I can figure out how a trick is pulled off. But the tricks don't always indicate fraud. More a sign of showmanship, really. They've all gone to modern conveniences like the computer for research, but the old parlor tricks are still necessary. You can't bewitch a mark with circuit boards."

"How would you like to go to a seance?"

Jack Coffey would not have believed there could be so many privately owned video cams in one square block. And it seemed odd, in this one little patch of town saved off from the twentieth century, that residents should be dangling from windows and balconies, making home movies of a homicide investigation. He would have had his own film on the murder itself, but the perp had found the one blind spot in Gramercy Park. The camera had seen nothing within ten feet on either side of this basement-level janitor's apartment.

His men were doing their best, superhumanly polite crowd control, but the upscale residents were vociferous in their misunderstanding of their constitutional rights to attend the dog and pony show of a bloody crime scene. He would not be seeing Beak's limousine tonight. Nor would Harry Blakely be stopping by to answer the inevitable reporter's question: how did this happen under your nose?

Floodlights lit up the building and made the sidewalk bright as day. The photographer, Gerry Pepper, was working without a flash as he leaned over the railing and aimed his camera down into the submerged enclosure outside the basement-level door. Pepper walked down the short flight of stairs leading below the sidewalk, the better to shoot the old woman. She was up against the wall which was red with one of her own bloody palm prints. He shot her again and again. She looked up at him in utter calm, unprotesting, quite beyond that now. The photographer shot her face, and then, suddenly stepped back as though she had just said something unpleasant.

"Hey, Gerry!" Coflfey called down to the photographer. "Get me extra shots of the palm print."

The man looked up, and Coffey saw something not quite right with Gerry Pepper. Something had unsettled this seasoned pro with fifteen years of shooting corpses, every damned thing that could be done to a human, from butchered infants to overdosed junkies. Gerry had seen far worse mutilations than this opened throat and hacked breast. Coffey waved him up the stairs and over to the wall.

"What's the problem, Gerry?"

The photographer spoke in a hoarse whisper, as though anything could be heard above the babble of one hundred independent conversations in the square tonight. "It's gonna be a suicide portrait. It's crazy, I know. But, Jack, you got no idea how many suicides I've shot." He ran one hand through his hair, and looked back over his shoulder before he spoke again. "I could paper my apartment with the suicide shots. And I got ten times as many murder victims, so I damn well know the difference."

Coffey had known Gerry for a long time. He wasn't about to say anything close to 'You moron, you think she mutilated herself?" It wasn't his job to demoralize the troops, that's what God created a chief of detectives for, and Blakely was never going hear about this.

"It's crazy," said Pepper. "But you asked."

The medical examiner's techs were moving slowly up the stairs from the basement level, carrying out the body in a bag, as Dr Edward Slope removed his rubber gloves and nodded to Coffey. In that nod he managed to convey that it was the same pattern, and that it was an insane world they lived in.

Coffey put one hand on Slope's arm. "When did this one go down? Can you give me a best guess?"

Slope closed up his bag and looked squarely at Coffey. He nearly smiled. "Well, Jack," said Slope, "I see Markowitz raised you right. It's not too difficult with this one, given the body temperature, state of the wounds and rigidity. Unless something bizarre turns up in the autopsy, I'd put it between eleven and two this afternoon. I can narrow that down a bit tomorrow."

With no "good-night", Slope turned and walked away, moving slow. The man's gait and posture made him years older than the last time Coffey had seen him. They had to stop meeting like this.

Riker was flipping back through the pages of his notebook. "The doorman doesn't remember when Samantha Siddon left the building. Thought it might be in the afternoon. The cleaning lady, Mrs Fayette, saw the old woman at noon. That's when Fayette finished up for the day. She said Siddon was wearing a housecoat and slippers. Give the old lady some time to change into street clothes and that puts her in the lobby around 12:15 at the earliest. She had arthritis in both hands and legs. Takes longer to do the buttons. Might make it closer to 12:30."