Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"Sergeant Riker seemed to think Markowitz got a great deal of help from you. The interview lasted what – three hours? His usual style was forty minutes at the outside. I call that interesting."

Gaynor appeared to be searching the ceiling for personal notes on the subject.

"He was looking for commonalities. The only common factor I could pin down for him was the isolation of the elderly. Now there had only been two murders at that time. I remember asking if the other woman, Mrs Cathery, had any social network. He said no, none that they could discover. Well, neither did Aunt Estelle, and neither of them had live-in help." One hand stumbled off the arm of the chair and landed as a dead weight on top of the other one in his lap.

"But Mrs Cathery didn't live alone. There was a grandson living in the apartment. Henry Cathery. Do you know him?"

"This is New York City. The good-neighbor thing doesn't extend to the next apartment, let alone a building at the end of the block. My aunt knew him. She said he was a recluse. And I know he's eccentric." One foot walked under the coffee table and the accompanying shin made a thud against the hard edge. The pain was not relayed back to Gaynor who never even winced. "According to the newspapers, he didn't even notify the police that his grandmother never came home that night. Didn't you find that odd? I mean, from the police point of view?"

"Odd? Well, he told the investigating officer he was only grateful for the peace and quiet, so it never occurred to him to go looking for her."

That initial interview with Henry Cathery had been conducted three months ago while the first kill still belonged to Homicide and not Special Crimes. The investigating officer's notes and a follow-up interview had decided Markowitz that Cathery had been truthful in this. Markowitz had always been charmed by blatant honesty.

"Mr Gaynor, you've never spoken to Henry Cathery?"

"Call me Jonathan," he said, sitting back in the chair, his elbow nudging a figurine to the edge of the table on his left. "I used to see him in the park now and then. I nodded to him a few times the first week I was here. He never nodded back – just looked right through me. He's a constant fixture in the park, but I don't spend much time there anymore."

He stood up and followed his legs to the wide picture window at the far wall. He motioned her over. "There he is," he said, pointing down to the bench behind the black bars and directly across the street from the building. Henry Cathery's head was bowed over a portable chessboard as she drew closer to the window and looked down on him. Cathery chose that moment to lift his head, and she could have sworn he was looking directly at her. A reflexive instinct pulled her one step back from the window. She continued to stare down at Cathery with equal parts of revulsion and fascination.

"Bit late for him to be out," Gaynor was saying. "He's usually there during the day. See the game board on his lap? He was some sort of chess champion as a child, I think. Burned out rather early. Forgive me, I'm probably telling you things you already know."

When they turned away from the window, it was he who guided her toward the couch. "I believe your first name is Kathleen?"

She nodded. "Did you know Pearl Whitman?"

"Never met her. May I call you Kathy?"

"No."

His face reddened. Good. "Pearl Whitman visited spiritualists on a regular basis. She might be connected to a medium who comes here every – '

"Redwing?"

"You know her?"

"Who could miss a spectacle like that? How tall is she? Six-two? And the girth." His hands made a wide circle, knocking into a slender porcelain figurine on a long table behind the couch and setting it to rocking slightly. "I passed her in the lobby of this building one day as I was leaving. The doorman told me her name. I asked my aunt about her the next time I came by. This was a very long time ago, but I remember the conversation very well. It ended in a very loud argument."

"Did your aunt attend the seances?"

"She never said. Of course she wouldn't have after that. So you think Redwing's involved in this?"

"I'm interested in everything that goes on in the square. Redwing's been coming here every week for more than a year. When you argued with your aunt, what did you have against the medium?"

His hand suddenly left him to wave in the air, and a scatter pillow sailed to the marble floor. "Well, it's a bag of tricks, isn't it? It probably wouldn't take anything very sophisticated to fool a pack of old women who really want to believe in that nonsense. It's a nasty business, victimizing the elderly. I really detest people like that."

"Would you like to take a shot at Redwing? She's giving a seance tomorrow afternoon. You'd have to be pre-screened and approved. Would you be willing to call Mrs Penworth? She's hosting the seance. I got my invitation through her daughter. It might be better if you called Penworth directly. Maybe you could tell her you'd like to contact your dead aunt?"

"Seriously?" His elbow jerked back, and his startled leg connected with the low coffee table. A delicate crystal vase skittered to the edge of the table and hung there just over the wooden lip and above the unforgiving marble floor.

"I'm very serious," said Mallory. "If it wouldn't be too hard on you, it might help with the investigation."

"But why would you want me there?"

"I'd like to know if Redwing can tell me anything about your aunt that wouldn't be common knowledge."

"So you do think she's connected to the victims."

One leg intended to cross the other, but a misinformed knee made contact first with the crystal vase. The vase moved over the edge of the table on one rolling foot.

Mallory's hand shot out to catch it on its way to the floor. She set it back on the table in its original position.

"No. If there was a connection, we would have turned it up by now. I'm only collecting information wherever I can get it. There'll be four or five women there in your aunt's age bracket. She might have known some of them. I need a way to get your aunt's death on the same table with Pearl Whitman."

"Looking for common denominators? Very good. So you've passed yourself off as a bereaved survivor of Miss Whitman's?"

"No. I'm planning to raise Louis Markowitz from the dead. He was my father."

The vase fell to the floor and shattered into a hundred shards, all sharp as knives.

When Mallory pulled into the driveway, the old house fell far short of her imaginings after six weeks of neglect. The windows were all dark, and yet there was a lived-in look to the house and yard. There was nothing about the place to tell anyone how ruthlessly she had abandoned it. The grass had been recently cut, and the walk and porch were swept. It was that time when leaves were falling, but none had landed in this yard without being raked up and disposed of. This had to be Robin Duffy's work. She looked over to the house next door.

It wouldn't be the first time this neighbor had mowed the lawn for Markowitz who was sometimes so preoccupied with a single human hair found at a crime site that he didn't notice the grass growing in his own front yard. She wondered if Robin Duffy was also playing a game of make-believe. Did he curse Markowitz as he was mowing? Or did he break with custom this time?

Riker must have come through the back when he was last here. The police-department seal was intact around the frame of the front door. She peeled away the tape and fitted her old key into the lock.

If the yard had kept her illusions for her, the inside of the house told the truth. The door opened onto the smells of long-settled dust, stale air and the terrible empty silence of no one home. She flicked the wall switch, and the overhead light came on with a soft warm glow.