Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"Charles Butler, Jonathan Gaynor," said Mallory.

"It's a pleasure, Mr Butler."

"Charles, please."

"I love your windows," said Gaynor. "Do you know the period?"

"Thank you. The architecture is circa 1935."

This tall triptych of windows was more aesthetic than the rectangles of his apartment across the hall. Restored woodwork gleamed from the frames which arched near the ceiling. Mallory, behind the desk, was a dark silhouette in the center panel, softly back-lit by the gloaming light of the dinner hour.

Charles settled his grocery bags on the desk. "This room is unique. All the other windows in the building are the same period but not quite the same style."

"It's a remarkably quiet room, said Gaynor. "Doublepane glass in the windows?"

Charles nodded. At times the room was so quiet Mallory swore she could hear pins crashing to the floor, and the "Oh shit!"s of spilled angels.

"You know what these windows remind me of?" Gaynor's hand sent a pencil caddie flying to the carpet. He bent down to pick it up with a lack of self-consciousness which must have come from the habit of sending things accidentally away. "This whole room could be the set for The Maltese Falcon. It's vintage Sam Spade."

Charles sat on the edge of the desk and looked around the room with new eyes. When he had taken over this apartment for his office, he had been working on the theory that a room was a three-dimensional metaphor for a human life, and a basic element of harmony. Once he had the room, he believed his life would take on a new shape, the right shape this time around. Now it was a bit of a shock to realize that his ideal room was the stereotypical setting of murder investigations. But it was.

"I've persuaded Mallory to have dinner with me," said Gaynor. "Care to join us?"

Charles gathered up his grocery bags and moved to the door, looking back over one shoulder to say, "Oh, you're both invited to dinner at my place."

And the parade of three crossed the hallway.

The kitchen in his apartment was his favorite room these days. In the past year, he had grown accustomed to people dropping by at all hours. He welcomed company after all the years he had spent isolated in his room at the think-tank.

The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields played a Vivaldi mandolin concerto at a background level that facilitated conversation. Jonathan Gaynor made himself useful stirring the sauce for Swedish meatballs. Mallory perched on the counter top, sipping white wine to the left of Charles's chopping block, and he was unreasonably happy.

"It's wonderful," said Gaynor, sipping from the spoon. "Did your mother teach you how to cook?"

"Oh no," said Charles, smiling as he wept over the minced onions. "She only managed to cook one unburnt piece of toast in her entire life."

"Oh, right," said Mallory.

"Really, I was there that day, I remember the moment when it hit the top of the pile on the breakfast table. It was golden brown, the first I'd ever seen that wasn't black. I reached out to grab it, but my father got it first. He handed it back to my mother and said, "This one isn't burnt yet." She never missed a beat. She put it back in the toaster and burned it to a husk."

"All I ever had was boarding-school fare," said Gaynor, holding his empty wineglass to Mallory, who filled it. "Burnt toast would've been the highlight of the meal."

Both men looked at Mallory who had never failed to have a well cooked, nutritionally balanced meal in all the years she lived with Helen and Louis. Just for one flickering moment, Charles believed her competitive streak might tempt her to recall a time when she lived out of garbage cans.

She jammed the cork in the mouth of the winebottle.

"So, Jonathan," said Charles. "You have any theories on the Invisible Man of Gramercy Park?"

"It had to be a lunatic."

"Why?" Done with onions, Charles moved on to tearing small bits of bread into smaller bits.

"I look out on that park every day," said Gaynor. "I promise you, there's no way he could have killed Anne Cathery with a hope of not being seen. Therefore, it had to be a mental incompetent without the forethought to protect himself from detection."

"Good reasoning, but how do you account for the fact that there were no witnesses?"

"A fluke. And it speaks well for my theory. There was one unguarded moment when no one was looking that way."

"And no one noticed a blood-splattered lunatic strolling out of the park," said Mallory dryly.

"He could have covered his clothes with something," said Gaynor.

"Wouldn't that indicate the presence of mind to protect himself from detection?" said Charles.

Gaynor sipped his wine and looked off to that corner of the eye which Charles recognized as the place where he did his own best work.

"In that case," said Gaynor, "I only have to extend my unguarded moment long enough for him to leave the park. He could have been a derelict who followed her through the gate after she unlocked it. And once he was out of the park, who would take any notice of a street person? Who would look long enough or close enough to determine that his clothes were stained with blood?"

In that same corner of the eye, Charles was reconstructing the long red dress worn by the young woman who had hailed Henry Cathery from the park gate. Gaynor might have something there. Blood, wet or dry, was not so detectable as the technicolor paint of motion-picture blood. Had the killer worn something dark or something red? Could it be that simple?

Mallory was not so open-minded.

"I can't believe it," she said.

"Of course you can't," said Gaynor, stirring the sauce dutifully, and misunderstanding her. "No sane person wants to believe that anyone is sick enough to kill a helpless old woman," he went on, continuing with his stirring and his misunderstanding of Mallory, who was not in the least sentimental about helpless old ladies. "But there are probably a lot of people who wish the Invisible Man had come to their house."

"That's cold," said Charles, crumbling raw ground beef into a bowl.

"Yes, it is," said Gaynor. "But true." He looked up to Mallory. "Think about relatives who can't afford nursing homes. Old people are living longer, into their nineties some of them, draining the resources of their children. I don't think that series of murders enraged the public. I think it fed their fantasies. It's no accident the Invisible Man is taking on superhero proportions in the news media."

"You make it sound like the freak's performing a public service," said Mallory.

Charles could see this line of conversation was not sitting well with her. She would have given anything to watch Louis and Helen grow old. She filled her wineglass, dismissing them both with her downcast eyes.

"I know you're a sociologist," said Charles, "but do you have any expertise in sociopaths?"

"Only to the extent that they impact on society. We need them in times of war. If we don't have enough, we manufacture an artificial pathology in their basic training. As long as they're confined to a military life or a combative sport, or even a police force, we can keep them in check. If you put them out in the civilian population, they'll cull the weak, the stragglers and – "

"The elderly," he would have said next, if Mallory had not cut him off.

"How does insider trading impact on society?"

Charles stared at her lovely face, her Irish eyes of Asian inscrutability.

"It's potentially devastating," said Gaynor. "In the worst possible scenario, Wall Street loses the trust of the investors. Who wants to risk their savings in a rigged game? Think of the small investors who suffer the most when they're cheated. Investments fall off across the board, from mutual funds to city bonds and blue-chip stock. Then the market collapses, and we all line up with a bowl at the local soup kitchen. That pack of thieves in the 1980s scandal shook a lot of people's faith. The soup kitchen was a near thing."