Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

Mallory continued to look at the photos. She put all but one of them into her tote and glanced at her watch.

The doctor must be feeling the pressure of impending loss of opportunity. Now he was puffing out his chest and his young ego.

Riker winced because he knew what was coming next.

“I’m off duty now. I thought we might go out for a drink,” said Daily, as though he were offering to do her a favor.

“Why would I want to do that?” Mallory’s face was incredulous.

“Excuse me?”

The words Fuck yourself were in her eyes, but she would not say them. Her foster mother had not liked such words, and Mallory continued to defer to Helen Markowitz long after the woman had died. So now she only stared at Daily for one chill moment, just long enough to shrivel his testicles with frost and drive his penis back up into his body cavity in a mad quest for warmth and survival. Satisfied that Daily was indeed self-fucked, she resumed her study of a dead body, apparently finding it a thousand times more appealing.

The young doctor looked quickly to Riker, who refrained from laughing aloud. Daily turned back to her. “I just thought-”

He was talking to the air. The door was swinging in her wake.

He walked back to Riker, pointing one thumb toward the door. “Frigid little bitch, isn’t she?”

“Naw,” said Riker. “That ain’t it.”

“So just what is that cunt’s problem?”

“You don’t know about Mallory? Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

“She’s an escaped nun,” said Riker.

Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope rounded a wall of filing cabinets to stand just behind Dr. Daily, the most junior member of his staff. The overhead light gave the elder doctor’s gray hair the shine of silver. Slope was a tall man, and his stony face was better suited to a general than a physician. When he cleared his throat, it had the effect of a gunshot.

The young doctor spun around to face his superior. Daily was all startled like a bird, and less the man now.

“She can’t have a drink with you,” said Dr. Slope, in tones of reined-in anger, “because I don’t think her mother would’ve approved of your language.” Slope bent down to bring his face level with Daily’s and to destroy all sense of personal territory. “Her parents were my oldest and dearest friends.”

After the younger doctor had fled the room with as much decorum as fear for his job would allow, Slope turned on Riker.

“Now what was all that crap about an escaped nun? Satan has no nuns.”

A long string of psychiatrists had told him that depression crept up on one so slowly and with such stealth, no victim could point to the hour of its arrival or even the day. But this was not true. Andrew Bliss could point out the very moment in the first whispers from the back of his own mind, which said to him, You are human garbage .

He had thought of visiting his current psychiatrist, but they would only have gone round and round again over the lithium. The lithium made him into a contented cow with slurred speech and hand tremors for all his waking hours, and he had long ago decided he would not forgo the epiphany of his euphoric highs in order to escape the black holes of depression. He preferred to self-medicate with alcohol, but the glow of it was wearing thin, and the calming effects were dissipating now.

The roller coaster was revving up its engine once more. The conductor of his moods was crying, All aboard, Andrew, and away we go ! And he was climbing, soaring in his mind, looking toward the radiant lights of Bloomingdale’s ceiling. Gathering speed, Andrew. Never mind that safety belt, boy .

He raced up the mechanical stairs, and two blue-haired dowagers bounced off the rail at his passing. He roughly shouldered a tall brunette who was young and a true child of New York City. But Andrew was one second gone before she thought to put her knee into his groin; he was moving that fast in the body, and his brain was fairly electrified as it sped along its single rail.

In the late hours of the night, when the store had been swept free of consumers and staff, Andrew emerged from the shadows of Bloomingdale’s with a shopping list. He consulted his watch and then his notebook. The watchman and his dogs should be patrolling the second floor.

He stepped lightly on the frozen mechanical staircase, heading toward the rug department. Oh, but on his way he must rip off a dozen raincoats. He would need at least a dozen to make a canopy. A small refrigerator was copped from the employee lounge. Housewares provided the electric espresso maker. He ticked off other items on his list: satin sheets, ten down quilts for his mattress, tulip glasses, a reclining chair and a reading lamp. An hour later, he leaned against the furniture dolly which he had boosted from the stockroom. Leverage was everything. He wasn’t even sweating.

Andrew saw motion among the clothing racks, the shadow of a lithe and graceful dancer, sleek and young. No, wait . It was not a woman, but a large security dog. He had mistimed the watchman’s rounds. He quickly sprayed his entire person with perfume, the better to smell like Bloomingdale’s.

The basement window gave her a ground-level view of the suburban backyard, with its green lawn and shade trees. This had been Louis Markowitz’s piece of the American dream.

The glass pane was streaked with water from the lawn sprinkler, and the grass was neatly trimmed. Mallory knew this was Robin Duffy’s work. Markowitz’s old friend and neighbor did what he could to create the illusion that people still lived there. The old lawyer had raked the leaves in the fall, shoveled the walks in the winter, and brought her offers from young families who wished to buy the place and bring it to life once more. But to Robin Duffy’s consternation, Mallory always refused to sell, and she never explained her reasons for wanting to keep a house she would never live in again.

When was she here last?

She could not remember if it had been weeks ago or a month. She reached up and opened the window. A fresh breeze cut through the basement to kill off the musty smell of abandonment.

Helen had been the first to abandon the house when she died under a surgeon’s knife. Then Mallory had moved out of Brooklyn and into a Manhattan condo with no reminders of home and grief. Markowitz had spent his last years working late hours to avoid coming home to empty rooms, unoccupied furniture and all the memories of Helen ganging up on him in the dark. After Mallory had put her father in the ground and finished his last case, she rarely visited the old place, though this was home and always would be.

No, she would never sell the house, never evict the Markowitzes, or what survived of them in closets, boxes and drawers, from the attic to the basement. She could not imagine an afterlife for them-so where were they, if not here?

Today she had one more piece of her father’s unfinished business, and she had come home again to look for answers among his personal notes in the boxes and files of his disorganized, unfinished life.

She ran her fingers across the dust which had accumulated on the record albums of the swing bands and the cassettes of the Rolling Stones. There were also ancient reel-to-reel recordings, Markowitz’s prized collection of vintage radio programs from the late thirties and forties. She blew more dust from the elaborate recording equipment she had brought to the house a year before his death. She had used it to preserve his most precious recordings on CDs before the old-fashioned tapes could rot on their spools.

Markowitz had been unreasonably happy when she told him he could play the CDs over and over, and never wear them out. She opened the plastic boxes now, all of them, and then she smiled. Though she had a mania for order and neatness, she was pleased to see the CD covers and discs completely mismatched to tell her he had made good use of her gift in the time that was left to him.