Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

It was coming back to him now.

Right.

He picked up the bullhorn in his free hand and cleared his throat, amplifying his phlegm a hundredfold. It worked.

But where… Oh, right.

He had broken into the security office last night. This was one of the bullhorns they used for fire drills.

Through the telescoping lenses, he scanned the sidewalk again. A heavyset woman was strolling past the store- his store. Oh, this was really too much. He raised the bullhorn and inhaled deeply. “No you don’t!” he blared in a voice so powerful it caught his hangover off guard, and the reaction time for pain to set in had a long lag. “You there! You in the black and white dress. Madam, you know damn well you’re too heavy to wear horizontal stripes. Your friends have all told you that. Might I suggest a dark rose ensemble to go with that Mediterranean coloring?”

The woman, trapped in the twin lenses, moved her head quickly from side to side. Her mouth fell open, and her head slowly bowed. As she turned away from the store, a newspaper fell from her hand and marked the spot where Andrew had scored his first direct hit. The young woman settled into the gait of an old woman, meandering down another street which was not Andrew’s street and of no concern to him. He had already moved on to the crime in progress at the bus stop.

“Oh, you can’t be serious!” he screamed. And now delayed reaction set in. His brain was throbbing and thrashing against the sides of his skull in a mad attempt to get free of it. In a lower pitch, and with the pathos of genuine agony, he said, “You can’t possibly take that gorgeous Armani creation on the bus.”

The perpetrator in the Armani suit was all eyes, and his eyes went everywhere.

“That’s right, you know what you’ve done wrong. Now go and flag down a cab. Show some dignity, for Christ’s sake. Let’s try and live up to the clothes, shall we?”

And the man did indeed put out his hand and flagged down a cab to carry him away as quickly as possible.

Andrew went back to his bed of ten down quilts and rested his damaged head on a pile of silk pillows. His head lolled from side to side as he took stock of his campsite. Fortuitously, he had remembered the larder of Le Train Bleu, and apparently he had removed their entire stock of premium wines. The cases were stacked in a solid wall of champagne and red wine. Cartons of imported cigarettes were strewn everywhere.

Did Bloomingdale’s sell…? Oh, right.

He had raided the locker of an executive.

Well, here was a snag. He had not had the foresight to steal a portable toilet before sealing the exits from the roof.

What about the fire escape?

No escape. The emergency exits were all interior. He looked up at the metal staircase which no longer led to the roof door. Distressed and mangled steel angled oddly away from the brick structure. Had he really done that? But how? Drunks could be so ingenious. He might have to get drunk again to figure out how he had managed it.

What else? Was that a year’s supply of espresso beans from the gourmet selection on six? It was.

Oh, joy.

He opened the half-size refrigerator. No cream. He was inconsolable. Ah, but two magnums of wine were cooling with companion tulip glasses. Light flooded his soul again.

And food?

None. Not any in the refrigerator, nor among the boxes and cartons. He counted fourteen smoking jackets, eight Dresden teacups, nine pairs of silk pajamas, two potted palm trees and no food.

During the bender, while he was in the genius mode, he must have resolved the problem of solid-waste disposal by eliminating the solids. Quite sensible. He could piss his liquid wastes over the side of the wall.

He returned to his post at the edge of the roof and slung the strap of the field glasses around his neck. He took up his horn just in time. There was another blight on the street. “You… in the too-mauve-for-words pant-suit.”

The mauve woman stopped and looked everywhere but in the right direction.

“Up here,” he guided her. “I’m up here with the pigeons and God. Look up! Good. What are you trying to do to me? Do you want me to hurl myself into the street? You can’t get away with that pantsuit, and you know it. Give yourself up on the second floor. Surrender to Alice. She’ll know how to deal with you.”

The woman was entering the store. So far, the pedestrian masses were rather good about taking creative direction. So he had finally found his true vocation- fashion terrorist.

Now if only he had his personal shopper, his life would be complete. He leaned over the roof once more and screamed into the bullhorn, “Annie! Annie, where are you?”

Charles Butler unsheathed his blade and slashed open an envelope. He was arrested for a moment by the shining surface of his antique dagger.

Mrs. Ortega had been polishing things again.

He would rather have the ancient piece of silver clouded with tarnish. He never cared to come upon his own reflection, or even the knife blade’s width of it, by surprise. But every now and again, he must endure a time when his housekeeper would go mad with metal cleaners, of which there were as many varieties as there were metals. And for a time, he could go nowhere in his own home without some bright piece of Mrs. Ortega’s handiwork throwing back the image of a man whose nose was too long, and whose eyes resembled heavy-lidded hen’s eggs with small blue irises.

Now he sat quietly awaiting his visitors’ knock on the door. No doubt the people advancing down the hallway were known to him. He hadn’t buzzed anyone into the building, so one of them must have a key. That narrowed the field to his tenants, his cleaning woman or his business partner. And of course the visitors were on their way to his own door, for this suite of offices and his apartment across the hall occupied the entire second floor of the SoHo building.

This particular room was the reception area of Mallory and Butler, Ltd. Queen Anne reigned with Louis XV in period furniture with graceful curving legs, which seemed always on the verge of dancing. Each morning, Charles sat down to this antique desk, opened his mail by the light of a tall triptych of arched windows-and wondered what his partner might be up to.

She so seldom stopped by anymore. He understood.

A consulting firm could not hold much allure for Mallory. The rather academic problems of quantifying, qualifying, and finding homes for the oddly gifted could hardly compare to the problems of Special Crimes Section. These days, she only stopped by to play with the computer toys she stored in her private office.

The footsteps in the hallway stopped. Now the door was opening without the customary knock. Only two people ever did that, Mrs. Ortega and Mallory. But his cleaning woman never traveled with an entourage.

Mallory was first into the room, carrying a large and dusty cardboard carton. She was in a black mood by her tone as she said to Riker, “I want to find that little twit, Andrew Bliss, and right now.”

Behind the safe cover of his own carton, Riker was making facial expressions to indicate that she was a brat. He in turn was followed by a young uniformed officer with his own load of boxes, and these bore the stamp of NYPD. The parade trooped past his desk with two “Hi Charles” ‘s from Mallory and Riker. And then the door to Mallory’s private office closed behind them.

Minutes later, the uniformed officer emerged, nodded to Charles in passing, and left him to wonder what was going on. Of course he could guess. He had read the morning paper. But most of the cartons had borne stamps from the NYPD evidence room. Now that was a problem, because they couldn’t possibly have four cartons of evidence in a brand-new case which, according to the newspaper, involved a single ice pick, no suspects and no leads.