Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“I’ll tell you what I remember best,” she said. “It was the weekly poker games. You missed three games in a row that year. Everybody knew you’d had a falling out with Markowitz. But I’m the only one who knows why. You were a long time forgiving him for asking you to bend the law and hide the facts.”

“You’re blowing smoke, young lady.”

Slope had been the best poker player among Markowitz’s old cronies. His face was always a model of composure, defying even God to guess what cards he held.

She reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out a sheaf of yellowed pages bearing the seal and signature of Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope. She set the papers down on the desk in front of him and tapped them with one long red fingernail. “This is the first autopsy report on Aubry Gilette. It’s dated two days earlier than the report on file.”

“Where did you get that?”

Slope reached out for the papers. Mallory was faster, picking up the report and casually turning it over in her hands.

“I found it in the basement of the old house in Brooklyn. That’s where Markowitz kept his personal case notes.”

She leafed through the pages. “It’s much more interesting than your amended report. I think Aubry Gilette’s brain weight is a bit light. I have a weight of three pounds, one ounce for Peter Ariel’s brain-that’s standard, right? But there’s barely six ounces left of Aubry Gilette’s brain. I didn’t see any mention of missing organ parts in your second report, the official report.” As though she were merely confirming the time of day, she asked, “Now falsifying an autopsy on a homicide- that’s a felony, isn’t it?”

Edward Slope stared at the pages in her hand, his head shaking slowly from side to side. “Why on earth would Louis have kept it?”

“He probably wanted to protect you. If anything had gone wrong, he could have substituted this original for the one on file. The signature copy is the only one that could come back on you. None of the duplicate copies would be admissible in court.”

She understood the shock in Slope’s eyes. In her hand was damning proof of the worst crime in his profession- the collusion of police and ME to falsify and suppress evidence. “If you remember any other irregularities in the old case, call me.”

She slipped the papers back into her pocket.

“I think you can trust me with this,” she said softly, with only a suggestion of sarcasm, “because you know how well I can keep a dirty secret. You can trust me because you know I wouldn’t rat on you if you broke a hundred laws.” Her eyebrows lifted with the afterthought of a third reason for his trust. “Oh, and I’m a cop.”

Night and dark came on. Andrew Bliss settled down with a new bottle and looked up at the stars. There were hardly any. He had to hunt them down with his binoculars. They were faint, pathetic things, washed out by the glittering cityscape, only pinholes in the ceiling. He believed the poetry of stars would be more deservedly dedicated to the dazzle of city lights. The traffic of headlights and turn signals kept to the rhythm of classical symphonies. Great buildings loomed as shimmering behemoths footed in concrete. Poetry was here in every physical metaphor. An aureole of light crowned the city.

God lived here. Screw the cowboy lore of the western Big Sky Country. Mere stars could not compete with this.

Emma sue Hollaran had awakened on a bed of pain. Now she lay nude under the four-poster’s canopy of red velvet, which matched the flocked red-on-gold wallpaper. The carpets and curtains were deep purple, the sheets were shocking-pink satin, and every red lampshade was rimmed with black tassels. A player piano was all that was needed to complete the cliche of an antebellum brothel.

As the plastic surgeon examined Emma Sue’s swollen thighs, her maid of the week paced the length of the bedroom, eyes cast up to heaven and muttering prayers or curses in a language her employer had not yet been able to identify. The succession of maids had all been illegal aliens, the cheapest labor to be found. Some had done only a single day in hell, and others, like this one, had lasted an entire fortnight in Emma Sue’s employ. She could not remember the maids’ names from day to day, week to week, and so had taken to calling all of them Alien.

“Alien, stop that damn pacing!” she screamed.

This week’s Alien stepped quickly to the bed, having recognized only her own new name in the spate of words. She looked down at Emma Sue’s bare body and turned away in disgust to resume her pacing and muttering.

Emma Sue was a mass of red splotches from hips to knees. The swelling made her legs twice as big as they had been before the fat was suctioned out. She stared down at the offensive limbs.

“Drain that crap out!” she screamed, more outraged than pained.

“I warned you,” said the surgeon. “This was entirely too much to-”

“Make it go away!”

“Don’t you remember when we did your abs and buttocks? You were swollen then, too.”

“Don’t you remember? My stomach and butt were swollen because you nearly killed me, you idiot! You drained me then. Do it now.”

“I drained an infection. This is just the normal post-op swelling.” He was writing on his prescription pad. “I want you to take these pills. The swelling will go down in two to three weeks. Try to-”

“Weeks? You moron, I haven’t got two to three days . The ball is tonight!”

“You can’t possibly go anywhere.”

“Watch me.”

Within the hour she was attached to the medical apparatus. She did not seem to mind the sight of fluid draining into her veins from a plastic bag attached to a long pole, nor the other fluid coming out through the series of drains plugged into her legs. The maid fled the room, as the doctor monitored the cortisone IV. The air was foul. The doctor’s face was going to that pale vomit shade of green, and then he too left the room in search of a toilet.

The bad drawings of body parts had been taken down, and gone was the babble and the crush of television people and tourists who had wandered in off the street. The last cable for the camera equipment was pulled out of the wall and rolled up by a crew grip.

His back turned on the door, Sergeant Riker stood alone in the quiet emptiness of the high white walls. The room was all too familiar, a long rectangle, coffinlike in the convergence of parallels toward the end of the room. Though this space was vast, there was the feeling of walls closing in, the coffin lid coming down on him. Koozeman’s new location was upscale, high-rent SoHo, but it was only a larger version of the old gallery in the East Village, the site of a crime so brutal, the photographs had never been published.

Twelve years ago, in the blood and butchery of a double homicide, Riker had come close to understanding art. Never had he seen anything so compelling. The image of the bodies would never leave him.

On that long-ago night, he had reported to the crime scene, pressed through the crowd and past the guards at the door. Two rookie officers had been standing in the room with the bodies. The young cops were statues, struck silent and still by shock. Flashbulbs had gone off from every angle, and everyone was blinded by the light. The dark shadowy bodies were the stuff of bad dreams, but they took on a terrible clarity with each blast of light, intermittently real and illusory.

The forensic technicians had gone about the night’s work with only the exchange of necessary words. Orders were issued in the low tones of talking in church. There had been no black humor that night. The youngest officer had looked on the bloody face of the dancer and cried. Riker had gently wiped the boy’s face and sent him away.