Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“Why did you support the idea that the girl was the real target?”

“Because she was the only one to suffer. The other one was hacked up postmortem. I know you read the report. You could probably recite it by heart. But it’s only a collection of data to you, isn’t it? Try to imagine it. She was crawling when the attacker followed her along the length of the floor, inflicting blow after blow. That was something that bothered Markowitz a lot. The girl was the victim of unmistakable savage rage.”

“It’s a pity you and Markowitz weren’t on speaking terms after the autopsy. Markowitz questioned Watt on Aubry. Watt didn’t know her at all, not the first thing about her.”

“So he didn’t know her. So? Perhaps he hated all women. It was a lunatic act and a crime of rage. You have the evidence of madness in my original report. He took a damn souvenir, her brain, for Christ’s sake!”

“You still don’t get it, do you? It was the brain that Markowitz used to rule out Watt’s confession.”

“You don’t know that.” He knew she was running a bluff. Sometimes she forgot he had been playing poker for decades before she was ever born. “You’re only guessing.”

“Yeah, but I’m real good at that. Call it a gift. And I know my old man’s style. You weren’t talking to Markowitz. You were angry with him. You never talked about the case again. It would have been a bad subject after what he asked you to do. Now suppose Peter Ariel was the primary target. What then? If Markowitz was alive, standing here right now, would you have anything else to tell him? Would you change anything?”

In a way, Slope felt that Markowitz was alive. He sensed the man’s presence every time she was near. She was a living reminder of a lifelong friendship. Even in death, Markowitz stubbornly refused to abandon her, forcing everyone who had loved him, to love his daughter too.

“No, Kathy, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“ Mallory ,” she said with insistence.

“ Kathy ,” he said with great deliberation. “One day your father’s friends will all be dead, and there’ll be no one to call you Kathy. That’s my biggest fear for you. Terrible thing being loved, isn’t it? It’s like a debt hanging over your head, and it pisses you off, doesn’t it? Well, good.”

She was angry now, and that was good too. Her anger was his only method of ferreting out her humanity in what limited range of emotion she possessed. She returned his broad smile with an icy glare. She advanced on him, gathering size as she closed in on his person, one hand rising to within striking distance of his face.

After she had gone, and the door was closing behind her on its slow hydraulic, he muttered, “Perverse little monster.” For she had touched his face so gently and kissed his cheek. She had left him disoriented, flailing for understanding in her disturbing wake, and she had done that to a purpose. He knew it-for he truly believed it was her mission in life to confuse him.

The photographer set up the tripod on the sidewalk, facing the plaza of Gregor Gilette’s new building. Workmen were pulling down the last section of the wooden wall to reveal the graceful stone arch. This gateway to the plaza mimicked the shape of the building’s lower windows.

When the photographer was done, the workmen would replace the wooden panels, and they would remain in place until the plaza sculpture was installed for the dedication ceremony.

Emma Sue Hollaran stood by the pile of wood sections, her face red and pinched, railing at the workmen, who only shrugged their shoulders and said they had their orders. Emma Sue, mover and shaker of the Public Works Committee, turned ungainly and charged on the young photographer, who took her for an infuriated bull, cleverly disguised as a smaller, dumber animal.

“I never authorized any of this!” she yelled.

The photographer screwed a filter onto a lens and bent over the camera, making adjustments that didn’t need to be made, hoping that she would simply go away. Stupid idea. Looking down at the camera, he could also see her legs, sturdy little fireplugs rooted firmly to the pavement.

“Young man, I’m talking to you.”

Gilette waved the photographer back, and now the architect stepped forward to loom over her. Gilette smiled as he looked into the angry slits of her eyes, with an intensity that forced her to step back a pace. “The photographer takes his orders from me.”

She had been planning to say something to him. What was it? She could only stare. He was so close. She couldn’t think.

Emma Sue had always been protected from her own mirror by a doting father who had insisted that she was truly beautiful. She was protected also by her father’s land and money, never suffering the plight of the homely girl at the school dance. Considered by every farmer in the county to be a good catch, landwise and moneywise, she was sought after by every landowner who had a son of marriageable age. She had always danced every dance and happily trod on the feet of the handsome, wild boys who feared their matchmaking fathers.

And money had protected her from her own dull-wittedness, with a generous endowment to an Ivy League college. Money could do anything. With money enough, black could become white and a bleating barnyard animal could become a peer of the art community in the art center of the world.

And yet, with all her protective armor, she was pinned like an insect and hadn’t a grasshopper’s wit to get loose. She could only stare at Gilette. He was so much more than just a man. There was something else in play here. He knocked the wind out of her by merely looking into her eyes and showing her something she couldn’t buy.

There was sex going on here, on the sidewalk in the daylight, in public view, and it was indecent and raw and-she could only stare. Would you care to dance, Gregor ?

No , his eyes said, not with you .

Ugly and lonely and witless, she turned and walked away with slow agonizing steps, size nine shoes clattering on the sidewalk, lost now in the sounds of Manhattan traffic.

People had begun to drift through the arch and into the plaza. A policeman asked Gilette if he wanted them cleared out. Some of them sat on the benches in the open light, some took the shade under the ash trees that formed the plaza walls, and two children dipped their hands in the water of the fountain. Gilette shook his head.

“No. Let them be.”

He looked into the photographer’s lens to see the fountain through the camera’s eyes, bringing it into sharp focus. A young Spanish sculptor had won an international competition with this design to match Gilette’s own skill for making marble flow like water. The lines of the fountain carried the eye along with a fluid grace that defeated its own hard substance, echoing the lines of the building’s facade, and stone called out to stone across the plaza.

Reflections of the water played over the faces of two boys, and the camera’s shutter clicked.

An old man flung one brittle arm across the back of a bench, which curved to fit the contour of his body. He lifted his face to the light and smiled peacefully, and a shutter clicked.

A young woman in a yellow dress stood in the lush green shadows of the young stand of trees, starting as a flock of birds settled in the branches overhead.

A derelict hesitated at the arch and turned to the place where Gilette stood. The man’s face, with five days’ dust and beard, was washed new with dazzling light, and a shutter clicked.

The television crew was unloading equipment from the large trucks. All about him was the hustle of people passing to and fro, laying cables and checking sound equipment and cameras, a babble of orders and questions.