Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

At the end of the afternoon, she was back in her office at Mallory and Butler, Ltd., sitting at her own computer. She waited for the trip lights to tell her she had access. The amber light glowed. The asylum’s closed system was operating on the modem now, accessing the internet, which made it an open system with a back door.

As she tapped into the phone line for the Orwelhouse lobby, she found herself intruding on a sexual liaison. The receptionist was hooked into an internet service which catered to the erotically deprived. Mallory checked the user’s personnel file with a purloined password. The receptionist was high school graduate Sylvia Ulner, who was passing for a psychiatrist on the anonymous internet connection. At the moment, Sylvia was typing out a pornographic analysis of her body for an amorous correspondent in a private cyberspace room.

Of course, there were no private rooms in cyberspace. Any cut-rate burglar knew there was no such thing as an inviolate system. But Sylvia and her keyboard stud were oblivious to Mallory’s intrusion as they were busy violating one another.

Welcome to the goldfish bowl.

Mallory stepped lightly on the information superhighway, tiptoed past the lovers in the circuit boards, and entered the hospital system to roam the patient entries of twelve years ago.

There was no medication on the charts for Oren Watt or any of the other Outsider Artists, and no one was paying the bills. The accountant was reporting this group as a loss, though each had a growing trust fund for sales of insane artwork. The insurance companies of the non-artistic patients were paying the moon for drugs and counseling. She found only one female patient in Sabra’s age bracket with no insurance and no scholarship. Well, that fit. Gilette had mentioned that Sabra never used their medical policy.

The computer called the woman Sarah, and itemized the counseling sessions and rounds of medication for depression. When Mallory called up the complete file, she was looking at the patient’s photograph, a blurred face twisting away from the lens, unrecognizable but for Sabra’s hallmark camera avoidance. The bills for her care had been paid directly by a blind account in a foreign bank until the account ran dry two years later. Her entire fortune was gone, and coincidentally, she was discharged that same month. No forwarding address.

Did the bastards give you bus fare, Sabra?

While the receptionist and her lover were trysting in cyberspace, taking off a hundred bytes of panties, Mallory was downloading all the patient files. The lovers were in printed throes of ecstasy as Mallory left the hospital records, closing the back door softly behind her.

MORE, MORE, MORE, wailed Sylvia at her keyboard.

Now Mallory scanned Sabra’s file on her own system and at a more leisurely pace. There were reams of charts which only told her Sabra’s deep sadness had never responded to drugs or counseling. The personal notes of a psychiatric nurse mentioned Sabra’s only close friendship with another inmate: Sabra and Oren Watt had been inseparable.

Riker walked into Coffey’s office unannounced. He looked from the man to the bottle, which Coffey made no effort to conceal. That was a very bad sign. Riker pulled a chair closer to the desk and settled into it. Coffey wouldn’t meet his face. A worse sign.

“I got ten bucks says I can guess what’s goin‘ down.” Riker put his money on the desktop next to the lieutenant’s empty glass.

Coffey gave him a grudging smile and fished a back pocket for his wallet. He laid a ten-dollar bill beside Riker’s, saying, “Go for it.”

“You’ve been in here for less than ten minutes, and the glass is drained. Now that’s criminal, ‘cause it’s a real good grade of sipping whiskey. Your knuckles are white, and you look like a man who shouldn’t be allowed near a loaded gun. It’s Blakely, right? He’s messing with your command.”

Coffey pushed both tens to Riker’s side of the desk. “Yeah, he wants Mallory off this case. He wants that really bad.”

“And he threatened you, right?”

Coffey nodded, as he reached into the drawer of his desk and produced another glass, holding it up to Riker as though he actually believed his sergeant might say no to a shot of whiskey.

“Well, I think he’s overreacting,” said Riker, accepting his glass and emptying it before he spoke again. “There’s worse department cover-ups to worry about. This one is really small potatoes.”

“Blakely’s taking it pretty seriously.”

“And I’m sure he’s taking it personally, too. He’s the one who ordered Markowitz to close out the case.”

“But the case stayed open. Blakely never screwed around much with Markowitz, did he?”

“Well, you have to figure Markowitz had something on Blakely-the things the old man got away with? Lieutenant, you know what your real problem is? You got your promotions on merit. You didn’t come up through the patronage system. If you had, you’d have enough dirt to fend for yourself. You remind me of my old man. That’s high praise, ‘cause the old bastard was as straight-arrow as they come.”

“Riker, why did you stay on the force after they busted you to sergeant?”

“Well, my old dad was a cop. My grandfather, too. There was nothing else I ever wanted to be. So I quit the force and do what? You think I’m gonna go be a hairball private dick? Gimme a break.”

“You’re fifty-five. You could retire with a nice pension and a few-”

“And put a gun muzzle in my mouth after the novelty wears off? Naw. I still got Markowitz’s kid to raise. She thinks she knows it all. You can’t tell her nothin‘. She’s gotta learn everything the hard way. Somebody’s gotta be there with the bandages when she falls down and skins her little knees, or gets kicked in the head.”

Rather normal people, suited and gowned, filled the gallery and mingled with the freaks of SoHo antifashion. Among the better dressed, there were many obvious cases of plastic excess and cut-rate work. With an unerring eye for aesthetics, it was not difficult for Charles Butler to guess which of the noses and chins had come from the store.

Charles took Mallory’s arm to escort her around a leering little man in a long fur coat which probably concealed something lewd. Among the lunatics, his instincts were seldom wrong. Whenever he smiled in public, they gravitated to him, taking him for one of their own. He held his loony smile accountable for every mad confrontation on the streets of New York.

“Mallory, it’s not the same crowd that would have been at the last Dean Starr show. If that group was the A list, this is definitely the C list, the incompetents of art collecting.”

“How can you tell?”

“Koozeman brought out the circus freaks to entertain them. They’ll want to tell their friends back home in the suburbs that they spent the evening with famous artists. Any freak will qualify in that role. In my experience, the real artists are fairly normal in most respects.”

A young woman with a half-shaven head walked by in earnest conversation with a pin-striped suit.

“So Koozeman is trying to unload the unsold work in a hurry,” said Mallory. “That fits. He put both galleries on the-”

“Check out the metal jacket on my tooth, here,” said the small man in the fur coat, who had followed along behind them. Now the little man put himself in Mallory’s path, and she was suddenly confronted with a wide, grinning mouth. A grimy finger pointed to the shiny metal crown reflecting a small silver cameo of her face between his lips. The tiny mirror was set slightly off center in a crooked line of yellow teeth. She backed up and stared at his sweating face above the collar of the fur, taking in the spiked hair, and the gold rings which pierced both his nostrils.