Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“Then he makes his profits in the secondary market after he and his friends drive the price up.”

“Right.”

“So it’s a cartel?”

“Nothing that sophisticated. He’s just an individual buyer. He bought Peter Ariel’s work, too. And then he made big bucks after the murder.”

“Could Berman have had anything to do with the murders?”

“That ass? Oh, give me a break. No. Let’s just say the money he made on Peter Ariel whetted his appetite for crime art. He also bought John Wayne Gacy’s work. He held it until after the execution, and then he made a bundle. And there are eight or ten minor mass murderers who paint. Berman buys ghoul art by the carload and makes a huge profit on volume. He gets it from prisons and mental institutions. It’s just business. He unloads it as fast as he can.”

“He used Koozeman to broker all the deals quietly, right?”

“Lots of people went through Koozeman.”

“I found your shrink’s name in Koozeman’s computer,” she lied. “It looks like they started doing business about twelve years ago.”

Oren Watt was nodding his head. All she’d been able to turn up were code names and dates. Blakely probably had the Rosetta stone to break that code. If so, it was burned by now.

“So Koozeman had a lock on the sickness market? He was the one who did the deal with the shrink for your confession, right?”

“Yeah, he snagged me outside the gallery the night of the murder-right after the cops let me go. He told me to go to his apartment building, and he put me into a cab. That night, we all met at Koozeman’s place. I signed an agent contract with the shrink, and the shrink did a contract with Koozeman. Koozeman had the lists of people who would pay the moon for art connected to high-profile crimes. No one seemed to care that I couldn’t draw.”

“Koozeman and the shrink I can almost understand. But it’s a funny business for a senator, making profits on murdered taxpayers. So Senator Berman must have gone nuts when there was another murder in one of Koozeman’s galleries.”

“He went through the roof. He thought it would all come out if Koozeman was investigated. Lucky the senator has powerful friends in the same funny business.”

“You mean the lieutenant governor?” The ex-mayor of New York.

“Sure. Why do you think that little bastard’s so in love with the damn death penalty? Every time one of those murderers dies, the price of their work goes up.”

Father Brenner would give Kathy Mallory a worthy performance. He was still doing penance for the sins which could not be put to Ursula, for she was truly insane, and therefore blameless. The sins of blindness were his own. What he had prepared was a small miracle, given the time he’d been allotted to pull it off. And throughout the day, Ursula had been invaluable in putting the fear of God into lapsed Catholics, none of whom wished to be on the bad side of a mad nun on a mission.

This was to be his finest mass. The music would be Mozart’s Requiem , for this was the piece which the precocious young student orchestra had been rehearsing when the priest made his begging call to the music school. A former student, a somewhat lax and guilty parishioner, was now the director of that school. Father Brenner had been refused with a hail of excuses from scheduling problems to personal problems. He had been told it was quite impossible on such short notice. Sister Ursula had then taken the phone, and the school’s director learned, once again, that it was a dreadful mistake to get between Ursula and God’s work.

And so, the holy stage was now set with the well-scrubbed faces of music students. And he had packed many pews with their proud parents. It was a good turnout for the death of a woman whose name would mean nothing to any of them.

The young musicians’ feet shuffled and tapped with stage fright as they held fast to their bassoons and bass horns, strings and trumpets, trombones and timpani. Father Brenner had pulled out all the stops for this most special occasion. The chorus would be sung by every gifted voice of choirs past and present whom the beleaguered choirmaster had been able to corral into service.

Both choirmaster and conductor had told him it was insane to attempt the chorus without a proper rehearsal with the orchestra. The priest had counseled faith, and counted on good memory, for the Requiem Mass was not new to any of them.

A parishioner who owned a mortuary had been leaned on to provide the flowers which graced the altar, a profusion of lilies and orchids borrowed for a few hours from the viewing room of the uptown funeral parlor. Actually, since some bereaved family had paid for those flowers, this might be considered a theft of sorts. But that was almost fitting, considering who he had in his front pew, the thief of candles.

He was touched that Kathy had brought a recording device, which sat on the space beside her. So she wanted to preserve her mother’s mass. He was confident that both Helen and the birth mother would have been proud to see how far their child had come in her spiritual growth.

He remembered the day twelve-year-old Kathy had stolen the communion wine from the school chapel and made herself sick on it. That day she had sat in his office, drinking strong tea and memorizing lines of scripture, preferring that to the alternative of his calling Markowitz at work to tell him his child could not hold her liquor.

That was the day he had noticed the fresh bruise on the side of her face, and not asked where she had gotten it. There had been other days and other bruises-more blindness. Helen Markowitz had asked her about the bruises, and then written a note asking that Kathy be more closely supervised during rough sports. He had found the note curious at the time, for there were no rough sports at the academy. More blindness.

Now the electric lights of the cathedral were switched off, and a score of candles flared up in the hands of the altar boys. The white flowers took on an eerie glow as the priest announced that this was a mass for a woman who had been brutally murdered-the very words Kathy had requested. He never mentioned that this woman had a beautiful child-as he had been requested to leave her out of it. But because he had known this woman’s child, he was able to summon up a passion he thought was lost to him.

He looked back at Kathy. How young she seemed, how little changed. The last time he saw her as a student, she had been carried into his office in the arms of the janitor who had found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She was unconscious as the janitor gently laid her slight body down on the couch. But she had rallied long enough to do some damage before the ambulance came for her. And the last time Sister Ursula ever saw Kathy Mallory’s face, the old woman was lying on the floor holding on to a freshly fractured leg and screaming in pain. That had also been the last time the priest ever saw Kathy smile. At the time, he had been startled, for the girl’s smile had a touch of evil to it. And in that same moment, he realized that it was Ursula’s own smile thrown back at her. And then the blindness was ended.

Ah, but hadn’t he always suspected?

The young music students took up their instruments, and the music blended with the voices of the chorus, building from the delicate sweet notes of a soloist, and swelling to the full accompaniment, rising, surging with beauty and power. Above the altar, a statue of Christ hung on a cross of gold and gazed down on the bouquets at His feet. In the flickering play of candlelight, lilies and orchids seemed to move to the genius music of Mozart, an illusory resurrection of cut flowers. A spate of “Ah”s came from the pews as the music rolled through the church to its conclusion.