‘How did you – ’
‘I’m a detective.’ Perfection was Mallory’s signature, and it was writ in what could not be seen. She had made the machinery, its wires and speakers invisible. And the sound was remarkably well balanced, creating the illusion of an orchestra at the center of Riker’s brain. The concerto was bright and hopeful, a portrait of Charles Butler in strings and flutes.
There were never any CDs lying about in Mallory’s personal car, and he sometimes wondered if she ever listened to music, perhaps something metallic with New Age clicks and whirrs.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘I wouldn’t say no to a beer.’ Riker sprawled on the sofa while Charles crossed the formal dining room, heading for the kitchen.
Though the detective had been in this apartment many times, he scrutinized the room of paneled walls and antiques. Books and journals were piled on all the tables and chairs, the sign of a man with too much free time. Riker found what he had been looking for – food, a bowl of cashews partially hidden under a newspaper, and he had devoured them all before Charles returned with two beers foaming in frosted glass. Any man who kept his beer steins in the freezer was Riker’s friend for life.
‘I have to tell you – ’ As the detective accepted his beer, he spied a fortune cookie on a small table next to the sofa. ‘This isn’t exactly a social call.’ He grabbed the cookie, then remembered his manners and asked, ‘You mind?’
‘It’s yours.’ Charles settled into an armchair. ‘What can I do for you?’
Riker unbuttoned his suit jacket and pulled out the stolen waterlogged paperback. ‘Can you fix this?’
Charles stared at the soggy cover illustration of cowboys and blazing six-guns – so far removed from his own taste in literature. His face expressed some polite equivalent of Oh, shit, as he attempted a lame smile. ‘I think so. It might take me a while.’
‘I got time.’ Riker cracked his cookie open. His printed fortune fell out. He watched this sliver of paper drop to the floor and let it lie there, for he was that rare individual who ate the cookies for their own sake. And now he looked around for another.
Charles excused himself for a few minutes, then came back with a sandwich wrapped in a napkin, and Riker happily traded his wet book for the roast beef on rye. A moment later, his happiness was destroyed. The paperback lay open in the other man’s hands, and the detective could see a piece of paper stuck to the back cover. If he had not been so tired and hungry, he would have thought to leaf through the book before handing it over. ‘What’s that?’
‘A receipt.’ Charles gently peeled up the paper. ‘From Warwick’s Used Books. Odd. I thought I knew every bookshop in Manhattan.’ He closed the old novel and stared at the lurid cover. ‘So this is rather important to you.’ He was too well bred to ask why in God’s name this might be true.
‘Yeah, you can’t get ‘em anymore. That western went out of print forty years ago. It’s the last novel Jake Swain ever wrote.’ Riker wolfed down his sandwich, then drained the beer stein, stalling for time, for the right words. Sheriff Peety rides again. What was the other character’s name? He had blocked it out of his mind long ago and hoped it would remain forgotten.
‘I’ll have to get started before this dries out.’ Charles rose to his feet, and Riker followed him into the next room. The library walls were fifteen-feet high and covered with a mosaic of leather bindings. A narrow door set into one bookcase opened on to a small boxy room. Glue pots and rolls of tape, brushes, tweezers and spools of thread lay on a long work table where the bibliophile repaired the spines and pages of his collection. Charles swept aside volumes with gold-leaf decoration to make room for a paperback that had cost fifty cents in the year it was published.
‘You can’t tell Mallory about this,’ said Riker. ‘Promise? I don’t want her to know I wrecked it.’ Stole it, robbed it from a crime scene.
But his partner would never know about that if Charles believed -
‘It’s hers!’ Charles should never be allowed near a poker game; his face expressed every feeling, every thought. And just now, he was thinking that Riker had lied to him. The office across the hall contained all the books that Mallory owned. Most dealt with computers; none were fiction. And, before leaving college to join NYPD, she had received two years of an elite education at Barnard. No way could he believe that this book was her property. Yet he nodded and said, ‘Understood.’ Charles reached up to a shelf above the work space and pulled down a bundle of blotting papers. ‘You were never here. We never had this conversation.’
‘Great. Thanks.’ Riker imagined that he could hear the man’s beautiful brain kicking into high gear and making connections at light’s speed.
Charles teased the block of pages away from its paper spine, then noticed his guest’s anxiety and mistook paranoia for concern. ‘Don’t worry. I can put it back together.’ After setting the cover to one side, he peeled away a top sheet of advertising and stared at the underlying page. ‘Oh.’ His face conveyed that everything had suddenly been made clear. ‘Well, I can’t blot this one. I’d lose most of the ink. I can save the inscription, but Louis’s signature is gone.’
Calmly, the detective asked, ‘What?’ And inside his head, he screamed, What?
‘This is Louis Markowitz’s handwriting, isn’t it? I imagine there’ll be trouble when Mallory sees the damage.’
Startled, Riker looked down at the inscribed page. An old friend’s quirky penmanship trailed off in a wash of blue ink. ‘No, it’s okay. She hasn’t seen it yet. I was gonna give it to her later – a present.’
Charles read the inscription. ‘So it’s a gift from Louis to Mallory. Almost poetry. I gather he wanted her to have it after his demise. A posthumous goodbye?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’ Untrue. On the only day when that note could have been written, Louis Markowitz had not been anticipating his own death; he still had many years ahead of him, time enough to raise Kathy Mallory. The old man must have forgotten that the book existed, and so had Riker – until it floated past him in Sparrow’s apartment.
‘Louis’s funeral was some time ago.’ Charles used clamps and cotton batting to fix the page to a board, then picked up a palm-size heater and switched it on. ‘You’re delivering this a bit late, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ Riker was slowly coming to terms with shock. A dead man had corroborated his lie – fifteen years before it was told.
An hour later, every surface in the room was covered with a book leaf pressed between blotting papers. Only the inscription page was exposed. The detective stared at the scrawl of blue ink, the words of a man who had loved a homeless child. The lines suggested that the book had been inscribed after the old man had seen convincing proof that the ten-year-old was dead and gone. Yet that grieving cop had obviously clung to the insane idea that Kathy might come back.
Riker bowed his head over the page to read the passage again.
‘Once there was a little girl. No, scratch that, kid. You were always more than that, bigger than life. I could have set you to music – the damn Star Spangled Banner – because you prevailed through all the long scary nights. You were my hero.’
After Charles had bid Riker good night at the elevator, he saw a crack of light under the door to Butler and Company. Mallory? He had not seen her face since early June. And now he forced himself to walk, not run, as he entered the office and passed through the lighted reception area, then moved quickly down a narrow hall, pulled along by the dim glow from Mallory’s room – where the machines lived.