“Well, she never cared about their money, did she? That’s what you told me. Her kid is dead, and she’s living with obsession and hate. Trust me, she could care less about the surroundings.”
“It’s madness.”
“Maybe it is, but I understand it.”
There was a warning edge in her voice. He chose to ignore it. “You have to find her and get her to a hospital.”
“I’ll find her eventually. It’s going to take some time.”
Her responses were crisp and growing cooler.
“Mallory, you must find her right now. It’s your duty to find her. This poor woman-”
“That’s enough.”
Something in her tone of voice made him lose the place-marker in his mind. Now his face was one naked question mark, and she rose from the table to come closer to him, the better to explain all the errors of his ways.
“I live in the real world,” she began, as though instructing an idiot child from some fraudulent planet.“All I care about is the murder of Dean Starr. It’s going to lead me to the evidence for the murders of the artist and the dancer. You must realize that nobody actually wants me to work that one out-not the commissioner, or the mayor, not the city attorney or the chief of detectives. It’s dirty laundry, big-time embarrassment and potential lawsuits.”
“But Sabra hasn’t harmed anyone. Justice dictates that-”
“There is no justice.” She left him to fill in her pause with the implied, but unspoken, You imbecile. “New York cops are paid to keep the city from sliding into a cesspool-that’s it! There is nothing in the job description about justice. Sabra didn’t get justice for Aubry.”
“But you could help this woman if you-”
“No, Charles, I can’t. I can’t fix the world for her and put everything back the way it was. Her kid will never come home again. But Sabra can help me. They all want the case buried, Charles. Do you like the idea of people getting away with a thing like that?”
“It’s your job to-”
“Back off!”
He did back off, and back up, and he would have backed out of the room, but she was standing in the doorway.
“I’m doing my job,” she said-spat. “So Sabra goes on, and I go on.”
She stalked down the hallway, crossed the front room and slammed the door behind her to say she had not appreciated his criticism very much, not much at all.
Charles pulled a blanket around his shoulders and surveyed the roof which overlooked Bloomingdale’s. This was penance for crossing Mallory. This was what it had taken to pacify her. His mistake was asking what he could do to help. The next thing he knew, she was handing him a blanket, a building key, binoculars and a cellular telephone. And now he was doing time on a roof, baby-sitting the lunatic Andrew Bliss.
He turned to Henrietta Ramsharan, a good friend and a good sport, who probably had other things to do this evening. But she had come when he called. “So what do you think?”
“Long-distance psychoanalysis isn’t in my bag of tricks, Charles.” Henrietta lowered the binoculars. “But I think you may have underestimated the case. He’s not unraveling, he’s unraveled.”
“Perhaps I should try to convince Mallory to bring him down from the roof.”
“Have you considered the possibility that Andrew’s state of mind is Mallory’s work?”
“No, I just assumed it was. How badly damaged is he?” And how badly damaged was Mallory? That was the question he really wanted to ask, but he didn’t really want the answer.
“Well, Charles, talking to the mannequin is not a good sign.” She raised the binoculars again. “I’m looking at wine bottles all over the roof and no sign of food. So, the aberrant behavior might be a temporary delusion brought on by fasting and alcohol abuse. If I’m right, it’s not irreversible damage. But he’s hardly moving now. Physically, he’s in very bad shape.”
He thanked her for coming, and walked her across the roof to the door. She was reluctant to leave him alone here, but he was even more reluctant to impose on her anymore. His good-mannered insistence won out, and she left him. It was his only clear win of the day.
He returned to his lonely outpost at the ledge and focussed his field glasses on the hapless Andrew, who at least had the mannequin to talk to. Henrietta had been gone for an hour when he turned to the sound of footsteps.
“Hey, Charles.” Riker leaned a rifle against the retaining wall and glanced over the side to the roof below. “So Mallory talked you into roof duty, huh?” He set a paper sack on the ledge. “You can go home now. I’ll take it from here.”
“No, I’ll stay. Mallory’s coming to relieve me. She wanted me to tell you to go home and get some rest.”
“Thanks, I could use a decent night’s sleep.” He handed the sack to Charles. “Here, you can have my sandwiches and beer. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Look out for Mallory?”
Riker smiled. “Mallory will be all right. She knows the rules. She pushed Blakely too far. She saved Coffey’s ass, and she paid the bill with her house.”
“The house? You think Blakely did that?”
“I don’t think it, I know it. Heller jumped into the arson investigation and pulled a print from the gasoline can and another print from inside the house. We bagged the perp who set the fire. He’s one of Blakely’s men. Now we get to hold the guy for seventy-two hours without charging him. That’s gonna make Blakely real nervous, maybe nervous enough to cut a deal with Robin Duffy.”
“Robin? He’s involved-”
“He’s known Mallory since she was a puppy. We couldn’t keep him out of it. There was no arson coverage on the house. Duffy was pressuring the department for an investigation so he could sue somebody to cover the damage. We had to cut him in, or he would’ve blown the scam.”
“The scam?”
“Yeah, it’s a thing of beauty, Charles.” Riker hunkered down beside Charles and took back the paper sack. He pulled out two sandwiches and a six-pack of beer. “Blakely keeps his payoff money in a nice fat offshore account-more than enough money to pay for the kid’s house and-”
“Just a minute. A lawyer is conspiring with police officers to blackmail the chief of detectives into paying for the arson with his bribery money. Am I following this?”
Riker nodded, popped the tab on a beer can and handed it to him. Charles thought, yes, he would very much like a drink just now.
“It gets better.” Riker slugged back his beer and grinned. “If everything goes well, Blakely is going down, resigning without a pension. That’s part of the deal. He’s going to walk away with no jail time, but he’ll be dead broke. Mallory only has to stay out of Blakely’s way for a few more days-just long enough for him to realize that he can’t dig his way out of this.”
Charles took a healthy swig of beer. “You think he might go after her again?”
“Well, she’s got him cornered, and he’s making a fight of it.”
“So Mallory’s involved in this?”
“Charles, do you know anyone else who could’ve put this scheme together?”
No, of course not. What had he been thinking of? “I don’t suppose this could’ve been managed in a clean, law-abiding fashion?”
“Naw, that almost never works.” Riker settled himself on the ground beside Charles and grabbed up a blanket from Mallory’s duffel bag. They sat together on the floor of the roof, cross-legged in the storytelling fashion of nearly forgotten summer camps.
Riker pulled a fresh pack of cigarettes from his paper sack and began the evening’s entertainment with a metaphor which was far from a child’s campfire. “Just think of corruption as cancer in an animal. So maybe forty years ago, the cancer overtook the animal that was New York City, and then the cancer became the animal.” Riker lit a cigarette, and the ember glowed in the dark. “Ah, Charles, the city even steals from the kids. You know, by the time the money travels through the bureaucrats, the kids get damn little. Stealing from babies is pretty low.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and they watched the smoke curl up to the moon.