“Oren, I’m sorry about this. Look here,” said Riker in his normal, amiable tone of voice. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I really did try to get the gun away from her. She kicked me in the balls.”
“She’s coming back? And that big guy? Him too?”
“Yeah, ‘fraid so. You know, she never levels with me. I really got no idea what she wants from you.”
“She wants to know who killed the artist and the dancer. And she wants to know why, but I don’t know, I swear I don’t know.”
“So you never killed anyone.”
“No, I never did. She already knows that. Ask her. But I don’t know who did kill them. And I don’t know anything about Dean Starr’s murder or Koozeman’s. It’s the truth, I swear it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Oren. If you help me, I’ll help you. And when she comes back, I promise I won’t let her hurt you. Deal?”
“What do you want?”
“You met a woman at the mental institution. She was very attractive, fortyish, short black hair and large blue eyes, very white skin.” He held up the photo Mallory had manipulated on her computer.
“Yeah, I remember her. She was my friend.”
“Suppose I told you she was a famous artist under an assumed name. Who would she remind you of?”
“Oh, shit, there are thousands of people in the famous-artist category. Who can keep track?”
“You remember when she left the hospital?”
“Yeah. It was the day they took her last dollar. She was worse off when she left, and I don’t mean the money. When she first came, she was very strong. I wondered what she was doing there. She never said. So she came in larger than life, and left when she was small. It was sad.”
“She was your friend.”
“My only friend.”
“You were close.”
“I miss her. I think about her all the time.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?”
“No. I wish I did.”
“Okay, you were very close to her. You confided everything to her. You told her something about the murders. What was it?”
“I told her the truth. All I did that night was deliver the pizza and the drugs.”
“You never heard from her again?”
“Oh, she keeps in touch. Sometimes she calls me, but she never leaves a number. I don’t know where she is, and that’s the truth.”
“Did you give her the connection between Koozeman and the murders?”
“What? You’re not gonna hang anything on me. I didn’t-” And now Watt’s eyes were showing entirely too much white.
Mallory was standing in the doorway. Riker got to his feet, dusted his pants and walked toward the door.
“Hey, Riker,” said Watt, voice straining, breaking. “We had a deal.”
“I lied,” said Riker, closing the door behind him and leaving Oren Watt to Mallory.
He walked to the door of Charles’s office and knocked.
“Come in.” Charles was slumped behind his desk, staring down at the blotter. “You’ll never forgive me, will you?”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Charles. I’m really glad you tossed me around. Ah, you think I’m kidding?” He sat on a corner of the desk. His smile was wasted. Charles would not meet his eyes. “I used to worry about the kid. I mean, suppose something happened to me?‘’ Something like his rainy day bullet, which would not wait forever. ”Now I don’t have to worry anymore. I know you’ll always be there for her.“
Riker put out his hand, but Charles only stared at it.
“You’re just gonna leave it hanging out there in the air that way?”
Charles grasped Riker’s hand, but his face was a long way from coming to terms with what he had done, and what he had planned to do.
“Snap out of it, Charles. You’re breaking my heart here. I don’t need that kind of crap from you. I got Mallory for that.”
“Oren, I already know how scum like you happen to be on such friendly terms with a senator. He buys your work. That bastard is one of the ghouls, the crime scavengers.”
Oren Watt had recovered a bit of his emotional stability now. Mallory had trained him like a rat. As long as he answered the questions, she kept her distance.
“No, that’s not exactly right. He’s not a collector, he’s only in it for the money, the turnover profit. He’s part of the start-up market. He makes the initial investment.”
“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.