Quinn lurched forward. His last thought before he fainted was that this woman must hail from Charles Butler’s planet, for she opened her arms wide to receive his falling body and to stain her robe with the blood of a stranger.
“No one murdered Peter Ariel,” said Andrew, as he began his story in a monotone. “He was stoned on drugs and very clumsy. I was there when the artwork fell on top of him. He was killed instantly. Koozeman was furious. All that planning and promotion for nothing. He’d done such a brilliant job launching this career, despite the lack of talent. He had Emma Sue and myself as the critics to promote Peter in newspapers. Dean Starr doubled as a critic and a publicist. That’s all his art magazine ever was, you know, a public relations plug for artists who were willing to pay for their reviews. But then it was all for nothing. The artist was killed by his own work, a potential joke of the art world.
“By the time Emma Sue arrived, Dean had come up with the idea to make it look like murder, to sensationalize the death and try to salvage something from sales of the artwork. Well, what was the harm in that? Peter Ariel was already dead. We’d pooled a lot of money to grease a lot of hands-editors of art magazines, and a promised slot in a museum group show. It was a major investment for all of us.”
He fell silent for a moment, losing the threads to this ramble. Mallory touched his shoulder and asked, “Was it Koozeman’s idea to butcher the body and work it into the sculpture?”
“Yes, Koozeman’s idea… Starr loved the concept and so did Emma Sue. All they had to work with was the fire axe from the box with the extinguisher. They underestimated the time it would take to cut up the body parts. All three of them took off their clothes and went to work. I stood by the door to keep watch. It was hard work, cutting up a body with that small axe, but once they got into the rhythm of it, it went much faster. My job was to call out if anything untoward happened-say if Quinn showed early. Had we left him a message then? I can’t remember. If anything happened, if anyone came, I was to call out and give them time to get through the door in the wall. I had no blood on me. I would say I’d just discovered the body. We’d thought of everything, almost everything.
“I could hear what they were doing in the room behind me. There was no door I could close. The noise was as sickening as the stench. Once, I turned around. It was an incredible sight, the three of them, naked and bloody, working over the body.
“It was then, while my back was turned, that Aubry came in. I swear I believed I had locked that door. But I was drunk that night-I’ve been drunk every night since. Aubry shouldn’t have been there. We’d left a message to send her to New Jersey. It was so incredible that she should show up at the gallery. It was the last thing we expected. We’d only meant to use her name to bait Quinn into coming. We needed him, his name linked to Peter Ariel in the press. Koozeman said Quinn would not be able to resist a comment on the artwork of the butchered body. You see, Koozeman had been a promising sculptor once, and now he was determined that this was to be the best piece of work he’d ever done. But now here was Aubry, and the whole thing was coming undone.
“I tried to stop her-to turn her around before she could see. ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. She misunderstood. We’d left a message to say it was an emergency. She thought something had happened to her uncle. I couldn’t stop her. She ran into the room. And then she stopped, frozen. Koozeman was just turning around, naked and holding the head of Peter Ariel in his hands. Aubry turned to run. Emma Sue screamed, ‘Stop her!’ I did stop her, I was even trying to explain when Dean Starr dragged her back into the room. Emma Sue was already running across the floor. She brought the axe down on Aubry.
“No one had expected that to happen. Emma Sue did it again, and again. The others stood back, and I turned away. Aubry was screaming to me to help her. I’d known her since she was a little girl. We were friends, you see. And now she was bleeding, dying, and she was asking me for help. I turned my back. Then, all I could hear was the gurgling. I closed my eyes. It went on for a long time.”
And now he put his hands over his eyes as if it were all happening again. “She would not die. I listened to the sounds of the axe, the scrabbling on the floor. She was crawling back toward the door. Her hand was within an inch of me when I turned to see Emma Sue strike the final blow to the back of her skull.” His hands fell away from his eyes. “That ended it.”
He turned to Sabra. “Then the others made the pact. They were all involved now and there was no way out. They each took the axe and made a cut in her body. And then they came for me. They forced me to take the axe. Starr pressed my hands around it and dragged it across her throat.
“They sent me back to the window. Quinn was due, but Koozeman, that crazy man, he was intent on his work of art. Starr and Emma Sue left the gallery. I stayed by the window, crying, waiting for it to be over. When Koozeman was done with them, he forced me to look at what he had done with the bodies.”
Andrew looked at Sabra. “Well, you saw what he did. You were there. When Koozeman had cleaned himself up and put on his clothes, he dragged me through the door in the wall. You and your brother were just coming in as we were leaving.”
He bowed his head. “I remember you wore that fabulous multicolored coat. I saw you as the door was closing. You looked so much like Aubry. Koozeman watched you and your brother through the pinhole. He couldn’t resist. He wanted to see how his work would be received. You were to be his first critics. I left by the back door. I ran all the way home.”
When the story was done, Sabra rose and walked to the back of the terrace where the fire escape ladder cropped up from the low wall. She reached out to the curled rail of the ladder.
Mallory lifted her gun. “I can’t let you go.”
“I don’t think I’ll get far, but I don’t want to end here.” Sabra lifted her head. “You understand?”
Mallory nodded. “But I can’t-”
Sabra walked back to her. She brought her face close to Mallory’s and kissed her cheek. “Yes, yes you can.” Then Sabra returned to the low wall at the edge of the terrace and lowered herself over the side and down the rungs of the fire escape.
Mallory walked to the ladder and watched the descent. Sabra climbed down slowly; blood smeared the handholds and dripped to the rungs below her feet. She slipped and lost one foothold and then the other. She hung there for a moment, and then she was falling, screaming out as she fell past all the dark windows. She landed on a large metal trash bin parked below. She lay spread-eagled among the garbage, her head twisted at an unnatural angle.
An ambulance was parked outside the apartment building. The screaming sirens of two police units pulled up alongside of Riker’s car, all their spinning cherry lights flashing codes of fear and urgency to all the civilians hanging from open windows and clustering on the sidewalk. The young uniformed officers moved quickly out of their cars and into the building, guns drawn. As Riker left his own car, he heard the scream. It came from the alley to one side of the building. He ran into the narrow breach between the brick walls.
An old woman was spread out on the trash, which was piled high and overflowing the large metal bin. He didn’t need to reach out and touch her to know that she was dead. He stepped back and looked up to see Mallory leaning far out over the ledge of a terrace.
“No!” she yelled, as though ordering him to undo this death.
He held his breath as she swung her long legs over the side of the building and hung for a moment in the air, trying to gain a foothold on the slippery ladder, descending now to the fire escape. She skimmed the stairs with her running shoes, moving with fluid speed down the zigzag of the ironwork. When she was level with the trash bin she jumped from the fire escape and landed on her feet beside the body of the old woman.