"You got a minute?" he asked, slipping, uninvited, through the narrow space between Charles and the door frame. Herbert came up short in front of Mallory who barred the foyer and showed no signs of standing aside.
The little man cocked his head to one side and fixed her with the intense, unwavering glare of one eye, and he did this with all the zeal of turning a cross on a vampire. Mallory, taller by six inches, looked down on Herbert with the same distaste she might show for a messy road-kill.
"Actually, I don't have a minute, Herbert," said Charles, forgetting that it had not been a question but Herbert's version of hello.
Herbert was saying, "It's getting dangerous. Everyone has guns."
"Everyone?"
"Henrietta on the third floor. She has a gun."
"Well, she's had it for quite a while, hasn't she? Seven years she says."
"I didn't know that. If I'd known that, I would've acted sooner." Though his feet were planted on the carpet, the rest of him was in constant motion, eyebrows colliding with one another, head jerking from side to side, one pointy ringer stabbing the air as he spoke. "Do you know that a bullet can travel through four floors and kill an innocent person? You get rid of that gun or I take immediate action."
"And what sort of action might that be?" Foolish question. Herbert had only one solution to every problem from a leaking faucet to a burnt-out bulb in the hall.
"I'm calling a rent strike. All the tenants will back me on this. I want that gun out of this building. Now!" His finger was nearly touching Charles's face.
Mallory advanced a step, and Charles warned her off with a wave. He pulled the door open wider, as though that might help, as though Herbert picked up on cues less subtle than GET OUT! He didn't.
"Henrietta belongs to a gun club. The gun is properly licensed and registered. There's nothing you or I can do about it."
"Yeah? You think so? Suppose I get my own gun?"
"Let's see if I'm following your logic. In the event that Henrietta accidentally discharges her gun, you plan to deflect the bullet by firing on it as it rips up through the floorboards. Have I got it right?"
"I'm gonna get a gun."
Mallory reached out and tapped him on the shoulder, smiling as she made him jump. She put one hand on her hip, drawing one side of her jacket open and exposing the.357 Smith & Wesson in her shoulder holster. It was a very big gun, and Herbert's eyes were very wide.
"Not a good idea, pal." As her voice was silking along, she walked towards the little man, and step for step, he backed up to the door. "If I see you with a gun, if I hear a rumor that you've got gun, it'd better have all the legal paperwork. You got that?" For emphasis, she reached out and touched his chest with one long red fingernail.
Charles watched in awe as the little man paled and turned smartly on one heel. Remarkably, Herbert was leaving of his own accord, and so quickly, too, not even shutting the door behind him.
Charles stared at the blessedly empty spot on the carpet where Herbert had been standing.
"It's my recurring nightmare – him with a gun."
"He'll never get clearance to buy one. I'll tag his name with a psycho profile."
"You'll what?"
"I left a coded backdoor in the department computer. I can go in whenever I like. Nothing to it."
"Kathleen, I wish you wouldn't tell me things like that."
"You're beginning to sound like Markowitz." She turned her back on him and walked over to the century-old desk. She ran one hand across the polished surface and then sat down in the chair behind the desk as though trying it on for size.
"I stacked up the tenant paperwork in the next room, along with all the research material and the reports. You've got close to six square feet of paper in there. I can put all of that on disks with a scanner. When I'm done, it'll take up five square inches of space."
Oh, back to that again. "I prefer the idea of papers I can hold in my hand. Seems more real somehow."
"You can't do that anymore, Charles. You're being buried alive by paper."
"My accountant comes by once a month and takes a bag of it off my hands."
She was not amused. "So, next month, you can send him a disk over the modem – save him a trip and a hernia."
"Ah, now, you see, Kathleen, that's the problem with computers. One day there won't be any human transactions left. We'll all socialize by computer networks."
And her eyes said, "Nice try."
She was right; he knew that. He lacked Louis Markowitz's gift for creating order that passed for chaos. The more clutter Louis had added to his surroundings, the more details and data, the more efficiently his brain had worked. Charles's own clutter was mere confusion. He looked over the office and the perfect order she had created for him and wondered how many days would pass before he slipped beneath the snow line of the paperwork once more.
She was already reading the I-give-up signs in his face. She smiled slow and wide. "You need me. I'll start tomorrow. I can use one of the back rooms for my office."
"What? Work here? Kathleen, why would you want to work for me?"
"With you. I'm talking partnership." Purse and car keys in hand, she stood up and crossed the room to set a check on the cherrywood table by his chair.
The check bore the name of a major life-insurance company. The claim on Markowitz's death should have taken two months not two weeks. He wondered if she had facilitated the speed of the check with her computer-hacking skills or her gun.
"That'll buy a lot of computer equipment," she said. "So, do we have a deal?"
It was hard to picture her even in temporary tandem with another human being, let alone a partnership. She hardly acknowledged that there might be one or two other officers on the same police force.
She was always such a loner, said Louis Markowitz's letter which Charles had opened on the day the body was found. She never hung out in cop bars, never saw the sad, mean side of burn-out. She keeps company with machines.
When Louis Markowitz had given him the letter to hold against that day, Charles had felt honored, but curious, too. Why him, why not Rabbi Kaplan or someone else he had known longer?
Louis had said then, "Kathy's a special case. You deal with special cases all the time."
Indeed. Kaplan or any other man of the cloth would be a poor match for what Louis had described in his letter as an amoral savage:
When my Helen died a few years back, Kathy wanted to kill the whole world. It was all I could do to convince her it wouldn't be civil to gut the surgeon who failed Helen. When I'm dead, Commissioner Beak will bump her out of Special Crimes Section and put her on compassionate leave. Make her understand this is department policy, and Beale is not to be found in an alley strung up by his balls.
As he recalled, she had been very civilized about the forced leave. She had taken his advice on that matter with no argument, no protest at all. Why hadn't that made him suspicious? Well, obviously because he was an idiot.
He could only wonder what else had gone by him. He supposed there wasn't much point in asking her a direct question. He believed she really did like him well enough to count him as a friend, to confide in him at times, but there were limits. He would have to settle for damage control.
He looked around this perfectly ordered room. It was obvious to both of them that he needed her, even if she didn't need him, not him or any other creature on this planet. But her proposal of a partnership would cost him sleep. The things she did with other people's computers, and without their knowledge or consent.
She had a gift that would have gone begging in an era without computer technology. He marveled over the far-sighted genetic blueprint. Each encounter with a human born to a specific talent, applied or not, gave him a window on the future of all mankind. But his limited window on Kathleen Mallory was frightening. The partnership was an insane idea to be considered with the same careful thought he might give to walking through a minefield or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. And Louis would have been the first to tell him so.