"Kathleen, could we discuss a few practical matters?"
"Mallory," she corrected him automatically as she flipped the switches to light up the first computer.
"Fine. Mallory. About my accountant? He's very upset. Thinks I'm looking for faults in his work."
"Good." She accessed a file on the accountant's floppy disk. "He'll think long and hard before he dicks around with the books."
"Arthur? He wouldn't steal a paper clip. His whole life is dedicated to honorable accountancy." Charles stood behind her chair, wondering how much of her attention he had, and what he was likely to get. "He laminated the first tax form where his child appeared as a dependent. Some people bronze baby shoes… with Arthur it's tax forms. He's a good man, and I don't want to lose him."
"I didn't accuse him of anything."
"No? You demanded a copy of his disk so you could run your own audit. How was he supposed to take that?"
She was no longer listening. She stopped scrolling and stared at the entry for apartment 3B. "This one's way behind in the rent."
He bent down to look over her shoulder at the entry for Edith Candle. "The woman in 3B doesn't have to pay rent."
Mallory's head lifted slowly, eyes with just the hint of incredulity and sexuality.
"Mallory, go wash your eyes out with soap. She's an elderly woman and the previous owner of the building. She has a lifetime estate in that apartment. Are we done with 3B?"
The door buzzer sounded for the third time in one hour. In the past few weeks he had come to realize that she had been dead right about one thing: it had been a mistake to let the tenants know he owned the building. Though he employed a full-time superintendent, every complaint came first to his own door. His clients were less troublesome traffic, coming by appointment or conducting business by mail and telephone.
"Not so fast," said Mallory. "Which one is it?"
The quick buzz was followed up by a soft knock at the door.
"Dr Ramsharan," said Charles. "The psychiatrist in apartment 3A. Henrietta would never buzz twice. She thinks it's rude."
Mallory followed him out to the front room and watched as he opened the door. When Henrietta Ramsharan walked in, Mallory padded off to make the coffee, payment on a standing bet that he could tell her who was at the door before he opened it. It had been weeks since he'd had to make his own coffee.
He had been resistant to the idea of a coffee machine in the office, along with all the other machines, entirely too many mechanical devices in his view. Then he realized that it was Louis's coffee machine which she had purloined from the old NYPD office. Oddly enough, he took the stolen coffee-maker as a sign of progress in her social development. It had been a theft of sentiment.
Every time he entered the office kitchen, he avoided looking directly at that machine. If it were possible for the spirit of Louis Markowitz to inhabit an object, it would be the coffee-maker. Each time Charles glanced at it, it reproached him for not figuring out how Mallory spent her days. He had not bought the story that she preferred to work nights. He was not a complete idiot, though he felt like one.
"I'm sorry to disturb you," the polite Henrietta Ramsharan was saying as he waved her over to the couch. There were touches of gray at her temples, which only glimmered as highlights in the loose fall of jet black hair recently escaped from the pins which held it in a tight bun from nine till five. She was wearing her after-work blue jeans which were faded and broken-in for comfort, but she had not been spending her free time in any comfortably relaxing pursuit. He noted the agitation about her eyes and mouth. The first person who leapt into his mind was the tenant who agitated everyone, even the placid Henrietta.
"Herbert, right?"
"Yes," said Henrietta. "How did you know?"
"Oh, I'm getting to know Herbert rather well."
But Henrietta knew everyone in the building. She had lived here for more than ten years, but that alone did not explain why all the tenants knew one another's history and business. At his former residence on the Upper East Side, he had gone four years without saying as many words to the people who shared one common wall with him. He had previously taken that experience as a reflection on his lack of social skills. Mallory had been the one to point out that cool-to-chilly neighbor relations were the norm, and that this building's close network of tenants was the oddity. They had no tenants' association, no focal point, no common gathering place. The small mystery nagged at him now and then. He suspected Edith Candle could explain it, but would not.
"So, you think Herbert has a gun," he said.
"How did you know that?"
"You know Martin Teller, lives across the hall from Herbert."
She nodded. "Of course."
"When I passed Martin in the hall this morning," said Charles, "it was hard to ignore the bulletproof vest, particularly on a warm day. Mallory has one, but she doesn't wear it to go grocery shopping. Ergo – Herbert."
"Martin's terrified of Herbert, I know that. But were you aware of the lipstick on Edith Candle's wall?"
"No. Was her apartment – "
"No vandalism, nothing like that. You knew about the fugues? She told me she'd known you all your life."
"Fugues?"
"The automatic writing?"
No he hadn't known. Edith had never used automatic writing in the magic act with Cousin Max. She had done a mind-reading act, he remembered that much. Something disturbing in a childhood memory began to emerge, some overheard conversation, but it was not the stuff that eidetic memory would help him with.
"Sometimes it's called trance writing," Henrietta was saying. "Edith was trying to wash the words off the wall when Martin came down to pick up his leftovers."
"His leftovers."
"He doesn't make much money from his art, not since the recession started. Edith gives him meals three times a week. She's been doing that for a few years now. So Martin just walked in on her when she was scrubbing the wall."
"Martin has a key to Edith's apartment?"
"Her door is never locked. You didn't know? You might talk to her about that. I've spent years trying to convince her it's dangerous. Strange people can always find a way into an apartment building, even one with good security."
"So it could have been vandalism."
"The writing? Oh, no. Edith does the writing, but she never has any memory of doing it."
"It's happened before?"
"Yes, but that was a long time ago."
And by her downcast eyes and shift of position, it was not open to discussion. Curious.
"What was written on the wall this time?"
"I don't know, and Martin won't tell me. You know Martin. It's a rare day if he says three words. The three he gave me were death, here, soon. I asked him if he was frightened of Herbert. He nodded and saved a word. That's all I know. Martin is a very fragile personality. And just the idea that Herbert might have a gun is making me a little nervous, too."
Mallory was standing over them. She had just materialized by the couch with two mugs of coffee and no warning.
"I'll fix that," she said, handing one mug to Charles and the other to Henrietta.
"No you won't. I'll handle it," said Charles. Herbert's paranoid little heart would not stand up to an interview with Mallory.
Henrietta sipped her coffee and smiled her thanks to the younger woman. "It might be a bad idea to approach Herbert directly. He's ripe for an explosion. I've seen it building up for a long time. His wife is divorcing him, and it's a pretty messy lawsuit. And then he got a lay-off notice at the end of September. I don't think he can handle one more thing, not a hangnail, not anything."
Charles looked up to Mallory, who seemed skeptical. "That's clear enough?" he asked.
"Yeah. He's a squirrel," she said.
Henrietta and Charles exchanged glances, silently approving Mallory's clarity and economy of words.
The phone rang. As he was rising and reaching towards the desk, Mallory beat him to it with no apparent effort at speed. It was disconcerting the way she moved about, or rather, disappeared from one spot and reappeared in another.