She picked up the receiver of the antique telephone.
Well, it was not altogether an antique anymore, was it?
He had been dismayed to find that she had rewired it and discarded the original base for one which accommodated a plug for an answering machine. And he only discovered the job when his incoming calls were ripped out of his mouthpiece and pulled into the desk drawer.
"Mallory and Butler… Hello, Riker. Hold on a sec."
She had to open the drawer to put the phone on hold. And now they both looked down on the blinking light-of four messages glowing inside the desk. If she was annoyed with him, it never showed as she walked back to her private office and pulled the door closed behind her.
He turned back to Henrietta. "Do you want me to speak to Edith?"
"No," she said, a bit too quick, too final, and in the attitude of absolutely not as opposed to no, I don't think so.
"Mallory, where've you been all day? I musta called a hundred times."
"Four times. Charles never looks for messages. He's pretending we don't have an answering machine."
"I got something," said Riker. "Gaynor and Cathery each have alibis for two of the murders, but together, they can't alibi all the murders."
"So? I'm not big on conspiracy theories if that's where you're going with this."
"Wait. Cathery can alibi his grandmother's murder, and Gaynor can alibi his aunt's murder – "
"Riker, I saw that movie too. It doesn't fit, not if Markowitz knew who the killer was. If the old man figured two suspects, he wouldn't have done the surveillance by himself. How could he?"
"You won't like the answer to that one, kid." "Give."
"Coffey doesn't think Markowitz worked it out. He figures the perp suckered Markowitz. The old man got killed because he didn't know who it was, never saw it coming."
"Oh, great detective work. Coffey was the one who figured Whitman for a snatch when a half-bright chimp could have told him she was meeting the perp at the scene."
"Hey, kid. This is Riker, here. I'm on your side, remember?"
"Anything turn up on the BDA in Markowitz's calendar?"
"Naw," said Riker. "Coffey's off that track. I'd do it on my own, but I got no leads. I've been through the old house in Brooklyn looking through his stuff. Nothing in the credit-card bills or the checkbook, but who knows. That little den of his looks just like his office. Easy to miss something in a mess like that. Maybe if you went through it? The door seals can come off anytime you want."
"Yeah, first chance I get."
When she hung up the phone, the first computer in the row of three was still screening the file on the old recluse in 3B. Charles had contributed very little information on Edith Candle in the past two weeks. He was a great respecter of privacy, and she had been unable to break him of this good quality.
Mallory looked up to the ceiling. She felt the old woman's presence before she heard the scrape of chair legs on the bare floorboards overhead. A blinking red light on the third terminal told her that Edith Candle was active again, powering up her computer and sending something out over the modem, that box which allowed the old woman to wander the electronic net from New York to the Tokyo Exchange and back again in seconds only.
Mallory picked up her test set, a black rotary dial with a handgrip. She dialed a number the telephone company used for maintenance checks as she rolled her chair over to the third terminal. Through the wires of the phone company which led into Candle's modem, Mallory climbed up into the computer one floor above her head and watched the screen that Candle was accessing in apartment 3B. The old woman wasn't following the stock-exchange figures tonight. She had patched into a small and remote commercial information network and was requesting a credit check. This J.S. Rathbone must be another wealthy spook groupy. She turned back to the third screen and watched the names of stock issues scrolling by as the credit-check service fed Rathbone's stock portfolio into Candle's computer in the apartment upstairs.
So far, none of the stock activity had shown up in mergers or hostile takeovers. However, Candle had remarkable luck in selling off stocks just prior to devastating drops in value. One of these drops had been brought on by the recall of a defective and dangerous product. Candle had sold her stock just prior to the information being made public. And she also had a streak of luck in making stock purchases before sudden booms in product development, also non-public information. One such purchase had resulted in stock prices doubling. Scores of these instances put Candle in the realm of world-class fortune-telling or insider trading. But there was no hard evidence. No single transaction matched the huge profits on the merger of Pearl Whitman's company.
Mallory switched on the second computer and flew into cyberspace. With the tap of a key, she landed inside the Washington, DC database of the Securities and Exchange Commission. No recent filings on stock activity would coincide with Candle's recent purchases, but there was a strong link to the Todd and Remmy merger of four years ago. This deal was well inside the statute of limitations, but the SEC seemed to have lost interest in Candle since the Whitman Chemical merger in the early 1980s. Perhaps they were shy of the crystal-ball defense. Ah, gold.
She was scanning the profiteer list of the Todd and Remmy merger. She found a familiar name from Gramercy Park, Estelle Gaynor, and a footnote that tied her to an old investigation. She neatly copied the block of type with five taps of the keys and shifted it onto a floppy disk. Now she patched in Candle's own credit check from the same firm which was feeding the old lady.
Apparently, Edith Candle was a longtime subscriber to this credit-check network, and when one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food. Mallory had always avoided this by never paying for the networks" she hacked into. Candle had been less prudent. The file was bare-bones traces of financial activity. With a quick shuffle of files, she added this new data to the old US Attorney's file on the Securities and Exchange Commission action, the same document which had led her into partnership with Charles and this window on the old woman up the stairs in 3B.
Perhaps an hour had passed before she heard the door buzzer again, and sounds of the door opening and closing, then the indistinct voices in conversation. She was a few minutes more putting the file on 3B in order before she closed it.
When she walked back to the reception area, Henrietta Ramsharan was gone, and the pinch-faced woman from Gramercy Park was sitting in front of Charles's desk.
"She's the one," said the woman in a shrill voice, waving the business card in Mallory's direction. "Now, don't tell me you don't do this sort of thing, like I've asked you to do something filthy, like a divorce case or something. One can carry discretion too far."
Charles had a trapped look about him as he slouched low in the chair behind the desk.
Mallory sat down in a Queen Anne chair to one side of the desk. "My partner handles a different kind of clientele. He deals with more unusual problems."
Charles looked at her in an openly suspicious way. His face couldn't hide a thought.
To Mrs Pickering he said, "My usual clients are research institutes, universities, the occasional government commission. I explore unusual gifts, talents, different modes of intelligence. I also develop ways of applying these gifts to occupations or research projects. It's my partner here who does the investigative work." He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. "Mrs Pickering was wondering what business you had in Gramercy Park."
He was smiling but hardly meaning it.