"We're gonna push for dealing, too."
"What about the little boy?" asked Charles.
She had ranted on and on about the boy, even when she believed that she was bleeding from every pore and dying. The drug had ripped her mind to shreds, and yet she had fought for words to tell him about a damaged child. Mallory, the hard case. No one had ever known her, not really, except maybe Helen Markowitz who had only suspected the best of her.
Unpolished grace, unlikely paladin, thy name is Mallory.
"The kid's in custody," Coffey was saying. "There's more than enough evidence of child abuse. Redwing's going away for a long time. In my sleep, I could nail her on five counts, good for five years each. And that's without the stock scam. The US Attorney can try her for that one from a prison cell."
"No murder charge," said Charles. "So, you don't believe she killed Louis Markowitz?"
"Naw. I talked the DA out of it. He only liked the idea 'cause she has the size for it. But she hasn't got the brains to sucker Markowitz. Maybe we'll get something on conspiracy with the bastard she was working for."
"Redwing gave you a name?"
"She doesn't know it. She calls the head of the operation the Director. Before the surveillance team lost her, they'd tracked her through five neighborhoods, one seance for every day of the week. We figure there's more than forty people in the network. We're gonna start rounding them up this morning."
Riker was looking down on his notebook. "Mallory told me they had more action going than a medium-size bank could handle. Between all the seance groupies, there was enough capital to run a small country."
"We can count on half of them climbing over each other in a race to turn state's evidence in exchange for immunity," said Coffey. "It was one of the craziest scams I've ever seen."
"Let me guess, it's more fun that way," said Charles. "The Director used Redwing to collect insider tips from a pool of majority stockholders. Then, instructions for sales and purchases were spread over this large client base – no single transaction large enough to merit investigation. Redwing provides all the clients with the crystal ball defense should the SEC ask questions. Redwing and the Director split their cut of the profits."
"Nicely done," said Coffey. "But it wasn't a split. The Director paid Redwing a very small commission. We had an SEC investigator explain it to her, just the scope of the single transaction Mallory gave us. Redwing went crazy. She had no idea that much money was changing hands. So now she's willing to cooperate, but she can't tell us much."
"If she doesn't know the Director's name, how did the two of them come together?"
"Pearl Whitman set it up. She went out shopping for mediums. She interviewed quite a few of them, Redwing says, before she found one who was reliably dishonest."
"How did the Director receive payment?"
"No idea. We assume Miss Whitman handled that."
"But the seances continued after Whitman's death. Not likely the Director would continue funneling the stock information without payment."
"The SEC man figures we'll find a foreign account set up for deposit. We won't know until we bring in the whole cartel."
"So why the attack on Mallory? It's not too bright, is it? Calling attention to herself by trying to kill a police officer?"
"She said she thought Mallory was going to expose the whole operation."
"Did she say where she got that idea? Did someone suggest it to her?"
"Dumb as Redwing is, it would've been hard to miss Mallory's brains. And then her pretty face was in the paper on the day of Markowitz's funeral, along with a nice little bio on the cop's daughter the cop. Mallory probably scared the shit out of Redwing when she had herself invited to the seance."
Mallory stirred in the white sheets, and three tired men turned to look at her. The gray window light of morning was humanizing the fluorescent lighting.
"Hey, what did the doctor say?" asked Coffey, nudging Riker's chair with one foot.
Riker looked down to his notebook again and read from the page which was blank but for the word okay. 'It's a new designer drug. Nasty stuff. The doctor who pumped her stomach says he got three deaths put down to this junk in the last year, all from self-inflicted wounds. Victims put their eyes out, rip their veins out. There's no permanent damage to Mallory. She's got a few bruises and cuts. That's it. She'll be okay, but her reaction time's gonna be a little slow for a few days."
"She thought she was bleeding to death when Riker and I brought her in," said Charles. "But there was no blood on her except for that cut on her head and the dried blood from the dog-bite victim."
"It's a lot like LSD," said Riker. "She probably did see the wounds. Even Mallory's got to believe what she sees with her own eyes."
Charles wondered if Mallory had seen the writing on Edith's wall and believed that, too. No, not likely. Not Mallory. She had a first-rate mind. She had probably seen Edith rather clearly then.
So, she was forewarned, and yet she walked into it.
Coffey put his hand on Riker's shoulder. "You're on babysitting detail again. Mallory doesn't go anywhere. You got that?"
"Yeah, Lieutenant. I can handle it."
"If you need to get some sleep, have the doctor sedate the shit out of her first. You got that, too?"
"Yeah."
"Could I have her house keys?" asked Charles. "If she's going to be here for a few days, she'll need some things from home. The nurse gave me a list."
"No problem. And thanks for the help, Charles." Smiling, he shook Charles's hand and held onto it a fraction of a second too long. "Was that old bio on the Soho murder any use to you?" Coffey was not smiling now.
So Riker had thought it worth mentioning to Coffey. And now Coffey was waiting on Charles to give him an explanation.
"Yes, thank you," said Charles.
The young policeman's brain was not so quick as Mallory's, but worked as well in its own time. Suppose he did give Coffey his explanation? What could Coffey do about it?
Nothing.
What Edith had done he could never prove. But one day soon, he and Coffey must talk. It had to end.
CHAPTER 11
Charles dropped the duffle bag, spilling out Mallory's toothbrush, hairbrush, robe and slippers onto the hall carpet. He wore the slack-jaw expression of a man who had just seen a ghost. And he had.
He walked through the open doorway into the den and met Louis Markowitz. The man inhabited this room as surely as if Charles could see him in the body. Louis was at work all over the back wall, and he was as messy as he had been in life.
Charles's memory recreated one section of the den's cork wall as it had appeared in Louis's office before he was murdered. The mental photograph agreed with half of this wall. The second half of the wall was also pure Louis Markowitz in style, but the man had been two days dead when the first of these photographs had been taken.
He pulled aside an overlay of paper on the right side of the cork. Photos and papers were more neatly aligned on the next layer. On the bottom layer, every bit of paper was machine-precision straight. Layer by layer, the beautiful machine had gone awry until she had captured her father's method of order passing for chaos.
On Mallory's side of the wall, an early layer of clutter held the background check on Margot Siddon. She had rejected Margot in favor of the medium on the next layer. Henry Cathery and Jonathan Gaynor were off to one side in separate categories. He pulled the photographs of Redwing off the board, eliminating the clutter of the red herring.
"Louis, talk to me," he whispered to the other side of the wall.
The bulletin board began to speak. A handwritten note jumped out at him, and credit reports, early 1980s stock transactions, and bank records. This was all Louis had to work with when he tailed the murderer to the scene of Pearl Whitman's death in the East Village. Was it the murderer he was trailing? Why had they all assumed that?