‘You never know, kid.’ A match sparked in his hand; the flame died in a cloud of exhaled smoke.
‘Don’t call me kid.’
Mrs Ortega returned to the front room and was plugging in the vacuum cleaner. Riker smiled at the woman.
‘You know, Mrs Ortega, we got a suspect here you’d really appreciate. All we know about the bastard is that he lives in a luxury condo, and he can clean an apartment like a pro.’
‘Then he wasn’t born no rich kid.’
‘Huh?’
‘Rich kids aren’t raised right. You can tell if they earn their money or get it the easy way. Mallory knows from clean.’ She turned to Charles. ‘Now your mother never let your feet touch the ground. You had live-in help when you were growing up. How do I know that? You don’t know what steel wool is, or what it’s for. I can always tell when you clean up after a meal in the office kitchen, and when it’s Mallory. Mallory was raised right.’
‘But this man who was raised right is a killer,’ said Charles in a somewhat defensive tone.
‘So? You think Mallory carries a gun for ballast in the wind?’ Mrs Ortega leaned on the vacuum hose and wagged her finger at Charles. ‘You can always tell the rich kids born with money. If the husband or the wife splits, they go off their feed for a week. You can tell how upset they are by the stock of booze and pills. But if the cleaning woman leaves them, their whole world falls apart. They go back to living like animals. So chances are your guy wasn’t born with money.’
Mallory was nodding as the woman said this. Mallory deferred to Mrs Ortega in all things regarding cleaning solvents and the chemistry of stains. Mrs Ortega might be the only human Mallory ever deferred to.
‘You can tell a lot about a person’s character from the way they clean and what they keep,’ said Mrs Ortega, waxing on in a rare philosophic mode.
‘You know,’ said Riker, turning to Charles, ‘I asked Mrs Ortega to clean my apartment about a year ago. She made the sign of the evil eye and turned her back on me. Now I figure I’m lucky she never saw it.’ A gray log of ashes fell from his cigarette and crumbled down the front of his suit as his arms shrugged out of his overcoat.
‘I don’t have to see your apartment, Riker.’ Mrs Ortega cast an appraising eye over his rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. ‘You’ve got at least three bags of garbage piling up in the kitchen. The sheets haven’t been changed in a month, and there are beer bottles under the bed. There might be two clean dishes in the cupboard. You’re real comfortable with spiders, and you’re seeing a woman tonight.’
Three heads turned to Mrs Ortega.
‘How did you know about the woman?’ asked Riker.
‘This morning you used a can of cheap spot remover. I can see the powder rings around the stains from here. You don’t usually get that fancy.’
Mallory nodded her respects to Mrs Ortega and headed for the door to her private office. ‘I have to pack my equipment. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
‘It’s good to see you again, Sergeant,’ said Charles. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’
‘Is it still morning?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’ll have a beer.’
The vacuum cleaner was moving slowly toward them, sucking conversation out of the air. When Mrs Ortega shut off the machine and turned to the quieter activity of dusting, Charles handed Riker a cold beer.
‘What Mallory’s doing is rather dangerous, isn’t it? I’m surprised you’re going along with it.’
‘She has to do it this way, Charles. There’s no evidence, no weapon, no witness, no motive. Everyone who can hold a rock has the means. The crime scene is six minutes from the building. Even the doorman has opportunity. You see the problem? If she can’t flush him out and fast, he gets away with murder.’
Charles’s brain was backing up in the conversation. No motive, did he say? Was it possible that Riker had not seen the manuscript that lay on the desk between them? As Riker’s eyes were settling on the ream of paper, some Mallory-guided instinct prompted him to call the man’s attention away from it.
‘You know, Markowitz wouldn’t like this at all. You’ll be close by her all the time, right?’
‘Like I said, Charles, I’m only along for the ride. She doesn’t need me. She’s not a kid any more, and she didn’t need anybody when she was one.’ He slugged back his beer.
‘But Louis always credited Helen with – ’
‘Helen could only see the good in Kathy, even when it wasn’t there. I remember how happy Helen was when Lou started bringing Kathy into work after school – it was the only way he could keep the kid from stealing New York. But Helen was only thinking about the positive role models of police officers.’
‘Apparently, she was right.’
‘And five days a week, the kid was surrounded by off-the-wall murders when other kids were out playing games.’
‘Didn’t Mallory ever play games with other children?’
‘She used to play with Markowitz. Now she plays alone.’
‘What sort of games did she like?’
‘I asked her once when she was maybe thirteen, what was her favorite. “Murder is the best game,” she says. I went all clammy. It was the way she said it. I asked Markowitz if he thought the kid was capable of killing. “Oh, yeah,” says Markowitz, like I’d asked him if Kathy could pitch a curve ball.’
‘That doesn’t tell me why you’re so confident that she can flush the killer out without getting hurt.’
‘If the suspects in this condo weren’t uptown taxpayers with good lawyers, we’d sweat the pack of them. Now when Mallory gets the perp, there won’t be any lawyers around. He’ll be under more stress than he’s ever known. He’ll flap his mouth with cameras rolling. The creeps always talk, even after we read them their rights. They lie, but they talk, they trip themselves up. If we don’t rush this perp, if a lawyer gets to him in time to shut his mouth, we lose him. No evidence, no case. It has to be quick. She has to flush him out fast and trip him up, or he gets away.’
‘But the danger.’
‘The biggest danger is that she stumbles over someone else’s dirty little secrets. You got the same percentage of scum in the Coventry Arms as you do in any tenement building.’
Charles picked up a photograph that had wafted to the floor from Riker’s small pile of papers.
‘Who is this?’
‘Amanda Bosch.’
‘But she looks nothing like Mallory. How did the mistake -?’
‘Well, she was alive when this shot was taken. Even I had to look at the body twice after the bugs had been at her.’
‘Have you notified her family yet?’
‘There’s no family alive to notify. Mallory liked that – less chance of a leak.’
‘What will happen to her?’
‘Her estate, whatever’s in her bank account, will go to the city tax office. The landlady will sell her stuff for back rent or put it out on the street. She’ll get a grave that no one will ever visit. And then she’ll be gone from the face of the earth. Or maybe not. Mallory could make her famous.’
The cat sat down between them, ignoring both of them and picking at the bandage on its ear. Charles was reminded of something Louis Markowitz had said: living with Mallory was like having a wounded animal in the house.
The building had been made to last and so it had, well into the twentieth century, and showed no signs of falling down at the cusp of the twenty-first. Dark wood beams and stucco facing rose for ten stories. The old West Side mansion would fit well with a gothic horror story.
Riker put down the heavy boxes to pant for a moment. Mallory had just slipped the doorman a hundred dollar bill.
The kid has style.
Riker wondered how she was going to bury the money in the department expense account.
As Mallory talked, the doorman smiled continuously, lips parting ever wider until they threatened to escape the margins of his face.