When Mallory slammed the door behind her, the Kipling boy was yelling, ‘Look what she did to my dog!’
Mallory returned by way of the stairwell. The door to the Rosens’ apartment was open. Could she have been that stupid?
This time, the cat didn’t cry when she dropped him. He was even prepared for the fall. Nose had grown accustomed to this game of holding and dropping. He padded away, yawning.
She opened the drawer of the table by the door.
The drawer was empty; her Smith & Wesson revolver was gone.
Nothing else had been disturbed. The cap gun lay on the table where she had placed it.
What now? She couldn’t call in for backup and admit she’d lost the gun. Neither Coffey nor Riker would let her live that one down. A rookie would not have lost her gun.
A crash came from the direction of the bedroom.
She passed through the kitchen and slipped a wine bottle into her hand. Now she entered the bedroom. The cat was standing over the remains of a broken lamp. There was no mystery to the breakage. A fringe of the lamp shade was tangled in the cat’s paw.
But there was still the problem of the gun.
She picked up the phone and dialed Charles from the bedroom. ‘I’m in a big hurry, Charles. Go to the center drawer in my desk and get the old Long Colt. And bring the box of ammo with it. You’ll have to turn off the…’ She lowered the phone at the sound that may or may not have been the cat. Now she set the receiver back on its cradle to stifle Charles’s loud repeated ‘Hello?’ coming from the mouthpiece.
She left the bedroom, quickly, silently gliding down the short hallway to the den. She flipped the array of switches for the cameras, backup tapes and audio.
She entered the front room to find the cat crawling under the couch and Harry Kipling standing in the center of the room. The cap gun was lying on the coffee table.
How much time would it take Charles to get to her with the real gun?
‘You left your door open,’ said Kipling. ‘That was careless.’
She had meant to make his access easy, but she had planned to have a gun in her hand when he came through the door. It was an odd moment to be thinking of Riker’s I-told-you-so grin. Too late for backup, and Charles was miles from here.
The cameras were rolling.
There was time to wonder if Coffey would catch her in this screw-up, or if she could lie her way out of it.
Max Candle’s knife lay on a shelf of the bookcase behind Kipling. Had he seen it? Originally, she had planned to steer him to it, so he would have a weapon in his hands in the event the cameras should catch her blowing away a taxpayer. But that plan had been contingent on having a gun in her own hand. And where was he hiding her gun?
Kipling was still staring at the cap gun on the table.
‘You recognize it, Harry? It’s the same toy gun you used to teach the cat to dance. Now Nose only has to see a gun and he dances. Was it the noise of the caps? Did you fire that toy close to his head to make him dance?’
And now the cat began to snore.
Charles was closing the door to his apartment. So that was it? I’m in a hurry! Bring me a gun! How many weapons did she need all at once? She had a rather large gun and a sharp knife in her possession now. But who was he to question Mallory, he who kept company with a dead woman.
He was crossing the hall to the offices of Mallory and Butler, Ltd, wondering which of all the stupid things he had said had made her the most angry. He had accused her of lack of logic, and of underestimation of…
Oh, fool.
She had questioned him about a blind man. Not too quick to underestimate that suspect, was she? And now she was gathering more weapons. No lack of caution there. Where was his own logic?
Perhaps he had gotten everything wrong, genius that he was. What had possessed him to take Coffey’s side in this? At the time it had made some sense, but now? Maybe Coffey had only feared she was too fixed in her knowledge of the suspect. Riker had been right to caution him. He should have shown her more respect. He must not let her down now.
He unlocked the door to Mallory’s private office and strode quickly to her desk. The center drawer was locked.
Now that was a snag. He had no keys for drawers. Mallory must assume that everyone was as gifted as she in the art of breaking and entering. He picked up the letter opener he had given her. It was the only object in the room not manufactured in the current decade. In fact, it dated back to another century. He hesitated only for a moment, hefting the irreplaceable piece in his hand. Then he inserted it into the space above the drawer and used force to pry the metal open.
An ear-splitting squeal was the first warning, followed by a cascade of bells, giant bells, gongs in hellish amplification. This must be Mallory’s idea of accommodating his aversion to high technology. She had wired the office for an alarm, and in place of an annoying beep or siren, she had worked in his recordings of church bells. And now he was inside the bell tower, inside the bells themselves.
He put up his hands to cover his ears. He would altogether lose his ears if he stayed much longer. He could turn it off, but there was not time enough to hunt the wiring from the drawer before serious damage was done to him. And the speakers might be anywhere in the myriad of electronic equipment. There could be no direction to sound when one’s head was itself the clapper of a monster bell.
He opened the wooden case nested in the center drawer, and there was Markowitz’s old.38 Long Colt, gleaming with Mallory’s good housekeeping, which extended into the barrels of antique guns. He picked up the revolver and the ammunition box and ran for the door. The peal of the church bells from hell followed him down the stairs and into the street, where every window had a head sticking out of it.
He put out his hand to flag down a cab, silently begging forgiveness from the neighbors.
Kipling walked back to the front door and locked it. ‘I don’t think we want to be disturbed right now.’
What would Charles do when he met with a locked door? He had the size to kick it in, but he would not know how.
‘How did you get on to it?’ Harry Kipling lowered himself to a straight-back chair and motioned her to another.
She remained standing.
He leaned back in the chair, lifting its front feet off the rug and rocking on the two back legs, staring absently into space. His face was drawn, dramatic in the hollows below the high cheekbones where afternoon shadows followed the contours. He seemed tired, at the point of giving in or giving up. ‘What mistake did I make?’
‘You made a lot of them,’ said Mallory. They had been tap dancing for ten minutes now. Where was the gun? It could be hidden in his belt at the small of the back. He had not yet looked directly at the knife with the crest of Max Candle.
‘How much do you want?’ Kipling smiled. ‘This is a simple case of extortion, am I right?’
‘What’s it worth to you, Harry?’
‘What’s my marriage worth? Call my wife’s accountant. I don’t have all day for this. How much do you want to keep it quiet?’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Desperation. If you want the sordid details, you’re not getting them. Just tell me how much money you want.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
She would not allow her eyes to travel back to the knife, to give it away. But she knew she could have it in her hand in a heartbeat if she only had the advantage of position. The chair and the rocking Kipling blocked the way.
Moving in slow silence, she angled around Kipling, who was holding the cap gun in his hand, examining it as a curiosity. She could see him in profile now. There was no gun concealed in the small of his back. He was dressed in a polo shirt and close-fitting slacks. There was no place on his person to conceal a large weapon.
So where was her damn gun?
‘So I had a relationship with Amanda Bosch – now how much do you want? How much not to tell my wife?’