‘Tell Palanski to back off, Judd.’
The captain sighed. ‘You know, Jack, with all the moonlighting and the free food and discounts for cops, all the little fiddles getting worked all over town, if we ever enforced the rules, we wouldn’t – ’
‘I don’t know where you think you’re going with this, Judd,’ said Coffey. ‘You got something on one of mine, you spit it out! Now!’
Thomas put up his hands to say, Okay, enough, and he lifted his bulk out of the chair and left the room.
And Riker knew that was too damn easy. He was wondering what the captain’s own fiddle might be when Coffey turned on him, angry.
‘Do you know what Mallory has on Palanski?’
‘No idea. She’d never rat out another cop. She might shoot him if he gets in her way, but she’ll never rat on him.’
‘You went too far with Judd Thomas.’
‘It’s her life on the line. You know Palanski is dirty and I know it. He’s responsible for all the damn leaks. One of those leaks could get her killed.’
‘You went too far, Riker. Thomas finds Palanski useful the way I find Mallory useful. If all she’s got on him is flashy clothes and fifty-dollar haircuts – Mallory’s clothes are tailor-made, for Christ’s sake, and she doesn’t cut her hair over the bathroom sink, does she? Right now, we’re real lucky the captain got his new job with politics instead of brains. But let’s not count him a complete moron. Let’s not push our luck, okay?’
Riker hated it when Coffey was right. ‘You want me to see what I can turn up on Palanski?’
‘No. I’ve got someone else working Palanski undercover. So just table that, okay? No more speculation, even if your lips don’t move.’
‘You didn’t put it through Internal Affairs?’
‘No, no IA men. I want to keep this one in the family. When you see Mallory, tell her to get her ass back in here. I think it would be nice if she went through the formality of handing in reports – just to be polite.’
‘You know, this might be her version of professional courtesy. Maybe she thinks you’d rather not know what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. She might have something there. Think about your pension.’
‘I’ve already got a problem with the way she’s handling the case. She’s trying to cover three suspects by herself. It’s a scattergun approach for one cop. If she doesn’t get him soon, she’ll lose him.’
‘Oh, I think she knows which one it is. If she tells you she has three suspects, you can figure two of them for smoke. She thinks you don’t trust her to run her own investigation, and that’s wise on your part. I haven’t trusted her since she was ten.’
‘It’s nothing supernatural, I promise you,’ said Charles.
Justin was deathly quiet, his small face turned to the cab window, to the fall of snowflakes silently crashing against the glass.
‘When I get home, I’ll go back down to the cellar and have a close look at the target. I’ll find that the old mechanism was triggered by accident. You probably jostled it when you leaned on the target. It’s that simple. In fact, I don’t even need to look. And I won’t look, that’s how much faith I have in you. There’s no other explanation, Justin. The knife came from the other side of the target. No one made it fly through the air. All right?’
The boy turned to him. In that small face, there was clearly a will to smile.
When they exited the cab in front of the school on the Upper East Side, Charles stayed awhile to watch Justin join the other boys who were standing about the yard in groups of threes and fours. But Justin did not join them. Hands in his pockets, head down, he stood alone by tacit agreement of the yard.
Charles winced, for he was watching a living memory of his own school days. Now a bell called the boys back into the building, two by two, and three by three, and Justin on his own.
Charles unfurled his umbrella against the hard drive of snow and stared at the park on the other side of the wide street. Mallory would be a straight shot across the park and a jog in the road north. Perhaps he would visit her if she was at the Rosens’ apartment. Also just the other side of the park was the crime scene.
Cabs passed by him, empty of passengers and ripe for the hailing, but he liked to walk in the snow. Over the years, he had acquired a taste for all the solitary occupations. And so would young Justin.
On his foul-weather meanderings closer to home, Charles would frequently encounter others in this select club. He was on a nodding acquaintance with fellow rain walkers and snow walkers, and they would smile at one another in passing, recognizing the secret sign – the gait of no pressing business, while all the other pedestrians were hurrying along, anxious to be out of the wet and the cold.
He crossed the street and took a path that wound down from the sidewalk and into a pristine valley of new snow. Only his footsteps marked the way until he came to the road which led through the park. He walked along the road, wondering what Mallory was up to, wondering if he would actually want to know that.
Now a horse-drawn carriage approached him. The snow ploffed on his umbrella, and it suddenly occurred to him that his shoes were not meant for snow. It crossed his mind to hail the carriage driver. But no. He let the carriage pass unhailed. New shoes could be got, new snow was not so easy to come by. He continued his solitary tracking.
What would Markowitz have said about Mallory’s negligence in failing to visit the crime scene? What might she have missed? Nothing, probably. Her refusal was most likely only an overreaction to Riker’s lecture on procedure.
Suppose he visited the scene himself, and possibly noticed something useful? How would she react to that? Well, they were partners, weren’t they?
‘You’re living in a fool’s paradise,’ said a voice which had come to shelter under Charles’s umbrella. ‘Behold a pale horse,’ said the man who materialized at his side to hold a conversation with a third person who was not visible to the naked mind.
Charles felt an involuntary shudder. He looked down to a shiny bald spot in the center of the smaller man’s matted swirls of gray hair. The old man’s coat was dirty, but good wool. A scarf was wrapped around his neck and trailed behind him on the ground. It was the longest scarf Charles had ever seen, and with all the colors of an unwashed, unkempt, unraveling rainbow. The man continued to walk along with him, accepting the shelter of the umbrella as though it were his due.
Charles knew he could never look on madness in the same way again. He had done his own time with one who was not there. And he had to wonder how often Malakhai had done that trick before the damage became permanent, before it became impossible to send Louisa away. Each thought changed the configurations of the very brain itself.
‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.’
‘I’m Charles Butler. Good day.’ He moved the umbrella to one side, the better to protect his gray-haired companion from the driving snow which dusted the old man’s sloping shoulders.
‘And lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair,’ the old man intoned.
‘Well, perhaps it hasn’t been a good day,’ said Charles.
‘A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon at her feet.’
What is Mallory’s day like? What is she up to right now?
‘And there was war in heaven.’
That might not be far from the mark.
Now the old man parted company with Charles, as the invisible partner in conversation led the man down another path of revelation and gravel covered over with snow.
When Charles came to the site of the murder, the yellow strands of tape were still in evidence, stake-tied by their broken ends and waving in the white wind of snow.