„It’s not in the wall anymore. You can’t even tell where the hole was.“
„And the headless bird?“
„It went to swim with the fishes in the East River.“ Of course, that would depend on the vagaries of plumbing and sewage routes; Mallory had flushed the bird down a toilet.
This evening, Charles Butler was dressed and showered, but not shaved; his cleaning woman had hidden the razor.
Mrs. Ortega watched her employer pulling volumes from his library shelves. He called them guidebooks for the road.
„Where yagoin’?“
„Not every journey involves leaving the house,“ he said.
She perused a volume by Hermann Hesse, but found the print too dense for her taste. „Me, I like a good fast read,“ she said, „with lots of white space on the page.“
He ran one finger down a row of titles on a lower shelf, plucked out three novels and handed them to her. „Here, gifts, first-edition Hemingways. I think you’ll like them.“
She set them on top of her cleaning cart, then turned back to his own short stack. „I don’t get it. If you’ve already read them, what good are they?“
Mrs. Ortega could wait all day for an answer to that one. Charles Butler’s eyes had gone all strange as he focused on some point above her head and behind her. She turned around to see Mallory standing just inside the door.
Spooky kid – quiet as a cat.
One icy glance from Mallory told the cleaning woman that she was dismissed from this babysitting job, and Mrs. Ortega was glad to go. She was sometimes afflicted with magical thinking from the Irish side of her family; over a passage of days, she had sensed a change in the very air of this apartment; it was thickening with sadness, and she could hardly breathe.
Charles Butler sat beside Mallory as she drove along Central Park West.
She had not yet convinced him that he was not responsible for Nedda Winter’s death, but she had finally succeeded in getting him out of the house. They were going on a field trip to see the radio. Shock therapy.
The man was badly broken. His eyes had a shattered look, and other fracture lines were showing in his face and in his rambling speech. Somehow she must put him back together again without any helpful manuals on human frailty. His world was more fragile than she knew.
Charles’s luck with parking spaces was riding with her tonight. She pulled up to the curb in front of Winter House. He was still going on and on about the radio when they climbed the steps to the front door. Why did he have to pick that one thing to obsess about?
Mallory led the way into the house. He was beside her in the foyer as she trained her flashlight on the two silver control panels by the door. „This one is for the security alarm. And this one is for the sound system. There’s a panel just like it in every room. It works the same way yours does.“ She tapped the built-in speaker. „The music you heard after the dinner party – when you and Nedda were sitting outside on the steps? It came from here.“
„No, I told you – Nedda couldn’t work this thing, and neither could I. She played the old radio in the front room.“
„All right, let’s have a look.“ Mallory took him by the hand and led him across the foyer threshold, preceded by the beam of her flashlight. She pulled the smoke-stained drapes aside, allowing the light of streetlamps into the room, and she opened the front windows to cut the smell of mildew with clean, cold air.
Charles was staring at the old-fashioned radio.
Mallory pulled it away from the front wall and turned it around to expose a rotted backing with holes in it. Charles moved closer as she used a metal nail file to undo the screws. She removed the back panel to expose the innards: another century’s technology of cracked glass tubes, frayed wires and loose connections. There were also cobwebs made by generations of spiders spinning their homes inside this antique box. The bones and skull of a long-dead mouse completed the evidence of a nonworking radio.
And now Mallory deconstructed this tiny crime scene for Charles. „Twenty or thirty years ago, this mouse took a hit of current from an exposed wire. It made him wild. He batted around in the dark and broke these tubes. Probably bled out on the broken glass. You see? This radio has been useless for a very long time. The one in Nedda’s room is in worse shape. It doesn’t even have a cord.“
„No, it’s a trick. This is a different radio.“
Mallory shook her head, and waited for his good mind to kick back into gear, to shake out the dust of deep depression and function logically once more.
„Butyou heard a radio the night of the fire,“ said Charles, „and no one has questioned your sanity.“
„Well, I know it wasn’t this one. Even if this radio had been in working condition, Bitty pulled out all the fuses that night – no electricity. What I heard was probably a small portable. It must’ve been destroyed in the fire.“
He seemed so suspicious now. Did he know she was lying? No, there was also doubt in his face. Her lie was making sense to him. Apparently, Charles did believe in the rules governing electricity.
In truth, if a battery-operated radio had been in the house – even if it had been near the fire’s point of origin, the investigators would have found residue materials, but there were none. And because it was so important to account for everyone in the house on that night, the arson team had gone looking for signs of Mallory’s radio operator, the one who had turned the music on and off. They had even run tests for music seeping in from neighboring buildings – all negative. Yet, like Charles, Mallory could not admit to imaginary songs. She never would. He must.
„I saw her play this radio twice,“ he said, insistent. „The first time was at the crime scene. And I’ve got a lot of witnesses for that performance.“
She nodded. „I heard music that night, but the built-in sound system – “
„And I heard it again,“ said Charles, angry now. „The night of the dinner party. It was a warm night. Nedda opened the front windows. We sat outside on the stoop. We drank wine and listened to this radio for hours.“
„When Nedda thought she was disabling the alarm, she probably hit the control panel for the stereo system. I’m sure Nedda believed the music came from the radio, but she was insane.“
„No, she wasn’t. I never had a conversation with her that wasn’t perfectly lucid.“ He turned his back on Mallory and left the house. She followed him as far as the open front door and watched him sit down on the steps.
After a few minutes of scavenging, she had found a wine cabinet behind the bar, and the rubber seal on its door was still intact. She selected a good sturdy merlot, the only wine that had a prayer of surviving the heat of the fire on the upper floor. With the wine and two glasses in hand, Mallory joined Charles outside on the steps. Indian summer was long gone, but he did not seem to feel the cold night air of fall.
„All right,“ she said, „we’ll restage what happened that night.“ She held up the bottle for his inspection, and he examined the label.
„This was served at the dinner party. I always wondered how Sheldon Smyth knew the vintner of my private stock. Do you have any idea what these bottles cost?“
„Not a problem, Charles. You’re receiving stolen goods from a police officer.“ She uncorked the wine and set the bottle down on the steps to let it breathe. He would consider it a worse crime if she simply filled their glasses before the wine had time to mellow. And Mallory had brought some reading material to pass the time. She opened her knapsack and withdrew a small leather-bound book. „This is Nedda’s last diary. I used it to run a bluff on Bitty Smyth. Open it.“
He did.
Every line was the same, the same words written over and over: Crazy people make sane people crazy. Charles flipped through page after page, incredulous. He turned his stricken face to hers.