CHAPTER 24

When Charles closed his tired eyes, he saw a tiny thief who ran with whores and lived by guile, surviving on animal instinct to get through the night – an altogether admirable child. Louis Markowitz’s hero.

‘Charles?’

His heavy lids flickered open, and Kathy grew up before his eyes. She was so lovely, and he wanted to tell her that, for how else would she know? The tragedy of Kathy Mallory was some malady that had no name but was akin to an aspect of vampirism. This sad insight had come to him by simple observation. She did not look for herself in mirrors, nor in the reflections of shop windows, never expecting to find herself there. He turned to the antique looking glass above his mantelpiece. Literally a magic mirror once used in a stage act of the last century, it was full of wavy lines and smeared realities.

‘Charles!’

‘Yes,’ he said, without turning round.

‘I want you to keep an eye on Riker tonight.’ Mallory walked back and forth across his front room, impatient with a cell-phone caller who had put her on hold. ‘You’ll find him in that cop bar down the street.’ She was still in motion as she resumed her phone conversation. Red designs in the weave of the mirrored carpet seemed to track the floor behind her.

Charles stared at the ancient glass, his gigantic nose, her wonderful eyes. He was fascinated by her form elongating and twisting, her legs bending back to form the hocks of a padding cat. Beast and Beauty were trading places. The reversal went far beyond their positions in the backward space of the mirror room, where she continued to walk to and fro. Her human face was gone, distorted and stripped down to the bestial aspect of Mallory in the panther cage, badly wounded by her life, elegant paws bleeding as she paced. She bore the scars, he felt the pain. How insane -

‘Charles?’

The SoHo saloon was crowded with cops and one civilian. Charles Butler had lost his jacket and tie somewhere between one death and another. His white shirt was wrinkled, sleeves rolled back, and his face was showing the wear of long days broken by catnaps.

Riker stared at his own tired image in the mirror behind the bar, then quickly looked away, saying, ‘Thanks anyway, but I’m taking a cab tonight. So pull up a glass. I hate to drink alone.’ Of course, this was a polite lie, for the detective did his best binge-drinking all by himself.

Charles obliged him and ordered two rounds of Chivas Regal. ‘So Sparrow is dying. And you’re not going to the hospital?’

‘No.’ He prayed that Sparrow would be long dead before an old enemy turned up.

Awe, Mallory, what a gift you have for payback.

It made her the ultimate cop. She was the paladin everyone wanted, a perfect instrument of vengeance. In Riker’s view, people should be more careful about what they wished for. Absent all humanity, its bias and fragility, the law was a sociopath.

Their drinks had appeared on the bar in front of them, and Charles had been left hanging again, awaiting some explanation for this failure to visit the deathbed of a whore. Riker cut the man off before he could ask one more time. ‘So tell me, how did Sheriff Peety outdraw the Wichita Kid?’

‘The usual way. The other man drew his gun too late.’

‘Impossible,’ said Riker. ‘Drunk or sober – even with the damn sun in his eyes – that gunslinger was the best man.’

‘Yes, if you mean faster. And that day – ’ Charles’s eyes were in soft focus now, and Riker knew he was projecting book pages on his cocktail napkin and quoting verbatim when he said, ‘ „That day, the gunslinger was a young god, walking out of the whirlwind of dust, growing larger, step by step. His birthright was dominion over all other men.“‘ He shuddered, then tipped back his shot glass, as if to kill a bad taste. ‘Terrible prose. You’re right – Wichita was fast with a gun, but Sheriff Peety was bigger.’

‘What?’ And now Riker was left to dangle while his barstool companion sipped his drink, taking his sweet time. Charles’s expression worried him. It was almost a Mallory smile.

‘A hero bigger than life. Your words, Riker. Well, he was Wichita’s hero, too – always had been. The boy loved the man. So you might wonder – did Wichita deliberately draw too slow? Or did he lose that gunfight in his own mind before he drew his weapon? Perhaps, at the end, he still believed that Sheriff Peety was a great man, the better man. Maybe that’s how the sheriff won… Or maybe it was a suicide.’

‘Thanks, Charles. That might drive me nuts for another fifteen years.’

‘Happy to return the favor.’

Riker recognized his own twisted signature in this exchange, and he smiled with the grace of a good loser. ‘Okay, you get one free question. Anything you want. Shoot.’

‘You said Kathy was posthumously charged with arson and murder.’

‘Right.’

‘Though she didn’t die, and she didn’t kill anybody. But I’ve still got a corpse and a fire. Does this have anything to do with why Mallory hates Sparrow?’

‘Yeah.’

Charles waited for the rest of the explanation. And he waited. Now the two men engaged in a contest to see who could outcreep whom with the most insipid smile.

Riker broke down first. ‘Okay, this is the deal. It took me a long time to piece this story together. You can’t repeat it to anyone. And when I’m done, you’ll wish I never started. Kathy Mallory’s death is gonna drive you crazy till the day you die.’

‘Word of honor, I’ll never tell.’

‘Charles, are you sure you understand? When you know the truth, you have to eat it.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Some of it’s guesswork.’ Only two people knew the real story. One was a gifted liar, and the other was a dying whore with a scrambled brain. ‘Fifteen years ago, Sparrow did a drug deal with a really scurvy character. She was trading stolen VCRs for heroin.’

‘The VCRs that Kathy stole?’

‘Yeah. So the hookers told you about the great truck robbery? Well, I’m guessing the drug dealer picked the location for the meet, a place with boarded-up windows and no back door. No neighbors either. The buildings on both sides were torn down, and this one was due for a midnight demolition.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The owner was planning to torch the place for the insurance money. He had accelerants stashed on every floor, kerosene, paint thinner. But that came out later – after the fire.’

‘The fire that killed Kathy?’

‘That’s the one. I figure this dealer – ’

‘Frankie Delight?’

‘Yeah.’ Riker wondered what else Charles had pieced together with the help of the Hooker Book Salon. ‘Frankie was gonna double-cross Sparrow. So he would’ve been the first one to draw a knife.’

‘The one that made that huge scar in Sparrow’s side?’

Riker nodded. ‘And she won that fight, but she left her knife behind. I’ve got a witness who saw it buried in Frankie Delight’s dead body. An ambulance picked up Sparrow three blocks away.’

‘And Kathy?’

‘She saw the whole thing. Another whore can place the kid in Sparrow’s hospital room the next day – one real tired little girl. And that’s when Kathy was sent back to the crime scene to get the murder weapon.’ This was the picture Riker wanted out of his head – that child pulling a knife from a corpse.

‘Lou and me, we’re in the car when we hear a call on the radio. A dispatcher’s sending all available units to investigate a puddle of blood on Avenue B. We would’ve blown it off, but then another call placed a little blond girl at the same address – following a blood trail into an empty building. We got there just in time to see the flames. That’s when Kathy came out the front door. One look at us and she runs back inside – back into the fire.’

‘But that’s not – ’

‘Not normal? No, you wouldn’t expect a kid to do that. But she was carrying a knife with Sparrow’s initial on the hilt and probably a good set of prints. If the kid was caught near Frankie’s body with the murder weapon, her favorite whore would go to jail.’